New West Book Review

Mormons & Taxidermy: Alissa York’s “Effigy”

By Jenny Shank, 11-10-08

Effigy
By Alissa York
St. Martin’s Press, 342 pages, $25.95

Effigy, Alissa York’s fascinating, accomplished new novel set largely in Utah territory in 1867, transports the reader to Mormon ranch where the four wives of Erastus Hammer pursue their separate destinies within the strictures placed on them by their marriages and their society.  York lives in Toronto, and Effigy was a finalist for last year’s Giller Prize in Canada.  It’s easy to see why—Effigy is written in convincing, image-rich prose and features a singular cast of characters who interact in complex and surprising ways.

The first wife of Erastus Hammer, Ursula, is a formidable presence overseeing and disapproving of much that goes on at the ranch.  She is the only wife who behaves outwardly as one might expect of a Mormon pioneer woman—spending her time cooking, cleaning, and raising children—yet she is far from a simple figure.  Through lucid flashbacks, we learn that as a young woman in Nauvoo, Illinois, she developed a desperate crush on Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon religion.  Devastated by his death at the hands of a mob in 1844, she collected a lock of Smith’s hair, which she keeps in a ring and occasionally allows her children to touch, with appropriate reverence. 

Only after Smith’s death did Ursula concede to marry Erastus Hammer, but her heart remained faithful to Smith.  The only child she gave birth to, a son named Lal, was born on the caravan Brigham Young led West to establish a settlement in Utah.  Of course, the devout Ursula would never call the territory that—she scolds the hired man, Bendy, that it’s properly called “Deseret.  It is the Congress of the United States that referst to this Territory as Utah, men who have never set foot on its blessed soil.”

Eventually Ursula convinces Erastus to take a second wife, as she wants help with the ranch work and to raise more children without having to bear them herself.  Erastus’s next wife, Ruth, is a quiet, lovely woman who learned to cultivate silkworms, and Erastus builds her a shed in which to work.  She spends most of her time there, doting on her silkworms, shirking regular housework, and bearing all the additional children of the family before relinquishing them to Ursula for their care.  Hammer picks up his third wife, Thankful, on a missionary visit to Chicago.  She worked as an actress in a theater of little repute, and as a coquettish woman of no beauty and few prospects, took her chances on heading West with the wealthy rancher.  She keeps Erastus entertained sexually, sewing elaborate costumes to wear to their nightly trysts, but for some reason evades becoming pregnant.  Ursula snoops to discover why, and she and Thankful bristle entertainingly at each other throughout the book.

Erastus’s fourth wife, 16-year-old Dorrie, is the character around which much of the narrative swirls. Erastus is an avid hunter and married Dorrie when she was thirteen upon discovering her unusual gift for taxidermy.  He builds Dorrie a workshop, and she prefers to live there rather than in the house, as she works through the night on mounting the various animals that the increasingly nearsighted Erastus shoots with the help of a Paiute man called Tracker.  At the beginning of the novel, Erastus presents Dorrie with a wolf family, complete except for the father, and for the first time Dorrie struggles with her craft, unable to get the poses right.  Meanwhile, Erastus hires Bendy Down, a former rider on the Pony Express, to take care of the horses, and he and Dorrie forge an unusual friendship.

Two additional figures lurk around the edges of the family, and give the narrative its sense of suspense and unease.  Lal, Hammer’s oldest son who has always been shiftless and unreliable at work, slinks around stealing food from the pantry, uncomfortable with his role as a low-regarded 19-year-old member of the family, mooning over Ruth.  The father wolf begins to haunt the ranch, and Erastus determines to kill it.

As the present action unfolds, York gradually reveals the characters’ pasts, which are colorful and intersect with Western history in interesting ways.  Bendy Down, for example, grew up in a gold mining town in California, where he eventually joined a circus as a contortionist.  The Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 looms large in the history of another character.

York casts a spell with the strange details with which she studs her narrative, such as Bendy’s fling with a fur-covered girl, Ruth’s writhing silk worms’ constant eating, Thankful’s elaborate sex costumes (such as a jacket whose “front panels mimic the face of an owl.  Two well-placed holes allow her nipples to stand in for the glowing eyes."), and the gruesome, precise details of Dorrie’s taxidermy work.  Effigy fulfills John Gardner’s prescription that a great work of fiction should be like a “vivid and continuous dream.  Besides telling a great story, Effigy is doubly satisfying for those with an interest in the pioneer history of the Western United States, which York animates with surpassing skill.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.