Effigy (6 page)

Now that she’s with child again, Lal watches Ruth whenever he can. There’s a lovely new shape under her apron. Her profile is softening, causing him to lie awake nights, sweating. To take himself roughly in hand.

It’s a sin to touch himself so, but with a religion that forbids so many comforts—liquor, hot coffee, even tobacco—how can a young man help but put a foot wrong? Yes, he could definitely use a smoke. And if he should happen to pass close by the silk-house in his travels, well, he could use a little of that, too.

A stone’s throw from his empty hut, the Tracker crouches in the brush. In his right hand, a digging stick—a tool so versatile, so scorned by white men looking down from their mounts.
Digger
. A single word to cover Paiute, Western Ute, Shoshone and more. Untold camps, untold peoples lumped into one.

He jabs and gouges, pausing to scoop the loosened earth away with his cupped hands. When the hole is elbow deep, he sits back on his heels. Closing his eyes, he feels tempted to call up a prayer. Instead, he reaches into the pocket of his waistcoat—sweat-stained, hanging open about his chest—and retrieves the she-wolf’s eyes.

He sets them, one after the other, into the hole. Pupils down. This is part kindness, to keep from dropping grit into their unprotected gaze, and part cowardice, to avoid meeting that gaze with his own. He covers the eyes gradually, gently, but it is still dirt, still a burial. Patting the infill flat, he finds himself reluctant to apply much pressure, picturing the balls bursting, leaking away.

He stands and goes looking for stones. A pile, even a small one, will remind him. Besides, if the ground is left bare, anything could scrabble down through the loose pack and spirit the eyes away.

After an absence of an hour or more, the Tracker returns to load Dorrie’s waste into the barrow. She doesn’t know whether he will burn or bury it, or simply lay out a scavengers’ feast. She’s never asked.

He bloodies his front with the flayed, headless wolves, saves the brimming pails for last. Then, finally, she is alone.

Standing at the foot of the straw tiers, a pair of ground owls in stasis by her knee, Dorrie becomes suddenly, crushingly aware of her fatigue. Her arms dangle at her sides, hands stinging. It makes no difference how long she soaks them, how many coats of tallow she applies before sleep—they remain a torment to her, a pair of bony crosses to bear.

In her stillness, she becomes aware of the gentle nausea brought on by the scent of her arsenical soap. The stuff only makes her truly ill when she has to cook up a new batch. It’s a simple recipe. Slice clean cakes of white soap into boiling water and watch them melt to slime. Add pounds of powdered arsenic, ounces of camphor, stirring to make sure the mixture doesn’t scald. There are fumes and, no matter how gingerly a body pours
the powder, fine particles that hover in a noxious cloud. Like any living creature, Dorrie can only hold her breath for so long.

She glances out the window, gauging the silky dark. Perhaps an hour or two until the first lightening, then another until Mother Hammer raises the alarm on her hollering bell. She should snatch a little sleep before breakfast, she knows, but the shelves stand between her and the cot, and she finds herself reaching for her gloves so that she might handle the mother wolf’s skull again.

It’s the teeth she can’t seem to get past. The canines bristle when she hinges open the jaws, interlock like yellowed fingers when she eases them shut. Built to clamp and hold fast to thrashing prey, they can puncture even the toughest of hides, crack through to marrow, sever spines. The flesh teeth come together further back—paired sets of scissors for shearing off chunks. Behind them lie molars designed to crush pelvises, femurs, the densest of ungulate bones.

Dorrie turns the skull face-on and brings it closer—crossing her eyes slightly to maintain focus on the weave of teeth. Again she works the formidable jaws. Open. Shut. Open. It’s all right. The only way she could get bitten now would be if she willed it. Snapped the mother wolf’s mouth shut on herself.

She’s not thinking right. She sets the skull back where it belongs and drags herself to the far corner of the barn, wheezing audibly as she hits the cot.

DORRIE DREAMS:

Wingbeats, deep and slow. The sun flares off my back feathers, firing my blood as I row through the grass-sweet current forced up by the escarpment below. The story stretches out beneath me, plain. Crow’s-eye view.

To the east, the nesting humans lie low—the females huddled with their wounded and their young, the able males on guard. Circled wagons or no, it’s a foolish place for a nest, the heart of a long meadow, open to predators on all sides.

They must be parched. The same sun that plays over my dark gloss will have shrunk their pink tongues to stubs. It’s been three or four days since their wide-open camp curled in on itself like a grub—and all the while the nearby spring calling to them, saying
wet, clear, life
.

Several gaunt, red-eyed males have tried their luck, bursting from the circle into the waist-high grass, buckets held high, striking their ribs as they ran. Time and again they drew fire, black smoke tracery from the hills. Time and again they lost heart, abandoning their buckets, hurling themselves back into the nest, panting and dry.

The breeze, shifting now, bears up a carrion perfume. Around the circled camp, the grass shelters countless dead. Horses and cattle by the score, humans by the handful lie unmoving in its sway. Drawing near, I breathe deeply, but do not dive.

Today the human nest shows white, something hoisted, flapping high. Birdlike, but a sorry excuse—all glaring light, in service to the wind. I could show it a thing or two, bend the air to my will and not the other way round. Curious, I tilt a wing tip to carve a rent in the space beneath me, contract and slip along its spiralling length.

Swooping close, I learn the white is no bird, but a thing human-made, a rag on a pole—like one of those set out to flash among corn forests, unnerving my kind. No living thing at all, no threat. Still, the bird-heart in me cries out for safe vantage. I flap, climb to comfort and veer.

On the turn, a stirring. A figure emerges from the scrub to the north, advancing with the stiff-legged stalk of a male. He bears a second not-bird, this one a shade whiter, held aloft. I pump his way. The white flutters, but I am high enough now not to answer its rapid pulse with a quickening of my own. Instead I turn again, lay a bead on its quavering and hold it in the crook of my eye.

Now the curled camp spills a rag-bearer of its own, my vision split until the pair of them come face to face in the waving grass. Talk now, as always with the humans, talk. In the lull I become sensible of my wings, growing heavy now, each pinfeather crying at its root. The high current calls. Better yet, a juniper’s jagged shade.

But wait. From the mouth of the same northern draw, a second figure appears. For a moment the distance plays tricks, showing a hound on its long hind legs. On the next wingbeat I see true—human, also male. This one comes empty-handed, arms swinging
to feed his rigid stride. His aspect in slanted shadow as he passes below. The scent he gives up is close to canine—ravenous as crow, but nowhere near as clean.

The camp accepts both strangers, opening just enough to take them in. I dip and drift, settle on the taut, ribbed skin of a wagon’s back. It stinks of humans, dead trees, broken-minded mules.

Ill omen. Normally, one of the females would catch sight of me and hiss—
sssssssttt
or
shoo
. Her brood would scoop stones and hurl, forcing me to lift and land, perhaps even shingle away. Not this day. This day they lie weakened, turning up their faces like a clutch of newborns, looking to the two outside males, especially the upright cur.

Only one of those nestled in the centre returns my gaze—a female with a fine fall of darkness down her back. Not feathers, but as close as any human might hope to come. Beside her, slumped in fitful rest, her young. Female, if I’m any judge—more of the same dark hair. Its over-skin is paler than the mother’s, perhaps once as white as the call-and-answer rags.

The dark mother watches me for several breaths, then drops her eyes to the outsiders, disregarding the rag-holder, focusing on the dog man, the one with all the words. One after the other, the females around her rise and go to him. Weep and smile at their seeming-saviour, reach out to him with their filthy hands. Not the dark mother. Like me, she has eyes, a nose. She keeps to the depression, drawing from beneath the folds of her draping skins a dark brown block. Under her prying fingers it opens out doubled and blank.

Her eyes fixed on the dog man, she touches the tip of a thin tool to the blankness, drawing out black as a claw draws red. Unable to resist, I open my wings and drop, land soundlessly atop the barrel that supports her back. Risky, yes, but the vantage is clear.

The bird brain reels to witness it. First the sloping shadow of his gaze, and now, in a single cutting line, the terrible set of his jaw. She does him justice, recording not only the bowed lips, but also the teeth they hide. In time he stares up at me from her lap.

I hunch forward over her shoulder, my claw-hold precarious on the barrel’s head. No one takes any notice of a lone black bird. All eyes on the dog man. He’s silent now, cocking an ear to one of the nesting males. When quiet comes, he bobs his head, his hand snaking out to meet the other’s in a clasp.

When I next look down, the line-and-shade face is gone. Doubtless she’s tucked it away beneath her sagging skins. Do these humans never preen? Many of them are smeared red-brown as though they’ve recently danced through an abandoned kill. Their smell, too, speaks of old blood, fresh fear, the tangy promise of rot.

At a word from the dog man, his partner squeezes out through the same chink that allowed him in. I lift and follow, touch down on the same wagon’s back, this time above the tail. Below, the rag-bearer raises his white signal and brings it tearing down. In answer, the northern draw disgorges two wagons, each bound to a pair of straining mules. What ails these creatures, that they allow humans to use them so?

Beneath my claws, a shifting—not of the wagon alone, but of the whole nest writhing, coming to life. I’m torn, tail to the chaos, beak and beady gaze to the slow advance. The wagons grow larger with every rolling step, cutting a wake down the wide river of grass. The bird eye describes two more human males, each seated astride a wagon’s protruding tongue.

The dog man moves into the open as they draw near, the females following him with their broods in tow. Mules and wagons halt. I watch along my beak’s black slope as, one after another,
the mothers let go of the smallest among their young, allowing them to be hoisted into the shadow of the first wagon’s mouth. The nesting males follow with their own offerings, feeding the wagon their long, glinting guns. Better to store these with the little ones than to trust them to the second wagon’s load of injured adults.

The dark mother comes last, her single offspring stumbling at her side. The child gives out a wail that lifts my softest inner down. More mountain lion than human. Her hold is a cat’s too. They have a time of it prying her free.

MOTHER HAMMER’S BELL
.

Dorrie wakes to a simple vision, the sole remnant of what feels to have been a lengthy dream. The image is harmless enough—a white flag in a stiffening breeze—so why does her flesh crawl so on her bones?

She’ll be late to the breakfast table if she doesn’t rise soon, a further transgression she really shouldn’t chance. Still, the white flutter lingers. Without planning to, she rolls onto her side and reaches beneath the cot. Feeling over the plump rise of a pillow, she closes her fingers around the feathered body resting there. Here is yet another sin against Mother Hammer’s divine order—a good feather pillow wasted, stuffed away underneath a bed.

The first wife kicked up a fuss when Hammer dragged the cot out to the old barn after Dorrie had spent a week sleeping on straw. Scarcely wide enough for one, it was a husband’s unspoken promise—she’d be left alone so long as she kept up the good work. Two wool blankets, a lone pillow and a worn set of sheets followed, sent on Hammer’s orders, but borne in Sister Ruth’s arms.