Effigy (29 page)

“I had to tear strips off my petticoat to bind him up.” She draws a breath to capacity, as though preparing to submerge. “But we were the lucky ones, those of us nearest the brush. Others sought refuge in the smithy’s. How many, Joe?”

The middle boy sits up tall. “Eighteen in all, Mother. Three boys, fifteen men.”

“That’s right, my angel. Eighteen in all, shot through the chinks between the logs. One boy hid beneath the bellows and lived to watch the militiamen break down the door. His name, Josephine?”

“Sardius Smith, Mother.”

“And what did he do? Joseph, now.”

“Mother, he begged for his life.”

“Begged for it. And the man who held a gun to poor Sardius’s head, what was his reply?”

Again the full chorus, a shrilling Bendy endures in his bones. “‘Nits will make lice!’”

“Good.” Mother Hammer plunges back in the chair, three violent rocks before she brakes with her heel. “Think, children, on what kind of man—what kind of
men
—would be capable of committing such an atrocity. Close your eyes. Be quiet some minutes and think.”

Bendy shuts his eyes along with the rest of them. He thinks hard—not along the lines Mother Hammer has dictated, but around and around a single word.
Atrocity
. He’s come upon it only once before—in print, and so he sees it now. Eight black shapes to build a troubling idea, one Robert Wicklow had to explain to him once he’d sounded it out.

It must be a decade ago now. He was reading aloud from the
Daily Evening Bulletin
, the story one of those that made his boss’s head shake slowly in time to the low tsking of his tongue. He can recall only fragments of it now—the parts Wicklow had him stumble over until he got them right.

… the vile brood of incestuous miscreants who have perpetrated this atrocity shall be broken up and dispersed
.

… a crusade will start against Utah which will crush out this beast of heresy forever
.

Here the image of newsprint folds away to reveal Wicklow’s face, his expression one of saddened disgust.
Mormons
.

“Well?”

Mother Hammer’s voice is jarring. Bendy feels himself colour, as though she’s caught him in the midst of some disgraceful act.

“Baby Joe?”

“Bad men,” the youngest blurts.

“Good boy. Josephine?”

The older girl bows her head. “Heartless men.”

“Good. Brother Drown?”

The children twist to peer at him, bracing their hands on the braided rug. His mind is a pale blue blank, the same shade as the first wife’s exacting eyes. Then suddenly, without a doubt, he knows exactly what she wishes, but does not expect, to hear. “Godless, Mother Hammer. Godless men.”

This time she cannot contain her pleasure. She shows it in a flash of teeth, a taut and spasming smile.

The Tracker’s nineteenth year promised to be a bright one. The boughs of the piñon trees dragged to the ground with the first bumper crop in seven years. Many camps came together to reap the reward—more young women than the Tracker had ever seen, and still he had eyes for only one.

What was stopping him? She had been a woman for two moons now. She wasn’t his blood—her people having joined the camp only one generation before—so there would be no objection to the match. He had only to declare himself and, if accepted, lead her by the hand to his hut.
If accepted
. And if not? He had never known such doubt. Perhaps this was what came of spying on a girl during her lonely time, the price of breaking taboo.

The piñon harvest had come none too soon. After all that work there would be dancing, young couples sparking and pairing off. The air would be ringing with cries of courtship. To approach her with longing in his eyes would come as naturally as drawing breath.

He watched her at every opportunity during the long days’ toil. Her right breast lifting as she reached for a cluster of cones with her long hooked pole. Pleasure crimping the corners of her
mouth as she knelt with the others over the roasting pit, watching the hard green cones spring open, inhaling the nutty smoke. Her hands were strong and small, especially skilful in their manipulation of
mano
against
metate
when reducing the shelled, parched seeds to meal. The action causing the muscles of her back to dance.

Later, during the dance itself, she evinced an all-over sinuous grace. She moved directly opposite him across the wide circle, her beauty made luminous by a fine, continuous sweat. Looking her full in the face, he found it difficult to maintain rhythm. Her midriff was worse, so he stared at her feet, sweet and brown in their sandals, and he danced.

He lost sight of her when the circle broke and pooled. By the time he located her face again, he found it changed. She shimmered as though viewed through a bright curtain of rain. Her arm too was different. It still flowed down to her pretty fingers, but those fingers now lay hidden, tucked in Younger Brother’s hand.

Life aboard the
Thornton
was an orderly round. The converted went about their business in orchestrated shifts—cooking, cleaning, praying to the rhythm of the ship’s bell. Time between tasks took the shape of instruction from one of the returning missionaries in their midst. Quarters were cramped—nearly eight hundred
aboard—but were divided into well-run wards, each with a bishop at its head. It took some effort for Ruth to apply this title to such ordinary men, a bishop being a creature of lacy hem and vaulted headdress in her former life. It was the least of many changes she would come to accept.

The days were made of ritual, so much so that actual rites such as baptisms—her own among them—took on a commonplace air. Not so funerals. There was no mistaking the gravity of a sheet-swaddled body slipping overboard. Some loss of life was to be expected during those long weeks at sea. The converted were poor. Many infants, many old. Schedules and scourings do not a magic vessel make.

It was after one such interment—a boy of twelve whose whip-thin corpse strove like an arrow for its watery mark—that Ruth found herself lingering empty-headed at the starboard rail. The sun had gone down, but the ocean still showed a residue of blood-red light. Her gaze glanced off the reflective swell, then penetrated to where a shadow swam close against the hull. It was huge, the length of two lifeboats laid bow to stern.

In the pocket of Ruth’s dress, a rind of bacon curled. She’d learned to save herself a morsel or two to sweeten the long hours between meals. Doubtless she would have been rebuked if anyone had seen—dropping good food overboard in the middle of an ocean, where every direction offered nothing but water meeting sky. What could she be thinking of? Only that the shadow required something of her, and that a curl of bacon was little enough to spare.

She did a wicked thing. Elbows on the rail, she clasped her hands before her, closed her eyes and began to murmur, as though she was addressing the Lord. The bacon slipped away as she loosened her fingers’ clasp. Just then the ship’s bell rang the
gathering to prayer. When she looked down again, the water’s dark was entire. She told herself the thing was sated. It had dropped to the bottom, or turned to follow its great mouth away.

Ruth was below decks when she first heard whispers of something called celestial marriage—a doctrine by which a Saint might take himself more than one living wife. Among the women of her ward, there were those who refused to believe and those who, horrified at the prospect, swore they would be on the next packet home. An empty threat. Most had paid only a small portion of the nine-pound passage, and had signed a bond promising to repay the Church’s Perpetual Emigration Fund once they were earning in the New World.

Ruth neither denied the rumour nor cried foul. The notion of more than one woman in a household seemed natural. The only man she’d ever lived with was her father, and memory had reduced those early years to variations on a single scene. It centred on a bedridden body shrunk to nothing, wet and endless coughing, gobbets of coal-black phlegm loosed into a rag.
He hadn’t the constitution for it
—the doctor’s sighed assertion when the patient finally passed.

Her husband dead and gone, the Widow Graves did the sensible thing and moved herself and her small daughter south to where there were jobs for women and girls. Mrs. Stopes ran a safe, clean house. Many came and went—some marrying, some lighting out for greener pastures, some giving up the ghost—but Ruth and her mother stayed. A dozen years together, then another three with Ruth left to warm the bed alone.

In all that time, she’d given the idea of marriage little thought. She wasn’t fool enough to imagine it would save her from hard work, and Mr. Humphrey’s attentions had taught her a husband’s
loyalties might stray. As for children, another topic favoured by the girls who gathered around Mrs. Stopes’s table, one glance about the below-decks village gave the lie to their tender imaginings. All around her lay mothers driven to near madness, women who hadn’t slept a wink since dry land.

Of course, Ruth had known, however vaguely, that her life in Zion would include a husband. All the same, she’d never actually seen a couple—let alone a family—in her mind’s eye. The forms she encountered there were a good deal simpler. The lobed, serrated figure of a mulberry leaf. The perfect oval of a cocoon.

Eighteen horses are too much work for one man. Since it appears Bendy will be left to his own devices more often than not, he’s made of himself two stable hands—one working by day, the other by night. When the diurnal man isn’t tending to fences and troughs, he’s shovelling shit and spreading fresh straw while the stalls stand empty. The nocturnal version works by lamplight, cleaning and mending tools, washing sweat-stiff blankets, resurrecting long-neglected tack. Sleep finds the gaps and fills them, an hour or two at a time.

What little veterinary know-how Bendy possesses, he’s already putting to use. Aside from the asthmatic nag, a round of cursory examinations revealed thrush in nearly half the herd. Turned-up hooves showed black, putrid sponges, the frogs gone yeasty from standing in piss and filth. As for Bull, in addition to his vice of windsucking, it turns out the troubled gelding is prone to bouts of spasming colic. There’s little Bendy can do during these episodes. He stands close by while the palomino sweats and paws the stable floor, talking softly until the pain dies away.

After less than a week on the job he can see some improvement in the old mare’s cough, now there’s some decent air for her to breathe. Daily hoof scrubbings with dilute iodine, plus fresh straw and clean, dry floors, are beginning to make a dent in the epidemic of thrush. In the meantime, however, a two-year-old paint has come lame—a case of pus in the foot as bad as he’s seen, swollen clean up the fetlock, the heel hot to the touch, alive with a jumping pulse. Having brought the matter up twice with Lal and once with his father, Bendy harbours no illusions about a horse doctor riding up any time soon.