Sanctuary (10 page)

Doc had made a pad of cotton and gauze and showed Ten Horses how to drip the chloroform on it and when. The preacher had given Ten Horses his watch so that he could time the drips, and Doc had shown him how to take Connie's pulse, told him to report any fluctuations.

The preacher stood ready to staunch the first flow of blood when the knife touched belly, and still Doc hesitated.

“Pray for us, preacher,” he said, and his hand, steadier now, cut through the skin stretched tight over the girl's swollen belly. The skin opened wide and filled with blood.

Ten Horses turned his head and began to cough.

“You vomit in here and I'll remove your appendix the hard way,” Doc growled. “I told you not to watch what I'm doing. You've got enough to do.”

And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “You're doing fine. She didn't feel a thing.”

“Damn little fat,” Doc said, suturing two bleeders, talking himself through the procedure. “I'm cutting now through the fascia—a thin protective sheath of the external oblique muscle, incising it parallel to the direction of the fibers.

“More bleeders. I'm tying them off now.”

Similarly, Doc cut through the internal oblique muscle and then the transversalis, giving the preacher and Jack a running account of each step of the operation.

“This is taking longer than it should,” Doc said. “The longer I'm in, the harder it is on her.”

“You're doing fine, Doc,” the preacher said.

The little girl stirred on the table.

“Damn it, Jack! Tend to your business. She's coming around.”

Ten Horses dripped more chloroform on the pad over Connie's nose.

“Sorry, it's just hard not to watch what you're doing, and when I do …”

Doc broke in again. “Now comes the tricky part.” He had reached the peritoneum, a paper-thin lining of the abdominal cavity. Carefully, very carefully, he worked the flexible tissue away from the muscle and down into the wound until it bulged like a balloon into the abdominal cavity under the pressure of his fingers.

“A slip here, and we have a hole in an intestine and we can say good-bye to Connie.”

Doc's face was pale, his attention focused solely on the scalpel in his hand and the intestine's natural inclination to spill out of any hole in the abdominal wall.

“Judd, we're going to need that lamp a little closer here in just a minute.”

Judd moved closer to the table, holding the light shoulder high and trying to look everywhere but at the gaping wound in front of him.

Doc touched the scalpel to the peritoneum, ever so carefully. He was into the body cavity now, and the primal smell of viscera filled the little shack.

“Now we need the retractor to hold the incision apart, so we can see what's going on there. Tip the light a litde, Judd. There. That's just right.”

“Jesus!” Doc sagged against the table, and the preacher moved against him, giving him his body to lean on. Doc took a deep breath and began talking again.

“Infection. Bad infection.” The words were toneless, bodiless. “It's localized. I take the appendix, and I may spread the infection to the rest of the abdominal cavity and Connie will die.

“I don't take the appendix and the infection will likely spread, and Connie will die.”

“Damned if I do and damned if I don't.”

He stood for a moment slumped against the preacher and then straightened a little with resolve.

“Give me one of those tubes. We'll drain the abscess first,” he decided. That done, Doc began a purse-string suture about a quarter of an inch above the base of the appendix pointing up at him through the wound like an ugly, accusing finger.

Doc was stitching around the base of the appendix without breaking through its wall and spreading fecal material into the wound.

“That's some fancy stitching, Doc,” the preacher said. “You should have been a seamstress.”

“Times like this I wish I had,” Doc retorted. He cut off the blood-bearing mesoappendix, crushed the base of the appendix above the purse-string suture, tied it tightly, and clamped it above that stricture. The wound was lined with gauze pads, and Doc cut through the offending organ, lifting it carefully through the wound.

He dabbed the stump with tincture of iodine and removed the gauze pads.

Then Doc pushed the stump inside the large intestine and pulled the purse-string suture tight. The effect was to close off the wound, leaving the intestinal wall smooth, and the stub inside.

He left a drain in the abscess, sutured the peritoneum, and stitched up the ugly slash on the belly of the little girl. Then and only then did the sigh that had been building in him since that first touch of the scalpel escape his lips.

“You've got a fine pair of hands, Doc. As good as any I've ever seen.”

The hint of a smile on Doc's face evaporated a second later, cut off by Ten Horses' frantic announcement. “She hasn't got a pulse, Doc. Her heart has stopped beating.”

“No!” Doc's denial cut through the room like the keening of Connie's mother an hour before. “No! She can't die. She can't.”

Doc pressed his ear to the little girl's chest—silence.

“Behind him he could hear Judd, the catch in the boy's voice: “When her little brother, Boyd, died last year after he stepped on that rusty can, Connie said she thought she would go visit him so he wouldn't be lonely.”

“Is that what she's done? Has she gone to visit Boyd?”

“No!” Doc was denying the little girl's death, pushing on her sternum, willing her heart to beat again. He dropped his ear to her chest—nothing.

The keening began outside the shack, Connie's mother reacting to a sixth sense that ties mothers and their children together. Other women joined in, and Doc was fighting panic.

The preacher stepped past Doc. He cupped Connie's head in his left hand, making the sign of the cross on her forehead. Then he laid his right hand across her forehead and looked up at the other men.

His face was shining as Connie's had shone with the fever burning inside her.

“Join hands,” he said. “Form a circle. You too, Judd.”

Ten Horses was shaking his head. “None of that mumbo jumbo for me.”

But even as he spoke it was obvious that he was fascinated by the preacher, as a bird is fascinated by a snake. And when Doc reached toward him, Ten Horses took the old man's hand in his own and reached for Judd.

“Doc, you put your free hand on me. You, too, Judd.” They stood then, a little circle of life in a tar-paper shack, joined together by their love for a tiny, helpless girl they hardly knew.

Life trickled through that circle like electricity through a wire. Each of them could feel it tingling in their hands and arms and hearts. The preacher was speaking, but they couldn't hear his words. They could only “feel” his voice, feel the words crackling across the synapses of their nerves.

And then it was over, and they found themselves standing in that same circle, and at the center of it was a little girl, a little girl stirring and making mewling sounds as she might have made as a baby.

The shout of the crowd roared into the shack and their consciousness, and Connie's mother and father burst through the door, their faces shining with the miracle of a little girl's life.

And when Doc and the preacher and Ten Horses and Judd stepped—still stunned—outside the shack, the crowd parted and stood silent as they passed.

As Doc and the preacher walked up the hill toward the slaughterhouse, the preacher was speaking, but the words pattered off Doc's consciousness like raindrops off a tin roof.

“You're not the ‘best damn drunkard' Sanctuary has ever seen,” the preacher said. “You are a man with the God-given talents of a fine mind and sensitive hands. You are a man who can make little girls well, offer hope to people who have never dared to wish for anything so grand.

“Your gifts are too precious to be wasted, Doctor Raleigh Benjamin. You are obligated to use them to help the less gifted around you.”

Doc stopped and turned to stare the preacher full in the face. “You've told me who I am, preacher. Now, tell me who the hell you are.”

“Name's Mordecai,” the preacher said. “Just call me Mordecai.”

Seven

The Sunday morning crowd at the Silver Dollar Saloon had grown, more from curiosity than anything.

The bar was lined with the backs of men in quiet conversation, most of them drinking coffee from the big pot Ben Johnson kept on the back bar. Three or four of the tables were filled, and a scattering of loners poked up at others.

They all looked up as Mordecai pushed through the heavy front door, faces bobbing around as word of his coming passed along the line of men.

Mordecai nodded and stepped up to the bar. He held up three fingers, and Johnson produced a glass and filled it three fingers deep with whiskey.

“Haven't seen Doc, have you?” Johnson asked. “Miss the old coot.”

“He's taken up with Doc Wilson now, helping out in the surgery. Wilson was impressed with the work Doc did on little Connie Old Hawk. Said he had never seen better.”

Johnson shook his head in disbelief.

“Who would have thought he had that in him? All those years swamping this place, and he turns out to be a real surgeon. Never know, do you?”

Mordecai shook his head.

“Haven't found anyone to take the job, so I've been doing it myself,” Johnson said, his face wrinkling. “Wasn't paying him enough for what he was doing.”

“You were paying him more than he thought he was worth.”

Johnson shrugged and hurried off to refill a cup of coffee. When he returned, he leaned across the bar, resting on arms locked at the elbows. “If he cuts as good as he swamps, I guess I wouldn't mind him working on me.”

“He cuts better,” Mordecai said. “Have any port?”

Johnson reached under the bar. “Ordered in two bottles special for you,” he said. “All the stories going around, I figured you'd draw a crowd.”

When Mordecai reached in his pocket, Johnson shook his head. “The wine's on me. Little enough for me to do. But I would favor a drink same as everyone else.”

The preacher smiled. “You're entitled.”

Mordecai, serving wine for the last of the men, felt a cool breeze as the front door opened. He felt, too, the tremor that ran through the men as they looked up.

He continued down the line, saying, “Take and drink. This is my blood shed for your sins,” ignoring the order that rumbled from the bar.

“Preacher, I want to talk to you”—and later, more insistently—“Preacher, get your rear end over here. I said I wanted to talk to you.”

Mordecai finished serving the wine and then stood. He raised his right hand and offered the benediction. Only after he was finished and the men were rising self-consciously from their knees did he turn his attention to the bar.

Jasper was there—the cuts from Mordecai's belt marking his face like a road map—and an older man.

The other man didn't wear his rank. He might have passed for any of the old cowboys in the bar if not for a back straight as a wagon spoke and a bite in his voice that said he was more accustomed to giving orders than to taking them.

As Mordecai neared, he could see the lines cut into the man's face by summer suns and winter blizzards. His eyes were hard and cold as January ice, and that image was strengthened by the white hair that sprayed from beneath the old man's hat like wisps of snow drifting ahead of Montana winds.

Jasper was standing deferentially beside the newcomer, and he didn't meet Mordecai's eyes as the preacher approached.

When the old man spoke, his voice was low, taut, and his eyes poked into Mordecai like a stiletto.

“Helluva job you did on my boy, here,” he hissed. “I'd like to know who the hell you think you are.”

“Mordecai,” the preacher said, offering his hand.

The old man's eyelids closed into slits.

“You don't know who I am, do you?”

The preacher shook his head.

“Newcombe. Dirk Newcombe. But you can call me mister.”

“All right, mister.”

The old man's eyes slitted again, and he growled through clenched teeth, “You aren't planning to take your belt off and whip me, are you, preacher?”

“Not unless you pull that knife out of your boot,” Mordecai answered.

The two men glared at each other for a moment, and then Newcombe continued.

“You haven't answered my question: What in hell gives you the right to carve up one of my boys?”

“He was standing on the other end of a skinning knife,” Mordecai said. “I was not in the mood to get skinned.”

“He is my employee. He was trying to get you off my land—Bar O land. That's bar zero: bar nothing, preacher. Jasper had every right to use that knife.”

“And I had every right to defend myself.”

“Preacher,” the old man said, sneering, “you are sorely trying my patience. Jasper told me about the Indian boy. I've told him before that I don't want any of them beggars around the slaughterhouse. They'll steal you blind if you give them half a chance.

“He understands that now,” the old man continued, glaring at Jasper. “Now you understand something. I don't want you or any of those ki-yis at that plant. Just to make sure that they stay away, I've ordered Jasper to burn all the liver and hearts and kidneys we don't have orders for. I will no longer feed those beggars.”

“Jasper was selling the meat to them.”

The old man's temper flared. “Preacher, you don't listen good. I don't want those Indians at that plant. I don't want those Indians anywhere. That's all of it, I don't want to hear any more.”

Newcombe paused, then his voice dropped a notch, and his eyes burned holes in Mordecai. “There was a time when you could respect those people. They did what they had to do, just like I did. But their scat aren't men. They're beggars and drunks and thieves. Men like me killed the last good Indians. We should have killed them all.”