Sanctuary (6 page)

Another murmur swept through the crowd, only louder this time.

Ten Horses cocked his head, looking at the preacher from the corners of his eyes. He hated Jasper, but he feared him even more.

“How did he whip Jasper?” Ten Horses whispered.

“With his belt,” Judd said. “Jasper pulled a knife, and the preacher whipped him until he fell to the ground, bleeding like raw meat.”

“Hai-eee,”
Ten Horses howled. “How I would have liked to have seen that.” He wrapped himself in his arms then, his chin resting on one fist and his eyes hard on the preacher. “I will do nothing now. But remember that when you decide to abandon my people, I will be waiting. Then we will see.”

The air hissed out of Judd's lungs like steam from one of the great train engines.

“For now,” the preacher said, “all I ask of you is that you collect jars, all the jars you can find. I will be back within a week.

“Also I have found a doctor for you. I will bring him with me next time I come.”

The preacher turned and put his hand on Judd's shoulder. “Now, I want you to show me to the newspaper office.”

Four

A bell tinkled over the door as the preacher stepped into the rattle and clatter of a flatbed press in the
Sanctuary Bugle.

Ben Topple—editor, publisher, bookkeeper, swamper, reporter, and printer for the paper—stood beside the press, scrutinizing an auction poster. He waved absently without looking up.

The preacher stood in the entryway, an uncluttered patch of floor in the midst of chaos.

The office was more paper than news. Stacks of the stuff slouched in corners and on tables and sloughed off here and there to lie on the floor like some mad artist's view of life. Topple's desk, covered by a chest-high heap of papers, stood against one wall.

And Topple, wearing a gray and black printer's apron, fitted into the tableau like a headline on a page.

Content with his poster, the printer, a skinny man of about thirty with a perpetual squint, tiptoed across the floor toward Mordecai, stepping from one uncluttered spot to another as though he were fording a stream.

“I'm Ben Topple, owner of this … this …” His arm described a circle around the room. “Or maybe I should say that it owns me,” he said, grinning.

He stuck out his hand, then withdrew it, wiping the residue of thick, black ink on his apron.

“Coffee?” Topple asked. When the preacher nodded, the newsman tiptoed to the back of the room where a pot simmered on the stove. He spent the next five minutes poking through shelves and boxes for his spare cup. He found it in a pile of papers on the floor.

Topple peeked into the cup, and his lip curled. He poured in a little hot coffee and scrubbed the cup with his fingers, foul liquid dribbling on a pile of stained and wrinkled papers at his feet. He squinted into the cup again and, apparently content with his effort, tossed the remaining muck out the back door. Then he wiped the mug with a relatively clean rag hanging from a nail on the wall.

Topple tiptoed back across the room and handed the preacher a cupful of thick liquid the color of a moonless night. Then he leaned his lanky frame against his desk and said, “Figured you'd be in. You've created quite a stir in town, preacher, and it's my guess that you're here to stir the pot some more.”

Mordecai grinned.

“Could be.”

“Well, what can I do for you?”

“I would imagine that you cover most of the city council meetings?”

Topple nodded.

“Well, I'd like to rent ten acres or so down around the dump to put in a garden. I'm willing to pay, but I need to know who I should approach.”

“You saw the shacks?”

Mordecai nodded.

“They're ghosts,” Topple said. “I saw them, too. I even imagined walking through that little village and seeing big-eyed children peeking out of dirty windows.

“When I first settled here I wrote an editorial saying it was a darn shame that we had so much and they had so little, and we'd all be better off if we shared with them.”

“Got a bushel of letters—most of them saying that if the
Bugle
subscribers wanted to read fiction, they'd buy dime novels.”

“Advertising and printing dried up—just dried up—and the papers would be tossed on the back step same day they were delivered.”

Topple swept some papers off a chair in the vicinity of his desk, sat down and continued, “From what I've been able to gather, the good folk here have gotten around the love-your-neighbor principle by deciding that they don't have any neighbors—leastways, none that aren't white.”

“Took them a while to cure me of my aberration, but I've seen the light, and I don't see those shacks or those red-skinned ghosts anymore.… There might be a lesson in that.”

“I just want to rent some land for a garden,” Mordecai replied.

Topple cocked his head and squinted at the preacher. He scratched the back of his neck without taking his eyes off Mordecai. “Well … Mary Dickens would be most sympathetic, but I don't know what good that'll do you. Mary came here from back east—Connecticut, I think—and got involved in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. When a couple of seats opened on the council, the union decided it was time for a woman councilman. Mary was the only one wasn't married and didn't have a husband weighing her down, so they picked her.”

“Although the women in the union couldn't vote, they put posters all around town that said, ‘If you don't vote for Mary Dickens, you don't know beans—yet'”

“All the men were laughing about that until they found out what it meant. The ladies served them beans—just beans—morning, noon, and night, for a week. Said if Mary wasn't elected, they'd be eating nothing but beans until they sprouted.”

“Men had a big meeting down in the saloon, but wasn't anything they could do about it, so Mary won. Got more votes than the mayor.”

“But the first night she took her seat on the council, Mayor Barnaby rose on a point of order. Said that Mary had won fair and square, but since she was a woman, she would not be allowed to vote. You should have seen those women in the audience fume, but—” Topple shrugged.

“So Mary sits on the council, but she can't vote. You wanted the name of someone on the council? She'd be the most sympathetic, but she has about as much influence as those ‘ghosts' down by the dump. Mayor Barnaby struts and frets his piece on the stage, but only that. The real push and shove on the council is Anthony Goodnight, but he's one of the marchers in the Reverend Eli's church, and he isn't likely to smudge his soul dealing with haunts.”

“I know he won't deal with a ‘blasphemer.'” The lines in Topple's forehead deepened, and his eyes almost disappeared as he studied the preacher's face. “Didn't take long for that story to get around town.

“Mary'd be your best bet,” Topple concluded. “She'd take great pleasure in putting one across on those stiff-necks after what they did to her.”

Topple pulled a gold, hunting-cover watch from his pocket. “Mary teaches school. Classes are out in about fifteen minutes. School's on that bluff overlooking the river on the northwest edge of town. She'll either be there or in the teacherage out back—nowhere else for her to go.”

Outside, Judd pressed himself against the back wall of the printing shop, willing himself into the pores of the unpainted wood, willing himself invisible.

Time stretched until it sang like a telegraph wire in a winter wind. Why was the preacher taking so long? Why had Judd agreed to wait?

With his ear pressed against the back wall of the
Bugle
building, Judd could hear the rumble of voices inside, but he couldn't understand what they were saying.

A moment ago, the back door of the haberdashery next to the printing shop had opened and the owner dragged a barrel of waste paper into the alley. He had glanced in Judd's direction, but his eyes were empty as the eyes of the catfish the boy sometimes caught in the Milk River.

Still, when the door to the haberdashery closed, Judd could hear the latch click shut. Perhaps the owner sensed that invisible people were about and that his goods were in jeopardy.

Judd shivered. He should have known better than to follow the preacher into such peril. To be in the middle of town in daylight was too risky.

Judd wanted to run, but to run was even more dangerous than to stay. He had tried running once last summer …

The sun sucked energy from the earth that day. The air, heavy as a club, seared the throat and lungs. Only the flies moved, safe from the halfhearted swats of men and the listless swish of cows' tails.

Judd sprawled in the shade of the shack, listening to the creak of his grandmother's chair as she rocked beside him, watching the hills simmer in the distance, breathing the foul pestilence from the dump.

He rolled over on his belly and pushed himself to his knees. The earth spun for a moment, and he reached out to his grandmother's chair to steady himself.

“I have to go to the river,” he said, and she nodded.

He pulled himself erect and stepped into the heat. He almost retreated; the air, thick and heavy as honey, resisted the passage of mortals.

Judd squinted. The air was warped, the heat so intense that sun and sky and earth merged into one as Judd flowed toward the Milk, slow as the river eddies where the big catfish lie.

His mind oozed out his ears, thoughts light and elusive as flies, and only instinct pulled him from weak shadow to weak shadow until he reached the bank of the Milk. He walked into the water, mud sucking at his feet, aiming to hold him in the sun until he dissolved and became part of the river, flowing toward its reunion with the sea.

A shiver ran over Judd's skin as he sat down on a submerged rock, up to his neck in the cool water. As his body cooled, thoughts began to crackle again across the synapses of his brain. It was then the boy heard the rumble of voices running upstream and against the current.

He had seen the big tent go up the afternoon before and had watched the marchers from the Reverend Eli's church begin their trek toward town, inviting residents to the big revival as insistently as cowboys “inviting” cattle through a gate.

Judd lifted his feet and floated toward the sound, only his face above water, his ears tuned to the click and sigh of a river running slow on a languid afternoon. His eyes watched the sun flash like Thor's hammer through the cottonwood branches overhanging the river.

Judd worried that if someone saw his face floating down the river they might take him for a muskrat and kill him for his pelt. But he was invisible, and anyone waiting on the bank would see nothing but a hole in the shape of his face floating by in the river. He wondered what the people of Sanctuary would think of that. He grinned then, and cool water ran into his mouth, almost choking him.

The great manitou was with him. The spring flood had pulled a cottonwood into the river, but it was still rooted enough in the soil of the bank to remain green-leaved and bushy. Through the green and gray and shadow that was the tree, Judd could see bits and pieces of people standing downstream on the bank. Their lips were moving, apparently in song, but Judd could not hear their voices over the gentle noises of the river.

The river carried him into the cottonwood, and he threaded his way toward the trunk, careful not to shake any branches and reveal his presence, careful not to be swept under the tree and drowned by the current.

Hidden by the tree's foliage, Judd crawled out of the water and lay straddled over a half-submerged limb, peeking through a hole in the branches.

There was a gravel bar below, and three men, one a stranger dressed in black like the Reverend Eli, had waded in waist deep. The others were standing on the bank, singing, sweat glistening on their faces as they swayed with the music.

And then a young woman pulled away from the singers and stepped into the water. Eyes rolling, body shaking, she carried her hands in front of her as though she were blind, her movements jerky as a marionette's.

The Reverend reached for her, and she struggled then, as people sometimes struggle in the night as they awaken from a dream. But the three men laid hands on her and lifted her supine above the water. The evangelist who had come with the tent was shouting something, and so were the people on the bank, but Judd couldn't understand what they were saying and he shook his head to drain the water from his ears.

Then the men thrust the woman beneath the surface of the river, and Judd's eyes grew wide. They were going to kill her, sacrifice her to their God as the Cree sacrificed their pain in the Thirst Dance to the great manitou.

Judd was horrified and fascinated at once. The woman was fighting the men. He could see her body thrashing under the water like a huge fish fighting for its life. And then she stopped fighting and was still.

Judd wanted to scream, but before the sound left his throat, the men pulled the woman from the water. She was limp, her face white and dead, the white robe clinging to her body.

Judd couldn't take his eyes from her face, bleached white in the water. He saw her eyes flicker just before she coughed, a stream of river water flowing back into the Milk.

A chorus of hosannahs and hallelujahs swept the crowd, and the music swelled as the men and women surged into the water to meet their new sister.

There was electricity in the air. Judd could feel it. It tugged at him as it had tugged at the young woman, and he felt compelled, too, to offer himself to the black-robed man, to be sacrificed for his people.

But he knew he wouldn't be welcome there, so he slipped off the branch and into the water, down deep where the current played with the bottom, down where the catfish lie waiting for dead chickens and young boys to come floating by.

Judd felt suspended in time and space, in a world more real and primitive than any he had known. He felt weightless and shameless and sinless, and he tried to hold that, tried to stay in the safety and solace of the cool waters, but his breath hissed out and he was drawn to the surface by his primal need for life.