by Alissa York
Before they laid leather to horseflesh again, the missionaries requested meat. Captain Willie made them a gift of a sinewy calf. A woman wailed at its slaughter, confusing the skinned carcass with the body of the husband she’d buried in a sandbank some hundred miles before.
The good weather left them. Rations dwindled. Ruth could no longer haul the heavy blankets she would freeze without. The company made it two-thirds of the way into October before a river stole the last of their strength. Crossing the Sweetwater, Ruth felt herself abandon hope. Such promise in a name—and it was indeed a beautiful river, rolling clear over its rocky bed. A sight to lift the spirits. A cold to kill them. On the far bank many lay down and died—little struggle, less sound. The keen air swam with souls.
For days the faithful lay suffering. Nine gave up the ghost the night before rescue wagons came rolling from the west, loaded with beef and potatoes, blankets and buffalo robes, hale and hearty Saints. It took every ounce of will Ruth had to lift her head and survey the glorious scene. Deliverance. A short, hard-faced man approaching, centred between her deadened toes.
Another day gone. Thankful must try not to doze so much during the daylight hours—it makes for interminable nights.
Hammer sleeps like a dog—heat-seeking, fitful. Even after Thankful’s worn him out, he snuffles on the pillow and kicks. Seated by the open window, she tires of watching him—the dull game of guessing where the covers will jump next—and turns her attention outward. As always, the peach trees, strict rows of whispering crowns. Their scent will be sickening come harvest, but for now it’s pleasant enough. Other than that, a clear night sky, half a moon—and movement. Yes, movement, just there, where the orchard butts up against the track.
The moonlight catches, then releases, whatever it is, and Thankful feels herself stand and strain forward into the night. For a long moment she sees nothing. Then a fleeting glimpse as it crosses an open aisle. It gives more of itself away this time—a thing of four legs and alarming size, its colour changeable, its locomotion smooth. Chicago was home to dogs of all descriptions—needle-eyed terriers on ladies’ leads, hip-high bone racks down snowy lanes—but never such a bulk as this. Never such beauty either.
The creature slips from between two trunks and turns right, following the dirt corridor toward the house. Thankful doesn’t speak for fear it will lift its eyes and catch her spying. Instead, she takes a long step back and gropes through the covers for her husband’s twitching foot. She squeezes gently, his heel hard as an apple in her hand, and he yelps himself awake.
“Shh!”
“What—”
“Shhhhhhh.”
He blinks like a boy for a second more, then sits up, wakeful and wary, a man. She holds a finger to her lips, then crooks it to beckon him from the bed.
When they stand together at the casement—Thankful in a diaphanous gown, her husband in nothing but the hairy skin the Lord gave him—she points to where the animal showed itself last. He knows enough to hold his tongue in patience. Moments later it surfaces again, two rows over, this time following the hard-packed aisle away. Thankful gasps. It veers right, disappearing again, and she turns to find Hammer squinting into the night.
Wolf? she mouths.
His face is screwed up, unreadable. Finally, he nods. Stands there, arms at his sides.
“Well?” she hisses.
“Well what?” he says loudly. It will hear him and get away.
“Go get it.”
“Now?” His laugh is louder still. “It’ll be miles off before I’m out the door.”
Her hands, clenched in terror now, find his chest. She would pummel him, but he already has her by the wrists. He walks her backwards to the bed. Her knees buckle and he covers her, quiets her, with his weight.
“Don’t you worry, Thankful.” His moustaches in the hole of her ear. “Nobody’s gonna gobble up my girl.”
She says nothing for a long stretch, sawing, hammering. Then stands back to cast an eye over what she’s done. She sighs. “Can I see the father?”
“Yep.”
Making dual loops of his legs, Bendy draws his tailbone down to form the centre knot of a bow. The human length of his fingers he doubles into toes. Having made forelegs of his arms, he lengthens from the root of his missing tail out through the top of his skull. If he could grow the ears to match the attitude, they’d be oriented forward, easy but erect. He inclines his head gently, training his gaze on his imaginary young.
After a time he steals a glance her way. “I used to do this for a living,” he says. “Back in California when I was a kid.”
She looks up. “Modelling?”
He’s made her curious about him—a realization he experiences in his chest.
“Not exactly. More like what you might call a street show.” For the first time ever, he can imagine telling the whole story. I was in a travelling show, too. Things ended pretty badly. See, there was this girl—
Instead, he says simply, “How about a break?”
She nods, releasing him, and he rises to walk out the kinks. Standing eye to eye with the blacktail buck on the second tier, he squints to inspect its seamless face. “I don’t know how you do it.”
His words have the desired effect. She comes to stand at his side, holding up her lamp.
“Deer heads are finicky.” Her free hand floats up into the lamp’s brightest field. “It takes forever to work around the horns.” She stirs the air at the base of one. “You have to keep sharpening the knife.”
His eyes leave the deer’s scalp to settle on hers. If she were to grow antlers, they’d have to drive up through her dirty hair. Just there. And there.
“You have to watch out near the eyes,” she goes on. “You never pierce the ball, but it’s easy to nick the lid, too.”
Here in the wick’s wavering, he gets his best look yet at her eyes. They’re unsettling in their depth. Beneath the near one, a hair’s-width vein ticks blue.
“Here, too.” Her fingertip touches the niche of the buck’s tear duct. “The skin sticks to this little hollow in the bone.”
It’s hard to picture her crying, but for a moment he does—her sharp cheeks painted with tears.
She trails a pinky down the length of the buck’s nose, crooking it up into the near nostril. “You have to get right up inside. Cut close to the skull. Otherwise you run out of skin when it comes time to mount.”
Again, he can’t help but compare. Her nose is severe in its descent, but softer, more appealing, at its tip. Like the ripe nub of a strawberry, a glory his tongue has known only rarely. He thrills to an imagined sensation—his teeth closing gently, the breath sighing out her nostrils into his mouth.
Her little finger finds its way along the deer’s muzzle to the juncture of top and bottom lip, a spot that, on her own face, shows a bitter little crease. Above it, though, a small, incongruous plumpness. “It takes practice. The first one I did, I cut along the outside of the lip. Had to throw the whole thing away.”
“It’s very fine,” he says quietly.
She withdraws her hand, as though she’s afraid the deer might nip. Stands still a moment, then lowers her lamp and turns.
Tracing the Father’s faint course through the mulberry trees, the Tracker can no longer deny the nearness of dawn. Soon the big house will spring to life, spilling smoke from its chimney, grim children from its door. He daren’t risk being spotted skulking around the yard. No choice, then, but to abandon the wolf’s trail and double back.
Only now, cutting at an oblique across the Father’s loose, deliberate circle, comes a second, even fresher set of tracks. Soles long and broad, stride eager—the trail of an overgrown boy. Four trees on, the Tracker catches sight of the son, his head silver in the before-light, flashing between trunks. Beyond, the little log house, black save for a window’s glow.
Selecting a tree behind which to hide, the Tracker stills himself against its bark before looking out. The son stoops, then drops to all fours and cr
awls for the rutted wall. He lays his cheek to it for a long moment before tucking his boots beneath him and beginning to rise. Lamplight turns the top of his head gold.
The Tracker understands. The broad-hipped, quiet wife is the only one of Hammer’s women he can imagine wanting, the sight of her having stirred him distantly once or twice. The son’s regard, however, is anything but distant—his neck a rigid column, his head cocked in a hungry stare. The Tracker shuts his eyes. Sees blackness and, in its far corner, the swish of an ancient tail.
Wolf’s younger brother was never one to respect taboo. Coyote wanted the woman he couldn’t have—some say daughter, sister, mother-in-law, some say all three. In every version, he comes to them in disguise. Once bedded, the women discover the trick. In their shame, they flee to the heavens, hardening their ruined bodies to become stars.
The Tracker cracks his eyelids on the first threat of light. Still he doesn’t move. The scene at the lone window prevents him.
Slowly, almost delicately, the son unfurls the fist at his left side. Raising it up, he brings his thumb to his mouth. The Tracker can hear nothing, but it’s clear the son is speaking—his lips churning with a pained and private voice.
A shiver runs through the Tracker, scalp to sole. Taking a step back, he feels the tree’s impression come with him, written on his cheek and chest. The little forest presents many paths. He chooses one and makes his way down its length, resisting the urge to run.
Dawn is breaking. Bendy left hours ago, yet Dorrie can still feel the effect of his unblinking eyes—a raw smarting wherever his gaze came to rest. She presses the tip of her middle finger to the corner of her lip.
It’s very fine.
He was referring to the buck’s mouth, of course, not hers. Still, the memory causes her to cross to the washstand in search of an object she hasn’t handled in years. The hand mirror, like the hairbrush it lies beneath, is silver, degraded to iridescent black. What would Mama say if she could see her parting gift now, lying beside a yellowed basin and a battered tin jug?
Mama’s hundred strokes. Dorrie never once brushed her own hair before coming to the Hammer ranch. Left to her own devices, she manages only the minimum required to keep matted clumps at bay, loosing and reforming her braid perhaps once a week. At least she still uses the brush; the mirror has lain untouched since the morning she removed her few belongings from the ranch house and took up permanent residence in the old barn. She’s come to think of its oval face as a holder of sorts, a saucer to the cup of the brush. Stooping over it now, she peers into its gloomy return.
Very fine.
She shifts her gaze from one sore spot to the next, finding nothing but plain. Worse than plain. Strange.
It wasn’t until she crested her first decade that things began to go wrong with Dorrie’s looks. Her dark, deep-set eyes receded, moving from fetching to frightening—a pair of tracks sunk deep in snow. Her mouth, once pleasingly full, began to seem swollen, compressed between lengthening nose and chin. Only one feature held true. As long as Mama was around to look after it, Dorrie’s black hair shone. But hair alone does not a beauty make. Papa was right, though surely he never meant for Dorrie to hear.
He and Mama must have thought she was still out in the shed, hard at work on the yellow barn cat, her most ambitious project to date. She was just slipping off her boots, about to pad through to the parlour in search of a spool of thread, when she heard raised voices from down the hall.
“It was a hell of a risk, but I took it. You think I’d have kept her if I’d known she’d turn out looking like that?”
“You kept her? If it were down to you—”
“All right, all right.”
“Lyman, she’s our child.”
“That’s as may be, but she won’t be a child for long.”
“She’s thirteen!”
“And the way things are looking, we’ll still be saddled with her when she’s thirty.”
There may have been more, but by then Dorrie was retreating, clutching her boots to her chest, easing the back door closed.
She stares into the dark puddle of the glass. So what if she isn’t much to look at? If her three sister-wives are anything to go by, beauty is no bar to misery. At least Hammer is content not to touch her—save once, but she won’t think on that now. Being plain and strange spares her the burden of his desire. But even as the notion soothes her, its shadow stretches long. And every other man’s too.
— 34 —
GREEN VALLEY ROAD led to White Rock Road—pretty names, but Bendy never forgot he was passing through the land gold built. As he rode into Placerville, he couldn’t help recalling its original name of Hangtown—a legacy of violence still palpable along the muddy streets. He kept his eyes to himself, asked directions of a plump washerwoman and pushed on through.
Mounting into the western summits of the Sierras, he encountered the first flaw in his plan. Though he’d only ever seen snow from a distance, he’d heard plenty of miner’s tales—none of which had done it justice. He was surrounded by great shivering crests of the stuff, blinding mounds. The drifts were head deep in places, seemingly bottomless in the gullies and draws. Stand was undaunted, but she was only one horse. If it hadn’t been for the trains of pack mules keeping the road open, they never would’ve made it through.
Buckland’s Station in the Territory of Nevada presented the second flaw—talk of hostile Indians in the country ahead. Who knew how many of them watched Bendy undetected. The only braves he actually crossed paths with were too taken up with driving a herd of ponies to afford him a second glance.
At Carson Sink he came upon a team of station builders—several men axing and dragging willows for a corduroy road while others stamped barefoot in a bath of adobe mud. He asked the way forward, nothing more.
After surmounting the brutal Sierras, Stand proved herself more than equal to a series of desert ranges, as well as to the thirst and drilling winds of the barren tracts between. It seemed no privation was too great for her, and so long as she kept her footing, Bendy swore he would keep his seat.
He was in Utah Territory before he encountered a second station-building team. Leaning back in his saddle, he wound down a steep grade above half a dozen men who were piling up a lonesome dwelling out of stone. Again he asked only for directions. When the inevitable where-you-headed arose, he offered the lone syllable, East.
Meanwhile, despite what he told himself about the green and peopled stretches at the limit of the route, Bendy was falling victim to the desert’s pull. And push. While drawing him through its vastness, it drove that same space inside. He carried its lovely, wrung-out weightlessness with him into the treed country around Utah Lake, up through the humming towns to the city that was the Territory’s beating heart.
Salt Lake City wasn’t exactly East, but neither was it the West he’d come to know. Yards were tended, porches neat. Fences stood whitewashed, upright. There were children everywhere, faces scrubbed, hands full of feed buckets, laundry baskets, books. Women—all women, it seemed—wore dark, high-necked dresses, unassuming prints. They kept their hair neat and plain, a knife’s-edge centre part, two halves smoothed down from the temples, over the ears and back. Men called one another Brother—Bendy overheard them—hail after neighbourly hail.
He drew up outside the post office and let Stand take her time at the public trough, watching the human whirl out the edges of his eyes. He’d heard a thing or two about Mormons. He would learn soon enough not to use the word. Here in their own Territory, these people referred to themselves as Saints.
“Pardon me,” he said, choosing one of them at random, “is there a Pony Express station hereabouts?” He’d asked the question many times along the route, but this time it felt different, vaguely electric on his lips.
The man turned and pointed to a grand verandah-fronted building across the street. Its swinging signboard read Salt Lake House. “Brother Egan—” He paused, looking Bendy up and down. “—Howard Egan�
�s the man you want to see.”
“Oh, no, I—”
“You won’t find him in there, though.” He arced an index finger westward. “They’re out building stations in the desert.”
Bendy nodded. He tipped his hat as the Saint moved on, then mounted up slowly, his mind a whirring expanse. What he did next confused him, confused Stand too. For the first time ever she resisted him, pulling against the reins for a moment, certain he’d made a mistake. After so many days spent moving toward sun-up, it made no sense to turn her white face back the way they came.
— 35 —
May 25th, 1867
Dear Daughter
Yes in spite of everything I carry on addressing you so.
How could I do it? I know a thousand questions must crowd in upon you now but surely this will be chief among them. How could I comfort my husband knowing what he had done? How could I assure him he was innocent in the eyes of the Lord when I knew in my heart I spoke a blasphemy? Because I was his wife? Yes but the truth must be whole or it is worthless. Dorrie I could do it because the Lord had seen fit to give me you. You must remember. Some part of you must. You were old enough when it happened six or seven years of age at most.
With all the weeping and carry-on it took Mr. Burr an hour or more to choke out the entire tale. Like the fool he is he left the heart of the matter till last mumbling it into my lap in the smallest hours.
I think maybe one of them scampered off he said.
Until then I had been listening through a kind of veil. It fell away at those words. I bucked his head up off my legs. What? I cried. What did you say? His eyes were popping. I was undoing what little calm I had wrought in him but I didn’t care. Tell me I cried. He could scarcely speak. A dress he said I saw a little white dress. In among the bushes up on the hill. But I might have mistook myself. It was night. Show me I said. I didn’t have to tell him twice.