Effigy (32 page)

THE MEAT IS COLD
, left over from last night’s roast. What’s more, there’s not enough of it on Lal’s plate. He cuts his mother a sullen look, but her eyes are fixed on Baby Joe, who’s sawing his own portion like a big boy. Her mouth is soft with pleasure. Lal looks away.

Reeling in his gaze, he lets it snag for a moment on Ruth. Her face, her lovely throat, rises from a great bulk of green fabric. He recognizes the dress as one resurrected from a previous confinement. An ugly, boxy thing, it houses rather than clothes her. He won’t see her again in the shift. Gulping, he glares down at his meagre share.

It was the briefest of looks—a mere flickering—but it hasn’t gone unnoticed. Thankful is staring at him. He can feel her augering twin points in his forehead with her eyes.

“Sister Thankful.”

Lal flinches at the sound of his father’s voice. He glances up to find Thankful’s attention has shifted, husband and wife a closed couple now, alone at a table of twelve.

“Yes, Mr. Hammer?”

“That’s a fetching dress you have on. You are a clever girl.”

Thankful touches a finger to her water glass, catching a bead of its sweat. “Am I?”

“You know you are.”

“And you, husband, are very generous to buy me such fine cloth.”

Lal waits for the inevitable, Thankful twisting on her seat to include another in their talk. “Isn’t that so, Mother Hammer?”

A quiet so cold it tinkles. Then, “Isn’t what so, Sister?”

“Isn’t Mr. Hammer a very giving husband?”

Lal scarcely knows whom to watch. He shifts from mother to stepmother to father—only to find Hammer’s attention is nowhere near the sparking exchange. His gaze is intent upon Ruth.

A hardening comes over Lal’s body. He presses the thumb to his lips, mouths urgently against it, “Do you see?”

Greedy
, the thumb observes.

His mother speaks now. “Giving. I suppose
you
could say that.”

Giving?
the thumb whispers.
Hardly. Remember Emily Frye?

How could Lal forget? It was less than a year ago, the Memorial Day picnic. The Frye farm lay some distance to the south; the last time Lal had laid eyes on the eldest daughter she’d been a yellow-braided rail. At the picnic she filled her good blue gingham like a jay fills its feathers. She stood closer than need be beside him, watching him over her chicken sandwich, taking sharp little bites.

It took him several minutes to think up something to say. “Blue’s your colour.” It wasn’t much, but the look in her eye told him it would do.

He’d only just gotten the words out when his father caught hold of him by the shoulder from behind. “Here you are. Is he boring you, Emily?”

“Oh no, sir, I—”

But Hammer was already steering Lal away. It turned out there was work to be done, a plank floor to be knocked together for the dancing later on.

By the time Lal got free of his father, his good white shirt was stained with sweat. He searched the crowd for her anyway, spotted her standing before an older man in a dark, well-fitting suit. His grey beard working. Her grey eyes fixed on the ground.

It wasn’t a month before Lal heard the news of their sealing at Sunday Meeting. For time and all eternity. What young man stands a chance? Little wonder he can’t keep his eyes off Ruth.

What does he expect?
the thumb breathes.

“What’s the matter with you?” Hammer barks suddenly in his ear.

“Huh?”

“You gonna suck that thumb?”

“I—”

“Eat your supper.”

“I—”

“You want me to eat it for you?”

Lal shakes his head violently. “I’ll eat it.” He grips his knife and fork, starts in on the first of three small medallions of beef. He’ll fill up on spuds and bread as usual. “Pass the potatoes, Joe.”

The boy doesn’t move. No one does. After a long, stupid moment, Lal realizes what he’s done wrong. The word nearly chokes him. “Please.”

They’re all abed. Ursula will go up herself soon, but for now she works the rocking chair like a cradle, wooing sleep. Why should a
body so weary refuse rest? Because it’s learned to. Because it’s known far greater exhaustion and remained upright.

She will speak of that grim time, but only when the children press her. Even then it’s up to them to draw out the details. It’s wrong, she knows. The Church didn’t die when Brother Joseph did. Its history—and her own, come to that—went rolling on.

I don’t understand, Mother. Why did the Saints leave Illinois?

The same reason we left Missouri, Joe, and Ohio before that. The Gentiles drove us from our homes
.

But wasn’t Nauvoo ours? Didn’t we build it to be our very own?

It was, son. We did
.

So saying, she would feel the loss anew.
Nauvoo
. It was the finest city in the state of Illinois, built in a scant five years on swampland nobody had wanted—that is until, by the sweat of the Lord’s Chosen, it was transformed into hallowed ground. Autumn 1845. The Prophet had been in his grave some fifteen months, Ursula’s heart having chilled along with him despite the hot-skinned man who now shared her bed. She filled her days with preparations for the coming winter, laying strips of squash out to dry, bottling bent cucumbers with warty skins. All of it undone in the fire. The squash would have curled up black, giving off a sugary, stinking smoke. The pickle jars simmering before going off like bombs.

What about you and Father?

What about us? I’ve told you before, they burned us out
.

And after that?

After that, an exodus to rival any endured in Old Testament times. They held out until February—still months before President Young had promised the Saints would leave peaceably, but when did a Gentile ever honour his end of a deal? It was a hurried leave-taking. Joseph’s mansion was left standing empty, his body, so rumour had it, interred in the basement of an
unfinished hotel. The mob helped themselves to all the Saints couldn’t carry. In time they would go so far as to desecrate the Temple—broken bottles in the yard, vomit in the font, excrement on the steeple stairs.

The riverbank was little better than a mudslide. Ursula can recall lying back on the wagon seat, the rumps of the mules straining before her. The Mississippi boiled with ice chunks. A bone-chilling crossing delivered them to the Poor Camp at Sugar Creek, where Ursula watched a dry-eyed woman split her hope chest with an axe and burn it board by board. Where Joseph’s people gathered and began in earnest to die.

Cold and hunger, croup and ague, black canker and bloody flux. Consumption. Axe wounds. Bad breaks splintering, poisoning the blood. All those who could manage it—the Hammers included—moved westward at the earliest chance.

Iowa was all mud. They wallowed in it, horses mired up to their barrels in evil-smelling sloughs, boots coated until they became black anvils that tortured the legs. Women and children goaded terrified teams while men laid their shoulders to sunken wheels. Some days they were lucky to cover four miles.

When the weather turned fine in mid-April, the grass sprang up high, providing cover for the snakes that came with it. A child’s bare ankle, the soft, seeking nose of a grazing horse. Some only sickened. Others died. Those still walking learned to thrash the path before them with sticks.

In areas where game was abundant, wolves contented themselves with culling old or ailing stock from the margins of the herd. They grew bolder wherever the land turned mean. A great snarling bawl would be heard from among the makeshift pens, men bursting from their camp beds, filling the night with bellows and sparks.

The losses were many. The woman in the screeching wagon in front of theirs packed her dead baby along for weeks in the hope that it might be blessed by a member of the priesthood and properly laid to rest. She kept the tiny corpse wrapped up tight so that it might not lose cohesion, but not tight enough to fool the flies. Ursula watched them day in, day out, a black tail lifting with every jolt of the wagon’s hind end.

It would be a lie, though, to say it was all hardship. Women, herself among them, wandered the grassy slopes, filling their aprons with wild strawberries. One night they gathered under starlight to bathe in the sand shallows of the Sweetwater, the men keeping their distance, having washed themselves earlier in the day. At times the air was so clear it flummoxed the eyes. The seam that held land to sky breached by jackrabbits, or was it Indians—Pawnee? Sioux? Or antelope? Everything made plain in the flash of a snowy behind.

Ursula comes close to dozing. Not all hardship. There were wonders. Things she’s never told the children, and never will.

His knock is unlike any she’s heard on her workshop door—a trio of clean, formal raps that play the old barn as though it were the chamber of a drum. She freezes, right hand gripping the saw, left hand braced against the workbench, fingers curled around a length of quarter-inch iron rod. Seconds elapse before it occurs to her that whoever knocked—and there’s only one person it could be—is awaiting a reply.

“Come in.”

The bad hinge gives a whimper. “I saw your light,” Bendy Drown begins, his gaze already drifting right to take in the collective
presence there. She says nothing. He turns his back to her to take it all in, but she catches the satisfying drop of his jaw. “Lord,” he breathes, staring up into the motionless ranks. And again, louder now,
“Lord.”

She allows herself a tiny smile.

“Did you—” he stammers. “Are these yours?”

She nods, an answer he must turn her way to see. As he does, she tucks the smile away, lowering her eyes.

“How long have you lived here?”

She lays the saw down on its side across the rod. Glancing up, she finds him staring at her hands. She takes a swift step back from the workbench and thrusts them into the pocket of her smock. “Three years.”

“Three years.” He shakes his head, and it is hard to credit, now that she thinks on it—the number of specimens she’s mounted in that time, how far she’s advanced in her craft. She knows a flush of quiet pride.

“But you’re so young,” he says. “You must’ve been—”

And now shame. She lifts her chin against it, the gesture working on him like a warning hand.

“Beg pardon.” It’s his turn to look down, inspect the straw-strewn floor. Abruptly, awkwardly, he wheels on one foot and once again faces the display. Then moves to the bottom tier and stoops over a rattlesnake’s coils. “He looks mean.”

The light there is poor, and Dorrie resists the urge to join him, lamp in hand. She could say so much about the diamondback—how her heart skipped a beat when Hammer dragged it from his kill bag, how its lank weight thrilled in her palms. It’s no mean trick getting a snake to come smooth. The detail she’s most proud of—the one everybody seems to overlook—lies in the rattlesnake’s open mouth. It required such patience, such delicacy
of touch, to slip her finest brush between its fangs and bring the bright palate to life.

All this and more she keeps to herself, waiting for him to speak. When he does, it has nothing to do with the snake.

“You always work at night?”

“Mostly.”

He nods. “I don’t sleep so good myself.” He turns his attention to the next bale, where a pair of yellow-bellied marmots sit up tall. “Hello, boys.”

“Boy and girl,” she corrects him, and he shoots her an over-the-shoulder glance. “Brother Hammer prefers mated pairs. Families.”

“That so.” He watches her a moment longer before letting his neck uncoil. Tilting his gaze, he points to where the mountain lion claims three bales of the highest tier. “What about him? He’s all on his own.”

“It takes longer with some. You can’t always bag a full set.”

“Huh.”

He stands still for a time, staring up. Then movement, the nature of which Dorrie can’t begin to comprehend. It’s as though he’s melting, dropping to the ground in a boneless, unknowable mass. In the time it takes her to inhale sharply, the mass reconstitutes itself in the shape of a second lion—rump settled between haunches, belly long, chin resting on paws. Dorrie feels her own jaw drop, the purest of compliments returned.