Effigy Read Online Free Page B

came upon a paragraph headed “Caterpillars and Worms.” She was to squeeze the innards out through the tail end—an act requiring considerable delicacy and, more often than not, practice. But Dorrie’s were not just anyhands. Ruth had brought her one specimen only, and that was the specimen she would mount.
    The silkworm was cool, smooth along its back, bumpy with leg-nubs below. It gave up its insides grudgingly, but Dorrie was patient, beginning again and again at the head, kneading gently, easing its substance along. In the end, skin and innards came apart, the one a flaccid slip, the other a slippery clot. Next, through the exit of the tail-end hole, she entered with a length of hollow straw. It was really that simple. Nothing to measure, nothing to construct. She would blow the shape into it, breathe back its living form.
    As per the Major’s instructions, she held the caterpillar over a lamp’s soft heat while she did so, rotating the straw in her lips so the skin might harden on all sides. One could either remove the straw or cut it off short. Dorrie chose the former, judging it to be the more difficult, and therefore the more professional, choice. Caterpillars marked with vivid designs often required retouching with paint—not a consideration in this case, as her sister-wife’s worm was grey.
    Dorrie wasn’t sure how fragile the finished specimen would prove to be over time, so she prepared a bed of tow for it in a squat and spotless jar. Ruth came for it before the breakfast bell. Her face took on a glow as she held the jar to the window’s weak light. “Such a gift,” she murmured, and Dorrie felt the jabbing again.
    Never having made a friend in her life, Dorrie harbours no illusions about making one of Ruth. It’s enough to know the other woman is there across the yard, working through the day just as Dorrie works through the night.
    Drawing the last stitch through the white wolf’s pliable skin, she ties the thread off in a tiny crystalline knot. Before snipping it,she turns the pelt over, laying it fur-side up across her knees. It’s strangely light, insular yet cool, a blanket of fresh snow in her lap. No sign of the bullet’s path. She runs a finger up the underside, feeling for the puckered scar.

    What a crew, Lord. What a sorry crew. All the thousands of times Ursula imagined herself presiding over a supper table of her own, she never once pictured it looking like this.
    As a girl and then a young woman, Ursula spent every mealtime ladling and fetching, in fealty to the bitter, exacting Harriet Pike and, later, the helpless Elsie Simms. Both of them slave-drivers in their own way. The moment Ursula took her seat, Mrs. Pike or one of her lumpen sons, or the original lump that was their father, would call for more pickles, more cornbread, more stew. The Simmses were no better—Saints or no, they never let her forget they’d taken her in after the Pikes had turned her out. The children were weaker-willed, and every order was preceded by,
Oh, Ursula, dear, would you mind?
, but little else had changed.
    How could she have guessed then at the bloated shape her own household would assume? If it weren’t for the children—her five industrious little angels flanking her left and right—Ursula doubts she would still walk the earth. Strong though she is in both body and mind, she would likely have dropped dead of work, like so many of the women who came westering.
    The thought narrows her eyes, and she sweeps them past her daughters—little Josepha earnestly buttering her own bread, her elder sister, Josephine, taking small, neat bites of stew—to rest on the most recent, and perhaps least supportable, of her husband’s wives. That filthy smock. And that hair, like a mule tail that’snever been groomed. Sister Eudora is bleary-eyed. She’s missed two meals already today, and Ursula was obliged to send Josephine to fetch her just now.
You knock until she comes. Don’t you go in there, mind,