Effigy (15 page)

At the back kitchen door she trades her slippers for boots and steps outside to find the moon lofty and full. Its distant light renders the yard in extremes, yet she feels no quickening in her chest, no urge to lengthen her stride.

Inside the cow barn she turns a slow revolution, holding her lamp high. Four, five, six good milkers, safe in their clean, dry stalls. She turns a similar circle in the cramped chicken house, adding only a nodding of the head to take in all three levels of roosts. Satisfied, she lowers her lamp. From here she’ll proceed to the larder, to tally her stores.

At the low sill of the kitchen door, something silver flashes in the corner of her eye. She turns her head to find stillness. Hers is not a mind to cling to glimpses. Stepping inside, she dismisses all conjecture as firmly as she closes the door.

She crosses to the larder, fits her body like a key into its narrows. Sacks and bushel baskets crowd her skirts. The honey cask nudges her knee. Down the far end the cured side of pork dangles. Ursula turns to face the left-hand bank of shelves. Bundles of candles, crocks and cakes of soap—all put up by her, stirring the stinking kettle while Joseph fed the fire and Josephine set wicks or added lye. Above these, neat lines of bottles and jars. A comfortable sufficiency, even surplus, though such words hold little meaning for one who’s known brutal seasons. Besides, she can’t afford to grow complacent with Hammer selling fewer horses every year.

At eye level, halved yellow fruits press against glass. One, two, three jars of peaches, Ursula tells herself, but her heart’s not in it.
In truth, she can scarcely focus on the jars before her, let alone count them, for the idea of what they hide.

She’s four jars deep before her middle finger makes contact with the tin. She brings the little box to her nose, flipping open its hinged lid. Inhaling deeply, she gives a small shudder. She closes the lid to avoid sacrificing so much as a morsel, nearly tripping on the hem of her dress in her haste to reach the stove. The coals still have life in them. Ursula prods and jabs them, centres the kettle and turns. She owns no teapot. She’ll steep it loose in a cup as always, add the cream and sugar direct, strain through her teeth as she sips.

Her parents would have cringed at the very idea. Like many an English commoner come to the New World, they’d made a religion of tea, warming the pot like their betters, setting out saucers and wedges of buttered bread. Ridiculous to be sensible of their disapproval even now. Ursula was Josephine’s age the last time either one of them drew breath, let alone brewed up a pot of best black Ceylon.

The stuff is hard to come by in the Valley of the Saints. She’s chanced ordering it in to the post office in Tooele, even stooped to trading with Gentile emigrants seeking butter and cheese. More than once she’s gone months at a time without. She digs out a heaping teaspoon. It’s greedy, right enough, but there’s no sense bowing to temptation if she doesn’t go all the way. The kick of it will tingle. Its heat will connect throat to heart, heart to vitals. She sets spoon, sugar tin and cream jug at the ready, listens hard for the water’s happy roll.

It is wrong to partake of stimulants. Sinful. It weakens the soul.

Surely, given all her labours, the Lord will see fit to overlook this pettiest of trespasses. Brother Joseph would—Ursula’s certain
of it. She gives a sharp smile at the idea of him. The Prophet was a man of flesh. Were he present, he might even join her in a cup.

Wary of horse thieves and other predators, Hammer insists the entire herd be stabled at night. Eighteen head. It’s less work than it would’ve been the week before—Bendy’s boss having pried half a dozen colts and fillies from their dams and taken them to the city for sale. Still, Bendy ought to be tired by the time he’s seen the last mare to her stall. His body knows it, every stretch of over-giving gristle burning as he mounts to the loft. It’s his brain that refuses him rest. What he wouldn’t give for some of his fatigue to settle in the grey weight behind his eyes. Wakefulness is a curse he’s known since boyhood.

Two days on the job, and any notion that this place might be different is already beginning to fade. What’s worse, he suspects the same might be said for this entire leg of his life. He’s taken oaths, learned secret signs, pledged himself a believer for life—and still he finds he is possessed of an isolated soul.

He might as well face it. Hammer shows only a surface interest in the horses, and Lal is lazier than an overfed dog. It’s not the idea of working on his own that troubles Bendy—he was never happier than when he rode the ponies—but he had hoped to become part of something larger than himself again, a brotherhood of shared purpose, if nothing else.

As for that other something larger, the elusive family life, it’s here, all right. He’s sat at many tables, but never one that boasted so many women and kids. The battles are quieter than most he’s witnessed, but they’re clearly raging all the same.

Sister Thankful, you’ll help clear away
.

I would, Mother Hammer, only I believe I can feel one of my megrims coming on
.

Oh you can
.

I believe I can
.

Pause.
I see it hasn’t affected your appetite
.

No
. Grey eyes cutting to the husband they share.
No, I appear to have appetite enough
.

Lying atop the blanket—a saddle blanket by the smell of it—Bendy drags down his eyelids and longs for sleep. Mere seconds pass before his eyes snap open, plumbing the blackness that is the barn’s ribbed vault. His joints howl. With a frame so loosely hinged, the muscles have little choice but to take up the slack, clutching and clinging about the bones. He sits up, folds himself lengthwise like a doubled slip of rope. Taking a boot sole in each hand, he bends his elbows out wide and draws his face down between his calves. Holding, breathing the blanket’s funk until his hip sockets begin to ease.

Rocking up on his buttock bones, he rolls through onto his back, hauling both legs with him. Shins alongside his ears, he grabs hold of his elbows behind his thighs. A further degree of easing, the burning almost benign. Hooking his fingers to his boot heels, he opens himself butterfly-wide. Lies there as though pinned, listening as a bad case of stable cough starts up below.

Hinging his body closed, he rises and steps to the opening in the loft’s floor. A lightless, tactile descent and he’s back on horse level. He lands with care, quiet on his leather soles. He considers lighting a lamp, but the gloom is thinner down here, leavened by moonlight falling through the windows he’s left unshuttered to clear the air.

Bendy follows the cough six stalls along to where a plain brown nag stands wheezing. Her every exhalation comes in halves, the
suffering too great to find release in a single stream. He rubs her damp brow for a time before unlatching the stall door.

“Here’s your neck,” he says softly, laying an open hand there. Then, with the other palm, “And here’s your back.” A course of skating strokes along her shuddering spine and he slides his fingers down her barrel. “There’s your ribs, girl.” He feels further, discerning the irregular ridge of a heaving line in the muscles of her gut. “Chronic, huh? Don’t worry, I’ll get it cleaned up in here for you. Get you some better air.”

He straightens and draws his outspread hand once again along the nag’s back, letting it rest on the high point of her hip. He might be fooling himself, but he could swear her breath is clearer, the cough shallower when it comes. He lays an ear to her sloping side. Finds himself thinking there might be something to this job after all.

Four pages before the picture book’s end, the Tracker comes upon a dark inversion of the portrait he lingered over last night. It shows the same small girl, half hidden under a bonnet’s drooping rim. She sits in the dirt, dustier by far than she was pages before. In this drawing there exists nothing so hopeful as a crystalline stream.

The child’s eyes are obscured, so the Tracker looks to the true focus of the work—her hands. As in the earlier, happier scene, the right one grips a tin cup. The left lies on its back in the lap of her filthy skirts. The cup holds nothing. The artist, possessed of no water with which to fill it, has instead darkened its mouth with a shadow of lack.

Beyond the thirsting child, three slumped figures and the back of a man on his knees. There is no horizon. The kneeling man fills
the gap between two wagons, his arms hoisted, neck compact—the pose a man assumes when sighting down a rifle’s length.

No matter how many times the Tracker turns to this page, it unbalances him to assume this point of view. Ten years have passed since that bright autumn day, and still he can close his eyes and look down on the circled wagons from above.

The People had come together in the hills, men from his own camp and countless others answering the call. The Tracker had taken part in large gatherings before, but never like this—so many assembled at a white man’s behest, and not a single woman among them. Their purpose was different too. Not a grass-seed gathering or an antelope drive or a piñon harvest, the dance and all its couplings to follow. Not a harvest at all.

Yet another Mericat wagon train was moving southwest across the People’s land, its stock eating a broad swath of what little good grassland remained. Yauguts and the other Mormonee captains had schooled the braves along the road, and again in buzzing huddles once a goodly number had arrived. More than ever, they claimed, the Mericats were the enemy of the Mormonee and the People both. Mericat armies from the East were massing in the mountains, preparing to make war on all those in the Territory. Red and white must band together against the common foe.

For hours the Mormonee captains stirred the People’s blood with their tales. One told of how this particular wagon train had poisoned the Pahvants at Corn Creek with the gift of a contaminated ox. No, said another, not an ox—these Mericats had sunk so low as to poison a spring. In any case, Kanosh’s people, who had done no worse than to come begging for bread, had doubled down over their cramps, turned circles in the dirt and died.

By the time all stood ready for the initial raid, the Tracker, Younger Brother and a hundred other braves were fairly dancing
to descend. It was the last and deepest dark, known to the People as second night. Filtering down from the sage-fragrant hills, they followed the ravine’s cut out into the black sea of grass.

In the way of whites, the camp had loosed its greedy herd. The meadow groaned with tearing teeth—horses, mules and oxen, thick-witted cattle by the score—beasts that were no match for men who had hunted pronghorn, mountain sheep and deer. They ran off hundreds. The Tracker followed the dark, boxy behinds of a dozen cows back down the draw. Watching them scramble and totter as the terrain grew rough, he felt a contempt colder than any he had ever known.

Yauguts and the other Mormonee, painted in crude imitation of the People, held the braves back until the pre-dawn gloaming. The long wait in that high-country cold only served to quicken their desire. Smoke rich with the fat of rabbit and quail drifted up from the Mericat camp. At long last, with the sky like deep water stirring, they returned to the valley bottom, again following the gully of the creek bed to within range of the sprawling camp. This time they made their presence known with a trilling howl, a great volley of singing arrows and leaden balls.

They killed a handful, a child among them, and wounded a handful more. Stray stock added to the numbers, animals shrieking and lowing as they fell. The surprise came when the sleepy sprawl of the encampment answered the attack. After a brief skirmish the People swallowed their battle cries and ran.

While the Tracker and his number were dragging their wounded back to the rocky cover of the western hills, the wagon train turned in on itself and sealed up tight. The Mericats worked on, throwing up breastworks, digging holes into which they would lower their wagons’ wheels.

All this the Tracker would comprehend hours later, looking
down on the closed camp in the dying light of that first long day. While the retreat was actually happening, he had no awareness of anything beyond the gunfire behind him, and the body of Younger Brother, by turns rigid and writhing in his arms.