Sanctuary (15 page)

“Ma'am?”

Mary's eyes flashed. “If you think I am the kind of woman who—”

“Don't think anything of the kind. Just that I let a nice young lady in to see a ‘friend' of hers, one time in Nebraska. She shot him dead. I didn't think she was packing, either.”

“So now I ask.”

Mary's voice softened. “No, sheriff, I am not carrying any weapons or whiskey.”

“Didn't think you were.”

Timothy pulled a ring of keys off the wall and opened the heavy wooden door that separated his office from the jail. “'Bout the only thing this door does is keep me from having to listen to the drunks wrestle with their snakes. No offense, Doc.”

Doc shook his head. No offense.

Mordecai was lying on a bunk in one of the three cells, head propped on his hands, eyes on the ceiling as though the secret of life were written there.

He turned as Mary, Doc, and the sheriff stopped in front of the cell.

“Might be you can get him to tell you what the hell is going on,” Timothy said. “He won't tell me anything.”

“Ask and ye shall receive,” Mordecai said with a grin.

Timothy snorted. “Where you from?”

“Everywhere.”

“Where'd you go to seminary?”

“Everywhere.”

“Where were you before you came here?”

“Everywhere.”

Timothy snorted again, and Mordecai laughed.

“You're pretty damned chipper for a man like as not will wind up in prison. You won't like prison, preacher, not one bit.”

“I've been in prison before.”

“You have?” Timothy asked. “Where?” and then he spotted Mordecai's grin. “Never mind, I know. Everywhere.”

Mordecai nodded.

“Miss Dickens, Doc,” Timothy said, tipping his hat. “I leave this rustler to you. Try to get him to talk. He isn't doing himself any good playing cute.”

Mary waited until she heard the door to Timothy's office close behind her, and then she asked, “What's this all about?”

“They say I rustled some Bar Nothing beef.”

“Did you?”

“Would a preacher rustle cattle?”

“You haven't answered my question.”

“Let's put it this way. I did what I did for a reason. I don't want to talk right now about what I did or why I did it.”

“Are you going to plead guilty?”

“And throw myself on the mercy of the court? I've found little mercy around here. No, Doc, I want a jury trial.”

Mordecai walked to the bars, reaching out to touch Mary's and Doc's shoulders. He grinned then, and Doc felt as though he'd been touched by a warm summer breeze.

The preacher's grin softened and was replaced by concern. He said, “Judd's hiding across the street behind the haberdashery. I'd appreciate it if you were to ask him to come over here.”

He waited then for Doc's nod.

“Walk soft, Doc. The boy's likely to run if he hears you coming.”

Twelve

Judd sat across the table from his grandmother, watching dust motes dance in the stream of light from the early-morning sun.

No words passed between the two, but they were speaking one to the other, Judd pouring out without words the anguish he felt and his grandmother listening without hearing.

Judd spoke in the way he fidgeted in his chair, in the tilt of his head and the sighs that crashed through the stream of light, sending the dust motes careering into darkness.

His grandmother listened only with her eyes, her mind peeking past the cataracts at this boy she had reared … her boy.

Even now, Grandmother felt her breath catch when she thought about Judd's mother. Grandmother's years were already long then, and the baby entered the world with great pain, both blessing and curse. Blessing because death had stolen Grandmother's other children. Curse because she feared this child would be taken, too. She lay awake nights listening to the child's breathing and wore her eyes out watching the girl toddle past sharp points and hard surfaces, her breath catching with each stumble.

Wise and quiet as an owl was the baby, and for a time Grandmother thought she should call her daughter Owl. But there was no predator in those eyes, no lust for the kill, only wisdom and forebearing and forgiveness, and Grandmother had called her Red Doe for the time in the spring when the deer are beautiful with the plenty of the land. The name seemed prescient as the girl grew toward womanhood, her step light and gentle on the earth.

In her sixteenth year she brightened the village as the crocus brightens the prairie drab in early spring. Fine-featured and beautiful in the old way, she was, the Cree sense of beauty having been preempted by pale skin and light eyes. But beautiful enough, still, in the white man's way to have caught the attention of some drifters.

She hadn't come home one night, and Grandmother found her by the river, clothing torn from her bruised and bloody body. Aieee, Grandmother thought as she carried the young woman home, those men possessed dark magic, indeed, to turn an act of love into something so brutal and ugly.

Grandmother nursed her daughter for three days, and when she returned on the fourth day from her snares along the river, Red Doe was gone.

Spring and summer and fall passed, and the white death of winter came visiting. The cold winds flirted with Grandmother, and she with them. And one night after she had been alone longer than anyone was meant to be alone, the Arctic wind sang love songs to her, calling her outside to its icy embrace. She might have gone but for the rapping at the door.

Red Doe, her face so gaunt and ravaged by cold and hunger that a smile would have shattered it, stood on the step. Without speaking, she gently handed a bundle of rags to her mother.

“Call him Judd. Judd was the strongest of the three and took the longest to die. Tell him his father is dead—and his mother.”

The door closed then, the scuff of wood against wood submerged in the howl of the Arctic winds and Grandmother's keening.

Judd stood, his chair scraping on the wooden floor.

“I have to go now,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

Judd shrugged.

“Are you coming back?”

Judd leaned against the table, looking into his grandmother's eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I'm coming back.”

He stepped toward the door, only to be pulled back by the sound of his grandmother's voice.

“Once when I was a girl in the month when the chokecherries are ripe, I saw a lake where there had never been a lake before. I thought it was a magic lake and thought that I should walk to it and drink of the magic water.”

“The sun was so hot the birds hid in the shade of the buffalo berry bushes. I walked and I walked and I walked. But the lake ran ahead of me across the prairie, not even leaving a track, not even a cool breeze from across its waters.”

“And then my father galloped up and lifted me to the back of his horse, and I told him about the lake that ran away from me. He said the lake wasn't real. It was just a trick that the sun plays on the people.”

“It's hard to tell the difference between magic and tricks.”

The old woman nodded then, and made herself invisible in her chair, a clump of rags awaiting Judd's return.

A cloudless sky promised a day ripe with light and warmth, and Judd walked to the garden. Lines of green rose again between the rail fence the preacher had “paid” them to build.

Judd spat. Paid them with stolen cattle and danger.

But a moment later, the bitterness ebbed, replaced by doubt. If the preacher had been hired by Dirk Newcombe, as Ten Horses said, why was he in jail? Why had no one come to see the people, to tell them they must leave the shacks by the dump?

And if the preacher meant only to help …? Judd shook his head. He didn't want to follow that line of thought. That could only lead him further down the path of despair.

Judd knelt beside the garden, pulling some weeds that had crept into the fertile soil. He was still busy at that when Clinton Old Hawk appeared at the other edge of the garden. Old Hawk stretched and relieved himself before he noticed Judd, then raised his arm in greeting. Judd waved back, and Old Hawk dropped his hoe over the fence and climbed through, working down a row of knee-high corn, cutting weeds and tilling the soil.

Judd grabbed a fence rail and pulled himself to his feet. He stretched then, too, muscles straining as he reached toward the heavens. He waved farewell to Old Hawk and turned toward the river.

It was the month when cottonwoods loose seeds like prayers on sun-warmed air. Judd watched them dance in the heat until a crick in his neck and the brightness of the morning sky forced his eyes to the earth.

The river, raucous and bawdy, staggered between the banks, pushing and shoving at everything in its path.

Judd picked up a flat rock and skipped it across the surface of the stream until a wave lying in wait downstream from a boulder reached up and swallowed it.

He chucked more stones in the river, rewarded only by the
ker-plunk
they made before sinking out of sight.

The boy sighed then and turned toward town. He would likely spend the day as he had spent yesterday and the day before that, hiding in shadows near the jail, afraid to go inside to speak to the preacher, afraid to leave.

Judd wove a circuitous route toward Sanctuary, pausing for a moment within view of the railroad station, seeing in his mind's eye that day a lifetime ago when the preacher stepped off the train. The preacher had changed Judd's life, but the boy didn't know if the change was for better or worse.

He slipped furtively into town, his step tentative, his legs ready for flight, and his eyes darting through backyards and kitchen windows for pale faces and stabbing eyes. Judd thought he was invisible now, but sometimes to move was to be seen and the boy was in too much turmoil to stand still.

Judd slipped into the alley behind the haberdashery and the newspaper. He heard the crunch of shoes against gravel, moving down the narrow space between the two buildings, and his heart jumped. He took a deep breath and stepped into a shadow growing smaller by the moment in the morning sun, hoping it would hide him until the sound and the person who made it went away.

Just as Judd pressed himself into the back wall of the newspaper, a stranger, wrapped in a two-day-old beard and the smell of stale cigar smoke and beer, stepped into the alley. He looked both ways, his eyes flicking across Judd without stopping. Judd's invisibility was holding. The man unbuttoned his pants and relieved himself in the alley, all the while alert.

He buttoned his pants, glanced around again, and then scrunched back through the narrow path between the buildings to the street.

Judd's nose wrinkled at the odor the man left behind, but he remained hidden in the shadows for several minutes before moving. He crept up the alley, following the path he and the preacher had taken on their way to see Mary Dickens for the first time.

This course took him to Sanctuary's busiest side street, the one leading to the bridge across the Milk. But only a few people walked there in the early-morning light. Judd waited, watching a fly laze about in the early-morning air.

Now! The street was empty.

Judd stepped on the hard-packed clay as he and the preacher had months before, invisible in the full morning light.

A little knot of people had gathered at the Finney house, and Judd smiled at the memory of Mordecai tickling Mrs. Finney on the neck with a feather as she snoozed in her backyard.

He covered his mouth to muffle a chuckle at the thought and stepped nearer to the house, keeping to shadows so he wouldn't be seen.

Doctor Wilson was there, along with the sheriff and a gathering of neighbors. One of the women, hair uncombed and clothing rumpled, stood at the edge of the group, holding her face in her hands as though great pain emanated from it.

“I had just gotten dressed,” she said, her hands gesturing to show the disheveled state of her clothing, “and I was … taking my morning walk … to the privy.

“Mrs. Finney—isn't it odd, I lived next to her for close to ten years and never did know her first name—was sitting in this old chair next to the fence.”

“Emily,” the sheriff whispered. “Her name was Emily.”

The woman cocked her head, a soft smile crossing her face. “Isn't that pretty.” And then the smile disappeared, and the neighbor's lips drew into a thin line.

She sighed before continuing. “She was up at this hour nearly every morning to hang out her wash. Even in the summer she rose before first light.”

“She had her first load of wash on the line, and she was just sitting in that chair enjoying the touch of the sun on her face …”

“I …” The woman's voice broke then, and sobs shook her body. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands and took a deep breath.

“I heard her voice, and I thought she was saying something to me, so I stopped, but she wasn't talking to me. She was sitting in her chair and her hand moved to the back of her neck as though she felt something crawling on it.”

“And then she said something I couldn't understand—it sounded like ‘call of a lovesick moose,' and she laughed.”

The woman broke into sobs again, and the sheriff and Doctor Wilson looked away.

“You know, she didn't have much to laugh about, not since her husband died and her children moved away. She's been taking in wash now for years, doing more work than anyone should have to do. But she didn't complain.”

“When she laughed, I almost laughed with her. There was so much joy in it. I don't know when I've ever seen her so happy, and then she stopped laughing and fell off the chair … and … and …”

But the woman's voice failed her, lost in the sobs that racked her body.

Sheriff Timothy stepped toward the woman, and Judd instinctively shrank back into the shadows. The boy had been taught to fear this man and the white man law he represented.