by Alissa York
“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.”
Eudora drops her fork. It glances off the verge of her plate, eliciting a hard click from Ursula’s tongue. The girl neither excuses herself nor looks up, only reaches out with that strawberry claw of hers, clutches the fork and resumes eating in her joyless way.
“It took a strong stomach, that work,” Erastus goes on. “Strong constitution, too. Those that could still walk had every plague and ague going. We lost more than one good man ourselves.” He shakes his head. “Their surviving stock looked like washboards on legs. We’d buy them at a low figure, keep the cream for breeding, fatten the rest and sell them on to the next sorry pack. That’s how I got started trading horseflesh. Folks want oxen and mules when they’re westering. A man settles, the first thing he buys is a good horse.”
“Scavenging.”
Ursula’s voice startles Erastus. He’s come close to forgetting table and family, seeing instead the long track of riches for the taking, the haggard ranks of gold-hungry fools. He blinks, her features refusing to come clear.
“That’s the word for it,” she adds.
Half a dozen retorts spring to mind, but not one of them does justice to the internal yowling her words have evoked. This woman he’s scratched and scrambled for, her best milch cow descended from an emaciated black-and-white he led back to her from the littered trail.
The wife at his left hand speaks up. “I call it commerce. What do you think built this place?”
“Commerce.” Ursula turns the word over like a lozenge. “There’s a topic you’d know something about, Sister.”
Thankful sucks air. It’s Erastus’s turn to take her part.
“Sister Thankful knows a great deal about many topics, Mother.” He wipes the back of his hand over his moustaches, a habit he knows she abhors. “Topics a simple country woman might not understand.”
Thankful knows better than to laugh out loud, but her bright lips widen in the corner of his eye. Ursula sits erect, her indistinct face the colour of something boiled. It seems he can still call her blood up, after all. He clears his throat.
“The fact is, Brother Drown, my own mother, may she rest, was a good deal plainer than the lady you see pictured there.” The hired man has lowered his head as though praying. Erastus waits until he raises it before adding, “My daddy was uglier still.”
Tonight Ursula needn’t lay her ear to Thankful’s bedchamber door to witness the noisy goings-on within. All the same, she does.
It’s a variation on the usual theme—a good deal of tousling, then a sharp avian screeee, followed by a thud that becomes thudding, rhythmic and obscene. Hammer wheezing on the offbeat, “I’ve—huh—got—you—huh—huh—now.” Thankful replying with stuttered whistles, another long, strangled squawk.
Ursula’s heard enough. She doesn’t wait for Hammer to finish the job, knowing full well the string of curses he’ll emit, the last and foulest dwindling to a groan. She glides past Ruth’s door and carries on to her own.
Once inside, she crosses to her dressing table and sits, regarding herself in the mirror’s swimming dark. Hammer lets himself go shamefully with his third wife, though, to be fair, she’s the sort of woman to invite profanity. It was a different story the first and only time he lay with Sister Eudora in her bedchamber. Hammer was so quiet about his business that night, Ursula caught nothing but the final disembodied grunt. The girl’s silence lay thick, muffling the proceedings like a blanket of snow.
With Ruth, he whimpers and moans. The second wife answers as though she were a bolster repeatedly compressed, releasing a chain of soft, exhausted sighs.
In his first marriage bed, Hammer neither whimpered, nor grunted, nor swore. He whispered endearments. What was worse, upon reaching his end, he wept. Doubtless he told himself Ursula didn’t notice—it was never more than a tear or two—but she wasn’t the k
ind to let weakness go unremarked.
Her face in the looking glass is without feature. She doesn’t bother lighting a candle to let down her hair, instead plucking out pins and dragging her brushstrokes by feel. Next she must undress, another chore she’ll manage, perversely, in the dark. She won’t sleep, she knows it. Still, she’d be a fool not to lie down and try.
The Father has kept mainly to hard ground. He’s left a trail so staggered that the Tracker, tracing it about the darkened ranch yard, gets muddled time and again. Often he has only scent to go by, one promising waft among a thousand airy ribbons of not-wolf—hardly more telling than a single shapeless scuff. Still, he tracks. Catches a whiff and follows it to a well-formed print, the Father’s broad forepaw preserved in a patch of damp out back of the privy. After reading its direction, he grinds the print away with his boot heel.
Setting off in a line defined by the two middle claw marks, the Tracker moves into scrubby grass recently disturbed. The Father’s scent condenses into a discernible stream, flowing on to a spot beneath the back window of the child wife’s barn. There, in the spill of her night-burning lamp, faint but undeniable, a pair of more compact tracks mark the place where the Father rose up on his hind legs like a man. The Tracker fits his own two soles over the prints, obliterating them. Standing where the wolf lately stood, he peers through the warped and cloudy glass.
The child wife sits on her stool, hands still on the workbench before her, face hidden behind a fall of hair. When she fails to move for minutes on end, the Tracker shifts his gaze to the crowded western wall. The gleam of a black horn beckons. Viewed through the wavy pane by the lamp’s low flicker, the stuffed antelope behaves as stones do in the bed of a creek. It moves. The Tracker drops, twisting to flatten his back against the old barn’s wall.
There can be no forgetting the day he brought the pronghorn down. It was around this time last year. Hammer didn’t accompany him so much as dog his steps, and then only until the grade steepened and he began to fall behind. After that it was just the two of them—the animal wounded in its haunch from the initial long shot, the only way the Tracker stood a chance of keeping up.
It felt all wrong. Though it wasn’t unheard of among the People for a lone hunter to stalk a single antelope, the Tracker had never done so, and neither had any of the men in his camp. As a rule, the spring-footed beasts were taken communally, with several years passing between culls. A pronghorn hunt required one who was gifted to call the animals down, keeping hold of them by their spirits until they could be killed. His father’s elder brother was such a man. He would haunt the verges of a herd for days on end, singing to the beasts by daylight, sleeping among them by dark. When the time was right, he would lead them to a brush corral. Once encircled, the pronghorns would run themselves ragged, then cede without struggle to a rain of clubs.
Despite its bleeding haunch, the antelope maintained a good lead. It gained an open cliff and, judging itself to be safe for the moment, paused to crane back and nuzzle its wound. So doing, it cut a sharp profile against the sky. The Tracker had a clear shot, but somehow failed to centre the heart. Knocked to the ground by the force of the ball, the pronghorn lay stunned a moment before rolling back up onto its hooves.
Again the Tracker gave chase. Following the weaving, blood-spattered trail, he jogged a memory loose. His father’s face, lost to him for years, hung before him, underlit by fire. The known mouth moving. One of the old, old tales.
A hunter, tracking his wounded quarry, entered the mouth of a cave. Soon enough, he found himself in the world below. Like the finest of underground streams, this world ran sweet and pure—a meadow green and waving, veined with water, rich with game.
While the story-hunter descended into that good valley, the Tracker climbed. Hammer must have been a good mile behind him by the time he ran the antelope to ground. When he stooped over the animal—collapsed and quivering on its side—he did so alone. Bright red bubbles whistled from the hole in its heaving chest. The sun was hot, the scene barren. He watched the antelope’s keen eye turn skyward, then turn to stone.
It’s not the first time a wolf has howled within earshot of the house. A body grows accustomed to such sounds, comes to appreciate them even, living on the frontier. It is, however, the first time a howl has yanked Erastus bolt upright out of a black ditch of sleep, palms wet, pulse thundering.
The wail is dying now, his waking mind gripping fast to its quavering tail. No braiding, declarative harmonies here. This wolf is alone—perhaps somewhere on the far pasture, paws planted in his best grazing grass.
In the silence that is the howl’s wide wake, Erastus wipes his palms on the quilt and wills his heart to slow. Each moonlit hand rests on a silky diamond. Finding his backbone too rigid to let him lie, he turns his pillow on end against the headboard and shuffles back on his buttocks to meet it. A burning under his ribs alerts him to the last breath he swallowed gone stale. Let it out. Drag in another. He looks for comfort to the face on the pillow beside him. Thankful is not a pretty sleeper. Her long nose whistles, the mouth beneath it a toothy gap. Erastus looks away.
Every inch of him is listening—the horned heel callus, the hairy belly, the clammy hands. Good sense to the contrary, he feels the whorled cups of his ears yearn forward, drawing taut the thin skin at their backs. This despite knowing the wolf will leave the sky quiet for a time, open for reply.
A lone animal poses the greatest threat to a ranch. Bereft of a pack to hunt with, a rogue wolf will turn his bright eye to a man’s livestock. Being neither a sheep nor a cattle man, Erastus has less to fear than some. It takes a gang of them to bring down a healthy horse, especially one rich with mustang blood. Still, there are the milch cows and the chickens to be considered. There are the foals.
The cry will come again. Unless the creature has moved on—and he finds himself hoping fervently that it has—it will sound its existence, unreel its ringing question again. No sooner than a quarter of an hour. Perhaps as long as three-quarters. Erastus listens. Outside, the wolf listens back.
Standing with her arms folded across her chest, Dorrie moves her gaze over the dimly lit collection. Three tiers up, the lantern-eyed lynx sits tonguing its paw—a pose that came to her the moment the Tracker rolled its snow-caked form onto her workbench. And there, the blacktails stand precisely as she imagined them upon her first glimpse of antlers protruding from a distant flank—buck and doe like a pair of hands sheltering their dappled fawns. Even the flying squirrels suggested their own scene as Hammer drew them from his bag. The female landing, clinging to her branch, her mate behind her, open wide in flight. It was the same with the birds. The turkey vulture insisted on being strung from the rafters in a tilting, soaring V. The mergansers chose to demonstrate phases of takeoff, the lead duck climbing, two followers still skating, flapping hard. It was simple—Dorrie saw the scene and made it. Until now.
Turning on her heel, she crosses to the door and pushes it open into flooding moonlight. The yard is large, but hemmed in by human structures and therefore safe. She sets off counterclockwise along its margin, making her best attempt at a shuffling stroll.
The ranch—at least all she knows of it—rotates past. The privy, then the slat block of the washhouse, wafting lye. The vegetable plot. The house’s silent sprawl.
She skirts the redolent dark of the peach orchard to where the track bleeds off into blackness. Taking a breath, she crosses its double cut and veers to hug the mulberry copse’s verge. In its shadows the silkhouse sits quiet, the worms about their business in the dark. Ruth will have checked on them recently, or will be rising to do so soon.
As the last of the broad-leaved trees falls away, outbuildings stand in order of increasing size. First, the chicken house with its warning fox nailed flat. A waste of a good pelt, but Mother Hammer had insisted. Never mind the effect of that star-shaped skin on the already nervous birds. Their every day flavoured with its constant tang, the promise of a squawking, mangled death.
The cow barn seems peaceful by comparison, its inhabitants dark-eyed and dull. Dorrie continues on to the stable’s massive facade and lingers there a moment, steeling herself before rushing the last, curving leg of the way—the corral a tame gateway to a terrible expanse.
Which brings her back to the old adobe barn. Its high grey door is so worn as to seem furry. She lays her palm to it, lets it slide in a single downward stroke. Nothing awaits her inside. Only the same set of questions she’s been struggling with since the wolves arrived, the same maddeningly blank internal slate.
Behind her, a sound. She’s heard it a thousand times, but tonight every sense is tempered by the spectral light. The moan of the stable’s great door is the utterance of something alive.
She turns in time to see the new man lead Lal’s palomino out into the corral. There’s no mistaking the horse. It’s the only one of its colour on the ranch, coat caramel-brown, mane and tail pure cream—ashen now in the lunar wash, but the eye, adjusting, translates. Bull. An unkindness of a name. The rider’s is scarcely better—Brother Drown. Or, as he informed the family at table that first evening, Bendy. Whatever his name, he’s got his work cut out for him. Bull tends to bear a man’s weight like a grudge.
As though in defiance of her thoughts, Bendy Drown hooks his boot in the iron and mounts in a baffling, elastic surge. Dorrie blinks. Limbs like so many whip lengths, and then he’s settled between cantle and horn. He lets Bull stand for a moment before nudging him into a walk, nice and easy, clockwise around the corral.
Dorrie hasn’t been on a horse in years. Doubtless Hammer would have allowed her if she’d asked, but the truth is she dislikes riding. Taking to horseback means taking to the open. A body has to be content to progress across a valley bottom like a stitch across a massive quilt, having no fear—no notion, even—that at any moment the quilt might buckle into smothering folds.