Sanctuary (14 page)

The old man's face was twisted into a question mark as he looked at Mary.

“They sell the bones for bonemeal,” she said.

“Aieee. I have been told that, but do they eat this bonemeal?”

“No, but—”

“Or wear it to keep them warm in the winter? Or burn it in their fires?”

Mary shook her head again.

“Ah,” he said. “That is what I thought.”

The old man sat silently, watching the fire eat the cottonwood.

“You know what I think?” he said, not taking his eyes from the fire. “I think that those men are taking the buffalo bones so that no one will ever know about the buffalo.”

He sighed, and Mary could feel the resignation in that breath of air.

“I think that the same men who sent the soldiers and the smallpox and wiped out the buffalo sent those men over there. I think these men were sent to wipe out the trail my people left on this land so that no one will know we were ever here.”

“They must hate us so. If I follow these men, maybe they will lead me to the others and they can tell me what we have done to make them hate us.”

The old man straightened on the log, his head swiveling toward the pishkin. “They are leaving now. I must go so I can follow them.”

“Aieee, is it not a great mystery?”

He rose then, smiled at Mary, and walked back toward the wagon, disappearing seconds later in the trees, just disappearing.…

Mary shuddered as she watched the women busy at their task of curing the meat. She felt that she was encroaching, that she didn't belong, that this time and space belonged to the people from the village.

But deeper—below her Eastern upbringing, below her years in school, below her pale skin—she felt at home. She sat down on a rock, anchored with bonds as tenuous as the smoke from the fire and as strong as the sinews of her body.

It was then that she noticed the preacher, the sharp contrast between black coat and white shirt softened by the smoke in the clearing. His attention was focused across the river, and her eyes followed his up the hillside to a barbed wire fence.

Judd had crossed the river and backtracked cattle to the fence that separated the Bar Nothing ranch from the river bottom. He seemed intent on the posts, examining the points at which the nails had been pulled free to drop the fence, allowing for the passage of the cattle, and then nailed up again.

Judd turned and gazed across the river. Even at that distance, his body seemed stiff, wary. His eyes met the preacher's and they stared across that gulf. They were still staring when Mary looked away.

Eleven

Sheriff Timothy rolled off the slaughterhouse hill toward the Indian shacks like a boulder, and faces hard as stone hid behind cracked windows to watch him come.

Children, jerked into shacks by older brothers and sisters, read their parents' faces and retreated into corners and under beds and huddled there in silence.

There was only one reason the sheriff came to the little village by the dump: to haul one of the people to jail and maybe to prison.

Minds skipped over the past week, wondering for which sin they would be held accountable. Parents worried about the occasions their children had been out of sight. Had one of them broken a window or taken something from an alley behind a house or store? Maybe Sam Jenkins, who traded rotgut whiskey to the people, had told the sheriff. It was illegal for Montana Indians to have whiskey.

Shrouded in shadow, Judd leaned against the stove in his grandmother's shack. He watched the sheriff rumble into camp, and he imagined for a moment that the earth trembled beneath the lawman's feet. His grandmother had made herself invisible, melding into the contours of the rocking chair. Judd had not yet moved outside. Her dark face bled into the dark clothing she wore, and only her eyes—nearly opaque now with cataracts—hinted of the life in that pile of rags.

Judd braced himself, but still he started when he heard the word.

“Outside!” rattled through the village like the first stones in a summer hailstorm. Judd looked at his grandmother and stepped toward the door.

Throughout the village, doors scuffed open and men stepped through. Their faces framed by the windows in the shacks, women and children waited inside to see how their lives would be changed by this day.

“Somebody dropped a Bar Nothing fence, two, three miles downstream,” the sheriff said. “Looks like he took ten or fifteen head across the Milk into the river bottom.”

The sheriff doffed his hat, running his handkerchief around the sweatband and wiping his forehead before returning the white Stetson to his head.

“Cattle seem to have disappeared. No cattle. No hides. No guts. Nothing.”

“But it looks like a lot of people got together across that creek”—his left hand rose to his face, and Timothy scratched his temple—“to cure some meat.”

“Most everthing is gone, but it's got that smell,” he said, turning his face into the gentle breeze. “Just like here. You folks know anything about this?”

Silence. Absolute silence.

Another door opened and Jack Ten Horses, propped on a crutch, hobbled out on his step.

“This doesn't concern you, Jack. Doc says you were still in the surgery when we figure it happened.”

“It concerns me,” Ten Horses said.

Timothy's eyes roved through the camp and settled on Judd.

“Judd, you know anything about this?”

Judd met the sheriff's eyes, but he didn't speak.

“I know you speak English, Judd, so I'll ask you again. Do you know anything about this?”

Silence.

Timothy sighed.

“You people could have saved me a little time, and the judge might have taken that into consideration. But you'd best know that I'll get to the bottom of this. You can count on that.”

“Dirk Newcombe is madder'n hell. He put up a five-hundred-dollar reward for the arrest and conviction of the rustler.”

Timothy rubbed the back of his neck. “Five hundred dollars is a lot of money. Sooner or later I'll get my man.”

More silence.

The sheriff sighed again. “Any of you want to talk, you know where to find me.”

He turned and rumbled toward the hill, and it seemed again that the earth trembled beneath his feet.

The people stayed in the village that day, leaving the garden to the grasshoppers and the hot June sun. Whenever children left the shacks, they were called back in hushed tones.

The preacher appeared around noon, walking down the hill with steps so light he seemed subject to the whim of the gentle wind dancing through the shacks.

When he reached the village, he pulled up a three-legged chair somebody had hauled from the dump, fished out his pocketknife from a trouser pocket, picked up a stick from the ground, and sat down.

The people stood in shadows behind dirty windows and watched the preacher whittle, like critics seeking meaning in an obscure theatrical performance.

The preacher's knife flashed, slicing light from the sun, yellow shavings drifting through the heavy air to a tiny pile at his feet. Flies buzzed through the air, and a meadowlark called from the edge of town.

Those were the only sounds until two doors scraped open and Judd and Jack Ten Horses stepped out. Neither acknowledged the other, but they met on the wide path that threaded its way through the village and stalked toward the preacher.

Mordecai continued whittling for several minutes after Judd and Ten Horses stepped in front of him. Then he folded his knife and slipped it into his pocket.

“I could hear the corn crying for water,” the preacher said. “Came down to see why no one was irrigating.”

“Timothy was here,” Ten Horses said, and when the preacher didn't reply, he continued. “He wanted to know about some cattle—ten to fifteen head, he said—that had been rustled from the Bar Nothing, downriver from here.

“I'd guess it was ten head, wouldn't you, preacher?”

“I don't know anything about rustled cattle,” Mordecai replied, rubbing his fingers over the stick, feeling for flaws left in the wood by the sharp blade of his knife.

“Helluva coincidence that Newcombe comes up short ten head the same time you deliver ten head to the people.”

“Sometimes things aren't as they seem.”

“Sorry, preacher, but I don't believe in coincidences.”

“What do you believe in?”

Ten Horses' voice dropped to a whisper. “For a while, preacher, I believed in you. I really thought you were different.”

“But now I think that you rustled those cattle, and we'll be the ones to go to jail. Preacher, they'll kill me if they get me into jail again.”

Mordecai shook his head.

“You shouldn't believe
in
people, Jack. Trust them, love them, but only believe in God.”

Mordecai shifted his seat on the wobbly chair. “But you can believe me now, Jack. You won't go to jail.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Ten Horses hissed. “You know what I think, preacher? I think you were in this from the beginning. I think Newcombe sent for you so you could make us think you were our friend, that you cared.

“I think he set it up for you to rustle those cattle so we'd get the blame. I've heard him. We're like a thorn in his side, and he had to get somebody we trusted to do his dirty work for him.”

“And we believed you. That's the part that's so damn hard to take. After Connie and Doc and the teacher and the garden, I really believed in you.”

“Then Judd told me about the wagon. How you had hired the wagon the morning Newcombe drove the cattle over … the garden. You knew what would happen, and only Newcombe could have told you.”

“Preacher, if I wasn't so busted up, I'd kill you right now. So help me, I'd kill you right now.”

The preacher stood and put his arms on Ten Horses' shoulders. Tears collecting in the man's eyes spilled over, and Ten Horses wept.

At first Mary Dickens thought she imagined the rapping. She had very few visitors during her time in Sanctuary and certainly none at this time in the morning. She rolled over to go back to sleep, but then she heard the rapping again, more insistent this time.

She climbed from bed, slipped her robe over her nightgown, and stepped cautiously to the bedroom door, opening it just enough to peer through the window in the front door.

Doc Benjamin had his face pressed against the windowpane. Now what in the world would he be doing out here at this time of day?

Mary stepped to the door and opened it about as wide as the question on her face.

“Mary, I've got to talk to you. They've got the preacher in jail—”

“What?”

“In jail—for rustling!”

“Start a fire, Doc, while I get dressed. I'll put some coffee on so we can talk.” Mary disappeared into the bedroom.

Doc tried to get his thoughts in order so he could explain the remarkable events that had transpired that morning.

Doc had been called out early to the surgery. Doctor Wilson had taken a week off to go fishing, the first vacation he'd had in years, and Doc was filling in.

There was nothing special about the call. Two cowboys had gotten into a fight in the Silver Dollar. One chewed off the other's ear, but the victim was too drunk to notice it was missing until he'd ridden nearly all the way to the Bar Nothing. By the time he returned to Sanctuary, the wound had clotted, and it was just a question of cleaning the stump and putting in the stitches.

The cowhand's stomach was churning, and when Doc mentioned that the only ill effect the young man was likely to suffer was that his hat would ride a little crooked, he stumbled out the door and vomited. He vomited again when one deputy offered to arrest the ear biter even though, he said, he was not anxious to tangle with a man who ate raw meat.

The wound was totally unremarkable, and the deputies gossiped as they watched Doc do his work. Doc overheard only bits and pieces of the conversation, but one line snapped into his consciousness.

“First time I've ever arrested a preacher,” one deputy said. “Never would have taken him for a rustler.”

The sheriff's office and jail was a little two-room brick building just a skip and a jump from the courthouse. Steel bars glinted from each of the windows in the morning light, and a red geranium sat in the window of the sheriff's office.

When Mary and Doc stepped through the door, Timothy was dumping the residue from a two-day-old pot of coffee on the plant. He looked up, muttering, “If there were such a thing as rotgut coffee, Whimple would make it, but this geranium seems to like it.”

Indeed, the geranium seemed to be flourishing, stretching out big, wide leaves to greet the early sun in the window. “Did you know that Whimple's running against me in the next election?” Timothy asked, raising an eyebrow so he could peek past a fleshy fold of skin at his two visitors. “He's down at the Silver Dollar now telling everybody how he'd run this office if he were sheriff. It would serve him right if he won—he could play sheriff, and I'd go down to the bar and politic. But I don't suppose you're down here to talk about that.”

Doc shook his head.

“I can't figure it,” Timothy said, rubbing his chin with the back of his hand. “Not much for religion myself, but if I was to go to a church, I'd go to the one he's squiring in the Silver Dollar.

“He's short on speeches and long on doing, and he doesn't seem to have the mean streak that … some do.”

Timothy shook his head, and then continued. “I swear, if words were weapons, I'd be arresting the Reverend Eli twice a day for assault. But there's some that think that he preaches the only brand of religion worth worrying about. Takes all kinds, I guess.”

Timothy straightened, peering one-eyed at Doc. “You aren't packing, are you, Doc?”

“Packing?”

“Guns? Knives? Whiskey?”

Doc shook his head.