The Book of Murdock (12 page)

Read The Book of Murdock Online

Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: The Book of Murdock
10.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
She asked me
when I was taking up my duties.
“Right away, provided you give me a recommendation.”
“It's a partnership, not a matriarchy. That system always fails. I've promised you my silence and given you my conditions. I've no reservations about your ability. I've seen you turn a lynch mob into a hospitality committee without even drawing your pistol. Are you wearing it, by the way? There must be a reason for that dreadful sack you have on.”
“I left it in my valise at the freight office. I didn't seem to need it to get past a seventy-year-old Mexican.”
“You thought you'd be searched.”
“The man went to the trouble and expense of constructing a hill so he could look down and see who's coming. I spotted that even before I found out the place was built like a fort. An ordinary preacher might be able to explain why he was armed. I can't afford it.”
“That won't always be the case, will it?”
“I didn't bring it all this way to leave it with Wells, Fargo.”
“Richard took precautions that were wise when he built the house. Once that fence-cutting bill becomes law, I'll have the shutters taken down and plant roses. There won't be any invading armies to use them for cover.”
“In your place I'd wait until someone cuts a fence and see what happens. There's a new lawyer in town with a trunk full of laws and less than half of them with teeth.”
She lifted her brows; she didn't pluck them close and they made strong apostrophes above her already expressive eyes. “You've met young Mr. Cherry. You don't waste time.”
“I haven't it to waste.”
“He doesn't approve of me, but then he's his wife's creature. She's one of those mouse-faced tyrants men wear in lockets around their necks in place of a leash.”
“We met on the stage from Wichita Falls, where he went to retrieve his trunk. He didn't show me a likeness.”
“Nor me. I spotted it, from as far away as you spotted this house. Depend upon it, he wears one, and he wouldn't part with it any more than a broke horse would stray far from a loose bridle. I expect that in a horse but I despise it in a man.”
“I always wondered what attracted you to me.”
“You're too arrogant for the ministry, Page, but that will change. You just haven't met a woman who will stay as long as it takes.” Her lips twitched at the corners; her Irish puck was up. “Thank you for the advice about the law. With whose welfare are you concerned, Richard's or mine?”
I picked up my drink and finished it. “He has good taste
in whiskey, and the panhandle's ugly enough even with you around for distraction. If something happened to you both I couldn't stand the place.”
“It has its virtues. When you find the time to spare you must ride out to Palo Duro Canyon and spend the day. Such country is the real reason Adam left Eden.”
“Your father had more influence than you think. You know Scripture better than I do, and I've had a steady diet of it for three weeks.”
“I had it for sixteen years. I've had opportunity to go back to the table. Someday you must ask me about Memphis.”
“I will,” I said. “When I find the time.”
She emptied her glass and said nothing, which I interpreted as a dismissal. I stood. “Freemason says I'll be comfortable behind the church. Does that mean no snakes?”
“Mrs. McIlvaine won't have them. She wouldn't have
me
if I weren't Richard's choice. Women don't approve of me any more than house-trained men. They see in me what they gave up when they set out to train them.”
“I think we almost met.” I described the woman I'd seen sweeping the church steps.
“I don't suppose she was cordial. She saves the energy she might spend on the social graces to assault the dust in the church and parsonage. She seems to tolerate it outdoors, but only because she's life-size and Texas is so big. Texas avoids direct confrontation, however. You'll find less sand in your sheets than anywhere else this side of the gulf.”
I turned the glass knob on the door but didn't pull on it. “You said Freemason knows everything about you. What does he know about me? I don't mean Brother Bernard. If he
suspected who I was, he wouldn't have left me alone in the house with you.”
“He knows I'm no tame blossom.” From her loose right sleeve she drew a trim American Arms pistol hardly bigger than my thumb, then slid it back. It was secured by a rubberized strap to her wrist; a quick flick would have placed it in her palm ready to fire. It's not a comfortable thing to carry around the house, so I guessed she'd taken it from the cabinet with the whiskey. “As for my past, I didn't bore him with details,” she said. “I look forward to hearing your sermon Sunday.”
“I'll select it with you in mind.”
“No Magdalens or Jezebels, I hope. I've always given you credit for being an original thinker.”
In the hallway, the old Mexican appeared from the woodwork with my hat and led me to the door. A bolt shot behind me.
I went from there to the freight office for my valise. The friendly clerk asked what I'd thought of the Freemason mansion, as he called it.
“I found it grand, but I'm a man of simple tastes.”
“Did you meet Mrs. Freemason?”
“She was quite gracious.”
“The wife thinks she's stuck up. I say she's shy. A lot of folks who don't talk much in society are just nervous about saying the wrong thing.”
“That's a very Christian thing to say.”
He beamed, as if he'd just been baptized. He had a face designed for beaming, red and round between black side-whiskers. He didn't seem eager for me to leave, so I took a
chance and asked about the shotgun messenger who'd been shot trying to guard a stage from bandits.
“That's Sweeney,” he said. “Charlie Sweet, and he's right named. They all take the work seriously, but I don't think I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He was smiling when they pulled out the slug, I heard. He's helping out in his sister's restaurant, dishing out soup and washing crockery, till he can sit a coach, on account of his back. The Pan Handle, she calls it: two words.”
“A clever woman. I thought I might be able to bring him cheer, but from what you say it may be the reverse.”
“He'd welcome a visit just the same. He and Jane are papists, but I don't suppose she'd object to Charlie sitting down with any man of the cloth. Between you and me, she works him like a horse. It's a chore to call her Miss Sweet, so most of us just tip our hats or take them off when we visit her establishment, not that it improves her disposition. Good biscuits,” he added.
“I'll look in on them first chance I get.” I offered him a nickel for looking after the bag, but he shook his head and smiled.
The door to the First Unitarian church was unlocked. I went inside. The place was clean and unremarkable, with a flight of open steps to the bell tower, bare planks between two rows of polished-pine pews, and a plain pulpit on a platform with two steps leading up to it. A parlor stove was placed just where it needed to be to dry out the coats and hats that would hang from a row of pegs when it rained or snowed; apart from that it was out of place in that simple room, with filigree and mica through which the flame would glow whenever
the mercury dipped below broiling. It stood on three elegantly curved legs like a Chippendale chest.
“It was a gift from Mr. Freemason. A common barrel stove would've heated the place just as well.”
It was a woman's voice barely, deeper even than Colleen Freemason's, with a burr that might have been smuggled from Scotland and kept in storage to preserve it until that moment. She'd come in through a door that opened onto the raised platform and stood holding her broom bristles up, like a rake. All these many years later, Mrs. McIlvaine remains one of my strongest memories of Owen, although we never exchanged more than a hundred words in all. I still see her with that broom. I never saw her without it.
She took me through that side door and across a patch of burned-out grass behind the church to a saltbox that stood on the same lot, an afterthought assembled from lumber left over after the church was finished and generously referred to as the parsonage. The sitting room held a rocking chair, a straightback with a caned seat that rocked more predictably on its short leg, and a small laundry stove that could warm a bowl of soup or brew a pot of coffee but not both at the same time, in a space about the size of Eldred Griffin's grim study in the caretaker's shack in Helena. A single partition separated it decently from the pastor's sleeping quarters, where I could lie on the iron-framed bed with a pencil in each hand and write my name on both opposing walls. In ugly weather a white enamel chamber pot under the bed spared the necessity to visit the gaunt little outhouse in the corner of the lot.
The place was spotless, and no wonder. There was little in it to impede the progress of Mrs. McIlvaine's ruthless
broom. The Reverend Rose, it developed, had taken his small personal library with him when he went west, leaving me with nothing to occupy my time that first night except the Bible and a brown page of advertising from a newspaper of unknown vintage someone had used to line the drawer in the spavined nightstand. When I tired of the Book of books I learned that at some point in history, gentlemen's English worsted suits of clothes had been available at J. Pearson's General Merchandise for eight dollars.
I awoke at
dawn for the twelfth time since retiring, famished and stiff. I hadn't eaten since noon yesterday, at a station stop where boiled beef and tinned peas made up the bill of fare, but I'd been too tired from the trip to venture out from the parsonage once I'd established residence. I was in possession of a new set of aches on top of those I'd acquired from the Overland. The bed needed slats and a mattress whose horsehair stuffing hadn't migrated to the outer edges. Someone—I learned later it was the fourteen-year-old son of one of the lay readers who had taken up the slack between pastors—had stocked the woodbox beside the stove; I built a fire, warmed a kettle I filled from the pump outside, and used it to freshen up and shave over an enamel dishpan that served as a basin, then finished dressing and went out to greet my first full day in Owen.
It greeted me back with a sixty-mile-an-hour gust, the first of many that had me chasing my old slouch hat across the Staked Plain all day long. You have to train a hat. I was
sorry I'd left my regular one behind, even if the quality was too good for a penniless preacher. I wondered if a stampede string would look out of place on a pedestrian headpiece, but in the end I decided that the sight of a scarecrow leaning into the wind holding down the crown with one hand was humble enough to help the disguise.
I put my hunger to dual advantage and stepped into the Pan Handle, where the freight office clerk had told me I'd find Charlie Sweet helping out his sister while he recovered from his bullet wound. As I leaned the door shut against the gale from outside, the smell of hot grease scraped at my empty stomach. Six tables covered with oilcloth took up most of the space in the small room, leaving only a narrow crooked path for the server to pass carrying his steaming tray. Fortunately he was rail thin, and fresh-looking hollows in his cheeks suggested that the ordeal of recuperation had swindled him out of pounds he could ill spare. He walked with the stiff gait of a man with a bad back; that was where the bullet had entered, but from experience I gathered he was less concerned with pain than with preserving stitches. A pair of rugged boots stuck out beneath the hem of his long apron.
It was early, and only two tables were occupied. When he finished setting out plates of food on one, he turned my way with the empty tray under one arm. “Sit anyplace, Parson. You got your choice of sausage and eggs or eggs and sausage. Flapjacks if you like, but I wouldn't today: weevils in the batter.”
“Sausage and eggs, then, please, and black coffee. Scrambled,” I added. That was the easiest way to prepare eggs and Brother Bernard wasn't a man to create inconvenience.
He nodded curtly and pushed through a door that swung on a pivot into the sizzling chamber of the kitchen. I selected a table in a corner by a window to cut down on eavesdroppers. In less than five minutes, he returned bearing my order on the tray and a two-gallon coffeepot in the other hand. He put the plate in front of me, its contents still cooking furiously, and filled a thick stoneware mug with the densest, blackest brew I'd seen in more than a week. His face, which had lost much of what appeared to have been a lifelong burn, flushed deep copper in appreciation when I expressed pleasure at the sight.
“Mud's my department,” he said. “Janey's Wild Bill with a skillet, but she never made coffee the same way twice in a row and always weak as a drownded kitten.”
“I understand you're more accustomed to sitting on top of a stagecoach than waiting on tables.”
“I am for a fact, and I'll be back up there soon. This ceiling's commencing to come down on me.”
“Not too soon, I hope. I'm told a bullet wound is not a thing to rush healing.”
He regarded me through eyesockets brambled with creases. Three inches of fair whiskers circled his lower face in the Mormon manner, but the tiny crucifix he wore at his throat supported the reports that he was a Roman Catholic. I'd begun to take note of such things. “You come educated. You the new fellow over at the Unitarian?”
“I got in yesterday. People have been most helpful in acquainting me with the community. I hope I didn't upset you with what I heard.”
“There's no shame in getting shot. I intend to turn the
shame on them that done it, soon as I'm in a position to. I reckon you'd say that's taking the Lord's own vengeance unto myself.”
“‘Judge not lest ye be judged.'”I took a bite of sausage. It was spicier than I like it, but when I swallowed, the acids in my belly pounced on it like sitting prey. I wasn't looking at him. “Would you like to talk about it?”
“Well, Parson, I'm not just your denomination.”
“You may think of me as a sympathetic stranger, and disregard the collar. I'm here to make friends, not poach on my neighbor's property.”
He stroked the underside of the fringe on his chin. “You best tie in. That lard sets up like tar when it gets cold. I'll go see what's keeping them biscuits.” He returned to the kitchen, stopping on the way to make sure the other diners were contented.
I ate my eggs, which were just right, and drenched my self-recrimination in the strong coffee. I'd come on just as strong and chased away my first best source of direct information on the Blue Bandannas, as I'd come to think of them.
Shortly after the door swung shut on him I heard raised voices, a man's and a woman's. They were hushed quickly and he came back out carrying three steaming bowls covered with checked cloths, one in his right hand, the other two lined up along his left arm from the crook of his elbow to the base of his palm. He set one on each of the other occupied tables, placed the third before me, drew out the chair facing me, and sat down.
“Janey's more of a chore to work for than Wells, Fargo,”
he said, taking a biscuit for himself, “but if blessed Mary had an oven, she couldn't bake better.”
I took one and broke it apart. It was as light as a banknote and piping hot. I'd noticed there was no butter on any of the tables, but when I bit into it I realized why. It melted on my tongue. “The next time I encounter an atheist I'll send him here. He'll not question miracles again.”
He winked, chewing. “We're powerful close to blaspheming here, Reverend. They're better than most, but they won't smuggle a sinner past Saint Peter.”
“That was my hunger speaking, from its impiety. I missed supper.” I had been ladling it out with a shovel; the mark was dangerous to fall short of, but just as bad to overshoot. I wiped my hands with my napkin and held one out, introducing myself. “Brother, not Reverend. I have no claim to any title not granted by the fraternity of man.”
He took it in a palm ridged with calluses from the lines. “Circuit rider. Well, Father Cress may not approve, but he's a thorny old bush. Charlie Sweet. Sweeney to friends and such.”
“I hope to earn that honor. Are you much in pain since your ordeal?”
“It hurt worse coming out than it did going in. I'd be back in the traces by now if it wasn't for the risk I'd start bleeding again. Then it's three more weeks on my belly and Janey changing the dressing two times a day and calling me all kinds of a damn fool while she's about it. Pardon my language, Reverend—Brother. I ain't in gentle company so frequent.” He crossed himself and popped the rest of his biscuit into his mouth.
“Have those men been captured?” I used mine to swab grease off my plate, putting concentration into it.
“They ain't, and it's thanks to the governor that's so. Now that the sheep trouble's let up, all he and the Rangers care about is what Pablo and Jose are up to down on the border. I say let 'em snatch a few head and stick up riders fool enough to carry more'n a cartwheel dollar that close to old Mexico. They'll just spend what they get in Texas, because there ain't a thing worth buying where they come from. Sow it around.”
“One might say the same about the men who waylaid you.”
“No, sir, that's false. This bunch buries its money, or goes up to Denver or somesuch other place that needs it like a hen needs a pecker. Pardon my coarse language.” He crossed himself again. “If I had a five-cent piece for every double eagle that showed up on a bar or a store counter anywhere in a hundred miles, I'd have a dime. I can abide a thief, though I'm pledged to lay down my hide to stop them in their taking ways and by God I will, but a miser's bad for business.” He pardoned himself and made the sign a third time.
“What makes you think they're not still in Denver or someplace like that?”
“That fellow that told Randy to throw down the box had West Texas all through his speech. I heard that even laying on the ground with a slug in my back. You can't put that on, not when a West Texan's on the other end of it. You ever meet anyone from West Texas?”
“Not until I got here. I've led a sheltered life.”
“Not the reason. You didn't on account of no West Texas boy ever leaves it for long. It gets in you like a tapeworm; you can't stay away even if you was wanted here for topping a nun.” His theme had him so worked up he forgot to ask forgiveness from me or the pope. “He's here, count on it, and so's his crew. They rustled a thousand head of Herefords outside White Horse just last week.”
Captain Jordan had said it was five hundred. Rumors seemed to grow faster in that arid soil than other places, but I wasn't supposed to know anything about the rustling so I didn't correct him. His was the first statement I'd heard that corroborated Judge Blackthorne's conviction that the gang operated close to home. “Did you tell the authorities the man was local?”
“I told everyone that bothered to listen, but it skidded off 'em like spit. Bad hats come from Missuri and Kansas and from down below the Rio Grande. Nobody wants to hear we're growing our own.”
I doubted that was the reason. As far as I could tell he'd spoken of this to Texans exclusively, who might be expected to regard one of their own as less than sensitive to differences in dialect; but shotgun messengers crossed state and territorial lines and guarded passengers from all over the country. They might not be connoisseurs of geographical speech patterns, but they would know domestic from imported. “Why West? Don't all the natives of this state sound the same?”
“To you, maybe, but you're green. Much east of San Saba they could pass for Virginia, though not to a Virginian, like as not. I don't claim special powers, just good hearing.”
“What about the driver; Randy, was that his name? Didn't he back you up?”
“Randy's from Connecticut originally. He thinks everyone talks funny once you get past New Haven.”
“Does he live here in town?”
“His wife got spooked after the robbery and made him move to Louisiana and clerk in a freight office. You ask a lot of questions for a preaching man.”
I could have played that two ways: emphasize my willingness to bring comfort to the stricken or fall back on Brother Bernard's past. I chose the one less holy. “I'm sorry to pry. This is the first time I've been more than five miles from where I was born. I'm overcome with the strangeness of it all. I never realized this country was so big.”
He laughed then, and helped himself to another biscuit. I'd scored with his provincial pride. “Oh, well, Brother, if the panhandle's as big as you think it gets, wait till you take the train to El Paso. You can hide all of New England and most of Michigan between there and where we're sitting.”
Other diners had begun to file in. The kitchen door opened and a woman nearly as thin as Sweet leaned in, wiping her hands on her apron. She stared at the back of his head until he turned her way, started, and rose. “Thanks for the palaver, Brother. It saved me scrubbing pots.”
I stood and shook his hand again. “I can see you're both busy. I'd like to come by sometime and meet your sister.”
“You wouldn't like it long. She lumps in Protestants with pagans and Chinamen.”
I took out my wallet, but he stopped me with a palm.
“Put it in the poor box on me,” he said. “I'm not so certain as Janey. I like to back the other fellow's hand just in case.”
I thanked him and left. I was in the right place, I was sure of that now. I just didn't know what for.

Other books

My Kind of Wonderful by Jill Shalvis
The Princess in His Bed by Lila Dipasqua
SavageLust by Desiree Holt
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
Labyrinth of reflections by Sergei Lukyanenko
Evil and the Mask by Nakamura, Fuminori
Surrender to Sin by Tamara Lejeune
Murder of a Dead Man by John, Katherine