Effigy (18 page)

Hammer drove the buggy long and hard, his black mare scarcely blowing. Squinting down the long track before them, he
talked of life on the Hammer ranch—the best grass, best horseflesh for miles around, the three wives who got there before her, the small herd of children who all appeared to be saddled with the same name. Dorrie said little, but pricked up her ears when he spoke of the game he’d bagged in recent years.

She’d travelled the same road only a year before, Papa driving her all the way to Salt Lake City, seat of the Lion of the Lord. They’d rolled right past the impressive edifice of the Beehive House, home of President Young and his host of busy wives. The Endowment House was a plainer affair, two storeys of adobe with a four-windowed front—three staring, one blinkered, obtuse. She entered alone, Papa pulling away smartly, off about his errands without a backward glance. In one hand she bore the ceremonial robes Mama had sewn for her, parcelled in brown paper and tied with curling twine. In the other, a bottle of oil.

Once inside, she removed her shoes, then whispered her name, date of birth and several other particulars the clerk desired to know. Before long, a white-haired woman with the split lip of a hare came to escort her within. Together they entered a vast, steamy room cut down the centre by a curtain hanging limp on its rod. Like all young Saints, she was to be cleansed of the blood of this generation.

The surface aroma of the place was fresh, strong soap and a bundle of herbs. Beneath it, like a layer of good air in a room full of smoke, ran a current of more personal smells, the boldest of which—a metallic tang reminiscent of the barn at calving—set Dorrie’s skin crawling.

In moments she found herself surrounded by female elders, women Mama’s age and older, whose practised hands made short work of removing her clothes and half carrying her to the waiting tub. They left no part of her untouched, scrubbing as vigorously
between her legs as they did between her toes. She was a raw thing by the time they towelled her down.

Next came the heavy yellow oil. Crown of the head, eyes and ears, mouth and feet made unctuous. Her breasts and loins greased so that she might bring forth a numerous race. Her arm anointed so that it might be strong in the defence of Zion and in avenging the Prophet’s blood.

By the time they began to dress her, Dorrie had gone numb. The muslin shift fell about her like an exhalation, warm and stale. Then the undergarment every Saint wears as a guard against disease and violent death. A long skirt over that, and finally Mama’s linen robe. On her head a square of muslin, pinched at one corner to form a veiled cap.

She can never quite recall the sacred name bestowed on her that day—familiar Old Testament syllables that ran through her like a tablespoon of fat. Other details elude her as well. She knows she sat witness to a play, a stilted enactment of Creation, the Fall, the final restorative Glory of Man. For this portion of the proceedings there were other initiates present, young men and women in similar garb to her own. Also present—can this be true?—was President Young himself, goat-eyed, bearded, built like the carpenter he used to be. Can she be remembering things correctly? Is it possible Brother Brigham himself acted the lead, pacing and thundering before her, clumsy in his depiction of God?

After the play came signs and passwords, arcane grips. In the end she knelt exhausted with the others in a ring. Right hand raised, she moved her lips in a series of oaths. She would avenge the death of the Prophet upon the Gentiles who murdered him and would teach the children of the Church in this wise. She would obey without question any command of the priesthood.
She would consider all that transpired within those walls to be a secret inviolable unto the grave.

And now she was to enter the Endowment House again, this time as a bride. First, though, there remained a distance of some two hundred and fifty miles to be travelled, including a detour to the ranch, to collect Hammer’s first wife. Mama had told her what to expect during the ceremony—the first wife positioning herself between Dorrie and Hammer, taking hold of Dorrie’s hand and placing it in the hand of the husband they would share.

The miles rinsed through her. They reached the town of Beaver that first evening and stayed with a family Hammer knew, Dorrie bunking in with a pair of plump daughters while her husband-to-be stayed up talking with the man of the house. They would make stopovers at the towns of Fillmore, Nephi and Lehi before they reached the ranch, and each night Hammer would see to it that she slept with other women or alone. He had yet to trouble Dorrie with so much as a brush of his lips against her cheek. She began to imagine herself becoming a daughter of sorts to him, a wife in name alone.

They drew up to the Hammer ranch in the waning of a warm, dry day. A pair of orchards flanked the track. To the left, strict aisles of peaches fanned like an apron from the hips of the main house. To the right, lines of unfamiliar black trunks ran at doglegs. Barely visible in their midst stood a log house large enough for one.

The yard opened out before them, Hammer reining in the black mare before a scene of some industry. A boy of perhaps six years of age sat in the crook of a limb, handing peaches to a smaller brother and sister below. Such care, such competence for children so young. In a nearby swath of sun, a girl who looked to be the eldest stood partway up a ladder, laying halved fruits on a scaffold to dry.
Only the youngest in evidence—a moon-faced little boy—sat idle in the grass. Every one of the children had skin the colour of butter and hair that looked polished, like expensive wood.

In the shade of the long verandah two women sat on rail-backed chairs, bowls in their laps and bushel baskets at their feet. Both were running knives down leaky fruits, separating flesh from stone. The younger of the two—butter-skinned, wooden-haired—worked slowly, taking pains. Her companion’s blade darted and flashed. She sat erect under a mound of white-blonde hair.

The woman Dorrie took to be the first wife waited until the buggy had come to a full stop before she looked up from the work in her lap. Even at a distance, Dorrie felt the measuring instrument of her gaze.

Hammer swung down from the buggy, sniffing the air. “Peach-cutting,” he said, presumably addressing Dorrie, though he didn’t look her way. Then, in a sudden bellow, “Lal!”

Down the far end of an orchard corridor, a young man dropped from a tree. Here too the bloodlines lay plain. Advancing with a jerk, he stumbled against a near-full basket, causing several tender fruits to leap its woven lip and roll. He froze for a long moment, then came at the buggy in a dead run.

“Haul that trunk in when you’re done,” Hammer shot back over his shoulder, already striding toward the pair of women—the younger rising now, smoothing her skirts.

It was then that Dorrie realized no one meant to hand her down. The son, having snatched up the reins, stood watching her, saying nothing. Mama’s training told her to ignore his rudeness and extend her hand, but she couldn’t help feeling it might come back damaged, like a finger pushed through the wire of a cage.

She chose to back down on her own, the buggy jolting into motion before she could get both feet beneath her. Righting herself,
she stared after Lal. Even his back was sullen. She had a nasty thought: come tomorrow, she would be his stepmother. Notwithstanding the fact that he was clearly her elder by at least two years, if all the other wives somehow dissolved, she would have to learn to call him son.

Still the first wife had not risen. Taking small steps toward the foot of the verandah stairs, Dorrie lowered her head. The air was honeyed, pitted with small cyclones of flies. She didn’t look up until she had to.

The younger wife, still standing, offered an unfocused smile. Hammer had taken her chair and was sliding a peach-half into his mouth, the flesh red and riven where it had clung to the pit. Dorrie dropped a shallow curtsy. The first wife looked her up and down. She laid her paring knife across her apron, entwined her sticky, discoloured fingers and made a steeple of her sizable thumbs.

Stew. It’s all the woman ever makes. You’d think there was never a decent cut of meat on hand the way she boils every chunk to mush and strings. A man likes to sit down to a recognizable portion of flank or loin at his own table from time to time. Something he can get his knife into.

Erastus looks down the long table, this small distance enough now to make him unsure whether his first wife’s eyes are meeting his. He glares dully in the event that they are.

“Pardon me, Brother Hammer.”

Erastus shifts his gaze to the hired man. A face long and wanting, too knowing for its twenty-odd years. Bendy. Fairly named from what Erastus has seen, his frame more rope than bone.

“Brother Drown?”

“Well, sir, I was just wondering, that picture, there.”

Erastus draws his lips back in a smile. Knowing he won’t see true—a furry frame around grey-green darkness, moth-white daubs of collar and cuffs, yellow smudges of face—he does what’s expected and angles his gaze alongside Drown’s. “A pretty piece of work, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir. Those people, are they your kin?”

Erastus clenches the smile in place. He hasn’t long to wait. The sound his first wife lets out is somewhere between a cough and a goose’s honk.

“You’d need a sight coarser paint to do justice to his people.”

“And you’d know, would you?” Erastus hears the strangled tone and smoothes it out. “You who never laid eyes on a single one.”

“I know the country, all right,” Ursula spits. “I know the stock.”

The old weapons are the keenest. He’s a Missourian born and bred, the cruellest persecutors of God’s people thus far. Never mind how he hated that river-soaked swatch of land. Not the river itself, though, the silty Grand muscling its way through his childhood, calling out to him from its catfishy snags. He only rarely penetrated its depths. He was too busy coughing up yellow batter in the Hammer Gristmill, or getting bitten raw by mosquitoes when he was lucky enough to work outside. Even his father’s bloodhounds had time to nose through the grass or lie panting in the shade. When Erastus wasn’t hard at it, he was crumpled in bottomless sleep.

Salvation came in the guise of a straggling crowd. He stood at his father’s side that bitter morning. Lalovee Hammer and a handful of others gripped their guns for the look of it, but knew better than to fire on such a numerous host. They kept their violence verbal, punctuated by the occasional high-lobbed stone. Erastus had heard plenty of talk about Mormons—a plague of
souls more trouble than Indians and slaves combined—but the day they came filing down the track that bordered his father’s land, their heads bowed against a hail of insults, he felt his heart twitch with pity. It was January, a cutting wind off the river, squalls of snow. Some dragged alongside wagons or stock, but many came with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, a bundle in their arms. More than one came on feet that were bare and blue.

The moment he spotted her, his heart left off twitching and began to burn. His vision was still perfect then—he took in every inch of Ursula Wright as she passed. Beneath her bonnet’s rim, hair like a cloud bank, eyes like two glimpses of sky.

Lalovee Hammer saw her too. Unlike his son, he didn’t stare in mute astonishment. He stooped for the sharpest, unloveliest stone at his feet. It was a boy’s reaction—spy out beauty and mar it, quick as you can. Erastus had his father by the wrist before he knew what he was doing. It was only then, as a young man of twenty-three, that he became sensible of his own strength. He squeezed long enough to render Lalovee’s grip useless, then a moment more to bring a glimmer of pain to the old man’s eye. He brought his lips within an inch of his father’s bristling cheek.

Did you never think I might want something of my own?

Erastus left home without a penny to his name to join that river of bodies, walking among their number clear to Illinois. The largest stone flew straight from the hand of his own father to catch him square in the back of the neck—a spot that pains him to this day when it rains. Still, in Ursula’s books he remains a Missourian. The lowest of the low.

Erastus ratchets his smile a finger wider. “My good wife speaks the truth, Brother Drown. That fine couple are no kin of mine.”

“I see, sir.”

It’s clear Drown is wishing he hadn’t spoken, hoping the talk will take another turn. Erastus hunches forward.

“You old enough to recall the forty-niners?”

Drown’s face darkens. He nods. “Yes, sir.”

“Most of them had never crossed a county, let alone a continent. No idea what they were signing on for. They come hauling dresser drawers, grandfather clocks—” He pauses for effect. “—paintings. The minute they hit hard country, they start shedding their goods. Myself and a few companions, we worked a stretch of the trail east of the Sweetwater. You wouldn’t credit it. Wash basins, harnesses, gunpowder. Like an auction house blown sky high.”

Again the hasty nod, a movement Erastus scarcely registers. He’s talking for his own ears now. “Not that everything they dropped was treasure. They’d come through some bad water a ways back. Dead cattle every other step, blown up so you could pop them with a pin. Graves, too. Shallow as cat scratchings.”