by Alissa York
Dropping down from the barrel, he slid backwards through the story of his life. By the time his boots met plank, he was a little boy, blind with panic and tears, stumbling after one among hundreds, only to be folded into a mother-scented suitcase and swung violently aboard.
“Father!” It came out in a wail this time, and a host of hairy faces turned his way. All but one. Bill Drown kept his eyes forward, trained on the gangplank, a bottleneck clogged with men.
Father. John James almost bellowed it a third time, but as he drew the necessary breath, he drew with it a gutful of truth. It was the wrong word. Bill Drown would never turn at the sound of it. He hadn’t answered to it for years.
Weeks later, John James was leading a pack mule loaded with farrier’s nails back to the stables when a display in a shopfront window brought him up short. He’d seen human bones before—a fingertip, even a skull—but never the whole story at once. The skeleton stood with arms akimbo, legs ever so slightly bowed. A hand-lettered sign leant against its bony toes: A Returned Frazer River Miner. John James felt the mule’s hot breath on his neck. He knew then and there.
A year would pass before he heard anything definite. When word did come, it spilled from the lips of a green-eyed miner old before his years. John James braced himself the moment he saw the stranger come limping. Laid down the harness he was mending and turned to take the brunt of it face on.
“You Bill Drown’s boy?”
He nodded dumbly.
“Your father’s dead.” Then, in the worn-away lilt of his mother country, “I’m sorry for your troubles.”
He was halfway to the door, rendered buglike by the stable’s cavernous insides, before John James managed a word. “How?”
The miner spun slowly, a move oddly graceful in the midst of his halting gait. “Shovel to the back of the head. Undermined his neighbour’s claim.”
Again the waltzing turn, the hobbled stride. John James closed his eyes. When he looked out again from the dark of his own making, the miner had gone. He let out his breath. All of it. Even the bit he normally kept by.
— 17 —
May 19th, 1867
Dear Daughter
How to begin a letter when the last one ended upon such a note. At the beginning surely but which one? My own was unremarkable. I was one of eight children born to the good soil of an Ohio farm. Mr. Burr’s was much the same only the soil and everything else was several grades poorer. What did I see in him? Everything he no longer is. Also I was the plainest of five sisters including poor dead Eudora. Chances were good I would be the one left to tend my parents in their dotage and though I served them to the best of my ability the truth is I bore my father little love. My mother for all she tried might as well have been his dog. You know the rest. Marriage followed by conversion followed by more persecution and toil and abandoned crops and forsaken homes than any life ought to hold.
And all of it nothing to the fact that I had no child.
Dorrie from the time I could walk I was stealing kittens from their mothers and feeding them with a finger dipped in milk.
All those years I imagined myself to be the barren one but look at him now. Nearly three years with his sturdy young thing and not so much as a false start to show. I tell myself I might not have minded if our marriage had been the sort to fill a woman up. It was not Dorrie. Not by half.
The beginning that matters came when you did my girl. Ten years ago now. I was forty years of age. I had given up hope.
You were sick when you arrived. You know this well enough. You have been told a hundred times but I wonder do you remember how you pitched like a mad thing in the bed? For more than a fortnight I dribbled water and weak broth between your lips. Anything more than a few spoonfuls and you would bring it back up. You went from ice to coals soaking the sheets and soiling them. I never slept so little in all my days. I was never more awake.
It was during those weeks that I began to tell you stories and one in particular. After many letters of entreaty from myself my sister had finally seen fit to join God’s people in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Widowed young she brought with her her only child a girl seven years of age. This same child was delivered unto Mr. Burr and myself by the captain of the handcart train my sister had joined. It was he who told us she had given up her spirit unto God. A sad tale. I told it every time I washed you or fed you or freshened the cloth on your brow. More than once I came within a hair’s breadth of believing it myself. Fatigue I suppose. That and the wish that this and not the other might be true.
You came out of it in the end. Shaky and pale but you came. Is it any wonder you were a quiet child? There is silence my girl and there is silence. Yours was visible. You will think me fanciful but I swear at times the air about you took on a bluish cast. How it wrung my heart. How I worked to draw forth if not joy then at least a hint of interest in the world around you. Help Mama make a pie Dorrie. Here you pop the pits from the cherries. Why don’t we go for a ride my girl just you and Mama. You obeyed but you never really took part. Not until he came. Dorrie you will know of whom I speak. Surely you must have felt the change his presence worked on you.
Coming from England Mr. Cruikshank might have been hoping for a cup of tea or perhaps even a glass of beer. Or he might have been in the Territory long enough to know he would receive no such refreshment in a Saint’s home. In either case he accepted the glass of plum juice I offered him with thanks. He was looking for work though what labour those stems of arms were suited to I could scarce imagine. So soft spoken for a young man. Well born I thought from his way of talking but down at the heel. I knew Mr. Burr would have no work for a Gentile but decided to let him rest a little and wait. A decision lightly taken and largely felt.
Dorrie you came to life the moment you laid eyes upon that sky blue bird. It was clear to Mr. Cruikshank and even to my own unschooled eye that you possessed a gift. He took me aside when I carried a plate of corn bread out to where you were working in the shed. Mrs. Burr he said to me you must encourage her. She must have instruction. The look on my face brought him down a notch. At the very least she must have tools and a book or two. At that he drew pencil and paper from his waistcoat pocket and wrote in the neatest man’s hand I had ever seen Collection and Preservation a Taxidermist’s Guide by Major Thomas Greene.
I wonder Dorrie did you even notice how I ran after Mr. Cruikshank when your Mr. Burr so unkindly sent him away? This was not as I later told my husband to apologize for his rudeness but instead to beg a favour. I pressed the scrap of paper back into that young man’s hand and with it all the money I had put by in the kitchen crock. I wouldn’t have the first idea I told him. Won’t you help me? No letter. Just have it sent to the post office in Cedar City. He said nothing only nodded. How he pitied us. I could see it in his eyes.
Mr. Burr was to know the depth of my feeling. Can you really think he wished her harm? I cried. He was teaching her Lyman. She’s thirteen years of age.
Marrying age. He wouldn’t look at me when he said it but he said it all the same. And worse. Brother Sykes has a wife of fourteen. Brother Turner took his youngest when she was twelve.
It shocked me Dorrie. It stunned me dumb but it should not have. I see now how he always had one eye on the day when he would marry you off to advantage. How he crowed over your milky skin and so-black hair when you were small. How he complained as you grew out of your childish good looks. I hope the truth of this does not pain you my girl. I have never known a woman who benefitted of thinking herself a beauty when she was not.
As you know the book arrived the following spring. It came direct from Greengage and Smythe Book Merchants of San Francisco along with a note from Mr. Greengage himself beginning Dear Mrs. Burr as per your inquiry. Mr. Burr handed the parcel to me already opened though the direction bore my name alone. I knew only joy that he would allow you to keep it at all.
The way you looked at me when I gave you that book. The way you pored over its pages your fingers trembl
ing. I had not known a body’s love could double in an instant. Would I have taken my gift back if I knew then how the secrets between its covers would draw Mr. Hammer’s eye?
Dorrie why did you offer no protest? I know you are a dutiful girl but not one word? You left me to fight for you alone. I could hardly argue forever when you yourself had already agreed.
But I torture myself. I torture us both. As fate would have it a man of wealth and influence set his sights on you. A man who could see to it that despite Mr. Burr’s low standing he should receive permission to take a second wife. But the truth is Mr. Burr would have seen you off sooner or later. He had another reason to wish himself rid of you. And of me. I will explain myself Dorrie I swear it. But for now I must rest.
All a mother’s love
Helen Burr
— 18 —
THE COW BARN is Mother Hammer’s territory, and it is for this reason alone that Bendy has been on the ranch some four days before he darkens its door. He’s only here now because there’s something he needs, and chances are this is where it’ll be.
Joseph and Joe are hard at it on their little stools, milk ringing in their pails. The air is body-warm. Sweet, too, not a hint of the sourness Bendy’s come to associate with milking. If these boys spill a drop, they know damn well to wipe it up.
“Morning, Joseph,” he says, “Joe.”
Both neat, gleaming heads draw back from their cow flanks and rotate his way.
“You boys know if your mother keeps a cat about the place?”
It’s an odd question, he knows—where there’s one barn cat there are twenty—but if he’s taken the first wife’s measure correctly, she’s the sort to tolerate only one or two. He’s just as sure she won’t be entirely without. It’s a fair bet a woman like her would regard a scattering of mouse turds not with apathy or even disgust, but rage.
“Tom,” the older boy says. “Up in the loft.”
“And Kitty,” Joe adds.
“No.” Joseph returns his brow to the cow’s side, resuming the task at hand. “Kitty went in the flour sack with the last litter.”
“Oh.” Joe nods, following through until his forehead too meets flank. “I forgot.”
Bendy feels this in his gut, as though for several seconds the writhing sack is located there. Foolish. It’s the way of things. Perhaps if the boys—the younger one at least—seemed to feel something about it, he wouldn’t have to. He shifts his weight to his toes and back. “You don’t mind if I borrow him for the morning, do you?” He forces a smile even though neither of the boys is looking his way.
“Go ahead.”
He can’t be certain which one of them has spoken. It scarcely matters. He proceeds to the ladder and climbs.
Tom is massive, thickly muscled, white. Bendy pokes his head up through the loft floor and meets him eye to opening eye. A trout-green gaze. Ears intact, tail supple and full, lifting now, drawing the hindquarters after it in a rising stretch. Without a doubt the handsomest cat Bendy has laid eyes on—no kin to the toothy, wire-legged wraiths he avoided as a child.
With a hand the cat can’t see, Bendy reaches into his trouser pocket for the chicken leg he kept aside the night before. Tom has a good nose on him. He’s easing forward, responding to the offering before it appears. Bendy peels off a swatch of nubbled skin as a teaser. Spreading it on the hayloft floor, he backs away down the rungs. Tom stands chewing, impatient above him. Once the way is clear, he springs down the ladder as though it’s the gentlest of slopes, landing in a dearth of sound.
Bendy holds the chicken leg at hip level, waving it like a stubby tail, leading the snowy brute past the wordless boys. Striding to the horse barn, he imagines the picture the pair of them make. Once inside, he leads the cat directly to the largest of several mouse nests he’s found.
“Not yet, boy.” He pockets the leg. “Don’t want you too full to do your job.”
But Tom is already wreaking havoc, tossing a blind baby into the air.
The Tracker wakes suddenly, awash in early light. He crawls from his hut, rises and sets off eastward. In the early days, Hammer would fetch him when his presence was required, but seven years at the white man’s side have made a limb of the Tracker—he flexes when the impulse comes. The first few times he showed up on his own, Hammer betrayed surprise. How in the hell? In reply, the Tracker employed a white gesture, turning his empty hands up to the sky.
This morning the wide pasture glows. The Tracker moves through its shifting brilliance into a time long gone.
Small Sister was newly a woman, proud to wade with the others deep into the grass, lifting her seed beater high. It happened that the Tracker was within shouting distance that day, he and Younger Brother setting snares. He felt the hoofbeats through the bark soles of his sandals, looked up to see the Ute braves high atop their mounts—ten, maybe twelve of them thundering from the northeast draw.
The Tracker might have been a horse himself, so fleet were the legs upon which he ran. Not thinking to shed her burden basket, Small Sister pelted toward him with it bouncing on her back, spraying a trail of seed. Her new breasts leapt and jangled. At the extremity of her arm the seed beater flailed, a wide and woven hand. He reached her—almost reached her—as the Ute slaver leant wide and low. A knotted arm encircled Small Sister’s waist, and the Tracker’s goal was gone.
He drove his heels deep into the ground to keep from throwing himself under the churning hooves. It was a dark horse that flowed past him, the deepest, richest brown, glowing with the lather of many miles. Its mane was true black, a windswept, rippling wash—not unlike the Ute’s tresses, falling over Small Sister’s face.
Black nostrils too. This the Tracker would remember later, the horse’s nostril flaring above him. He would remember the Ute’s nose, too. The flash of eyes above it, the broad, strong bridge, even the tiny white protrusion—the nostril cartilage home to a shard of polished bone. From a deer? A bird? And there were fish bones in the Ute’s necklace. And bear claws. The swinging scoop of it rattled and shone.
It is this more than anything that pains him. If he was close enough to take note of the Ute’s nose pin, close enough even to hear that fine rattling above the drumming of hooves, how is it he couldn’t catch and keep hold of her, his own dear flesh?
Seven women taken that fine summer’s day. Try as he might, the Tracker can only picture one.
As always, the Tracker finds whatever summoned him to the white man’s side wasn’t wrong. Trading the morning light for the ribbed insides of the horse barn, he finds Hammer oiling his gun. Nearby, the new man eases a bit into the black giant’s mouth. Their gazes cross, the new man offering a nod over the horse’s lowered nose. The Tracker keeps all expression to himself.
Between them, Hammer’s mount is somehow changed. The Tracker can’t help but remark the difference—nowhere more evident than in the cant of her massive head. It’s as though she desires nothing more than to surrender its great weight, skull and senses, to the new man’s hands. The Tracker focuses on the horse’s right ear, cocked his way now, measuring him despite her bliss. He follows the black column of neck to her shoulder, the barred marks there a memory they share.
He and Hammer had followed the fat tracks for miles, the Tracker losing the trail repeatedly. The pale cat was playing with him, padding through water, taking to trees. At last it split off from the river and led them in a steep ascent.
The air, close and curdled in the bottomlands, began to move. The Tracker scented then caught sight of the cat’s leavings, a partially covered pile. Dense with hair and bone, the stools spoke of hunger, a goodly stretch since the last fresh feed. Reaching country too broken for horse hooves, he waited while Hammer tied the animals in the shade of an outcropping before carrying on.
He should have known better. The mountain lion doubled back, the promise of tethered horseflesh too sweet to resist. The pack horse would have been the safer bet, but the cat knew good meat from tough.
A horse und
er attack makes a sound impossible to forget. They hadn’t made it far—Hammer holding him back, cautious among the rocks—when the scream spun the pair of them where they stood. The Tracker ran on goat legs, leaving the white man behind. Rounding the last dogleg of a narrow cut, he brought the Henry’s sights up in line with his eye.
The scene beneath the outcropping entered him with the slow-flowing force of a dream. The pack horse hauling back into its haunches, the black giant thrashing, all hooves and whipping spine. For now, the fight was enough to keep the cat from biting, working its long teeth between bones to snap the hidden cord. It was holding on tight, though, a fat, cream-coloured saddle with a glaring face. Spotting the Tracker, it added its own voice to the squealing song of its prey. The black horse rocked forward, baring the cat’s white chest. On the back-surge the mare’s head and breast obscured the shot. The trick was in the timing. Crooking his finger, loosing the ball a hair’s breadth before the next plunge.
It was a kill for the telling, the first shot rendering a second one unnecessary. Claws let go, retreating into their sheaths the moment the Tracker’s ball met heart. The lion was airborne on the following buck. It landed in a crease of the outcropping, both horses dancing in the wake of its death. Hammer broke upon the aftermath through the thin smoke drifting from the Henry’s muzzle.
The Tracker felt something akin to respect for the black mare that day. Once she’d quieted enough to see the predator was well and truly dead—Hammer showing her, kicking it in the belly where it lay—she stood rock-steady, seemingly oblivious to the blood escaping the four corners of her back.
On the white man’s command, the two of them heaved the mountain lion up onto the skipping pack horse. While the Tracker lashed it down, Hammer shucked out of his coat and laid it across the mare’s shoulders to blot the worst of the wounds. It was a long ride back, the first third of it a straining downward grade, but the big horse never flagged. The pack horse eventually took his cue from her lead and settled into the rhythm of burden and track.