Part 7
“I’m here, sweetheart. Stay with Claire.” I kept my voice as steady as I could. On my way to the radio, I picked up my fallen knife and the leader’s and set both on the high kitchen shelf. He watched me over his injured arm, then asked me to call an ambulance.
I gave our location and said we needed medical help and troopers. Claire waited until I told her the wolves had left before bringing Iris down. She checked our daughter first, put her behind the kitchen counter, and wrapped a clean towel around my arm.
Iris held the back of my shirt. She hadn’t been cut or struck, and neither had Claire. I kept asking anyway, until Claire put her hand against my face and made me look at her.
“We’re all right,” she said. “Now sit before you fall.”
The neighbors who answered the radio arrived before the troopers. By then the men wanted treatment and nobody was trying to fight; two couldn’t stand without help. We waited with the main room lit and Iris tucked beside Claire, while people from the road crew kept watch at the broken door.
The troopers had been looking for five prisoners who had escaped a transport in southern Alaska. They had come north in a stolen vehicle and reached our settlement before they ran out of options. I learned that afterward, when I could follow a question without turning to check where Iris was.
All five were taken into custody and treated for their injuries. A trooper photographed the marks outside, the damaged doorway, and the room where the attack had stopped. He asked about the wolves more than once.
“You’re saying they came inside?”
I showed him the tracks. I told him about the river, and about the female’s ear, but when he asked why she had done it, I had no answer he could put in a report. I had thanked her myself; I had also seen frightened, dangerous animals in that room, and I didn’t know what they understood about us.
While the trooper finished his questions, I held the broken door in place for a neighbor to fasten it. The wolves never came back to the cabin.
Months later I asked Claire to marry me under the northern lights, with Iris stamping her boots beside us. Iris cheered when Claire said yes. Claire circled a Saturday on the shift calendar, and Ray and Beth flew up for our potluck wedding with fiddle music at the community hall. Iris held the flowers, and when Beth faltered during a story about Erin, Claire took her hand and listened until she could finish.
The calendar stayed above the kitchen table through school dates, night shifts, and appointments during Claire’s unexpected pregnancy. She smiled as she wrote the first date, then rubbed her eyes. “Come with me,” she said. “I want to ask about a hundred things, and I don’t want to sit there by myself.” I changed my workdays. We named our son Raymond for Iris’s grandfather, and the calendar filled with the practical business of raising two children.
By the summer Iris was nine, she was helping little Ray learn to walk. I was watching him pull her toward the blueberry bushes when someone knocked on the doorframe beside me. Hank Miller stood on the porch with a travel bag at his feet.
His jacket hung loose around shoulders that had seemed enormous when I was a boy. He was smiling before I said his name. When I hugged him, he patted my back with the broad hand that used to rest on the pickup’s seat.
“Ray told me where you landed,” he said. “Thought I’d better come see it.”
Claire took his bag, Iris asked whether he’d really taught me to drive, and little Ray investigated his shoes. He stayed several days, helping me mend a section of fence slowly enough for his knees. In the evenings Iris made him repeat the story about stalling beside the barn.
I told him about the river and the cabin. He listened without asking me to explain the wolves, then looked toward the stairs, where Iris was helping her brother get his pajamas on backward.
“You miss the long runs?”
“Sometimes I miss seeing a new place.” I listened to the children upstairs. “I don’t miss being gone.”
He nodded and reached into his jacket for a photograph. There I was at fifteen, behind the wheel of the red Ford, sitting so straight that my head nearly touched the roof. He’d caught me just before I stopped trying to hide my grin.
“You kept this?” I asked.
“On my dresser.” He pushed it back toward me when I tried to return it. “You’ve got room for it here.”
I carried his bag at the airstrip and helped him over the gravel to his plane. He squeezed my arm before boarding. His photograph went on our dresser; months later, a second picture joined it, arriving with a letter that told me his heart had given out. Hank had left a few lines about the boy he remembered and his pride in the father I’d become, along with a picture of himself in his Peterbilt.
I asked Claire about taking the children to Spokane. We arranged time off and drove together through Canada. At Hank’s grave I held the photograph for Iris, my other hand against the stone, then put it away for the drive back to Alder Crossing.
Back home, I spread both pictures on the kitchen table one evening. Under them lay a rough plan for an addition to the cabin. Claire had measured the room while I held the other end of the tape, and Iris had already drawn where she wanted her bed.
She stood beside me, looking at the boy in the Ford. Little Ray leaned against my knee and reached for the paper; I moved my coffee and brought him onto my lap so he could see without pulling everything down.
“Where’s Hank in this one?” Iris asked.
“Taking the picture.”
She looked from that photograph to the other, where he sat in his own truck. I showed her how the Peterbilt’s wheel and cab differed from the pickup’s. She followed my finger, then put hers on the boy’s face.
“Did you know how yet?”
“Enough to park without stalling. I thought I knew a lot more.”
She laughed, and I told her about the cassette player and the barn, how Hank had turned the music down and waited instead of reaching for the controls. Little Ray had heard his name somewhere in the conversation and wanted to be included. Iris explained that he was named for Grandpa Ray, then started telling him a story about their grandfather before I could finish mine.
Claire came over to see what had made us laugh. She rested a hand on my shoulder while Iris moved the plan out from under the pictures and asked whether her new room could have a shelf for books. We hadn’t agreed on everything yet, including which work we could afford that year. I turned the paper so Claire could draw in the space she’d measured.
The photographs lay beyond her elbow. I picked them up before we cleared the table, keeping them flat against my palm while Iris gathered her pencils. She asked me to tell the driving story again at bedtime; I said we had to get her brother upstairs first.
Later I stepped onto the porch and looked up at the stars. I stayed a moment with Erin and Hank in my thoughts. Then Claire called that the children wanted the rest of the story, and I went back inside, pulling the door firmly closed behind me.