Effigy (36 page)

He steadies himself by plucking up one of her worms.

Ruth touches them all the time—he’s watched her bestow light, loving strokes, occasionally taking one of them up into her palm—but never like this. Never, as Lal now finds himself doing, pinching one of them hard about its middle and watching it writhe.

The worm is the colour of flesh no longer living, the colour a finger might turn if he were to separate it from the quick force of a hand. He fights the urge to sniff it, see if it smells secretly of decay.

“Lal!” Ruth’s voice is one he’s never heard, panicky, high. “LAL!”

He blinks. “What?”

“You’re killing it!” Her hands close around his bent arm, tugging at his biceps. A sensation he must prolong.

“No, I’m not.” He resists her just enough.

“It’s suffocating!” she cries, yanking now. “They breathe through their sides!”

“Oh.” Lal knows he should set her precious worm down gently, contritely, but he doesn’t want to. Her grip on his arm is beginning to pain him. She’s staring as though he’s some kind of demon, and maybe, just maybe, he is.

He flicks the thing like the burnt stub of a smoke. It lands amid its siblings with a nasty bounce. Ruth lets go. The look on her face is bad enough, but it’s about to get worse. It seems he’s upset more than just the one silkworm. He has, in fact, managed to terrorize them all.

One by one, and then tray by tray, the worms contract, drawing into themselves as though injured, swelling their ugly heads. Lal could show them what injured looks like. In his mind’s eye he’s all boots and knuckles, laying waste.

“Get out.” Another voice he’s never heard, this one terribly cold. He shifts on his feet, his mouth working a mute apology.

“Get out, Lal. Now.”

After the passing of his woman and child, the Tracker left his camp on the Santa Clara River and travelled north. It was as good a direction as any, being the one he faced when he turned his back on the pyre that had been his home.

It seemed every Indian camp he skirted was dying, the People sick or starving, two men to every woman, scarcely a child or an elder to be seen. Many had given up on the land and moved to form shabby gatherings at the verges of Mormonee towns.

Each white settlement or solitary farm sat on country denuded by stock. Foreign cheatgrass and toadflax drove thick fingers into the surrounding grasslands, extending the damage done by the great herds. Flocks of flint-voiced English starlings darkened the sky. Here and there the mottled flash of a hunting house cat, the grey squirt of a Norway rat.

The Tracker passed scene after scene, watching, walking. There was a lightness to this new life—hunting when there was
game to be had, now and then stacking crates for a soft-hearted shopkeeper or clearing brush on an expanding farm. He was careful to eat and sleep alone. For company he took to paging through the picture book every night, entwining the journey it recounted with his own.

He thought of settling. From time to time he would come upon some isolated spot that offered water, shelter and sign of game, and he would set to work gathering brush and cutting poles. It didn’t matter how well he structured the hut; once complete, it would seem deserted—even when he crawled inside. Especially then. A day, or three, or five later, he would abandon it to follow the northward pull.

By the time he’d moved through Pahvant territory into lands inhabited by the Gosiute, he had lost both spring and summer to his wandering. He had no shelter, no cache, not so much as a single rabbit-skin blanket to lay down between his body and the slow, sleeping death that comes of cold. He could have joined a camp—in times of scarcity a good hunter would not be turned away. It was his best chance for survival, and yet, when he happened upon a large gathering, he held himself apart.

The Gosiute had come together just as his own people did, to harvest piñon along a series of slopes that had yet to yield to the axes of the Mormonee. And like his own people did on such occasions, they were dancing, arms linked in a great rotating wheel.

The Tracker took cover in the buggy scrub at the clearing’s southern verge. The song was one he didn’t know, the tongue several waves stranger than that which he’d overheard among the Pahvant. Still, he strained his ears, told himself he understood.

With a shift of the circle, a young woman’s profile came into view. The Tracker felt his heart contract. It wasn’t a case of resemblance—nothing so forgivable as that—but of beauty, pure
and keen. Gazing at that face, turned full on to him now, the Tracker felt desire flare in his hollow insides.

She came to him for the first time then, his whirlwind wife, cool and drilling in the runnel of his spine. He knew her instantly, and the knowing nearly choked him with grief. Whether it was jealousy or something finer that had summoned her, the Tracker couldn’t know. Sorrow, perhaps, or rage at having been forgotten, even for a moment, when she was barely six moons gone. He reached behind him with both hands to comfort her. Felt a shock like mountain runoff and then she was gone.

Gone also was the dancer’s face when he opened his eyes, the circle having taken another turn. He set off before the fine features could come around again.

Some time after the whirlwind wife had made herself known to him—long enough that the nights had grown so cold as to remind him of her touch—the Tracker was making his way through a stand of young poplars when a sound brought him to stillness. The blowing of a recently tethered horse. He caught sight of it through the bony trees, a beast taller and blacker than any he had seen. It scented him and swung its great anvil of a head his way.

He gave it a wide berth, taking the gentle slope to the river’s edge. There, above the water’s low talk, he heard the horse’s other half—a loaded tread, the rustle and crack of a white man on the hunt. Upstream a little way, in the shallows off the far bank, a blacktail stag had heard it too. It lifted its wet muzzle, lengthening up through its white throat and switching ears, out through its antlers’ branched extremes. Every one of its fibres alight. An animal making ready to die.

The Tracker took a soundless step. Two, three more and he caught sight of the white man—a sun-riven profile beneath a hat’s
broad rim, eye squinting hard in its web of creases, sighting along a rifle’s gleam.

There is no explaining to himself or any other what the Tracker did next. At that distance there was no way for him to know how skewed the hunter’s aim was, how far the ball would go wide. Still, he slipped his rifle from his shoulder, aimed and loosed the ball, echoing the white man’s wasted shot. The buck seemed to leap a little, then toppled to colour the river with its blood.

The white man’s face buckled in an expression of disbelieving joy, then sagged as he took in the meaning of the doubled report. He looked about him slowly, as though he feared the second, unseen hunter now held human quarry in his sights. The Tracker had no earthly reason to approach with his gun slung over his shoulder and both hands where the hunter could see them. And yet he did.

Later, when the two of them sat facing one another across a dying fire—each with blood under his nails and a portion of the buck’s haunch in his belly—the white man looked down at his breastbone and spoke. “It’s my eyes. Been going this past couple of years. I used to be able to hit anything, you name it, a sparrow on the wing.”

The Tracker understood enough. He held his tongue until the white man looked up. Then, laying a hand to his heart, he surprised himself again. “Tracker,” he said.

“Is that so.” The face buckled once more, this time with the force of a smile.

Hammer won’t wake. Even if he did, Thankful would simply tell him she’s making rosewater. Men know nothing of a woman’s
toilet. And anyway, he’s well and truly gone, drumming the mattress with both heels, in the grip of his night’s first dream.

She turns on her chair to face the mirror, the vanity’s crowded top. A forest of tiny bottles and pots. Near the back, a fat pewter cup holds brushes—some fluffy, dusted with powder, others pointed as a mouse’s tail. She closes her fist around the entire bundle, lifts and sets them aside. Taking up her nail scissors, she works the tip of the bottom blade into the seam of a plump sachet.

A moth, meaty and dull, collides with her lamp’s chimney yet again.

Having cut through several stitches, she folds the pink satin back and upends the sachet over the heavy cup, working contents from casing. Once the cup’s bottom is covered, she bends to take up her bed bottle from the floor.

Mother Hammer deigned to take notice of her tonight, pausing in her miserly larder count to find fault. “A bed bottle in May? Have you no blood in your veins?”

Thankful cradled the earthenware bottle to her breast. “Best ask Mr. Hammer.” Such a treat to see those blue eyes twitch.

The cork gives her a little trouble, but comes loose with a low pop in the end. She tilts bottle to cup and smiles in the resulting scented steam. The moth, getting wind, moves off.

While her infusion steeps, Thankful takes up needle and thread and sews the sachet closed. A little limp, but it’ll do. Next time she’ll have to pick out the entire seam and turn it down. Such a clever trick. Not Thankful’s invention, but she feels a surge of sly pride all the same.

Charlotte de Courcey was a woman of experience. Little wonder she handled knowing roles like Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth with such sensuous ease. Thankful kept her ears wide open when
the house lead was dispensing advice.
House of Anjou. Tell them Miss de Courcey sent you
.

It was months before Thankful worked up sufficient courage to turn down the lane that would take her there. She was greeted, halted in fact, at the door, but Charlotte’s name worked as promised, its syllables the teeth of a key. The shop was more than a marvel—it was an education. Notwithstanding her experience in the theatre, she’d had little idea of the costumes women might assume.

She would come to know the apothecary aspect of Anjou’s perhaps a year later, the first time she felt the need. They were terribly helpful, terribly discreet. Her final visit to the little shop fell on the morning of the day she was to leave Chicago at Hammer’s side. Monsieur Anjou himself came up with the solution.
It is usual for a lady to receive parcels from the city, is it not?
He made up a dozen sachets to get Thankful started, and he hasn’t failed her since.

The first sip carries an initial hint of rose—like apple, if there existed a variety that was all scent and no flesh. The second taste is keener, its small-leafed source the business of the brew. Mint but wilder, reduced to a woody bite. Lowering the cup to draw breath, Thankful steels herself against the coming nauseous swell. A shred of petal clings wetly to her lip. The moth keeps its distance, thudding up the wall.

BENDY AND PHILOMENA
were together fifteen times. He kept count. Once for every year he’d been alive.

The first time he was helpless. He’d been privy to enough hard talk to know he’d be allowed—expected, even—to suckle. Also that a triangular pelt would mark the spot. Not much use with a girl whose every mound and crevice presented fur. Philomena took over, parting the hair that hid her nipples, guiding him with a palm at the back of his skull. She found his britches buttons with ease. Released and maneuvered him in all that dark.

Fifteen times. Not every night. The cageboy always drank, but not always enough to put out the light in his head. More than once Bendy turned down the cage corridor with a spring in his step only to come upon Stanley dull-eyed and staggering.

Once, on a night livid with moonlight, he was partway along the corridor before he spotted the cageboy down the far end. Stanley’s back was turned. He was sitting cross-legged in the muck outside the stable door, rocking side to side as though nursing something in his lap. After a time he curved down over whatever it was and began a concentrated struggle. Bendy stood watching, unsure. Should he back out the way he came? Or say
something—
Evening, Stanley?
Or creep up and peek over the cageboy’s shoulder, see what poor creature he’d gotten hold of, and whether or not it still stood a chance.