Effigy (5 page)

“What’s your name?” he asked, after laying her down alongside another near cadaver in the wagon’s box.

“Graves.” Her voice was reedy, threaded through with air. After a slow, skipping breath, she added, “Ruth.”

“Ruth Graves.”

She did her best to nod.

“My name is Brother Hammer. Erastus.” He paused. “I have one wife, but she’d welcome another. There’s a good-sized house and plenty of land. You’d want for nothing.”

She watched him from inside all that hair, a bleak portrait in a polished frame. “Trees,” she wheezed finally.

“Cottonwoods, scrub oak, pine up in the hills. There’s a peach orchard out front of the house.”

She fumbled beneath her blanket, withdrawing a hand wrapped around a stubby length of stick. “Mulberries.” Quiet but crystal clear.

He straightened his spine, as much as any man might when he’s bent double in a squat. “I’ll plant some first thing.”

She nodded again, her eyes falling shut.

Coming back to himself, Erastus retracts his gaze to find Thankful staring straight ahead, unaware of his wandering. Out of habit, his eyes flick to her bosom, shoved up high for his pleasure, bare almost to the nipples’ rosy rings. Necklines unknown anywhere else in the Territory, a scandal in Ursula’s eyes. He rests there a moment more. The pale flesh sighing, beating with her cinched-in breath. Always a suggestion of panting about his third wife. She catches him looking and makes slits of her little grey eyes.

The air is stagnant in Dorrie’s barn, daylight gone now, trailing its warmth. The skulls have taken hours. She’s proceeded in order of descending size—adult male down through female runt—
scooping out brains, severing optic nerves, prying eyeballs out whole. Careful work, but nothing compared to removing all traces of facial flesh. When bone was all that remained, she applied a thorough coating of the creamy arsenical soap, making certain to force the bristles deep into every dimpled fissure, every hinge.

As always, the Tracker sounds a single knock. Dorrie learned long ago not to waste her breath calling out for him to come in. He’ll wait there until she comes, stepping back when she pushes open the door. She takes up the lamp. On her way she passes the five new skins drying fur-side down over bales, salt drawing out the moisture so they seem to sweat.

As she returns to her workbench, the Tracker follows close. His nearness no longer troubles her. It may be that the sight of a strange Indian would cause her pulse to lurch and patter, but he’s the only one she’s set eyes on since coming to the Hammer ranch.

He drops into a squat before the pile of skinned wolves, fingering a pink off-cut from a pup’s tender thigh.

She watches him. “Would you eat that?”

He turns up his eyes.

“I never thought. I would’ve used cornmeal. Instead of sawdust, I mean.” She forces a thin smile. He makes no pretence of offering one in return.

“Eat.” The Tracker drops his gaze, then shakes his head slowly, imparting something weightier than a simple no.

“All right.” She moves to a set of standing shelves, where five bundles of leg bones lie interspersed between five open-backed skulls. Picking up a small paper tag, she feeds its knotted string through the bone circle that lately housed the runt’s eye.

The Tracker rises. He should be preparing to spirit away her leavings. Instead, he stretches out his hand, a single finger pointing to what he desires. Second largest, second from the left. The
Tracker turns up his palm. Dorrie draws on her heavy gloves, reaching for the female’s skull.

“It’s poison now. You can’t touch.”

Still his open hand.

“Poison.” She moves past him to the workbench, setting the skull down and taking up her pot and brush. These she uses to mime painting the skull. When he still doesn’t move, she acts out painting her own hand, then holds the pot up near her face, letting her tongue spill out of the corner of her mouth as she rolls her eyes back in her head. A moment is all he requires. Upon letting her vision settle, she finds he’s plucked up the skull. He holds it to his chest in a doubled grasp.

“No, Tracker.”

He meets her gaze, his eyelids contracting to form the chilling squint she’s chanced to see him turn Hammer’s way. The skull faces her too—open sockets, teeth. The tip of the Tracker’s thumb dips down into an ear niche and flinches back. Dorrie takes a few quick steps to the nearest specimen—a blacktail buck—and knocks three times on a spot between its antlers.

“See,” she says, “I need it.”

His eyes leave hers to play over the form in his hands. Freed from his narrow stare, she approaches, reaching out her hand. He nods, but instead of handing over the skull, he returns it to its place on the shelf.

“Eyes,” he says softly.

It’s beginning to dawn on her that the Paiute has in mind some greater purpose than the decoration of his hut. “All right. You have to wash your hands first, though.” He turns to her, his face blank. She can never be sure how much he understands. Again she mimes, falling water, scrubbing hands. To her relief, he follows her to the wooden crate she uses for a washstand. She
empties the tin jug into the basin and hands him a yellow lump of soap. “Wash.” She points to a shallow cut in the heel of his hand. “Wash hard.”

He accepts the soap, bends and sets to work. Once it becomes clear that he means to be thorough, she leaves him to it, returning to her workbench. On the floor down the far end, abutting the pile of carcasses, three gallon pails brim with brains, clots of fat and other scraps. She knows without thinking which one she must delve into—it sits a little apart from the others, giving off a soundless hum.

Discarding her gloves, she kneels down beside it, pushes up the sleeve of her smock and reaches in past her elbow. There’s a good deal of waste to feel through, but the shapes she’s after seem to co-operate, one and then the other brushing her fingertips like fat little fish. She palms them carefully, drawing her fist out of the pail with a sucking plop. When she glances up, the Tracker stands over her, hands dripping at his sides.

“Here.” She holds up her hand, suddenly too tired to rise. Two dark eyeballs glisten on her palm. “These are hers.”

Still hungry, Lal Hammer hunkers in his mother’s larder, cutting himself a wedge of her bread, loading it with the tallow she collects in a jar. He saws roughly, gouges deep. She’ll spy out what’s missing and finger him either way, so why not leave his mark? Nineteen is too old for a beating—she hasn’t taken her spoon to him in earnest in over two years—and what kind of a fool fears a mother’s unloving gaze?

The bread goes down slippery, the fat edging on rank. He hacks and slathers a second helping. Certain to be noticed now.

The last time his mother took him on, she did real damage, cracking the little finger on his left hand so he had to bind it to its neighbour, nurse it close to his chest for weeks. If only that had been the worst of it.

The second slice down his gullet, Lal stands contemplating a third. The loaf looks like a bear’s been at it. One by one, he sucks his fingers clean.

It wasn’t as though he’d done anything so terrible. Wasn’t it the eldest’s duty to share with his younger brother, to teach him the ways of the world? He’d wondered if Joseph would follow him at all—the poor kid strangling in her apron strings—but the boy came readily enough. A quick look round to be sure she wasn’t watching and they were away.

Joseph was seven then, plenty old enough to learn. He worked like a grown man, worried like one too. Wasn’t it only fair he should come to know some method of blowing off steam?

Lal had the tobacco rolled and ready—no sense wasting time while the pair of them might be missed. Or one of them, anyway. Lal could wander as far as he liked without Mother Hammer troubling herself on his account.

The smoke rose thick and fragrant, climbing the afternoon light, clinging to the stable’s back wall. Joseph hacked like a consumptive but kept at it, taking goodly pulls and forcing them down. For the first time ever, Lal entertained the notion of warming to his suck-up of a little brother. Despite the decade between them, he might make a pal of the kid after all.

She made no sound coming down the long side wall. Not a whisper. Burst on them like an Indian—a pale, blue-eyed savage in a speckled dress. Joseph dropped his soggy butt. Didn’t run, though, knew better than to add cowardice to his crime. But it wasn’t Joseph she was after. The kid pelted off the moment she
released him—like a witch freeing an enchanted man, she did it with a wave of her wand. Or rather, her long-handled wooden spoon. She’d brought it with her, knowing that if Lal was leading his little brother anywhere he was likely to be leading him astray.

Unlike Joseph, Lal kept hold of his smouldering butt. He took a pull on it in the full of her gaze, clenching his teeth about its papery tail to keep them from rattling in his head.

“Is that tobacco?” The spoon at her side now.

He couldn’t stop himself. He sucked another lungful, let it colour what he said next. “What do you think?”

He’d known all his life she was strong, but never to what terrifying degree. She thrashed his smoking hand until it was a curled cupful of pain. He was big for seventeen. She was his mother. Struggle though he might, he could not break her hold on his arm.

That evening he came to the table and found his place unset. She pointed behind her to the kitchen without a word. Confused, he left the dining room, found his portion sitting on the kitchen table in a battered tin bowl. He ate quickly, set the bowl beside the basin and carried the pail of kitchen waste out to the mound. After that, he hauled the next day’s water—slowed but undaunted by his useless hand. Wounded or no, he busied himself with a dozen other chores he hadn’t seen to in years.

That night Lal worked long after his brothers and sisters were tucked up in bed. When he dragged himself to the kitchen door, she was waiting. To forgive me, he thought, his heart leaping. Then he saw the grey mass draped over her arm. It must’ve been the roughest blanket in the house, a relic from their first years in the Territory, when they were still just making do. She pointed the way to the horse barn. She wasn’t speaking to him. No one was.

The next morning the tin bowl held porridge—no molasses, no cream. He spent a fortnight eating alone in the kitchen, sleeping in the stable loft. It wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if he’d known it would come to an end—if he hadn’t been convinced this proximate banishment described the new limit of his life.

When, after those two long weeks, he came to the kitchen and found no bowl awaiting him, he felt his heart sink further. Now she wouldn’t even feed him. How long before she flushed him from his sorry bunk with a hay fork and sent him packing?

When she called him, her voice distorting as it filled the front hall—
Come to table, Lal
—he had trouble making sense of the words. Luckily, he’d made a friend by then, somebody who could set him straight. He brought his left hand to his mouth. Not the pinky side—the bent little finger was weak. The strong one, the one he could count on, was the thumb.

“Huh?” he asked it.

You’re in
, the thumb cried,
you’re back in!

“Lalovee Hammer!” his mother yelled.

Hurry up, clot
, the thumb hissed,
you’ll miss your chance
.

And Lal felt the legs beneath him move.

He gives a jerk, remembering. Finds himself still in the larder, his pinky finger—the right one, not its crooked partner—still plugging his mouth. He pulls it free. A soft, wet pop and, with it, the surfacing of a green idea.

Ruth will be in the silkhouse. Aunt Ruth, he should say properly, but as there’s no one to hear him, he whispers only,
“Ruth.”

He could use a smoke about now, to singe the taint of stale fat from his tongue. Where safer than among Ruth’s mulberry trees, where his mother has yet to set foot. Anything not purely
practical is a waste in her eyes. Never mind that Ruth gleans silk from her labours.

Lal had his initial feel of the stuff when he was fourteen. It was the first year Ruth wasn’t heavy with his father’s latest brat, and it coincided with her first decent crop of mulberry leaves. She ran a length of newly spun thread across his palm, proud of what she’d made, unaware that she was altering the lined inside of his hand with a new, invisible groove.