Effigy (2 page)

She ties off the topknot of the
o
, lays down her needle and takes up the Book of Mormon from where it lies on the bedside table. Parting it at the purple ribbon’s mark, she rereads the passage, making certain she has it right.

Wo unto those
—“those,” not “them.” It’s as well she checked. Her knowledge of Scripture is formidable—more than once she’s mentally corrected the Bishop of the ward during Sunday
Meeting—yet it wouldn’t do to let pride be her ruler and chance setting Holy Writ down wrong.

Ursula closes her eyes. For an instant she sees the words laid out as they shall be, three by three.

It’s then that she hears him, cracking the kitchen door beneath her bed, pausing to remove his jacket and hat then wrestle free of his boots. Several minutes pass while she listens to him rooting around in her larder. She’ll be cleaning up after him in the morning, wiping grease from the banister, sweeping crumbs from the stairs where, soon enough, he’ll ascend.

Not yet, though. First, he’ll pass through the front hall to the dining room. Ursula nods—a smug, chin-tucking bob—as the floorboards creak out this very pattern beneath her. As the dining room lies at the far end of the house, she has to strain to make out the following string of sounds—the chuck of the key in the sideboard’s only locking door, the thwack of his book meeting table, the glassy grind of his ink jar coming to rest at its side.

Ursula opens her eyes. She’d make a fine hunter herself, her senses are so very keen. She has the steady hands of a hunter, too, the right one starting up again now, pushing down into the
u
. She must take care to keep its walls straight. Once, distracted by the unholy din Hammer and Sister Thankful were making two doors down, she worked an
n
off-kilter and had to prick it out.

Now comes the distant scuff and scrape of Hammer dragging a chair out to sit. And not just any chair. Ursula smiles to hear it—not with pleasure, but with a species of bleak satisfaction, a keeping of strict accounts.

Opening to a fresh page in his kill book, Erastus Hammer writes,
13th of May 1867. Wolves. Full set taken on a stone apron outside the den. High ground. Stream running below. Took the mother first—all white—single ball to the skull behind the ear. Tolerably clean
.

He blinks, his eyes still watery.

Clubbed the pups—3—pelts perfect. Scarcely done when the father cast in his lot with the rest. Played upon me from the ridge at my back. Came flying from above and behind. Such a weight as would knock a man flat never to rise only a pebble’s clatter gave him away. Swung up the barrel and spun to find him looking very sour at me mid air. Got a shot off on him. Used him up in one. Might still have taken me down with him only I stepped lively aside
.

Erastus sits—as he always does when no eyes are upon him—not at the head of the table but at its tail. Ursula’s chair. It’s as close as he’s come to touching her backside in years. Lord, the shock of it, bare against his palms that first time, hard as a man’s thigh but infinitely smoother. Smooth and hard and cool.

His forearms lie on either side of the splayed kill book, dirty with curling black hairs, marked all over with the scars of a settler’s life. His blue-eyed wife brings her elbows to rest here thrice daily, her pale arms knotted but somehow unmarred, longer than his own by half. How long now since he lined them up side by side in their bed, marvelling at her white and flawless size?

He screws his eyes shut a moment, then forces them to focus on the page. Reading over what he’s written, he finds it wanting a line or two. He considers a moment, nods and wets his nib.

A fine weight of wolves. Not a dry hair on the horses by the time we made home
.

Good enough. He fishes out the list of figures in Eudora’s cramped, back-slanting hand. Hard to believe the tricks those scabby fingers know.

Was it providence, his overhearing the Burr woman’s proud talk in Cedar City that day? He could scarcely help it, the way she was bleating on to the woman behind the counter.
She’s so clever, my Dorrie. Just last week she made up a jaybird, dead one day, resurrected the next!
Erastus thought he’d travelled the more than two hundred miles south to Utah’s Dixie to see about an exceptional mare, but in that moment the true purpose of his journey came clear. He lurked at the back of the store, fingering shirt cuffs and shoe leather, until she was gone. Then made his way to the counter, took out his purse and inquired as to where the good woman lived.

Driving out to the scrappy patch the Burrs called a farm, Erastus nurtured bright visions of every creature he’d ever killed. He pictured them arranged about his home—owls like vases, a grizzly like a gleaming desk—pretending for the moment that Ursula would stand for a wilderness dragged indoors. He imagined visitors stooping to examine teeth, or rising on tiptoe to marvel at claws, forgetting he was a man without the burden of friends.

Upon drawing into the dusty yard, he spotted the blur of a girl’s figure through the open door of a shed. It was all he could do to keep his stride unhurried, matching it to that of her father, a man who ran like a slave to meet him then scuffed along babbling at his side.

At length Erastus drew near enough to get a look at her face. It gave him no pleasure—a shock of pleasure’s opposite, in fact—but it wasn’t her face he’d come to see. Her hands were a mess, nails chewed down, backs nicked, more than one narrow knuckle split. They were at work on a cottontail, divesting it of flesh and bone. The inner body was a headless, sinewy thing—plain meat. The pelt, on the other hand—face and feet and tail still attached—was all promise, a vessel to be filled. Those hands held secrets. He would have them, and the rest of her too.

Having copied the list of weights and measures, Erastus blots the page. A fragmentary inversion of his story appears on the blotting paper. He stares at it for a long moment before folding shut the book.

Not long now. She can hear him—no longer scribbling, sitting still a moment, directly below. Of course she can hear him. She’s down on her knees, ear to water glass, glass to floor. A woman has a right to keep track of her man.

He stands, the chair scraping out behind him. Why does he sit in the first wife’s chair rather than his own? Because he knows the witch wouldn’t like it if she knew? Or because it’s closer to the sideboard, the book he keeps locked away?

She hears the snick of the sideboard door. The chair shoved forward again. Any minute now.

She’s been dressed for hours, face painted, ringlets set. Thankful Cobbs Hammer, third and favourite wife, standing at her window, staring into the night. Not that she expected him to approach from that direction, taking the track like a civilized man. Her husband is a hunter, a pioneer. More often than not he returns to her overland.

Soon she will hear his footsteps in the corridor. When they halt outside her door, there will come a slim silence before the handle turns in its works. It is this silence—this sound-not-sound of being chosen—that lends her every performance its edge.

Thankful rises, a curtsy undone. Returning the glass to its spot on the crowded vanity, she licks finger and thumb to pinch off her candle’s flame, then sweeps herself to the darkest corner of the room.

Erastus slips the sideboard key into his waistcoat pocket. Instead of taking up the lamp, he lowers his mouth to its glass chimney and blows it out. He’ll feel his way.

After the dining room’s clutter, the front hall gapes. He built this house—eight bedchambers stacked atop kitchen, front hall, dining room and parlour. There’s no angle of it he doesn’t know. He’s up the black stairs like a spider up its thread.

At the top he meets temptation in the shape of a door. His second wife, Ruth, lies behind it, probably sleeping on her back. She’d half waken if he went in. Let him push the silk shift up around her neck without protest, accept him with scarcely a sound. The nut-brown gloss of her hair, black in the blackness, the colour somehow still present in its slippery weight.

It wouldn’t be worth it. The last time—the briefest of visits—earned him a month cut off from Thankful’s favours. Quiet as he might be, he can be certain his third wife would lay her ear to the wall.

A left turn would lead him down the corridor to the large corner room, where his first wife lies alone in the tall brass bed. It’s an idea he mustn’t dwell on if he’s to know any peace. Ursula’s
never actually barred him from their chamber, but years of trying have taught him there’s no cold akin to that which her body gives off in their bed.

Erastus turns right. He runs the tips of his fingers silently along the wall, keeping low to avoid upsetting Ursula’s framed mottoes, until he reaches the depression that signifies Thankful’s door.

Maybe she’ll have on that black feather ruff—the one that makes her look like a vulture would if it were a woman. Mouth red, eyes glistening. Erastus grins in the darkness. If he’s lucky, he’ll get the bounce on her, catch her off guard.

At the periphery of the Hammer ranch, the Tracker lies prone in his brush hut. His roof stands open above him, the night sky visible through a tangle of upthrust poles and, beyond them, the boughs of a scraggly oak.

The wolf den had not been new to him. He’d discovered the modest pack some five springs previous, the mother leading him there. He tracked her splayed toes back from a torn-open fawn, watched from a downwind distance as that year’s brood spilled from the den to meet her. Ears flat, crouched and wagging, they chewed at her throat, licked and nuzzled about her lips. The Tracker watched her sides heave in response, saw her bring up a fair portion of kill. She sat back on her haunches as they fell upon the glistening pile.

He stayed on long after they’d finished every scrap, letting his belly join rock, his back lift off into sky. He witnessed the lolling aftermath of the feed and, some time later, the return of the silver-maned father. The white wolf roused herself to greet him, skipping forward with a pleasure so keen it cut the Tracker to his
solitary heart. He took his leave of them then, but found himself passing that way every year at whelping time to see if they’d returned.