Effigy Read online

  “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.

  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.

  — 3 —

  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, ope
n 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.

  — 4 —

  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.

  When requesting a second pillow didn’t work, Dorrie lied, complaining of congestion, a need to prop herself up in bed.

  “Is it any wonder?” Mother Hammer directed her reply to the far end of the table, as though she and her husband were dining alone. “Sleeping out there like a barn cat. She belongs indoors.”

  Hammer looked up from his plate, folding a strip of roast into his mouth. His silence was impossible to gauge. While Dorrie had yet to see him openly take Mother Hammer’s side, he was not above deserting the poor soul who’d angered her.

  He laid down his k
nife and fork. “Give her the pillow.”

  “I have enough to manage without babying the likes of her.” Mother Hammer set her mouth, only to gasp when Hammer brought his fist down hard on the table. Dishes jumped. The first wife let the quiet billow and swell. Then punctured it. “As you wish.”

  It was childish, Dorrie knew, all this fuss so she could provide a stuffed crow with a comfortable bed. It wouldn’t have been necessary if he could have perched on the crate beside her cot, standing guard the way he had on her bedside table back home. But Hammer had been perfectly clear on that point: every specimen on his ranch would be one that met its end by his hand. The collection they would build together would stand as a testament to his skill.

  She hadn’t minded leaving behind the weasel, the yellow cat, the mice. Not even the bright jay, so difficult to skin over the head, or the sharp-shinned hawk she’d mounted on the wing. Cruikshank Crow, however, she couldn’t bear to part with. He was the first specimen she’d mounted, the only one she’d blessed with a name. She smuggled him along, swaddled in a petticoat at the bottom of her trunk.

  Drawing the old crow out from beneath her bed, Dorrie lies back and stands him up on her chest. Black claws at her breastbone. His head sits slightly askew—an error she’d never make today, but as luck would have it the effect is fitting. Cruikshank Crow is curious.

  If anything about the black bird seems unnatural, it’s his gaze. It wasn’t Dorrie’s fault—Mr. Cruikshank had a great many supplies in his bulging leather case, but he’d run clean out of bird eyes. He fingered through those he did have—fish, dog and deer, all wrong in colour and nowhere near the right size—then sent Dorrie on a hunt, showing her how to measure likely prospects against her baby fingernail. A pair of pebbles were the best replacements she could find. Both were black with a slaty sheen, one round save for a tiny nick, the other slightly oblong, making Cruikshank Crow a bird forever on the verge of winking.