Effigy Read online

  Dorrie wasn’t sure how fragile the finished specimen would prove to be over time, so she prepared a bed of tow for it in a squat and spotless jar. Ruth came for it before the breakfast bell. Her face took on a glow as she held the jar to the window’s weak light. “Such a gift,” she murmured, and Dorrie felt the jabbing again.

  Never having made a friend in her life, Dorrie harbours no illusions about making one of Ruth. It’s enough to know the other woman is there across the yard, working through the day just as Dorrie works through the night.

  Drawing the last stitch through the white wolf’s pliable skin, she ties the thread off in a tiny crystalline knot. Before snipping it, she turns the pelt over, laying it fur-side up across her knees. It’s strangely light, insular yet cool, a blanket of fresh snow in her lap. No sign of the bullet’s path. She runs a finger up the underside, feeling for the puckered scar.

  What a crew, Lord. What a sorry crew. All the thousands of times Ursula imagined herself presiding over a supper table of her own, she never once pictured it looking like this.

  As a girl and then a young woman, Ursula spent every mealtime ladling and fetching, in fealty to the bitter, exacting Harriet Pike and, later, the helpless Elsie Simms. Both of them slave-drivers in their own way. The moment Ursula took her seat, Mrs. Pike or one of her lumpen sons, or the original lump that was their father, would call for more pickles, more cornbread, more stew. The Simmses were no better—Saints or no, they never let her forget they’d taken her in after the Pikes had turned her out. The children were weaker-willed, and every order was preceded by, Oh, Ursula, dear, would you mind?, but little else had changed.

  How could she have guessed then at the bloated shape her own household would assume? If it weren’t for the children—her five industrious little angels flanking her left and right—Ursula doubts she would still walk the earth. Strong though she is in both body and mind, she would likely have dropped dead of work, like so many of the women who came westering.

  The thought narrows her eyes, and she sweeps them past her daughters—little Josepha earnestly buttering her own bread, her elder sister, Josephine, taking small, neat bites of stew—to rest on the most recent, and perhaps least supportable, of her husband’s wives. That filthy smock. And that hair, like a mule tail that’s never been groomed. Sister Eudora is bleary-eyed. She’s missed two meals already today, and Ursula was obliged to send Josephine to fetch her just now. You knock until she comes. Don’t you go in there, mind, don’t even open the door.

  Truth be told, Ursula despaired of the fourth wife the moment she first clapped eyes on her. Doubtless thinner girls had managed to force babies out from between the pincers of their hips, but few of them would have lived to tell the tale. For more than a day she was at a loss as to the motive behind Hammer’s choice. It couldn’t have been carnal, as the last two had been. She wondered about a possible alliance with a family of note, but found upon questioning the girl that she came from nothing—a hard-scrabble farm somewhere off the southern road, people by the name of Burr.

  It was only after their sealing, when Hammer took his child bride shopping for needles and knives, that Ursula understood. It was no longer enough to keep a record of every animal he shot—now he wanted to stockpile the creatures themselves. To think a man could be so ruled by vanity.

  A hank of Sister Eudora’s hair slithers loose to dangle in her stew. She takes no notice, lifting another in a series of indelicate mouthfuls to her lips. Ursula can stand to watch her no longer. She shifts her gaze to Sister Ruth and feels her eyelids relax.

  It’s hard to credit now, but Hammer’s second wife was also thin as kindling when he brought her home. Even harder to imagine is the flush of bad feeling Ursula experienced when he first led Ruth into her house—not jealousy, exactly, but something very like. Ruth was warmly, quietly beautiful, a fact Ursula found she could not entirely take in stride.

  Five children and a decade later, she’s come to regard her sister-wife as, if not an ally, then at least no threat. Ruth helps around the house throughout the winter months, but come spring she spends every waking moment with her worms. She’s happy enough to produce bobbins and hanks of thread, but despite years of weaving in the land of her birth, she refuses to make cloth. Ursula learned long ago that any talk of procuring a loom will meet with silence and a lowered head. A stubbornness as soft as it is enduring. Never mind how it galls Ursula to peddle the surplus unfinished product in town, then turn around and pay premium for a bolt of inferior twill.

  Still, she wouldn’t trade the second wife. She knows full well not one in a hundred would have borne five strong, squalling babies and turned them over without a fight. Five and counting. Ursula can’t help but smile at the idea—a sixth little lamb to be welcomed before Christmas of this year. And more after that, even if she has to peel Hammer away from his worthless third wife every time.

  Ursula turns her attention to Sister Thankful now, making her eyes like open winter windows, letting them linger on the round of a fat ringlet until the other woman feels them there. Not a finger lifted in the six long years she’s lain about this house. What’s worse, despite endless nights abed with the husband they share, not a single new soul to show.

  Ursula doesn’t bother to meet the third wife’s kohl-rimmed eyes. She looks instead to the table’s head, and for an instant considers calling Hammer to account for his wives. But to what end? This is old territory—she’s trodden it until every inch of her is sore.

  What can you mean, Mother? I never see Sister Ruth or Sister Eudora but they’re about their work.

  Work? Ruth is never to be found when I want her. And when did Eudora ever churn the butter or knead the bread? I doubt she even knows how. As for the other one—you’re not going to tell me she’s anything but bone idle!

  Here he might smooth his moustaches, tilt his head as though mystified by what she’s said. How she hated it when he kept his temper while hers began to fray.

  Charity, my good wife. He could smile so unkindly when he wished to. You know Sister Thankful is a martyr to the megrims.

  Ursula closes her eyes rather than continue to regard him or, worse, look one seat further to Lal, her poor excuse of an eldest son. None of it—not one of her husband’s choices—would be so galling if she hadn’t instructed him to the contrary in nearly every respect.

  After a dozen years of managing a household alone, Ursula was ready for help. Hammer was taken up with breeding and trading horses, and Lal was as useless at eight years of age as at any other. Housemaids were few and far between on the frontier, and those who were about commanded too great a price. Wives were cheaper and easier to control—or so Ursula imagined at the time. Besides, was it not a man’s sacred duty to people Zion with his seed? Hammer must take another wife, at least one. Ursula made it clear to him—sat beside him on the parlour settee and spelled it out.

  “She must be in excellent health—look for a good complexion and carriage, colour in the cheeks, a sturdy spine. Young but not a child. Cheerful but no idiot—I can do without prattling in my ear. She should be orderly, industrious, clean. And mark this, husband: she must be easily governed.”

  Hammer stared at the floor while she talked. “Anything else?” he muttered when she’d had her say. As though she’d been browbeating him rather than urging him to marry again.

  Ursula knows she must open her eyes soon. The children will begin to worry, one of them—Joseph, most likely, bless him—asking, Are you all right, Mother? Are you well?

  Chancing Thankful’s wrath, Erastus slides his eyes past her to rest for a moment on Ruth. Even as she lifts her fork, his second wife radiates stillness. She could be a glossy parlour plant, the kind a man can’t help but finger when he’s left alone with it in a room.

  More than a decade has passed since the first time he held Ruth in his arms. Her English skin was chapped and sullied then, her brown eyes those of a heifer much abused. She was one of many he lifted into waiting wagons that d
ay—women and children, even several men too weak to rise, lying dusted with snow on the iron ground. They were converts on the trail to Zion, victims of a poorly planned, ill-fated migration scheme. The handcarts they’d been dragging for months stood over them where they lay.

  It was no great feat to lift her. He felt little evidence of the soft creature she would become, the hips and breasts she would redevelop in his care. Then her bonnet fell away, and her hair tumbled free to clothe his shoulder, his cold, bare hand. Such a slithering. How could it shine so, when the wick of her life’s force was clearly guttering? How could it give off such a scent—flowers grown in the bed of a woman’s hidden parts—when the rest of her already smelled of death? Mysteries then and now. He knew only that he would have her. It would be necessary to pay out her bond, but he would have her. And Ursula would have her wish.

  “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 terr
ible. 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.