by Alissa York
Back in his bed, Lal fights to control his body’s trembling. He’s a small boy with the ague. He’s dying. His mother is busy in the cow barn—she won’t come if he calls.
Idiot. He’s a man of nineteen years, possessed of the knowledge he’s longed for since the first of many growth spurts stretched him like a thief on the rack. Thankful. It was a blessing her bedchamber was dark. He wasn’t called upon to confront her face—all angles where there ought to have been roundness, grey eyes where he wished for a deep, reassuring brown. The hair, too, was all wrong. He wanted it loose, wanted to follow its slick drop with his fingers to where it ended at the small of a back. He made do. Took a mass of spirals in his fist and held on.
As for the rest of her—breasts and spreading legs and hole—Thankful was a woman, all right. All right and all wrong. It hadn’t stopped him losing himself inside her, burying his need.
Shivers animate every inch of him now, despite the night’s warmth. He hauls the blanket up to his chin, the stubble there itchy upon contact with the wool. Thankful. Not Ruth. For a moment he considers the unconsiderable. Probably never Ruth.
The thumb is close by, just under the blanket’s hem. He pops it out. “I don’t feel good,” he moans.
Good?
“She’s—” Lal glances about in the blackness. “She’s his.”
He asked for it.
“He’ll kill me.”
He’ll never find out.
Lal’s teeth chatter. “He won’t?”
The thumb nestles against his lips. Trust me.
— 40 —
THE TRACKER ARRIVES AT DAWN. The ranch house shows signs of life, but Hammer and the son have yet to emerge. The cottontail is gone, the sinew snapped clean through. The Tracker reads what happened on the ground at his feet. The initial approach. The warning scented, read full circle around the trap. The retreat, the turn, the bursting, bounding run—the leap. On the far side of the pit, the long skid of his landing, the triumphant trot away.
It’s foolish, Erastus knows, but, just to be certain, he has the Tracker clear the brushy cover aside. Faced with the empty trap, he feels a similar pit open in the region of his bowels. First it drags off a poisoned carcass and now this?
Smart, the Tracker has said, but something in the Indian’s hooded eyes hints at more.
What’s it after? Not a single foal, not even a chicken, taken. The damn thing won’t make a kill and won’t clear off.
This one smart. Maybe, but a man can always outwit an animal. Erastus has an idea—a needle-sharp notion that mends his misgivings, sewing the internal pit closed. Dropping a smile into the hole before him, he glances up to meet the Tracker’s gaze. “First light tomorrow.”
He can count on the Indian to ask no questions. Just as he can count on him to show.
Ursula stoops at the edge of the vegetable plot, her back paining her just where a mother’s will. Within eye’s reach, three of her five little darlings work. Her girls are busy by the wash house—Josephine wrestling a mass of petticoats over the line, Josepha crouching over the basket, selecting the next sodden twist. Joseph is visible through the open door of the cow barn, shuffling forward and back, his shovel dipping. The other two are out of sight for the moment, but Ursula knows exactly where they are—Joe on his knees before the kitchen stove, Baby Joe beside him, filling his bucket with ash.
Any minute now, her youngest will scoot from the kitchen door, like as not sending up a ghostly cloud. She may be called upon to chide him for his carelessness, but she’ll wait a moment before doing so, watch to see if he corrects himself. Who can say—the child might do as he’s been told and take a direct path to the ash pile, swinging the pail only after he’s emptied it. She’s not overly concerned. He’s still the baby. He’ll grow up soon enough when he holds a brand new brother or sister in his arms.
Finding she’s reached the end of a row, Ursula looks back over her trail of uprooted weeds. She straightens just as Baby Joe comes spurting from the kitchen door, her movement arresting him in his tracks. The smallest puff of ash escapes his bucket. He stands blank-faced for a moment, then hazards a smile her way. Ursula’s heart is suddenly full. She grants her youngest the rarest of gifts—the long, low trill of her laugh.
Thankful is hearing things. It’s the third time tonight she’s hurried to unbolt her chamber door. No one. Not a soul. She closes the door slowly, locking herself back in.
Unwilling to return to her bed, she crosses to the window and looks down. The wolf is a silver memory. Not dead, though, despite Hammer’s assurances; its singing reached her while she lay wakeful last night. She both looks for it and doesn’t, unsure which is the more likely to keep it away.
Leaning out a little, she gulps at what passes for a midnight breeze. If only she could put more of herself out there, sit on the wide sill, dangle her legs in the air. Well, she could, couldn’t she? What’s stopping her? Her nightdress, for one. It drags at her shoulders, pools about her feet. Its folds would thwart her, send her toppling headlong to the verandah roof.
Most nights the idea would be enough to send her back to bed. Tonight she fights her way out of its gossamer mass. Forty pearl buttons drive her fingers mad. Then she’s free of it. Showing herself at the casement like a naughty princess.
Easy now. Climb up in a crouch, work one foot out, then the other. She can feel the night’s freshness. Wriggling her toes, she knows a sudden flood of promise, like a child laying claim to a swing. As the bare halves of her bottom widen across the sill, she pictures the arrowhead of dampness her sex is printing there. And thinks again of Lal.
As though conjured, her young lover appears below. He moves in the far left corner of all she surveys, his head illumined, dragging his dark body like a tide. She wills him to look up. He’ll see her perched here like an exotic bird. Like Juliet without the burden of a costume. Like a woman he can’t help but adore.
Only he’s facing precisely the wrong way. He’s leaving the ranch house, forsaking it for a much smaller structure hidden from Thankful’s eye. Her heart slows with understanding, becomes a cool-skinned creature lodged in mud. She’s not fool enough to imagine a tryst. It’s worse than that. He’s still pining for her—after all Thankful’s given him, after all she’s allowed him to do.
Let him scratch. Let him drag his damn nail over her door until it breaks and bleeds—she’ll cut her arm off before she lets the thankless bastard in.
It’s the arm that betrays her in the end. It strikes during the silence that follows the third scratching—the one where he might be deciding to give up—taking matters, in the form of the brass bolt, into its own trembling hand. His face in the crack weakens the rest of her. He slips inside with a smile.
Tonight he’s bolder. He clutches at her rib cage, her buttocks, her calves. His hands are most certainly a farm boy’s. He lifts her breasts as though weighing them, worries her nipples with his thumb to see what they do. He stops short of fingering her sex, approaching it blindly with his own.
Thankful has never felt anything like it. It’s like being pawed over by some creature come loping from the wild. No knowledge, only want. A touch that could kill her, it’s that clumsy. That powerful. That good.
Lal tries lying down, but the size of what he’s done—done again—inhabits him, making him too large for his boy’s thin bed. He considers leaving the room, the house, stalking about the yard—then imagines his bulk on the stairs waking his mother, rousing her suspicious mind. No outside, then, not this night. That much decided, he assumes the only bearable position, slouched at his open window. Here, at least, he can breathe.
And see. The sudden breach of the stable door—a cleft of darker dark from which the loose-limbed figure of Bendy Drown divides itself, becoming distinct. Out for a piss. No, a stroll. No. Lal feels a sudden buzzing, like a bright skullcap fitted to his crown. Drown is out to stretch more than his legs. He’s crossing the yard in a hurry, a spring in his step. And now another barn door—this on
e showing a warm strip of light—takes him in.
Lal throws caution to the wind. He frees himself from his bedchamber, follows corridor to staircase, front hall to kitchen, creaking all the way. The latch on the kitchen door clatters. He’s directly beneath his mother, but she won’t mind when she learns what he’s discovered. She’ll thank him, Lal thinks with a flush, just as his father will.
He hasn’t paused to drag on his boots, and the rough ground troubles his soles. Still, he wastes no time, threading between vegetable patch and wash house, sneaking up on the fourth wife’s barn from behind. The window glass is wavy, but clear enough to show a pair of bodies stripped and tangled on a cot.
Only they’re not. At least four paces lie between them, his father’s wife tucked in behind her workbench, intent on the mannequin taking shape beneath her hands, Drown on the floor before her, all forearms—forelegs?—and settled haunches. Sitting like a dog.
Lal stretches out his disappointment, watching them a good long while. The girl’s every movement is in fealty to the thing she’s making. The hired man never even twitches a hair. They’re nowhere near each other, and what’s more, Drown is doing better than no harm—he’s being of service to Hammer, helping the fourth wife get his precious trophies right.
Lal shifts his eyes to take in the tiered crowd. Beasts of half-light and haze, such as come to him rarely in dreams. His heart skitters briefly, then sinks. There’s nothing for him here. He leaves them to it—animals, woman, man. Walks heavily back the way he came.
Nothing to record. And yet Erastus, pacing the dining-room floor, grips the kill book in his hands. For reasons as yet unarticulated to himself, the lamp remains unlit. Without benefit of its light, he can’t even peruse the book’s contents—a pastime he’s not generally disposed to in any case. He turns its bulk in his hands. What, then? Why unlock the cabinet in the first place, why take the damn thing down?
What else is a man to do when he’s woken in the middle of the night and there’s no woman beside him in bed? This time it wasn’t the wolf that roused him, but the sound of someone moving beyond his chamber door. Or the dream of a sound. The corridor lay dark and deserted by the time he stood peering down its length.
The book weighs against his fingers. It’s high time he was making another entry. 29thof May 1867. No kill. No wish to. Maybe Ursula’s right. Would it signify if he never hunted again?
The moment the thought presents itself, he puts a shoulder to it, shoves it away. It’s nothing to do with him. It’s Eudora. She’s taking so long—too long, dammit—to finish those wolves. What’s the point of bringing her anything fresh? Did she even dress those jackrabbits like she promised? For all Erastus knows, she could have laid them aside to rot.
Again he turns the dark book in his hands. There are kills he hasn’t recorded. Most recently, the look-alike brothers, mouldering some three years under the far pasture’s crust. Not even a twinge of guilt there. They were fool enough to help themselves to what was his, and anyway, like he said at the time, it was doing them a favour to shed their sinful blood. The same couldn’t be said for the many Gentiles he’d taken care of back in Nauvoo—not one of them died saved. But that was different. That was war.
Ursula had been his wife for a few short months, and already Erastus had given up hoping she’d remove the ugly locket ring from her married hand. He’d built a house for her, digging the foundations long before she accepted him. He’d had little choice but to guess at the layout she might want, for though he’d called on her countless times—were ever so many proposals laid down at a woman’s feet to be so blithely kicked aside?—she had steered their every conversation down a single path. Always Brother Joseph. All he’d endured. All he’d created in God’s name.
So it was that Erastus alone imagined, then erected, their first home. Logs hewn and dragged and fitted. Modest but well made. He set it in the midst of a hayfield—sown when he scarcely dared hope, high and swaying the day he brought her home.
The hay was drying in stacks the night marauders set fire to their farm. Erastus counted three of them. He let Ursula out the bedroom window, told her to run for the treeline and lie low. For once she did his bidding without question, without narrowing her brilliant eyes.
Having flushed many a creature from its cover, Erastus knew well what the trio of shapes had in mind. He was meant to belt it for the well in a desperate bid to save his house, making himself good sport, a clear target against the flickering yard. Instead, he let the log walls smoulder around him, waiting until the last possible moment before he took the back window himself and crouched beneath its smoking sill.
One haystack, set a little apart from the others, had yet to catch. Erastus crawled for it, rifle thrust out before him. Interring himself in its sweetness, he felt the mice around him burrow deep.
The Gentiles couldn’t have known how long he would wait. Once they figured every Saint on the place had fled or burned, they began to move boldly about the yard. Erastus picked them off in sequence. The first taken unawares, the second firing a pair of guesswork shots before turning tail, the third running straight for the haystack in his panic, showing Erastus the space between his eyes.
It made sense to burn rather than bury the dead. Erastus dragged the bodies—two by their boots, the third by his armpits—as far inside the crackling cottage as he dared. He watched from a safe distance until the roof beams came tumbling, then set off for the woods in search of his wife.
That winter he rose through the ranks of the Nauvoo Legion, earning himself a reputation as a deadeye shot with an unflinching hand. Whatever he did, he did in the name of righteous duty, and in the fierce, undying faith that his side would prevail. That was before President Young relented, before the Lion of the Lord agreed his people would once again leave behind all they had built up about them. The defeat is still bitter to Erastus. Much as Brother Brigham was right to lead them west—much as Erastus and Ursula and so many others have prospered in the valley of the Great Salt Lake—the fall of that log house, of Nauvoo the Beautiful, pains him still.
No, definitely no remorse. Not for those three or any other. Excepting one. The one whose life he took without reason, before he even knew he was capable of such an act.
He fought because they all did. Because Lalovee Hammer was unbeaten among the men of Carroll County, and so his son must be unbeaten among the boys. In order to match his father’s record, Erastus found he had no choice but to match his style.
The boy’s ear was freckled like the rest of him—Erastus couldn’t help but notice when he spat it out. It was more than enough to elicit a cry of Uncle, and that should have been the end of it, the extent of the damage done. Erastus heard tell of, rather than witnessed, the rest. The wound—perhaps dressed poorly, perhaps not at all—lay open too long, healing over only after a festering contagion had taken hold. The freckled face swelled, ripening cherry red through to a shade just this side of black. There was no talk of murder. Not a whisper. Men fought. Occasionally, one of them died.
With an iron tang in his mouth, Erastus returns suddenly to his present form, finding it hunched in his first wife’s chair. The kill book lies closed on the table. His forehead resting on it God only knows how long.
Lying on his bunk in the small hours, Bendy absently massages his hips. He can think of nothing but Dorrie’s hands. They are ugly, yes, but also terribly, inexplicably beautiful. It would seem there is nothing they cannot do.
Sound stirs the space beneath him, hooves shifting, restlessness passing like a secret from stall to stall. And now, bringing him up on his elbows, the high, inquiring whinny that signals fear. The brown nag. It’ll be nothing—she’s a flighty thing. Still, maybe he ought to descend, light the storm lantern, take a turn about the barn.
For a full minute Bendy regards the rafter blackness, straining his ears. They’re settling now. Definitely nothing. He lies back. Lets fall the lids of his eyes.
Night draws toward morning. The howl is t
aking shape rapidly, Dorrie having finally hit her stride. In the midst of the five new mannequins, she tilts forward on her knees, setting the runt’s left eye. Later, when she’s mounted and sewn the skin—soaking, softening now with the others in the tub—she’ll take the tip of a pin and draw the eyelid down over the ball. Bendy told her they close their eyes completely, but half-mast is as far as she’s willing to go. She can’t bear the idea of them wailing blind.
A current plays along her spine. She pays it little mind—another of the body’s small complaints, brought on by her penitent’s pose.
This time her work has progressed in cycles—runt to father to brothers, mother saved for last. Five centre boards traced, sawn and shaped. Twenty blocks nailed in place. Twenty leg rods stapled. Five skulls wired and affixed. She suspects this may be how she went wrong in the first place, by attempting to raise them up one by one. These are not individual specimens. This is a pack.
While the other four sit back on their haunches, the white wolf stands. The reason for this is simple—it’s how Dorrie sees them, gathered on a moonlit meadow, the edges of which meet the steep inner slopes of her skull.
On the floor by her knee, what’s left of a small batch of plaster glistens in its pot, enough to build up the little one’s nose and lips. After that, she’ll mix up a fresh batch and set to work on the adult male. She dips her putty knife into the pot, scoops a blob onto the bone peninsula of the runt’s skull and begins working up the snout.
Digging out the right nostril, she feels again the tremor in her spine. It’s stronger this time, an almost audible rush. She turns, chin over shoulder. The back window betrays an expression—canine, quicksilver, gone.