Effigy (7 page)

When requesting a second pillow didn’t work, Dorrie lied, complaining of congestion, a need to prop herself up in bed.

“Is it any wonder?” Mother Hammer directed her reply to the far end of the table, as though she and her husband were dining alone. “Sleeping out there like a barn cat. She belongs indoors.”

Hammer looked up from his plate, folding a strip of roast into his mouth. His silence was impossible to gauge. While Dorrie had yet to see him openly take Mother Hammer’s side, he was not above deserting the poor soul who’d angered her.

He laid down his knife and fork. “Give her the pillow.”

“I have enough to manage without babying the likes of her.” Mother Hammer set her mouth, only to gasp when Hammer brought his fist down hard on the table. Dishes jumped. The first wife let the quiet billow and swell. Then punctured it. “As you wish.”

It was childish, Dorrie knew, all this fuss so she could provide a stuffed crow with a comfortable bed. It wouldn’t have been necessary if he could have perched on the crate beside her cot, standing guard the way he had on her bedside table back home. But Hammer had been perfectly clear on that point: every specimen on his ranch would be one that met its end by his hand. The collection they would build together would stand as a testament to his skill.

She hadn’t minded leaving behind the weasel, the yellow cat, the mice. Not even the bright jay, so difficult to skin over the head, or the sharp-shinned hawk she’d mounted on the wing. Cruikshank Crow, however, she couldn’t bear to part with. He was the first specimen she’d mounted, the only one she’d blessed with a name. She smuggled him along, swaddled in a petticoat at the bottom of her trunk.

Drawing the old crow out from beneath her bed, Dorrie lies back and stands him up on her chest. Black claws at her breastbone. His head sits slightly askew—an error she’d never make
today, but as luck would have it the effect is fitting. Cruikshank Crow is curious.

If anything about the black bird seems unnatural, it’s his gaze. It wasn’t Dorrie’s fault—Mr. Cruikshank had a great many supplies in his bulging leather case, but he’d run clean out of bird eyes. He fingered through those he did have—fish, dog and deer, all wrong in colour and nowhere near the right size—then sent Dorrie on a hunt, showing her how to measure likely prospects against her baby fingernail. A pair of pebbles were the best replacements she could find. Both were black with a slaty sheen, one round save for a tiny nick, the other slightly oblong, making Cruikshank Crow a bird forever on the verge of winking.

Dorrie could replace the pebbles—pry them loose from their sockets, chip out the hard putty and push in fresh, set in a shiny pair of number nine browns—but it’s an idea she’s never seriously considered. It would render the old bird more lifelike, more like all the rest. Something he is not.

Mr. Cruikshank came out of nowhere that day—or rather everywhere, the wide world beyond the farmyard she’d called home since she was seven years old. His long legs carried him down the Burrs’ dirt track, a fat carrying case hampering his stride. Mama took off her apron, told Dorrie to go into the kitchen and walked down to meet him at the gate.

Dorrie slid down in her chair when her mother led the stranger in through the kitchen door.

“Dorrie, this is Mr. Cruikshank. He’s come to speak to your father about some work. Sit down, Mr. Cruikshank.” Mama crossed to the cupboard and took down a glass.

“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Burr.”

Dorrie said nothing. She was thirteen years old but built like a riding quirt. His tone showed he’d taken her to be the age she looked.

The three of them sat in silence for a time, the visitor sipping the plum juice he’d been given, Mama seating herself before a pail of potatoes, turning one after another against her knife. The spotty ones she passed to Dorrie, who dug in her knifepoint to twist out bruises and sprouting eyes.

Mr. Cruikshank held his tongue until they’d peeled close to half the pail, then reached down to the case at his feet. “Do you mind, Mrs. Burr?”

Mama glanced up. “Go right ahead.”

A leather tongue held the two halves closed. When he thumbed its brassy hasp, the case sprang wide, a hairless creature that had been holding its breath. Reaching into the nearest half, he withdrew a glossy wooden box. Its dimensions were those of a modest jewellery case. Its contents proved infinitely more precious than any locket or brooch.

The bird would have fit snugly in the cup of her hand. It was neat-headed, chubby, perfectly preserved. Heavenly blue marked with a cirrus waft of white. Mama smiled. Dorrie felt herself stand and draw close to the stranger and his prize.

“Budgerigar,” he said softly.

“Budge-eri—”

“Or just plain budgie.”

“Budgie.” Her mind was racing. “How—”

He grinned, patting the open case at his feet. Dorrie knelt for a better look. Glint of bottles, gleam of blades. Mama set her potato aside and peered over the table’s edge. “Why, Mr. Cruikshank, what on earth?”

It turned out that what appeared to be magic was in fact the result of a series of physical acts. Once Dorrie had secured Mama’s permission, she led Mr. Cruikshank around back of the
barn, finding to her delight that the crow Papa had stoned that morning had yet to be carried off in the mouth of a fox. She stooped for it, and Mr. Cruikshank, comprehending, laughed.

“Very well. Have you a table where we can work?”

The butcher block in the shed would do nicely. He was a generous teacher, talking her through the process step by step, letting her learn with her hands. They began by loosening the wings.

“Bend them back until you feel the shoulders touch. Gently now, you don’t want to break any bones.”

She obeyed, easing the feathered limbs together across the crow’s back.

“You can mount a bird with broken wing bones, but it’s sloppy work. A professional takes every precaution to avoid mutilating his specimen. Remember that.”

The initial cut taught her much—how to slide the knife like a finger’s feeling tip, deep enough to sunder skin while leaving the flesh beneath it intact. Mr. Cruikshank kept up a steady stream of instructions, sprinkling handfuls of cornmeal over the crow’s body from time to time. “You can always clean the feathers later if you must, but it’s better not to spoil them in the first place.”

She smiled at the ease with which the skinny legs pushed up out of their skin. Mr. Cruikshank handed her the heavy scissors, and she snapped through each of them at the knee. After stripping the toothpick bones clean, she thrust them back inside their leathery socks.

Next he talked her thumb and forefinger down either side of the ribs until they met at the small of the back. “Sever the tail at its root. Use the scissors. Careful you don’t cut into the quills—your tail feathers will drop out if you do.”

The skin could be peeled back now. The crow became a raw hand emerging from a glossy glove, its skull the final joint of the
middle finger. Dorrie cut through both shoulders cleanly, releasing the black fans of the wings. Which left the delicate work of the head.

“Never pull,” her teacher said quietly. “Use your thumbnail. Push the skin gently from the bone.”

Dorrie felt her way. The folds that were tucked into the ear holes came out with a combination of prod and pluck. Mr. Cruikshank took over to work around the eyelids but allowed her the satisfaction of skinning down to the crow’s black bill. Stooping to his case, he retrieved a heavier knife, with which he sliced deftly through the back of the bared skull, separating it from neck and tongue. The body adhered nowhere now. The skull, like the wings and leg bones, would remain with the hollow skin. Mr. Cruikshank laid the stumpy torso aside.

Dorrie was surprised when he told her to guide the tip of the fine knife around the socket of an eye. Her hand shook a little, and she was grateful when, for the first time, he reached in over her shoulder to steady it with his own. Together they loosened the dark brown balls, scooping one, then the other, out whole.

“Never, ever burst an orb, Miss Burr. Treat your specimen with respect.”

After the eyes, there remained the small matter of the brain. Three secret, judicious cuts and out it came.

He taught her a great deal in those few short hours—how to poison skin and bones with a coat of creamy soap, rendering them resistant to both insects and rot. “Take extra care about the wing bones, Miss Burr.”

She learned how to ease the skull back inside the skin, to tease the face and head feathers flat with the tip of a pin. Mounting the black bird then became an exercise in restoration—all they had removed, they now constructed anew. A brain of wadded cotton,
a trunk of tow wound firmly with thread. Wires anchored in the new body gave shape to the neck, wings and legs. A fourth curved out beneath the tail, this last to be snipped off at its base in a week or so, once the skin had dried, allowing the tail feathers to set.

Threading a needle’s narrow eye, Mr. Cruikshank showed her where to sink the four small stitches that would hold the crow’s breast closed. When the last of these was tied, she bent its neck and limbs into a modest roosting pose.

“Be sure the flight feathers overlap one another cleanly.” He folded the wings, pinning each to the body at the wrist joint, then shoving a further two pins in either flank for support. Withdrawing a pair of pointed tweezers from his breast pocket, he handed them to her. “Neaten him up. Whatever state he dries in, that’s how he’ll remain.” She nodded and began picking over the crow, teasing every stray quill into place. Together they wound thread in complicated patterns about the pins that held the wings closed, further assurance against any hint of disarray.

It was then that he sent her to look for the eyes. She was only gone for a few minutes, but by the time she returned, both sockets were lined with moist putty, and Papa had come in from the fields. His moustaches were wet with labour, lank. He sucked at them, his eyes blazing. Mr. Cruikshank stepped away from her side to meet him.

Her memory of what followed is incomplete—she was so intent upon the crow, the final, unsupervised step of setting its ersatz gaze. Fragments of heated discussion filtered through.

“I don’t understand you, sir.”

“Don’t come the innocent with me. You Gentiles are forever sniffing around our women—”

The crow was black, yes, but not only. A shimmer of green about its shoulders, blue along its cawing throat.

“You think—my God, man, she’s a child!”

What more there was to it, Dorrie never knew. In truth, after doing the decent thing and naming the crow after him, she seldom spared her teacher a thought. His departure signified little, as he’d already set her on the path. Her mind was alight. So many creatures in the world, and all of them going to die.

Saddling Ink for the thirty-odd-mile ride to Salt Lake City, Erastus keeps his back to his first-born son. Can’t help hearing, though, the overeager rattle of him rigging up that blasted horse. Erastus bought the pretty, difficult gelding in a moment’s soft-headedness, made a first anniversary gift of it to Thankful. She kept the red sash he’d tied around its neck—turned it into a surprising set of drawers, in fact—but refused to go near the horse.

He never actually gave the palomino to Lal. Just left it festering in its stall, let it grow desperate for the field while the boy got up the guts to ask.

“Can I ride him?” Voice cracking over a few short words.

“Suit yourself.”

“Can I name him? I picked out a name.”

Erastus left this last unanswered. Days later, he heard the boy whispering his choice in the gelding’s ear.
Bull
. Not many could’ve gotten it that far wrong.

Erastus feels his upper lip contract. He plays with the notion of changing his mind.
I believe I’ll go on my own
, is all he’d offer, let Lal’s face fall as it may. And wouldn’t it be fine, riding out for
the city alone. Fine, yes. If only he could make out the terrain that lay more than a few yards beyond Ink’s nose.

He tried spectacles, some four or five years ago now. It was a bit of a trick getting his hands on a pair. The nearby town of Tooele was out of the question—a crack hunter could scarcely wander through the front door at Brother Rowberry’s and declare to all and sundry gathered there that he was getting on for blind. He knew of an apothecary’s in the city, though, tucked away down a side street, quiet in the late stretch of day. There were no other customers in the place, but he locked the door behind him all the same, dragging down the blind. The man behind the counter stood steady. There were reasons besides robbery why a man might visit an apothecary on the sly.

Erastus tried on pair after pair, drawing them from the straw nest of their crate, settling them straight-armed and precarious across the bridge of his nose. He couldn’t see far enough within the shop’s walls for a proper test, so he opened a gap at the blind and peered down the dusty lane.

One pair did it, a bit slithery around the edges but the centre crystal clear. He could think of nothing but dropping his first quarry—something tricky, an antelope maybe, or a bighorn. That and the look on the Tracker’s face when Erastus told him to hold his fire.