Effigy (25 page)

THE COW BARN
is Mother Hammer’s territory, and it is for this reason alone that Bendy has been on the ranch some four days before he darkens its door. He’s only here now because there’s something he needs, and chances are this is where it’ll be.

Joseph and Joe are hard at it on their little stools, milk ringing in their pails. The air is body-warm. Sweet, too, not a hint of the sourness Bendy’s come to associate with milking. If these boys spill a drop, they know damn well to wipe it up.

“Morning, Joseph,” he says, “Joe.”

Both neat, gleaming heads draw back from their cow flanks and rotate his way.

“You boys know if your mother keeps a cat about the place?”

It’s an odd question, he knows—where there’s one barn cat there are twenty—but if he’s taken the first wife’s measure correctly, she’s the sort to tolerate only one or two. He’s just as sure she won’t be entirely without. It’s a fair bet a woman like her would regard a scattering of mouse turds not with apathy or even disgust, but rage.

“Tom,” the older boy says. “Up in the loft.”

“And Kitty,” Joe adds.

“No.” Joseph returns his brow to the cow’s side, resuming the task at hand. “Kitty went in the flour sack with the last litter.”

“Oh.” Joe nods, following through until his forehead too meets flank. “I forgot.”

Bendy feels this in his gut, as though for several seconds the writhing sack is located there. Foolish. It’s the way of things. Perhaps if the boys—the younger one at least—seemed to feel something about it, he wouldn’t have to. He shifts his weight to his toes and back. “You don’t mind if I borrow him for the morning, do you?” He forces a smile even though neither of the boys is looking his way.

“Go ahead.”

He can’t be certain which one of them has spoken. It scarcely matters. He proceeds to the ladder and climbs.

Tom is massive, thickly muscled, white. Bendy pokes his head up through the loft floor and meets him eye to opening eye. A trout-green gaze. Ears intact, tail supple and full, lifting now, drawing the hindquarters after it in a rising stretch. Without a doubt the handsomest cat Bendy has laid eyes on—no kin to the toothy, wire-legged wraiths he avoided as a child.

With a hand the cat can’t see, Bendy reaches into his trouser pocket for the chicken leg he kept aside the night before. Tom has a good nose on him. He’s easing forward, responding to the offering before it appears. Bendy peels off a swatch of nubbled skin as a teaser. Spreading it on the hayloft floor, he backs away down the rungs. Tom stands chewing, impatient above him. Once the way is clear, he springs down the ladder as though it’s the gentlest of slopes, landing in a dearth of sound.

Bendy holds the chicken leg at hip level, waving it like a stubby tail, leading the snowy brute past the wordless boys. Striding to the horse barn, he imagines the picture the pair of them make.
Once inside, he leads the cat directly to the largest of several mouse nests he’s found.

“Not yet, boy.” He pockets the leg. “Don’t want you too full to do your job.”

But Tom is already wreaking havoc, tossing a blind baby into the air.

The Tracker wakes suddenly, awash in early light. He crawls from his hut, rises and sets off eastward. In the early days, Hammer would fetch him when his presence was required, but seven years at the white man’s side have made a limb of the Tracker—he flexes when the impulse comes. The first few times he showed up on his own, Hammer betrayed surprise.
How in the hell?
In reply, the Tracker employed a white gesture, turning his empty hands up to the sky.

This morning the wide pasture glows. The Tracker moves through its shifting brilliance into a time long gone.

Small Sister was newly a woman, proud to wade with the others deep into the grass, lifting her seed beater high. It happened that the Tracker was within shouting distance that day, he and Younger Brother setting snares. He felt the hoofbeats through the bark soles of his sandals, looked up to see the Ute braves high atop their mounts—ten, maybe twelve of them thundering from the northeast draw.

The Tracker might have been a horse himself, so fleet were the legs upon which he ran. Not thinking to shed her burden basket, Small Sister pelted toward him with it bouncing on her back, spraying a trail of seed. Her new breasts leapt and jangled. At the extremity of her arm the seed beater flailed, a wide and woven
hand. He reached her—almost reached her—as the Ute slaver leant wide and low. A knotted arm encircled Small Sister’s waist, and the Tracker’s goal was gone.

He drove his heels deep into the ground to keep from throwing himself under the churning hooves. It was a dark horse that flowed past him, the deepest, richest brown, glowing with the lather of many miles. Its mane was true black, a windswept, rippling wash—not unlike the Ute’s tresses, falling over Small Sister’s face.

Black nostrils too. This the Tracker would remember later, the horse’s nostril flaring above him. He would remember the Ute’s nose, too. The flash of eyes above it, the broad, strong bridge, even the tiny white protrusion—the nostril cartilage home to a shard of polished bone. From a deer? A bird? And there were fish bones in the Ute’s necklace. And bear claws. The swinging scoop of it rattled and shone.

It is this more than anything that pains him. If he was close enough to take note of the Ute’s nose pin, close enough even to hear that fine rattling above the drumming of hooves, how is it he couldn’t catch and keep hold of her, his own dear flesh?

Seven women taken that fine summer’s day. Try as he might, the Tracker can only picture one.

As always, the Tracker finds whatever summoned him to the white man’s side wasn’t wrong. Trading the morning light for the ribbed insides of the horse barn, he finds Hammer oiling his gun. Nearby, the new man eases a bit into the black giant’s mouth. Their gazes cross, the new man offering a nod over the horse’s lowered nose. The Tracker keeps all expression to himself.

Between them, Hammer’s mount is somehow changed. The Tracker can’t help but remark the difference—nowhere more evident
than in the cant of her massive head. It’s as though she desires nothing more than to surrender its great weight, skull and senses, to the new man’s hands. The Tracker focuses on the horse’s right ear, cocked his way now, measuring him despite her bliss. He follows the black column of neck to her shoulder, the barred marks there a memory they share.

He and Hammer had followed the fat tracks for miles, the Tracker losing the trail repeatedly. The pale cat was playing with him, padding through water, taking to trees. At last it split off from the river and led them in a steep ascent.

The air, close and curdled in the bottomlands, began to move. The Tracker scented then caught sight of the cat’s leavings, a partially covered pile. Dense with hair and bone, the stools spoke of hunger, a goodly stretch since the last fresh feed. Reaching country too broken for horse hooves, he waited while Hammer tied the animals in the shade of an outcropping before carrying on.

He should have known better. The mountain lion doubled back, the promise of tethered horseflesh too sweet to resist. The pack horse would have been the safer bet, but the cat knew good meat from tough.

A horse under attack makes a sound impossible to forget. They hadn’t made it far—Hammer holding him back, cautious among the rocks—when the scream spun the pair of them where they stood. The Tracker ran on goat legs, leaving the white man behind. Rounding the last dogleg of a narrow cut, he brought the Henry’s sights up in line with his eye.

The scene beneath the outcropping entered him with the slow-flowing force of a dream. The pack horse hauling back into its haunches, the black giant thrashing, all hooves and whipping spine. For now, the fight was enough to keep the cat from biting,
working its long teeth between bones to snap the hidden cord. It was holding on tight, though, a fat, cream-coloured saddle with a glaring face. Spotting the Tracker, it added its own voice to the squealing song of its prey. The black horse rocked forward, baring the cat’s white chest. On the back-surge the mare’s head and breast obscured the shot. The trick was in the timing. Crooking his finger, loosing the ball a hair’s breadth before the next plunge.

It was a kill for the telling, the first shot rendering a second one unnecessary. Claws let go, retreating into their sheaths the moment the Tracker’s ball met heart. The lion was airborne on the following buck. It landed in a crease of the outcropping, both horses dancing in the wake of its death. Hammer broke upon the aftermath through the thin smoke drifting from the Henry’s muzzle.

The Tracker felt something akin to respect for the black mare that day. Once she’d quieted enough to see the predator was well and truly dead—Hammer showing her, kicking it in the belly where it lay—she stood rock-steady, seemingly oblivious to the blood escaping the four corners of her back.

On the white man’s command, the two of them heaved the mountain lion up onto the skipping pack horse. While the Tracker lashed it down, Hammer shucked out of his coat and laid it across the mare’s shoulders to blot the worst of the wounds. It was a long ride back, the first third of it a straining downward grade, but the big horse never flagged. The pack horse eventually took his cue from her lead and settled into the rhythm of burden and track.

It was the finest kill they’d delivered to the child wife so far. Her eyes caught fire when she opened the door to them. When they laid the body out on her workbench, she bobbed over it like a crow.

“Meat,” the Tracker said over his shoulder, following Hammer to the door.

The white man turned. “You’d eat that? Marmot I can see, even beaver. But cat?” He shook his head. “You hearing this, Eudora?”

She didn’t look round, saying only, “Come back in the morning. Before the bell.”

“Tracker. Hey, Tracker.” Hammer’s voice now, jabbing down from the great horse’s height. “What’re you waiting for?”

As always, the Tracker takes a moment to harden himself before assuming his place at Hammer’s back. His people never took to riding—a body’s own two legs made more sense in a country of river, sagebrush and rock. They paid for it when the Utes came thundering, scooping up slaves.

The Tracker accepts a hand up. He knows a familiar wash of panic as he leaves the ground, feels it ebb as he settles in. It’s an uneasy intimacy, this riding groin to buttock, belly to back. Often a good grip on the cantle behind him is all the Tracker requires, but there are times when Hammer can’t resist urging his horse on. At a full gallop the Tracker has no choice but to wrap both arms around the white man, squeeze his eyes shut and hold on.

The new man draws wide the stable door. As the black horse gains the yard, the Tracker stares over Hammer’s shoulder straight into the lifting sun. He blinks, the skeletal scene imprinted on the backs of his eyelids. Drawing them open again, he spies the first wife framed in the kitchen door. In the People’s camp, the
Niav
stood just so each morning, poised at the threshold of his hut. The Tracker blinks again, harder. The old life is stretching itself inside him today, breaking through.

Meanwhile the scene before him evolves. The smallest boy bursts from the chicken house, gripping a shallow basket to his chest.

“Walk, Baby Joe,” the first wife calls out sharply. “They’re no good to me smashed.”

The child halts abruptly, nearly upsetting his load. Then proceeds on tentative feet.

“Joseph!” she yells over the boy’s head. “Joe!”

From the depths of the cow barn, a united, unintelligible reply.

“What’s keeping you?”

A second muted answer brings her broad hands to her hips. She is nothing like the
Niav
. He was the People’s voice, yes, but never their ruler. Such gentle, sensible exhortations.
Today we hunt rabbit. Hunt well or the People will go without
.

The first wife has ignored her husband until now, but as Hammer turns his mount’s head westward, she raises her voice his way. “Husband!”

The Tracker feels the word kick and ripple through the white man’s back. Hammer goes so far as to halt the horse, but draws the line at turning back her way. Behind them, she hollers again. “See if you can’t bring back some meat this time.”

Hammer answers with a nudge of his heels. The black horse tenses and flies.