Effigy (49 page)

Back in his bed, Lal fights to control his body’s trembling. He’s a small boy with the ague. He’s dying. His mother is busy in the cow barn—she won’t come if he calls.

Idiot. He’s a man of nineteen years, possessed of the knowledge he’s longed for since the first of many growth spurts stretched him like a thief on the rack. Thankful. It was a blessing her bedchamber was dark. He wasn’t called upon to confront her face—all angles where there ought to have been roundness, grey eyes where he wished for a deep, reassuring brown. The hair, too, was all wrong. He wanted it loose, wanted to follow its slick drop with his fingers to where it ended at the small of a back. He made do. Took a mass of spirals in his fist and held on.

As for the rest of her—breasts and spreading legs and hole—Thankful was a woman, all right. All right and all wrong. It hadn’t stopped him losing himself inside her, burying his need.

Shivers animate every inch of him now, despite the night’s warmth. He hauls the blanket up to his chin, the stubble there itchy upon contact with the wool. Thankful. Not Ruth. For a moment he considers the unconsiderable. Probably never Ruth.

The thumb is close by, just under the blanket’s hem. He pops it out. “I don’t feel good,” he moans.

Good?

“She’s—” Lal glances about in the blackness. “She’s
his.”

He asked for it
.

“He’ll kill me.”

He’ll never find out
.

Lal’s teeth chatter. “He won’t?”

The thumb nestles against his lips.
Trust me
.

THE TRACKER ARRIVES AT DAWN
. The ranch house shows signs of life, but Hammer and the son have yet to emerge. The cottontail is gone, the sinew snapped clean through. The Tracker reads what happened on the ground at his feet. The initial approach. The warning scented, read full circle around the trap. The retreat, the turn, the bursting, bounding run—
the leap
. On the far side of the pit, the long skid of his landing, the triumphant trot away.

It’s foolish, Erastus knows, but, just to be certain, he has the Tracker clear the brushy cover aside. Faced with the empty trap, he feels a similar pit open in the region of his bowels. First it drags off a poisoned carcass and now this?

Smart
, the Tracker has said, but something in the Indian’s hooded eyes hints at more.

What’s it after? Not a single foal, not even a chicken, taken. The damn thing won’t make a kill and won’t clear off.

This one smart
. Maybe, but a man can always outwit an animal. Erastus has an idea—a needle-sharp notion that mends his
misgivings, sewing the internal pit closed. Dropping a smile into the hole before him, he glances up to meet the Tracker’s gaze. “First light tomorrow.”

He can count on the Indian to ask no questions. Just as he can count on him to show.

Ursula stoops at the edge of the vegetable plot, her back paining her just where a mother’s will. Within eye’s reach, three of her five little darlings work. Her girls are busy by the wash house—Josephine wrestling a mass of petticoats over the line, Josepha crouching over the basket, selecting the next sodden twist. Joseph is visible through the open door of the cow barn, shuffling forward and back, his shovel dipping. The other two are out of sight for the moment, but Ursula knows exactly where they are—Joe on his knees before the kitchen stove, Baby Joe beside him, filling his bucket with ash.

Any minute now, her youngest will scoot from the kitchen door, like as not sending up a ghostly cloud. She may be called upon to chide him for his carelessness, but she’ll wait a moment before doing so, watch to see if he corrects himself. Who can say—the child might do as he’s been told and take a direct path to the ash pile, swinging the pail only after he’s emptied it. She’s not overly concerned. He’s still the baby. He’ll grow up soon enough when he holds a brand new brother or sister in his arms.

Finding she’s reached the end of a row, Ursula looks back over her trail of uprooted weeds. She straightens just as Baby Joe comes spurting from the kitchen door, her movement arresting him in his tracks. The smallest puff of ash escapes his bucket. He stands blank-faced for a moment, then hazards a smile her way.
Ursula’s heart is suddenly full. She grants her youngest the rarest of gifts—the long, low trill of her laugh.

Thankful is hearing things. It’s the third time tonight she’s hurried to unbolt her chamber door. No one. Not a soul. She closes the door slowly, locking herself back in.

Unwilling to return to her bed, she crosses to the window and looks down. The wolf is a silver memory. Not dead, though, despite Hammer’s assurances; its singing reached her while she lay wakeful last night. She both looks for it and doesn’t, unsure which is the more likely to keep it away.

Leaning out a little, she gulps at what passes for a midnight breeze. If only she could put more of herself out there, sit on the wide sill, dangle her legs in the air. Well, she could, couldn’t she? What’s stopping her? Her nightdress, for one. It drags at her shoulders, pools about her feet. Its folds would thwart her, send her toppling headlong to the verandah roof.

Most nights the idea would be enough to send her back to bed. Tonight she fights her way out of its gossamer mass. Forty pearl buttons drive her fingers mad. Then she’s free of it. Showing herself at the casement like a naughty princess.

Easy now. Climb up in a crouch, work one foot out, then the other. She can feel the night’s freshness. Wriggling her toes, she knows a sudden flood of promise, like a child laying claim to a swing. As the bare halves of her bottom widen across the sill, she pictures the arrowhead of dampness her sex is printing there. And thinks again of Lal.

As though conjured, her young lover appears below. He moves in the far left corner of all she surveys, his head illumined,
dragging his dark body like a tide. She wills him to look up. He’ll see her perched here like an exotic bird. Like Juliet without the burden of a costume. Like a woman he can’t help but adore.

Only he’s facing precisely the wrong way. He’s leaving the ranch house, forsaking it for a much smaller structure hidden from Thankful’s eye. Her heart slows with understanding, becomes a cool-skinned creature lodged in mud. She’s not fool enough to imagine a tryst. It’s worse than that. He’s still pining for her—after all Thankful’s given him, after all she’s allowed him to do.

Let him scratch. Let him drag his damn nail over her door until it breaks and bleeds—she’ll cut her arm off before she lets the thankless bastard in.

It’s the arm that betrays her in the end. It strikes during the silence that follows the third scratching—the one where he might be deciding to give up—taking matters, in the form of the brass bolt, into its own trembling hand. His face in the crack weakens the rest of her. He slips inside with a smile.

Tonight he’s bolder. He clutches at her rib cage, her buttocks, her calves. His hands are most certainly a farm boy’s. He lifts her breasts as though weighing them, worries her nipples with his thumb to see what they do. He stops short of fingering her sex, approaching it blindly with his own.

Thankful has never felt anything like it. It’s like being pawed over by some creature come loping from the wild. No knowledge, only want. A touch that could kill her, it’s that clumsy. That powerful. That good.

Lal tries lying down, but the size of what he’s done—
done again
—inhabits him, making him too large for his boy’s thin bed. He considers leaving the room, the house, stalking about the yard—then imagines his bulk on the stairs waking his mother, rousing her suspicious mind. No outside, then, not this night. That much decided, he assumes the only bearable position, slouched at his open window. Here, at least, he can breathe.

And see. The sudden breach of the stable door—a cleft of darker dark from which the loose-limbed figure of Bendy Drown divides itself, becoming distinct. Out for a piss. No, a stroll. No. Lal feels a sudden buzzing, like a bright skullcap fitted to his crown. Drown is out to stretch more than his legs. He’s crossing the yard in a hurry, a spring in his step. And now another barn door—this one showing a warm strip of light—takes him in.

Lal throws caution to the wind. He frees himself from his bedchamber, follows corridor to staircase, front hall to kitchen, creaking all the way. The latch on the kitchen door clatters. He’s directly beneath his mother, but she won’t mind when she learns what he’s discovered. She’ll thank him, Lal thinks with a flush, just as his father will.

He hasn’t paused to drag on his boots, and the rough ground troubles his soles. Still, he wastes no time, threading between vegetable patch and wash house, sneaking up on the fourth wife’s barn from behind. The window glass is wavy, but clear enough to show a pair of bodies stripped and tangled on a cot.

Only they’re not. At least four paces lie between them, his father’s wife tucked in behind her workbench, intent on the mannequin taking shape beneath her hands, Drown on the floor before her, all forearms—forelegs?—and settled haunches. Sitting like a dog.

Lal stretches out his disappointment, watching them a good long while. The girl’s every movement is in fealty to the thing she’s making. The hired man never even twitches a hair. They’re nowhere near each other, and what’s more, Drown is doing better than no harm—he’s being of service to Hammer, helping the fourth wife get his precious trophies right.

Lal shifts his eyes to take in the tiered crowd. Beasts of half-light and haze, such as come to him rarely in dreams. His heart skitters briefly, then sinks. There’s nothing for him here. He leaves them to it—animals, woman, man. Walks heavily back the way he came.