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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

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I foundered back toward shore, where Griffin waited with my clothes. He knew better than to say anything. In the cobbled-up men's dressing room I tossed the gown onto the soaking heap on the ground, wiped myself down with a
towel damp from other bodies, and put myself back together. When I left the tent, Griffin was standing with Dr. Little, who'd rolled down his sleeves and put on a fine black broadcloth Prince Albert with velvet facings on the lapels. The bathing party had broken up.
“Father Griffin tells me you seek redemption.” His grip was as strong as Brother Dismas', but not as skeletal. “You could not have chosen a better guide.”
I looked at the former priest and got nothing back. We hadn't discussed secrecy, but he'd spent too much time in the confessional not to know a confidence when he was told one.
I said, “He's opened my eyes. That was a stirring sermon.”
He chuckled. It was as if a steam thresher were starting up in his throat. He had a bulging forehead that made him look as if he was balding, but at closer range a crop of black hair as thick and coarse as the one that covered his body grew up from a straight line and swept back in an arc to the nape of his neck. His eyes were brown, mottled like river stones, and small, even teeth flashed in his beard. “Inspiration struck in an outhouse in Creede, where a torn copy of Ward's spring catalogue furnished an essential service. God never knocks, nor waits without.”
Griffin shook his hand and wished him luck on the remainder of his tour. We left as a middle-aged couple stepped up to the head of the reception line. “Amazing,” said Griffin. “He took in more today than Sacred Hearts does in a month.”
“Did you ask him if he needs a partner?”
He stopped walking and looked at me. “That is unkind.”
Before I could respond he strode ahead. At the buggy he took my revolver and wallet and star from under the seat and gave them to me. We drove into town without a word. At the bottom of Catholic Hill he stopped to let me down and continued. There was no lesson that day.
“
Mrs. Blackthorne told
me I'd find you here,” I said. “I thought you didn't work on the Sabbath.”
The Judge glared down at me. “I work every day. I'm not Pentecostal. It happens I report to chambers every other Sunday, when my parlor at home becomes the central headquarters of the Lewis and Clark County Book Club. Ostensibly they're discussing
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
but I doubt three of those esteemed ladies have read a line of Twain's. They gather to consume tea and thumping amounts of liverwurst and carve the ballocks off every married man in town.”
Blackthorne stood on the top of a stepladder in the square, high-ceilinged room down the hall from his court where he retired to consider his rulings. He'd started with plenty of space, then crowded it with worktables, glazed book presses, books spread open to passages of current interest, leather portfolios stuffed with reports and depositions, and old numbers of the
Montana Post
and the
Congressional
Register
, in which he kept track of freebooters locally and in the U.S. Capitol. The only vacant seat was his own embossed-leather chair behind the big American walnut desk. The strategy was to discourage lengthy digressions by requiring gouty defense lawyers with big bellies and bad backs to stand throughout meetings. It seemed to work; they rarely ran longer than fifteen minutes and his court disposed of more cases per month than any other in the federal system.
He was in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, removing dust from hefty legal volumes on his shelves with a deerskin rag. He never allowed the cleaners employed by the United States District Court to touch his personal library, which he'd assembled a piece at a time as he could afford it while clerking in a St. Louis firm and studying for the bar at night. They'd seen him through private practice, accompanied him to Washington during his lone term in the House of Representatives, and ridden in baggage cars, stagecoach luggage racks, the holds of steamboats, and on his own back when he'd crossed the prairie with his wife to take up his present post, and he wasn't about to trust them to any other hands.
He asked me how my education was progressing.
“You were right about Genesis,” I said. “I made short work of it and have a dally around Exodus. Turns out the Bible's the easy part. Behaving as if I belonged in the same room with it's the part I'm having trouble with.” I gave him an account of my morning.
Lawrence Little's chuckle and Blackthorne's shouldn't be referred to by the same term. The minister's was deep and plummy, the Judge's dry and sibilant, like a diamondback's buzz. “I wish I'd known. I'd have foregone the Reverend
Clay's sermon on the destruction of Babylon and risked damnation just to see you tread water in a buffalo wallow in early spring.”
“I'd respond to that, but I may need you to intercede for me with Griffin. If his door's not barred to me tomorrow I haven't got his measure.”
“I doubt you have. No pleading on my part would improve your case. Griffin belongs to that stubborn cadre that's convinced I'm bound for hell. Every time I sentence a prisoner to hang I trespass upon the province of God.”
“You might have let me know that before I went to his house carrying a letter of introduction signed by you.”
“I had nothing to lose by being straightforward, and with luck his cooperation to gain. He'd have known you came from me regardless. This way he's assured that no chicanery is involved.”
“That won't help me now.”
He twisted himself on the ladder, holding a tattered collection of Cicero's orations. The points of his brows were at their diabolical peak. “I honestly believe you're more self-obsessed than I. If he permitted you to cross his threshold on my behalf, condemned though I am, what makes you think he'll turn you away merely because you questioned his integrity?”
I saw there was no point in pursuing that line, so I chose another. “What made him break with the Church?”
“Ask him.” He swept the rag across the untrimmed page edges and slid the book back into its slot.
“I did. He refused to answer.”
“Then it's hardly my place to address the question.”
“I didn't know you had a place.”
He blew a dead bug off the top of
Principles Regarding the Division of Property in the State of Vermont, Vol. IX.
What system he used to categorize his library mystified me. “I keep an unruly pack of dogs to patrol a savage territory, Deputy,” he said. “I hold the leash loose lest I break their spirit. Do not make the mistake of assuming I won't jerk it tight when one tries to urinate on me.”
“I think you just did.” I backed off. “He doesn't have a crucifix or a picture of Jesus anywhere in his house. If he's given up on faith, why do you suppose he's so concerned with how I represent it?”
“I wasn't aware he displayed no religious symbols in his home. I've never been invited.” He sounded thoughtful.
“I'm trying to understand the man. I'll make an unconvincing minister if I don't.”
“You'll make one regardless. But Ter Horst won't budge from his pious stance and you're the only other man available who can string ten words together without a spitoon handy. You're in the way of being me.” The Vermont volume had a snug berth; he rammed it home with the heel of his hand and climbed down. Abusing books seemed to be a privilege of ownership, denied all others. He extended the same philosophy to the officers of his court.
He got rid of the deerskin and spent a full minute brushing smears of dust from his waistcoat. “I daresay his complaint is not so much with belief as with the institution he served. No other concerns itself so completely with iconography. The absence of it from his own walls is a rebellion against Rome.”
“What's his difference with the pope?”
“Chastity would be my guess. Celibacy. He opposes it.”
“You're saying he threw the Church over for—”
“Hold your tongue on the Lord's day. As I understand the situation, it was a matter of romantic attraction, not lust.”
“He fell in love with a woman?
Was
it a woman? I've heard stories.”
“A woman was the reason, yes; but you've spent time with Griffin, and surely you've observed that whatever passion he has is reserved for the ethereal. The woman fell in love with him, and committed the blunder of confessing her temptations to her mother superior, who told the bishop, who cast her from the order. Griffin resigned in protest.”
“She was a nun? What happened to her after that?”
“Her family disinherited her. Our society deals harshly with unmarried women of marked reputation with no one to support them and no skills with which to support themselves. A man like Eldred Griffin, having sacrificed his divine calling for the woman's sake, had no choice but to volunteer for the duty.”
“Esther Griffin.” I'd had it backwards, thinking she was the rock that kept him from collapsing under the weight of his own bitterness.
“Naturally, their betrothal lent credence to the rumors that her affections were requited, and that they had both sinned in the eyes of the Church. God spare us all from men who have the courage of their convictions.”
He was one to talk. More than a few of his decisions had made enemies of powerful men he'd have been better served
to pacify; letters to Congress had led to calls for impeachment. I said, “You know a lot about him for someone he hates.”
“We've not met, and I doubt he'd confide in me if we had. A scandal limits itself to no particular denomination. The Reverend Clay is a gossip. If he weren't so useful as a source of intelligence, I might have converted to Lutheran years ago.”
“It's no wonder he took it badly when I cast him in with Dr. Little. I'd have avoided it if you were half as forthcoming as Clay.”
“You'd have found some other way to give offense. I suggest you make your peace. Your train pulls out in eight days.”
 
 
Esther Griffin answered
my knock Monday morning. She wore the same severe brown dress or one like it. “Mr. Griffin is ill. You must come back tomorrow.” She started to close the door.
“Will it make a difference?”
She paused. “No.”
“I didn't expect a lesson. I came to apologize.”
“He said you would, after you spoke to your master. He won't accept.”
“I want to do it anyway. If not to him, then to you.”
She seemed to consider it. She had a kind face for all its lack of distinction. At length she moved aside to let me in.
The kitchen was her answer to her husband's study. In addition to the usual facilities for preparing meals and washing up after, it contained a bentwood rocker and a large
sewing basket brimming over with spools of colored thread in a windowlit corner. A fancy bit of embroidery on white linen draped one arm of the chair. She went that way and twitched it so that the needlework didn't show, then moved a battered tea kettle from a trivet to the top of the wood range; apparently the silver set was for company, and I no longer qualified.
We sat at an oilcloth-covered table, where I pictured the couple sharing most meals, saving the simple dining room for guests. It wore a look of well-used comfort as opposed to the other, where even the hosts had seemed stiff and ill at ease; I was sure I'd been their first visitor in many a day.
She caught my glance straying toward the sewing corner. “I take in work sometimes. Eldred works hard, but there is only so much caretaking to be done in a small cemetery. We manage.”
“I don't know when I've been in a place that felt so much like home.”
“You're not married?”
I shook my head, and shook it again when she asked if it was because of the nature of my work. “Most of the deputies have wives. Sometimes I think they fished out the stream. It means a lot of nights spent alone waiting for bad news.”
“Men give up so easily. But then it's always easy making the decision you've wanted to all along.”
I wondered what was keeping that pot from coming to a boil.
“You mentioned an apology.”
“I spoke out of turn yesterday. My work doesn't put me in contact with many honest men. You're not at it long before
you begin to think everyone has his hand out. At the time I wasn't in possession of all the facts, but I knew by his reaction I'd made a huge mistake.”
“The facts in regard to what?”
Her eyes were the color of her dress, and faintly cowlike. That made what was behind them a concealed weapon. I braced my hands on the table and sat back. “In regard to how he came to leave the Church.”
“Judge Blackthorne told you? How—no, never mind. The clergy is worse than a house filled with old women.” She got up to tend to the pot, which had come to a boil. She spooned tea from a square tin into two cups, poured in the steaming water, stirred, and returned to the table carrying a cup and saucer in each hand. When she was seated she said, “It's been so many years, and still they're talking about it. You'd think nothing else has ever happened in the Church.”
“You don't have to talk about it. I wasn't asking.”
“Who else is there to talk to? All our closest neighbors are dead. The Sisters of Mercy from Sacred Hearts pick up their habits and hurry past this house and cross themselves after. They won't forgive us for leaving and the Protestants we meet won't forgive us for having been in.”
“That's part of the reason I've gone this long without religion.”
“No one is without religion; not the gambler who credits his winning streak to luck or the woman who blames her dark star because her husband beats her. Have you ever connected a good or bad experience with timing?”
“I have, but I assumed the responsibility.”
“I'm sure that's what you told yourself, but let us say
you're right, and for whatever reason you've chosen to live without God. That's not the same as saying that God has had no influence upon you. The steps you've taken to avoid Him have altered your journey.”
I drank tea. I was beginning to aquire a taste for it, or at least for the way she brewed it. I'd had camp coffee that was less strong. “I can see why your husband doesn't encourage these discussions.”
“My mother superior shared the aversion. I was naïve. A convent is no place for a lively exchange of ideas. I believe now that if I had not made the mistake of confiding my inner feelings to her, she would have found some other way to dispose of me.”
“Then you have no regrets?”
She curled both hands around her cup and looked at her reflection on the surface. “I regret daily that I didn't hold my tongue and let nature find another course, one that did not destroy Eldred's life.”
BOOK: The Book of Murdock
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