Port Hazard (17 page)

Beecher caught up
with me three blocks away from the Slop Chest. “What we doing today?”

I'd grown tired of the question.

“I'm headed to Mission Street. You can come along if you want. I don't need anyone to stand behind me this trip.”

“I hear different, if it's Goodhue you're going to see. He broke a deacon's neck on East Street fighting over Jesus.”

“I heard something along those lines. I don't intend to argue Scripture.”

“Reckon I'll tag along. I ain't tried riding one of them cable cars.”

“One streetcar's pretty much like all the rest.”

“You shamed to be seen with me, boss?”

“Stop drawing lines in the dirt. This is a friendly visit. The reverend gentleman might not take kindly to two deputies dropping in.”

“I'll wait outside.”

“You're coming inside if you're coming with me. You're no good to me with a wall between.”

“That's what I been saying.”

The conductor, a sidewhiskered Scot with a short clay pipe screwed into the middle of his face, scowled at Beecher, but he took our money. We shared the car with some laborers traveling with their lunch buckets and a ladies' maid with a basket of knitting in her lap; the gentry were wedded to their private carriages and the conductor was adept at blocking access to the steps whenever someone of doubtful character tried to board. We alighted a block short of Mission and walked the rest of the way. Here the buildings were made of proper planed siding and brick, with flower boxes and well-tended gardens fenced off behind wrought iron. Five minutes from Barbary and we might have been separated from it by a thousand miles. The sight of a white man and a Negro walking together drew passing interest from the occasional pedestrian, no more. The Civil War and Emancipation were remote things to genteel San Francisco, like a revolution in Singapore. The male strollers wore brushed bowlers and silk tiles and swung ebony sticks with gold and silver tops. All the women were escorted. Policemen in leather helmets and blue serge congregated on street corners, twirling their sticks. We saw more officers in ten minutes than we'd seen in three weeks. The city had managed to pen up the bad element like Indians on a reservation. I saw then why respectable San Franciscans had little interest in closing down the whorehouses, deadfalls, and opium dens operating within walking distance of their townhouses and colonial palaces; they were protected by a trellis wall, and behaved as if it were made of iron. The place was a powder keg, but they were too busy walking their dogs and raising money to rescue someone else's wayward daughters to look down at the sparking fuse.

The address given to us by a policeman belonged to a modest two-story house with green shutters and a boot scraper shaped like a porcupine on the tiny front porch. I turned a handle that operated a jangling bell on the other side of the painted door.

“Yes?”

We took off our hats in front of an old woman in a floor-length dress with her gray hair in a bun. I inquired if this was the home of Mr. Goodhue.

“
Doctor
Goodhue,” she corrected gently. “He is in his devotions at present.”

I introduced myself and Beecher. “We're deputy federal marshals. We don't require much of his time.”

She took in this information as if I'd told her we'd come to sweep the chimney and let us into a small front parlor containing some mohair furniture and what looked like a complete set of Bowdler's Gibbon next to
The Bible Lover's Illustrated Library
in a small-book press. “Please wait here.”

She went out through a curtained doorway, leaving us alone with the smells of melted wax and walnut stain.

“Smells like church,” Beecher whispered. It was a room designed for whispering.

I made a tour of the papered walls. Carved mahogany framed a series of Renaissance prints of the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the Sermon on the Mount, and the usual Montgomery Ward's run of secular subjects: Cornwallis's surrender, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, fairies, a beefy tenor stuffed into Hamlet's tights. With a few variations, it was the same parlor visitors waited in fron New Hampshire to Seattle, a disappointment after what I'd been told by Nan Feeny. There wasn't a flaming sword or a scrap of brimstone in evidence. I began to wonder if anything she'd said was true, from Goodhue's participation in the violent uprising of '56 to the soiled dove she'd saved from drowning at his hands. Tall tales were a staple on the frontier and it looked as if Barbary was no exception.

“Dr. Goodhue asks that you join him in his cabinet.”

We followed her down a short hallway with tall wainscoting, at the end of which she opened a door and stood aside to let us pass through. This room was scarcely larger than the parlor and unfinished. Plaster had squeezed out between the laths of the walls and frozen like meringue, the naked ceiling hung six inches above our heads, and the floor was made of unplaned pine, laid green so that the planks had warped and drawn apart; they bent beneath our weight, sprang back into shape when it was released, and invited drafts from the crawl space underneath. The addition of a rolltop desk, a wooden chair mounted on a swivel, and a low, plain table supporting a stack of books with burst and shredded bindings had done nothing to convince me we weren't standing in an unconverted lumber room. There was no window, just a copper lamp with a smudged glass chimney burning on the desk.

Our host sat on the swivel with his elbows on the desk and his head propped between his hands, studying a book that lay open and flat on the blotter. He was too big for the chair—nearly too big for the room—and at first glance resembled nothing so much as a tame ape perched on a child's chair for the entertainment of an audience. His shoulders strained the seams of a homespun shirt, his broadcloth trousers, held up by leather galluses, fell short of his ankles, and his feet were shod in farmer's brogans, either one of which was big enough to hang outside a cobbler's shop for advertising. At length he finished the paragraph he was reading, laid an attached ribbon between the pages to mark his place, closed the book, and rotated to face us with his hands on his thighs and his elbows turned out. The book was bound in green cloth, with the legend stamped in gold:
The Fairest Cargo, or The Christian Legions' Crusade Against the White Slave Trade in the New World,
by the Reverend Hobart Thorpe Forrestal. Just in case the point was missed, an illustration inlaid on the cover portrayed a female beauty with an hourglass figure and unfettered hair, clasping her hands to Heaven behind iron bars. No room in the clutter for trumpets and cherubim.

It all seemed like a theater set. I looked around, but couldn't tell for certain if he'd swept a copy of the
Police Gazette
into a drawer when he'd heard us coming. There is no showman like a minister, and no minister quite so authentic in appearance as one who is self-ordained.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” rumbled Owen Goodhue. “I had scarcely hoped that our little campaign would draw the attention of Washington City.”

His likeness on his flyers didn't do him justice. His head was the size of a medicine ball, with iron gray hair parted in the center and plastered into curls like a Roman emperor's ahead of his temples. Purple lesions traced the S-shaped path of his broken nose, and his close-set eyes burned deep in their sockets. The coarse beard began just below the ridge of his cheekbones and plummeted to its abrupt terminus across his collar, sliced off in a straight line as if with a dressmaker's shears. Here was yet another dangerous face to hang in my ever-expanding black gallery.

I said, “We haven't come that far, and we didn't hear about your crusade until we read the
Call
. However, it's what we're here to discuss.”

“And which one are you, Deputy Murdock or Deputy Beecher?”

He had a powerful voice, shaped by the pulpit, and it required control to keep from shaking plaster loose from the laths. He might have trained it by shouting into the barrels he'd made, tuning it by the sound of the echo.

“Page Murdock. This is Edward Anderson Beecher. We represent the United States District Court of the Territory of Montana, presided over by Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne.”

“I've heard of the man. Presbyterian, is he not?”

I said he was. “We're investigating an organization that calls itself the Sons of the Confederacy.”

“A wicked lot. I supported Abolition in eighteen hundred and fifty-one, when it was far less popular than it became later. Are you familiar with the work of the Reverend Forrestal?” Without turning, he reached back and thumped the cover of
The Fairest Cargo
with a forefinger the size of a pinecone.

“I've neglected my reading these past few weeks, apart from the
Call
.” I was trying to steer the conversation back to his pet crusade. He seemed to have a habit of following up each statement with a question that diverted the course.

“You would find it illuminating. The conventional wisdom is that the surrender of that godless man Lee put the period to slavery in these United States. Meanwhile, chaste young white women are being exchanged like currency in broad daylight on the streets of our greatest cities, and forced into degradation which to describe would bring a blush to the cheek of a base pagan. Are you aware of the threat posed by the nation's ice-cream parlors?”

Beecher laughed. Goodhue turned the full heat of his gaze upon him.

“You are amused, my Ethiopian friend; as well you may be, until I explain that most of these establishments are owned and operated by foreigners; Jews and papists, turned in the lathes of Mediterranean seaports where girls are auctioned off in public and conducted in chains to workhouses and brothels, never to be seen again by decent society. These scoundrels ply them with sweets and flattery, and when the tender creatures are sufficiently befogged, offer them employment—stressing that the work is undemanding and respectable—and by these lights lead them down the garden path toward the burning pit. One moment of feminine weakness, and someone's cherished daughter delivers herself to a lifetime of debauchery and an eternity of damnation. I would no sooner allow a child of mine to enter the polished whiteness of one of these emporia than I would escort her into a saloon. Ice cream, you say? The serpent's fruit,
I
say.”

As he spoke, his volume rose, until the room shook with thunder. Just hearing it made me feel hoarse. I cleared my throat.

“I haven't seen any ice-cream parlors in Barbary.”

“There is no reason why you should, since by the time this poor baggage arrives their purpose is done. Hell's broad avenue begins in New York and Boston and Chicago and ends in Portsmouth Square. Stare deeply into the eyes of the next harlot you see; disregard the painted features and tinted hair, the hollow cheeks and lying lips, and you will discern the frail, faded glimmer of the trusting girl who turned her back on church and home, never suspecting it was for the last time.”

Beecher said, “You feel that way, you ought to set up shop in New York or Boston or Chicago. By the time they get here, they're gone for good.”

“That is the crossroads at which the Reverend Forrestal and I part ways. He counsels eradicating this pernicious growth at the point where it blossoms, whereas I am in favor of burning it out at its root. Close an ice-cream parlor, incarcerate its proprietor, and two more will spring up in their place, so long as there is profit to be made. It is simple economics. Destroy the houses of sin, and with them the source of income, and there will be no need for the parlors. Smite the sinners, burn their tabernacles to the ground, baptize them in the blood of the lamb. Sacrifice the sheep that are lost along with those who led them astray, and spare those who may yet be folded back into the flock. In order to rebuild, one must first destroy.”

The walls were still ringing when the door opened from the hallway. The gray-haired woman's face was stoic. “Owen, I have loaves in the oven.”

His voice dropped six feet. “I'm sorry, my dear.”

She drew the door shut. The exchange was the first indication I'd had that she was his wife and not just his housekeeper.

I said, “It's the destruction we've come to talk about. We want to ask you to postpone Judgment Day until we lay this Sons of the Confederacy business to rest.”

“I am far more concerned with the daughters than I am with the Sons. I care not whether they prosper or perish.”

“Some of the names on your list are no threat to anyone's daughter,” I said.

“Infamous assassins, harlots, and thieves! Slay the hosts and the parasites will wither. These targets were not chosen arbitrarily. David declared war upon the Philistines, but he joined battle with Goliath, and thereby claimed victory with but a single stone. I wish you gentlemen well upon your mission, but your objectives are not mine.”

“You won't reconsider?”

“I will not. Indeed, I cannot. Immortal souls are at risk.”

I drew the Deane-Adams.

“That being the case, you're under arrest for obstruction of justice.”

Beecher unbelted his Le Mat and cocked it.

Goodhue's brow darkened. The muscles bunched in his arms and thighs. He looked ready to pounce. Then he smirked in his beard. It wasn't a pretty sight, but I preferred it to Goodhue rampant on a field of hellfire. When he spoke, his tone was level.

“Are you so certain that placing a spiritual leader in a cage will postpone the event you fear, rather than accelerate it?”

I was still thinking about that when the door opened again. Mrs. Goodhue took in the pistols without expression. “A man to see you. He wouldn't give his name.”

The smoldering eyes remained on me. I returned the five-shot to its holster. Beecher lowered his hammer and put up the Confederate pistol.