by Alissa York
Dorrie knows full well a field can’t swallow her. Knows it and doesn’t, all at once.
Chances are she never would have climbed onto the paint’s back if Papa hadn’t insisted she do something to put a little colour in her cheeks. Little wonder she looks like the dead up and walking. Does she ever even set foot outside?
Mama took the time to join her long after Dorrie was proficient enough to ride out on her own. Notwithstanding a dearth of sidesaddles on the property, Lyman Burr expected a lady to ride like one. Dorrie’s unease doubled when her seat was off-kilter. Sensing this, Mama held a trot until they were out of Papa’s sight, then slowed to a stop so the pair of them could rearrange themselves astride. Better, my girl? Now you can get a proper grip.
Mama knew to avoid the open without ever being told, keeping to the maze of cottonwoods or making brief, speedy bursts between clots of scrub. Dorrie followed close, tucked deep in her drooping bonnet. Whenever she felt a wash of panic, she stared hard at a spot midway down Mama’s back. More often than not, Mama would turn in her saddle and smile.
Coming back to herself, Dorrie finds she’s flattened her back to the workshop door. Her eyes refocus on horse and rider just as Drown presses Bull into a trot. It’s something to see. Normally an eye-rolling, lip-flaring mess, the palomino obliges him with a steady three-beat stride, ears forward, head high. For a good half-circuit. And then he shies.
Drown holds to the animal like a second tail, rippling along its length but firm at the bony root. He clings fast while Bull skips and reels, eventually quieting him to a shuffle. Sliding down from the saddle, the new man resembles nothing so much as a bucket of some dark liquid upturned. He takes a few steps and crouches, his hand disappearing in the grass. Behind him, Bull holds rigid, wheezing his fear.
When Drown rises, he does so slowly, in his hand a long black stick. He lays it flat across both palms, taking a narrow step then another toward the horse. He says nothing—at least nothing loud enough to reach Dorrie’s ears—yet his meaning is crystal clear. A stick, see? Only a stick. No snake here. Bull understands him, too. Relief passes over his handsome bulk, redrawing him in kinder lines.
Drown hurls the stick hard and far, his arm flailing. End over end, it cuts a fluid arc, disappearing as it crests the fence. He remounts with a spring, Bull catching him in the grasp of his back and breaking into a joyful run. Dorrie stares after them. There’s no denying the evidence of her own two eyes. Under a new man, the palomino is a whole new beast.
— 13 —
IN THE HEYDAY of the gold rush, San Francisco drew hard men from the far corners of the globe. Australia, land of red earth and venom, gave up some of its worst—abused, brutal men known about town as Sydney Ducks. Others came steaming from the green wedge of continent to the south, still others from the eastern states, a land cankered with civility, rotten with farms. In a few short years the golden city had nursed up an underworld to be reckoned with. Eight-year-old John James walked softly, grew eyes in the back of his head.
Neither strong nor particularly fleet of foot, he learned to adopt the ways of the crabs he looked down on for hours from the wharves. Snatch what you need. Scuttle short distances. Hide. It became a kind of genius—the spring and give of his limbs extending clear up to his brain, his kelp-green eyes. He was forever scanning, picking out shadows that told of unoccupied space. They were everywhere once a body started looking—here between piles of siding, there among coils of jute. The shape of each potential refuge registered internally, dimensions translating into terms of his own design. Elbows hooked around ankles, knees tucked behind ears.
Hiding was what he should have done—would have done if he’d had his wits about him—the day he came face to face with the stray. But his wits were on holiday, taken up with a good half panful of pork and beans, slung out in a clot on a refuse pile, out back of one of the better rooming houses in the district. Rich with a bubbly sheen, the beans had clearly turned. Not so far gone they wouldn’t stay down, though. The mountain man had served up worse.
They called to John James, a slow-slipping, come-hither ooze. He felt his saliva run and pool, and, in the keen pleasure of anticipation, let a trickle escape his thin smile.
Looking up, he found his expression mirrored by a dripping grey muzzle, a pair of narrowed eyes. The dog stood equidistant to the beans, assuming the third point in the ancient triangle of human, beast and food. It bared a pink reef of gum, eased out a snarl. John James glanced about for a hidey-hole, but aside from the muck of the refuse pile, the lane stood solid, flooded with light. Garbage could cut you, seep poison into the wound—he’d nearly lost a foot that way only a month before. Besides, his guts were twisting with hunger. And he’d gotten there first.
He saw now the stray was a bitch, bald black nipples dragging low. He met her gaze. She bristled, took a stiff-legged step his way. He allowed rather than willed what happened next—his malnourished corpus pitching forward, assuming another’s form. Arching his spine, he felt the transformation take. As near as any human being could, John James turned himself into a dog. He knew it. The bitch knew it. She winded him, turned tail and ran.
John James woofed. He was weighing his next move—whether to rise up and stride manfully to the prize, or keep low, gobble and growl—when he heard an unfamiliar sound. It was a pair of hands meeting, a hard, happy racket that echoed the bright length of the lane. The doorway to the rooming-house kitchen stood wide. A woman in a fat-soaked apron came close to filling its frame.
“Clever, clever.” She left off clapping. “Never seen the like.”
John James stood warily, wiped his paws—his palms—on his britches. When the woman shifted out onto the stoop, he took a matching step back.
“Don’t run, child.”
The word arrested him. Child. Of course. Not a dog. Nowhere near a man.
“You live round here?” she said.
He stood quivering.
“Hungry?”
He bit back a grin. Talent could do more than save your skin. It could fill your belly, too.
He was drawn to the company of women long before he ever dreamt of holding one in his arms. Kate Blakey, the rooming-house mistress who’d applauded his first-ever trick, had rewarded him with enough bread and bacon to choke a pig that day and several since. On fine mornings, he’d sit on the stoop by the trash pile. When it was raining, she’d let him inside to eat by the stove. He knew better than to wear out his welcome—once a fortnight or so kept her glad to see him.
Other times he would wander to the foot of Telegraph Hill, skirting the violence of Sydneytown to wind his way through the tents of Little Chile. The women there hadn’t much to give, but buckling himself down into a roosterly strut and scattering their chickens generally earned him a bowl of spicy soup. That and an hour or two in the light of their keen laughter, the sound, rather than the sense, of their talk.
He’d been alive for a full decade when he came within spitting distance of Red Meg, a rare beauty whose company commanded a staggering sum. John James was on his back on the boardwalk, ankles knotted behind his head. He’d drawn a small crowd that afternoon—seven miners, a merchant and a man in black who was likely a preacher of some kind. Meg came up catlike, the only sound the sudden rush of nine men sucking air. They opened a chink in the circle for her skirts to fill. Eyes the colour of whisky, comfort and havoc in one. A weight of copper curls. John James caught his breath along with the rest of them. He craned his neck upward, gaping at her over the twin points of his behind.
“Bendy.” She spoke softly, thoughtfully, as though the two of them were alone. “Bendy boy.”
“You know that one, Meg?” one of the miners said into his beard, breaking the spell. The rest of them laughing their relief.
Meg’s yellow eyes turned to glass. She let the howls die down as she smoothed the green silk about her ribs. “Open your purse and find out.”
To a man, even the one she’d bested, they roared. Red Meg drew bac
k with a kind of curtsy, swivelled and sailed away. John James let go the pose, rolled up and hugged his knees. Around him the men howled on.
“Bendy,” he whispered to his kneecaps, and smiled.
— 14 —
DORRIE DREAMS:
Clearly the child is strong. Witness how she clung to the dark mother, her bold, slithering escape. Then there’s the force with which she holds me to this stunted oak, making my feathered body a black mark above her huddled form. True, I’ve flown a few slow loops over the greater scene, but each time she drew me back to her, her pull like the call of a mate, or larger—the call of the roosting place, the flock.
Being crow, I should make my way back to the killing field. I might have to haunt the margins for a time if the humans are still at work. On my last circuit I winged all the way back to the circled wagons. Between here and there, the dog man’s pack hunkered over the dead. They were stripping the bodies, revealing even the blue-white underskins of their feet. One yanked a glitter-string from a female’s wrist. One plucked shimmer-discs from an overskin he’d peeled away. The crow eye sparked and buzzed.
A third sank to his knees as I flapped over his head. He regurgitated heavily into the grass, though there was no sign of him having partaken of the kill. They tend not to feed on their own kind, or on other predators, come to that. Someone should tell them the flesh of a meat-eater is more storied—veins of every creature it’s run to ground still marbled throughout.
Some Originals stooped alongside the pack members, others gone to gather up the cattle and horses they ran off into the hills some nights since. How is it the freed beasts don’t know to keep running? They wait only for their hearts to slow, then forget their captors, drop their noses into the green and feed. Herbivores. So often at a loss in the face of the true nature of things.
Such waste, such feast the humans leave behind. Those inner skins exposed to the sun, great softener, great opener of the dead. It remains to be seen how long they will protect their kill, standing over it jealously like wolves. At least the silver ones desire the flesh for their own consumption and, once sated, will often share. When humans kill humans, they cache every scrap, cry bloody murder if any creature dares dig it up.
Were I to alight on one of those bodies, they’d welcome me like a plague. I might manage to hop to its chin, slip the fine tip of my beak beneath an eyelid. I might even pierce the rich salt jelly, but before long one of them would cast the first of many stones. So unjust. They’ll never unearth the cache themselves, so why not let the other blood-lovers feed? Still, eventually night will fall. The humans will build a fire and cower round, or, better yet, beat a hasty retreat back to their lairs.
The pattern of bodies shows the killing was swift. Here and there lie signs of a few short chases, bursts of panicked speed, but most fell not far from where they were surprised. The females and their walking young form a loose flower head, fully blown. Some distance away, the line of fallen men marks the poor bloom’s severed stem. It’s a picture rendered all the more striking by sprays and welters of blood. To pick a path between the corpses would be to wet my claws, to paint a tail-feather trail.
The air is heady—wafting from the field to where I bob and wonder on this scrubby branch. The light is long. Time to follow the thread of a flight line to the gathering tree, to hail the others, the mate among them, build numbers before carrying on to the roost. For days now I have resisted evening’s draw. I tell myself nothing could be more crow than to be trapped between carrion and curiosity. I lie. The child’s gravity is great. She controls me as my own deepest nature cannot.
My perch affords perspective. A string of humans, Originals and pack members, moves through the scrub close by—near enough that an open-winged glide would bring my claws in contact with scalp. The child’s eyes, if she dared open them, would make out human hooves and legskins flashing between trees. Perhaps even the swing of a bloodied hand.
I drop my beak, staring down through the leaves of the sad oak, already burnt with the gold of their own dying. She curls white and black about the base of the trunk. Mammal surely, but human? I watch until her dark eye opens and meets my own. Then tuck my beak deep into my wing and select a secondary flight feather, one I can make do without. I tug it from its bony mooring and let it fall. Its path describes the mystery that has grown up between us, this undeniable, spiralling thread. Despite the black point of its quill, she watches it through her open eye.
— 15 —
MOTHER HAMMER has a mania for sage. She adds it by the fistful to her every soup and stew, so that, more often than not, a perfumed cloud hangs over the table during the supper hour. Dorrie has learned to take small sips of air between her lips, holding her breath while she chews. She’s had little choice. The first wife put her foot down early on when it came to the subject of Dorrie eating with the family.
“Bread broken together is a covenant.” She addressed their husband as though the crowded table were a tunnel, the two of them crouched at either end.
Hammer smiled. “Judas broke bread, Mother.”
Her gaze took on a gilding of frost. “She’ll come for breakfast and she’ll come for supper, or she won’t eat a blessed thing.”
So Dorrie came. Took her place between eldest daughter and second wife, and endured Mother Hammer’s glare.
For three years now the first wife has been obliged to set aside a portion for Dorrie before seasoning the rest. Dorrie has no wish to vex her; she simply can’t stomach the dusty herb. Not that stomaching was ever an option—she’s never once managed to force down so much as a mouthful of anything that bears its taint.
She was fourteen years old, a bride-to-be come morning, when she encountered her first taste of Mother Hammer’s stew. She spit it out. Brown and slippery, it landed with a plop in her bowl. Mother Hammer was on her feet in an instant.
“I’m sorry—” Dorrie began, but her explanation met the first wife’s leathery palm. A person might be expected to tremble, even colour up, after delivering such a blow, but Mother Hammer stood steady, her creamy complexion unperturbed. No one—not Hammer, not his wives or his children—made a sound. After a long moment, the first wife folded her height gracefully, resuming her seat.
Dorrie raised a hand to her cheek, felt blood, or possibly a hot stream of drool, escape the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t crying. She very rarely cried. Her eyes had remained perfectly dry some five days previous while Mama sat weeping, watching her pack her trunk.
Mama hadn’t minded Dorrie’s aversion to sage. There was never even a question of setting portions aside—once she discovered the reason behind the frequent upsets at the supper table, she dumped a full jar of the vile stuff down the privy, never had it in her kitchen again.
It was clear Dorrie could expect no such kindness in her new home. Mother Hammer was watching her. Eyes lowered, she loaded her fork carefully—a glistening disc of carrot, a stringy clot of beef. Raising them to her lips, she felt her gullet constrict. It was no use. She laid down her fork.
“Mother Hammer,” she said quietly, “I mean no disrespect—”
“Don’t you dare.” The first wife’s tone was confusing, more suited to a request for the salt cellar than a threat.
Dorrie took a deep breath and held it, snapped the stinking forkful back up to her mouth. Shoving it between her lips, she bit down hard, striking a sharp note across the tines. Her throat wasn’t fooled—it flinched shut, the sheer force of rejection propelling meat and vegetable in an exceptional arc. Both morsels hit the floor somewhere behind Joseph’s chair.
Who knows what Mother Hammer would have been capable of, had she not been suspended in disbelieving shock. This time it was Hammer’s turn to rise, and once he had, even the first wife had to keep her seat.
“Are you ill, Sister Eudora?”
“No,” Dorrie choked.
“Something amiss with your supper?”
The first wife gave a noise as though she too were in danger of gag
ging.
Dorrie rubbed her throat. “It’s the seasoning, the—” She hesitated, even the word nauseating now. “—the sage.”
Hammer nodded, working his gaze down the table in a slow stitching motion. “Mother,” he said, locking eyes with his oldest wife, “you know the Church counsels all good women to welcome their husbands’ wives.”
Mother Hammer’s eyes grew wide in what seemed a supernatural gesture, a calling down of the sky.
“From now on you will cook something simple for Sister Eudora. Something plain.” Hammer resumed his seat, grabbed his roll and tore it in two. “You must be tired, my girl.” It took Dorrie a moment to realize he was addressing her. He pushed the smaller of the two halves into his mouth and talked around it. “Sister Ruth, be so good as to fetch Sister Eudora some bread and milk, and show her to her room.”
The first wife has been holding forth on the life of the Prophet, letting her supper grow cold.
“That’s enough of that, Mother,” Hammer says abruptly. He shoots Bendy a look. “My wife holds but one subject dear to her heart.”
“You know of one more deserving, do you, husband? Hunting, perhaps? Or horses? Or—hunting?”
Hammer breaks the following silence by working his knife across the china with a squeal. “I suppose you’ve got a tale or two from your days on the ponies, Brother Drown.”
“Not many, sir. I had a pretty smooth time of it.”
“You in on any of those mustang roundups Brother Egan ran?”
“Once or twice.”
Hammer nods.
Seeing more is expected of him, Bendy chews and swallows. “Well, there was this one time just after I signed on, we took a dozen or so down around Topaz Mountain.”
“Uh-huh.” Hammer pulls a stretchy, close-mouthed smile.