Ironclad Page 2

  Molly spun away to the wood burning stove. She opened one of the ornate doors in its belly, then the other. Snatching a towel off the hanger on the wall, she grabbed a tin of cornbread out of the stove and set it on top, carefully keeping her back to Garret.

  You should have just let it burn, Garret sulked. Your cornbread is terrible. He looked around the kitchen while he fumed. I’ll be forever paying off this damn place. The sale of his Ma and Pa’s twenty acres and the old Jenny Lind hadn’t brought much, and he’d halved it with Sarn, of course. Fortunately, the sale of the cabin and surrounding property had brought a little more.

  Not that the new house wasn’t worth it. The kitchen was high-ceilinged so it wouldn’t be insufferably hot in the summer, and predominantly whitewashed, with all the oak shelving Molly could want. They’d been in the house for less than a month and she’d already filled most of the shelves with glazed earthenware vessels, various shades of brown and white with a few blue ones.

  There was little cabinetry, but he’d had a hutch built into the wall opposite the stove, and a large rectangular washbasin sunk into the wooden countertop with a pump handle from the well plumbed right above it. The floors were wooden, as he had been used to all his life, but these were sanded and finished.

  His previous irritation with her became awkwardness. “Your kitchen looks prettier than your mother’s,” he said after a moment. It was a peace offering of sorts. It was also true. Everything her mother did was garish and flamboyant. Molly had a subtler touch. Everything she organized or decorated was nice to look at, but more than that, it was nice to live in. Molly’s kitchen was warm, comfortable and relaxing, and it put Garret at ease. Almost as if he belonged.

  She’d hung her ironware and copperware from the iron wall racks he’d made for her. He didn’t know if she spent half the day burnishing the copper pots or not, but they were always spotless, so that now, as the daylight was gone, the copper reflected the lamplight and gave the whole kitchen a warm glow. She’d hung curtains that were light blue, which picked up the blue pieces of crockery on the shelves and even the bunches of chicory she’d hung to dry over the door to the buttery.

  She turned back to him, finally replying to his peace offering. She was only seventeen, but her face was lined with stress. “Garret, I’m on your side.”

  “I know.”

  Molly retrieved a bowl covered with a cloth. She removed the cloth, turned a lump of biscuit dough out onto the counter and kneaded it in silence.

  “You don’t have to make biscuits,” Garret said, “we already have cornbread.”

  “You hate my cornbread,” she replied. “But these are for breakfast tomorrow.”

  “Well,” he mumbled awkwardly. “You haven’t been cooking for very long.” I shouldn’t have said that.

  She was kind enough to let it go. Suddenly the day caught up to him. He and his brother Sarn had both worked like dogs in the smithy. Garret’s lower back ached all the way up into his neck from swinging his hammer. He leaned more heavily on the table. At breakfast, she’d mentioned venison for dinner, but she hadn’t gotten it out yet. I can do that.

  Garret walked into the buttery, a long narrow room that ran alongside the kitchen. At the far end of the buttery stood an empty barrel, in which the apples would eventually go for next winter. Other than the barrel, the room was nothing but wall shelves, floor to ceiling, with just enough space between to squeeze down the rows and retrieve what he needed. He passed the crocks of cooked bacon and sausage, covered in lard, and a few wrapped loaves. He pulled the stool out from under the bottom shelf. He stood on it, and reached above the rows of mulberry and huckleberry preserves that Mrs. Hutchins had given them as partial payment for an iron hall tree Garret had made. He found a jar of pickled venison and returned to the kitchen.

  Molly passed him on the way through the door, wiping her hands on a dishtowel as she went. Garret watched her go, curious. Only after she turned the corner did he hear the squeaking sounds of a waking baby.

  How does she hear that?

  Garret went to the hutch and pulled down some plates and bowls and quietly set the table. The hutch contained a dizzying assortment of shapes and sizes. Molly was still trying to educate him on what to use and when to use it.

  Molly reappeared with the baby in one arm. Garret was standing, silverware in hand, trying to remember on which side of the plate to lay the spoon. She nodded appreciatively. “Knife and spoon on the right,” she said.

  He pulled out her chair for her so she didn’t have to fumble with it while holding the baby. She unbuttoned her dress and let the baby nurse.

  “Do you want me to get you some food?” Garret asked.

  Molly shook her head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fine, Gar.”

  Garret scooped himself a bowl of cabbage soup and a bigger-than-normal slice of cornbread. Tucked under the far end of the counter stood his Ma’s icebox. It was the only item he’d brought from his parent’s house. He knelt, pushed down on the latch and pulled it open. Garret and Molly didn’t keep ice in it any more than his Ma had, but if something was already cool, such as the morning’s bottle of milk, then the icebox kept it cool longer than letting it sit on the counter. He pulled the milk out. He got another bowl down out of the hutch, half-filled it with milk, and added the chunk of cornbread.

  Molly raised a curious eyebrow at him. The baby made contented gurgling noises while he nursed.

  “I remember my Granddad eating it this way,” Garret said.

  A fat little foot was sticking out of the blanket in which Molly had wrapped the baby. Molly rubbed a toe that looked more like a pink pea between her fingers. “I thought your Ma didn’t make cornbread.”

  “I think my Grandma did, a few times. I don’t remember it very well.”

  “I wish Sarn would come and stay with us,” Molly said as she tucked a wild curl of baby hair behind a button-like ear.

  “Me too,” Garret said around a mouthful of cornbread. “I told him we had an extra room. I guess he likes Babe better than us.” The cool milk worked wonders with the crisp, buttery crust of the cornbread. He had to admit it wasn’t that bad.

  “I kinda like the cornbread.”

  Molly rolled her eyes.

  Garret rejoined the previous topic. “I think Sarn just doesn’t wanna be here when we’re…” Garret waggled his eyebrows significantly.

  “I saw Mrs. Rossi at the General Store this evening,” Molly responded smoothly. “She had that cute little boy of hers carry my bags back to the wagon for me. She wanted to know how you’re doing.”

  Garret shrugged and went to his cabbage soup. “I’m doin’ fine.” Unlike the cornbread, the soup was great even without anything added. He opened the jar of pickled venison and added some anyway. Molly observed his culinary weirdness without comment.

  She had ignored the sexual innuendo, so he returned to it. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told him that you howl like a wolf when we’re…”

  “Garret Vilner, if you actually said that to him…”

  Garret held up a hand in self-defense. “I told him you weren’t that good at howling yet, but I’m teaching you.”

  She shook her head, glaring at him. “Next time you turn into a wolf in your sleep, I’m going to shave all your fur off.”

  That gave Garret pause. She’d do it. Suitably humbled, he ate his food.

  “Gar,” Molly said in a tone that indicated a change of topic. “I don’t want to fight, but can we talk about what happened yesterday?”

  Garret started to grit his teeth, but forced himself to relax his jaw and nod. He didn’t offer a return comment, though.

  The baby had at some point fallen from Molly’s nipple into slumber. She shifted the sleeping bundle and expertly rebuttoned her dress with one hand. She used the time to choose her words. “Gar, I don’t pretend to understand what it feels like to be you. I don’t even pretend to know exactly wha
t you are.”

  Even Garret didn’t really know what he was.

  “But,” she continued, “I know what the other people in this town are. They’re small-minded and easily frightened.”

  Garret sighed. Here it comes again— “Garret, you’re not being careful enough. If anybody ever sees a grey wolf hair laying some place, we’re all going to die and the world’s going to explode.”

  “Garret, if anybody sees you change, they won’t let us be together.” There was genuine fear in her eye. It bothered Garret too, but he tried to laugh it off. He only managed a depressed smile.

  “Ha. I’d like to see them try.”

  “Gar,” she pled. “It’s not about that. What do you plan to do, kill every person who comes after us? If the Stevens’ knew, they’d come for you. They’re good people, but they’d think you’re a warlock. And once the secret’s out, it’s out. It would spread like wildfire. Would you kill Mr. Stevens to stop it? How about old Mrs. Halstead? She loves you like a grandmother, Garret, but she’d send her son after you. Would you kill old Mrs. Halstead to keep our secret?”

  No, but that jackass-Sheriff son of hers, I might.

  She took a breath. “How about Mr. Fix?”

  “Mr. Fix wouldn’t come after us,” Garret said, but he didn’t say it with much certainty.

  “Would you kill him to make sure?” she replied.

  Garret was staring at his soup. “I don’t want to kill anybody.”

  She reached across the table and took his hand. He squeezed hers but didn’t look up. He knew she was going to hit him harder.

  “This part of you doesn’t,” she said quietly.

  “How do you know?” Garret said, feeling cornered. “You don’t know what I did to find you and Sarn. You don’t know what I did to people.”

  “I know what the wolf did yesterday,” she said levelly.

  That humiliated him, made him feel lower than the dirt. And that made him angry. “I saved her life!”

  Molly was level. “No, you didn’t, Gar. They were robbing her. They weren’t going to kill her. You saved her money, and that was kind of you, but—”

  “But what?” Garret asked, meeting her eye and pulling his hand back. He spread his hands. “I’m not a man or a wolf. So what am I?”

  “Garret—”

  He cut her off. “All I know is that I can do things other people can’t. I don’t know why any of this happened!”

  “Gar—”

  He interrupted her again. “So when I try to help somebody, you slap me down?”

  “Garret! You—”

  He cut her off for the third time. “So maybe they were just going to rob her. Maybe I taught them a lesson!”

  “Garret! The Samuelson boy died this morning! Half the town went out hunting the wolf that killed him.”

  That set Garret back, and frightened him a little, but as usual, anger swarmed in to keep fright from cooling him off.

  She went on before he had a chance to rally. “Garret, you disappeared into the woods to ‘get help,’ then a wolf came out of nowhere and tore up both of them, then the wolf disappeared and you came back. Did you not see what you did to them? You tore them to shreds. The Samuelson boy died from it, and the doctor doesn’t think the other one will ever walk again, and the whole town barely seems to care that they were robbing Mrs. Greenly, you know why? Because the entire town is looking for you!”

  Molly stared at him with entreaty. And not well-hidden frustration. The whole kitchen was full of the silence after. The quiet was so loud that the copper pots seemed to be ringing with it.

  “What did you want me to…” he faltered. Broke. “Molly, you don’t know what it’s like to—”

  “Garret!” she screeched, waking their son. “You got blood on my baby!”

  It took Garret a moment to process that. He stared at the precious bundle in her arms. Molly and the baby. The two most important things in Garret’s world. Molly’s shoulders sagged a little. She began unwrapping the baby’s legs. It was the same blanket she’d had him in yesterday on the way to church. She unfolded an edge, revealing the rust brown splatter stains.

  They were faded. She’d obviously tried to scrub them out at some point in the day, but his baby’s blanket was stained with blood none the less.

  She and the baby had been standing ten feet from the Samuelson boy when Garret had attacked. Ten feet away, but he’d sprinkled them with blood.

  Chapter 4

  April 2nd, 1914

  Lightning broke the sky with a violent, hurtful crash. Molly lay in bed with the baby beside her. She’d tucked him there under her arm so that she wouldn’t be alone. Garret was gone. He was going farther and farther from her every night. He was only seventeen years old, the same as she, but he wasn’t a boy any longer. At first, that had been wonderful. Then she began to realize that he wasn’t a man either.

  He was out there right now, somewhere, running through the storm, his fur flinging water away, his teeth bared in exertion. The storm was raging. Not even wolves went out in weather like that, but Garret did.

  The lightning split the sky again and the wind howled, slapping the house with rain. Molly watched out the window as the sky was torn over and over, revealing the brief blinding glimpses of the apocalypse that always loomed just beyond her world. She rolled over away from the window and tucked the baby close, but it only brought her nearer to the empty side of the bed.

  How can you leave me like this? Don’t you care that I’m lonely?

  She stretched her fingers into the cold depression her husband had left when he sneaked away an hour ago. He thought she didn’t hear him go, but she always heard. Worse, she felt him go. She felt the warmth and strength of his presence fade away from her. She felt the gulf growing.

  I work so hard to see everything from your perspective. I try so hard to be sensitive to your hurt. Doesn’t it occur to you how badly I’m hurting? When do I get to cry and be cared for and have somebody tell me it’s alright?

  The pillow under her cheek was growing damp and her breath was coming unsteadily. Even so, a sound caught her attention. She sat up and listened, holding so still that she began to hear her own blood throbbing in her head. The storm continued to pound the house, thrashing the woods and flogging the hills. It roared and screamed, a thousand demons, reaching through the bars of their reality, dragging their talons through the dark earth, grasping at the trees, striking the sky so it sparked and crackled.

  Beneath it all, though, Molly had discerned another sound. It was small and soft, but she heard it because she was a mother.

  Quickly, Molly stood, scooped up her own baby and crossed into his room. The lightning painted her motions in flickering freeze frames as she tucked him safely in his crib, then she whisked away towards the back door.

  When she opened it, the wind wrenched it from her grip. It slapped against the siding. The storm hacked gouts of rain into the house. She wrestled the door closed, then she headed into the night towards the tree line. She hadn’t brought a lantern because she didn’t trust her eyes as much as her heart. It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for. At the edge of the woods, only a dozen yards to the east of the house, a dead tree had fallen, its decaying body finally broken by the storm.

  Under the fallen trunk lay a whitetail deer, a doe. The doe’s hindquarters were crushed beneath the trunk, her back legs splayed at a painful angle. She pulled with her front hooves. Her limbs were long and delicate, almost twig-thin, and her hooves seemed too small to support her svelte body. They were churning the mud in futility.

  The doe’s slender neck was stretched as well, her small chin elevated as she pulled uselessly at the mud. Deer were some of the fleetest animals in the forest. How had she not managed to escape a falling tree? No matter. Beside her in the dark stood a tremble-legged fawn. It mewled again, nosing along its frantic mother’s neck. That was the sound that Molly had heard, the cry of a bab
y calling for its mother.

  Molly approached with a hand extended. Despite the crashing storm, the doe turned her head Molly’s way and flipped her big white ears around. She was small, except her eyes which were large, dark orbs of fear. The fawn cowered at the sight of Molly, huddling close to the doe’s side. Molly stopped advancing and knelt. She knew what the doe was feeling. She felt it each day as she watched her husband losing his grip on himself.

  Suddenly, the doe swiveled her head away, facing along the tree line. She froze for an instant, then she became frantic, scrambling to get out from under the tree. She wasn’t pulling in a concerted way that would have moved her even if she could have dislodged the tree. She had simply panicked. As the lightning flashed again, Molly saw why.

  Something was moving along the tree line. Molly had left the lamps burning in the kitchen, and though they shed meager light in the house, and even less through the storm, Molly caught eyeshine moving towards herself and the ensnared doe.

  The eyes came and went as they passed behind trees, but they did not blink, nor did their gaze waver. They were amber, and they were remorseless as the black sky above. Immovable as the old earth beneath. They were the eyes of a predator. And they were coming slowly through the storm. The fawn gave up its mother and bolted, at once becoming incorporated into the trees and the night.

  Lightning flashed again, and Molly saw the body behind the advancing eyes. It was large, canine, muscular and powerful. Better than a hundred and fifty pounds. She watched its shoulders rise and fall as it approached. Its gaze was intent, fixed.

  Since the dawn of time, men had told stories of wolves, making them partners with the Devil, agents of the darkness, and harbingers of all things wicked and deceitful. Watching the wolf close in through the night, Molly began to understand why.

  It was an eerie thing, watching the carnivore move towards them through the dark. The wolf was powerful, its form and even its motions blending with the night’s storm as if they were one. Vicious forces of nature that neither thought nor understood. Both the wolf and the storm delivered death and destruction because it was what they were made to do. It was what they were. Molly had been a fool to think she could tame either of them.