They Called Me an Abomination and Ordered Me Killed, So I Came Back as the Wolf They Buried novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Boil

The pack ate crawfish on my gravel in the second week of March.

The Atchafalaya had crested and gone back down, and the first run of the season came up out of the basin in the traps.

Somebody backed a pickup into my lot with two propane burners in the bed, and somebody else brought a sixty-quart pot.

By noon there were two hundred people in my yard.

They spread newspaper on the shop's steel table and on a dozen sawhorses.

They dumped the crawfish out in red steaming heaps with corn and potatoes and whole heads of garlic.

The smell of cayenne and lemon rolled across the cane.

Nobody had asked me.

They had simply come, with ice chests and folding chairs and casseroles, and put themselves to work.

I stood in the bay door with a beer in my hand and watched my shed turn into a church picnic.

"They're in your light," Remy said, beside me.

"They're in everybody's light," I said.

"It's two hundred people eating off my parts bench."

"Two hundred and ten," Bastien said, sliding between us.

He had a crawfish in each fist and a smear of red on his chin.

"Mr. Anselme counted."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," I said.

"I'm not full, I'm a wolf," Bastien said.

He took off at a run across the gravel with the dog behind him.

He had shifted four times since the levee.

He did it in the kitchen and in the yard and once in a church pew, which had caused a small and holy commotion.

He was always white, always small, always brown at one ear, and always delighted.

Remy watched him go.

He wore a look I had stopped trying to name, because it was on his face nearly all the time now.

"The woman in the blue dress had her baby," he said.

"I heard," I said.

"A girl, her first, at fifty-one.

"Her wolf had been quiet since she was thirty.

"The doctor in Pierre Part said it was impossible."

"The doctor in Pierre Part doesn't know about wolves," I said.

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