Effigy (48 page)

Truly, it’s a lucky thing grandson and granddaddy never crossed paths. Erastus’s father was a hard man in the Missouri backwoods mould. A devil of a shot, he took out every wild pig and redskin unlucky enough to set foot on his land. Besides clearing that willow-choked plot and planting it with corn, he’d had the foresight to build the only gristmill for miles around. It ran near constantly, his children put to work as soon as they stood as high as a fifty-pound sack. Erastus was the second of seven, black-haired Emmeline his senior by a year. He became the eldest when she was dragged by the hem of her dress into the works.

A hard, hard man. Folk thereabouts came to Lalovee Hammer’s for more than the week’s hominy and flour. Saturday nights they came in droves to watch men beat each other senseless on the patch of ground outside the delivery door. When he wasn’t fighting himself, Lalovee was the one to call foul or declare a winner—the former heard rarely, as biting, eye gouging and blows beneath the belt were the order of the day. When the mill’s owner was one of those who stripped to bare chests and braces, only one winner was ever declared. He wasn’t a big man—shorter by a thumb’s width, in fact, than Erastus would eventually stand—but he was wound tighter than any who dared meet him, and he could bite like a bloodhound, holding on until a finger or an ear, or once even a nose tip, swam loose in his mouth.

A man greatly respected, greatly feared. The same man who had pitched apple-weight stones at a son who dared strike out on his own, causing that son to see stars. It’s some kind of love, surely, to try to kill the one who leaves you. Erastus can’t imagine his own son leaving—can’t even picture him filling a pack. One thing’s certain. If, by some miracle, Lal ever did get up on that mess of a horse and ride out for good, Erastus wouldn’t throw a blessed thing.

THE TRACKER DIGS
the pit trap where the white man wants it—some twenty paces out back of the cow barn. Hammer looks on for the first yard or so down, during which time the son does his share, steering the barrow smartly to and fro, clearing the telltale mound of fill.

“Good and deep,” Hammer says by way of excusing himself.

The Tracker glances up to see the son already laying down his shovel. “Yes sir,” he calls out after his father. “You heard him, Tracker,” he adds, once Hammer rounds the corner of the barn. “Good and deep.”

They lock gazes. As expected, the son shifts his away, turning it skyward, acting the part of a man impatient with those in his charge. A melody, thin and mocking, stirs in the Tracker’s brain. He works his jaw to its rhythm. The son is scarcely worth warning, but he sings a rough translation all the same.

The son glares at him a moment, then turns his head to spit. “What the hell was that?”

The Tracker cuts and tosses a shovelful. “Song.”

“I know it’s a song. Since when do you—why’d you sing it?”

“Song for bad child.” The Tracker makes a third leg of the shovel, loaning it his weight. “Warning song.”

The son shrinks visibly before the Tracker’s eyes. “Get to work,” is the best he can manage, barked side-on as he whirls away.

To the beat of the son’s footfalls, the Tracker returns to the task at hand. Blade to earth, boot to blade, earth to sky. He puts his back into it and soon spills sweat from every pore. No one will think to bring him water. Nor will he be welcome at the well mouth, let alone the kitchen door.

By the time he stands neck deep, his thirst is turning dangerous. He floats rather than scrambles out of the hole and skirts the barn on the shady side. They will see him. From the garden, from the windows—the wives, the offspring, perhaps even Hammer himself, will catch sight of him on his knees, canting forward, lowering his face to the trough. They will laugh, or frown, or both. It matters little. The water is warm, fragrant with the meadowy mouth-slime of cows.

Having drunk his fill, the Tracker returns to his hole. Load after load, he diminishes the mound of earth. Pushing the empty barrow across the yard, he passes through a rich river of scent and knows the family to be gathered around the table for the midday meal. At the poplar brake, he cuts leafy switches and piles them high.

Back at the pit, he fixes the bait—a cottontail taken before he began digging. He ties one end of a long sinew around its neck, the other to the dead oak limb he’s driven deep to overhang the hole. The rabbit dangles. He spreads the net over the mouth of the pit, then lays a loose weave of switches over that, saving the last of them to brush his traces from the surrounding ground. He will do so walking backwards, easing himself out of the scene. But first a sweeping glance to assure himself he’s alone.

The Tracker kneels down at the pit’s hidden lip. From the bag at his hip he withdraws a handful of rifle balls. Nothing smells more keenly of danger, but to be certain he nestles the cupped hand into the damp beneath his arm. Then holds it to his nose. Tang of metal, musk of man. Satisfied, he plants the first of them one knuckle deep. Leaving a hand’s breadth between balls, he crabs sideways on his knees, circling the trap.

The clang of the supper bell comes as a great relief, Dorrie glad of the excuse to leave her work behind and trudge through evening birdsong to the house. She’s the last to take her seat at the long table, her chair scraping when she pulls it out, drawing a matching sound from Mother Hammer’s throat.

Hammer scarcely draws breath between muttering the blessing and making demands. “You made any progress on those wolves, Sister Eudora?”

Dorrie keeps her head bowed.

“I’ll come and have another look after supper.”

“No.”
A hint of shrillness. Her husband hears it too. He lays down his utensils. All eyes on the youngest, ugliest wife.

“I can’t—” she blurts, “I’m having a little—trouble.”

“Trouble? What trouble? You build a wolf, you cover it with wolfskin.”

“I know.” She looks up. “I am. I will.”

He watches her for a long moment, until a hand in motion distracts him. Lal ravaging the butter dish. “Go easy on that butter, boy.”

The eldest son jumps, yanks his knife back barely smeared. Glancing up, he catches Dorrie watching and twists his lip.

There is one at the table who would sympathize, whose eye she might seek if she dared. Instead, she forces her portion down in silence, rises when the rest of them do and hauls herself back to her cot.

Dorrie cracks an eyelid on blackness. She rises up on one elbow, strikes a match to light her bedside candle and finds herself faced with the same problem she abandoned at the peal of the supper bell. Sitting up, she blinks the crust from her eyes. The wolves haven’t moved. Crowded together on the floor, they stand coated in plaster, ready to receive their skins. Ready as they’ll ever be. Not ready at all.

To a one, the mannequins are lifeless. The runt is by far the worst—no suggestion of play, not even of submission, in its lines. Unless it be the final submission. Flat on its back with its four legs in the air, the smallest of the wolves looks dead.

Dorrie swings her feet out from beneath the covers, planting them on two uneven planks. She rises in a rush and crosses to her workbench. Reaching beneath it, she unhooks her hammer from its cradle of nails.

It’s gone midnight by the time Bendy arrives. Dorrie is on her knees, prying staples from a slab of splintered wood. Around her, the floorboards tell the story of what she’s done.

It’s mostly plaster—dust and chunks, the odd shell-like fragment, smooth or faintly ribbed. Tufts of tow skitter, rushing for the vacuum of the open door. Some escape, others wheel back as Bendy draws it closed. Curls of excelsior sound beneath his boot heels. He walks a slow, crackling line to stand over her where she kneels. She says nothing, intent on the final staple, stubborn in the wood.

“I see you’ve done your worst.”

She shoots him a glare.

“Never mind. You can always—” He’s interrupted by a sound. Somewhere, neither proximate nor truly remote, a wolf sends up the first, low loop of a howl. Speech, even movement, is unthinkable. Only listening, the kind that takes place in the bones.

A second round ascends, ripples and trails away. The third is patchy, skipping over itself, splintering into a query of barks. On its heels a full-throated bawl. Each new vowel is both an echo and terribly new. It goes on forever. For a full minute, maybe even two.

Dorrie feel its aftermath in her skin, every last little hair rooted in gooseflesh.

“All on his ownsome.” Bendy’s voice startles her. “You heard him before?”

She nods.

“I saw a pack of them at it once. Maybe seven or eight.” He shakes his head. “No two of them ever stick on the same note, but somehow it makes a song.”

Dorrie’s eyes have opened wide. She can feel them drying in her face. “Show me.”

He cocks his head.

She scrambles to her feet, lunging for the sketch block. “Show me a howl.”

Erastus is cold. Eudora hasn’t slept in this room for three years, but it’s as though the bed remembers her lifeless chill. The quilt is dusty, but he drags it up about his neck all the same.

A man with four wives shouldn’t have to sleep alone. He tried Thankful’s door on his way past, but found it bolted. Ursula would laugh at him if he showed his face in her chamber. He could always put in with Ruth, but Thankful’s already fit to be tied. No, best to wait his third wife out. A week, a month—whatever it takes. Patience is a hunter’s virtue. A husband’s even more.

In the dead of night, a thin sound at Thankful’s door. She rises like a giddy girl to let him quickly, quietly in. They must be careful, Hammer snoring next door in the fourth wife’s abandoned room, Mother Hammer like a mastiff down the corridor’s far end.

The bed frame groans, so they lower themselves gingerly to the Persia rug. There can be no games—no hunt and capture, no costumes, no roles. And none are required. She need only lift her nightdress and he’s wrenching his britches down. Thankful knows to help herself along, wasting no time with one so green. She swallows the cry when it comes, shoving her tongue hard against the backs of her teeth.

He leaves before he’s entirely gone down, stuffing himself, elastic now but still large, back into the dingy folds of his smalls. Watching him slip out through her door, Thankful is swamped by an unfamiliar rush. She plunges her left hand down through the skewed neck of her nightdress, taking a nipple between finger and thumb. The unknown feeling comes clear. It is her own, and no one else’s, desire.