by Alissa York
The bear was more grizzly than black, humped over a mess of unidentifiable gore. One foreleg twice the length of the other, snout flattened around a rat’s nest of teeth. The mountain lion was worse, stretched all out of proportion along an elephant-grey ridge, its head a fat house cat’s under coyote-sized ears.
The birds came nearer the mark, perhaps copied from the plates of a book. Inside, Bendy knew, fewer than half the wire birdcages hung. He’d learned the night before—shortly after learning he was to bunk in with Camden—that the clown routinely carried his favourites back with him to the hotel. Room number nine was already crowded by the time Bendy arrived, the birds tucked into themselves on various perches, Camden splayed like a tide-abandoned starfish across the bed. Bendy took the armchair, disturbing the fat macaw that clung to its back.
Last and perhaps strangest, the painted monkeys hung from ropy, lime-green vines. A single face repeated atop various configurations of limbs, the moony grin of an infant dosed with rum.
At the gallery’s end, a second lantern spilled light down the stable’s wall. If Stanley was within, he made no sound. Drawing open the door, Bendy held his light down by his thigh and made low, friendly noises in his throat.
Not one of them flinched. Not a rustle, not a single hoof stirring the straw. They watched him, mules and horses, motionless in their pinched stalls. For a moment he was puzzled, but then it came to him—he couldn’t spook these animals if he tried. To a one, they’d dulled their senses to the wuffing of a bear, the shrieks of the deep jungle, even the feline musk of the ancient foe. These mules pushed through frenzied crowds as a matter of course. Belle and the brown gelding—and maybe even the old roan in her day—had learned to run rock-steady circles while no end of human nonsense took place on their backs.
Bendy lifted his lantern, fixing on the gelding’s stall. By habit, he found himself treading softly, easing back the latch, murmuring as he took down a bridle and slipped it over the long brown nose.
The horse came quietly, Bendy leading him through the back flap and round the blind, past the draped darkness of Philomena’s cage. Still no sign of the cageboy. Was it possible he’d sloped off somewhere, leaving his charges without a guard?
Bendy strode to the centre of the ring and set the lantern down on the beaten earth. He took a moment to stroke the gelding about the withers and neck, then tucked his boot into the near stirrup iron and rose.
Three trotted circuits and the brown horse broke into a canter on his own. Bendy let him have his head. Another turn of the circle and he felt himself on the brink of a gravitational trance. It shattered at the sound of her voice.
“So far, so good.”
He hauled back on the reins harder than necessary, but the gelding took it, skidding neatly to a stop. Philomena stood poised on one of the bale seats, a furred creature at the limit of the lantern’s reach. It hadn’t occurred to him that she’d spend the night in her cage. But now that he thought about it, what alternative did she have? To step blithely through the front door of the Gillespie Hotel clad in nothing but her own glossy hair? Or worse, to belie her canine character by showing up there in a dress?
“Don’t quit on my account.”
She hopped lightly, gracefully to the adjacent seat, then the next, the next—a child crossing a creek on stones. Or not a child. Something fleeter, more certain of its feet. She breezed past him where he sat motionless astride his mount, bounding full circle, bale to bale. His head swivelled, eyes dogging her as they would a flash of something feral, thrill and misgiving made one. She closed in on her starting point, surpassed it and carried on, landing in moments on the bale nearest his suspended heel.
She gazed up at him, obscure in the melded shadow he and the gelding cast, wearing nothing but her own thick pelt.
“Or do,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Do quit.” Her teeth came clear in a smile. “On my account.”
He was down on his own two feet before he knew it. When he glanced about for somewhere to tether the horse, she caught hold of his hand and said, “He’ll stay put.”
She pulled him after her, not looking back. Her grip was strong, her palm hairless, smooth. Her nails were pointy. They dug in a little, quickening his pulse.
As they drew up alongside her cage, she brought her face in close. “He’s in there.”
Bendy felt something tear free inside his chest cavity and rise. “He?”
She mouthed the next word. Stanley. The heart in Bendy’s mouth beat hard.
“Don’t worry.” She made a bottle of her fist, tipped a thumb to her lips. “He’ll be out for hours.”
“But—” Bendy looked past her, contemplating escape.
“I don’t invite him.” She let his comprehension build for a moment before adding, “I’m inviting you.”
All notion of fleeing left him. Together they passed the cloaked form of her cage, padding onward to the block of bales. She led him behind it—not, as he’d imagined, through the back flap to the rest of the world, but past it, round the far corner of the blind. There she dropped to all fours, fit her fingers around one of the bottom bales and, as though it were an oversized, golden brick, wrestled it out of the wall. In its place, the black promise of a tunnel. On her belly now, Philomena wriggled inside. In moments Bendy was faced with the twin swishing tails of her legs, the bald calluses of her upturned soles.
He followed. Never mind the risk, the solid fact of the cageboy—sunk in a stupor, but still mere yards away. The tunnel was close about Bendy’s shoulders, heady with her scent. He squirmed forward the full length of his body before the dark opened into the shape of a den. Her hand came out to meet him. He clutched it and reached for more.
— 26 —
DORRIE DREAMS:
Dawn, and beneath me the sage clump quivers with life. The night was chill, but perhaps the child’s fold of hillside held some of the day’s heat. Doubtful. This high up, the changing time comes early, cold rising from the earth itself.
Her thirst must be terrible—how many dry days before her flock was freed, first from their camp, then from this waking world? Hunger too. This may be what’s woken her, smoke wafting from the camp below, the smell of food being ruined over fire. Not that I’d refuse a scrap if offered. In the night my own hunger opened to swallow me whole. I can feel it in my wing tips, little flight left there, perhaps a mile or two more.
Who knows if the child can smell anything, wedged beneath that reeking bush. I have yet to catch a whiff of her—not her sweet, bruised flesh, not the deep, seeping scratches on her limbs. Not even her fear.
Dawn colours the scene below us in hopeful light, the bodies rosy now, shining with dew. The dog man’s pack is rising, having filled their bellies with the usual human mess. Why make a paste of desiccated corn when it’s so much sweeter straight from the ear? Their meat is worse, pig that tastes as though they found it floating in the reeds of a salt marsh.
Sated, they move again among the dead.
A whisper of paws on rock, and I look down on the grizzled back and black-tipped tail of a grey fox. Tree-climber, the sinewy bridge between cat and canine, a known threat to nestlings, but nothing serious to the fully fledged. A mocking caw, perhaps even a dive at the first click of those retractable claws—only, in my torpor, I begin to mistrust my wings. Hold still, then. Dead still, until the wave of its tail is gone.
See how the humans cache their kill, how they bow and scrape, swinging their heavy tools. Soon shallow patches have been scratched, and the dragging of bodies begins. Like weasels hoarding mice, they pile dead upon dead, dusting them with not enough earth to dissuade a fox kit. Some do even less, dumping corpses in gullies and concealing them with clumps of grass.
Willing the child to stay put, I stretch my hollow wings and drop, let the slope fall away before me in an easy glide. At grass level, I wing along deep and easy, skimming low over the waving green, mounting only when I reach the trampled bed where the females f
ell.
She is still there, one of half a dozen left. A male with hair the colour of a yellow martin stoops to take hold of her bloated ankles. He hauls her into the scrub, covering her with several branches in waning leaf. To the last, her hair calls the eye. A black, spreading wedge, like tail feathers landing or lifting off. It points the way to the rest of her, until the male kicks dirt over it and stamps it down.
— 27 —
A PAIR OF SHAPES dogs Dorrie’s waking—one curved and gliding, the other triangular, terribly still.
She’s been dozing since Bendy left. Any moment now the breakfast bell will sound, and if she fails to respond to its pealing, chances are good one of the children will be sent to knock endlessly at her door. Still she doesn’t stir. Her body floats on its fatigue, a buoyancy she’s reluctant to forsake, having experienced it only once before.
She’d been a member of the household for close to a year when Hammer announced there was to be a family outing: a picnic on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Dorrie sat with the children in the buckboard, Lal taking the reins with Sister Ruth at his side. The first and third wives rode up ahead, wedged into the buggy with the man of the house. Dorrie’s stepchildren fixed their ten eyes on the passing country while she fastened hers to the cart’s jumping floor.
Lake seemed entirely the wrong word. Climbing down stiffly over the tailgate, Dorrie thought, Sea. Not that she’d ever laid eyes on one, or ever cared to. Lake, sea—whatever she called it, the great body before her was another gaping expanse to be endured. She made herself useful, laying the first of four blankets alongside a brine-encrusted thicket, so at least there would be something at her back.
Mother Hammer had put up enough sandwiches to feed a horde, and she made it clear she wasn’t carrying any home only to find they’d spoiled in the heat. Her pickled cucumbers snapped audibly between the teeth, shooting vinegar into the sinuses. The children were used to them, knew to hold their breath and start gnawing, wary and persistent as mice.
Last came a mound of oaten biscuits, buttery and sweet. Everyone but Hammer and Sister Thankful ate their share. While Mother Hammer was busy brushing crumbs from Baby Joe’s cheeks, her husband took the opportunity to rise from where he lay propped on one elbow and offer a hand up to his favourite. The pair of them set off together arm in arm to, as Hammer called back over his shoulder, take the air. Leaving the rest of them to take the waters.
Mother Hammer herded Dorrie, Ruth and the two girls into a thin cover of trees. Dorrie changed hurriedly, back hunched to the others, into a drooping costume that consisted of a linsey-woolsey dress and matching pantalets. A furtive glance showed Ruth undressing methodically, looking only to herself, while Mother Hammer fussed over Josepha and Josephine. Trudging down to the shore, Dorrie brought up the end of a uniformed female string. Lal and the three Josephs met them at the water’s edge, clad in overalls and nothing else. Dorrie averted her eyes.
Mother Hammer kept Baby Joe and the girls close, but allowed Joseph and Joe to wade out after Lal. The eldest reached waist depth and plunged, striking out clumsily, kicking spume into his brothers’ eyes. Joe let out a yelp.
“Lal!” Mother Hammer barked, and he stood up dripping, hands at his sides.
Ruth got no further than the shallows before she sat down, water creeping up the fibres of her bodice, darkening her breasts. Dorrie moved off on her own, not such a distance as to attract Mother Hammer’s attention but far enough to escape the family’s waves.
When no one called her back, she waded out a little more, turned to face the comforting curve of shore and dropped to her knees. Water to her neck. Until that moment, the creek that cut across the far acreage of the Burr farm had provided the only natural immersion she’d known. The water there only ever reached hip deep, but even so, you could feel the drag of it, its desire to suck a body down. There in the glassy lake, even the knit costume was weightless, unequal to the saline lift.
It required so little faith, such minimal movement, to let her knees slide out from beneath her. She tilted back in head-wetting surrender and found herself on the surface, trapped between planes. The sky yawned, so she drew down her eyelids against it. Her hands burned, but it was little enough to endure. Her ears knew only lapping. She could hear nothing of the others, and after a time she began to imagine they had forgotten her and returned to the ranch. And then to imagine that she too had forgotten, had abandoned her only body, setting it adrift.
That afternoon it was Sister Ruth’s light touch on her floating arm that brought her back. This morning it is the angry, clanging bell.
Packed full of porridge and molasses, fried eggs and fatty ham, Erastus feels even lower to the ground than usual as he makes his way across the yard. It’s as though Ursula has weighted him down on purpose, and not just with breakfast—the grace she delivered wound on and on while the meal lost steam. He listened long enough to determine the matter was the usual one, then stopped his ears with thoughts of the day ahead. Not that there was much to think of. A ride, certainly, but where? On his own he’d have to stick to the property. He could always look in on the Tracker, maybe beat the bushes for a male grouse to match the hen they bagged last year.
Hammer kicks a small stone from his path, pausing to watch it roll further than expected, its progress becoming unclear. Beyond, sunlight glances off the water in a trough, a brilliance evocative of Ursula’s bowed head.
He was never a believer the way his first wife is. Ursula is steeped not only in feeling but in knowledge, well versed in Church history, Scripture and law. Weekly Meeting is more than enough learning for Erastus. Fiery sermons are best; when the topic is the need for continued vigilance, he’s less likely to nod off.
Faced with the stable, he finds himself reluctant to go indoors. Instead, he veers left, leans into the corral gate and takes in the wash of the wide-open valley, letting his thoughts run.
It’s always been the living religion for him, that great mass of cried-down people choking the road. Of course, one of those people—the tall, bonneted one he made sure not to lose sight of—mattered more than all the others combined.
He may have come to the new religion via things temporal, but as it turned out, he was fully prepared to believe. The Hammers were Baptists, his father in church when it suited him, his mother fond of face-down prayer, a gentle begging delivered nightly to the floorboards. From what Erastus could make out, the new religion offered all the benefits of the old—baptism to wash a soul clean, the theatre of tongues and healing, the happy threat of end times—and more besides. A bible story whose violent and miraculous chapters unfolded right here, rather than in some distant, sand-swept land. A vast, unconquerable kingdom, not only later, in the great beyond, but now. Best of all, a living prophet in direct communication with God.
Brother Joseph was a shepherd no man could fail to love—and yet, much as Erastus mourned the Prophet’s passing, there was a part of him that leapt heavenward at the news. It wasn’t long before that portion knew its reward. Ursula was more beautiful than ever in her grief—eyes cloudy and crimson-rimmed, hair stark under a bonnet of iron black. Having refused him countless times, she stared out from beneath its overhang and said yes.
Along with their marriage came the reign of President Young—a leader less winning, to be sure, but in the end no less loved. He may not have drawn gazes in those early days the way Brother Joseph did, but he draws them now, by God. The Lion of the Lord earned his place at the head of things. Joseph talked to angels; Brigham built Deseret—not one of many settlements the Saints would be driven from, but their own Zion, a desert fortress ringed round with stone. Land where it was said no white man could prosper—and look, twenty years on and Erastus Hammer stands amid orchards, pasture and stock. He takes satisfaction in the idea, squinting out over the fog and dazzle of his fields, then turning to survey his yard.
By habit, his eyes seek Ursula first. He finds her on the move past the clamouring garden—blue dress beneath a sn
ow-bright apron, a lesser drift marking the large knot of her hair. Stooping to take up what must be a basket, she puts him in mind of the bright breakers he endured when, still a bachelor, he crossed the wide Atlantic on a mission to Wales. He converted precious few. Those he did manage to win came for the promise of acres as much as for the glory of God.
Movement shifts his gaze. A flush of reddish brown glimpsed among the mulberries—Ruth’s undeniable hue. It runs like paint through the veins of every child he put inside her; doubtless the one she carries now will emerge with the same chestnut hair and gleaming, wooden eyes. What of his own colouring? Not one of them sprouted a thatch of black bristle in tribute to him—least of all his eldest, so like Ursula it troubles Erastus to look at him. What would he call a little Hammer if he got one—Erastus Junior? Ezra? No sense wondering. Naming is Ursula’s privilege. Her own she called Lalovee after Erastus’s father—a flowery name for a flint-hard unbeliever she never met. Erastus shortened the hated name the first time he uttered it, but the missing syllables still sound in his head.
After Lal—almost a decade after—Ursula began dubbing Ruth’s issue, assigning each new arrival a variation on the only name she’d ever really loved. She did Erastus a favour in the end. On the rare occasion when he finds himself wanting to address one of the eerie brood, he possesses a fair notion of where to begin.
And soon there will be another. Ruth must be four months along now, the first of which Erastus spent waiting for Thankful to unlock her chamber door. It was scarcely fair. He wouldn’t have been compelled to bed his second wife if the third would bear him a child. Thankful has been barren these six years, though—what are the chances she’ll manage it now? Truth be told, Erastus is just as glad. He’d be expected to keep his hands off her until the thing was born, and anyhow, the notion of Thankful with a baby is all wrong. Like trusting a fox to carry a downy new chick in its mouth.