Effigy (52 page)

Broken again. Ursula sucks the insides of her cheeks. Three out of thirteen eggs have fissures. One has cracked clean through and leaked its bright slime over the straw. He must have run with the basket again. She stoops over him.

“How many times, Baby Joe?” In the corner of her eye, Josephine takes up breadboard, knife and loaf, and filters away. “How many times?”

The child looks up at her.

“You. Never. Run. Not when you’re carrying the eggs.”

“I—” he attempts.

“Hold out your hand.”

He does so, but keeps it bundled in a fist. Her youngest has a vein of his father running through him.

“Palm to heaven,” she says quietly, and he obeys with a slow unfurling. She averts her eyes from his small, soft fingers, the leniency they might evoke. Busies herself with wiping porridge from her kitchen spoon.

One good whack ought to do it. Ursula gauges the force required, then doubles it on the downswing to be sure. Baby Joe may have a wilful streak, but he’s not made of stone. He curls the injured hand inside the good one and presses both to his belly, betraying the stab of nausea that accompanies the sudden infliction of pain. His brown eyes widen, full to brimming with tears.

“M-mother,” he moans, the first tear snaking loose as he lowers his face.

The word works on Ursula like a lineament, soothing, loosening her resolve. “None of that, now.” She resists the urge to kneel and kiss him, press his hot cheek to her own. “Go and wash that muck off your hands, then maybe I’ll let you ring the breakfast bell.”

To her surprise, the child doesn’t move.

“Mother,” he says again, tilting his face up to regard her through dark and streaming eyes. “I want my mother.”

This time the word is narrow, honed. It penetrates just where Ursula’s breastbone reaches its ribbed conclusion—a pain so vivid, so pure, it demands to be returned.
Strike him
, it says,
hard
.

But the child is only six, his limbs padded with baby fat, a stubborn strata through which the milk of the one who built him still swims. Ursula contents herself with grabbing him by the shoulders. She kneels down before him. Descends to show him the pale discs of her eyes.

“I am your mother, Baby.” She shakes him.

A glint of defiance taints his gaze. She sees she must be cruel.

“You think your Aunt Ruth wants you? You’re mistaken, my angel. She’d much rather keep company with her worms.”

His eyes dry as she watches. She gives him another shake for good measure before letting him go.

“Sister Eudora.”

Ruth stands in the lee of the door—for how long, Dorrie has no notion. She’s been driving pins through the mother wolf’s fur, ensuring the skin will adhere. It takes her a moment to focus, her pupils having shrunk to pinpricks from staring so long into such whiteness. The frame of daylight around her sister-wife’s form confuses things further. Dorrie realizes she’s worked through to late morning, clean through Mother Hammer’s bell. She rises from her knees. Save for a final brushing when dry, the white wolf, and therefore the pack, is done.

Ruth steps inside the barn, drawing closed the door. “My.” She crosses to stand by the snowy hindquarters, knows without being told not to touch. “Such fine work.”

Dorrie feels herself colour.

Ruth lifts her leaf-stained hand and closes it gently around Dorrie’s wrist. “Eudora, your mother has passed.”

Just like that. No,
I’m afraid I have some sad news
. Not even,
Sit
down, dear
. Dorrie sways, just the once, pressing her thigh to the wolf’s shoulder for support. Four paws planted. Legs of iron.

“She’d been ill for some time, I believe.”

“Yes. Ill.”

“She died on Sunday.”

Ruth withdraws her hand. Delving into her apron pocket, she produces a parcel sewn up in burlap, untidy stitches traversing its spine. Dorrie reaches for it. The heft and dimensions are familiar, only the rough skin strange. Mama’s
Doctrine and Covenants
. She had Dorrie fetch it for her every evening so that she might read a passage aloud.
For after much tribulation come the blessings. Wherefore the day cometh that ye shall be crowned with much glory; the hour is not yet, but is nigh at hand
. Papa listening intently, elbows on knees, head a great weight in his hands.

A high groan causes Dorrie to glance up from the swaddled book. Ruth is pushing open the door, letting in a slash of day. “I’m sorry,” she says, her tone less one of condolence than of apology. And then she’s gone.

Sorry for what? Not staying longer? Not even attempting to comfort Dorrie in her grief?

The truth is, Dorrie has no wish to be comforted. As for grief, she’s having difficulty locating any—a quick internal inventory reveals only space, echoing and cool. Mama has died, she thinks, the words careful, clean. How could a mother be dead some five days and a daughter not feel it? Or not a mother. Not truly.

Maybe that explains it. If Dorrie never mourned the original, how can she spill tears for the one who took her place? It’s a relief to think it, like discovering the source of a nasty draft. She sidles in behind her workbench, drags the stool beneath her and sits. She can cut open the parcel later. For now she sets it aside.

From behind, Hammer and the Tracker could be brothers. Two heads of pitch-coloured hair beneath matching battered hats. The same shoulder-slung rifles, same squat, solid build hinged in downward inquiry at the hips.

There are differences, of course, as there are between brothers. The Tracker is perhaps an inch taller, his hair longer, sitting jagged about his shoulders. Where Hammer’s arms are clothed in shirtsleeves—parsnip-coloured, rolled to the elbow—the Tracker’s hang bare, flanking the silken back of his waistcoat. As Lal approaches, he notes these and other discrepancies, yet every step closer to their twinned, stooping backs is a step less sure of himself. The thumb floats up to worry his lip.

“Brothers?” he asks it.

Mm-hm
.

For a moment, Lal considers turning back.

Brothers can fall out
.

Of course. He takes heart and strides forward, twigs snapping beneath his heavy steps. Both men glance back at him, say nothing, return their attention to the scene at their feet, the trap lying closed on its side. It will be the last time either one of them pays him so little mind.

“How in the hell—” Hammer says as Lal comes to a halt behind them.

“I’ll tell you how.” Lal hears himself say it, his voice deeper, clearer than he’s ever known it. His father looks round, his expression sour, and in an instant Lal sees another way things could go. The Tracker could deny it. More than deny, he could pin the thing on Lal. And more. He could tell whatever he knows of Lal’s
own transgressions.
Song for bad child. Warning song
. Whose word would Hammer value more?

“Well?” His father glares at him. The Tracker keeps his eyes to the ground. It’s not much to go by, but it’s all Lal’s got.

“He did it.” The sure voice gone now. He lifts a trembling finger. “He tripped it, tripped all of them.” It’s all he can do not to garble the words. “The pit trap too, more than like, hell, probably even the deer.” This last comes out in a squawk.

Hammer’s face is rigid. Lal is done for. All the Indian has to do is speak. But he doesn’t. He turns to face them, holds his tongue.

“You?” And then a sound Lal never could’ve imagined escaping his father’s lips—a whimper, high and helpless, twisting its tail into a word.
“Why?”

The Indian stares. Lal takes his chance.

“He doesn’t want you to have it, Daddy.” It’s a child’s term, one that’s lain dormant since the days when Lal needed his meat cut for him by a big pair of hands. A term natural as teeth now, at home in his grown-up mouth.

“That true, Tracker?”

Still no word. Still the dark, unwavering gaze.

“You son of a bitch.” Hammer forms the words slowly, as though trying them out for the first time. Then, like a blast of birdsong in Lal’s ears, “Get off my land.”

The Tracker doesn’t run. Doesn’t walk, either, but spins and sets off at a doggy sort of trot. His repeater bouncing. Nary a backward glance.

Lal knows better than to smile, and anyway, he’s thinking too hard about what to say next. It matters terribly. His father is a wide-open door—the right words in the right order could walk Lal clean inside. The thumb would know, but to consult it would be to risk rousing his father’s contempt. His brain churns. And
then, from amid the slippery waste, a milk-white answer takes shape.

The Tracker sits for a time in his shelter. Not because he wishes to stay, but because he cannot, for the life of him, think where to go. He takes cover at the sound of hoofbeats, watches from the scrub until the son has gone. An easy shot let slip away.

It makes little sense to enter the hut again, even less to stand rooted when one is not a tree. In the end the Tracker sets off in the direction he’s facing, thinking only that he must move.

He keeps up a good pace, despite having no notion of where he’s bound. Only south, his feet seeking the tracks they laid when coming north some seven years before. Being feet, they are possessed of limited understanding; by undoing distance, they hope to undo time. They will carry the Tracker back to the old life, back to before the world went bad.

The idea—clearly impossible in the mind’s bleak light—stops him dead. Looking about, he finds he’s reached the southern boundary of Hammer’s land. He stands still for as long as he can bear to. Then, as though spun by a great gust, he jerks a quarter turn.

To the west, the Gosiute scratch in the desert and starve. Turning further, the Tracker faces north—the half-life he’s only just abandoned, Hammer and the son standing together against him, one flesh. Miles beyond them lies the site of the Bear River Massacre, Bear Hunter’s band slaughtered, four winters gone. He turns still further, looking hard now into the east. That way even the mighty Ute are being driven from their lands, herded into wastelands set aside by the Mormonee.

The Tracker looks down on the scarred noses of his boots, watches them shuffle the last quarter, back to where they began. This final story is not one he’s gleaned from Hammer’s talk, or overheard while waiting for the white man in town. This is the story he would utter himself, if there were anyone in the world to tell.

To the south a long green meadow bulges with human skulls. In that sad valley, as in every other, swelling herds trample ancient seed grounds, drain water holes, drive game into the barren hills. The People follow the rabbits and deer or, worse, stay and cling like children to the skirts of towns. Many worship the Mormonee God in the hope that he won’t abandon them as their own spirits have done. Their children steal or go hungry or wash white women’s floors until they sicken and die.

To the south even the rivers, the land’s life-giving veins, bring death.

DORRIE DREAMS:

Hoofbeats waken me, even as they scatter the lolling, meat-drunk wolves. I draw my beak from beneath my wing, watch as the last bloated stragglers push up into the scrub.