Effigy (19 page)

Eudora drops her fork. It glances off the verge of her plate, eliciting a hard click from Ursula’s tongue. The girl neither excuses herself nor looks up, only reaches out with that strawberry claw of hers, clutches the fork and resumes eating in her joyless way.

“It took a strong stomach, that work,” Erastus goes on. “Strong constitution, too. Those that could still walk had every plague and ague going. We lost more than one good man ourselves.” He shakes his head. “Their surviving stock looked like washboards on legs. We’d buy them at a low figure, keep the cream for breeding, fatten the rest and sell them on to the next sorry pack. That’s how I got started trading horseflesh. Folks want oxen and mules when they’re westering. A man settles, the first thing he buys is a good horse.”

“Scavenging.”

Ursula’s voice startles Erastus. He’s come close to forgetting
table and family, seeing instead the long track of riches for the taking, the haggard ranks of gold-hungry fools. He blinks, her features refusing to come clear.

“That’s the word for it,” she adds.

Half a dozen retorts spring to mind, but not one of them does justice to the internal yowling her words have evoked. This woman he’s scratched and scrambled for, her best milch cow descended from an emaciated black-and-white he led back to her from the littered trail.

The wife at his left hand speaks up. “I call it commerce. What do you think built this place?”

“Commerce.” Ursula turns the word over like a lozenge. “There’s a topic you’d know something about, Sister.”

Thankful sucks air. It’s Erastus’s turn to take her part.

“Sister Thankful knows a great deal about many topics, Mother.” He wipes the back of his hand over his moustaches, a habit he knows she abhors. “Topics a simple country woman might not understand.”

Thankful knows better than to laugh out loud, but her bright lips widen in the corner of his eye. Ursula sits erect, her indistinct face the colour of something boiled. It seems he can still call her blood up, after all. He clears his throat.

“The fact is, Brother Drown, my own mother, may she rest, was a good deal plainer than the lady you see pictured there.” The hired man has lowered his head as though praying. Erastus waits until he raises it before adding, “My daddy was uglier still.”

Tonight Ursula needn’t lay her ear to Thankful’s bedchamber door to witness the noisy goings-on within. All the same, she does.

It’s a variation on the usual theme—a good deal of tousling, then a sharp avian
screeee
, followed by a thud that becomes thudding, rhythmic and obscene. Hammer wheezing on the offbeat, “I’ve—huh—got—you—huh—huh—now.” Thankful replying with stuttered whistles, another long, strangled squawk.

Ursula’s heard enough. She doesn’t wait for Hammer to finish the job, knowing full well the string of curses he’ll emit, the last and foulest dwindling to a groan. She glides past Ruth’s door and carries on to her own.

Once inside, she crosses to her dressing table and sits, regarding herself in the mirror’s swimming dark. Hammer lets himself go shamefully with his third wife, though, to be fair, she’s the sort of woman to invite profanity. It was a different story the first and only time he lay with Sister Eudora in her bedchamber. Hammer was so quiet about his business that night, Ursula caught nothing but the final disembodied grunt. The girl’s silence lay thick, muffling the proceedings like a blanket of snow.

With Ruth, he whimpers and moans. The second wife answers as though she were a bolster repeatedly compressed, releasing a chain of soft, exhausted sighs.

In his first marriage bed, Hammer neither whimpered, nor grunted, nor swore. He whispered endearments. What was worse, upon reaching his end, he wept. Doubtless he told himself Ursula didn’t notice—it was never more than a tear or two—but she wasn’t the kind to let weakness go unremarked.

Her face in the looking glass is without feature. She doesn’t bother lighting a candle to let down her hair, instead plucking out pins and dragging her brushstrokes by feel. Next she must undress, another chore she’ll manage, perversely, in the dark. She won’t sleep, she knows it. Still, she’d be a fool not to lie down and try.

The Father has kept mainly to hard ground. He’s left a trail so staggered that the Tracker, tracing it about the darkened ranch yard, gets muddled time and again. Often he has only scent to go by, one promising waft among a thousand airy ribbons of not-wolf—hardly more telling than a single shapeless scuff. Still, he tracks. Catches a whiff and follows it to a well-formed print, the Father’s broad forepaw preserved in a patch of damp out back of the privy. After reading its direction, he grinds the print away with his boot heel.

Setting off in a line defined by the two middle claw marks, the Tracker moves into scrubby grass recently disturbed. The Father’s scent condenses into a discernible stream, flowing on to a spot beneath the back window of the child wife’s barn. There, in the spill of her night-burning lamp, faint but undeniable, a pair of more compact tracks mark the place where the Father rose up on his hind legs like a man. The Tracker fits his own two soles over the prints, obliterating them. Standing where the wolf lately stood, he peers through the warped and cloudy glass.

The child wife sits on her stool, hands still on the workbench before her, face hidden behind a fall of hair. When she fails to move for minutes on end, the Tracker shifts his gaze to the crowded western wall. The gleam of a black horn beckons. Viewed through the wavy pane by the lamp’s low flicker, the stuffed antelope behaves as stones do in the bed of a creek. It moves. The Tracker drops, twisting to flatten his back against the old barn’s wall.

There can be no forgetting the day he brought the pronghorn down. It was around this time last year. Hammer didn’t accompany him so much as dog his steps, and then only until the
grade steepened and he began to fall behind. After that it was just the two of them—the animal wounded in its haunch from the initial long shot, the only way the Tracker stood a chance of keeping up.

It felt all wrong. Though it wasn’t unheard of among the People for a lone hunter to stalk a single antelope, the Tracker had never done so, and neither had any of the men in his camp. As a rule, the spring-footed beasts were taken communally, with several years passing between culls. A pronghorn hunt required one who was gifted to call the animals down, keeping hold of them by their spirits until they could be killed. His father’s elder brother was such a man. He would haunt the verges of a herd for days on end, singing to the beasts by daylight, sleeping among them by dark. When the time was right, he would lead them to a brush corral. Once encircled, the pronghorns would run themselves ragged, then cede without struggle to a rain of clubs.

Despite its bleeding haunch, the antelope maintained a good lead. It gained an open cliff and, judging itself to be safe for the moment, paused to crane back and nuzzle its wound. So doing, it cut a sharp profile against the sky. The Tracker had a clear shot, but somehow failed to centre the heart. Knocked to the ground by the force of the ball, the pronghorn lay stunned a moment before rolling back up onto its hooves.

Again the Tracker gave chase. Following the weaving, blood-spattered trail, he jogged a memory loose. His father’s face, lost to him for years, hung before him, underlit by fire. The known mouth moving. One of the old, old tales.

A hunter, tracking his wounded quarry, entered the mouth of a cave. Soon enough, he found himself in the world below. Like the finest of underground streams, this world ran sweet and pure—a meadow green and waving, veined with water, rich with game.

While the story-hunter descended into that good valley, the Tracker climbed. Hammer must have been a good mile behind him by the time he ran the antelope to ground. When he stooped over the animal—collapsed and quivering on its side—he did so alone. Bright red bubbles whistled from the hole in its heaving chest. The sun was hot, the scene barren. He watched the antelope’s keen eye turn skyward, then turn to stone.

It’s not the first time a wolf has howled within earshot of the house. A body grows accustomed to such sounds, comes to appreciate them even, living on the frontier. It is, however, the first time a howl has yanked Erastus bolt upright out of a black ditch of sleep, palms wet, pulse thundering.

The wail is dying now, his waking mind gripping fast to its quavering tail. No braiding, declarative harmonies here. This wolf is alone—perhaps somewhere on the far pasture, paws planted in his best grazing grass.

In the silence that is the howl’s wide wake, Erastus wipes his palms on the quilt and wills his heart to slow. Each moonlit hand rests on a silky diamond. Finding his backbone too rigid to let him lie, he turns his pillow on end against the headboard and shuffles back on his buttocks to meet it. A burning under his ribs alerts him to the last breath he swallowed gone stale. Let it out. Drag in another. He looks for comfort to the face on the pillow beside him. Thankful is not a pretty sleeper. Her long nose whistles, the mouth beneath it a toothy gap. Erastus looks away.

Every inch of him is listening—the horned heel callus, the hairy belly, the clammy hands. Good sense to the contrary, he feels the whorled cups of his ears yearn forward, drawing taut the
thin skin at their backs. This despite knowing the wolf will leave the sky quiet for a time, open for reply.

A lone animal poses the greatest threat to a ranch. Bereft of a pack to hunt with, a rogue wolf will turn his bright eye to a man’s livestock. Being neither a sheep nor a cattle man, Erastus has less to fear than some. It takes a gang of them to bring down a healthy horse, especially one rich with mustang blood. Still, there are the milch cows and the chickens to be considered. There are the foals.

The cry will come again. Unless the creature has moved on—and he finds himself hoping fervently that it has—it will sound its existence, unreel its ringing question again. No sooner than a quarter of an hour. Perhaps as long as three-quarters. Erastus listens. Outside, the wolf listens back.

Standing with her arms folded across her chest, Dorrie moves her gaze over the dimly lit collection. Three tiers up, the lantern-eyed lynx sits tonguing its paw—a pose that came to her the moment the Tracker rolled its snow-caked form onto her workbench. And there, the blacktails stand precisely as she imagined them upon her first glimpse of antlers protruding from a distant flank—buck and doe like a pair of hands sheltering their dappled fawns. Even the flying squirrels suggested their own scene as Hammer drew them from his bag. The female landing, clinging to her branch, her mate behind her, open wide in flight. It was the same with the birds. The turkey vulture insisted on being strung from the rafters in a tilting, soaring V. The mergansers chose to demonstrate phases of takeoff, the lead duck climbing, two followers still skating, flapping hard. It was simple—Dorrie saw the scene and made it. Until now.