by Alissa York
A deep-chested male pads by close to the trunk of my juniper, nose thrust into the blood-rich breeze, eyes on the valley below. His mate comes hard on his heels, her flank brushing the very bush that hides the child.
The breeding pair do not scent her, nor do any of their pack—a couple of rangy yearlings leading four of this spring’s issue, fat-footed, overgrown pups. As the last of them files past the sage, a faint crackling issues from within. The pup hesitates, cocking his head. I caw, jagged and high, a note designed to trouble his ears. He looks up, spots me and shows a little fang. I sidle down my branch, draw a thin, silvery whine from between those glinting teeth. It’s over before it begins. In the empty-headed way of the young, he suddenly recalls his purpose, the descent of his kind upon the field. He gives a growl for good measure, drops his snout into the current of rot and trots away.
A close call, yet I can’t help but be heartened by the child’s small stirring. She’s been holed up in there since the middle of last night. Hours ago, when I returned from my survey of the humans at their burying work, the bush was so silent I began to wonder if she’d crept from its cover and scuttled away. I listened for her shallow breath, but could hear nothing over the echoes of human tools. In the end I swooped down from my branch, claws extended, and raked through the bush’s crown. The child gasped and, on the exhale, released the softest of squeals. It was enough. I mounted to my post again.
For the moment no other wolves track over our particular rise. Perhaps all within reach of scent and howl have arrived. Territory means little now, enemy packs converging to answer the enormity of the call. Within the greater group, they keep loosely to their own. A skirmish or two breaks out along borders, but for the most part they are intent upon the surfeit of food.
Wolves are fine diggers. Watching them unearth the pitiful caches with such strength and skill, I feel a stab of envy, usually reserved for others with the gift of flight—the soaring ones, especially vultures, their bald heads a badge of purity, of dedication to the dead. Still, of all the ground-walkers, wolf is closest kin to crow. If we’re patient and wait until they’ve had their fill, they’ll let us dance through the bodies they’ve begun. It’s a kindness coyotes never know. Wolves begrudge their little brothers and sisters, occasionally tearing a bold one limb from limb.
The coyotes are here too, a few within nostrils’ range. For the time being they cling to the slopes, showing themselves here and there in a smear of yellow back, the twitch of an outsize ear. Not a yip to be heard. The sight of so many of their brutish big siblings gathered in one place keeps them quiet.
The wolves are co-operating now, large rings of them with noses down, pawing hard to reveal hands and bare rumps and heads. Teams of three and four haul bodies from the earth. Muzzles drive in through the open doors of mortal wounds. Where a shot through the skull or a knife in the back yield little, they make for the softest parts.
Near the heart of the meadow a red-faced female tilts over her find, dipping snout then shoulder in a delirious roll. Anointing herself with the odour of abundance and its brother, peace; the night meat lay ripe for the taking, enough to feed every member of every rival pack.
Wolves can be terribly quiet, pressing the earth with those soft, spreading toes, but when they eat, they give rise to a torrent of noise. I hear it now, and so must the child, the valley a bowl of sound. It grows out of a growl, steady and low, the organizing pulse of the pack. Tearing and gulping form loose, unpredictable strains. Bones wedged between molars crack.
Again a twinge of envy. What is a beak when compared with a mouthful of teeth? I imagine thrusting my face deep into a rib cage I’ve broken open myself, closing my jaws around the chewy wholeness of a heart. Then remember that teeth make a body head-heavy. Ashamed, I extend one long, fused finger, reminding myself of the irreplaceable span of a wing.
A sudden yelp calls my attention back to the field. A yearling prances near the foot of our hill, leading her brother in a game. She bears the prize in her mouth—a portion of leg snapped off at the knee, gnawed about the calf, the foot still strangely pristine. She twists to face her pursuer, grinning through the jagged clamp of her bite. Shaking the leg at him, she sends a chunk flying, unheeded by either of them, but glowing in my eye. Hunger freshens as I follow its arc.
I peer down into the sage bush, angle my head, listen hard through the hum of the feast. Sleeping, I tell myself. Deaf and blind. I could ease down the grade with barely a flap, land where the muscled chunk did, gulp under cover of grass. The child would be none the wiser. I’d be back in the blink of an eye.
— 33 —
RUTH CAN TELL something’s amiss even before she opens the door. The worms are feeding—she can hear that much—yet there exists a dull spot in their sheeting sound. Her eyes take their time widening to the interior gloom, but once they do, the trouble is plain.
The mice are two trays apart, brothers in arms. In their greed they ignore any instinct to flee. Each regards her over a feast in progress—one gnawing a living worm, the other closing its teeth over a quiet tail end. Ruth has never moved so swiftly in all her life. Too late, the mice retreat, scrambling over worms like children over logs—only these logs are writhing, deadfall come to life. She plucks the little demons up, one in each fist, and brings her hands together in an almighty rodent-crushing clap.
The impact is great, yet not quite sufficient. A hind leg escapes her grip, kicking. Such a sight might give a woman pause, if it weren’t accompanied by the sensation of needle-fine teeth sinking into her palm. Crying aloud, Ruth grinds her double handful from quick to quiet. Twist, crack, twist. Trickle of mouse blood down the crease between finger and thumb.
She stands in the middle of the room, her hands clasped tight. Inside her skull there is silence. Surrounding her, the soothing flutter of rain-not-rain. Miraculous—they’ve continued feeding, unperturbed. She bends her gaze to the worm bed before her. Her little charges are all softness and trust, equipped neither to fight nor to flee. If she didn’t feed them, they would starve. A thought both comforting and sad.
She takes a breath and steps toward the door. She’ll work the latch with her elbow. Once outside, she’ll think what to do with the mess in her hands.
Thankful’s husband prefers to face out into the room when she shaves him. He needn’t watch in the mirror—he trusts her.
The middle boy brought the hot water this morning, halting at the door, refusing to look his Aunt Thankful in the eye. Doubtless her nightdress made him edgy, the bodice ribbons left untied. And, yes, she may have stooped a little lower than was strictly necessary to take the jug from his hands. Are they ever too young to learn?
Once she gets Hammer settled under the hot, wet towel, she flicks the shaving brush over the knuckles of his near hand. The hand plays dead, then springs, catching hold of her by the thigh. She squeals for him, and he squeezes hard, then releases, laughing through the steam.
She wets the brush and swirls it into the soap’s hollow—brisk circles are best, folding in the air. She’s good at this, one of the many skills a bit-part actress picks up to be sure and keep her job. While Charlotte de Courcey was busy rehearsing, Thankful learned how to sew far better than her mother could have taught her, how to sponge stage blood from a doublet, how to groom restive actors and otherwise tend to their needs.
Hammer’s face is tricky, so many crags, even when he’s relaxed. She nicked him badly the first time, just below the jaw. He didn’t yelp, didn’t even flinch. Just bled for her, pink through the lather, resolving into long red drops.
She lifts away the towel. He opens his black eyes halfway, regarding her for a moment before closing them again. She lathers the same pattern she will shave, beginning at his throat-apple, circling up and out. She’s reached his right nostril when a knock sounds at the door. Two sharp raps, bolder than any delivered by the children. Mother Hammer has carried the breakfast up herself.
“Come.” Charlotte’s only answer to knuckles at t
he dressing-room door. Never a homely Come in. Or worse, the response favoured by Thankful’s mother, Who is it? Who’s there?
Mother Hammer pushes the door open wide as though she would air out the room, the breakfast tray balanced on one mannish arm. Despite herself, Thankful edges round to take a position at Hammer’s back.
His head snaps up from the chair. “Ah, my good wife.”
Mother Hammer crosses to the bedside table and deposits the tray, then straightens to survey the room. Her pale eyes pick out Thankful’s costume from the night before, lying where she slipped out of it at the foot of the bed.
“Half a dozen eggs for you this morning, Mr. Hammer.” The first wife stares Thankful in the eye. “To promote begetting.”
Thankful spreads a hand over their husband’s shoulder and feels it sag. He drops his head back and closes his eyes.
“You’re very good, Mother Hammer, to wait on us so.” Thankful should probably stop there, but her hand—the one not gripping Hammer—has other ideas. It rises to curl about the neck of her nightdress, drawing its frilled gap down. The air on her bare breast is shocking. She feels her nipple stand.
The first wife makes coins of her eyes.
“Was there something else?” Thankful hears the quaver and hates it. Hastily tucks the breast away. Mother Hammer’s silence is frightening. The room seems to grow narrower as she leaves it, collapsing in on itself in her wake.
Ursula doles out the porridge like a punishment. Every male at the table shrinks back to avoid getting splattered—her three fine boys, then the hired man, then Lal. When Lal reaches to be first at the cream jug, she brings her spoon down across his wrist with a gluey thwack. He yips, his bright eyes rolling. The hired man lowers his gaze.
A moment passes before Joseph rises to take possession of the jug. He tilts it first over Baby Joe’s bowl, then Joe’s and finally his own. Ursula waits, spoon at the ready, arm aching to fall. But Lal thwarts her. Manages to hold his tongue.
Joseph passes the jug to Brother Drown, who spills a small stream over his portion and passes it on. Ursula skirts Hammer’s empty chair and the one beside it, working the spoon like a chisel, gouging deep into the pot. She pounds a great dollop into Sister Ruth’s bowl, glancing up to find Lal holding the cream jug, unsure what to do.
“What are you waiting for?”
He jerks a yellow surge from the jug’s pinched lip, then shoves it, doily and all, across the table. Ruth takes up the cream and pours.
As usual, Sister Eudora has come to the table looking wild. Hunched shoulders and hollow eyes. Ursula ladles out a helping so large it threatens to overflow her bowl. Might put some meat on her bones.
Josephine enters bearing a platter of fried eggs just as Ursula drops a serving into her bowl. “Hurry up, girl. Cold food is halfway to no food at all.”
“Yes, Mother.” She follows in Ursula’s footsteps, shovelling out two eggs to each of the boys, three to the hired man and Lal. She rounds the table’s empty head. Two for Ruth, one for Eudora.
“For shame, Josephine.” Ursula scrapes the last glutinous knob of porridge into her own bowl. “Would you have your Aunt Eudora waste away? Give her another.”
Josephine complies, taking a lone egg for herself to compensate, then laying another down for her sister before sliding a pair of unbroken beauties onto Ursula’s plate.
Brother Drown is the first to bow his head. The others follow suit, and Ursula proceeds to address the Lord with her mouth drawn tight. Opening her eyes, she glares at the pair of empty chairs. Half a dozen years gone since her husband returned from a mission among the hard-hearted Gentiles of the eastern states with his third wife in tow. Convert, indeed. Hammer sat grinning like a demon all through supper that first night, his new catch making eyes at him over her peach cobbler—not a pretty sight, given the stubby-lashed pebbles she had set in her head. Her dress, like every dress she’s appeared in since, was a disgrace.
Hammer led his bride up the stairs long before any hint of dark. At least things looked hopeful on that front. It was difficult to be certain with all those petticoats, but the new wife appeared to be favoured with a decent set of hips.
Ursula laughs, a single ha that travels the table’s midline as though it were a fault. To think she ever imagined Thankful would be delivered of anything so precious as a child.
She looks down to find a skin grown over her porridge, a white lacework of lard about the fringes of her eggs. A scarcely audible whimper issues from the place at her left hand. Josepha sits with knife and fork suspended over her lone egg. Having pierced the yolk and found it runny, she cannot bring herself to go on. Beside her, Josephine mops at the yellow leak with a sponge of bread. “There now,” she murmurs. But Josepha’s appetite has turned. She shakes her head slowly, her bottom lip swelling in a pout.
On another day Ursula might choose to indulge her youngest girl, tell her to go ahead and eat around the slime, perhaps even exchange the offending egg for one of her own. Not today. Today she lays the blade of her butter knife to Josepha’s mouth. There is no risk of misunderstanding. The offending lip contracts. The child forks and swallows her food.
Having blanketed the last tray with leaves, Ruth can afford to sit down for a few minutes and rest. Her feet are bad this afternoon. They’ve never been so tender so early on, but then she’s never asked so much of them before. The first five babies seem now to have been grown with little or no movement on her part, as though she were one of Mother Hammer’s potato plants stuck waiting for harvest. Not this time. This time she has work to do.
She lifts her right foot to rest against the opposite thigh, taking it gingerly in both hands. It hurts to rub, but she’ll pay for it later if she doesn’t. Running her thumb down the upturned sole, she persuades trapped blood from ball to heel—three slow passes and she’s awoken a burning tide. She closes her eyes and rubs harder, recalling the longest of roads.
After so many weeks of salt pork and sea biscuits aboard the Thornton, she was violently ill over her first plate of fresh vegetables and meat. New York City seemed a monstrous sprawl—it took forever to fall away beyond the soot-streaked windows of the train. It wasn’t her first time in a passenger car—as a child she’d clung to her mother’s side on the trip south to London, to an unknown life—yet she jumped when the steam whistle screamed, shut her eyes against the speed long before the engine hit its stride. Over the miles she came to trust the understanding between wheel and rail, and opened her eyes again to look out. The country streaming past her was huge.
At Iowa City the railway met its end. Under the direction of their many captains, the faithful made camp on the riverbank. It seemed not one of them had ever constructed a tent. When told to gather wood, the children wondered why, the fires of their acquaintance having fed exclusively on coal.
By the light of those first campfires, the converted made a sorry show. Most were thin, many were skin and bone. Hollow cheeks and fallen chests, scarcely a head over thirty years of age with half its teeth left. They ate well enough that night, the captains moving among them with butter, flour, beans. Once fed, they massed for evening prayer. Only then were they treated to the truth.
It is a great, a wondrous blessing that so many have answered the Lord’s call. Would you have the Church waste money on wagons, on oxen, on mules, when those same funds might purchase passage to Zion for hundreds of weary souls? I feel certain, brothers and sisters, you would not.
They would walk to Zion. Well over a thousand miles. Pushing or pulling all they owned.
They camped on the bank of the Iowa River for a month, oppressed by a hovering, wet heat the likes of which Ruth had never known. The grass jumped with chiggers. Children flowered in rashes of many hues. The only relief came in the form of bucketing rain, a fractured, bellowing sky. The men—few carpenters and even fewer wheelwrights among them—laboured over the handcarts they would come to hate. A knocked-together box on a five-foot frame between a pair of waist-high wheels. The
lucky ones got iron axles, iron tires. The rest made do with unseasoned wood.
It seemed they would never be under way. Then suddenly, one sweltering mid-July morning, they were. Ruth was one of five hundred souls to set out under a missionary captain by the name of James Willie. Men took their places behind crossbars and heaved-to. Women carried infants or helped the older children push from behind. The sad carts howled the news of their departure, drawing Iowa Gentiles to stare from their gates. Many laughed, but those of a more serious turn of mind cried that it was a sin to make beasts of human beings. The faithful replied with song.
By the time they made the Missouri River, hauling precious heirlooms no longer made sense. Clocks and china, family portraits in ponderous frames—all were sacrificed to make way for sacks of flour or the grievous weight of the weak. The flesh of the living, the food it required. All else would be borne by memory alone.
Beyond Loup Fork the land turned dry. The very air took from them now, greedy for the moisture locked in skin, in green and groaning wood. Both shrank and, when they could shrink no more, began to crack. The converted gave up their soap, even their precious bacon, for axle grease, only to draw more sand and wear the soft wood away. Still they sang. Ruth knew by heart the verses the clear-voiced missionary had sung by Mrs. Stopes’s hearth; she warbled along with the rest of the shambling horde, All is well! All is well!
The days bled into weeks, into months. At some point the train was overtaken by a party of carriages, each drawn by four horses or mules in an unseemly surfeit of power. The carriages, dark and gleaming, disgorged men well dressed and well fed. Word travelled through the crowd that these were Saints of high standing, returning from missions abroad. One of the men took the time to deliver a speech concerning the need for continued faith, obedience and prayer. Watching him talk, Ruth found she couldn’t quite focus her eyes. She blinked long and often, until the man closed with a prophecy that they would reach Zion in safety, come what may. Beside her a boy of perhaps five trapped a passing beetle and slipped it wriggling into his mouth.