Effigy (12 page)

She got close enough to learn that his eyes, like her own, were blue. Darker, though. Water to her air. He kept them shaded under lashes as long as a calf’s. How Ursula ached to stand directly beneath that fringed gaze. She strove against the throng, but the Prophet’s people were gathered tight about him, and in the end she had to content herself—if such a state of rapt agitation could be called content—with a distance between them of some half a dozen feet.

He didn’t colour up as lesser men did when speaking before a
crowd. Instead, the blood seemed to leave his face entirely, allowing the vessels therein to fill with a serum of liquid light. His topic was the persecution of his people—and rightly so, for the Saints were driven from Missouri less than a year later—but it wasn’t the theme of Joseph Smith’s oration that held Ursula fast; it was the man himself. Every part of him was perfect, save perhaps the nose-heavy profile he revealed when blessing the crowd’s flanks with his gaze. Even this she loved instantly, taking a flawed feature to mean he was not a god come to ground, but a creature she might one day speak to, even touch.

She feels the weight of another clean, wet glass against her fingers and hands it off absently, letting go before Josephine quite has it in her grasp. The girl reacts with an all-over spasm, snatching and clutching it to her chest. Ursula says nothing, fishing in the basin again.

Until that day—that voice, that man—Ursula’s life had been mouse-coloured. The spongy bread dough and dingy quilts, the endless soiled diapers of the Pike babies, the shuddery ill-constructed barn, even the nubbled udder she yanked daily. The time before she turned eleven and entered servitude had been little different. She had toiled for her aged parents in a state called Pennsylvania. Coming west to Missouri with the Pikes, she had simply traded one unkind family, one rodent-grey farm, for another.

So it was that when the gift of conversion came, she experienced it in biblical terms, as the falling of scales from her eyes. And when, as leaders will, Joseph Smith concluded his fine speech and rode off in the company of his lieutenants, she knew with a bright certainty that she would look upon his radiance again.

It took little effort to cut free from her life—apprising her employers of her new-found faith was all that was required.
Harriet Pike did her best to berate the religion out of her housemaid, and when that didn’t work, Walter Pike drew his belt from its loops and did his worst. Ursula limped from their house purple from her buttocks to the backs of her knees. She asked the way to the Mormon Meeting House in the street, eliciting half a dozen sneers from unbelievers before she happened upon a Saint. The plain little woman did more than direct her. She looked into Ursula’s burning eyes, caught hold of her hand and led her the whole way there.

Crouched hard against the silkhouse wall, Lal breathes slowly through his mouth in a bid to quiet his blood. At length its foamy rush subsides, withdrawing from his ears to pool thickly in his heart. He listens. A low hissing—the feeding worms still too small to produce a hard-raining racket. Ruth is close by, her weight playing over the floorboards not far from the log at his ear. Sooner or later she’ll cross to the stacks that line the far wall, and he’ll rise to the window and watch.

For now he lays a hand to the wall. Logs he helped haul and fit. Not cut, though. Hammer chose to share the crosscut saw with the Indian—who’d clearly never laid hands on one—rather than trust his own son with anything sharp. Lal was fourteen when they built the little house, still uncertain of the strength in his burgeoning limbs, the dimensions of his own two feet. Hammer barked at him every step they took together on opposite ends of a log. He was on edge, in a hurry to finish this favour for his second wife and get back to his third.

Lal fits his grip to the humped round of a log, finger pads nosing for the strip of adobe chinking, silty and cool. His father left
him to it when it came time for the sloppy, skin-peeling work of mudding up the gaps. It was early spring. At times the mud formed a glassy skin he had to break through. His fingers cracked and bled, and still Hammer said nothing but,
Get on with it
, the few times he strode over to check on the progress being made.

Ruth worked alongside him. She needed everything ready before the mulberry trees came into leaf, and there were still the shelves to be constructed, and four small corner hearths to be bricked in, in case of unseasonable cold. It was to be her first year keeping silkworms—that much Lal understood, though he had no clear notion of what such an endeavour might entail. Left to his own devices, he imagined a mass of spidery creatures with slimy pink legs.

What mulberries had to do with it he couldn’t guess, and he wasn’t about to give himself away by asking. It turned out there was no need. Ruth, who seldom uttered more than three words together, told him everything—not in one go, but portioned out through the days’ toil.

When the trees were ten days or so from turning green—look for leaf buds three-quarters of an inch long—it would be time to set the eggs to hatching.

Eggs? There would be chickens involved as well?

Ruth would fetch them up from the cellar, and wear them here—she touched her bosom, giving Lal a brief, confusing jolt in his britches—keeping them warm against her heart.

How many eggs could she mean? Surely even one would crack.

A week and a half later, the eggs would hatch, giving rise to tiny silkworms.

Not chickens, then. Worms, too, could be born in this way.

These hatchlings would feed on the first, tenderest leaves, chopped fine for their baby mouths. As the leaves swelled and
strengthened, so too would the caterpillars.
Caterpillars
. Finally something Lal could make sense of. The grappling creatures of his fancy fell away, replaced by an image nearer the truth.

The month of May would be devoted to the gathering and laying down of leaves—it was shocking how much the little fellows could put away. Then, after four weeks or so of gorging, the worms would climb up into twigs stooked for the purpose and begin to spin. For two or three days straight they would draw silk from their mouths, until they closed themselves off entirely from the world.

Once ensconced, the worms would become chrysalides. Lal heard
crystal-ids
and pictured the glasses his mother kept in the sideboard—one let fall from the fingers, reduced to wriggling shards—but Ruth described hard little cases full of a sort of living soup. This would be the end for most. When the time was right, she would pluck the cocoons from their branches and boil them alive. Why? So they wouldn’t spoil their silk in the process of being reborn.

Only the lucky few would be suffered to emerge. The look on Ruth’s face when she spoke of this final phase—as though she were stroking the unfolding wings, when in truth her fingers wedged red muck into the rift between two logs. The jolt returned to crackle through him, searing a blackened path. And then she scolded him—
No, Lal, not like that
—and he was himself again, put-upon, enraged.

He returned to the mulberry copse often that May. The first time he carried a sack of new leaves inside and saw the stacks of writhing beds, he felt a boy’s disgusted delight. He stood and watched Ruth mince leaves, then distribute the green hash over several trays. She’d warned him to be quiet, but his voice came out chalky and loud. “Don’t you need a lid on them or something?”

“They won’t wander,” she whispered. Then held a finger to her lips, a gesture that somehow made it harder for him to keep still.

He left soon thereafter, closing the door carefully behind him before walking, then running, through her trees. Reaching open pasture, he hammered on until his heart gave him pain. He couldn’t understand what was wrong with him. He wouldn’t until some three months had passed and those same low trees cast a mottled August shade.

There was a good crop of mulberries, ripening to black. Lal came with a pail in each hand to help his aunt. He found her lying propped against the thickest trunk. She was marked, splattered all over with what he could only conceive of as blood. Red at her throat, her pale dress filthy with splashes. Ruth was hurt, possibly even dead, and the shock of it taught him he loved her.

Then a dark berry came loose, falling to explode brightly across the back of her hand. She stirred, and Lal clenched his teeth hard to keep from howling his relief. The stains were sweet now. What he wanted more than anything, what he kept himself from doing next, taught him the nature of his love.

When Ruth moved in her sleep again, he set his pails down softly and fled. He didn’t kneel down by her side and clean her like a mother cat would, one lick at a time. Or not like a mother cat. Not like a mother at all.

Tonight the Tracker opens to what may be the finest drawing in the book. As always, he is torn. Part of him wishes desperately to turn the page. Another, slightly stronger part insists he fill his eyes.

The child wears little—a stringy vest, a pair of the swollen pants they call drawers. Her face, neck and forearms are painted
with streaks of dust. She is young, perhaps six or seven years on the earth. Innocent of all that is to come, she crouches in the shallows of a stream. Her shins angle off beneath the surface—water’s trick of bending whatever it holds. Her gaze is open, direct. She looks out at the Tracker from the moment between dipping her tin cup and raising it chill and dripping to her mouth.

It’s a mouth, a gaze, a head of dark, unruly hair the Tracker would know anywhere.

He knew them instantly three years back—even though the girl’s age had doubled, even though her grimy, eager expression had narrowed and soured. Knew without a doubt the day Hammer brought his fourth wife home.

WHEN DOES A LIFE BEGIN
, if not with its first memory?

Bendy would’ve been four years old. He remembers his mother kneeling on the floor beside him, her broad palms cupping his heels, pushing his feet back over his head the way he liked. Not three feet distant, his father perched on the lip of the sunken couch. Beside him sat a man twice his girth. Something lay open on the steamer trunk before them. A book? A newspaper?
A map
.

Such a crowded scene wouldn’t have been unusual. Two ground-floor rooms were all the Drown family had claim to in that converted New Orleans mansion—one a glorified closet that housed the parental bed and wardrobe, the other a kitchen, parlour and nursery in one. The washstand hulked in the corner nearest the door. The privy lay down a dim hallway. Three heavy doors and there was still the yard to cross before you got there, the only path a spider-slung gully hacked through yellow, sweating leaves.

The air in that old house clung wetly to the lungs. It made no difference if his mother hoisted the window; when there was any breeze to speak of, it only delivered the delta’s ooze, the human fetor of the port. Close quarters. On his father’s shipping-clerk wages they could afford nothing else.

The steamer trunk served as a table, a desk and, before he grew too long for it, Bendy’s bed. He’d resisted moving to the couch—drawing his shins up alongside his thighs, forming a tight W with his lower half—but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. Bend all you like, John James, but you need to sleep straight. Nighttime’s when little bodies grow.
John James
. The first half all his own, the second the name his mother gave up when she married a man called Drown.

While she folded him in half, easing his aching joints, his father talked business with his thick-bellied friend. “Three hundred!” Bill Drown thrust an ink-bruised finger into the air. “Three hundred dollars a day, just waiting to get spooned up out of the ground!”

It was the first time John James saw gold in his father’s gaze. The man beside him showed it too, albeit a milder case. That was when his mother let go his heels and sat back against her own. “Thirty,” she said, her own eyes grey and clear. John James held the shape she’d made of him, sensing it was no time to move.

“What did you say?” His father’s voice was quiet.