Sanctuary (19 page)

“I would like to enter into evidence, your honor, my bill of sale for the purchase of ten butchered steers, and my receipt for the wagon I used to haul the beef to the killing place. Please note that the bill of sale is marked ‘paid in advance.'”

Mordecai stepped up to the bench and handed two pieces of paper to Judge Harding. Driscoll, face white as Mordecai's receipt, jumped from his chair and rushed to the bench.

Harding asked, “Mr. Driscoll, do you have any objection?”

Driscoll had a plethora of objections. He objected to being dragged through this farce of a trial. He objected to laying his political future on the line for what was obviously some ploy of the preacher's. He objected to the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Dirk Newcombe.

But the receipts were valid. Driscoll knew that to be a certainty. He shook his head, trying to find a new line.

Judge Harding hid a grin behind his hand. When word got around that Dirk Newcombe tried to pin rustling charges on a man who bought Bar Nothing beef, he'd be the laughingstock of eastern Montana. Serve the son of a bitch right.

“The clerk will enter the receipts into evidence,” Harding said. “Please mark them One-A and Two-A.”

Mordecai turned to the judge. “Your Honor, I rest my case.”

Harding nodded. The trial had gone even better than he had expected. If they worked through the lunch hour, he might be able to catch the afternoon train home and sleep in his own bed tonight, not the lumpy contraption in the hotel.

“If the prosecution has no questions of this witness, we will continue with the final arguments. Would the clerk please make arrangements for lunch to be served to the jurors after they retire?”

Melvin Jacobs nodded, but he wasn't happy about the decision. He had planned to have lunch for the jurors at twelve noon. Now he would have to change his plans for the judge's convenience. He rolled his eyes. Just one thing after another.

Driscoll stood to fight for his political life. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “I'm surprised that you haven't been forced to tie bandannas over your noses to protect your lungs from the smoke Mr.—uh—Mordecai has pumped into the courtroom.

“He would have you believe that the fact that he may, or may not, have bought the steers he delivered to the—uh—Indians ameliorates his guilt in this case. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“The facts are quite simple. Mr. Mordecai comes into Sanctuary from only God knows where. None of us knows what secrets he might have left behind him, secrets so terrible that he would refuse even to reveal his name for fear that we might discover them.”

“Mr. Driscoll!”
Judge Harding spat the name as though it were a bug that had flown into his mouth. “You are an attorney at the bar of the state of Montana. You know better than to breach the rules of this court, planting wild conjecture in the minds of this jury.

“You will confine your remarks to the evidence at hand. Do you understand me, sir?”

A stain of red crept across the back of Driscoll's neck; he wilted visibly under the heat of Harding's remark. “Yes, Your Honor.”

Driscoll cleared his throat. “The facts in this case are simple. But first we must discuss what we don't know.”

“We don't know how many cattle were taken. Mr. Newcombe estimated that he had lost between ten and fifteen head.”

“We don't know where those cattle were taken, and we don't know if the cattle the preacher brought to the slaughterhouse were the same animals taken from the ranch.”

Judge Harding stood, back stiff as the gavel in his hand. “There is one more thing we don't know, Mr. Driscoll. We don't know why you continue to try to plant speculation in the minds of the jury. The defendant can be found guilty only by that which we
do
know. Let's get on with that. The jury is instructed to ignore Mr. Driscoll's earlier statements.” The judge sat down, glowering at the prosecutor.

Driscoll pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. When he spoke, his voice seemed broken, the words poking through his trepidation like bits of ice floating down a river.

“We do know the preacher Mordecai admits to having gone on Bar Nothing land to take cattle pastured there without the knowledge or permission of the owner. That's all you need to know to find the preacher guilty.”

“Thank you for your attention during the trial.” Driscoll smiled wanly at the jury and sat down.

Mordecai rose.

“No,” he said, his voice soft as a spring rain. “That isn't all you need to know.

“You need to know why I went such a roundabout way to buy cattle for the people of that little settlement down by the dump. I'd like to tell you about that.”

“Dirk Newcombe has a soul-deep hatred for the Indian people. Most of you probably don't know this, but Mr. Newcombe lost his wife to a marauding band of Blackfeet only a couple of years after he drove his longhorns into this country.”

“The pall of black smoke that hangs occasionally over Sanctuary comes from fires at the slaughterhouse, where Mr. Newcombe has decided that he would rather burn livers and hearts and kidneys than to
sell
them to the Cree and Métis in the village.”

“It is not often that conviction gets in the way of profit, but Mr. Newcombe's hatred is deeper than even his pocketbook. I didn't consider it likely that he would go out of his way to sell me beef which I would then give to the people.”

“So I bought the cattle that afternoon at the slaughterhouse and took delivery that night on the Bar Nothing. Since the butchers expected a delivery of beef, they didn't question finding the animals in the corral. Since I took all those animals after they were slaughtered, the butchers didn't question the fact that more steers showed up later.”

Mordecai's voice dropped to a whisper. “And since Mr. Newcombe had already set a precedent for herding cattle to slaughter in the darkest hours of the night, they didn't question that either.”

“Those are the reasons I took those cattle from the Bar Nothing.”

Mordecai walked back to the table for the defense and poured a glass of water from a pitcher there. He drank it and turned again to face the jury.

“It seems to me there are two more questions that need to be cleared up.”

“Why did I wait for the trial rather than show the receipts to the sheriff? First, I thought I had a better chance of pleading my case before a jury than pleading it before Dirk Newcombe. His behavior in the courtroom vindicates my judgment. Second, I wanted a chance to talk with you in a neutral environment, away from the banging drums of the ‘Christian soldiers' and the stridency of the Reverend Eli Timpkins.”

A murmur ran through the courtroom. The trial could turn out to be a showdown between the preacher and the Reverend. Members of the Church of Righteousness stiffened their backs. The Reverend had warned them of the battle. Other townsfolk hid grins of anticipation. The preacher Mordecai was no pushover. Could be they were about to witness a first-class fight.

Eyes jerked to the Reverend Eli. The muscles of his jaws were knotted and his face was tinged deep red. His mouth was a thin line, tight with the effort of holding it closed.

Mordecai continued. “There is one point on which I must agree with Mr. Newcombe. The moment I stepped off the train in Sanctuary, I realized there is a godawful stench here.”

Judd slipped down even farther into his seat. He had been the first person the preacher had seen in Sanctuary. He had been waiting at the station, staining the air with his stink.

Judd could feel the eyes and the contempt of the audience on his back. He wished that he could disappear, leave this courtroom and find someplace where his foulness would be less noticeable.

“Madam,” Mordecai said, pointing to a woman in the audience. A portly woman in a plain dress stared back in puzzlement. “Yes, madam, you in the dark blue dress and black hat.

“You know about the stink, don't you?”

The trial was the biggest show in Sanctuary, and the woman was flattered to have been chosen to play a part in it. Her exaggerated nod played to the townsfolk. Who in the world didn't know about the foul smell?

“I thought so,” Mordecai said. “When Newcombe was talking about how bad this boy”—his finger settled on Judd huddled in the corner of the bench—“smells, you poked your neighbor with an elbow and held your nose.”

Laughter rippled through the courtroom, and the woman held her nose again to emphasize the joke.

Driscoll stood.

“Your Honor, I don't see what this has to do with the case.”

Mordecai answered the judge's inquiring look. “Your Honor, I am not an attorney. I don't know all the subtleties of presenting my case, but I believe this is germane, and I would ask you to bear with me.”

Harding, as much for curiosity as anything, nodded. “You may continue.”

“The stink is terrible,” Mordecai said. “It has permeated the very wood of this courtroom. It hangs in the air like a deep fog, confusing the senses. But dear lady, when you put your fingers over your nose, you weren't holding the stink out. You were holding it in.”

A gasp squalled through the courtroom, but Mordecai cut it short

“The stink doesn't come from Judd. It comes from all of you. It is the stink of hatred and ignorance untempered by compassion and reason. It is the stink of false pride and prejudice. That stink is an abomination on God's Earth, and you people sit smugly in the reek of it, happy as pigs in a wallow.”

“It is a strange place where a hate-filled man can drive a herd of cattle over a helpless victim and cannot be prosecuted because the victim is an Indian: a place where I sit charged because I had the audacity to feed the hungry among you, a people you are bludgeoning into oblivion by your ignorance and disregard.”

The preacher sighed, hands on hips, in silence so deep everyone there heard the soft sound of breath leaving fifty sets of lungs.

“Most of you came here as refugees,” he said, his voice soft again. “You were running from poverty and prejudice and hatred and lack of opportunity. And once you reached Sanctuary, you began victimizing other refugees you found here, others also seeking sanctuary from poverty and prejudice and hatred.”

The preacher's eyes ranged over the crowd, still as a winter night. “Seek those people's forgiveness,” he whispered, “if you ever hope to have God's.”

The crowd sat in shocked silence. They seemed fascinated by their feet, studying them with a marked intensity, hiding their faces from Mordecai's eyes moving around the courtroom like a scythe.

And then the Reverend Eli was on his feet, face glowing dark red.

“Liar!” he shouted, his upraised arm swinging down like a club to crash across the room against Mordecai.

“Did I not tell you that this man is the great deceiver?” he shouted. “Did I not tell you that he would attempt to make you doubt the sanctity I have granted you? Did I not tell you that he would twist the scripture to fit his own evil ends?”

The roar of the Reverend's voice echoed through the courtroom, resounding against the walls, bouncing into the minds of the listeners.

“It is he, not you, who is evil. He consorts with drunkards and heathens. He would pull you down into the mire of sin and desolation. You are the soldiers of the Son of God.”

And a roar went up from the crowd. The Reverend was right. They weren't the sinners. The preacher was on trial, not they. The preacher was a thief, not they. The stink came from the twelve-year-old boy hiding in his seat at the front of the courtroom, not from them.

They roared with righteous anger. The sound filled the room. It fed upon itself, growing with each new voice as a fire grows with each branch thrown on it.

The sound was almost deafening, too loud to hear the rapping of Judge Harding's gavel, too loud for thought.

Sixteen

Jasper stood at Dirk Newcombe's elbow. He downed his whiskey in one gulp and held up the glass again for bartender Ben Johnson to fill.

Newcombe had been buying drinks for the house since leaving the courtroom, and Johnson had enough “dead soldiers” lined up below the bar to man a ghost brigade.

After the first order to keep the whiskey coming until he cut it off, Newcombe had been silent, glowering into the mirror in the back bar, Jasper doing all the talking for him. Jasper didn't mind a bit so long as the whiskey kept coming.

The crowd had turned surly with the alcohol and Jasper's prodding. When a fight broke out between two cowhands, blood lust rose in the throats of the crowd, men growling to the cadence of knuckles meeting bone. Newcombe let the fight go until one cowboy was beaten senseless.

And now Jasper was picking at the violence that underlined the room, focusing it on the man who had humiliated him that day at the slaughterhouse.

“Hell of a thing,” the butcher said. “When a son of a bitch like that comes into town calling himself a preacher and stirs the pot, causing problems for decent, law-abiding folk.”

Arms saluted up and down the bar, glasses making one more trip to numbed lips.

“You really think there's a chance he might get off, Charley?”

Charley Benson had just come from the courthouse. He'd stayed to the end of the trial.

“Stranger things have happened,” Benson said. “Talking to a shyster down in Glasgow one time, he told me that when the jury looks at the defendant when they're going out or coming in that's good news for him. When they don't, that's bad news.

“All those jurors were looking at the preacher. Some of them even smiling. All except for Elder Jackson. Course, that son of a bitch never smiles—or looks you in the eye, for that matter.”

A voice drifted in from farther down the bar. “He looked you in the eye that time you brought in the—uh—lady from Glasgow. He was right at the front of the Christian soldiers when they convinced her to move along to some more sinful place.”