by Alissa York
His hand, clean now, reaching to take hold of her arm in its sleeve.
Then the reaction that flares in response to his touch—not rage so much as disgust, pity’s cruellest edge. The idea that he should still try, still hold out hope after so many years.
Then the groan of a stair, a light step descending. Hammer makes no sign of having heard it—and why would he, his pulse drumming, his breath coming quickly, like a dog’s.
The children do not wander. If they need her, they know to lie still and call. Ruth returned from her last feeding an hour ago and won’t stir again for another three. Lal’s tread is clumsier by far. Thankful, then. Coming to snoop at the sound of their voices. Coming to fill her beady eyes.
Ursula waits for the hall floorboard that squeaks, covering the sound when it comes with the last words Hammer can expect to hear. “You know I am, husband.”
Then something he has no cause to hope for, let alone foresee. She lays her own hand over his where it wraps around her arm and, with a gentle squeeze, lifts and guides it to her breast. He sucks air like a man shot through the windpipe. She lowers her face, parting her lips to show him the tip of her tongue. He drives her back against the cupboards, levering up on his tiptoes to smother her mouth with his own.
Three, perhaps four seconds of his grinding whiskers and scrambling hands is all she need endure. Thankful isn’t clever enough to slip away quietly and bide her time. She squawks like a pullet on the chopping block, stands shaking in the wide doorway, hair lank about the pale twist of her face. Hammer spins to face her, his hands in the air. Ursula meets her gaze over their husband’s bristling scalp.
“Did we wake you, sister?”
And now, far too late, the ninny runs.
Ursula steps soundlessly to one side so that, when Hammer turns back to her, she’s no longer there.
“I see now why she wears all that muck on her face.” She smiles. “She’s not much to look at without it.”
“Ursula,” he moans, still not in possession of himself.
“You’d best see to your wife, Mr. Hammer.”
He gapes at her.
She smooths the bib of her apron, erasing any sign of his touch. “Quick now.” She treats him to one of his own hateful grins. “Before she draws the bolt on her door.”
Striking out across the darkened yard, Erastus suffers a tearing sensation in his heart. Weakest of organs, it cleaves to her still. His first. His only. If he could, he would carve the bloody thing out whole.
He cannot seem to reach the horse barn. His stride is comically short—a feeling heightened by the sneaking suspicion that she’s watching him from the kitchen window, perhaps even the open door. Eyes laughing. Mouth cruel.
And now those same damnable features come winding toward him out of the night. Lal is always slithering out of nowhere, this time from the blackness that clings to the stable’s wall. He insinuates himself into Erastus’s path, swivels and falls in step.
“You riding out again, Father?”
As a rule, Erastus would answer with a well-chosen word or two—Man’s work, or Nowhere you’d be of any use—but just now he doesn’t trust himself to speak.
“Father, I—”
Bereft of words, Erastus quiets his son with a single backhanded blow.
Alone in the parlour, Lal nurses his hurt cheek. It no longer throbs—scarcely even smarts—but remains painful all the same. He cups it in his palm, the thumb twisting up under his chin to rub at his bottom lip.
“It’s not fair,” he tells it.
No, it murmurs back, not fair.
Lal thrusts down through his heels, setting the rocking chair in motion. He’s not allowed to sit here. No one is save her, but the household is abed, so his chances of getting caught are slim. In any case, there’s nowhere he’s not unwanted.
“Ruth,” he moans softly.
“Speak up, Lal.”
He starts, the chair dropping him back. Thankful stands before him by the time he rocks forward again. Her dress is a slippery petal pink. He doesn’t know enough to realize the colour doesn’t suit her—only that she looks washed out, maybe even a little green. He glares at her.
“All right, then.” She gives a little quarter turn. “Don’t tell me.”
Scarcely a second elapses before she swivels back and covers Lal’s hand with her own. Only then does he realize it’s still welded to his injured cheek. He flinches, but Thankful holds steady.
“Somebody hit you? Was it her?”
He wants not to respond, but his head shakes itself slowly, his eyes fall closed.
“Him.” An edge in the way she says it.
Lal nods. Her hand leaves his, hovers, and lands again, this time on his knee. Skirts rustle. He lifts his eyelids to find her kneeling before him on the braided rug. Up close she’s definitely greenish. He wonders briefly, distantly, if she might be ill.
Then her other hand on his other knee. It’s difficult to say who’s to blame for what happens next, so equally do the pair of them take part. His legs spreading to the curved limit of the chair’s two arms, Thankful dipping rapidly to nudge her sharp little chin into his groin. He groans an unlimited assent, but she’s already standing.
“You like that?” She turns her back to him, crossing to take up a froth of crimson fabric from the low table beside the armchair.
“Uhn.” The pain is exquisite, blood rushing to answer the touch she’s withdrawn.
She turns, the bundle jammed beneath her arm. “He’s in my bad books too.” Her small teeth flash.
Lal nods, watching her move his way again. She halts just outside his reach.
“Ever heard a mouse scratch?” Thankful works a fingernail across her palm, producing the faintest of sounds. “Sometimes I hear a sound like that at my chamber door.” She regards him keenly. “You know, in the middle of the night.”
She sweeps past him, declining to wait for a reply. It’s just as well—his throat and tongue feel as though they’ve been coated in salt. He wonders if he should rise like a gentleman now that she’s moving to quit the room, but to do so would mean giving himself and his desire away.
Wrenching round to watch her go is better than nothing. She rewards him by repeating the sign—three light scritches written quickly over the lines on a palm. He spreads his hand and apes her, sealing the pact.
Erastus is in no hurry to return to the house, given that he’ll be spending the night alone in Eudora’s disused room. He plays with the idea of checking on the doe’s carcass, but it’s full dark now, and he’s loath to come upon the wolf alone. The near pasture, then, is far enough. He lets Ink drop her great head and graze.
The knuckles of his right hand ring with the memory of Lal’s cheekbone. The boy doesn’t know how soft he’s got it. His namesake, the first Lalovee Hammer, wouldn’t have stood for a son who finished every day God sends with little or nothing to show. The other children work hard for Ursula, but they’re too young as yet to be of any use to Erastus. Besides, they make him edgy—more like a clutch of blinking chicks than children. And anyway, it’s a man’s eldest son who ought to be his right hand.
Any work Lal does has to be laid out for him step by step. Tell him to see to the horses and you’ll find them watered but not fed. Set him to cleaning stalls and he’ll muck out every other one. Little wonder Erastus had to take on hire. At least that much is panning out. Drown earns his board and more, coming close to making up for the handsome sack of nothing Erastus is bound to call his son.
Truly, it’s a lucky thing grandson and granddaddy never crossed paths. Erastus’s father was a hard man in the Missouri backwoods mould. A devil of a shot, he took out every wild pig and redskin unlucky enough to set foot on his land. Besides clearing that willow-choked plot and planting it with corn, he’d had the foresight to build the only gristmill for miles around. It ran near constantly, his children put to work as soon as they stood as high as a fifty-pound sack. Erastus was the second of seven, black-haired Emme
line his senior by a year. He became the eldest when she was dragged by the hem of her dress into the works.
A hard, hard man. Folk thereabouts came to Lalovee Hammer’s for more than the week’s hominy and flour. Saturday nights they came in droves to watch men beat each other senseless on the patch of ground outside the delivery door. When he wasn’t fighting himself, Lalovee was the one to call foul or declare a winner—the former heard rarely, as biting, eye gouging and blows beneath the belt were the order of the day. When the mill’s owner was one of those who stripped to bare chests and braces, only one winner was ever declared. He wasn’t a big man—shorter by a thumb’s width, in fact, than Erastus would eventually stand—but he was wound tighter than any who dared meet him, and he could bite like a bloodhound, holding on until a finger or an ear, or once even a nose tip, swam loose in his mouth.
A man greatly respected, greatly feared. The same man who had pitched apple-weight stones at a son who dared strike out on his own, causing that son to see stars. It’s some kind of love, surely, to try to kill the one who leaves you. Erastus can’t imagine his own son leaving—can’t even picture him filling a pack. One thing’s certain. If, by some miracle, Lal ever did get up on that mess of a horse and ride out for good, Erastus wouldn’t throw a blessed thing.
— 39 —
THE TRACKER DIGS the pit trap where the white man wants it—some twenty paces out back of the cow barn. Hammer looks on for the first yard or so down, during which time the son does his share, steering the barrow smartly to and fro, clearing the telltale mound of fill.
“Good and deep,” Hammer says by way of excusing himself.
The Tracker glances up to see the son already laying down his shovel. “Yes sir,” he calls out after his father. “You heard him, Tracker,” he adds, once Hammer rounds the corner of the barn. “Good and deep.”
They lock gazes. As expected, the son shifts his away, turning it skyward, acting the part of a man impatient with those in his charge. A melody, thin and mocking, stirs in the Tracker’s brain. He works his jaw to its rhythm. The son is scarcely worth warning, but he sings a rough translation all the same.
Coyote
on his tail
he take him away
take him away
on his tail
Coyote take the child away.
The son glares at him a moment, then turns his head to spit. “What the hell was that?”
The Tracker cuts and tosses a shovelful. “Song.”
“I know it’s a song. Since when do you—why’d you sing it?”
“Song for bad child.” The Tracker makes a third leg of the shovel, loaning it his weight. “Warning song.”
The son shrinks visibly before the Tracker’s eyes. “Get to work,” is the best he can manage, barked side-on as he whirls away.
To the beat of the son’s footfalls, the Tracker returns to the task at hand. Blade to earth, boot to blade, earth to sky. He puts his back into it and soon spills sweat from every pore. No one will think to bring him water. Nor will he be welcome at the well mouth, let alone the kitchen door.
By the time he stands neck deep, his thirst is turning dangerous. He floats rather than scrambles out of the hole and skirts the barn on the shady side. They will see him. From the garden, from the windows—the wives, the offspring, perhaps even Hammer himself, will catch sight of him on his knees, canting forward, lowering his face to the trough. They will laugh, or frown, or both. It matters little. The water is warm, fragrant with the meadowy mouth-slime of cows.
Having drunk his fill, the Tracker returns to his hole. Load after load, he diminishes the mound of earth. Pushing the empty barrow across the yard, he passes through a rich river of scent and knows the family to be gathered around the table for the midday meal. At the poplar brake, he cuts leafy switches and piles them high.
Back at the pit, he fixes the bait—a cottontail taken before he began digging. He ties one end of a long sinew around its neck, the other to the dead oak limb he’s driven deep to overhang the hole. The rabbit dangles. He spreads the net over the mouth of the pit, then lays a loose weave of switches over that, saving the last of them to brush his traces from the surrounding ground. He will do so walking backwards, easing himself out of the scene. But first a sweeping glance to assure himself he’s alone.
The Tracker kneels down at the pit’s hidden lip. From the bag at his hip he withdraws a handful of rifle balls. Nothing smells more keenly of danger, but to be certain he nestles the cupped hand into the damp beneath his arm. Then holds it to his nose. Tang of metal, musk of man. Satisfied, he plants the first of them one knuckle deep. Leaving a hand’s breadth between balls, he crabs sideways on his knees, circling the trap.
The clang of the supper bell comes as a great relief, Dorrie glad of the excuse to leave her work behind and trudge through evening birdsong to the house. She’s the last to take her seat at the long table, her chair scraping when she pulls it out, drawing a matching sound from Mother Hammer’s throat.
Hammer scarcely draws breath between muttering the blessing and making demands. “You made any progress on those wolves, Sister Eudora?”
Dorrie keeps her head bowed.
“I’ll come and have another look after supper.”
“No.” A hint of shrillness. Her husband hears it too. He lays down his utensils. All eyes on the youngest, ugliest wife.
“I can’t—” she blurts, “I’m having a little—trouble.”
“Trouble? What trouble? You build a wolf, you cover it with wolfskin.”
“I know.” She looks up. “I am. I will.”
He watches her for a long moment, until a hand in motion distracts him. Lal ravaging the butter dish. “Go easy on that butter, boy.”
The eldest son jumps, yanks his knife back barely smeared. Glancing up, he catches Dorrie watching and twists his lip.
There is one at the table who would sympathize, whose eye she might seek if she dared. Instead, she forces her portion down in silence, rises when the rest of them do and hauls herself back to her cot.
Dorrie cracks an eyelid on blackness. She rises up on one elbow, strikes a match to light her bedside candle and finds herself faced with the same problem she abandoned at the peal of the supper bell. Sitting up, she blinks the crust from her eyes. The wolves haven’t moved. Crowded together on the floor, they stand coated in plaster, ready to receive their skins. Ready as they’ll ever be. Not ready at all.
To a one, the mannequins are lifeless. The runt is by far the worst—no suggestion of play, not even of submission, in its lines. Unless it be the final submission. Flat on its back with its four legs in the air, the smallest of the wolves looks dead.
Dorrie swings her feet out from beneath the covers, planting them on two uneven planks. She rises in a rush and crosses to her workbench. Reaching beneath it, she unhooks her hammer from its cradle of nails.
It’s gone midnight by the time Bendy arrives. Dorrie is on her knees, prying staples from a slab of splintered wood. Around her, the floorboards tell the story of what she’s done.
It’s mostly plaster—dust and chunks, the odd shell-like fragment, smooth or faintly ribbed. Tufts of tow skitter, rushing for the vacuum of the open door. Some escape, others wheel back as Bendy draws it closed. Curls of excelsior sound beneath his boot heels. He walks a slow, crackling line to stand over her where she kneels. She says nothing, intent on the final staple, stubborn in the wood.
“I see you’ve done your worst.”
She shoots him a glare.
“Never mind. You can always—” He’s interrupted by a sound. Somewhere, neither proximate nor truly remote, a wolf sends up the first, low loop of a howl. Speech, even movement, is unthinkable. Only listening, the kind that takes place in the bones.
A second round ascends, ripples and trails away. The third is patchy, skipping over itself, splintering into a query of barks. On its heels a full-throated bawl. Each new vowel is both an echo and terribly new. It goes on forever.
For a full minute, maybe even two.
Dorrie feel its aftermath in her skin, every last little hair rooted in gooseflesh.
“All on his ownsome.” Bendy’s voice startles her. “You heard him before?”
She nods.
“I saw a pack of them at it once. Maybe seven or eight.” He shakes his head. “No two of them ever stick on the same note, but somehow it makes a song.”
Dorrie’s eyes have opened wide. She can feel them drying in her face. “Show me.”
He cocks his head.
She scrambles to her feet, lunging for the sketch block. “Show me a howl.”
Erastus is cold. Eudora hasn’t slept in this room for three years, but it’s as though the bed remembers her lifeless chill. The quilt is dusty, but he drags it up about his neck all the same.
A man with four wives shouldn’t have to sleep alone. He tried Thankful’s door on his way past, but found it bolted. Ursula would laugh at him if he showed his face in her chamber. He could always put in with Ruth, but Thankful’s already fit to be tied. No, best to wait his third wife out. A week, a month—whatever it takes. Patience is a hunter’s virtue. A husband’s even more.
In the dead of night, a thin sound at Thankful’s door. She rises like a giddy girl to let him quickly, quietly in. They must be careful, Hammer snoring next door in the fourth wife’s abandoned room, Mother Hammer like a mastiff down the corridor’s far end.
The bed frame groans, so they lower themselves gingerly to the Persia rug. There can be no games—no hunt and capture, no costumes, no roles. And none are required. She need only lift her nightdress and he’s wrenching his britches down. Thankful knows to help herself along, wasting no time with one so green. She swallows the cry when it comes, shoving her tongue hard against the backs of her teeth.
He leaves before he’s entirely gone down, stuffing himself, elastic now but still large, back into the dingy folds of his smalls. Watching him slip out through her door, Thankful is swamped by an unfamiliar rush. She plunges her left hand down through the skewed neck of her nightdress, taking a nipple between finger and thumb. The unknown feeling comes clear. It is her own, and no one else’s, desire.