Effigy (13 page)

His mother rocked a little on her knees. “Thirty dollars a day. That’s what you said this morning. That’s what you told me you heard.”

The look Bill Drown gave his wife remains hard and true in Bendy’s mind, the shaft around which the memory spins. Still the golden gleam, but beneath it a fathomless, fish-eyed stare. Chances are his mother realized then and there what she’d married. She may even have seen the future open out before them like a roiling sea, herself and her precious boy bobbing, hitched by their necks to a rowboat with broken oars.

In truth they bid farewell to New Orleans from the hold of a cotton boat, Bill Drown having filched a mound of coin from the
warehouse’s inner office and dispensed the first part of it crossing palms—beginning with a longshoreman’s, rope-burnt to a glassy pink, and ending with the cotton boat’s second-in-command. The boatswain’s palm bore a scar in the shape of a crucifix, the ruched inversion of a deliberate gouge. Whether he’d done it for simple adornment or as a kind of devil’s bane, it was clear the fool had gone too far. He’d cut clean through the tendon near the crux. His middle finger curled useless and grey.

These and countless other images the boy inherited from his father. Always the darkest of details, related most often in the dark—John James under a scrap of sacking on a rooming-house floor, or rolled up against the damp inner slant of a tent when they hadn’t the price of a bunk.
Night stories
. At times they were part of a call-and-answer ritual involving the disembodied voices of other prone men. Mouth after mouth opening to gild the grim present—stories of strikes up this river or that stream, so-and-so sinking every last penny into pick and shaft, going down broke but coming up glittery with the real stuff, not a word of a lie, covered head to toe with the dust.

Now and then Bill Drown uttered one of the tales John James stayed awake for, a snatch of what lay behind them, the life that came before. In this way he learned the rough plot of his past, a short, jagged line along which he arranged the few scenes he could recall.

The three of them had ridden high on the cotton bales, the dark of the hold alive with fibres, ghostly wisps that clogged his nose and caused it to leak blood. They put in on the eastern flank of Panama’s narrow waist. Chagres, a port hotter and more sulphurous than New Orleans, or, as John James was still foolish enough then to think of it as,
home
. They journeyed by canoe as far as the Chagres River would take them, then onward
by mule. The isthmus, a thin, serpentine twist on the map, became five days’ journey through a stinging, biting fog. His mother began to lag.

She batted John James away from her while she still could, but on the night before they were to reach the Pacific coast she no longer possessed the strength. He clung to her despite her whispered, delirious warnings, felt her twist and sizzle, then slide away into a calm blue cold. Meanwhile, Bill Drown cultivated a western campfire squat with several other San Francisco hopefuls, not one of them fool enough to bring a woman and child in tow. He kept his distance until the first disturbing cries of a tropical dawn, then kicked a sullen path across the camp to find his wife dead and staring, wrapped in her wide-eyed son.

Bill Drown said nothing at the graveside, leaving the stunted prayer to one of two young brothers with whom he’d shared the previous night’s fire. They’d refused to move on with the rest, staying to help dig a hasty grave.
Lord bless this woman and keep her always for one of your own. Ashes to ashes. Amen
. The three men shovelled hard and fast, wedge after wedge of pungent, sticky earth.

“Make haste, boys,” Bill Drown wheezed, “the
California’s
on her way. Keep back, John. You’ll take a shovel to the face.” Just like that, he cut his son’s rightful name in half.

John James sat pressed up against his mother’s straw suitcase in the heaving cart the last leg of the way. They heard the mayhem first. Then, from half a mile distant, they caught sight of the roaring throng.
Forty-niners
. There were hundreds of them, a vast herd bristling with gun barrels and blades. Steaming towards them, the high black hull of the
California
. Virgin vessel on a historic trip, she was the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s shining
pride, bound to commence service between the Isthmus and Oregon, with a stop at San Francisco along the way. Having set off from New York harbour in early October, she’d successfully navigated the clawed toe of Cape Horn and come steadily up the Pacific side of things—only to put in at Panama and be mobbed.

Bill Drown tore their luggage from the cart and broke into a run. John James struggled after him, the straw suitcase snagging in the mud. He began to cry, eyes only—he needed all his breath to try to keep up. At the verge of the crowd his father whirled, pounded back and snatched the soiled case. As John James stared, he popped the hasp, dumping its contents on the trampled ground.

Her good black silk. The grey-blue gingham, plain but not when she wore it, not with those eyes. It was the sister to the dress she’d died in, cut from the same thin cloth. Her under-things, yellowed despite effort. Her shoes gone lumpy with wear.

“Get in,” said his father.

The suitcase gaped. It was perhaps two-thirds as long as the steamer trunk and not nearly so deep, but John James could feel where he would fold, see precisely the angles it would take. Just as he could see his father would wait only a few seconds more.

His fingers were the last part of him in, withdrawn moments before the lid came slicing down. On their way, they raked the loose mound of his mother’s things, the index hooking a handkerchief by its lacework corner and dragging it along.

Perhaps half the crowd managed to crush aboard, a human storm more forceful than any gale. John James witnessed the boarding through the suitcase’s weave—men’s trouser legs a frantic darkness, here and there an impression of coloured light. In the thundering rush up the gangplank, he felt certain his father would have second thoughts. A suitcase was an easy thing to discard.
Let it drop over the guard rope, sink and settle to the ocean’s floor.

John James kept mum for an age in the woven case, Bill Drown finally remembering to free him hours after they were under way. The
California
, California bound—a voyage pared down to departure and arrival by his childhood mind. They slipped through the Golden Gate on a radiant day in February ’49. Arriving as they did in the company of the mail, they were heralded like a cargo of kings. Ships at anchor showed bunting. The bay was an oscillating table, festive with floating cakes.

A thunderous volley of welcome caused John James to cower at his father’s knee, convinced the ship was being fired on. The guns raised a shout from the men at work on the yards, a rolling cheer that spread ear to mouth through those gathered along the surrounding hills.

On board the dark steamship, John James felt the press of bodies tense and sway, and heard the mass of mouths—his father’s among them—belt out a cheer of their own. He was attempting to worm a pathway up along his father’s hard, sour-smelling thigh when Bill Drown reached down and grabbed him beneath the arms. Dragged up painfully through the crush, he screwed his eyes shut, felt himself hoisted aloft and swung. Then felt the shaft of his father’s neck between his legs. Instinctively, he looped his bare feet back under Bill Drown’s armpits, twisting and locking them in place.

It was the right idea. They were only one row of bodies back from the rail, and Bill Drown needed both hands free to wave like mad. John James opened his eyes on a forest of thrashing arms. Many flew standards—undershirts, rags, whatever came to hand. His father’s whipped by brighter than most. John James had rolled
his mother’s handkerchief up tight in his trouser pocket, but Bill Drown must have plucked it out while he slept. To look at or to hold. More likely to swaddle a finger with and clean out his nose.

Now he was ripping it back and forth through the air. John James made a grab for it too late. His father relaxed his long fingers, let it catch on a gust and fly.

DORRIE DREAMS:

The human nest is emptying. From my post atop the wagon’s back I watch the adult females and their walking young advance in loose formation, following the wagons that carried their injured and their little ones away. The dog man’s pack has grown, forty or so males having trotted from the northern draw. Like a stand of sucker saplings, they form a line across the land. Each holds a long gun across his chest. Each lowers his eyes as the females and their charges pass.

The dark mother moves at the flock’s leading edge, eyes fixed on the wagon that swallowed her child. For all their wide-ribbed sway, the mule-drawn loads are gaining ground. There is little the dark mother can do. Even if she were capable of breaking into a run, she would butt up against the pack member that leads their group.

Below, the last of the nesting males leave the circled wagons behind. They snake through the grass in a column, following their females at a distance, moving north. At the tail end, a male on horseback herds them on. Flanking them on the east, the line of
pack members falls in step. I drop from my station, climb twenty, forty wingfuls, let go in a jagged glide.

I sweep along the doubled line, winging on to where the females and young advance in a shifting pool. The wagons follow their mules over a rise. They’re still visible to me, but lost to those below. I hear their disappearance in the dark mother’s inhalation, sharp with fear. Tied to the undulating earth, there is much she cannot see.

Such as this.

The hollow I fly over is choked with scrub, bristling with hidden life—human males, both Originals and Pales dressed to resemble them, smelling of horsetails and grease. The true Originals hold still, making their brown bodies so many slender, harmless trees.

Sensing an end, I’m tempted to set down on one of the scrappy oaks and count the ragged females as they pass, beak nodding over every bare or bonneted head. But the bird brain jumps to the dark mother’s young, so I tilt and pump hard to where the shambling wagons roll on.

Having overshot the lead wagon’s mules, I bank to meet a wave of change. Back along the trail where the males walk two by two, the mounted pack member has broken ranks. His horse skittish beneath him, he lets a shot ring out, followed by four human barks.

The far meadow explodes in rolls of thunder, the doubled male column sliced down its length, the western half falling before the glinting guns of those who met and matched them on the field. In the same instant the Originals, true and false, burst from the scrub. They too show metal, some lifting guns, others unsheathing knives like long, single claws. They fall upon the females and their young, meeting the shrieks of their prey with blood-thinning cries of their own. I climb and witness all.

At the head of things, the dog man and the two wagon riders buzz around the second wagon’s tongue. With a heave and a squeal, they lead it off to one side of the track. I can hear its cargo—an infirm adult female and three bloodied males—calling out from inside. Then more flash and thunder and they are quiet, their bodies dragged from the wagon and dumped.

From the lead wagon no such silence. The sky shudders with sound—the frightened wails of the young left unattended inside rising to meet the howls of those being cut down back along the trail. Curiosity should send me wheeling that way, not to mention the scent of fresh blood, so thick it can almost be seen. Instead, I pace the air, awaiting I know not what.

Until it comes. Just as the second wagon gave up its dead, the first gives up one of its living. A small body, blurring white and black. Compact, quivering, it slips over the wagon’s tongue, dropping to land in a crouch. It scuttles hard, turns serpent when it makes the grass. At the scrub line it disappears, but not before I’ve gotten a good look. There’s no mistaking it. She was the last one in. The only one to make it out.

DORRIE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD
the first time the Burrs took her to town. Cedar City. She knew she was meant to be delighted, and so she made sure to keep her trembling hands hidden, twisting them beneath her shawl. She rode sandwiched between them on the front seat—Papa’s jouncing hip bone, Mama’s giving haunch. When the track hit a flat stretch, Papa let her take the reins. Or not let, exactly. She had no real interest in assuming control.

He’d shown a fine mood all morning, harnessing the horse early, then coming to stand at the bedchamber door and watch Mama brush and brush Dorrie’s black tumble of curls. “Leave it loose,” he said when Mama began dividing the dark mass into braidable hanks.

Mama turned on her chair. “She’ll get terribly tangled.”

At that he delved into his trouser pocket, withdrawing a length of silk ribbon, the purest white. He tossed it onto the bed.

“Oh, Lyman.” Mama reached for it, smiling. “Look, Dorrie, see what Papa’s bought you.”

Dorrie stepped out from beneath the shadow of the stilled brush and stroked a finger down the ribbon’s length.

The ride made Mama happier still. She crowed to see healthy
colour in her daughter’s cheeks, and indeed Dorrie could feel it there, soft and spreading, nothing like a fever’s immovable daubs. Papa turned his head their way. He looked Dorrie up and down, his moustaches dragging up at their ends. How could she tell them the idea of a street bustling with strangers horrified her? Or that sitting up high on the buckboard—even in the midst of an unpeopled meadow bisected by a narrow track—made her feel like a lump of living bait?

As they neared the ragged Indian village at the edge of town, Papa drew up to let a wagonload of young Saints pass them going the other way. He lifted his hat with one hand, the other flat and insistent at Dorrie’s spine. “Sit up straight, girl. Who’s gonna see you slumped down there like a sack of corn?”

After he’d helped his wife and daughter down in front of the dry goods store, Papa slapped the reins along the paint’s sway-back and drove on. Inside, Dorrie clung to Mama’s skirts like a much younger child, dropping shallow curtsies whenever someone stared long enough to elicit an introduction. “My late sister’s child, Eudora.” Then, “Eudora, this is Brother Oates.” Or, “Dorrie, meet Sister Creel.”