She withdraws her hand, as though she’s afraid the deer might nip. Stands still a moment, then lowers her lamp and turns.
Tracing the Father’s faint course through the mulberry trees, the Tracker can no longer deny the nearness of dawn. Soon the big house will spring to life, spilling smoke from its chimney, grim children from its door. He daren’t risk being spotted skulking
around the yard. No choice, then, but to abandon the wolf’s trail and double back.
Only now, cutting at an oblique across the Father’s loose, deliberate circle, comes a second, even fresher set of tracks. Soles long and broad, stride eager—the trail of an overgrown boy. Four trees on, the Tracker catches sight of the son, his head silver in the before-light, flashing between trunks. Beyond, the little log house, black save for a window’s glow.
Selecting a tree behind which to hide, the Tracker stills himself against its bark before looking out. The son stoops, then drops to all fours and crawls for the rutted wall. He lays his cheek to it for a long moment before tucking his boots beneath him and beginning to rise. Lamplight turns the top of his head gold.
The Tracker understands. The broad-hipped, quiet wife is the only one of Hammer’s women he can imagine wanting, the sight of her having stirred him distantly once or twice. The son’s regard, however, is anything but distant—his neck a rigid column, his head cocked in a hungry stare. The Tracker shuts his eyes. Sees blackness and, in its far corner, the swish of an ancient tail.
Wolf’s younger brother was never one to respect taboo. Coyote wanted the woman he couldn’t have—some say daughter, sister, mother-in-law, some say all three. In every version, he comes to them in disguise. Once bedded, the women discover the trick. In their shame, they flee to the heavens, hardening their ruined bodies to become stars.
The Tracker cracks his eyelids on the first threat of light. Still he doesn’t move. The scene at the lone window prevents him.
Slowly, almost delicately, the son unfurls the fist at his left side. Raising it up, he brings his thumb to his mouth. The Tracker can hear nothing, but it’s clear the son is speaking—his lips churning with a pained and private voice.
A shiver runs through the Tracker, scalp to sole. Taking a step back, he feels the tree’s impression come with him, written on his cheek and chest. The little forest presents many paths. He chooses one and makes his way down its length, resisting the urge to run.
Dawn is breaking. Bendy left hours ago, yet Dorrie can still feel the effect of his unblinking eyes—a raw smarting wherever his gaze came to rest. She presses the tip of her middle finger to the corner of her lip.
It’s very fine
.
He was referring to the buck’s mouth, of course, not hers. Still, the memory causes her to cross to the washstand in search of an object she hasn’t handled in years. The hand mirror, like the hairbrush it lies beneath, is silver, degraded to iridescent black. What would Mama say if she could see her parting gift now, lying beside a yellowed basin and a battered tin jug?
Mama’s hundred strokes. Dorrie never once brushed her own hair before coming to the Hammer ranch. Left to her own devices, she manages only the minimum required to keep matted clumps at bay, loosing and reforming her braid perhaps once a week. At least she still uses the brush; the mirror has lain untouched since the morning she removed her few belongings from the ranch house and took up permanent residence in the old barn. She’s come to think of its oval face as a holder of sorts, a saucer to the cup of the brush. Stooping over it now, she peers into its gloomy return.
Very fine
.
She shifts her gaze from one sore spot to the next, finding nothing but plain. Worse than plain. Strange.
It wasn’t until she crested her first decade that things began to go wrong with Dorrie’s looks. Her dark, deep-set eyes receded, moving from fetching to frightening—a pair of tracks sunk deep in snow. Her mouth, once pleasingly full, began to seem swollen, compressed between lengthening nose and chin. Only one feature held true. As long as Mama was around to look after it, Dorrie’s black hair shone. But hair alone does not a beauty make. Papa was right, though surely he never meant for Dorrie to hear.
He and Mama must have thought she was still out in the shed, hard at work on the yellow barn cat, her most ambitious project to date. She was just slipping off her boots, about to pad through to the parlour in search of a spool of thread, when she heard raised voices from down the hall.
“It was a hell of a risk, but I took it. You think I’d have kept her if I’d known she’d turn out looking like that?”
“You
kept her? If it were down to you—”
“All right, all right.”
“Lyman, she’s our child.”
“That’s as may be, but she won’t be a child for long.”
“She’s thirteen!”
“And the way things are looking, we’ll still be saddled with her when she’s thirty.”
There may have been more, but by then Dorrie was retreating, clutching her boots to her chest, easing the back door closed.
She stares into the dark puddle of the glass. So what if she isn’t much to look at? If her three sister-wives are anything to go by, beauty is no bar to misery. At least Hammer is content not to touch her—save once, but she won’t think on that now. Being plain and strange spares her the burden of his desire. But even as the notion soothes her, its shadow stretches long.
And every other man’s too
.
GREEN VALLEY ROAD
led to White Rock Road—pretty names, but Bendy never forgot he was passing through the land gold built. As he rode into Placerville, he couldn’t help recalling its original name of Hangtown—a legacy of violence still palpable along the muddy streets. He kept his eyes to himself, asked directions of a plump washerwoman and pushed on through.
Mounting into the western summits of the Sierras, he encountered the first flaw in his plan. Though he’d only ever seen snow from a distance, he’d heard plenty of miner’s tales—none of which had done it justice. He was surrounded by great shivering crests of the stuff, blinding mounds. The drifts were head deep in places, seemingly bottomless in the gullies and draws. Stand was undaunted, but she was only one horse. If it hadn’t been for the trains of pack mules keeping the road open, they never would’ve made it through.
Buckland’s Station in the Territory of Nevada presented the second flaw—talk of hostile Indians in the country ahead. Who knew how many of them watched Bendy undetected. The only braves he actually crossed paths with were too taken up with driving a herd of ponies to afford him a second glance.
At Carson Sink he came upon a team of station builders—several men axing and dragging willows for a corduroy road while others stamped barefoot in a bath of adobe mud. He asked the way forward, nothing more.
After surmounting the brutal Sierras, Stand proved herself more than equal to a series of desert ranges, as well as to the thirst and drilling winds of the barren tracts between. It seemed no privation was too great for her, and so long as she kept her footing, Bendy swore he would keep his seat.
He was in Utah Territory before he encountered a second station-building team. Leaning back in his saddle, he wound down a steep grade above half a dozen men who were piling up a lonesome dwelling out of stone. Again he asked only for directions. When the inevitable
where-you-headed
arose, he offered the lone syllable,
East
.
Meanwhile, despite what he told himself about the green and peopled stretches at the limit of the route, Bendy was falling victim to the desert’s pull. And push. While drawing him through its vastness, it drove that same space inside. He carried its lovely, wrung-out weightlessness with him into the treed country around Utah Lake, up through the humming towns to the city that was the Territory’s beating heart.
Salt Lake City wasn’t exactly East, but neither was it the West he’d come to know. Yards were tended, porches neat. Fences stood whitewashed, upright. There were children everywhere, faces scrubbed, hands full of feed buckets, laundry baskets, books. Women—all women, it seemed—wore dark, high-necked dresses, unassuming prints. They kept their hair neat and plain, a knife’s-edge centre part, two halves smoothed down from the temples, over the ears and back. Men called one another
Brother
—Bendy overheard them—hail after neighbourly hail.
He drew up outside the post office and let Stand take her time at the public trough, watching the human whirl out the edges of his eyes. He’d heard a thing or two about Mormons. He would learn soon enough not to use the word. Here in their own Territory, these people referred to themselves as Saints.
“Pardon me,” he said, choosing one of them at random, “is there a Pony Express station hereabouts?” He’d asked the question many times along the route, but this time it felt different, vaguely electric on his lips.
The man turned and pointed to a grand verandah-fronted building across the street. Its swinging signboard read
Salt Lake House
. “Brother Egan—” He paused, looking Bendy up and down. “—Howard Egan’s the man you want to see.”
“Oh, no, I—”
“You won’t find him in there, though.” He arced an index finger westward. “They’re out building stations in the desert.”
Bendy nodded. He tipped his hat as the Saint moved on, then mounted up slowly, his mind a whirring expanse. What he did next confused him, confused Stand too. For the first time ever she resisted him, pulling against the reins for a moment, certain he’d made a mistake. After so many days spent moving toward sun-up, it made no sense to turn her white face back the way they came.
May 25th, 1867
Dear Daughter
Yes in spite of everything I carry on addressing you so.
How could I do it? I know a thousand questions must crowd in upon you now but surely this will be chief among them. How could I comfort my husband knowing what he had done? How could I assure him he was innocent in the eyes of the Lord when I knew in my heart I spoke a blasphemy? Because I was his wife? Yes but the truth must be whole or it is worthless. Dorrie I could do it because the Lord had seen fit to give me you. You must remember. Some part of you must. You were old enough when it happened six or seven years of age at most.
With all the weeping and carry-on it took Mr. Burr an hour or more to choke out the entire tale. Like the fool he is he left the heart of the matter till last mumbling it into my lap in the smallest hours.
I think maybe one of them scampered off he said.
Until then I had been listening through a kind of veil. It fell away at those words. I bucked his head up off my legs. What? I cried. What did you say? His eyes were popping. I was undoing what little calm I had wrought in him but I didn’t care. Tell me I cried. He could scarcely speak. A dress he said I saw a little white dress. In among the bushes up on the hill. But I might have mistook myself. It was night. Show me I said. I didn’t have to tell him twice.
It was a dark ride of two hours or more and the night was chill yet I was insensible of any hardship. Dorrie I believe I became inhuman for a time that night. So pointed was my purpose that I felt little revulsion and even less pity when we finally came upon the scene. The wolves had begun their work. Every grave was undone. The ground was littered with corpses and not one of them whole. Mr. Burr slumped in his saddle gibbering. By then he had given up begging me to turn back.
You will think me hard my girl but I had eyes for the living alone. More than eyes. Dorrie I could feel you. I could not think how a small child could escape so many men to survive uncared for in the wild yet in my bones I knew you were still alive. And so I called you. Over and over I voiced the plea I had borne in my heart for so long. Child child child. I would have called until the voice withered in my throat but Providence did not try me so. You answered and were found.
Dorrie I have never clasped another so tightly in all my life. I had to remind myself time and again not to squeeze the life out of you. You fit perfectly between my body and the saddle horn. The smell of everything you had lived through rose from you like smoke. Blood and filth and fear. And sage. My eyes burned with it over the miles.
You were so ill during those first few weeks. There were times when your pulse thinned to a thread yet I never once feared I would lose you. You had been given to me. You were mine and I would do anything to keep you. I would blaspheme. I would lie. Even to you my daughter. Most especially to you.
I will bundle this letter up with the others now as I am quite sure I shan’t live to dip my pen again. My heart wallows Dorrie. It is well and truly mired. You may wonder at these words that are so much darker than any I have written in months gone by. I feel as though I have been sending you packets of pressed flowers only to surprise you with a parcel of some wild animal’s flesh. I console myself with the notion that you of all people will understand both to be the stuff of life.
See how a plain-spoken woman might wax poetical in her dying hours. Dorrie those flower letters passed always through my husband’s hands on their way to the post office in Cedar. I cannot say if he read them but I know a guilty man imagines every shared word to be a word against him. These last I will make certain he does not see. He is gone to town. He will return with some ribbon for Kitty and nothing at all for me. But I will not begrudge her. Did I ever truly? I knew from the start the thing was none of her doing. What is more their sealing was not the true betrayal. That came before she ever set foot in this house when he traded my only child away.
Besides now she is become my accomplice. I could not hope to wield the knife with such close and careful force. It seems she is capable of neat work when it is truly required. She manages a few pages at a time working where I can see her with the Doctrine and Covenants laid out upon the bedside table. Watching her I grow quiet as though I were observing
the digging of a grave. She leaves the white margins just as I have asked and in time she has crafted me a clean and secret hole. She folds the book’s insides into her apron pocket. As agreed she will set fire to them shortly in the stove. It is a sin to burn Scripture I know but we are both of us willing enough.
I trust her to do me this and one other final service. You will see she gets it? I ask her again. Along with the news? Beside her my hand is a bloated thing. She covers it with her own. I will Mother Burr she whispers. I do not bother to correct her. Thank you Kitty. I smile and watch her silly eyes fill with tears.
She has left me alone now to fumble at finishing the job. I can see my letters will fill the carved space nicely. Now at last you may hold the truth in your hand. Goodbye my daughter.
All a mother’s love
Helen Burr