Effigy

by Alissa York

  I would know that sensation again. Months perhaps even a year on when I was already beginning to suffer from a pooling in my feet and legs. The hour was late. I had been abed and sleepless in my discomfort for some time when I decided a poultice might afford me some relief. I was creeping to the kitchen each step a punishment when I spied them through the crack of the parlour door. This time it was Lym Mr. Burr who was on his knees. The girl was in my armchair a fact that would have irked me had it not been for the way she was holding her face in her hands. He had the stocking off. He was lifting the fist of her bad foot and touching it to his mouth. Dorrie you will pardon my plain talk. You are a married woman now and so I believe you will understand. A man’s feelings do not always spring from his heart. Do you take my meaning? Mr. Burr’s interest in that foot was unhealthy. The girl knew it. She kept her face hidden the entire time I stood watching. She held herself rigid as a corpse.

  Dorrie I know well how such a scene will trouble you now you have witnessed it through my eyes. I know you must cry inwardly that a mother ought not to burden her child with such a story most especially with regard to the man she has called Papa. Do you think me cruel my daughter? This is nothing to what I must tell you before I am through.

  Doubtless you imagine your mother to be a virtuous woman unshakable in her faith. You will recall how I polished the table upon which the Book of Mormon and the Bible and the Doctrine and Covenants lay. This last my favourite and yours too I believe for its recounting of the many revelations that came to Brother Joseph direct from God. How many lines of Scripture have passed from my lips into your ears? As many and more into the ears of Mr. Burr. At times I confess I have fancied myself a kind of bottomless pitcher pouring out the word of the Prophet and with it the word of the Lord. But there is a bottom. I can see it now.

  It turns upon this point. I am Mr. Burr’s wife in this world. It cannot be helped. But to be sealed to him for all eternity is a fate I cannot brook. The idea sticks in my throat. I cannot swallow it and so my girl I spit it out.

  Some three decades have passed since Mr. Burr and myself were baptized by Brother Joseph himself at the temple in Kirtland. Decades during which my faith has been tested and tempered more times than I care to think on. And yet I can still recall a time before I made bold to call myself a Saint. At that time I was acquainted with a vision of the hereafter that was a good deal vaguer and in my dark hours I find it is this Heaven and not the Prophet’s upon which I dwell. I tell myself I will be admitted entry. Mr. Burr may or may not but I believe I shall be rid of him in either case. God willing I shall tread upon the clouds alone.

  Dorrie yesterday morning Brother Creel came to say a blessing over me and to heal me with a laying on of hands. It was all I could manage to lie quiet while he jabbered on. Words even holy ones can lose their worth if you hold them cheap. Just as if one were entrusted with an innocent body and allowed strangers to make free with it until the flesh ceased to feel. Am I frightening you? Forgive me. It is my own fear that leads me to so dance about the matter.

  Let me begin with a small truth and see if it won’t loosen my pen. The girl as I have always named her to you is called Katherine. Her family called her Kitty and Mr. Burr has followed suit. A sly ridiculous name he utters at every chance. I have refused to do so just as I have refused to call her Sister which as you know an obedient wife is called upon to do. Katherine is the best I can manage. I would call her Miss Ells but she no longer is. She is like myself Mrs. Burr.

  But I promised you a truth and here it is. Kitty suits her. Not because she is sly or ridiculous but because she is warm and demands little more than her keep. Because she belongs and she doesn’t. Because she turned up one day and never left. Nor would I have her do so. I would not be without her. There now. All this fuss over a name. But a name holds meaning my girl. Shall I keep on while my ink still flows?

  Eudora I told you time and again you were named after your real mother my poor sister who perished on the road to Zion. That was a lie. I had a sister called Eudora yes but she died before her seventh birthday of poison blood from a blister overlooked. Poor child she was always a secretive thing. She said nothing until a vein the full length of her leg had turned black. She was like you in that way but she was not of course your mother. I don’t know who your mother was. And yet I still presume to write these words. Not because I claim the right but because I cannot bear to give them up.

  All a mother’s love

  Helen Burr

  — 12 —

  THERE HAD BEEN NO COURTSHIP as such. Hammer came to the Burr farm on a Thursday. Dorrie looked up to find him staring—not at her face but at the work in her hands. She was turning a rabbit’s hind leg out of its fur.

  The eyes that watched her were small and dark, set in a weathered face. His hair was black like her own, his moustaches greying. He shifted his gaze to the butcher block before her, taking inventory of her rudimentary tools. He was short, so much so that Papa’s entire face showed above and behind him. Dorrie expected to find irritation written there, or the prickling shame he often betrayed where she was concerned—but found instead a beaming smile. The stranger took a step toward her.

  “Tricky work.” The first words she heard her future husband speak.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Brother Hammer,” Papa said, thrusting his face forward over the man’s shoulder, “this is my daughter, Eudora.”

  Hammer nodded. “Done many others?”

  “She has indeed.” Papa’s voice came out squeaky. “Eudora, come inside and show Brother Hammer your animals.”

  She hesitated. Did he mean for her to take the stranger into her bedchamber, the only place Papa allowed her to display her work? He said it gave him the shivers to have them hanging around. No fit way for a girl to amuse herself. She’s artistic, Lyman, Mama would remind him. And if he grumbled further, It gives her joy.

  Dorrie set the rabbit down, wiped her hands on her apron and followed the two men across the yard to the house. To her relief she saw Papa was showing Brother Hammer into the parlour. It would seem he wished her to present her collection to them where they sat.

  Mama had done more than stand up for Dorrie’s chosen pastime—it was she who had made it possible in the first place by sending away for the best Christmas present any daughter had ever known. Never mind that it hadn’t arrived until March. Collection and Preservation: A Taxidermist’s Guide came bound in thick red leather, still smelling faintly of the beast on the hoof. Opening it, Dorrie came close to wailing, so keen was her joy.

  She’d been in possession of the book for some months when Hammer came calling, and had been making do with limited materials and blunt, unwieldy knives. Still, she felt a silent thrill of pride as she carried in her work. First the mice, then the weasel, then the birds. Cruikshank Crow, convincing though he was, she left on the bedside table. She saved the yellow barn cat for last, setting it down in the midst of the others, turning it by its arched back so the men could make out the teeth she had so skilfully bared.

  Brother Hammer sat with his boots planted wide, right hand raking his moustaches. “Well, now,” he began, just as Mama appeared at the parlour door.

  “Oh.” She was fresh from the garden, dirt to her elbows, her apron a sight. She took in the stranger, the menagerie laid out before him. “I didn’t realize we had company, Mr. Burr.”

  “This is Brother Hammer.” Papa left off the second half of the introduction, the part that included his wife. “You won’t have had your dinner, Brother Hammer,” he added. “Eudora, help your mother in the kitchen. Leave the menfolk alone to talk.”

  The following day, when Hammer returned to the Burr farm, it was he and Dorrie who were left alone. Sitting opposite her suitor, she could hear Mama’s protests vibrating in the walls. Papa’s voice came only once, loud enough to bring about the quiet that ensued.

  Hammer wasted no time in wooing. “Eudora, your father has given his say-so for you to become my wife.”
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  Dorrie nodded dumbly. Her head felt curiously off-kilter.

  “You won’t be the first.”

  She nodded again. A sensation of slippage, as though her skull were somehow improperly anchored to her spine. She stared at a dark flower on the rug.

  “There’s an old adobe barn,” he went on. “I’m something of a hunter, see.” Then the words that lifted her eyes. “It’d be yours. Your workshop.”

  “Workshop?”

  He grinned. “Thought you might like that.”

  She twisted her hands. He held his peace while she thought. Her answer, when it came, was firm. “I’ll need materials. Proper tools.”

  It was Hammer’s turn to nod. “Anything you want.”

  It wasn’t until perhaps an hour after they pulled away from the gate that it dawned on Dorrie—she was now entirely dependent upon the near stranger at her side.

  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 hi
s 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?”