The Wolves of Midwinter (42 page)

On and on Phil wrote, and then finally, he shut the diary and rose to his feet. He wore a fresh black sweatshirt and black sweatpants. His dark green eyes regarded Reuben calmly, but abstractly, as though he were struggling to bring himself out of his deepest and most crucial thoughts.

“My boy,” he said. He gestured to the breakfast on the table before the window.

“You know what’s happened to you?” asked Reuben. He sat down at the table with the window to his left. The sea was a steel blue beneath a bright white sky, and the inevitable rain fell hard in silent sheets of sparkling silver.

Phil nodded.

“What do you remember, Dad?”

“Just about all of it,” Phil said. “If I’ve forgotten anything, well, I don’t know what that would be.” Hungrily he sliced through the fried eggs, making a mixture of them with the bacon and grits. “Come on, aren’t you hungry? A man your age is always hungry.”

Reuben stared at the food. “Dad, what do you remember?”

“All of it, son, I told you,” said Phil. “Except being carried through the woods, that I don’t remember. It was the cold that brought me around, and it took a few minutes. That and the light of the fire. But I remember everything after that. I never lost consciousness. I thought I would. But I never went completely under.”

“Dad, did you want us to do what we did?” asked Reuben. “I mean, what we did to save your life. You know now what’s happened to you, don’t you?”

Phil smiled. “There’s always plenty of time to die, isn’t there, Reuben?”
he answered. “And plenty of opportunity. Yes, I know what you did, and I’m glad that you did it.” He looked youthful, vigorous in spite of the familiar creases in his forehead and the slight jowls he’d had for years. His white hair was shot through with thick locks of reddish blond.

“Dad, have you no questions about what you saw?” asked Reuben. “Don’t you want an explanation for what you saw? Or what you heard?”

Phil swallowed a couple more forkfuls of food, scooping up plenty of the thick grits with the eggs. Then he sat back and ate the last of the bacon with his fingers.

“Well, you know, son, it wasn’t a shock, though to see it that way was a shock all right. But I can’t say I was entirely surprised. I knew you’d gone out there to celebrate Modranicht with your friends, and I pretty much figured how that might go for you, the old Yuletide customs being what they are.”

“But Dad, you mean you knew?” Reuben asked. “You knew all along what we were, all of us?”

“Let me tell you a story,” said Phil. His voice was the same as ever, but his sharp green eyes kept startling Reuben. “Your mother doesn’t drink much, you know that. I don’t know that you’ve ever seen your mother drunk, have you?”

“One time, tipsy, maybe.”

“Well, she stays off the sauce because she tends to go crazy on it, and always did, and then she blacks out and she can’t remember what happened. It’s bad for her, bad for her because she becomes emotional and carries on and cries and then she can’t own what happened.”

“I remember her saying all that.”

“And of course, she’s a surgeon, and when that phone rings she wants to be ready to go into the operating room.”

“Yes, Dad. I know.”

“Well, right after Thanksgiving, Reuben, I think it was the following Saturday night, your mother gets completely drunk all by herself and comes into my room crying. Of course she’d been telling the
newspapers and the televisions twenty-four/seven that she’d seen the Man Wolf with her own eyes, seen him here at Nideck Point when he broke in the front door and killed those two Russian scientists. Yes, she’d been telling everybody who asked that it was no myth, the California Man Wolf, and that it was some kind of physical mutant, you know, an anomaly, a one-off as she kept saying—a biological reality for which we’d all soon have an explanation. Well, anyway, she comes into my room and she sits down on the side of my bed, just sobbing, and she tells me that she knows, just knows in her heart, that you and all your friends up here are the very same species—‘They’re all Man Wolves,’ she sobs, ‘and Reuben’s one of them.’ And on and on she goes explaining that she knows this to be true, just knows, and knows that your brother Jim knows, because Jim can’t talk about it, which can mean only one thing—that Jim can’t reveal what was told him in Confession. ‘They’re all in it together. Did you see that big picture of them all over the library fire? They’re monsters, and our son is one of them.’

“Well, of course, I helped her back to bed, and I lay down with her until she stopped crying and went to sleep. And then in the morning, Reuben, she didn’t remember a thing except that she’d gotten drunk and she’d cried over something. She was humiliated, terribly humiliated like she always is over any excess emotion, any loss of control, and she swallows half a bottle of aspirin, and goes to work like nothing happened. Well, what do you think I did?”

“You went to see Jim,” said Reuben.

“That’s exactly right,” said Phil with a smile. “Jim was saying the six a.m. Mass as usual when I got there. There was, what, fifty people in the church? Probably half that many. And the street people were all lined up outside waiting to get in to go to sleep in the pews.”

“Right,” said Reuben.

“And I caught Jim right after Mass, right after he’d said farewell to the people at the front door, and he was heading back up the aisle towards the sacristy. And I told him what she’d said. ‘Now you tell me,’ I said to Jim, ‘is this conceivable? That this Man Wolf creature is not some simple freak of nature, but that there’s a tribe of them, and that
your brother is in fact part of that tribe? That this is some secret species that’s always existed, and when Reuben was bitten up there in that house in the dark, he became one of them?’ ”

Phil stopped and took a deep swallow of the hot coffee.

“And what did Jim say?” asked Reuben.

“That was just it, son. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me for a long time, and the expression on his face, well, I don’t have words to describe it. And then he looked up at the high altar. And I saw he was looking at the statue of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio. And then he said, in the most sad, discouraged voice, ‘Dad, I don’t have any light to shed on this.’

“And I said, ‘Okay, son, we’ll let it go, and your mother can’t remember any of this anyway.’ And I just went on out, but I knew. I knew it was all true. I knew it was true, really, when your mother was laying it out, I felt it was true, felt it, felt it in here. But I knew it was true then when I watched Jim walking on back to the sacristy behind the altar—because there were a million things he might have said if it had been nonsense, and he didn’t say any of them.”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin, and refilled his mug with coffee. “You do know that Lisa makes the best coffee in the world, don’t you?”

Reuben didn’t answer. He was feeling so sorry for Jim, so sorry that he’d ever burdened Jim, yet what would he do without Jim? Well, there was time to deal with Jim, to made amends, to give thanks, to thank him for taking over with Susie Blakely.

“But, Dad, if Mom knew,” Reuben asked, “why ever did she let you come up here to live with us?”

“Son, she blacked out that night, I told you. What she’d revealed had come from someplace deep down inside that’s closed off to her when she isn’t drinking. And the next day she didn’t know. And she doesn’t know now.”

“Ah, but she does,” said Reuben. “She does. What the liquor did was let her speak of it, confess it, face it. And she also knows she can’t do anything about it, that she can never mention it out loud to me, she
can never become an accessory to it. The only way she can live with it is to pretend she doesn’t have an inkling.”

“Maybe so,” he said. “But to get back to your question, what did I think when I saw all of you out there in the forest on Christmas Eve? Well, I was shocked. I’ll grant you that. It was as shocking a spectacle as anything I’ve ever seen in my life. But I wasn’t surprised, and I knew what was happening. And I knew that wily Helena, I knew her by her Polish accent when she picked me up out of my bed with her great hairy arms, when she said, ‘Are you willing to die for your son, to teach him and his friends a lesson?’ ”

“She said that to you?”

He nodded. “Oh yes. That was her scheme, apparently, and I knew the voice of Fiona, who was with her. Ah, such monsters! And right here in this room. ‘Foolish man,’ she said, that Fiona. ‘That you ever came here. Most humans have better instincts.’ ”

He sipped the coffee, then put his elbows on the table and ran his hands back through his hair. He seemed a man some twenty years younger now, whatever the stamp of age on his face. His shoulders were remarkably straight and his chest was broader. And even his hands were larger and stronger than they had been.

“I blacked out after they appeared here,” he said. “But when I came to in the forest, I understood their evil plan, those two, to use me as the living proof that Felix’s way with Nideck Point, of living in the very midst of human beings, of carrying on as if he were a living man, a normal man, a generous man—that this was all, as Fiona called it, folly. I saw and heard all that when the spectacle unraveled.”

“Then you know what happened to Fiona and Helena,” said Reuben.

“Not at first I didn’t,” said Phil. “That is the one part that wasn’t clear, that was puzzling me. But as I was lying there in that bed, I was having nightmares some of the time, nightmares that they’d burn down Nideck Point, and burn down the village.”

“She spoke about those very things,” said Reuben.

“Right, I’d heard that part,” said Phil. “But what wasn’t clear to me
was that she and Helena were gone. I hadn’t seen what happened to them. The nightmares were terrible. I grabbed hold of Lisa and tried to get her to understand that Nideck Point was in danger from those two. And that’s when Lisa told me, told me how Elthram and the Gentry had driven them into the fire. She explained to me who the Gentry were, or at least she tried to. She said something about them being the ‘woodland spirits’ and not people like us.” He laughed softly under his breath, shaking his head. “I should have known. Well, Lisa said no one had ever seen the Forest Gentry do such a thing. But the Forest Gentry would never have done it without ‘grave cause.’ And then Elthram was there, I mean by my bed, right beside Lisa. I saw him looking down at me. And he placed one of his warm hands on me. And Elthram said, ‘You are all safe.’ ”

“That’s what happened,” said Reuben.

“And then I knew they weren’t coming to harm anybody, and I better understood all the rest of what I’d heard—what I’d heard Hockan saying out there, with his voice like Giazotto’s notorious Adagio in G Minor.”

Reuben gave a little bitter laugh. “Yes, it’s exactly like that, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, that Hockan has quite a voice. But then they all do. Felix has a voice like a Mozart piano concerto, always full of light; and Sergei, well, Sergei sounds like Beethoven.”

“Not Wagner?”

“No,” said Phil, smiling. “I like Beethoven better. But about Hockan, I sensed a sadness in him at the banquet, a kind of deep broken melancholy, I guess I’d call it, and how he seemed to love that Helena even though she frightened him. I could see that. Her questions to me frightened him.” He shook his head. “Yeah, Hockan, he’s the violin in the Adagio in G Minor all right.”

“And it is all right with you what’s happened,” asked Reuben. “That they used the Chrism to save your life, and that you’re now one of us.”

“Didn’t I just say that it was?” asked Phil.

“Can I be blamed for asking a question like that twice?” asked Reuben.

“No, of course not,” said Phil gently. He sat back and looked at Reuben with the saddest smile. “You are so young, and so naïve and so truly good of heart,” he said.

“Am I? I always wanted you with us!” Reuben whispered.

“I knew what I was doing when I came here,” said Phil.

“How could you have really known?”

“It wasn’t the mystery that drew me,” Phil explained. “It wasn’t mad speculation as to whether these friends of yours really had the secret of living forever. Oh, I knew there was a possibility of that, yes. I’d been putting it together for some time, just as your mother had. It wasn’t only the picture in the library, or the unusual personalities of the men who were living with you. It wasn’t just their curious anachronistic speech, or the odd points of view they hold. Hell, you’ve always had a way of speaking that made us joke about your being a little changeling.” He shook his head. “So it wasn’t all that surprising that you’d cultivate some group of otherworldly friends who sounded as strange as you sometimes sound. No, it’s overwhelming and irresistible, surely, immortality. It is. But I don’t know that I quite believed that part of it all. I don’t know that I believe it now. It’s easier to believe that a human being can turn into a beast than it is to believe he’ll live forever.”

“I understand that perfectly,” said Reuben. “I feel exactly that way, myself.”

“No, it was something more mundane than that yet infinitely more profound and meaningful that brought me here. I was coming to live with you in this anointed place, because I had to do it! I just had to. I had to seek this refuge against the world to which I’d given my long and dreary and inconsequential life.”

“Dad—.”

“No, son. Don’t argue with me. I know who I am. And I knew I had to come. I had to be here. I had to spend my remaining days somewhere that I truly
wanted
to be, doing the things that mattered to me, no matter how trivial. Walking the woods, reading my books, writing my poems, looking out at that ocean, that endless ocean. I had to. I couldn’t keep moving towards the grave step by step—choked with
regret, choked with bitterness and disappointment!” He sucked in his breath as though he were in pain. His eyes were fixed on the barely visible line of the horizon.

“I understand, Dad,” said Reuben quietly. “In my own way, my young and naïve way, I felt the same thing the first day I came here. I can’t say I was on a dreary path to the grave. I just knew I’d never lived, that I’d been avoiding living—like I’d learned early to decide against life rather than for it.”