Effigy (44 page)

He carried no lamp, but she found she could set a course by the moonlight in his hair. She could be stealthy when life required it. Years crossing backstage while others hogged the applause taught the trick of an undetected step.

He didn’t go inside the silkhouse—didn’t even approach the door—and in a way, that made it worse. To moon at a window like that, to risk so much just to fill his eyes. That was more than lust. It was worship.

Thankful watched him watch, and in all that darkness she saw, for the very first time, his singular beauty. He was something more than a reworking of his mother’s looks, something separate and entire.

It was plain his vigil would be long. After some minutes she left him and crossed the dark yard alone.

Erastus plunges his nib carelessly, spreads the kill book and messes the page. Before him the lamp sputters, the table trails off into dark. Along its margins, empty chair backs loom. It’s been a trying day, hours spent dogging the Tracker about the property and beyond, the only wolf sign to be found a single, days-old turd.

He returns to the ink blob—a shape that suggests nothing—and frets for a moment over whether he should commence writing
beneath it or tear out the page and start fresh. His hands choose the latter, leaving a ragged edge as they uncover the dark ghost that’s bled through. Resisting the urge to rip the second page out as well, Erastus dips the nib with care and employs pen against paper—the pressure of writing itself—to steady his hand.

26th of May
, he scratches,
1867. Jackrabbits a fine pair. Blacktails. Flushed to a run in the far pasture
.

They hadn’t been on the lookout for small game, but when the stupid creatures showed themselves, it seemed a shame not to pick them off.

Caught on the fly one shot each. Male in the neck. Female in the hind end
.

Erastus halts, biting the pen’s tail. She hasn’t given him the particulars. He has no notion of weight or length, not a single figure to set down. His jaw tightens, the anger a rush he knows often, though rarely in relation to Eudora. He’s asked little enough of her over the three years he’s called her wife, and for her part she’s done her work ungrudgingly and well.

Until tonight. Tonight she smiled—sniggered even, it seems to Erastus now—at his discomfort. And what about the wolves? He’d expected to find at least some of them back inside their skin.

He’s been too soft on her, he sees it now. He’d march over there for the jackrabbit numbers right now if it didn’t mean subjecting himself to that poisoned air. Besides, why should he go running? He’ll send her back for the figures when she comes shuffling in answer to the morning bell. Tell her to comb her hair, too, maybe. Take off that filthy smock. Erastus nods. He’ll have the family sit tight until she’s back. Let the breakfast go stony cold.

Dorrie perches on her stool, her notebook open in her hand. Before her on the workbench lie the partly formed pups. She’s fixed leg bones to rods, wired on skulls and shaped the crude bodies, but can’t bring herself to begin the careful work of plastering. Her notes detail the location of every hollow and ridge, but they’re only numbers, words.

“Can you do the barking pup again?” she asks.

“Sure thing.” Bendy rolls up on all fours, rump to the rafters. His shoulder blades slip to vertical. Clicking his lower jaw out an extra inch, he bares his teeth.

She sets the notebook aside, takes up her block and sketches listlessly, wasting time. A line or two is the most she can manage before she scribbles and begins again. Perhaps using a model is actually clouding her vision. Or perhaps she’s simply tired.

Beneath these and a dozen other excuses, a stream of truth runs cold and clear. None of that matters. Either you can do it or—
what if?
—you can’t. Her pencil halts, clinging to the page.

“Brother Drown,” she begins.

He barks.

“That’s enough.” She lays the series of aborted sketches face down on her workbench. “That’s enough for tonight.”

“Okay.” He draws back into the high point of his tailbone, stands and shakes out his limbs. Then, looking about him, “You never did a horse?”

She shakes her head.

“Think you would’ve, living here.”

“He doesn’t want me doing anything he didn’t kill.”

“Huh. But would you want to, say, if one died?”

Clear as crystal, Dorrie envisions the huge mare, Ink. It would be a touchy job—thin hide, short, glossy hair, every vein showing through. Never mind the issue of size.

“Yes,” she says finally, “I believe I would.”

He plucks a straw from his shirtsleeve. Plays its tip over the palm of his hand. “That’d be something to see, a horse standing still so long.”

She nods, only half listening, rebuilding Ink’s great barrel in her mind.

“Don’t see that with the wild ones.”

“Hm?”

“Horses. They’re always grazing or fighting or—” He colours a little. “—you know, moving.” He tosses the straw aside. “You’d have to be a cat to catch them sleeping. They hear too good. Crack a twig under your boot a quarter mile off and the whole herd’s up and away.”

Dorrie blinks to picture it.

“Hell, most of the time they spook the second you lay eyes on them. They can feel it.”

She brushes her fingers over the end of the runt’s leg bone, the knob that will give rise to a paw. “Feel what?”

“Your eyes.” He pauses. “Same as a hand.”

Same as she can feel his now, her scalp tingling.

“Yes.” A small word, out before she can swallow it. When she looks up, the barn has shrunk by half. The collection breathes down Bendy’s neck. Birds dangle over his head, perilously close. Again she casts her eyes down, fixing on her scaly knuckles, peeling nails.

“Hey,” he says, “let’s you and me try it.”

“Try what?”

“Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Just close them.”

She does, if only to avoid looking at him. Her internal darkness
shrinks things further. It’s as though she could reach out a hand and make contact with every creature in the place, from the red-tailed hawk to the bighorn—even Cruikshank Crow on his pillow beneath her cot. Even Bendy. She could easily touch him too.

“Where am I looking?”

She’s startled to find his voice no closer, still a good three yards away. “My hands,” she blurts, fighting the urge to hide their ugliness.

He sighs. “You’re not trying. Try.”

She bites her lip. Then feels it—a soft burning, dead centre between her eyebrows. She raises her right hand, touching a forefinger to the spot. “Here?”

He laughs. “That’s more like it. Okay, now where?”

A flare at the tip of her nose. She touches it.

“Huh.” No laughter this time. “Got it in one. Where now?”

Her finger moves of its own accord to the bone cradle at the base of her throat.

“That’s right.” He says nothing for a time. Then, “How about now?”

At first, her body is a blank. Then, sudden as a slap, her knees begin to sting. He’s looking under her workbench. Tucked away beneath smock, dress and stockings, her legs might as well be bare. She snaps open her eyes, and he lifts his to meet them. Slowly. Not as though she’s caught him doing wrong. As though she’s interrupted him mid-page in a beautiful book.

“This is foolish.” She jerks up off the stool. “You’d best be going.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He scoops his hat up off the floor. At the door he turns. “I’ll come tomorrow night, will I?”

She says nothing.

“We can try the mother if you like.” His grin is uncertain.

“I suppose.”

“Good night, then.” He hesitates at the door.

She turns her back to him. “Good night.”

THE RUN HAD A LOGIC
all its own, an inverted sense of things Bendy felt rather than knew. Working the desolate stretch between Fish Springs and Faust’s Station, he risked death by a hoof put wrong, by frying or freezing, by an arrowhead embedded in the skull—yet each of these hazards held a balm of compensation at its core.

The possibility of a bone-crushing tumble came courtesy of great speed, the same speed that caused his blood to beat up and wash his insides to sparkling. In summer, blistering heat made the horizon dance, made his head hum on its stalk, made water—even the body-warm, sulphurous water of Fish Springs—a pleasure close to that which he’d known in the dog girl’s den. His childhood had hardened him to damp and chill, but the desert winter shoved sere blue nails into places the coastal rains had missed. He felt those places crystallize; surfaces that might have been broken, their depths plumbed, could now only be skittered across. Besides, he’d heard death by cold was a close cousin to one of his dearest loves—a deep and untroubled sleep.

Death by Indian attack would be another matter. Still, there was something to be said for an enemy at the margin—glimpsed
or imagined between greasewood clump and black volcanic boulder, known to be wreaking havoc just a few stations further west. There’d been the trouble at Williams Station and the resulting battle at Pyramid Lake. Seventy-six white men lost and another twenty-nine wounded, a hastily mustered body of volunteers trapped in the cottonwoods and picked off like bewildered deer. Rumour had it the whole mess had started over a squaw, Williams or one of his brothers or someone else entirely forcing himself on her and paying a heavy price. Pyramid Lake was the worst of it in terms of numbers, but the raids continued, several ending with riders or station keepers lying dead.

Most of Bendy’s route lay through the wide open, where he’d spot any trouble against alkali flats or snow. Any mount he’d be riding would be a match for an Indian pony; nearly all the animals on Egan’s division were just broken, fresh from the wild. They were fast the way only prey can be, and they feared nothing for their flint-hard hooves.

Of course, there were hills, passes where the land folded and closed in, where a war party could be upon him before he knew what he was about. In those narrow circumstances, he reverted to the old knowledge, the areas of his brain that had formed in reply to blind corners, darkened lanes. As it was, fortune smiled. In a year and a half of service he suffered neither ambush nor open assault.

Even the subtler dangers passed him by. The rigours of the schedule were a punishment to some, but Bendy felt the press of time and purpose like a defining embrace. St. Joseph to Sacramento, nearly two thousand miles, in just ten days. Seventy-five miles give or take between home stations, eight to fifteen of them per horse. The mail must go through. The mail must go through. The mail must go through.

Some who could handle the pressure buckled under the solitude. That portion of the trail sustained few inhabitants—only the hardiest of station keepers and hostlers, not one of them with a woman in tow. Game sightings were so infrequent they stopped the heart. With the exception of the mire around Fish Springs, even the swoop of a bird was rare. For a city boy, Bendy turned out to be a master at being alone. Because he wasn’t. To consider himself solitary would have meant discounting the creatures on whose backs he rode—an idea that never once entered his mind. It would have made as much sense to disregard his own body, for, moments into any ride, he could feel the border between horse and rider begin to fray.

The rapid-fire strike of hoofbeats—right-hind, left-hind, right-fore, left-fore—chased by a hair’s-breadth moment of suspension.
Glory
. He felt it down the inner traces of his shin bones, just two more ribs in the pony’s cage. Felt it most of all in the fiery springs of his thighs. It beat a path to his heart, rebounded in a racing pulse. The sweat of his own effort melted into the animal’s back lather. He began to blow along with the pair of great bellows between his heels.

Somewhere mid-route, after the second or third change of horses, he began to feel as though his eyes were slipping back to the sides of his skull. Then horse and rider looked out as one, Bendy’s field of vision widening to encompass all but a narrow strip of forehead and a rippling wake of tail. By the time he reached Fish Springs or Faust’s Station and passed on his
mochila
of mail, it seemed as though separating from his final mount would require a blade of some length, the spilling of considerable blood.