Effigy (24 page)
“Fond of horses, are you?”
“Fond?” John James echoed.
The man lifted two fingers, signalling to one of the stable hands to hold his side ajar. “Best come inside and find out.”
It was the beginning of a softer time. Robert Wicklow kept John James clothed and fed, and allowed him to bed down in one of the narrow back stalls. Clean straw, three walls, a door with an audible latch. John James wriggled himself a nest and slept more soundly than he had in memory. In exchange, he cleaned and cared for the stalls, then the equipment, and finally the animals themselves. It turned out he was indeed fond of horses, profoundly so. Mules too, though the feeling was blunter—strength and iron will paling in comparison with grace.
Wicklow worked him hard, but also took care to teach him a thing or two. Pressed side-on to the gunmetal flank of a mare, the stable owner ran both hands down her shank, several loving passes before he stooped to lift her foot. “Give her leg a little rub, get her used to the idea.” He began carefully to pick out the hoof. “They fear terribly for their feet.”
John James learned horses the same way he learned their tack—piece by piece. He’d been at the stables for nearly four months before the boss allowed him to saddle up and mount. Even then he scarcely got hold of the reins before Wicklow barked at him to get down.
“Clean your tack.”
John James opened his mouth to protest—what was there to
clean? he hadn’t even made it to the stable door—but clamped it shut when he saw the look on Wicklow’s face.
Wicklow stood over him while he shined the bit. The moment he set it aside, the bald head tipped into his line of vision and a hand came forward to pluck it up.
“Open your mouth.”
John James felt the knot of his innards drop. He’d come to expect kindness from this man—the terse, distant variety, but kindness all the same. Sucker, he thought dully. Then closed his eyes and parted his lips.
Wicklow didn’t bother to fit him with the crownpiece. He let the bridle dangle loose, easing the bit between John James’s teeth, holding it in place with a light, even pressure on the reins. It was a jointed snaffle, designed to subdue a rising tongue while dragging icily at the corners of the lips. Wicklow held steady a moment, then gave the right rein the mildest of tugs. John James felt the bit’s message all down his right side. He braced himself for what was undoubtedly to come; Bill Drown tended to start off with an open hand, building his way up to boots.
Wicklow let go the reins. John James felt the weight of them, slack against his jaw. He stood perfectly still until Wicklow took him by the shoulder and turned him round, holding his hand up like a dish beneath the boy’s chin. John James tilted his head downward, let the bit roll. His boss caught and held it in his open palm.
“It’s for talking. For telling them what you want them to do.”
John James nodded.
“And you were yelling at that old boy, weren’t you. Fair screaming in his ear.”
To his shame, John James felt his eyes—dry in the face of hunger, of beatings, of impenetrable dark—fill instantly with tears.
A drop escaped the left one’s duct before he could blink it back. Wicklow had the decency to let go of his shoulder and look away.
Even after he’d proven himself competent in the saddle, John James rarely got the chance to break a trot—never mind feel the creature beneath him run. Once when he delivered a draft horse to one of the milk ranches beyond Leavenworth Street, once when he walked the toll road out past the Mission to the Pioneer Racetrack and rode back on a pregnant mare. These were exceptions. He counted himself lucky if an errand gave him cause to breach the business district, let alone the city’s ragged verge.
Wicklow took a similarly careful approach to acquainting him with the written word, beginning with
A
and inching forward from there. “Maybe one day you can help me in the office,” he murmured through his beard when, after several botched attempts, his pupil spelled
Wicklow
across a clean white page. John James felt a sudden internal swelling. For a moment he didn’t dare breathe, in case whatever it was might burst.
He felt it again the day Wicklow took it upon himself to keep Bill Drown at bay. The one and only time John James’s father set foot in the stables, he was fresh from the Monte table, where he’d heard over a particularly sour hand that his son had taken a job and, with it, a home. He’d been gone six months, breaking his back at a hydraulic operation in the foothills of the Sierras for precious little payout, only to return and find himself forsaken. When he shoved his way in past one of the other stable hands, John James was five stalls back along the western wall, saddling a placid mare. At the first familiar bellow, he dropped into a squat.
“John!” Bill Drown shouted, the truncated name more chilling than any threat. John James’s train of thought gave way to the dull
surge of his pulse. He scuttled, reached for the stirrups and swung, clinging to the underbelly of the mare.
“JOHN DROWN!”
The horse held steady. He pressed his cheek flat to her chest, listening to her heart thud while Bill Drown howled for him, lurching from stall to stall. More than one animal reared, a colt of no mean value bruising a foreleg, coming close to splintering bone. Wicklow led the pack that came hammering—men and boys armed with rifles, shovels, whips. John James let go and fell into the straw. Rolling up onto all fours, he pressed his eye to a knothole and watched his father run.
From then on, Bill Drown sent word for his son to meet him at his latest hotel or rooming house, or at the foot of Long Wharf, or at the barber’s, where John James would like as not find his father lolling in a big brass tub. If Bill Drown’s luck was running clean, they might meet up at Noble’s Coffee Saloon, where he’d stand his son a boiled egg or a hot roll, maybe even a black chaser of tea—paid for with a pinch of yellow grit.
John James didn’t always answer his father’s call. Early on, the pull was still strong in him, but by the time he’d been at the stables for a year, it had died down to a tug he could choose to ignore. He had responsibilities. He couldn’t go running off just because some bastard he used to know was tearing another strip through town.
John James was a young man of thirteen years when, once again, the docks of Yerba Buena Cove boiled with fevered men. Some were green, but most came bowed under the miner’s packs they’d been shouldering for years. Picks and shovels, dented pans. A scant decade and California was played out. British Columbia beckoned. Ho for the Fraser River, the promise of virgin streams.
Already five foot eight, John James was growing so the pains in his legs woke him nightly. He stood like a beacon atop a creosote barrel at the crowd’s edge, looking down over the swell of hats. One caught his eye, familiar in its battered slant.
“Father!” he heard himself shout.
Dropping down from the barrel, he slid backwards through the story of his life. By the time his boots met plank, he was a little boy, blind with panic and tears, stumbling after one among hundreds, only to be folded into a mother-scented suitcase and swung violently aboard.
“Father!” It came out in a wail this time, and a host of hairy faces turned his way. All but one. Bill Drown kept his eyes forward, trained on the gangplank, a bottleneck clogged with men.
Father
. John James almost bellowed it a third time, but as he drew the necessary breath, he drew with it a gutful of truth. It was the wrong word. Bill Drown would never turn at the sound of it. He hadn’t answered to it for years.
Weeks later, John James was leading a pack mule loaded with farrier’s nails back to the stables when a display in a shopfront window brought him up short. He’d seen human bones before—a fingertip, even a skull—but never the whole story at once. The skeleton stood with arms akimbo, legs ever so slightly bowed. A hand-lettered sign leant against its bony toes:
A Returned Frazer River Miner
. John James felt the mule’s hot breath on his neck. He knew then and there.
A year would pass before he heard anything definite. When word did come, it spilled from the lips of a green-eyed miner old before his years. John James braced himself the moment he saw the stranger come limping. Laid down the harness he was mending and turned to take the brunt of it face on.
“You Bill Drown’s boy?”
He nodded dumbly.
“Your father’s dead.” Then, in the worn-away lilt of his mother country, “I’m sorry for your troubles.”
He was halfway to the door, rendered buglike by the stable’s cavernous insides, before John James managed a word. “How?”
The miner spun slowly, a move oddly graceful in the midst of his halting gait. “Shovel to the back of the head. Undermined his neighbour’s claim.”
Again the waltzing turn, the hobbled stride. John James closed his eyes. When he looked out again from the dark of his own making, the miner had gone. He let out his breath. All of it. Even the bit he normally kept by.
May 19th, 1867
Dear Daughter
How to begin a letter when the last one ended upon such a note. At the beginning surely but which one? My own was unremarkable. I was one of eight children born to the good soil of an Ohio farm. Mr. Burr’s was much the same only the soil and everything else was several grades poorer. What did I see in him? Everything he no longer is. Also I was the plainest of five sisters including poor dead Eudora. Chances were good I would be the one left to tend my parents in their dotage and though I served them to the best of my ability the truth is I bore my father little love. My mother for all she tried might as well have been his dog. You know the rest. Marriage followed by conversion followed by more persecution and toil and abandoned crops and forsaken homes than any life ought to hold.
And all of it nothing to the fact that I had no child.
Dorrie from the time I could walk I was stealing kittens from their mothers and feeding them with a finger dipped in milk.
All those years I imagined myself to be the barren one but look at him now. Nearly three years with his sturdy young thing and not so much as a false start to show. I tell myself I might not have minded if our marriage had been the sort to fill a woman up. It was not Dorrie. Not by half.
The beginning that matters came when you did my girl. Ten years ago now. I was forty years of age. I had given up hope.
You were sick when you arrived. You know this well enough. You have been told a hundred times but I wonder do you remember how you pitched like a mad thing in the bed? For more than a fortnight I dribbled water and weak broth between your lips. Anything more than a few spoonfuls and you would bring it back up. You went from ice to coals soaking the sheets and soiling them. I never slept so little in all my days. I was never more awake.
It was during those weeks that I began to tell you stories and one in particular. After many letters of entreaty from myself my sister had finally seen fit to join God’s people in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Widowed young she brought with her her only child a girl seven years of age. This same child was delivered unto Mr. Burr and myself by the captain of the handcart train my sister had joined. It was he who told us she had given up her spirit unto God. A sad tale. I told it every time I washed you or fed you or freshened the cloth on your brow. More than once I came within a hair’s breadth of believing it myself. Fatigue I suppose. That and the wish that this and not the other might be true.
You came out of it in the end. Shaky and pale but you came. Is it any wonder you were a quiet child? There is silence my girl and there is silence. Yours was visible. You will think me fanciful but I swear at times the air about you took on a bluish cast. How it wrung my heart. How I worked to draw forth if not joy then at
least a hint of interest in the world around you. Help Mama make a pie Dorrie. Here you pop the pits from the cherries. Why don’t we go for a ride my girl just you and Mama. You obeyed but you never really took part. Not until he came. Dorrie you will know of whom I speak. Surely you must have felt the change his presence worked on you.
Coming from England Mr. Cruikshank might have been hoping for a cup of tea or perhaps even a glass of beer. Or he might have been in the Territory long enough to know he would receive no such refreshment in a Saint’s home. In either case he accepted the glass of plum juice I offered him with thanks. He was looking for work though what labour those stems of arms were suited to I could scarce imagine. So soft spoken for a young man. Well born I thought from his way of talking but down at the heel. I knew Mr. Burr would have no work for a Gentile but decided to let him rest a little and wait. A decision lightly taken and largely felt.
Dorrie you came to life the moment you laid eyes upon that sky blue bird. It was clear to Mr. Cruikshank and even to my own unschooled eye that you possessed a gift. He took me aside when I carried a plate of corn bread out to where you were working in the shed. Mrs. Burr he said to me you must encourage her. She must have instruction. The look on my face brought him down a notch. At the very least she must have tools and a book or two. At that he drew pencil and paper from his waistcoat pocket and wrote in the neatest man’s hand I had ever seen
Collection and Preservation a Taxidermist’s Guide
by Major Thomas Greene.
I wonder Dorrie did you even notice how I ran after Mr. Cruikshank when your Mr. Burr so unkindly sent him away? This was not as I later told my husband to apologize for his
rudeness but instead to beg a favour. I pressed the scrap of paper back into that young man’s hand and with it all the money I had put by in the kitchen crock. I wouldn’t have the first idea I told him. Won’t you help me? No letter. Just have it sent to the post office in Cedar City. He said nothing only nodded. How he pitied us. I could see it in his eyes.
Mr. Burr was to know the depth of my feeling. Can you really think he wished her harm? I cried. He was teaching her Lyman. She’s thirteen years of age.
Marrying age. He wouldn’t look at me when he said it but he said it all the same. And worse. Brother Sykes has a wife of fourteen. Brother Turner took his youngest when she was twelve.
It shocked me Dorrie. It stunned me dumb but it should not have. I see now how he always had one eye on the day when he would marry you off to advantage. How he crowed over your milky skin and so-black hair when you were small. How he complained as you grew out of your childish good looks. I hope the truth of this does not pain you my girl. I have never known a woman who benefitted of thinking herself a beauty when she was not.
As you know the book arrived the following spring. It came direct from Greengage and Smythe Book Merchants of San Francisco along with a note from Mr. Greengage himself beginning Dear Mrs. Burr as per your inquiry. Mr. Burr handed the parcel to me already opened though the direction bore my name alone. I knew only joy that he would allow you to keep it at all.
The way you looked at me when I gave you that book. The way you pored over its pages your fingers trembling. I had not known a body’s love could double in an instant. Would I have taken my gift back if I knew then how the secrets between its covers would draw Mr. Hammer’s eye?
Dorrie why did you offer no protest? I know you are a dutiful girl but not one word? You left me to fight for you alone. I could hardly argue forever when you yourself had already agreed.
But I torture myself. I torture us both. As fate would have it a man of wealth and influence set his sights on you. A man who could see to it that despite Mr. Burr’s low standing he should receive permission to take a second wife. But the truth is Mr. Burr would have seen you off sooner or later. He had another reason to wish himself rid of you. And of me. I will explain myself Dorrie I swear it. But for now I must rest.
All a mother’s love
Helen Burr
