Effigy (41 page)

Having blanketed the last tray with leaves, Ruth can afford to sit down for a few minutes and rest. Her feet are bad this afternoon. They’ve never been so tender so early on, but then she’s never asked so much of them before. The first five babies seem now to have been grown with little or no movement on her part, as though she were one of Mother Hammer’s potato plants stuck waiting for harvest. Not this time. This time she has work to do.

She lifts her right foot to rest against the opposite thigh, taking it gingerly in both hands. It hurts to rub, but she’ll pay for it later if she doesn’t. Running her thumb down the upturned sole, she persuades trapped blood from ball to heel—three slow passes and she’s awoken a burning tide. She closes her eyes and rubs harder, recalling the longest of roads.

After so many weeks of salt pork and sea biscuits aboard the
Thornton
, she was violently ill over her first plate of fresh vegetables and meat. New York City seemed a monstrous sprawl—it
took forever to fall away beyond the soot-streaked windows of the train. It wasn’t her first time in a passenger car—as a child she’d clung to her mother’s side on the trip south to London, to an unknown life—yet she jumped when the steam whistle screamed, shut her eyes against the speed long before the engine hit its stride. Over the miles she came to trust the understanding between wheel and rail, and opened her eyes again to look out. The country streaming past her was huge.

At Iowa City the railway met its end. Under the direction of their many captains, the faithful made camp on the riverbank. It seemed not one of them had ever constructed a tent. When told to gather wood, the children wondered why, the fires of their acquaintance having fed exclusively on coal.

By the light of those first campfires, the converted made a sorry show. Most were thin, many were skin and bone. Hollow cheeks and fallen chests, scarcely a head over thirty years of age with half its teeth left. They ate well enough that night, the captains moving among them with butter, flour, beans. Once fed, they massed for evening prayer. Only then were they treated to the truth.

It is a great, a wondrous blessing that so many have answered the Lord’s call. Would you have the Church waste money on wagons, on oxen, on mules, when those same funds might purchase passage to Zion for hundreds of weary souls? I feel certain, brothers and sisters, you would not
.

They would walk to Zion. Well over a thousand miles. Pushing or pulling all they owned.

They camped on the bank of the Iowa River for a month, oppressed by a hovering, wet heat the likes of which Ruth had never known. The grass jumped with chiggers. Children flowered
in rashes of many hues. The only relief came in the form of bucketing rain, a fractured, bellowing sky. The men—few carpenters and even fewer wheelwrights among them—laboured over the handcarts they would come to hate. A knocked-together box on a five-foot frame between a pair of waist-high wheels. The lucky ones got iron axles, iron tires. The rest made do with unseasoned wood.

It seemed they would never be under way. Then suddenly, one sweltering mid-July morning, they were. Ruth was one of five hundred souls to set out under a missionary captain by the name of James Willie. Men took their places behind crossbars and heaved-to. Women carried infants or helped the older children push from behind. The sad carts howled the news of their departure, drawing Iowa Gentiles to stare from their gates. Many laughed, but those of a more serious turn of mind cried that it was a sin to make beasts of human beings. The faithful replied with song.

By the time they made the Missouri River, hauling precious heirlooms no longer made sense. Clocks and china, family portraits in ponderous frames—all were sacrificed to make way for sacks of flour or the grievous weight of the weak. The flesh of the living, the food it required. All else would be borne by memory alone.

Beyond Loup Fork the land turned dry. The very air took from them now, greedy for the moisture locked in skin, in green and groaning wood. Both shrank and, when they could shrink no more, began to crack. The converted gave up their soap, even their precious bacon, for axle grease, only to draw more sand and wear the soft wood away. Still they sang. Ruth knew by heart the verses the clear-voiced missionary had sung by Mrs. Stopes’s hearth; she warbled along with the rest of the shambling horde,
All is well! All is well!

The days bled into weeks, into months. At some point the train was overtaken by a party of carriages, each drawn by four horses or mules in an unseemly surfeit of power. The carriages, dark and gleaming, disgorged men well dressed and well fed. Word travelled through the crowd that these were Saints of high standing, returning from missions abroad. One of the men took the time to deliver a speech concerning the need for continued faith, obedience and prayer. Watching him talk, Ruth found she couldn’t quite focus her eyes. She blinked long and often, until the man closed with a prophecy that they would reach Zion in safety, come what may. Beside her a boy of perhaps five trapped a passing beetle and slipped it wriggling into his mouth.

Before they laid leather to horseflesh again, the missionaries requested meat. Captain Willie made them a gift of a sinewy calf. A woman wailed at its slaughter, confusing the skinned carcass with the body of the husband she’d buried in a sandbank some hundred miles before.

The good weather left them. Rations dwindled. Ruth could no longer haul the heavy blankets she would freeze without. The company made it two-thirds of the way into October before a river stole the last of their strength. Crossing the Sweetwater, Ruth felt herself abandon hope. Such promise in a name—and it was indeed a beautiful river, rolling clear over its rocky bed. A sight to lift the spirits. A cold to kill them. On the far bank many lay down and died—little struggle, less sound. The keen air swam with souls.

For days the faithful lay suffering. Nine gave up the ghost the night before rescue wagons came rolling from the west, loaded with beef and potatoes, blankets and buffalo robes, hale and hearty Saints. It took every ounce of will Ruth had to lift her head and survey the glorious scene. Deliverance. A short, hard-faced man approaching, centred between her deadened toes.

Another day gone. Thankful must try not to doze so much during the daylight hours—it makes for interminable nights.

Hammer sleeps like a dog—heat-seeking, fitful. Even after Thankful’s worn him out, he snuffles on the pillow and kicks. Seated by the open window, she tires of watching him—the dull game of guessing where the covers will jump next—and turns her attention outward. As always, the peach trees, strict rows of whispering crowns. Their scent will be sickening come harvest, but for now it’s pleasant enough. Other than that, a clear night sky, half a moon—and movement. Yes, movement, just there, where the orchard butts up against the track.

The moonlight catches, then releases, whatever it is, and Thankful feels herself stand and strain forward into the night. For a long moment she sees nothing. Then a fleeting glimpse as it crosses an open aisle. It gives more of itself away this time—a thing of four legs and alarming size, its colour changeable, its locomotion smooth. Chicago was home to dogs of all descriptions—needle-eyed terriers on ladies’ leads, hip-high bone racks down snowy lanes—but never such a bulk as this. Never such beauty either.

The creature slips from between two trunks and turns right, following the dirt corridor toward the house. Thankful doesn’t speak for fear it will lift its eyes and catch her spying. Instead, she takes a long step back and gropes through the covers for her husband’s twitching foot. She squeezes gently, his heel hard as an apple in her hand, and he yelps himself awake.

“Shh!”

“What—”

“Shhhhhhh.”

He blinks like a boy for a second more, then sits up, wakeful and wary, a man. She holds a finger to her lips, then crooks it to beckon him from the bed.

When they stand together at the casement—Thankful in a diaphanous gown, her husband in nothing but the hairy skin the Lord gave him—she points to where the animal showed itself last. He knows enough to hold his tongue in patience. Moments later it surfaces again, two rows over, this time following the hard-packed aisle away. Thankful gasps. It veers right, disappearing again, and she turns to find Hammer squinting into the night.

Wolf?
she mouths.

His face is screwed up, unreadable. Finally, he nods. Stands there, arms at his sides.

“Well?” she hisses.

“Well what?” he says loudly. It will hear him and get away.

“Go get it.”

“Now?” His laugh is louder still. “It’ll be miles off before I’m out the door.”

Her hands, clenched in terror now, find his chest. She would pummel him, but he already has her by the wrists. He walks her backwards to the bed. Her knees buckle and he covers her, quiets her, with his weight.

“Don’t you worry, Thankful.” His moustaches in the hole of her ear. “Nobody’s gonna gobble up my girl.”

She says nothing for a long stretch, sawing, hammering. Then stands back to cast an eye over what she’s done. She sighs. “Can I see the father?”

“Yep.”

Making dual loops of his legs, Bendy draws his tailbone down to form the centre knot of a bow. The human length of his fingers he doubles into toes. Having made forelegs of his arms, he lengthens from the root of his missing tail out through the top of his skull. If he could grow the ears to match the attitude, they’d be oriented forward, easy but erect. He inclines his head gently, training his gaze on his imaginary young.

After a time he steals a glance her way. “I used to do this for a living,” he says. “Back in California when I was a kid.”

She looks up. “Modelling?”

He’s made her curious about him—a realization he experiences in his chest.

“Not exactly. More like what you might call a street show.” For the first time ever, he can imagine telling the whole story.
I was in a travelling show, too. Things ended pretty badly. See, there was this girl
—

Instead, he says simply, “How about a break?”

She nods, releasing him, and he rises to walk out the kinks. Standing eye to eye with the blacktail buck on the second tier, he squints to inspect its seamless face. “I don’t know how you do it.”

His words have the desired effect. She comes to stand at his side, holding up her lamp.

“Deer heads are finicky.” Her free hand floats up into the lamp’s brightest field. “It takes forever to work around the horns.” She stirs the air at the base of one. “You have to keep sharpening the knife.”

His eyes leave the deer’s scalp to settle on hers. If she were to grow antlers, they’d have to drive up through her dirty hair. Just there. And there.

“You have to watch out near the eyes,” she goes on. “You never pierce the ball, but it’s easy to nick the lid, too.”

Here in the wick’s wavering, he gets his best look yet at her eyes. They’re unsettling in their depth. Beneath the near one, a hair’s-width vein ticks blue.

“Here, too.” Her fingertip touches the niche of the buck’s tear duct. “The skin sticks to this little hollow in the bone.”

It’s hard to picture her crying, but for a moment he does—her sharp cheeks painted with tears.

She trails a pinky down the length of the buck’s nose, crooking it up into the near nostril. “You have to get right up inside. Cut close to the skull. Otherwise you run out of skin when it comes time to mount.”

Again, he can’t help but compare. Her nose is severe in its descent, but softer, more appealing, at its tip. Like the ripe nub of a strawberry, a glory his tongue has known only rarely. He thrills to an imagined sensation—his teeth closing gently, the breath sighing out her nostrils into his mouth.

Her little finger finds its way along the deer’s muzzle to the juncture of top and bottom lip, a spot that, on her own face, shows a bitter little crease. Above it, though, a small, incongruous plumpness. “It takes practice. The first one I did, I cut along the outside of the lip. Had to throw the whole thing away.”

“It’s very fine,” he says quietly.