Wolf Season Read online

  SELECT PRAISE FOR HELEN BENEDICT’S

  Sand Queen and The Lonely Soldier

  On Sand Queen

  “Every war eventually yields works of art which transcend politics and history and illuminate our shared humanity. Helen Benedict’s brilliant new novel has done just that with this century’s American war in Iraq. Sand Queen is an important book by one of our finest literary artists.”

  —Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and Perfume River

  “Every American who claims to value the lives of our soldiers should read this powerful, harrowing, and revelatory novel.”

  —Valerie Martin, author of The Ghost of Mary Celeste and Sea Lovers

  “Helen Benedict’s compelling story provides an intimate picture of what it means to be a soldier, what it’s like to live on the battlefield, and what the ethical choices are that our troops have had to make in Iraq. . . . At times funny, at times grimly painful, Sand Queen offers a new chapter in contemporary American history.”

  —Roxana Robinson, author of Cost and Sparta

  “This is The Things They Carried for women in Iraq.”

  —Boston Globe

  “If you missed out on serving in the Iraq War, you can, if you’re willing, be catapulted right into the midst of some of its more challenging moments courtesy of Ms. Benedict’s gutsy prose. . . . Sand Queen [is] a novel that will leave you deeply unsettled if not shaken to the root of your being.”

  —Herald-Dispatch

  “Told in compellingly vivid detail with the clear ring of truth every step of the way.”

  —Free Lance-Star

  “[A] completely heartbreaking, vivid story of the particular difficulties of being not just a soldier, but a female soldier.”

  —Bustle

  “In writing what might be the first major woman’s war story and alternating points of view between opposing sides, [Benedict] has created something enormously fresh and immediate.”

  —Chronogram

  “[Benedict] is an exceptional writer and storyteller. Her gritty depiction of a soldier’s life in the Iraq desert is particularly well done.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Benedict’s writing is impressive, passionate, and visceral. . . . Reading this book is the best literary path to understanding the particular challenges of being female in the military during warfare.”

  —Publishers Weekly “Best Contemporary War Novel” citation

  “Funny, shocking, painful, and, at times, deeply disturbing, Sand Queen takes readers beyond the news and onto the battlefield.”

  —Booklist

  “An eye-opening glimpse into a life that many Americans have never seen.”

  —Library Journal

  “A convincing and affecting portrait of two resilient young women caught up in war.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  On The Lonely Soldier

  “It’s outrageously immoral that our female soldiers have to fear many of the male soldiers they serve with, as well as being let down by the very Veterans Affairs system that’s supposed to help them out. Thanks to Helen Benedict, the world is watching!”

  —Roseanne Barr, Emmy Award–winning actor

  “The Lonely Soldier is an important book, a crucial accounting of the shameful war on women who gave their bodies, lives, and souls for their country.”

  —Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and In the Body of the World

  “No matter your politics, this book is vital. Helen Benedict’s brilliant and compassionate reporting is neither left nor right—it’s human.”

  —Dale Maharidge, author of And Their Children After Them and Bringing Mulligan Home

  “The Lonely Soldier tells an important and often ignored story about our military women. Benedict writes with skill and compassion, helping us understand what it feels like to be a woman soldier in Iraq. I recommend this book to everyone who cares about our soldiers.”

  —Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia and Seeking Peace

  “The Lonely Soldier will shock you and enrage you and bring you to tears. It’s must reading for everyone who cares about women, justice, fairness, the military, and the United States.”

  —Katha Pollitt, award-winning columnist, The Nation

  First published in the United States in 2017 by Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2017 by Helen Benedict

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Benedict, Helen, author.

  Title: Wolf season / Helen Benedict.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017015974 (print) | LCCN 2017022200 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: War and families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Family Life. | GSAFD: War stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.E5397 (ebook) | LCC PS3552.E5397 W65 2017(print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015974

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  135798642

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-31-3

  To the widows and orphans of war

  To my mother, and Iggy

  Behind each sociable home-loving eye

  The private massacres are taking place . . .

  —W. H. Auden, “In Time of War,” 1939

  Mothers have been stolen from their own tears.

  —Kareem Shugaidil, “Flour Below Zero,” 2005

  CONTENTS

  Part One: August

  1. Storm

  2. Wolves

  3. Mosaic

  4. Visitor

  5. Maghrib

  6. Hope

  7. Moon

  8. Devotion

  9. Fog

  10. Knot

  11. Enemy

  Part Two: September

  12. Fence

  13. Bargain

  14. Home

  15. Elbow

  16. Hoodlums

  17. Mantra

  18. Dawn

  19. Vigilance

  Part Three: October

  20. Box

  21. Fire

  22. Threshold

  23. Collateral

  24. Patience

  25. Stake

  26. Tongue

  27. Rabbit

  28. Atonement

  29. Arrow

  30. Peace

  Part Four: November

  31. Flag

  32. Underground

  33. Cane

  34. Pack

  35. Howl

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Book Club Extras

  Part One

 
; AUGUST

  1

  STORM

  The wolves are restless this morning. Pacing the woods, huffing and murmuring. It’s not that they’re hungry; Rin fed them each four squirrels. No, it’s a clenching in the sky like a gathering fist. The wet heat pushing in on her temples.

  Juney feels it, too, her head swaying, fingers splayed. She is sitting on the wooden floor of their kitchen, face raised, rocking and rocking in that way she has. Hair pale as a midday moon, eyes wide and white-blue.

  “It smells sticky outside, Mommy. It smells wrong,” she says in her clear, direct voice, no hint of a whine. Soldiers don’t whine. And Juney is the daughter of soldiers.

  “Nothing’s wrong, little bean. Maybe we’ll get a summer storm, that’s all. Come, eat.”

  Juney is nine years old, the age of curiosity and delight before self-doubt clouds the soul. Fine hair in a braid to her waist. Bright face, wide at the temples, tapering to a nip of a chin. Delicate limbs, skinny but strong.

  She lifts herself off the floor and wafts over to the kitchen table, a polished wooden plank the size of a door, where she feels for her usual chair and settles into it with the grace of a drifting leaf. Starting up one of her hums, she dips her spoon into the granola Rin made for her—sesame seeds, raisins, oats, and nuts, every grain chemical-free.

  “More milk, please.”

  Sometimes, when Rin is not hauling feed, chopping wood, weeding, or fixing some corner of their raggedy old farmhouse, she stands and watches Juney with wonder, her miracle daughter, and this is what she does after pouring the milk; she leans against the kitchen counter, still for a moment, just to absorb her. Juney moves like a sea anemone, fingers undulating. She can feel light and sun, shadow and night, and all the myriad shades between.

  “I want to go weed,” she says when her bowl is empty, sitting back to stretch, her spindly arms straight above her, twiggy fingers waving. The scrim of clouds parts for a moment, just enough to allow a slice of sun to filter through the windows, sending dust motes spinning and sparking into the corners of the kitchen. She rocks on her chair inside a sunbeam, hair aglow, fingers caressing the air. She can hear their cats, Purr, Patch, and Hiccup, stretching out on the floor. Smell their fur heating up, their fishy breath slowing into sleep.

  “Me, too,” Rin says. “Let’s go.”

  Juney was born in the upstairs bedroom, amid Rin’s outraged yells and the grunts of a stoic midwife; she knows her way around their ramshackle house and land as well as she knows her own body. Rin only helps by keeping unexpected objects out of the way, as even the dogs and cats have learned to do. No tables with sharp corners; no stray chairs, bones, mouse corpses, or drinking bowls. The house itself might be a mishmash of added rooms and patchwork repairs, windows that won’t open and trapdoors that will, but everything inside has its place.

  Out in the backyard, Juney stops to sniff the thickening heat—the clouds have closed over again, gunmetal gray and weightier than ever. “Itchy air,” she declares, and makes her way to the vegetable garden. Ducking under the mesh Rin erected to keep out plundering deer and rabbits, she squats at the first row of tomatoes. Weeding is Juney’s specialty. Her fingers climb nimbly up the vines, plucking off the brittle spheres of snails, the squishy specks of aphids. Her palms caress the earth, seeking the prick of dandelion leaves and thistles, the stubs of grapevine and pokeweed, and out they come, no mercy for them.

  Her father loved planting. Jordan Drummond was his name, Jay to all who loved him. Jay, flaxen-haired like Juney, face white as a Swede’s, eyes set wide and seaglass blue. Tall and rangy, with enormous feet, and so agile he might have been made of rubber. He, too, was born and bred on this property, back in the time when it was a real farm. Helped his parents raise cows and corn all his life, until the farm failed and drove him into the army. When his platoon razed the date groves around Basra, acres of waving palm trees, their fronds a deep and ancient green, their fruit glistening with syrups—when they ploughed those magnificent trees into the desert just because they could, he wept as if for the death of a friend.

  Now Rin arranges her days around forgetting, pushes through a list of tasks tough enough to occupy her mind as well as her muscles. Juney comes first, of course, but her wolves take concentration, as do her chickens and goats and vegetables. She has staked out her ground here with all her companions. If anyone wants to find her, they have to negotiate half a mile of potholed unpaved driveway, barbed wire, electric wire, a gate, and her four dogs, who are not kind to strangers. Not to mention her army-trained marksmanship.

  Juney feels her way around the spinach and carrots, pulling and plucking. “Mommy, what are we doing today?”

  “Going to town. The clinic. Not till we finish the chores, though. Come on, let’s feed the critters.”

  “Which clinic?”

  “Yours.”

  She hesitates. “Have I got time to do the birds first?”

  Juney’s favorite job is tending the bird feeder. Rin wanted to throw it out after that mama bear knocked it off its squirrelproof stand, plunked herself on the ground and dumped the seeds down her throat like a drunk—Rin watched the whole thing from the kitchen window, describing the bear’s every move to Juney. But the feeder means too much to Juney to relinquish. She judges how empty it is by feeling its weight in her palms, plants it between her feet to hold it firm, fills it to the brim from the seed sack, and deftly hangs it back up. Then she sits beneath it, head lifted while she listens and listens. “Shh,” she says this morning. “There’s a nest of baby catbirds over there.” A faint rustle, the quietest of hingelike squeaks. “Three of them. They want their breakfast.”

  Leaving her to sit and listen, Rin kicks the sleepy cats outside to make their way through the day and eases her car out of the barn. The barn sits to the side of her house, on the edge of a flat field that used to hold corn. Beyond that, a hardscrabble patch of rocks and thistles meanders up a hill to scrubby hay fields and a view of the Catskill Mountains to the south. Otherwise, aside from her yard, the ancient apple orchard in the back, and the vegetable patch, she is surrounded by woods as far as the eye can roam.

  Ten acres of those woods she penned off for her three wolves, leaving them plenty of room to lurk. Wolves need to lurk. They are normally napping at this time of morning, but the seething heat has them agitated and grumbling. Rin can sense their long-legged bodies moving in and out of the shadows, scarcely more solid than shadows themselves. Even her absurdly hyperactive mutts are feeling the unwholesome weight of the day, but instead of expressing it with restiveness like their cousins, they drop where they stand, panting heavily into sleep.

  The entire compound is preternaturally still. The yard, the woods, the porch cluttered with gnarled geraniums and fraying furniture; the rickety red barn with its animal pens clinging to its side for dear life; the piles of lumber and rusting machinery—all are as somnolent as the snore of a summer bee.

  Rin looks at her watch. “Time!”

  Juney straightens up from under the bird feeder, wipes her earthy hands on her jeans, and walks toward her mother along the little path planted with lilac bushes, a path she memorized as an infant. She puts her head on Rin’s chest, reaching the exact level of her heart.

  She smells her mother’s fear even before she hears it in her voice. The sweat breaking out slimy and oyster-cold.

  Juney was conceived in the back of a two-ton, Camp Scania, Iraq, under a moon as bright and hard as a cop’s flashlight. A grapple of gasp and desire, uniforms half off, bra up around Rin’s neck, boots and camo pants flung over the spare tire. Jay’s mouth on her nipples, running down her slick, sandflea-bitten belly, down to the wet openness of her, the salt and the sand of her, the wanting of her, his tongue making her moan, his fingers opening her, his voice and hers breathing now and now and now.

  Wartime love in a covered truck, that desert moon spotlighting down. His chest gleaming silver in its glare, eyes glittering, the scent of him sharp and needing he
r, the voice of him a low growl of yes like her wolves.

  But even through the slickness, even through the wanting and wanting, she felt the desert grinding deep into her blood. Toxic moondust and the soot of corpses.

  As Rin drives her rackety maroon station wagon along the rural roads that take her to town and the clinic, Juney hums again beside her, rocking in her seat, her warbly tune following some private daydream. The windows are open because the AC refuses to work and the sweat is rolling down Rin’s arms, soaking the back of her old gray T-shirt, the waistband of her bagged-out work pants. She glances down at herself. She is covered with dirt from the yard. Probably has burrs in her hair. Once she was slim with just enough curve and wiggle to make Jay smile. Long hair thick as a paintbrush till she cut it for war. These days, squared-out by childbirth and comfort food, she looks and moves more like a lumberjack. Still, she should have had the decency to shower.

  Juney is mouthing words now, rocking harder than ever to her inner rhythm. Rin should teach her not to do that—it makes people think she’s retarded—but she doesn’t have the heart. Juney rocks when she’s happy.

  “Tweetle tweetle sang the bird,” she croons in some sort of a hillbilly tune.

  “Twootle twootle sang the cat.

  You can’t get me, sang the bird.

  I don’t want to, sang the cat.

  Tweetle and twootle, tweetle and—”

  “Juney?” Rin is not exactly irritated but needs her to quit. “You’re going to be okay at the clinic, right? No screaming like last time?”

  Juney stops singing long enough to snort. “I was a baby then. And they stuck me with that long needle.” She takes up her song once more, then stops again. “Are they going to stick me this time?”

  “Soldiers don’t mind needles. It’s just a little prick, like you get every day in the yard from thistles.”

  “Yeah. Who cares about needles?”

  “It’s just an annual checkup to see how much you’ve grown. Nothing to worry about. They’ll probably tell you to eat more, skin-and-bones you.”

  “That’s ’cause you won’t let me have candy. I’m going to tell the doctor to order you to give me candy.”