Effigy (43 page)

ERASTUS FINDS THE TRACKER
sitting with his legs knotted like a sultan’s before an ebbing fire. He slides down from the saddle, his boots touching ground alongside the Indian’s rifle. Only now can he make out the bones of something insubstantial among the embers, the grease on his companion’s lips.

“Had your breakfast already, I see.”

The Tracker looks up at him.

“Got a wolf sniffing round the house.” Erastus folds his arms. “Big bugger. Making himself at home.”

No response.

“You seen him?”

“See him. Hear him.”

“Yeah. Makes one hell of a racket.”

The Tracker shoves the unburnt tail of a twig forward, stimulating the coals.

“Makes the womenfolk jumpy. We’ll have to see to him.”

The Indian rises. “No gun.”

“No gun?” Erastus points to the Henry. “What do you mean no gun?”

“No gun this wolf.”

“No gun this wolf.” Again, Erastus finds himself repeating the Indian’s nonsense. “Why the hell not?”

The Tracker toes something in the dirt. He takes his time answering, and when the words finally come, Erastus feels rather than hears them, three cool fingers laid across the stubble at the nape of his neck.

“This one smart.”

He forces a laugh. “Too smart for shooting?”

The Indian shifts his gaze, staring through a break in the brush to some uncorrupted view Erastus can’t hope to know. Then dips his chin in a single, irrefutable nod.

They are ten at table, Sister Eudora eschewing the midday meal as usual to keep company with her dead animals, Hammer busy chasing down more.

The hired man interests Ursula. Not as a man—only one has ever done so—but as a creature come into her fold. Wolf or sheep, it remains to be seen, though in her fibres she feels he is the latter. Still, a body can never be too sure.

Looking down the laden table, she takes his measure yet again. Wiry. Thoughtful. Not entirely whole. The kind to keep his eyes, his hands and, unless prodded, his opinions to himself.

Beside him sits a different sort of man altogether—and he is a man now, nineteen years since his crippling birth. Ursula’s eldest son slides his knife under the skin of his chicken leg, causing it to jump. She registers a corresponding flinch in her own right arm. The urge to smack him is nothing new. It only makes matters worse that, when he meets her damning look, as he does now, it’s through eyes that are brazen copies of her own.

Uncomfortable under her scrutiny, Lal shifts his gaze away. It’s not something she’d ever give voice to, but Ursula’s certain her son dug into her insides while she sweated and strove to push him out. She can picture him driving his elbows and knees into the walls of that red canal, making of his small body a sharp-angled star. She fought him for hours in that swaying wagon bed. Overhead, rain needled through the canvas, finding out the seams. Beneath her, the trail jolted on.

The Prophet had been dead four years, his people driven westward, scattered in temporary settlements across Iowa’s breadth. Brigham was no Joseph, but there was no doubt the new Church President could lead. In the summer of 1847 he had done just that, seeking out the desert paradise Brother Joseph had foreseen. One year later, Ursula and her husband were part of the Big Company, Zion-bound. It ought to have been a time of glory.

Lal came tearing his own momentous path a fortnight early, when the company was scarcely under way. Ursula had known he would be born on the trail, but she’d hoped to get her bearings first. She wasn’t the only woman bracing for such an ordeal. Some, having witnessed so much death, expressed a simpering pride at their bodies’ capacity to begin anew. Ursula felt none of their satisfaction, only a grim sense of purpose. After four fallow years with Hammer, she was finally doing the work of the Lord.

She bested Lal eventually. Forced him out bloodied and bawling during the drizzling tail end of the storm. She insisted on rising the next day, leaving the baby in the wagon, well swaddled, immobilized in a crate of straw.
A mother knows
, she told Hammer when he questioned her. She wasn’t about to lie still and let her blood turn bad—fresh air and exercise were what she required. She would rest when everyone else did, when night fell and the company made camp.

She climbed into the wagon box only when absolutely necessary. It was during those times—once the baby had finally quit blubbering, clamped down on her rigid, burning nipple and drawn its fill—that she changed the dressings between her legs. She wadded up whatever she could bear to sacrifice from among their scant possessions—tea towels, table napkins, winter socks. She could have washed them of an evening—rigged up a rope-and-sheet screen to be alone with her mess—but Hammer would have been curious. Eventually he would have peeped.

Instead, she waited until he was taken up with the team or the back axle, or had mounted up in pursuit of a flash of game. Freed from his prying gaze, she would reach past the idiot trail hand’s knee, feel under her straw pallet for the latest bundle and slip it beneath her apron’s folds. From there she had only to drift to the company’s verge and duck into the first cover she met.

There was nothing strange about a body seeking a moment’s privacy—it happened all day long down the train’s great length. Unlike the other women and girls, however, Ursula didn’t gather her skirts about her and squat. She saved her water for the night pot, knowing the holding would do her blown and ragged insides good. Also, with the pot she could gauge parts of urine to parts of blood.

Among the thickets that crowded the trail, she stuffed her dirty rags into root tangles, or flung them deep into undergrowth too knotted for a fellow human to breach. Not so the host of wild things those long woods housed. Ursula knew full well some creature or other would sniff out and feed upon her secret. It was a comfort to think she would leave no sign.

By the tail of the fourth day the baby was quietening, learning to like its crate. The blood, too, was coming under control—a scattering of scarlet coins on Ursula’s drawers now, the sticky
wadding no longer required. To walk was all she wanted. She was getting her strength back now, her thighs no longer trembling with every stride.

She must have been getting her colour back too, for something fired Hammer’s foolish enthusiasm, causing him to narrow the space between them and attempt to take hold of her hand. It was then that she let him know the way of things—not in so many words, but she gave him to understand what she herself had comprehended in the midst of her labour pains. She would not populate Zion, not even one small corner of it. One baby. One vicious, blue-eyed boy and she was ruined for life.

Dorrie’s been struggling with the adult male mannequin for over an hour; no matter how she tries, she can’t seem to reproduce the deep hull of the animal’s chest. She’s astride its back, passing twine under its belly, when Hammer yanks open the door. She knows it’s him without looking up, his short-armed jerk producing a squawk from the bottom hinge. Besides, Bendy only ever comes during the night’s second half.

“What’s this?” her husband says.

She drops the ball of twine, straightening to face him. A black-tailed jackrabbit hangs by its feet in his grasp. Slung over his shoulder, the kill bag betrays the slack brown ear of what is undoubtedly the mate. He drags his gaze over the skeletal pack.

“Thought you’d be further along by now.” He stands staring for another long moment, then crosses to her workbench and swings the jackrabbit up from his side. It lands with a muted thud. Blood trickles from the cleft in its upper lip.

Dorrie eases back off the mannequin as Hammer digs a hand
into the blood-stiff bag and draws out the female, a slightly smaller version of the first. This one he clutches by its ears. Again the jaunty swing. It lands alongside its mate, seepage from the wound in its hindquarters darkening the bench.

Moving closer, Dorrie feigns interest in the kill. “Big.” She gestures to the male.

“Hm.” Hammer pivots to survey the situation again.

“I’ll just skin these two for now,” she says quickly. “Mount them when I’m done the wolves.”

“Good idea.” He gives her a hard look, notwithstanding the sheen of reactive tears now evident in his eyes. His mucus too is beginning to run, already glistening in his moustaches. “I’m itching to see them.” His hand lands on her shoulder, giving the stringy muscle there a squeeze.

“I know it,” she mumbles.

A fat droplet spills from his left eye, and he lets go of her shoulder, reaching up to knuckle it away. “I’ll leave you to it.” Swallowing a cough, he chokes momentarily on its tail. He tries not to hurry on his way out, but his agitation is plain. He’s desperate, almost gagging, to be gone.

Thankful has been left to her own devices again all day. She’s filled the hours with sewing, and now the black and blue dress lies alongside her on the bed, complete but for the final hemming. She glares into the drooping canopy, brings both hands to her skull and presses, courting pain. When it doesn’t come, she rolls and drives her face into the quilt. Smothering herself. Not long, just until her heart begins to labour. Then gasping, wrenching her face aside, catching sight of herself in the vanity mirror.

The light of a lone candle ought to be flattering. Hair like a mouse nest—how can it take so little to undo all her work? Kohled eyes turned to mudholes—why in hell is she crying? When did she start?

A little over four months have passed since Hammer lay with Ruth, but Thankful isn’t the kind to let bygones be bygones. She tells herself he’d never have done it if Mother Hammer hadn’t worn him down, but that’s only part of the story. Hammer chose his second wife in the first place, remember. Got her with child five times before Thankful caught his eye. Worse than that, he still rests his gaze on her from time to time. Imagines he’s getting away with it. Takes his third wife for a fool.

But Thankful is no such thing. She knows it’s natural enough for a man’s attention to stray—but to stray to an object like that? Ruth spends her days playing with grubs, staining her fat hands green. Her complexion isn’t bad, and yes, her hair is enviable, but the rest of her scarcely merits a glance. She’s built like a stack of corn sacks. Her belly, already ballooning, must be striped like a tiger’s back.

Let a man breed you and it’s the beginning of the end
.

Charlotte de Courcey, peeling out of her costume and holding forth. On the night in question she was Desdemona, come backstage after the suffocation scene.
Mark my words, girls, the day he makes a mother of you, he’ll be looking for a fresh field to plough
.

It seemed good as Gospel, given more than one poor dupe Thankful had known—not to mention her own mother’s throw-away life. Words to live by, or so she believed. Yet it’s clear Hammer would get across Ruth more often if Thankful let him. And Hammer’s not the only one.

Less than an hour ago, alone and lonely in her room, Thankful conceived a craving for something sweet. She made her way
downstairs to the kitchen, this time entering not when Lal was returning from his nocturnal wanderings but just as he was slipping out the door. She followed without choosing to, as though she were tethered to him on a lead. It was her first time setting foot outside in weeks, and she felt the night turn and regard her with hostile eyes. Wolf eyes, for all she knew.