Effigy (4 page)

Dorrie takes special care in sewing up the mother wolf’s bullet hole. It’s a tricky turn, just there, behind the ear. The male was no trouble—a clean shot through the chest where the fur stood thick and dark. The hole fit nicely into her ventral cut. The pups were
even easier. Two of the skulls showed cracks, but none was dented, let alone crushed. The small pelts came away whole.

The salted skin eats at her finger pads, but fine work such as this doesn’t allow for gloves. In any case she’s accustomed to working through pain. Pushing her needle into the bullet hole’s verge, she draws the silk thread taut, a lone stitch already minimizing the tear. Her sister-wife’s product is both strong and fine.

You let me know if that’s a good weight
.

Ruth delivered the first of many spools to the old barn not long after Dorrie came to live at the ranch. It took months for the second wife to beg a favour in return. Or not beg. In fact, Dorrie’s fairly certain the request was never spoken aloud. She can recall only Ruth’s hand reaching into her apron pocket, producing a fat caterpillar gone still.

“He wouldn’t like it,” Dorrie said after a moment.

Ruth treated her to a soft smile. “I should think it would be a challenge, a pleasure to you.”

Dorrie felt a jabbing sensation in her chest. The thrill of having one’s nature even partly understood.
A challenge. A pleasure
. She held out an upturned hand.

Major Greene clearly held the preservation of insects to be a lesser art. He also held, however, that the true professional must be able to handle any specimen he is presented with, and so he had included a slim chapter on the subject toward the back pages of his invaluable treatise—between “Collection and Preparation of Eggs, Bird and Reptile” and “Essential Materials and Tools.”

The bulk of the section dealt with mounting winged specimens, but at length Dorrie came upon a paragraph headed “Caterpillars and Worms.” She was to squeeze the innards out through the tail end—an act requiring considerable delicacy and, more often than not, practice. But Dorrie’s were not just any
hands. Ruth had brought her one specimen only, and that was the specimen she would mount.

The silkworm was cool, smooth along its back, bumpy with leg-nubs below. It gave up its insides grudgingly, but Dorrie was patient, beginning again and again at the head, kneading gently, easing its substance along. In the end, skin and innards came apart, the one a flaccid slip, the other a slippery clot. Next, through the exit of the tail-end hole, she entered with a length of hollow straw. It was really that simple. Nothing to measure, nothing to construct. She would blow the shape into it, breathe back its living form.

As per the Major’s instructions, she held the caterpillar over a lamp’s soft heat while she did so, rotating the straw in her lips so the skin might harden on all sides. One could either remove the straw or cut it off short. Dorrie chose the former, judging it to be the more difficult, and therefore the more professional, choice. Caterpillars marked with vivid designs often required retouching with paint—not a consideration in this case, as her sister-wife’s worm was grey.

Dorrie wasn’t sure how fragile the finished specimen would prove to be over time, so she prepared a bed of tow for it in a squat and spotless jar. Ruth came for it before the breakfast bell. Her face took on a glow as she held the jar to the window’s weak light. “Such a gift,” she murmured, and Dorrie felt the jabbing again.

Never having made a friend in her life, Dorrie harbours no illusions about making one of Ruth. It’s enough to know the other woman is there across the yard, working through the day just as Dorrie works through the night.

Drawing the last stitch through the white wolf’s pliable skin, she ties the thread off in a tiny crystalline knot. Before snipping it,
she turns the pelt over, laying it fur-side up across her knees. It’s strangely light, insular yet cool, a blanket of fresh snow in her lap. No sign of the bullet’s path. She runs a finger up the underside, feeling for the puckered scar.

What a crew, Lord. What a sorry crew. All the thousands of times Ursula imagined herself presiding over a supper table of her own, she never once pictured it looking like this.

As a girl and then a young woman, Ursula spent every mealtime ladling and fetching, in fealty to the bitter, exacting Harriet Pike and, later, the helpless Elsie Simms. Both of them slave-drivers in their own way. The moment Ursula took her seat, Mrs. Pike or one of her lumpen sons, or the original lump that was their father, would call for more pickles, more cornbread, more stew. The Simmses were no better—Saints or no, they never let her forget they’d taken her in after the Pikes had turned her out. The children were weaker-willed, and every order was preceded by,
Oh, Ursula, dear, would you mind?
, but little else had changed.

How could she have guessed then at the bloated shape her own household would assume? If it weren’t for the children—her five industrious little angels flanking her left and right—Ursula doubts she would still walk the earth. Strong though she is in both body and mind, she would likely have dropped dead of work, like so many of the women who came westering.

The thought narrows her eyes, and she sweeps them past her daughters—little Josepha earnestly buttering her own bread, her elder sister, Josephine, taking small, neat bites of stew—to rest on the most recent, and perhaps least supportable, of her husband’s wives. That filthy smock. And that hair, like a mule tail that’s
never been groomed. Sister Eudora is bleary-eyed. She’s missed two meals already today, and Ursula was obliged to send Josephine to fetch her just now.
You knock until she comes. Don’t you go in there, mind, don’t even open the door
.

Truth be told, Ursula despaired of the fourth wife the moment she first clapped eyes on her. Doubtless thinner girls had managed to force babies out from between the pincers of their hips, but few of them would have lived to tell the tale. For more than a day she was at a loss as to the motive behind Hammer’s choice. It couldn’t have been carnal, as the last two had been. She wondered about a possible alliance with a family of note, but found upon questioning the girl that she came from nothing—a hard-scrabble farm somewhere off the southern road, people by the name of Burr.

It was only after their sealing, when Hammer took his child bride shopping for needles and knives, that Ursula understood. It was no longer enough to keep a record of every animal he shot—now he wanted to stockpile the creatures themselves. To think a man could be so ruled by vanity.

A hank of Sister Eudora’s hair slithers loose to dangle in her stew. She takes no notice, lifting another in a series of indelicate mouthfuls to her lips. Ursula can stand to watch her no longer. She shifts her gaze to Sister Ruth and feels her eyelids relax.

It’s hard to credit now, but Hammer’s second wife was also thin as kindling when he brought her home. Even harder to imagine is the flush of bad feeling Ursula experienced when he first led Ruth into her house—not jealousy, exactly, but something very like. Ruth was warmly, quietly beautiful, a fact Ursula found she could not entirely take in stride.

Five children and a decade later, she’s come to regard her sister-wife as, if not an ally, then at least no threat. Ruth helps
around the house throughout the winter months, but come spring she spends every waking moment with her worms. She’s happy enough to produce bobbins and hanks of thread, but despite years of weaving in the land of her birth, she refuses to make cloth. Ursula learned long ago that any talk of procuring a loom will meet with silence and a lowered head. A stubbornness as soft as it is enduring. Never mind how it galls Ursula to peddle the surplus unfinished product in town, then turn around and pay premium for a bolt of inferior twill.

Still, she wouldn’t trade the second wife. She knows full well not one in a hundred would have borne five strong, squalling babies and turned them over without a fight. Five and counting. Ursula can’t help but smile at the idea—a sixth little lamb to be welcomed before Christmas of this year. And more after that, even if she has to peel Hammer away from his worthless third wife every time.

Ursula turns her attention to Sister Thankful now, making her eyes like open winter windows, letting them linger on the round of a fat ringlet until the other woman feels them there. Not a finger lifted in the six long years she’s lain about this house. What’s worse, despite endless nights abed with the husband they share, not a single new soul to show.

Ursula doesn’t bother to meet the third wife’s kohl-rimmed eyes. She looks instead to the table’s head, and for an instant considers calling Hammer to account for his wives. But to what end? This is old territory—she’s trodden it until every inch of her is sore.

What can you mean, Mother? I never see Sister Ruth or Sister Eudora but they’re about their work
.

Work? Ruth is never to be found when I want her. And when did Eudora ever churn the butter or knead the bread? I doubt she even
knows how. As for the other one—you’re not going to tell me she’s anything but bone idle!

Here he might smooth his moustaches, tilt his head as though mystified by what she’s said. How she hated it when he kept his temper while hers began to fray.

Charity, my good wife
. He could smile so unkindly when he wished to.
You know Sister Thankful is a martyr to the megrims
.

Ursula closes her eyes rather than continue to regard him or, worse, look one seat further to Lal, her poor excuse of an eldest son. None of it—not one of her husband’s choices—would be so galling if she hadn’t instructed him to the contrary in nearly every respect.

After a dozen years of managing a household alone, Ursula was ready for help. Hammer was taken up with breeding and trading horses, and Lal was as useless at eight years of age as at any other. Housemaids were few and far between on the frontier, and those who were about commanded too great a price. Wives were cheaper and easier to control—or so Ursula imagined at the time. Besides, was it not a man’s sacred duty to people Zion with his seed? Hammer must take another wife, at least one. Ursula made it clear to him—sat beside him on the parlour settee and spelled it out.

“She must be in excellent health—look for a good complexion and carriage, colour in the cheeks, a sturdy spine. Young but not a child. Cheerful but no idiot—I can do without prattling in my ear. She should be orderly, industrious, clean. And mark this, husband: she must be easily governed.”

Hammer stared at the floor while she talked. “Anything else?” he muttered when she’d had her say. As though she’d been browbeating him rather than urging him to marry again.

Ursula knows she must open her eyes soon. The children will begin to worry, one of them—Joseph, most likely, bless him—asking,
Are you all right, Mother? Are you well?

Chancing Thankful’s wrath, Erastus slides his eyes past her to rest for a moment on Ruth. Even as she lifts her fork, his second wife radiates stillness. She could be a glossy parlour plant, the kind a man can’t help but finger when he’s left alone with it in a room.

More than a decade has passed since the first time he held Ruth in his arms. Her English skin was chapped and sullied then, her brown eyes those of a heifer much abused. She was one of many he lifted into waiting wagons that day—women and children, even several men too weak to rise, lying dusted with snow on the iron ground. They were converts on the trail to Zion, victims of a poorly planned, ill-fated migration scheme. The handcarts they’d been dragging for months stood over them where they lay.

It was no great feat to lift her. He felt little evidence of the soft creature she would become, the hips and breasts she would redevelop in his care. Then her bonnet fell away, and her hair tumbled free to clothe his shoulder, his cold, bare hand. Such a slithering. How could it shine so, when the wick of her life’s force was clearly guttering? How could it give off such a scent—flowers grown in the bed of a woman’s hidden parts—when the rest of her already smelled of death? Mysteries then and now. He knew only that he would have her. It would be necessary to pay out her bond, but he would have her. And Ursula would have her wish.