by Alissa York
Dorrie perches on her stool, her notebook open in her hand. Before her on the workbench lie the partly formed pups. She’s fixed leg bones to rods, wired on skulls and shaped the crude bodies, but can’t bring herself to begin the careful work of plastering. Her notes detail the location of every hollow and ridge, but they’re only numbers, words.
“Can you do the barking pup again?” she asks.
“Sure thing.” Bendy rolls up on all fours, rump to the rafters. His shoulder blades slip to vertical. Clicking his lower jaw out an extra inch, he bares his teeth.
She sets the notebook aside, takes up her block and sketches listlessly, wasting time. A line or two is the most she can manage before she scribbles and begins again. Perhaps using a model is actually clouding her vision. Or perhaps she’s simply tired.
Beneath these and a dozen other excuses, a stream of truth runs cold and clear. None of that matters. Either you can do it or—what if?—you can’t. Her pencil halts, clinging to the page.
“Brother Drown,” she begins.
He barks.
“That’s enough.” She lays the series of aborted sketches face down on her workbench. “That’s enough for tonight.”
“Okay.” He draws back into the high point of his tailbone, stands and shakes out his limbs. Then, looking about him, “You never did a horse?”
She shakes her head.
“Think you would’ve, living here.”
“He doesn’t want me doing anything he didn’t kill.”
“Huh. But would you want to, say, if one died?”
Clear as crystal, Dorrie envisions the huge mare, Ink. It would be a touchy job—thin hide, short, glossy hair, every vein showing through. Never mind the issue of size.
“Yes,” she says finally, “I believe I would.”
He plucks a straw from his shirtsleeve. Plays its tip over the palm of his hand. “That’d be something to see, a horse standing still so long.”
She nods, only half listening, rebuilding Ink’s great barrel in her mind.
“Don’t see that with the wild ones.”
“Hm?”
“Horses. They’re always grazing or fighting or—” He colours a little. “—you know, moving.” He tosses the straw aside. “You’d have to be a cat to catch them sleeping. They hear too good. Crack a twig under your boot a quarter mile off and the whole herd’s up and away.”
Dorrie blinks to picture it.
“Hell, most of the time they spook the second you lay eyes on them. They can feel it.”
She brushes her fingers over the end of the runt’s leg bone, the knob that will give rise to a paw. “Feel what?”
“Your eyes.” He pauses. “Same as a hand.”
Same as she can feel his now, her scalp tingling.
“Yes.” A small word, out before she can swallow it. When she looks up, the barn has shrunk by half. The collection breathes down Bendy’s neck. Birds dangle over his head, perilously close. Again she casts her eyes down, fixing on her scaly knuckles, peeling nails.
“Hey,” he says, “let’s you and me try it.”
“Try what?”
“Close your eyes.”
“Why?”
“Just close them.”
She does, if only to avoid looking at him. Her internal darkness shrinks things further. It’s as though she could reach out a hand and make contact with every creature in the place, from the red-tailed hawk to the bighorn—even Cruikshank Crow on his pillow beneath her cot. Even Bendy. She could easily touch him too.
“Where am I looking?”
She’s startled to find his voice no closer, still a good three yards away. “My hands,” she blurts, fighting the urge to hide their ugliness.
He sighs. “You’re not trying. Try.”
She bites her lip. Then feels it—a soft burning, dead centre between her eyebrows. She raises her right hand, touching a forefinger to the spot. “Here?”
He laughs. “That’s more like it. Okay, now where?”
A flare at the tip of her nose. She touches it.
“Huh.” No laughter this time. “Got it in one. Where now?”
Her finger moves of its own accord to the bone cradle at the base of her throat.
“That’s right.” He says nothing for a time. Then, “How about now?”
At first, her body is a blank. Then, sudden as a slap, her knees begin to sting. He’s looking under her workbench. Tucked away beneath smock, dress and stockings, her legs might as well be bare. She snaps open her eyes, and he lifts his to meet them. Slowly. Not as though she’s caught him doing wrong. As though she’s interrupted him mid-page in a beautiful book.
“This is foolish.” She jerks up off the stool. “You’d best be going.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He scoops his hat up off the floor. At the door he turns. “I’ll come tomorrow night, will I?”
She says nothing.
“We can try the mother if you like.” His grin is uncertain.
“I suppose.”
“Good night, then.” He hesitates at the door.
She turns her back to him. “Good night.”
— 37 —
THE RUN HAD A LOGIC all its own, an inverted sense of things Bendy felt rather than knew. Working the desolate stretch between Fish Springs and Faust’s Station, he risked death by a hoof put wrong, by frying or freezing, by an arrowhead embedded in the skull—yet each of these hazards held a balm of compensation at its core.
The possibility of a bone-crushing tumble came courtesy of great speed, the same speed that caused his blood to beat up and wash his insides to sparkling. In summer, blistering heat made the horizon dance, made his head hum on its stalk, made water—even the body-warm, sulphurous water of Fish Springs—a pleasure close to that which he’d known in the dog girl’s den. His childhood had hardened him to damp and chill, but the desert winter shoved sere blue nails into places the coastal rains had missed. He felt those places crystallize; surfaces that might have been broken, their depths plumbed, could now only be skittered across. Besides, he’d heard death by cold was a close cousin to one of his dearest loves—a deep and untroubled sleep.
Death by Indian attack would be another matter. Still, there was something to be said for an enemy at the margin—glimpsed or imagined between greasewood clump and black volcanic boulder, known to be wreaking havoc just a few stations further west. There’d been the trouble at Williams Station and the resulting battle at Pyramid Lake. Seventy-six white men lost and another twenty-nine wounded, a hastily mustered body of volunteers trapped in the cottonwoods and picked off like bewildered deer. Rumour had it the whole mess had started over a squaw, Williams or one of his brothers or someone else entirely forcing himself on her and paying a heavy price. Pyramid Lake was the worst of it in terms of numbers, but the raids continued, several ending with riders or station keepers lying dead.
Most of Bendy’s route lay through the wide open, where he’d spot any trouble against alkali flats or snow. Any mount he’d be riding would be a match for an Indian pony; nearly all the animals on Egan’s division were just broken, fresh from the wild. They were fast the way only prey can be, and they feared nothing for their flint-hard hooves.
Of course, there were hills, passes where the land folded and closed in, where a war party could be upon him before he knew what he was about. In those narrow circumstances, he reverted to the old knowledge, the areas of his brain that had formed in reply to blind corners, darkened lanes. As it was, fortune smiled. In a year and a half of service he suffered neither ambush nor open assault.
Even the subtler dangers passed him by. The rigours of the schedule were a punishment to some, but Bendy felt the press of time and purpose like a defining embrace. St. Joseph to Sacramento, nearly two thousand miles, in just ten days. Seventy-five miles give or take between home stations, eight to fifteen of them per horse. The mail must go through. The mail must go through. The mail must go through.
Some who could handle the pressure buc
kled under the solitude. That portion of the trail sustained few inhabitants—only the hardiest of station keepers and hostlers, not one of them with a woman in tow. Game sightings were so infrequent they stopped the heart. With the exception of the mire around Fish Springs, even the swoop of a bird was rare. For a city boy, Bendy turned out to be a master at being alone. Because he wasn’t. To consider himself solitary would have meant discounting the creatures on whose backs he rode—an idea that never once entered his mind. It would have made as much sense to disregard his own body, for, moments into any ride, he could feel the border between horse and rider begin to fray.
The rapid-fire strike of hoofbeats—right-hind, left-hind, right-fore, left-fore—chased by a hair’s-breadth moment of suspension. Glory. He felt it down the inner traces of his shin bones, just two more ribs in the pony’s cage. Felt it most of all in the fiery springs of his thighs. It beat a path to his heart, rebounded in a racing pulse. The sweat of his own effort melted into the animal’s back lather. He began to blow along with the pair of great bellows between his heels.
Somewhere mid-route, after the second or third change of horses, he began to feel as though his eyes were slipping back to the sides of his skull. Then horse and rider looked out as one, Bendy’s field of vision widening to encompass all but a narrow strip of forehead and a rippling wake of tail. By the time he reached Fish Springs or Faust’s Station and passed on his mochila of mail, it seemed as though separating from his final mount would require a blade of some length, the spilling of considerable blood.
Attempts to puzzle it all through never progressed far. Thinking on the back of a galloping horse wasn’t thinking at all, but a kind of blissful streaming—the mind relaxing its grip, giving up its holdings to the wind. He fared little better in the between times. Swing station stops were barely that, his heels touching down as Dan Pitch’s had when he’d vaulted over Belle’s forgiving back. Unlike Pitch, Bendy traded one horse for another, slipping his mochila free from one saddle horn and buttonholing it over the next. A fresh set of reins gracing his palm, he’d break for the horizon before his backside ever touched down.
At the home stations he knew the gift of true fatigue. As he slid down from the last of the day’s ponies gone rubbery beneath him, he too would be close to collapse, his joints shaken so slack he feared they might give way entirely, leaving him tangled in the dirt like a mess of twine. After a plate of something salty and warm, and some bread unleavened by female hands, he was bound for the nearest bunk.
Two months into the job, continued raids forced a temporary suspension of operations between Salt Lake City and the Carson Valley. Through June, Bendy cooled his heels, tending stock at Fish Springs while stations further west were rebuilt, fortified and supplied with guards.
The springs wriggled with small silvery fish that fried up nicely in a smear of lard—a taste his coast-raised tongue had come to miss. To the west the trail cut through alkali glitter up into the hills, to the east it skirted marsh. Dawn and dusk were raucous with wheeling flocks. Fishing and stable work aside, the time lay heavy on Bendy’s hands. He began to explore.
Prowling the marsh’s verge, he found it thick with life. Bayonet grass sighed with muskrat, shivered with snake. Reeds, when parted, revealed nest after nest. Even the reek of the place was rich. Bendy penetrated further, careful of sinks. Coming upon a snowy egret fishing, he found he couldn’t help but copy its shaggy dance. Tilt and shift the torso, lift one foot, make a lunging, beak-jabbing rush.
When the run started up again later that summer, Bendy found he loved the ride all the better for having made do without it.
There was more likely to be talk at the eastern limit of his route, where Doc Faust, the station keeper, was fond of telling tales. Bendy overheard portions from where he lay, the meat of each narrative bleeding into dream state.
Being the only non-Mormon among the riders and hostlers in those parts, he had trouble getting his bearings amid the storied landscape that began to unfold. He could never quite get a fix on the order of things—though it scarcely seemed to matter, as each chapter was more or less the same. The Saints gathered together, erected temples, planted crops and raised stock. They began to prosper. They were driven from their homes. Kirtland, Ohio. Far West, Missouri. A cursed hamlet called Haun’s Mill. A fine city called Nauvoo the Beautiful, built up out of nothing, somewhere in Illinois. Only the town of Carthage stood apart. It was there that the Prophet himself met his end, plummeting through a hail of lead into the blackface mob below. Bendy tumbled alongside him, landing in a dark well of sleep.
Over time the frayed narrative wound into a single cord. One end led off into the ether, but the other looped around Bendy where he lay in his bunk. Every mention of persecution, of homelessness, was a chafing tug. There was hope, though, a happy ending of sorts. Joseph Smith’s people had made their way to a wilderness all their own. When their enemies had tried to drive them even further, the Saints would no longer be moved.
From time to time the captain of a supply train or a carrier for the mule-packed regular mail stopped in. Passengers were few and far between, the stage forsaking that leg of the route for months at a time. When they did appear, they were almost always male. An exception arrived one spring night when the ponies had been running for just over a year, a girl of perhaps nineteen, travelling in her uncle’s care. She would’ve been fetching—dark, lashy eyes—but for the strawberry mark that had her by the throat. Three fat, red fingers curled up over her chin and across one cheek. She kept quiet. Kept back from the candle’s glow.
The uncle was well spoken, the kind Faust warmed to, being a learned man himself. Together the two of them took on the story of all stories—the New World miracle at the core of the belief they shared.
“Imagine,” the uncle began, “he was but a boy of fourteen when the Lord came to him in the grove.”
Faust nodded. “Seeking counsel even then.”
“Well, he was torn, wasn’t he. So many factions.”
“Methodists, Baptists, Campbellites, Footwashers, Shakers—”
“All of them corrupt, abominations in the sight of the Lord.”
A deeper nodding, almost a rocking, from the station keeper now. “The Lord told him so. Told him to wait.”
The uncle’s head answered with a slow shake of its own. “Three long years until the Angel Moroni came.”
Here Bendy saw the girl’s eyes flutter closed, the loss of reflection carving two black pits in her unfortunate face. It was the smallest and most sensuous of movements. He felt his own eyelids follow suit, the resulting darkness giving rise to desire. It wasn’t the act he craved so much as that which he imagined would come afterwards. It was a luxury he and Philomena could never afford—the pair of them closing their eyes as one, slipping together into sleep. He settled for toppling sideways on his bunk, following the great weight of his head.
The uncle murmured on. “Even then Brother Joseph had to wait. Four more years, four more visits from the Lord’s messenger. Even after he’d been to Cumorah, unearthed the treasure, feasted his eyes upon the golden plates.”
Bendy came close to letting go then, allowing himself to drift off. If the story was about gold, he’d heard it a hundred times before.
“Put them back, Moroni told him,” said Faust. “The time for bringing the plates forth has yet to arrive.”
Bendy’s ear—the one not pressed to his folded-coat pillow—pricked up. Put them back?
“Ah, Joseph.” The uncle gave a long sigh. “Such obedience. Such persistence when the time finally came to unearth the treasure and translate the story engraved thereon.”
“He was no man of letters.” Faust chuckled. “Little matter when you read with the eyes of the Lord.”
“The world doubted him.” The uncle seemed to sing now. “Some fought to discredit him. Some thought only of the gold, of melting the sacred plates.”
“Let them try,” Faust cried, indignant. “Let them mount up to h
eaven and try.”
Bendy’s head was a sack of sand. It split a seam, his consciousness scattering, whirling like the many desert storms he’d ridden through. Sleep curled itself around the one notion too weighty to blow away. Imagine a man who could drag gold from the earth and see nothing of its lustre on account of the message it bore. A man who, once he’d gleaned that message, returned the precious metal to its owner on high.
Nineteen months after two lean men on opposite sides of a continent kicked off on their inaugural rides, the ponies ceased to run. All it took was the meeting of two wires. Word crackled across the country now in a garble of dot and dash—electricity a current that put the rush of mere horseflesh to shame. It was early November, 1861. Bendy might have found work at one of the stage stations, or out on Egan’s ranch at Deep Creek, but the idea held little appeal. Standing still in the heart of nowhere seemed a poor substitute for travelling breakneck along its spine.
All that hard riding had shaken a good deal of his old thinking free. He recalled an eastward impulse, but it had faded to a notion, and a vague one at that. Still, when he set out from Fish Springs the day after handing off his final mochila of mail, east was the direction in which he rode.
Anything slower than a gallop felt like riding through a saddle-high swamp, but it didn’t seem fair to push Stand, not when they had so far to go. She too had done her time on the route. Unwilling to give her up, Bendy had worked out a lease of sorts, whereby she’d been kept to stations along his section of the line. Other men had ridden her, but this was a fact of no great concern. Cruel or careless riders seldom lasted long, being cheaper and more expendable than the animals they rode.
Still, the route had taken its toll. Stand was all wood and wire now, the long skull plain beneath her bleached-out face. She would carry him as far as the western bank of the Missouri. There, after a snow-whipped run that would’ve been routine to her only a month before, she would wait for him to dismount, then drop dead of a worn-out heart.