He worried for Mrs. Sorensen. She was young and vibrant and terribly alive. And yet. She was in stasis somehow. She didn’t seem to age. She had none of the spark she had had as a child. It was as though her soul was hibernating.
There was a time, maybe fifteen years ago, when Mrs. Sorensen closed the door of the booth behind her and sat for ten minutes in the dark while the priest waited. Finally, she spoke in the darkness. Not a prayer. Indeed, Father Laurence didn’t know what it was.
“When a female wolverine is ready to breed,” Mrs. Sorensen said in the faceless dark. “She spends weeks tracking down potential mates, and weeks separating the candidates. She stalks her unknowing suitors, monitoring their habits, assessing their skills as hunters and trackers. Evaluating their abilities in a fight—do they prefer the tooth or the claw? Are they brave to the point of stupidity? Do they run when danger is imminent? Do they push themselves to greatness?”
Father Laurence cleared his throat. “Have you forgotten the prayer, my child?” he said, his voice a timid whine.
Mrs. Sorensen ignored him. “She does not do this for protection or need. Her mate will be useful for all of two minutes. Then she will never see him again. He will not protect his brood or defend his lover. He will be chosen, hired, used. He will not be loved. His entire purpose is to produce an offspring that will eventually leave its mother; she needs a child that will live.”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” prompted Father Laurence. “That’s how people usually—”
“Now, in the case of a black bear, when the female becomes aware of the new life in her womb, she makes special consideration to the construction of the den. She is at risk, and she knows it. Pheromones announcing her condition leak from every pore. Her footsteps reek pregnant. Her urine blinks like road signs. Her fertility hangs around her body like a cloud.”
“Agnes—”
“When she digs her den, she moves more than a ton of rock and soil. She designs the space specially to provide a small mouth that she can stopper up with her back if she needs to.”
“Agnes—”
“She will grow in the dark, and birth in the dark, and suckle her babies in the feminine funk of that tiny space—smelling of mother and baby, and sweat and blood, and milk and breathing and warm earth—hiding under the thick protection of snow.” Her voice caught. She hiccupped.
“Agnes—”
“I thought I was anonymous.”
“And you are. I call all my confessionals Agnes.”
She laughed in the dark.
“I am asleep, Father. I have been asleep for—ever so long. My arms are weak and my breasts are dry and there is a cold dark space within me that smells of nothing.” She sat still for a moment or two. Then: “I love my husband.”
“I know, child,” he whispered.
“I love him desperately.”
What she wanted to say, the priest knew, was “I love him, but . . .” But she didn’t. She said nothing else. After another moment’s silence, she opened the door, stepped into the light, and vanished.
Father Laurence had no doubt that Agnes Sorensen loved her husband, and that she missed him. They had been married for thirty years, after all. She cared for him and tended to him every day. His death was sudden. And certainly one must grieve in one’s own way. Still, the sheer number of animals in the house was a cause for concern. The list of possible psychiatric disorders alone was nearly endless.
The priest walked out to the apple barn but no one was there. Just the impossibly sweet smell of cider. It nearly knocked Father Laurence to his knees. He closed his eyes, and remembered picking apples with one of the girls at school when he was a child—sticky fingers, sticky mouths, sticky necks, and sticky trousers. He remembered her long hair and her black eyes, and the way they fell from the lowest tree branch—a tangle of arms and legs and torsos. The crush of grass underneath. Her freckles next to his eyelashes, his front tooth chipping against hers (after all those years, the chip was still there), the smell of her breath like honey and wine and growing wheat. So strong was this memory, and so radically pleasant, that Father Laurence felt weak, and shivery. There was a cot in the barn—he didn’t know what it was there for—and he lay upon it.
It smelled of woodland musk and pine. It was covered in hair.
In his dream he was barefoot and lanky and young. He was on the prowl. He was hungry. He was longing for something he could not name. Something that had no words (or perhaps he had no words; or perhaps words no longer existed). He was watching Agnes Sorensen through a curtain of green, green leaves. She carried a heaping basket of apples. A checkered shirt. Apple-stained dungarees. A bandana covering her hair. Wellington boots up to her knees, each footfall sinking deep into the warm, sweet mud.
When Father Laurence woke, it was fully dark. (Was someone watching? Surely not.) He got up off the cot, brushed the hair from his coat and trousers. His body ached and he felt curiously empty—as though he had been somehow scooped out. He walked out into the moonlit yard. Mrs. Sorensen wasn’t in the barn. She wasn’t in the yard. She wasn’t in the house, either. (Was that a shape in the bushes? Were those eyes? Heavens, what am I thinking?) The house had been emptied of its animal
