Effigy (45 page)

Attempts to puzzle it all through never progressed far. Thinking on the back of a galloping horse wasn’t thinking at all, but a kind
of blissful streaming—the mind relaxing its grip, giving up its holdings to the wind. He fared little better in the between times. Swing station stops were barely that, his heels touching down as Dan Pitch’s had when he’d vaulted over Belle’s forgiving back. Unlike Pitch, Bendy traded one horse for another, slipping his
mochila
free from one saddle horn and buttonholing it over the next. A fresh set of reins gracing his palm, he’d break for the horizon before his backside ever touched down.

At the home stations he knew the gift of true fatigue. As he slid down from the last of the day’s ponies gone rubbery beneath him, he too would be close to collapse, his joints shaken so slack he feared they might give way entirely, leaving him tangled in the dirt like a mess of twine. After a plate of something salty and warm, and some bread unleavened by female hands, he was bound for the nearest bunk.

Two months into the job, continued raids forced a temporary suspension of operations between Salt Lake City and the Carson Valley. Through June, Bendy cooled his heels, tending stock at Fish Springs while stations further west were rebuilt, fortified and supplied with guards.

The springs wriggled with small silvery fish that fried up nicely in a smear of lard—a taste his coast-raised tongue had come to miss. To the west the trail cut through alkali glitter up into the hills, to the east it skirted marsh. Dawn and dusk were raucous with wheeling flocks. Fishing and stable work aside, the time lay heavy on Bendy’s hands. He began to explore.

Prowling the marsh’s verge, he found it thick with life. Bayonet grass sighed with muskrat, shivered with snake. Reeds, when parted, revealed nest after nest. Even the reek of the place was rich. Bendy penetrated further, careful of sinks. Coming upon a
snowy egret fishing, he found he couldn’t help but copy its shaggy dance. Tilt and shift the torso, lift one foot, make a lunging, beak-jabbing rush.

When the run started up again later that summer, Bendy found he loved the ride all the better for having made do without it.

There was more likely to be talk at the eastern limit of his route, where Doc Faust, the station keeper, was fond of telling tales. Bendy overheard portions from where he lay, the meat of each narrative bleeding into dream state.

Being the only non-Mormon among the riders and hostlers in those parts, he had trouble getting his bearings amid the storied landscape that began to unfold. He could never quite get a fix on the order of things—though it scarcely seemed to matter, as each chapter was more or less the same. The Saints gathered together, erected temples, planted crops and raised stock. They began to prosper. They were driven from their homes. Kirtland, Ohio. Far West, Missouri. A cursed hamlet called Haun’s Mill. A fine city called Nauvoo the Beautiful, built up out of nothing, somewhere in Illinois. Only the town of Carthage stood apart. It was there that the Prophet himself met his end, plummeting through a hail of lead into the blackface mob below. Bendy tumbled alongside him, landing in a dark well of sleep.

Over time the frayed narrative wound into a single cord. One end led off into the ether, but the other looped around Bendy where he lay in his bunk. Every mention of persecution, of homelessness, was a chafing tug. There was hope, though, a happy ending of sorts. Joseph Smith’s people had made their way to a wilderness all their own. When their enemies had tried to drive them even further, the Saints would no longer be moved.

From time to time the captain of a supply train or a carrier for the mule-packed regular mail stopped in. Passengers were few and far between, the stage forsaking that leg of the route for months at a time. When they did appear, they were almost always male. An exception arrived one spring night when the ponies had been running for just over a year, a girl of perhaps nineteen, travelling in her uncle’s care. She would’ve been fetching—dark, lashy eyes—but for the strawberry mark that had her by the throat. Three fat, red fingers curled up over her chin and across one cheek. She kept quiet. Kept back from the candle’s glow.

The uncle was well spoken, the kind Faust warmed to, being a learned man himself. Together the two of them took on the story of all stories—the New World miracle at the core of the belief they shared.

“Imagine,” the uncle began, “he was but a boy of fourteen when the Lord came to him in the grove.”

Faust nodded. “Seeking counsel even then.”

“Well, he was torn, wasn’t he. So many factions.”

“Methodists, Baptists, Campbellites, Footwashers, Shakers—”

“All of them corrupt, abominations in the sight of the Lord.”

A deeper nodding, almost a rocking, from the station keeper now. “The Lord told him so. Told him to wait.”

The uncle’s head answered with a slow shake of its own. “Three long years until the Angel Moroni came.”

Here Bendy saw the girl’s eyes flutter closed, the loss of reflection carving two black pits in her unfortunate face. It was the smallest and most sensuous of movements. He felt his own eyelids follow suit, the resulting darkness giving rise to desire. It wasn’t the act he craved so much as that which he imagined would come afterwards. It was a luxury he and Philomena could never afford—the pair of them closing their eyes as one, slipping
together into sleep. He settled for toppling sideways on his bunk, following the great weight of his head.

The uncle murmured on. “Even then Brother Joseph had to wait. Four more years, four more visits from the Lord’s messenger. Even after he’d been to Cumorah, unearthed the treasure, feasted his eyes upon the golden plates.”

Bendy came close to letting go then, allowing himself to drift off. If the story was about gold, he’d heard it a hundred times before.

“Put them back, Moroni told him,” said Faust. “The time for bringing the plates forth has yet to arrive.”

Bendy’s ear—the one not pressed to his folded-coat pillow—pricked up.
Put them back?

“Ah, Joseph.” The uncle gave a long sigh. “Such obedience. Such persistence when the time finally came to unearth the treasure and translate the story engraved thereon.”

“He was no man of letters.” Faust chuckled. “Little matter when you read with the eyes of the Lord.”

“The world doubted him.” The uncle seemed to sing now. “Some fought to discredit him. Some thought only of the gold, of melting the sacred plates.”

“Let them try,” Faust cried, indignant. “Let them mount up to heaven and try.”

Bendy’s head was a sack of sand. It split a seam, his consciousness scattering, whirling like the many desert storms he’d ridden through. Sleep curled itself around the one notion too weighty to blow away. Imagine a man who could drag gold from the earth and see nothing of its lustre on account of the message it bore. A man who, once he’d gleaned that message, returned the precious metal to its owner on high.

Nineteen months after two lean men on opposite sides of a continent kicked off on their inaugural rides, the ponies ceased to run. All it took was the meeting of two wires. Word crackled across the country now in a garble of dot and dash—electricity a current that put the rush of mere horseflesh to shame. It was early November, 1861. Bendy might have found work at one of the stage stations, or out on Egan’s ranch at Deep Creek, but the idea held little appeal. Standing still in the heart of nowhere seemed a poor substitute for travelling breakneck along its spine.

All that hard riding had shaken a good deal of his old thinking free. He recalled an eastward impulse, but it had faded to a notion, and a vague one at that. Still, when he set out from Fish Springs the day after handing off his final
mochila
of mail, east was the direction in which he rode.

Anything slower than a gallop felt like riding through a saddle-high swamp, but it didn’t seem fair to push Stand, not when they had so far to go. She too had done her time on the route. Unwilling to give her up, Bendy had worked out a lease of sorts, whereby she’d been kept to stations along his section of the line. Other men had ridden her, but this was a fact of no great concern. Cruel or careless riders seldom lasted long, being cheaper and more expendable than the animals they rode.

Still, the route had taken its toll. Stand was all wood and wire now, the long skull plain beneath her bleached-out face. She would carry him as far as the western bank of the Missouri. There, after a snow-whipped run that would’ve been routine to her only a month before, she would wait for him to dismount, then drop dead of a worn-out heart.

THE TRACKER WAKES
with a start to find Hammer staring down at him through the hut’s brushy mouth. Beyond, a black tower of horse.

“Hell, Tracker, why build a house if you’re not gonna give it a roof?”

The Tracker sits up, pressing a hand to his skittering heart.

“Thought you weren’t supposed to be able to sneak up on an Indian.” The white man laughs. “What’re you doing sleeping in the middle of the day, anyway?”

Getting his heels under him, the Tracker assumes a squat. Hammer blocks his threshold a moment more before stepping aside to let him stand. It’s better, now he can meet the white man eye to eye. Still, to be caught off guard like that—and by a clay-foot like Hammer. The Tracker’s first taste of oblivion. Mineral. Dark. A taste he could get used to.

“Thought we’d bag us a deer,” Hammer says.

The Tracker steps past him, relieves his bladder against the ragged oak. “Deer,” he says finally, buttoning back up.

“I know, we already got a full set.”

The Tracker nods, memory sending a charge along his arm. A
swift downswing and the fawn no longer breathing, no longer struggling to stand.

He quiets the limb by making use of it. Dropping to one knee, he reaches into the hut and closes his fingers around the Henry’s stock.

“It’s not for the collection,” Hammer tells his back. “It’s a present.”

Drawing the barrel alongside his shin, the Tracker turns in time to see the white man dig into his kill bag and withdraw a corked bottle of what appears to be salt. But isn’t, the Tracker realizes. Nothing so benign. Hammer gives the bottle a happy little shake before slipping it back.

“What say we get started down along the ravine.” Turning to the horse, Hammer hikes a foot up into the stirrup-iron. After a few levering hops, he mounts in defiance of natural forces, raw determination bent to resemble grace.

In lieu of a spoken answer, the Tracker rises, pivots west-southwest and sets off.

“Hey,” Hammer calls after him, “aren’t you gonna ride?”

“Not far.”

“Far enough. I don’t want it to be dark by the time we get there.”

His eyes fixed on a dip in the horizon, the Tracker breaks into a run.

Stepping down from the kitchen doorsill, Ursula tosses her washing-up water over the flower bed that runs along the house. Come summer the dusty strip will be choked with black-eyed Susans. She smiles at the idea, a moment’s pleasure before a small sound wipes her expression clean.

Listening hard, she scans the scrubby grass about her feet. Not far from the tip of her right boot a dead leaf trembles. She hunkers as quietly as her skirts will allow and slips a forefinger beneath its frilled edge. A grasshopper cowers in the sudden light. Ursula strikes before it can jump, tweezing it hard between finger and thumb. Its bent legs kick. She looks it square in its opaque-eyed face and twists off its head.