Effigy (8 page)

The thrill lasted until the city fell away behind him—houses thinning out, yards expanding to become farms. At the first unpopulated stretch, he tried the spectacles on. They stayed put while he kept Ink to a careful walk, but threatened to fly off at any kind of speed. Closer to home, he cut across country, dismounting when he was well into his own land but still a good distance from the house.

The damn things made a fool of him then and there. Without
them he couldn’t discern the target. With them he couldn’t line up his sights. He hurled them down as a child might and crushed them beneath his heel. Once mounted, he grinned bitterly to hear Ink follow in his footsteps, grinding the lenses beneath her hoof.

His vision is much deteriorated since that day—back then he could still trust himself to make a journey alone. He might take the Tracker with him to auction, if only the mulish devil would ride. There’s no way in hell he’s drawing up to that crowd with an Indian sharing his saddle, hugging his back. Besides, being Paiute, the Tracker doesn’t know the first thing about handling horses. Lal tends to come down on the nasty side of things, but at least he can keep a string of colts and fillies under control.

On the up side, the pair of them will turn heads together. Erastus is a man of reputation, mounted on the finest-looking horse in any crowd. Bull makes a good contrast to Ink, an eyeful in his own right, so long as he chooses to behave. And there’s no denying Lal’s the sort both women and men watch. His mother’s son. It’s as close as Erastus will come to parading Ursula around Temple Square—the city no lure to her, even if it is the City of the Saints.

Truth be told, Erastus would just as soon not go himself. It’ll be a day spent feigning interest in gaits and bloodlines, followed by a short night in a shared hotel room and the chore of the return ride. Hard to believe he used to have trouble sleeping the night before an auction. He can recall lying awake in a kind of fever, wondering how much his best colt would fetch, or whether a promising mare or even a stallion would catch his eye. It’s been five years since he felt moved to buy a new horse. Last night he slept like a stone.

Ink stands waiting, kitted out. Mounting up, Erastus feels a familiar rush at assuming her height, a pride that encompasses both the horse and the springing strength extant in his fifty-twoyear-old
thighs. Once seated, he nudges out a stately, long-legged walk with his knees.

At his back, Lal opens the corral gate, cursing as he organizes the young horses in their string. When he finally takes his seat, grunting, the palomino paws and blows. Erastus gnaws at his lip, keeping himself in check. Ink trots up at his signal, the track disappearing before him as they leave the waking ranch behind. They’ll do fine today, just fine. Lal manages well enough in town—it’s in the wild that he’s no earthly use.

Erastus used to let him tag along on hunts or roundups from time to time, telling himself the boy would harden into something worthwhile. It must be three years now since he last spun himself that particular line—yes, three, because Eudora had lately come to stay. In that case Lal would’ve been sixteen, old enough that Erastus should’ve been able to count on him. He shakes his head, recalling how his eldest son blanched at the sight of blood on that stark morning.

Erastus had heard talk of horse thieves at work in the region. Twin brothers, once good Saints, now apostates, were headed out the back door of the Territory, grabbing what horseflesh they could on the way. It was the Tracker who brought word that they were cutting favourites from the herd on the far pasture.

Erastus rode out at a gallop with the Indian clinging to his waist, while the boy floundered along behind them, kicking the palomino’s ribs in to keep up. He drove Ink hard, but running was a joy to her, and before long the herd hove into view. Or what he understood to be the herd. What he saw was a particoloured, shifting copse. As they drew closer, he could make out a pair of forms that jutted above the canopy, wheeling to and fro.

The brothers fancied their odds. They held their ground and started shooting. Erastus turned loose on their wavering forms,
his revolver bucking in his hand. The brown arm that swung up from behind him worked its weapon like an extra digit. Gesturing with muscular precision, it picked one twin, then the other, out of the panicking herd.

If the boy got off a single shot, Erastus didn’t hear it. Chances are he had both hands around the saddle horn, hanging on like a slip of a girl.

The twins’ own two horses were full-blood trotters, a chestnut gelding and an iron-grey mare, both welcome additions to the herd. The brother who fell first had a set of saddlebags tooled all over with a western vista—jagged peaks, trees clustered along a riverbank—the neatest bit of leatherwork Erastus had ever seen. The bags were wet with blood, enough so it ran in the many licks and hollows that made up the scene. To let the colour sink and stain would’ve been a shameful waste. Having quieted the spooked horse, Erastus worked the buckle loose and hailed his son.

There were dirtier jobs going than rinsing a pair of saddlebags in the nearby creek. Dragging a pair of matching bodies to a single grave, for instance—the Tracker didn’t need telling, he was already breaking ground with his pick. You wouldn’t know it, though, to see the look in Lal’s eyes. It wasn’t like Erastus to justify his actions—especially not to one of his own issue—and yet he found himself muttering something about sins beyond saving, apostasy being at the top of the list. Had the boy never heard of blood atonement? Didn’t he know there was only one substance that could wash those brothers’ souls clean? Brother Brigham himself had asked the question—
Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood?

In the end the boy did as he was told, but he handled the bags as though they were a pair of lungs still breathing. After that he helped the Tracker cover the twins with dirt and gathered brush
to build a fire on the spot—thereby throwing animals off the scent and hiding any change in the earth. The whole time dropping things, stumbling over his own two feet.

Since then any outing that included Lal commenced and ended with the wheel-cut trail they follow now, known hereabouts as the Hammer Track. Ink knows the road and wants to run it. After a mile or so Erastus lets her.

“Hold up,” Lal cries, already falling behind.

Dorrie’s rhythm is all off. It’s mid-afternoon and she ought to be sleeping—or if not sleeping, then working on the wolves. Instead, she paces from the small window at the back of her barn to the smaller one beside the door. The back view sprawls southwest down the greening valley. The front looks northeast into the circle of yard. On perhaps the twentieth pass, she halts to watch Sister Ruth exit the main house and cross to her stunted trees.

The swelling under Ruth’s apron troubles Dorrie. How will the second wife carry on with her work next year? Can she possibly pick leaves and bear them to her worms with a baby dragging at her breast? True, she can look forward to Mother Hammer taking over once the thing is weaned, but by then she will have lost an entire season.

Babies are a deal of trouble, but at least they can be laid down and left to cry. Ruth’s older children are dutiful—Mother Hammer has made them so—but they still require tending. Someone must feed and wash them, teach them to be virtuous, to warble out songs, to read. Endless trouble. Endless need.

Once, in the dead of Dorrie’s first winter on the ranch, the eldest daughter made the mistake of bringing that need to her.
Hammer had dropped off a frost-stiffened snowshoe hare only an hour before. Dorrie was just getting to work on the thing when she felt a sudden blast of cold and looked up to find Josephine standing mutely in the crack of the door. The stove threw its heat her way. Stupid child, holding a door ajar in January. Telling her to close it would be risky, though. She might take it as an invitation to step inside.

Dorrie crossed her arms. “Mother Hammer doesn’t like you being here.”

The girl didn’t budge.

“It’s dangerous.”

Still nothing. Josephine stood shivering, snow sifting in around her, dusting the raw wood floor. Her eyes wide and wary, she took in the hare, the knives in their neat array. What harm if she did come in and warm her small hands by the stove? None, except that Dorrie had come over all gooseflesh. From the wind, yes, but only in part.

It was something about the girl’s size—perfectly normal for the six- or seven-year-old she was then. Dorrie had worked on smaller specimens, creatures whose translucent ribs would seem mere filaments alongside the finger bones Josephine harboured in her mittened fist. Still, the child’s body seemed insufficient, vulnerable in the extreme.

A nauseous ache took hold of Dorrie by the shoulders. She reached for the hare and held it out at arm’s length.

“Run away, little girl,” she squeaked, bobbing the rigid ears. But her stepdaughter was already long gone.

There’s a dream Ruth has—not often, perhaps once a month. Save the past four. Save any she’s passed while in the family way.
It will return, she tells herself. Once I am delivered of my burden, it will return.

Lying atop the covers, she cups a hand to the rise of her condition. Still months to go and already the thing is stoking her blood to blazing, weighting her steps, making a dull sponge of her brain. She shifts onto her side, her temple seeking a fresh spot on the pillow. How is she meant to rest? More to the point, how is she meant to work?

She’s seen through five whole seasons, egg to moth, but never while carrying a child. Sister Thankful gave her those good years, arriving when Ruth was fit to burst with Baby Joe and thereafter keeping their husband to herself. It was all but painless, being cast aside. Five babies in as many years had gone a long way to dulling what little wifely feeling Ruth had known. By the time Hammer took his third wife, his second was dwelling more and more frequently on the life she’d led before meeting him. Or, more precisely, on the sense of future she was then possessed of, the promise she had yet to fulfill.

Of her actual life, she missed nothing. Not London—though in truth she knew little of the great city beyond her home district of Spitalfields. Certainly not the close quarters she’d shared with her mother until her sixteenth year, when the older woman died gasping in her sleep.

Every day but Sunday, Ruth navigated the pinch and racket of Brick Lane. Weavers’ cottages stood chockablock, their high banks of windows fitted not for anyone’s pleasure, but to keep the workers within from going blind. Mr. Humphrey ran as good an operation as any. Ruth knew a decade’s employ there, from the time she was nine years old. Her mother had started six years before that. The pair of them would sit back to back in their corner of the attic loomshop, each tying on a warp. Until Ruth sat alone. Fifteen
thousand threads give or take. A donkey’s workday. A pauper’s wage.

As she turns to cool the other temple, the face of her employer rises unbidden, long and wavering as a wraith’s.

Miss Graves, you strike me as an intelligent young woman. Tell me, are you interested in silk?

I am, sir
.

She answered without pause, without gauging the layers of his intent. He was old enough to have fathered her—to have fathered her poor dead mother, come to that. And he was married, even if Mrs. Humphrey, martyr to a trick heart, rarely left her bed. Ruth sees now how it ought to have been clear to her. It was fitting that an employer should stoop close to inspect his worker’s technique, but no man’s eyesight is that near.

“In that case I shall instruct you in the subject. It is, as you can well imagine, a particular passion of mine.” He smiled thinly. “Come down to my office when you finish here.”

So began an education. Weeks passed without so much as a hint of suspicion to cloud her mind. This was in part because Mr. Humphrey advanced upon her at a glacial pace—knuckles brushing her elbow, then nothing for days—but in the main because the matter of his talk so stirred her imagination that she grew dull to her actual surrounds.

One lesson in particular impressed itself upon her mind.