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vanished. He slept his sleep of a thousand years and waited and no oaks or maples grew from the grasses over his head
.
    “Is the giant mean? I don’t want him to wake up.” She never tired of hearing such stories, imagining the hatchet-faced mountain rising above the fields.
    “Don’t you worry. He’s old and sleepy, but he watches and waits. He only wakes in times of trouble. There arewolves that live in his caves, and he sends them forth to help those in need.”
    “His emis—?”
    “Emissaries. They do his bidding.”
    “Like the ones who came for the woman. To keep her from hurting the baby. Like the coyote who found the baby after all those people died in the war?”
    “Yes, the very ones.”
    “Why did the woman want to hurt the baby?”
    The giant in the mountain was as old as the moon or stars, as ancient as a stone left by the seashore. Things fastened to him like lichen or mollusks so the rocks found on the mountain were like nothing on the earth. The last tallgrass prairie became the giant’s beard and eyebrows. Nowhere else in the valley could you find the Great Plains prickly pear cactus, green and bristling, among the cedar trees and prairie bush clover thick with bees
.
    Granodiorite. Gabbro. The rocks were living things the Indians said flew about the stars at night. The boulders were witnesses to creation. A hundred years before, the mountain was holy to the Dakotas. The sick went there to drink from a limestone spring; infertile women ate the dirt. Where red rock showed through the grass, pink as skin, the young men painted their visions. Thunderbeings and black bears and buffalo. Sometimes just a hand etched into the stone to say
I was here,
if only for a single heartbeat of the one who lives within the mountain
.
    “Will you take me there, Daddy?”
    “Maybe when spring comes again. When I’m feeling more peppy and can make the climb. Then we’ll pack apicnic and sit on the mountaintop and feel the wind in the grass.”
    “When?”
    “Someday.”

    There was no mountain near the town of Lone Mountain so far as Clara could tell, the streets as quiet as a secret on Sunday morning. The competing spires of Trinity Lutheran and Our Lady of the Sorrows peeked above leafy treetops. Silt laden, the Minnesota River wound like a thick ribbon of caramel in the valley below.
    It was a pretty enough town at first glance, the women sweeping their porches, the men cutting precise patterns on riding lawnmowers. Victorian houses with gables and wide porches surrounded Hiawatha Park, a green space where the town enacted the annual Longfellow Pageant. Black iron lampposts lined the main street where buildings of dun-colored brick bore the mark of previous decades, advertisements for Lee’s overalls and mugs of Sanka. Farmers wearing seed caps parked their trucks along the curb. At the pool hall, they passed rainy mornings playing a card game called sheepshead to determine who would have to pay for coffee. Know the price of beans or the weather forecast, and you might find your way into a conversation. Logan had told her that people lived in this town for twenty-five years and were still counted as strangers.
    There was the grocery store, Jurgen’s Corner, and a baitshop, the Bookworm, which sold yellowing paperbacks and comic books along with supplies for fishermen wishing to ply the brown river. The town movie theater had shut down, but the marquee still advertised
Red Dawn
with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. Downtown also held a hardware store, two bars, and a Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon. Two bars and two churches made for an even balance of liquid spirits and holy spirits in Clara’s estimation. The high school and nursing home were across town from where Clara lived. On either end of the valley, where County Road 29 dropped from the prairie tableland as it sliced through town, big billboards had been erected, each featuring smiling babies meant to represent fetuses. I HAD A HEARTBEAT AT