Once There Were Wolves

by Charlotte McConaghy

I meet his eyes. “If I were you I’d be more worried about the wives and daughters going out to run with the wolves.”

It took an enormous amount of work to live a subsistence life and when one thread came loose the rest followed and suddenly the life you’d created unraveled.

He’s right, and also not. A man’s anger, his violence, is no one’s responsibility but his own. “When does it end?” I ask. “If no one ever says anything, for fear of him, then when does it end.”

“We’re all frightened.” “Is that the excuse you make for him?” “Just a fact.” “He’s a monster,” I say. “You’re giving him too much credit. He’s just a man,” Duncan says. “That’s dangerous. That’s how you let people do terrible things.” He doesn’t take to this. “I’m not minimizing. It’s just that if you paint a picture of him as a monster then you make him mythical, but men who hurt women are just men. They’re all of us. Too fucking many of us and all too human. And the women they hurt aren’t passive victims, or Freud’s masochists who like to be punished either. They’re all women, and all they’re doing, minute by minute, is strategizing how best to survive the man they loved, and that’s not a thing anyone should have to do.”

“Men get taught to expect control but a modern society no longer supports that, so some men feel it slipping and it humiliates them. The humiliation makes them angry, and then violent.”

“Do you think it can ever be?” he asks me softly. “Bred out of a creature?” “The wild?” I reach to pat the dog and my fingers come very close to his. I want to touch him so badly I could combust. “It happened to us, I think,” I murmur. “Most days I think we couldn’t be farther from it, that it was slowly bred from us until we became more like machines than animals.” “And the other days?” he asks. “On the other days,” I say slowly, “I think I will go mad with the wildness.”

I’ve watched him enough days now to know that these are his regulars but there are others he fits in too, people who need help, or perhaps simply some company. He cares deeply; it is the fabric of his life here. I think he must be a good man. But nobody is only one thing.

but what I didn’t know then is that any force can be stopped by enough resistance.

I turned so he could see my face when I spoke. “When it comes to my sister, I can be anything I need to be. Don’t forget that.”

They might have shown me animosity but the stakes were so high, I should have risen above it, led the way toward cooperation, toward the sharing of this planet. No one can meet your trust if you don’t offer it.

This is my pain. It is no trick, not stolen; it belongs to no one but me. This is my body, my child. I can feel her and she is mine

She opens her eyes. And looks at me. I am halved and doubled at once.

You saved my life. I swell with the knowledge that he was right. He was so right. He could have become his father but he chose to become his mother instead. We all have that choice, and most of us make it. There is cruelty to survive, to fight against, but there is gentleness more than anything, our roots deep and entangled. That is what we hold inside, what we take with us, the way we look after each other. I look at little one and I tell Duncan, “You saved mine, too.”

“My thought’s got to do with that. Yeah, people do bad things to each other. And we remember those stories, we remember the pain, but we remember it because it stands out. It’s the blip in the timeline, the thing that doesn’t fit, and that’s because the rest of the timeline, which is our whole lives really, is made of kindness. That’s what’s normal, it’s so normal we don’t even notice it.”