Effigy (50 page)

Nothing to record. And yet Erastus, pacing the dining-room floor, grips the kill book in his hands. For reasons as yet unarticulated to himself, the lamp remains unlit. Without benefit of its light, he can’t even peruse the book’s contents—a pastime he’s not generally disposed to in any case. He turns its bulk in his hands. What, then? Why unlock the cabinet in the first place, why take the damn thing down?

What else is a man to do when he’s woken in the middle of the night and there’s no woman beside him in bed? This time it wasn’t the wolf that roused him, but the sound of someone moving beyond his chamber door. Or the dream of a sound. The corridor lay dark and deserted by the time he stood peering down its length.

The book weighs against his fingers. It’s high time he was making another entry.
29thof May 1867. No kill. No wish to
. Maybe Ursula’s right. Would it signify if he never hunted again?

The moment the thought presents itself, he puts a shoulder to it, shoves it away. It’s nothing to do with him. It’s Eudora. She’s
taking so long—too long, dammit—to finish those wolves. What’s the point of bringing her anything fresh? Did she even dress those jackrabbits like she promised? For all Erastus knows, she could have laid them aside to rot.

Again he turns the dark book in his hands. There are kills he hasn’t recorded. Most recently, the look-alike brothers, mouldering some three years under the far pasture’s crust. Not even a twinge of guilt there. They were fool enough to help themselves to what was his, and anyway, like he said at the time, it was doing them a favour to shed their sinful blood. The same couldn’t be said for the many Gentiles he’d taken care of back in Nauvoo—not one of them died saved. But that was different. That was war.

Ursula had been his wife for a few short months, and already Erastus had given up hoping she’d remove the ugly locket ring from her married hand. He’d built a house for her, digging the foundations long before she accepted him. He’d had little choice but to guess at the layout she might want, for though he’d called on her countless times—were ever so many proposals laid down at a woman’s feet to be so blithely kicked aside?—she had steered their every conversation down a single path. Always Brother Joseph. All he’d endured. All he’d created in God’s name.

So it was that Erastus alone imagined, then erected, their first home. Logs hewn and dragged and fitted. Modest but well made. He set it in the midst of a hayfield—sown when he scarcely dared hope, high and swaying the day he brought her home.

The hay was drying in stacks the night marauders set fire to their farm. Erastus counted three of them. He let Ursula out the bedroom window, told her to run for the treeline and lie low. For once she did his bidding without question, without narrowing her brilliant eyes.

Having flushed many a creature from its cover, Erastus knew well what the trio of shapes had in mind. He was meant to belt it for the well in a desperate bid to save his house, making himself good sport, a clear target against the flickering yard. Instead, he let the log walls smoulder around him, waiting until the last possible moment before he took the back window himself and crouched beneath its smoking sill.

One haystack, set a little apart from the others, had yet to catch. Erastus crawled for it, rifle thrust out before him. Interring himself in its sweetness, he felt the mice around him burrow deep.

The Gentiles couldn’t have known how long he would wait. Once they figured every Saint on the place had fled or burned, they began to move boldly about the yard. Erastus picked them off in sequence. The first taken unawares, the second firing a pair of guesswork shots before turning tail, the third running straight for the haystack in his panic, showing Erastus the space between his eyes.

It made sense to burn rather than bury the dead. Erastus dragged the bodies—two by their boots, the third by his armpits—as far inside the crackling cottage as he dared. He watched from a safe distance until the roof beams came tumbling, then set off for the woods in search of his wife.

That winter he rose through the ranks of the Nauvoo Legion, earning himself a reputation as a deadeye shot with an unflinching hand. Whatever he did, he did in the name of righteous duty, and in the fierce, undying faith that his side would prevail. That was before President Young relented, before the Lion of the Lord agreed his people would once again leave behind all they had built up about them. The defeat is still bitter to Erastus. Much as Brother Brigham was right to lead them west—much as Erastus and Ursula and so many others have prospered in the
valley of the Great Salt Lake—the fall of that log house, of Nauvoo the Beautiful, pains him still.

No, definitely no remorse. Not for those three or any other. Excepting one. The one whose life he took without reason, before he even knew he was capable of such an act.

He fought because they all did. Because Lalovee Hammer was unbeaten among the men of Carroll County, and so his son must be unbeaten among the boys. In order to match his father’s record, Erastus found he had no choice but to match his style.

The boy’s ear was freckled like the rest of him—Erastus couldn’t help but notice when he spat it out. It was more than enough to elicit a cry of
Uncle
, and that should have been the end of it, the extent of the damage done. Erastus heard tell of, rather than witnessed, the rest. The wound—perhaps dressed poorly, perhaps not at all—lay open too long, healing over only after a festering contagion had taken hold. The freckled face swelled, ripening cherry red through to a shade just this side of black. There was no talk of murder. Not a whisper. Men fought. Occasionally, one of them died.

With an iron tang in his mouth, Erastus returns suddenly to his present form, finding it hunched in his first wife’s chair. The kill book lies closed on the table. His forehead resting on it God only knows how long.

Lying on his bunk in the small hours, Bendy absently massages his hips. He can think of nothing but Dorrie’s hands. They are ugly, yes, but also terribly, inexplicably beautiful. It would seem there is nothing they cannot do.

Sound stirs the space beneath him, hooves shifting, restlessness passing like a secret from stall to stall. And now, bringing him up on his elbows, the high, inquiring whinny that signals fear. The brown nag. It’ll be nothing—she’s a flighty thing. Still, maybe he ought to descend, light the storm lantern, take a turn about the barn.

For a full minute Bendy regards the rafter blackness, straining his ears. They’re settling now. Definitely nothing. He lies back. Lets fall the lids of his eyes.

Night draws toward morning. The howl is taking shape rapidly, Dorrie having finally hit her stride. In the midst of the five new mannequins, she tilts forward on her knees, setting the runt’s left eye. Later, when she’s mounted and sewn the skin—soaking, softening now with the others in the tub—she’ll take the tip of a pin and draw the eyelid down over the ball. Bendy told her they close their eyes completely, but half-mast is as far as she’s willing to go. She can’t bear the idea of them wailing blind.

A current plays along her spine. She pays it little mind—another of the body’s small complaints, brought on by her penitent’s pose.

This time her work has progressed in cycles—runt to father to brothers, mother saved for last. Five centre boards traced, sawn and shaped. Twenty blocks nailed in place. Twenty leg rods stapled. Five skulls wired and affixed. She suspects this may be how she went wrong in the first place, by attempting to raise them up one by one. These are not individual specimens. This is a pack.

While the other four sit back on their haunches, the white wolf stands. The reason for this is simple—it’s how Dorrie sees them,
gathered on a moonlit meadow, the edges of which meet the steep inner slopes of her skull.

On the floor by her knee, what’s left of a small batch of plaster glistens in its pot, enough to build up the little one’s nose and lips. After that, she’ll mix up a fresh batch and set to work on the adult male. She dips her putty knife into the pot, scoops a blob onto the bone peninsula of the runt’s skull and begins working up the snout.

Digging out the right nostril, she feels again the tremor in her spine. It’s stronger this time, an almost audible rush. She turns, chin over shoulder. The back window betrays an expression—canine, quicksilver, gone.

She stares into the blackened pane, her brain tumbling to make sense of what she’s seen. First,
reflection
. Only none of her wolves has a long silver mane, a robber’s mask of black. A trick of the angle? The lamp’s dubious light? She releases her craned neck, hears vertebrae click and grind. She’s thinking clearly now. Not one of her specimens has its fur on. Not one of them has a face to reflect.

THEY TAKE THE BUCKBOARD
, a sure sign they’ll be hauling something weighty back from town. Which is why the Tracker’s been told to come along in the first place—Hammer only ever brings him when there will be many sacks and barrels to heft. Today the light is violent. The son rides up front alongside his father, leaving the Tracker to bounce alone in the back.

Tooele hasn’t changed—the road hemmed in by houses, crowded with carts and wagons, mules and Mormonee. While Hammer and the son conduct their business, the Tracker jumps down and walks a little way, easing the track’s unkindness from his bones. He knows to move slowly in town, keep his eyes down, stay within earshot of Hammer’s call. He will stray to the corner of the block and no further. It is far enough.

On a narrow patch between buildings, six Indians sit facing each other, three on three. A moment passes before the Tracker understands they are gambling, a twelve-bone variation of the game. The marked bone hidden, then revealed. The men sing the accompanying song quietly, passing it from mouth to ear under a blanket of shared breath. Stock-still on the dusty road, the Tracker listens. Though not precisely the version he
knows, it’s close enough to start the plain tune stuttering in his throat.

“Tracker! You, Tracker!” Hammer’s voice drops down around his shoulders. He turns and ventures back.

As expected, there are several barrels and sacks, plus a single crate. The Tracker curls his fingers under the wooden lip of a cask. In the old life, nothing save the largest game weighed so much, and a kill was rarely borne by one man alone. A shoulder net, a burden basket, these were the most a body was expected to bear. They lift the crate last, he and the son sliding it aboard. The Tracker rests his boot heels on it the whole way back.

He should have known. If he had let his mind wander down the track of Hammer’s thinking just a couple of steps further, he would have. As it is, the crate’s contents take him by surprise.

Hammer insists on prying the lid off himself, showing his teeth as the long nails screech and groan. It comes away to reveal straw. Hammer digs, not with his hand but with the curved tail of the crowbar. One, two hookfuls and the light finds metal, dark and cool. The son lets out a yip.

The white man decides where the leghold traps will go. One among the peach trees, where the painted wife sighted the wolf, one alongside the stable—Hammer himself spotted a full set of tracks there—and one at the far limit of the quiet wife’s trees. All three laid where one of the family could put a foot wrong and lose it. The Tracker says nothing. It is not his place.

Hammer leaves them to it. The son stands back, clearly afraid of the teeth. The Tracker kneels over the first of the traps, beside him a basin of bloody scraps. The first wife had given them grudgingly, Hammer besting her with a few soft words—
Nothing a wolf likes better than children, Mother
.

As the son watches over him, the Tracker rubs the double hook of the drag chain with a fatty chunk of bait. Then the chain itself. Then, ever so gently, taking care to avoid the trigger pad, he treats the trap itself.