Effigy (30 page)

It’s the dead of night when he decides to take matters into his own hands. The paint puts her faith in him. She allows him to bend and lift her bad leg, even tolerates his probing fingers, flinching only when he hits the sweet spot and the pain is too pointed to bear. It hurts him to betray her, to produce the freshly whetted hoof knife from where he’s kept it hidden in his belt and make the scraping, plunging cut. He feels her cry all through him, but takes comfort in the yellow spurt, the gust of septic air.

Straightening, he tells himself she understands—the release of pressure a lesson in itself, a wordless treatise on the necessity of purging poisons, airing wounds. And indeed, she does seem to forgive him, holding fairly still while he pares away enough of a hole to be certain the abscess can drain. His hands careful, he ties on a poultice to encourage the ooze.

Stepping outside to clear his sinuses of the lingering stench, he spots the square of yellow light in the wall that faces him across the wide yard. He’s noticed it burning before. It would seem the youngest wife secretes herself in the old adobe barn at night, as well as during the day.

What she does with her time, he’s hard put to imagine. From what he can see, Mother Hammer and her appropriated flock do
the lion’s share of the work in both house and yard. The third wife keeps herself to herself—he has yet to catch sight of her out of doors. He’s seen the second wife pitch in when pressed, but more often than not she spends her days in and around the little log house that seems to be all her own.

For the most part, Bendy finds he’s already accepted these and other small mysteries about the place—what does Lal do with himself all day? where does Hammer go?—but there’s something about this particular discovery that awakens his curiosity. It would be simple enough to see for himself what the fourth wife’s up to. He could skirt the yard, sidle up to the bleary window and sneak a look.

The moment he thinks it, he puts the thought from his mind. If he goes over there—and he will, he realizes, soon—he’ll go directly. Walk up plain as anything and knock on her weathered door.

In the clearing outside his hut, the Tracker stands naked before a smouldering fire. Some time ago—one hour, perhaps two—he awoke to find his waistcoat and trousers binding him close. He tore free of them in a dreamy panic, crawled gasping into the night.

The fire is low. He feeds it—a tangle of scrub that flares quickly—and, in the uprush of light, frees the picture book from his leg. Crouching, he flattens it on the ground before him, open to the second-to-last page.

Yauguts stares up at him. The Crying Man. His Mormonee name was John D. Lee, his title, Indian Farmer—as though the People were a crop to be tended and eventually cut down. In the portrait he is smiling, or near enough. Pinching his thin lips
into a bow, softening those pale, pale eyes. No tears there—not now—but the corners slant down as though fashioned for the purpose, the blinding water to be whisked from his vision quickly, leaving it cold and clear. Not a cruel face exactly. Some might even find it fatherly—and hadn’t the People turned to children in his shadow? Coming to him with their palms outstretched in hunger. Doing his bidding. Trusting his word.

Yauguts gathered a great many to the long valley that day, summoning them with promises of cattle and clothing, pots and guns. Cedar City men under Big Bill and Moquetas. Chief Ammon’s Piedes from the country around Beaver. A goodly number from as far off as the Muddy and Virgin rivers. The Tracker, Younger Brother and many more from camps along the Santa Clara’s banks.

They came expecting a raid, the killing swift and simple, the bounty great. They found instead a siege. It was clear from that first dawn attack gone wrong. As they retreated, some fell softly, swallowed by the grass, while others hit hard, bucked and wheeled in the spill of their own blood. Younger Brother one of these.

The Tracker felt his brother’s absence growing keener as he ran, each threshing stride the tautening of a lifelong cord. He had yet to reach cover when it snapped him round.

He found Younger Brother without looking. Those long brown legs. As far back as the Tracker’s memory stretched, he had envied those two fine limbs. The gift of grace they bestowed upon their owner, the way they lifted Younger Brother’s head above a crowd. And now the right one was a ruin. The Tracker shouldered him and pounded for the hills.

The pair of them lay low behind a boulder, Younger Brother clawing at him, whimpering. A better man would have finished him off. Knelt to cut the straining neck, or at least stood back
and fired. A better man would have had the clear conscience, the clean intent to help his brother die.

The Tracker should close the book. Instead, he turns the page.

One grief supplants another, the second finer, both delicate and deep. The final portrait, while impressive, was clearly drawn in haste. To achieve a likeness so true, the maker must have needed help, one of those fragile plates the whites call a looking glass—good for looking one way only, back at oneself. The Tracker imagines it tilted just so, held up by a pair of small, dusty hands.

It’s a striking face. Thinner than that of the daughter laid down some pages before, it shows the same pinched evidence of thirst. The eyes betray suffering and more—the adult curse of foreknowledge. The hand that captured these features had done justice to the Crying Man’s too.

The Tracker is suddenly cold, the whirlwind wife touching down for the briefest of instants, looking over his shoulder into the dead woman’s eyes.

He cannot know for certain if the knife was his. He did slit throats—they all did, true Indians and painted Mormonee alike. Leapt from the thin cover and cut the women and walking children down, just as Yauguts and the other captains had planned. He recalls only skirts against his bare ankles, hair in his fist—one head dark like hers, another dead-grass pale, yet another red and glaring in his eyes.

Blood ran hot in those abandoned moments, washing over his hands, surging through him in hateful, joyful waves. The veins danced in his skin, full to bursting with his own red share and that of Younger Brother too—Small Sister a third pulsing presence, wherever her body might be.

It was only afterwards, when all but the very young of the Mericat camp lay quiet, that the Tracker felt his blood begin to
cool. He moved among the bodies in the company of both Indian and Mormonee. Stripping the dead made sense—their belongings were nothing to them now.

White women’s clothing was a puzzle to the fingers, so many layers in that heat. It took him an age to work the dark-haired woman free of her blood-wet dress. Further fumbling loosed her undergarments, revealing pasty, smeared breasts, nipples that had known a child. The patch of hair, so black against the fish-belly sheen of her thighs, seemed an opening, a triangular gateway to the night. Another darkness lay a hand’s breadth further down—a book like a brown fungus, fixed to the top of her leg.

Yauguts had driven out of sight with the children, but the other white captains had been perfectly clear—any writing, any book or paper, was to be delivered up to one of them the moment it was found. The Tracker glanced about him. More than one Mormonee crouched close at hand, but each was blind to him, engrossed in his grisly work.

The thrice-looped knot held tight. He worried at it for several breaths, then slipped his knife from its sheath and made short work of the job. He held the book close, opening it in the shadow of his own chest. To his surprise—his delight, sharp and strange though it seemed in that desolate scene—he found not the baffling insect tracks of the white man’s words, but a horizon of woolly humps and gleaming horns.

A second sweep about him revealed not a single gaze trained his way. Sucking in his belly, he opened a gap down the front of his trousers and slipped his find away.

Returning home from the blood-soaked valley that day, the Tracker knew Younger Brother’s woman would take him in. It was possible she would have accepted him while her husband still
lived. Younger Brother would have agreed—it was in his nature to share—but a portion of her would have been worse than no part at all.

Now it was the Tracker’s duty to become her husband. His duty, his guilty reward. His heart leapt when she looked up at him from the weaving in her lap. He took a step closer, the picture book pinching where he’d tied it. Still she didn’t rise. And when she lowered her head again, he saw there would be no need to speak the news aloud.

His eyes, greedy even in that moment, sought her lovely hands, motionless now, fingers frozen against the warp. Only then did he take in the shape of her design.
Cradle
. His joy was so terrible it threatened to separate his soles from the earth. The child would be Younger Brother’s issue, but it would be down to her new husband to stoke the coals of her hotbed as she lay recovering from her labours. It would be the Tracker who would watch over her—not from afar this time, but lying beside her, joining her in the forsaking of salt, cold water, meat.

Looking through her fingers to the cross-hatching of willow below, the Tracker flashed on a story of himself. He saw a proud father walking with the stump of the baby’s cord curled in his hand, carrying it high into the hills. Stooping down, he placed the precious object not on the track of a mountain sheep but in the hole of a pocket gopher. Despite himself, despite the heavy news he had come bearing, the Tracker smiled. The child would be a girl. Not a return of Younger Brother to haunt him, but an echo of the woman they loved.

GILLESPIE’S WASN’T
the sort of hotel to send word up to a guest’s room. The desk clerk told John James the number and let him wander the dank halls. Three raps and a man’s voice bid him enter.

The yellow top hat sat at a forward tilt, obscuring the ringmaster’s gaze. His legs were golden stems outstretched. “Dan Pitch.” He didn’t rise, didn’t even extend his hand. Nothing of the barker’s singsong now.

John James flicked a glance about the room, scanning for bottles—whiskey-large or laudanum-small. He found none. Melancholy then, or plain fatigue. He stepped into the cramped room, drawing the door closed behind him.

“What is it you seek?”

John James would soon grow used to the ringmaster’s peculiar mode of speech, but that first night it put a chill through him. At a loss for words, he turned side-on and widened his stance. Snaking his hands back between his legs, he followed their lead until his head, shoulders and a good part of his rib cage were through, armpits hooked at the backs of his knees. Craning his neck, he peered up under the yellow hat rim into the ringmaster’s eyes.

“Well, well.” Pitch sat forward, his face suddenly plain. He was all wax and hollows, an unlit taper of a man. “What shall we christen you? Rubber Boy? Rope Man? The Human Knot?”

John James released himself, swinging up tall. As the blood rushed from his skull, a face rose up to fill the void. Red Meg was pure memory now. Like so many of the city’s females, she’d lost her looks, then her mind and finally her life to the plague of her trade. He’d caught sight of her from time to time over the past few years. Like standing vigil while a champion swimmer drowned.

“Bendy,” he said, turning to face his new boss.

Dan Pitch nodded. “Bendy it is.”

The tent was daunting, a giant bone-white molar set up two short blocks from the hotel among the ashy ruins of a warehouse fire. It sat back from the street, a long flap quivering in place of a door. Bendy called hello. Nothing. He felt foolish, entertained a moment’s fantasy of retreat. Then took a breath, caught hold of the flap and gained the tent’s white world.

Light like a thin cloud cover, trembling, diffuse. In the far corner, one of the wheeled cages stood alone, draped in plum-coloured cloth. Beside it, a minor mountain of straw bales. No sign of the ringmaster, but the clown stood dead centre in the ring. His back was turned, his arms outspread, heavy with birds. His head wagged slowly, side to side. He was chattering to them, a soothing cipher of whistles and words.

“Pardon me.” Bendy felt the words sucked out of him, drawn upward into the hum.

The clown turned to reveal a row of faces—the fulcrum human, avian along either wing. Cleared of paint now, his features bore some resemblance to the ringmaster’s. Slacker, though, underscored by a pouch of jowls.

“Show opens tomorrow night,” he said, keeping his voice even, his flock calm.

“Oh, no. I’m J—I’m Bendy. Bendy Drown. Mr. Pitch hired me last night.”

“Not this Mr. Pitch.”

Bendy shifted on his feet. A long moment passed before the clown let him off the hook.

“You’ll mean Dan.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m the brother. Camden.” Again no hand came forward in greeting, though, to be fair, he hadn’t a hand free. “He hasn’t shown himself yet. Likely won’t for a time yet.” His gaze flipped inward then, as though in answer to a striking thought. He inclined his head toward the bird on his left shoulder, a lizard-footed brute with a flexing yellow crown. Letting a burbled whistle escape his teeth, the clown murmured, “Yes, Cocky. That so?”