Free The Work of Wolves by Kent Meyers

blade of grass.
    After a time Carson climbed out of the draw and walked to the horse and waited for his grandfather to reach down and loft him, his feet leaving the ground, that long float up. The old man secured his grandson in the crook of his arm, clucked to the horse, and turned it without urgency toward the house. Carson dozed within the sharp and sweetish smell of his grandfather's embrace. When the horse stopped moving, he half-woke but kept his eyes closed. Marie came across the yard with upraised arms, her face tear-streaked.
    "Give him to me, Ves."
    Carson's eyes fluttered at the sound of her voice, but glimpsing her broken expression through the slits of his lashes, he knew he'd done something to hurt her. He didn't know what, but he quickly closed his eyes again.
    "Boy's sleepin, Marie," his grandfather said. "I'll go on ridin with 'm. He was jus playin, but he's about wore out. I'll ride 'm around, let 'm sleep, and when he's awake I'll bring'm back."
    Carson heard his mother's sob. He knew he should reveal himself as awake, leap down to her. But he couldn't. He let his grandfather turn the horse away. Through fluttering, narrow lids, he saw his mother floating backwards, and he could feel the horse's muscular, rocking body. It felt to him as if the horse were the one still thing in a moving world.
    "He's not sleeping."
    It was his father's voice. Carson had seen his father standing behind his mother, unmoving as she walked toward the horse. His father in the background, waiting, watching. How did he know the truth?
    Ves let the horse continue walking.
    "He's not sleeping, Dad," Charles said again.
    But Ves didn't turn around, and Carson didn't open his eyes. If his father had told him to, he would have. But his father said nothing more. So, complicit, Carson let his grandfather take him away.

    NOW, AS THEN, CARSON FELT A GULF between himself and his mother. Not an estrangement—just a quiet gulf that he couldn't bridge. Nothing she said about the old house seemed to him an argument not to live in it. He didn't mind wind, or even cold, that much. When he'd wandered away at four years old, he'd not intended to hurt his mother. That had just happened. But he'd never been lost. She'd just thought he was, and her grief had confused him. And here again she seemed to be insisting he was lost when he wasn't.
    He'd never told anyone what he'd seen or done the day his grandfather died. He thought of telling her now. But he didn't know how to say it: how he'd seen the horse's hoof connect with his grandfather's skull and that instead of it making him bitter toward the animal, he'd left the bedroom window where he'd watched the snow falling in slantwise lines and gone out to the animal and untied it and led it into the barn and removed the saddle and bridle and laid his ear against the large, calm ribs and heard the faraway, slow thump of the heart. He'd broken a hay bale and fed the animal and watched it eat, then gone back into the snowstorm, where near the corral the ambulance squatted, and men were bending down. He had watched them for a moment, then found a bucket, taken it to the mudroom of the house and drawn warm water, added detergent, returned to the barn through the snow. The ambulance had its back door open, and the men were carrying a stretcher. He had looked at the stretcher and what was on it but had not stopped—had gone back to the barn and with a rag ripped from a pair of his grandfather's old denims washed blood from the horse's hoof. The next day he'd ridden the Scooter horse out to the draw where his grandfather had found him when he was four and dug a hole in the frozen earth and buried the bloody rag. Wind had blown and snow had fallen, the world indifferent, going about its vast and austere business, beyond all human grieving.
    Carson thought that if he could speak of these things his mother might understand why he wanted to live in the old house. But he couldn't even begin. He thought of horses.