Effigy (11 page)

Thankful takes solace in her figure, which is better than the ninny’s ever was—better than most. High, full breasts, a girl’s hard waist and a nicely bustling behind. Dancer’s legs. Her mother suffered wormy, painful veins, but Thankful knows better than to let her blood sink and pool. She puts her feet up whenever she can, sleeps with her heels on a pillow plumped up fatter than the one beneath her head.

She had her admirers, men in ill-fitting coats who sat partway to the back. They were generally good for six months to a year before they tired of her or ran low on funds. One, an overseer at an ironworks, was missing five teeth—three top and two bottom—where a grapple hook had caught him in the cheek. The flesh there sunken as though sucked from the inside. He begged Thankful to push her tongue through the gap, moaning when she worked it slowly over the bumpy gum. She did what she had to. The better men, the ones who brought roses backstage, never brought them for her.

When Hammer approached her in the theatre’s back lane, he bore a clump of ox-eyed daisies in his fist. Thankful had been at
the Limelight for half a dozen years by then, and if anything, her parts were getting smaller. Of late a girl with a heart-shaped face, formerly assistant to the wardrobe mistress, had been cast as Audrey, a Country Wench—a role that had been Thankful’s on the last run.

She knew the sound of a door opening when she heard it, and in this case it sounded like a terse proposal offered by a short, uncultured man. He was father-aged, no drawback to a girl who’d made do without one. He let her know right off he was a man of property. The best grazing land in the valley. The finest horses. A beautiful eight—
eight!
—bedroom house. The fact that two of them already held wives came as a surprise, no denying, but she’d never let wives stand in her way before.

Backstage the following night, she couldn’t help but crow.

The heart-faced girl piped up. “Utah? He’s never one of them Mormons?”

“Saints,” Thankful corrected her icily. “And yes, he is. He’s in Chicago on a mission.”

“A
Mormon?”
This from Charlotte de Courcey, perpetual lead. She was Cleopatra that night, haughty in headdress and bird’s-wing eyes. “Thankful, you silly slut, how do you know he hasn’t got himself a wife already?”

Shrieks of laughter.

“He does, Charlotte.” That shut them up. And then the line she’d been practising all day: “Just like your Mr. Webb.”

If Thankful had any doubts, they died during that night’s show. A house half empty, a few hoots for Charlotte, smatterings of shabby applause. And her rancher. Front row centre, leaning forward in his seat whenever she set foot on the stage.

Following Lal into the dining room, Bendy finds himself herded to a seat on the table’s left flank. He’s surrounded by sons—the sullen eldest on his right, the younger boys to his left. Three sets of eyes, three heads oiled and combed, a single equine shade. Beyond them, at the table’s tail end, sits the woman who can only be first and foremost among Hammer’s wives. Her gaze is unnerving. Even seated, she’s clearly inches taller than any woman he’s known.

Bendy pays little attention to Hammer’s muttered grace. He knows he should keep his eyes closed, even as he cracks them to take in the facing female side. On the first wife’s left, the youngest girl wears her hair in stubby plaits. Beside her, an older sister has hers dragged back into the severest of knots, though she can’t be more than ten. They match their three young brothers in colouring. A third, the eldest girl, has inherited Hammer’s jet-black hair.

Letting his eyes linger a moment, he finds she resembles her five look-alike siblings in no way. Where they’re sturdy and well groomed, she’s sinewy, unkempt. Her loosely clasped hands are raw, afflicted with angry scales. Her age is difficult to judge—her build adolescent, her bone structure adult. Between her and the eldest son there exists no point of comparison. Lal is a masculine recasting of the first wife—the same cornsilk hair and startling eyes. As she is handsome, so he is beautiful.

To the left of the black-haired girl, the source of the chestnut-haired children becomes plain. The woman seated directly across from Bendy is quietly lovely. The second wife, he guesses. It’s not such a difficult idea to get used to. Women were a rare commodity in San Francisco, where he grew up—it only made sense to share. Here they do things differently again.

Beside the second woman sits a third and possibly favourite wife, given her position at Hammer’s right hand. She’s dressed
entirely out of keeping with her surroundings, her dress fly’s-wing green, the bodice cinched tight, spilling a powdered helping of breasts. Painted lips between hollow cheeks between two great clutches of dirty-blonde curls. A complexion along the same yellow tones, though here too she’s been generous with the powder. She’s no beauty, but holds herself as though she were. On the word
Amen
, her eyes snap open, fixing not on Bendy but on the young man beside him. On Lal.

The first wife lifts her head and orients it his way. “Brother Drown, you know my husband and our eldest son.” She gestures to the boys on Bendy’s left. “This is Joseph, Joe and Baby Joe.”

Bendy nods, keeping his face a blank. With such a woman, there’s little chance she’s pulling his leg.

Two fingers touch down briefly on her bosom. “You will address me as Mother Hammer.” The hand sweeps on. “This is Josepha, and my eldest girl, Josephine.” She leaves him hanging for a moment, confused. Then, “My husband’s fourth wife, Sister Eudora.”

Wife?
She watches him through a slide of black hair. For an instant he feels his face betray him—the very instant confusion gives way to alarm. She looks away before he can wipe his expression clean.

“Sister Ruth is Brother Hammer’s second wife.” Mother Hammer concludes the round of introductions with a flick of her long fingers. “Sister Thankful is number three.” The third wife cracks her mouth as though to speak, but Mother Hammer holds the floor. “Tell me, Brother Drown, how do you come to live among God’s people in Zion?”

Her gaze is blade-like. He fights an idiotic urge to lift a hand to his face and feel for the warm, wet evidence of its touch.

“Well, ma’am—”

“Mother Hammer.”

“Mother Hammer. I lived in Utah once before.”

“Deseret. It is the Congress of the United States that refers to this Territory as Utah, men who have never set foot on its blessed soil. They named it after the Indians who were content to leave it a barren wilderness. The Kingdom of Deseret, that is the rightful name.”

“Brother Brigham’s name.” Hammer sits back, smug-faced in his chair.

“Taken,” Mother Hammer adds, “from the Book of Mormon, which, as you know, was translated from the ancient tongue by Brother Joseph, the
original
Prophet and President of the Church. You know the meaning of the word, Brother Drown?”

Bendy does. Or did. Knows he’s been told. “I—”

“Honeybee.” She looks hard at her husband, directing her voice to Bendy out of the side of her mouth. “A creature that knows the sweet reward of industry, that works not merely for its own selfish gain but for the benefit of the whole.” She smiles, her lips drawn out long. “In any case, you were saying, Brother Drown? Some years ago …?”

Hammer answers for him. “Brother Drown rode for the Pony Express.”

A change comes over the children, sudden, palpable. On the far side of the table both girls look up at Bendy with widening eyes. To his left, the boys turn their heads as one.

“I see.” Mother Hammer nods. “I believe the ponies stopped running in ’61.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Six years ago, then, you lived in Deseret.”

“Just about.”

“Yet you’ve only just been baptized.”

“That’s right. About a month back.” Seeing she’s less than satisfied, he adds, “In Iowa.”

“Iowa.”

“Mother,” Hammer says darkly.

She meets his stare. “I’m only inquiring, husband. If Brother Drown is to live among us, I believe I have the right to inquire.”

“It’s all right.” Bendy looks from wife to husband and back. “I don’t mind.”

Mother Hammer is the first to break deadlock, her eyes shifting to pin Bendy anew. “And during those six years?”

“I carried the mail.”

She raises her pale eyebrows. “You drove a stage?”

“No, ma’am, I—”

Hammer’s fork rings out against his plate rim. “For pity’s sake, woman, not every one-horse shithole’s on a stage line.”

The children lower their eyes.

“Language, Mr. Hammer.” His wife lays down her longest silence yet. When she speaks again, her voice is several notes closer to a man’s. “I imagine you volunteered for the Union.” She pauses. “Or perhaps you waited for the draft.”

Bendy feels himself colour.

“My wife the patriot,” Hammer sneers. “Abe Lincoln’s girl.”

She doesn’t spare him a glance. “Well?”

“No, ma’a—Mother Hammer.”

“Don’t tell me you had the means to buy yourself a replacement.”

“No, we were exempt.”

“We?”

Bendy swallows. “A war can’t run without the mail.”

“Hah.” Hammer grins. “What do you say to that, Mother?”

Her gaze buckles, and Bendy takes the opportunity to look down at his plate. She’s put her finger on a sore spot. He did hide
behind the job, holding on to the numbingly dull route from Ottumwa to outlying settlements far longer than he would have if the South had never attempted to secede. The war terrified him, the official news paling in comparison with the flesh-and-blood horrors that travelled by word of mouth.

“The war’s been over two years,” Mother Hammer says, breaking in on the thoughts she’s woken. “Did you carry the mail all that time too?”

He nods. It’s a small enough lie, born of a vague sense of shame. It’s not as though he’s done anything wrong over the past couple of years, committed any crimes. Like so many cut free after the war, he drifted, first on foot, then on horseback—Stride the second mare he’d owned, solid dark where the first had been patchy, pale. Together they crossed streams and rivers, unseen county lines. Bendy hired on driving cattle, breaking colts, riding flank on a wagon train that dissolved when it was only a fortnight under way.

He could list these and half a dozen other jobs if he had to. Instead, he focuses on the space between salt cellar and gravy jug, and tells a portion of the truth.

“This one Sunday I came upon a man preaching by the river. I’d heard the story before, back when I lived here—it was all about Brother Joseph and the Angel Moroni, how Brother Joseph went and dug up the sacred plates. I don’t know, somehow hearing it called out in a clearing like that, the sense of it finally sank in.” He pauses. “After he was done talking, he started leading folks into the water. Before I knew it, I was in up to my waist.”

The first wife makes a close-lipped sound of comprehension. He hazards a glance her way, meets a look that couldn’t hurt a fly.

Ursula empties the hissing kettle into the dishpan and plunges her hands in past their wrists. No pain, thanks to the slow numbing of years. She grabs a glass by its bottom, her mind returning to the story of the hired man’s conversion. From there it’s but an easy sidestep to the memory of her own.

Mrs. Pike liked her to be quick about the morning errands, and so it happened that Ursula was walking at a fair clip when she first heard the Prophet speak. Preachers were common as pigeons in the town square of Independence, Missouri, and Ursula knew Mormons to be the worst snake oil merchants of the lot, but Joseph Smith had a voice that would not be denied. It stopped her with a jerk—like a pair of hands gripping her suddenly, almost brutally, about the waist.

Realizing she’s still washing the same glass, Ursula dips and passes it to Josephine, who dries it carefully, setting it mouth down on the tray.

The Mormon Prophet had no real need of the stump he stood on. He was tall—her own six feet of corporeal height plus another of pure presence. The voice that had so firmly halted her progress now turned and drew her close. She made her way forward through the schooling faithful, growing sensible of the body inside her dress—feeling it turn slippery, sleek as a trout’s.