“Lover,” she whispers, and closes her eyes.
It falls upon her.
Love is like dying.
MARCH
The last real blizzard of the year-heavy, wet snow turning to sleet as dusk comes
on and the night closes in-has brought branches tumbling down all over Tarker’s
Mills with the heavy gunshot cracks of rotted wood. Mother Nature’s pruning out her
deadwood, Milt Sturmfuller, the town librarian, tells his wife over coffee. He is a
thin man with a narrow head and pale blue eyes, and he has kept his pretty, silent
wife in a bondage of terror for twelve years now. There are a few who suspect the
truth-Constable Neary’s wife Joan is one-but the town can be a dark place, and no
one knows for sure but them. The town keeps its secrets.
Milt likes his phrase so well that he says it again: Yep, Mother Nature is pruning
her deadwood … and then the lights go out and Donna Lee Sturmfuller utters a
gasping little scream. She also spills her coffee.
You clean that up, her husband says coldly. You clean that up right … now.
Yes, honey. Okay.
In the dark, she fumbles for a dishtowel with which to clean up the spilled coffee
and barks her shin on a footstool. She cries out. In the dark, her husband laughs
heartily. He finds his wife’s pain more amusing than anything, except maybe the
jokes they have in The Reader’s Digest. Those jokes-Humor in Uniform, Life in These
United States-really tickle his funnybone.
As well as deadwood, Mother Nature has pruned a few powerlines out by Tarker Brook
this wild March night; the sleet has coated the big lines, growing heavier and
heavier, until they have parted and fallen on the road like a nest of snakes,
lazily turning and spitting blue fire.
All of Tarker’s Mills goes dark.
As if finally satisfied, the storm begins to slack off, and not long before
midnight the temperature has plummeted from thirty-three degrees to sixteen. Slush
freezes solid in weird sculptures. Old Man Hague’s hayfield
– known locally as
Forty
Acre Field-takes on a cracked glaze look. The houses remain dark; oil furnaces tick
and cool. No linesman is yet able to get up the skating-rink roads.
The clouds pull apart. A full moon slips in and out between the remnants. The ice
coating Main Street glows like dead bone.
In the night, something begins to howl.
Later, no one will be able to say where the sound came from; it was everywhere and
nowhere as the full moon painted the darkened houses of the village, everywhere and
nowhere as the March wind began to rise and moan like a dead Berserker winding his
horn, it drifted on the wind, lonely and savage.
Donna Lee hears it as her unpleasant husband sleeps the sleep of the just beside
her; constable Neary hears it as he stands at the bedroom window of his Laurel
Street apartment in his longhandles; Ollie Parker, the fat and ineffectual grammar
school principal hears it in his own bedroom; others hear it, as well. One of them
is a boy in a wheelchair.
No one sees it. And no one knows the name of the drifter the linesman found the
next morning when he finally got out by Tarker Brook to repair the downed cables.
The drifter was coated with ice, head cocked back in a silent scream, ragged old
coat and shirt beneath chewed open. The drifter sat in a frozen pool of his own
blood, staring at the downed lines, his hands still held up in a warding-off
gesture with ice between the fingers.
And all around him are pawprints.
Wolfprints.
APRIL
By the middle of the month, the last of the snow flurries have turned to showers of
rain and something amazing is happening in Tarker’s Mills: it is starting to green
up. The ice in Matty Tellingham’s cow-pond has gone out, and the patches of snow in
the tract of forest called the Big Woods have all begun to shrink. It seems that
the old and wonderful trick is going to happen again. Spring is going to come.
The townsfolk celebrate it in small ways in spite of the shadow that has fallen