Effigy (28 page)

Before Eudora came to live among them, Erastus took his pelts to be tanned in Tooele. The finest of these he presented to Thankful. His third wife accepted the fox with ardour, closing her eyes to run a hand down its red length. Then met his gaze and demanded half a dozen more. His curiosity fired, Erastus set out directly, covering endless ground, spurring horse and Indian on.

Thankful took her time with the pelts, but waiting only honed Erastus’s desire. When the unveiling finally came, it exceeded his every imagining.

That night, as tonight, his actress wife met him clothed in an unmistakable musk. Her limbs were bare, save for the burnished cuffs that clattered with claws when she moved. Her hair was bound up in a tawny headdress. In place of a blouse, she wore a bib of bushy tails, the slightest shimmy allowing glimpses of human flesh. A short cape covered her back, falling to the three-quarter mark of her bare behind—this he would discover when she turned to lead him in a frantic, restricted chase.

But the true revelation lay beneath the tips of those dangling tails. Erastus gasped like a child when he found it—he couldn’t help himself. She had the narrowest of the pelts tucked up snugly
between her thighs. Its eyeless face nosed her navel. He was loath to remove it. Driving once, twice into the pelt for pleasure, he found Thankful had thought of everything. The fur parted for him where she’d razored a tidy little slit.

Again the sharp, impatient bark. Erastus approaches his third wife with caution. She’ll scratch him given half a chance. She’s broken skin before.

JOHN JAMES MIGHT WELL
have gone on to work in the office of Wicklow Stables, might even have followed in his father’s long-ago footsteps and become a clerk, if only that father had remained among the living. As it was, ever since he’d received word of Bill Drown’s comeuppance, he could feel himself coming loose from the moorings of his new life. Could a boy—a man, really, he was closing in on fifteen—could a man one day up and begin to float? A fool’s notion. But in the war between sense and sensation, the latter inevitably holds sway.

He took to keeping his hands full at all times. Feed sack, water pails, saddle—in a pinch a pair of horseshoes would do. Anything to keep his boot soles in contact with the stable floor. At night he draped himself with heavy saddle blankets, woke sweating, certain he’d dropped into consciousness from a position several inches above the straw.

For months the feeling dogged him. Then, just when he was beginning to resign himself to a private, circumscribed lunacy, it left him in the midst of a bright day. He was propped up against a hitching post on Montgomery Street, both hands keeping a firm grip behind him. The stable owner had sent him out with a list
the length of his forearm.
And mind you don’t take all day
. It was a warning Wicklow wouldn’t have issued before the change, one John James wouldn’t have needed to hear.

Two blocks down, a disturbance erupted into the street. Intially John James thought
fight
, at least one man bellowing in the eye of the throng. Then he caught sight of something brilliant—wheeling through the air, a succession of bright red balls. Wagons swung out next, their fringed tops visible above the advancing crowd.

The bellowing came clear in scraps. “Beasts the likes of which you’ve never seen!” And then, “Equestrian feats—that’s horse tricks, folks—to halt the beating heart!” Soon the seams met to form an endless ribbon of words, half shouted, half sung.

John James let go his post. He had to if he was going to press in with the rest of them for a better look. The ballyhoo issued from a tall, thin source—a reed of a man in a dark yellow top hat, his velvet tailcoat and trousers the same unpleasant shade. He led a well-muscled grey—a real beauty, dappled and heavy-lashed. From a distance the pair seemed otherworldly. As they drew closer, the horse remained lovely while the man betrayed a moth-eaten fatigue. John James watched him pass, heard his monologue dissolve into the general din.

In the wake of the grey mare came a white-faced, juggling clown, his suit of loose ruffles soiled, his boots bulbous and worn. The nose of one caught on a warped plank in the road, jerking him in a four-step stumble. Twisting through an off-kilter whirl, he recovered, keeping all five balls aloft. He cracked a painted grin, the crowd rewarding him with a roar.

The first cage was horse-drawn—a dark brown gelding alongside a bluish nag that could’ve been its grandam, one part horseflesh, three parts glue. John James let his gaze slide over their
sweat-dark backs to where a smallish black bear rocked on its haunches in the shifting space between bars. Its plaque read
Rocky Mountain Bear
—golden letters on a background of hunter green. A creature common as played-out claims in the surrounding hills.

A pair of mules hauled the lion. Neither golden nor maned, it was one of the biscuit-coloured giants from the mountains not far to the east. A
California Lioness
. Deaf to a chorus of miners’ jeers, it lay motionless in a doughy heap, chin flat between its massive paws.

Two more mules dragged a cage full of cages. Suspended, swaying, they contained perhaps a score of exotic birds, lush and varicoloured as the New Orleans fruit stands John James had known as a boy. Banana yellow, banana black. For a moment he felt his mother’s fingers gripping his, market-tense.

Next, hitched to a near-lame mule and its compensating partner, came a barred cargo of scampering forms. Seven silver-ruffed monkeys, three in grubby white dresses, four in miniature sombreros and little black britches. A man clung to the far side of the cage; John James saw only his arm, thrashing and grabbing at the monkeys, keeping them wild. Their screeches mingled with the shrieks of the birds, lifting the finest of John James’s hairs. He’d endured a similar chorus one morning as a child. The morning he woke clinging to a mother gone cold.

He resisted clapping his hands to his ears, instead giving his head a prolonged and violent shake. When he finally left off, the last of the cages was before him. Behind its bars sat a beast whose fur was long and gleaming, coffee-dark. A hyena? A baboon? John James had heard tell of such creatures but had never laid eyes on so much as an engraving. He raised them now to the nameplate, shocked to find it bore an actual name:
Mena the Amazing Dog Girl
.

He gasped, and as though drawn by the minute vacuum his mouth created, the dog girl turned her face, and then the rest of her, his way. As near as John James could tell, she was unclothed. The hair on her head met and melded with the hair that adorned her body. A shorter, finer version sprouted from her chin and cheeks. Bare flesh peeked through in two creamy rings around wet black eyes. She met his look. Looked him straight in his dazzled eyes.

It had been four years since John James last tied himself up in knots. The performances had grown up out of instinct, a creaturely call to survive, and since Robert Wicklow had taken him in, he’d no longer seen the need.

That night, in the grip of a new instinct, he lay on his back in his hollow of straw and caught hold of the sole of one foot. In three tries he had the heel tucked behind his skull. It was a start. He reached for the other foot. Pictured himself shaking the ringmaster’s bony hand.

DORRIE DREAMS:

Night, and the scuttle of a pocket mouse wakes me. I am ravenous, stiff, still rooted to this scrappy oak. Beneath me, the child stirs, the noise that spoke to me of potential prey speaking to her of threat. How can they be so at ease among their own killing kind yet so jittery in the wild, when even wolves turn tail at the sight of them? A grizzly could be trouble, true, or a mountain lion, but neither makes a mouse-sized scuttle in the scrub. Bears come crashing, the sound of wild abandon, an absolute dearth of fear. Cats are all silence until it’s too late. A blessing both are too weighty to waste their time on birds.

The child sits up. Half a moon is more than enough to pick out her grubby, hanging skin. If she understood the dark language, I would tell her of my last flapping survey of the field. The ragged bloom of females and young lying separated from its stem of males. Bodies gleaming blue, dark patches where blood rose up gurgling like the water in the spring they never reached. Here a split skull, brain showing dove-grey through a starburst of bone, there an arrow still bristling. Such a temptation. To take wing and
land at one of those gracious holes, dip the beak, grasp hold of something tender and tear.

It would be taking a chance. The dog man’s pack are clinging to the field. They’ve bedded down, but their fire still burns high. And there is the child. She wouldn’t like it, though she must be hungry too.

She stands now, trying out her legs. Knowing it’s futile, I let out a rasping, tight-throated caw.
Not safe yet. Stay
. She looks up at me, hollow eyed, and I hear myself,
uh-uah, uh-uah
, the gentlest of begging calls. Still she turns, orienting toward the meadow, moving back the way she came.

Keeping her always in my eye, I hop along branches, glide from crown to crown. True flight takes energy, something I feel the lack of all through me, having gone a full day’s distance with no food. The underbrush thrills with promise, but I haven’t time. The child steps out onto the path, walking narrowly, fitting her feet to the track of a single wheel. She crests the slight rise. Brush crowds the trail as we approach the spot where the Originals lay in wait.

Poor earthbound thing. She’ll never know the fine shape her flock has drawn upon the ground. On her level there exists only a mess of bodies, and one in particular—the female who held fast to the lead, staring after the wagons even as they disappeared.

The child halts. Makes no sound save a prolonged absence of breath, followed by several shallow gulps. I feel an urge to give up my vantage, glide and settle on her shoulder. It would terrify her, I know. She would scream and give herself away.

She takes a step forward, a step closer to the black fan of human hair. In the dark it blends with the stain around it, the life that drained out the deep slash in her gullet. Give humans their due—the bright blades they draw from nowhere make a clean, deep cut.
For a long moment the child stands staring, taking in the dark mother’s stripped and moonlit form. Then she whirls, forsaking the wagons’ rut and plunging into the brush. She beats a noisy, scrambling retreat, thrashing so I can’t help but call out another alarm. I cannot say if she hears me. Only that she keeps on.

Low hills rise up beneath her, oak giving way to juniper and sage. When the grade grows steep, she makes feet of her hands, turning animal beneath the partial moon. I follow her up into the sharper air, longer glides between trees now, stretches of open ground. When the climb becomes too much, she veers south and follows the sloping range.

She overlooks it now. If she were to direct her gaze downhill, she would see the long meadow rich with dead. From this angle some are hidden, others plain, depending on how they fell, which way their bodies flattened the grass. She would see the smoking fire of the dog man’s pack. Beyond all this, she would see what remains of her flock’s camp, the circled wagons bereft of their white covers now, all shadow and rib.

But she keeps her eyes forward, stumbling on, and I begin to believe she will follow these hills to the desert lands, running until she drops and dies. What difference in the end? To the west, the smouldering camp. To the east, more unknown humans, Originals and Pales. To the north, the dog man and his wagons. She might as well cut a path over the punishing sands. I will stay with her if she does, at least to the line where the warm-blooded must turn back or burn.

It won’t come to that, at least not tonight. A wrinkle in the hill’s face sprouts a clump of sagebrush, grown fat in its protective fold. As though returning to the burrow she’s always known, the child drops to all fours and forces her way in headfirst, finally hiding her white overskin away. She bruises leaves, bursting countless
veins of scent. Suddenly I can no longer see, smell or hear her. My senses tell me the child is gone, but in my mind’s eye she curls beneath the stinking bush just as she curled at the foot of the oak.

Nearby, a twisted juniper stands. I alight on its thickest limb.

TONIGHT THE BROWN BULK
of a roast graces the table. The first wife is an expert carver. Everyone gets their due.

“Brother Drown.”

Bendy jumps a little. “Yes, Mother Hammer?”

“I imagine your knowledge of Church history leaves something to be desired.”

Hammer forces a loud exhalation out the side of his mouth. Says nothing, though. No longer a novelty, Bendy is on his own.

“Well, I—”

“It is my custom to instruct the children in that very subject of an evening. Perhaps you’d care to join us in the parlour.”

He knows an order when he hears one. “I will, Mother Hammer. Thank you, I will.”

Bendy’s heard tell of Haun’s Mill before, but never the damning details. Hearing them now, he finds himself sitting forward on the hard settee.

“Two dozen families and your poor mother among them. Not a mother then, though, children. Not even a daughter. A servant.” Mother Hammer pauses, looking down at the children gathered
about her feet. “Two dozen families working the fields, the sun low and red in the sky.” Her rocking ceases. “What day was it, my lambs?”

“October thirtieth,” they reply in concert.

“What year?”

“Eighteen thirty-eight.”

“Eighteen thirty-eight.” She nods. “Can you imagine, children, I was but sixteen years of age the day they came squeezing out of the woods all around us, raising up their guns. Missouri militia. Two hundred and forty troops, they say, though I can tell you, we none of us stopped to count. We cried surrender, but they fired on us all the same. I ran for the thickets after my mistress, the pair of us dragging her children by their wrists. They nicked the youngest across his calf.”

Baby Joe gives a gasp, Bendy noting its effect in the muscles of the first wife’s face—the briefest of contractions, a smile she doesn’t allow.