Sanctuary (8 page)

The boy tentatively took one cookie and hid it beneath the table.

“Try it,” Mordecai whispered again. “They're good.” He punctuated his words by taking a half-moon bite from his own.

The boy studied him for a moment, and then lifted his cookie and bit off a corner. The cookie was crunchy and sweet and good—really good. He stuffed the rest of it into his mouth and reached for another.

The preacher put his hand on Judd's. “Slowly.”

Mary sat down, waiting for the teakettle to whistle. “What city land is this, and what do you need it for … for what do you need it?” she corrected herself.

“Want to put in a garden down by the dump,” the preacher said. “Make a farmer of the boy here.”

Mary studied Judd. Her first impression was the ragged state of the boy's clothing, and the second was his eyes, black and impervious as the obsidian his people once used for arrow points.

“Where do you go to school, Judd?” she asked.

Judd turned his eyes to the preacher, hoping Mordecai would speak on his behalf. But the preacher was silent.

“He speaks English, doesn't he?” Mary asked.

“Sometimes,” Mordecai said.

“Where do you go to school, Judd?”

“Don't,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Why not?”

“No school for us.”

“No school for Indians?”

“No school for sinners,” Judd whispered, his voice tight as his face.

“Why are you a sinner?” Mary asked, her voice soft as the rustle of aspen leaves in a spring breeze.

“The people are heathens,” Judd explained, laying his shame before the teacher. “I am of the people.”

Rage flared across Mary's face, hotter even than the fire in the stove.

“How could you do that to him?” she hissed, fixing the preacher with a withering stare. “How could you teach him something so—so hateful?”

The preacher threw up his arms and leaned back from the force of her words. “I—”

Judd interrupted, “Not the preacher …”

As quickly as Mary's temper flared, it changed direction.

“That ugly little man,” she said through gritted teeth. “I should have known. It was the Reverend Eli, wasn't it?”

Judd nodded.

Mary stood so fast her chair almost tipped over backwards. She stalked back and forth across the room, her face black with anger.

“That … that man!” Mary hissed. “There is no limit to the hate he spews around him.”

“He is a man of the cloth,” Mordecai said.

Mary turned to glare at the preacher. “He may be a man of the cloth, but he is not a man of God.”

“There is a difference?”

“There is a difference.” Mary sighed, the anger draining from her. “I didn't mean that as any reflection on you.”

Then her temper flared again. “How could he do such a hateful thing to this boy?”

Mordecai shrugged. “Maybe a better question is how could he so control a woman like you?”

“Control me?” Mary raged. “He doesn't control me.”

“He isn't even here,” the preacher replied, “and still you're dancing on his string.”

Mary glared at the preacher and then sighed. “Yes,” she said, “I am dancing on his string.” She sat down in the rocker, staring out the window, her mind drifting back to that day last fall.…

The Jimison boy had been persistent, tugging at her skirt until he pulled her attention away from the other children. That was unusual. Most days he sat quiet as a post, speaking only if asked a question.

He was whispering something, but she couldn't hear his words until she leaned toward him, bending almost double.

“I want to show you something,” he whispered. “Outside.”

Mary was busy, but this was the first time little Edgar had volunteered anything and she didn't want to discourage him, so she followed the youngster outside.

There, on the bed of a home-built toy wagon, was a rock. “What a nice rock,” she said and turned to go back into the classroom, but he caught her skirt again.

“Please,” he said.

She knelt beside the wagon. It was a fossil, an ancient animal encased in rock, and Mary's mind began sifting through some of the paleontology books she had read. A chambered snail about twelve inches in diameter. The rock had split longitudinally and opened the mineralized snail to the wonder of a six-year-old boy and his teacher millions of years after its death.

Her mind settled. Ammonite, from the Mesozoic period 60 million to 230 million years ago. She reached out in wonder to touch this creature, alive when a sea covered most of Montana.

“This is wonderful, Edgar,” she whispered, taking the boy by the shoulder. “Would you mind if we show it to the other children?”

Edgar shook his head, his eyes on the ground, but Mary thought she could see a hint of a smile on his face.

“I found bigger ones,” he said. “But I couldn't lift them.”

Mary smiled. “This one is just right.”

She carried the fossil into the classroom, met by children curious to see what made Edgar's rock different from other rocks. She had told them, then, about the ammonite and how old it was and how it had lived in a time when Montana was covered by a sea. She had pulled one of her books from the sparse bookshelf and was showing the children pictures of some of the animals that were once found in Montana.

Naomi Parkman, classroom tattletale and daughter of one of the elders of the Reverend Eli's church, was standing away from the circle of fascinated children, hands on hips and head tilted to one side.

“That's a lie, teacher.”

The other children gasped.

Mary looked up. “Whatever do you mean, Naomi?”

“That rock isn't sixty million years old. God created the earth six thousand years ago. It can't be any older than that”

Naomi was smirking. “You're lying, teacher.”

“Where do you think the snail came from, Naomi?”

“I don't know. But I do know it isn't more than six thousand years old. Maybe the devil made it,” she said, squinting her eyes at Mary. “Maybe you're a servant of the devil.”

Mary gasped, and then ire rose in her throat. “That's enough!” she said. “You go home. I expect you to bring your parents tomorrow, and I expect an apology. Go!”

Naomi stopped at the door and sneered at Mary. “You're going to be sorry you did this. Real sorry.”

Naomi did come the next day with her parents, walking side by side with the Reverend Eli at the head of his Christian soldiers.

They circled the school as though to prevent Mary's escape, singing verse after verse after verse of “Onward Christian Soldiers” until they were evenly spaced in a ring around the teacherage.

Then the Reverend Eli stepped forward, his face twisted, warped with the fires that burned within him. He placed one shaking hand on Naomi Parkman's shoulder.

“Mary Dickens, you have sinned, and we have come to save you from the fires of eternal damnation.”

The Reverend's voice came from deep within his bowels, and the sound echoed off the teacherage and through the river bottom.

“You have been a false teacher, twisting the mind of our dearly beloved and sinless child. You have turned your face from God. Behold the word of God!” The preacher raised his Bible over his head, stretching as though he intended to reach into heaven.

The chanting began then, hallelujahs and hosannahs rippling through the crowd. Mary watched from the shadow of the teacherage, gaping as excitement built in the crowd.

They were moving now, Christian soldiers lost in a rising chorus of chants, reason lost in the mob. One young man, eyes wide and wild, sprinted from the crowd to Mary's door. He swung his fist as though he meant to break the door down. The door shuddered under the onslaught, and Mary could see blood splatter from the young man's fist as he swung again and again.

But there was no pain on his face, no emotion, no humanity. He was dancing on the Reverend Eli's string, an obscene ballet of abandonment.

The Reverend's face seemed forged of molten rock spewed red and black from the earth. When he stepped toward the house, his body was shaking, each step taken as though he were barefoot on broken glass.

“Mary Dickens,” he growled. “We have come to offer you forgiveness.” A shudder racked his body. “Show us that you repent your sins.”

The Reverend's eyes glowed hot as coals, red as the eye of an animal caught in the light of a lantern.

“Come on, Mary Dickens, as that sinner came to Christ in the Pharisee's house, and wash my feet with your tears and dry them with your hair … and I will forgive you.”

The Reverend's eyes glazed, his fists clenched, and deep shudders ran through his body. Another chorus of hosannahs rolled through the crowd.

But only Mary had been facing the preacher, and only she knew what he meant when he whispered, “Alleluia.”

“This sinner is not repentant,” the Reverend shouted a moment later. “We must now devote our attention to our own needs. Get behind me, good people, and we will march back to town in the name of the Lord.”

Mary watched through the window until the Reverend and his marchers disappeared into town. She wet a towel at the sink and stepped outside to scrub the young man's blood from her door.

She spent more time at it than necessary, her thoughts dwelling on the growing realization that her first year of teaching at Sanctuary would be her last. The Reverend Eli would see to that.

A tear ran down her face and dropped on the step. She would miss her children.

Her thoughts were tugged back then, even further, to that first day. What a commotion she had created when she stepped off the train!

School trustees and their wives and children had turned out in their finest to view this strange creature, a Connecticut woman with a list of degrees after her name.

They had meant to be patronizing, to guide the “poor thing” clear of the shoals that rippled under the surface of Sanctuary, to help her find her rung on Sanctuary's social ladder.

But when Mary appeared on the train platform, they acted more like a doddering court gathered to pay homage to a princess. She was dressed in the height of fashion, and from the number of male faces pressed against the glass of the car in which she had been riding, it was obvious she had been the focus of attention on the train.

She stood for a moment at the step of the car, as though wondering whether she should climb back aboard. Pretty she was, with light auburn hair and the clear, almost translucent complexion of her Irish background. Shanty Irish, the trustees had said, nodding to each other as they read her application.

But when she spoke at the railroad station, it was apparent that Mary Dickens was a creature of culture and breeding, more of the lace-curtain variety. The men crowded around her, eager to carry her baggage to the buggy provided her.

When she was elected to the city council, the Reverend Eli's congregation was incensed. That Mary Dickens acted more like a man than a woman, they whispered. Could be that she was one of those “transvestites,” they hissed, and the men winked at one another when they heard that.

Gossip would likely have eventually cost Mary her job, but she'd hoped that she could spend at least a couple of years in Sanctuary. She was fascinated with the West, as foreign to her as an African veldt, and she wanted to see it, touch it, understand it.

Not much chance for that now …

Mary sighed, and the sigh carried her out of her reverie and back to the table in the teacherage with Mordecai and Judd.

“I will help you get that land,” she told the preacher. “I cannot ask directly, of course. The council opposes everything I suggest, so I will have one of my friends ask to lease it, then I will oppose the request. The men on the council will all grin at each other and vote for the lease, to teach that back-east schoolteacher—as they call me behind my back—a thing or two about Sanctuary politics.” She smiled wanly. “But you will have your land, and Judd can learn to be a fanner.”

Mary put her hand on the boy's shoulder, and he jerked.

“Whose string are you dancing on now, Mary?” Mordecai asked.

Mary's eyes flashed. “My own.”

The preacher's voice dropped to little more than a whisper.

“Then I have still more to ask of you,” he said. “As I understand it, your contract was for a full year?”

Mary nodded.

“So even though you will not be returning next year, you could stay in the teacherage this summer?”

“I suppose I could, but why would I?”

“I would like you to teach Judd and some of the other Indian children reading and writing and arithmetic.”

“Taught to the tune of a hickory stick,” Mary whispered, “the way the Reverend Eli says it should be done?”

“No,” the preacher said, placing his hand over Mary's. “Taught with love. The way you know it should be done.”

Mary looked at the preacher, and her eyes filled with tears. “I would be happy to do that, preacher. Very happy to do that.”

Six

Doc sat in a room lit only by a sliver of morning light squeezing past the shade. He was trying hard to ignore the rapping at the door.

But his visitor was insistent, and finally the old man sighed soul deep and croaked, “Come in.”

The door opened, and the preacher stood silhouetted in the doorway, black on white like an overexposed photograph. Doc squinted against the light, trying to read the preacher's face, then dropped his eyes, rubbing them with his fingers.

“Figured you'd be around.”

“You figured right.”

“Wasting your time if you're here to give me a pep talk. Just wasting your time.”

“Feeling a little down, Doc?”

Doc sighed. “Yeah. You almost had me there for a while, preacher. I really thought that I could be something that I'm not. But the fact is that I'm a damn good drunkard, the best drunkard this town has ever seen.” Tears were running down Doc's face, falling on the table next to the kerosene lamp. “I'll never be anything more than that.”