Effigy (46 page)

Why kill it? It’s not one of the huge black crickets that come in plagues to smother the land, only a single green grasshopper, pretty in its way. Still, its destruction affords a rush of satisfaction she can only vent through a grin. She flings the broken body away. The bodies of those others—the grasshopper’s filthy black cousins—don’t bear thinking on. All the same, Ursula does.

Eighteen fifty-five. She and Hammer had been on their particular patch of Zion for seven years when the crickets came on like the worst kind of weather—unforeseen, unrelenting. As bad as the plague of ’48, when a dark wave of them washed down into the valley of the Great Salt Lake, threatening the crops that had been sown to feed the faithful. Thousands would have starved if the Lord hadn’t seen fit to send his angels, a great battalion of them disguised as gulls.

One moment a darkening waste, the next a fluttering, clover-white field. The gulls so bright as to be blinding. Where their wings showed grey it was the grey of a stone plucked up from a riverbed. A good, clean stone.

They gorged themselves, dragged their bellies spraddle-legged across the fields. Not a single Saint took advantage and scooped one up for the pot. The flock rewarded them by sending for reinforcements in the silent way birds do. They came and they came, until the foul rift that had given rise to that clicking black river finally healed. Their work done, the birds
lifted and banked away. Beneath them, the fields stood swaying and green.

No gulls came to meet the swarm of ’55. Seeing his people were settled, the Lord left them to fight that battle on their own.

Hammer could think only of his horses; it would be a decade yet before he would tire of them, abandoning them to Lal’s care. The ranch looked burned-over, coal-black and glistening where the crickets still laboured, sere where they’d done their worst. He drove the herd south in search of grass they had yet to discover, leaving his wife and child alone.

Lal couldn’t be counted on for much, so Ursula drove the buggy into Tooele the morning Hammer left and took a pair of town boys on for hire. All day long and deep into the night the three of them worked their shovels, Ursula rolling up her sleeves, her two arms more than equal to their four. The trench marked the western limit of the near pasture. It was the only decent grass still standing for miles, and Hammer had left her cows behind. The crickets would reach it within a day.

When the dark ranks came pouring, filling the long ditch like a fast black rain, Ursula and her helpers spilled a year’s ration of kerosene, running end to end. Then lit their torches and set the trench aflame. The idea wasn’t strictly her own. She’d heard tell that the Indians thereabouts were known to employ similar techniques—not to contain the onslaught, but to feed themselves and their children on the charred remains. Disgusting, but no real surprise.

Long after the town boys collapsed, Ursula laboured on. The creeping black carpet wasn’t the only thing the fire consumed. Destroyed also was the mystique of sleep, as she learned how a body could thrive on the bright opposite of rest.

The smoke hid a foul grease in its folds. Ursula gagged on
mouthful after mouthful, even as she felt grateful for one small mercy—the stench had gotten Lal out from under her feet when even the sternest of her warnings wouldn’t. When the last cricket had shrivelled and popped, and the trench was a smoking, stinking creek, Ursula opened her kitchen door to find him gnawing a green crust of bread.

The swarm would come again the following year, and again she would defeat it alone. She would have blamed Hammer more for deserting her, but there was no sense denying it—those horses were the best source of ready money they had. Besides, there was a sweetness to having saved the place without him. When he returned, she paid him even less mind.

Following the Tracker through close-knit trees, Erastus can almost bring the Paiute’s outline clear. Almost tell the skin of those bare arms from the brown silk of his waistcoat’s back.

It’s odd, seeing one’s castoffs animated in such a way. The Tracker wears whatever Erastus gives him until it falls to ribbons—or he would, if it weren’t for a certain all-seeing eye. Ursula invariably notices when the Indian’s pants are getting thin. Before any indecency can occur, she selects Erastus’s oldest pair from the bottom drawer. His clothes still share a dresser with hers. He may bed down elsewhere, but there’s never been any question of his effects going with him.

“Here,” she said, passing him the most recent pair—the pair that moves through the forest before him now. “See to it he wears a proper belt.” The backs of her fingers brushed his forearm, and she withdrew them quickly, as though they’d made contact with something unclean.

He held her gaze a moment. “Kind of you, Mother.”

“You spend a good deal of time with that Indian.”

“True.”

“You must be fond of him.”

He considered a moment, kinking his neck to her, drinking his fill of her eyes. “Does it matter?” he said finally.

“I should say so.” Her gaze tilted to catch a shaft from the window. “If it keeps you from fulfilling your duty.”

“My duty.”

She gritted her teeth. “Yes, your duty. As a husband. As a
man.”

How long ago now? It was still full winter—he remembers the Tracker dropping his threadbare britches into a snowdrift and wriggling into the new pair. Erastus would give Ursula what she wanted not long thereafter—lying with Ruth, planting his seed—but just then he decided to hold his ground.

“My dear, are we not also duty bound to draw our red brothers back into the fold? I haven’t your knowledge of Scripture, but—”

“Scripture!”

It was a rise such as he hadn’t provoked in her for some time. He let her see how it pleased him, showing the first sliver of a grin.

She drew herself up. “‘This people shall become a dark, a filthy, and a loathsome people.’”

“Indeed. But isn’t there some nugget about the scales of darkness falling away come the final days? ‘White and delightsome,’ isn’t it? Or have I got that wrong?”

He’d won. They both knew it, though Ursula acknowledged no defeat. Victory was fleeting. It departed when she did, leaving him to stand alone at their bedside, clutching a pair of old trousers like a fool.

Shifting, soundless trousers now. No matter how mindful Erastus is of his steps, he never comes close to matching the
Tracker’s airy tread. It’s as if those brown feet, clad though they are in a pair of Erastus’s boots, are walking in a different wood—one where a body never quite makes contact with the earth. A lesser man might envy his companion, but Erastus knows silent soles aren’t everything. They hadn’t helped the devil he ran to ground near the settlement on the Provo River.

The Saints down that way had been too soft on their Ute neighbours—asking permission to put up houses, making them gifts—and they were paying the price. The band took what they wanted and answered any protest with gunfire. Erastus and some hundred and fifty others answered the call to give the region a good scrubbing out.

Seventeen years gone and still his blood beats hard to think of it. The wood was not unlike the one he and the Tracker pass through now. The cottonwoods a little older perhaps, and still naked, the ground blanketed with snow. His eyes could be counted on then—he spotted the brave when no one else did, got off a pair of shots and took after him, crowding his horse through the cover for all the beast was worth. The Indian should’ve had the advantage, being afoot in that narrow tangle, but a snow-deep root sent him flying. All Erastus had to do was draw up beside him and drop a couple of balls straight down from his barrel—one where the brave’s shoulder blades met beneath his buckskin, a second where dark hair and feathers hid the base of his skull.

Erastus had killed men before, red and white, but never from on high, dropping lead balls as though they were swollen seeds. The Ute lay still, his right arm crooked where he’d raised it to break his fall—an image as clear and cold as the day that gave it rise.

The scene that lies before Erastus now is vaguer by far. The Tracker is opening the gap between them, gaining sufficient
ground to render his form devoid of limits, discernible by motion alone. And now, by motion’s cease. The Tracker raises his hand—a slow, exaggerated signal even a half-blind white man cannot fail to see. Erastus halts his own steps in answer. Remembers, for the first time since they entered the trees, the reason they’ve come.

The white man wants to lay the deer out where they can watch over it, but on the Tracker’s insistence they deposit the body at the western edge of the far pasture.

“Wolf walk dying. Too close to house, take somebody with him.”

Hammer doesn’t need telling twice. He slits the doe’s belly himself, beginning at the hole the Henry’s ball opened in its breast, then salts her liberally with strychnine, upending the bottle to empty it along the length of the wound.

The job complete, the two men set off separately. Keeping the waning moon behind him, Hammer makes for the house at an easy canter. The Tracker turns his left side to the far ranges and heads homeward as well. Or so it would seem.

The moment the white man passes over a low rise out of sight, the Tracker turns back the way he came. A magpie beats him to the scene. He stoops on the move, swiping up handfuls of dirt, lobbing as many as it takes to drive the bird away. In sympathy, he feels his own hunger stir. He’s eaten nothing since the night before. Crouching by the doe, he comes close to forgetting she’s tainted, no longer food.

Poison
. He recalls the she-wolf’s skull, the child wife insisting he scrub its stain from his hands. He takes the doe by her uncontaminated forelegs and hauls her into the scrub, leaving a messy
drag trail behind. Not what a wolf would do, but it’s the best way he can think of to obscure his own tracks. Besides, for one who fancies himself a hunter, Hammer knows little of such things.

He’s already decided where the doe will lie—close by the mother wolf’s eyes but deeper. He’ll take pains to pack the infill down and weight it with stones. He’s seen the damage these white man’s crystals can do, a single carcass spinning a wide spiral of death. Wolves and their younger brothers, foxes and skunks, weasels and wolverines—these and others leave staggering tracks as they abandon the kill, convulse and fall. Beyond the furred bodies, birds, the sky cut out from under them. Hawks and magpies. A mess of eagle. Always crows.

The first time he came upon such a scene, it radiated from the brown rise of a heifer. Some Mormonee farmer at war with the wild beyond his fields. The Tracker had left the ashes of his old life behind him just days before. Standing still in that littered pasture, a dead skunk reeking not far from his feet, he lost his bearings. The sun passed from above his right shoulder to above his left before he got them back.

Ursula is one jar away from reaching her tea box when Hammer shoves open the kitchen door. She doesn’t flinch. Only replaces the peach quarts mechanically, their half-moon contents in slow commotion before her eyes.

“What’re you up to, Mother?”