Authors: Loren D. Estleman

The Book of Murdock (6 page)

BOOK: The Book of Murdock

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“Does he look at it that way?”

She picked up her ears, motioning for silence. The residents of that house seemed superhumanly attuned to the sound of their names. The stairs creaked and in a moment Griffin entered the kitchen. When he saw me he stopped, although of course he had to have known I was there. The place was small and voices traveled, even if words didn't.

“Did you return his money?” he asked his wife.

“I did not. We've spent some, and it would be weeks before we could save enough to return it. And you agreed to provide the instruction Mr. Murdock requested.”

“I changed my mind.”

I started my speech of apology, but she interrupted me. “You made a bargain; but we'll overlook that. A partial education in the ways of the Lord is worse than none at all. He might take what he's learned and not knowing the rest twist it to suit selfish purposes. I've heard you say that a hundred times about these traveling opportunists.”

“He thinks I'm one of them.”

“He's spent most of his visit telling me he doesn't. If you hadn't fled into your burrow when he knocked at the door, he'd have told you.”

“There's been entirely too much telling going on. You've been doing most of the talking.”

“Our story is known, but it's been poorly told. Should our enemies' version be the only one anyone hears?”

I scraped my chair back and stood. “I should leave.”

“You should come upstairs,” Griffin said. “A kitchen is for filling your belly, not your head.”

SEVEN

The programme accelerated
from that hour. Griffin seemed suddenly conscious of the time constraint and sped through the less illuminating biblical passages, questioning me sharply on certain points without warning, a bushwhacking maneuver that caught me unprepared the first time, but not again. His Church was founded on the New Testament, and lest the apostles be slighted for the sake of catching a train, we studied them between First and Second Kings. Infrequently he elaborated on the text, providing extraneous but revealing detail on the structure of the Roman legions and farming methods under the pharaohs of Egypt. His ragtag library was as heavy on history as it was light on theology; his massive Bible was the only religious authority in the room apart from himself. Arguments in print appeared to put him off as much as dissent from his wife, whom experience had taught him to defer to early and avoid a long and pointless discussion with the same result. He would not defer to rival philosophers.

One morning, near enough to date of departure to spoil my concentration with thoughts of linen and train changes, he marked his place in Deuteronomy with his bit of strop and shut the book with a thump. “How much experience have you had with speaking in public?”

“I've given manhunting parties their charges in town squares from here to California,” I said.

“Bawling like a master sergeant and preaching to the faithful do not belong to the same world, particularly in a proper house of worship. You must speak as if you were alone with one parishioner, yet be heard as clearly in the rear pew as in the front. That last is important. People who sit in front are already disposed to pay close attention. It's the stragglers who perch near the door you must capture. They will fly at the first dry rustle.”

“I'll try to get in some practice.”

“What will you speak about?”

“I don't figure I can go wrong with âLove thy Neighbor' and âStay Out of Hell.'”

He pulled his lips away from his teeth. I think they were falseâno set ever grew so evenly or stayed so whiteâbut the workmanship was superior to Judge Blackthorne's, which fit him so uncomfortably he wore them only on public occasions. He must have gone to a Catholic dentist while still a priest. “Why do you suppose most people go to church?”

The answer was too obvious for it to be anything but a trick question, but I've never learned anything by avoiding a trick. “To pray.”

“They can do that at home. Some attend out of fear of damnation, or love of salvation, or because their friends and
family expect them to, or to win public office, or to drum up business; back East, they would be the majority. Here on the frontier, most people surrender their one day of rest to be entertained. Be truthful. When you went in to hear Lawrence Little, did you expect to enjoy the experience?”

“No. I expected to be bored to my boots, then get frostbite in a buffalo wallow.”

“I'd suspected there was truth in the compliment you paid him. Preposterous and blatant as it is, his Sunday-school-simpleton picture of hell is what puts them on their feet and brings back return customers who know the text by heart. Some of those who were baptized with you had already been in ponds and springs and swollen streams where the Traveling Tabernacle has stopped in the past. The blessing does not wear out or expire; renewal is not necessary. They wanted to be part of the show. Very few seriously believe they're in danger of being condemned perpetually. Those who do are not so simple as to accept Little's parable of the torturous corset as punishment for vanity. It's theater, and only a fool thinks Ophelia is going barking mad before his eyes. The rest do insist that the
performer
believes, or produces a reasonably convincing counterfeit, preferably with Roman candles or some substitute. If all they wanted was the Golden Rule, they would stay home and read Matthew.”

“You're forgetting I'm going there to make arrests, not fill the collection plate.”

“And when half your congregation stays home the second Sunday, who's to tell you whom to arrest? Barren soil yields dust.”

I surrendered the point. “I'd planned to read straight from Scripture, but you've shot that down.”

“You're supposed to interpret it, not parrot it. A casual familiarity with the statutes won't win a legal case or we'd not need lawyers who are themselves entertainers.” He twisted to face his writing table and ransacked the heap of books and documents on top until he drew out a bundle of papers as thick as a brand book, bound lengthwise and sidewise with dirty cord. The edges were ragged and molting. They appeared to have been chewed by mice:
Church mice
, I thought, and surprised myself by feeling shame for thinking it. I wondered if piety was contagious.

I took the bundle, shedding paper flakes all over my lap. It was heavier than my own Bible and smelled like silage.

“My sermons,” he said. “Call it âThe Gospel According to Griffin' if you like. You'll need to make them your own. I wrote them with a cadence in mind that was comfortable to me, but no two musicians play the same tune the same way. I expect them back. I'd almost sooner part with Esther.”

Was there a flat note of insincerity in his
almost
? I asked myself if he didn't share his wife's regret. “Thank you. I doubt I'll be able to copy out many of them before I leave.”

“I'm suggesting you take them with you. Yours is not a tent show. It may be months before you finish your mission. Your audience will expect something fresh each week.”

“Are you sure you want to trust me with them? I've a habit of traveling light, with nothing I can't bring myself to abandon if the hunt goes the other way.”

“I haven't decided to trust you with them yet. I'll reserve
judgment until I've heard you read one in church. I've persuaded Father Medavoy to lend us the use of Sacred Hearts tomorrow morning. No services are scheduled that day. We'll have the place to ourselves and the odd sparrow.”

“That's cutting it close. My train's Saturday. We're not halfway through the Bible.”

“The seminaries are turning out graduates with a half knowledge of the Bible at best, and there are pastors who've forgotten more than that but continue to drift along on the same dogma they've been preaching for fifty years. As it stands, you know more than most of those who will come to you for spiritual aid, and it hasn't escaped my notice that you have the gift of blarney. My mother's people were Irish; I failed to inherit, but I have a healthy respect for it. I'm confident you'll find a way to fill the gap.”

“I can't help but suspect you're giving me up as a lost cause.”

“I resent the implication. I collect my pay for resodding sunken graves with my chin high, and if I thought I had shorted Judge Blackthorne in any way, I would return his gold if it meant working for Methodists to make up the difference.”

I didn't know what to say to that, whether to ask why pulling weeds for the Methodist Church was more demanding than performing similar work for Sacred Hearts. Democrats vs. Republicans was enough of a closed door without pondering the politics of prayer. What I came up with was, “What if you don't like what you hear tomorrow morning? If I get a failing grade, do I get to stay home?”

“I've not met your employer, but based on what I've heard
of his methods, he'll toss you into the furnace regardless of anything I might say. I seek merely to satisfy myself that I've done all I can in two weeks that can be expected of mortal man when faith is involved. If in my heart I cannot accept that I am doing other than releasing yet another profanity upon the land, I will beg your Judge on my knees to send me in your place.”

“He'd never agree to that. It would be a death sentence.”

“Just so.”

A squeak from the floor below told me that Esther Griffin had opened the damper in the stovepipe to prepare noon dinner. I'd come to know the house like none I'd lived in since my father's dugout in the mountains, and the thought that I would soon leave it, with no good excuse to come back, put the cold lump of homesickness deep in my belly.

“I can't get the straight of you,” I said. “How can you still be so devoted to God after He treated you as He has?”

He showed surprise for the first time since we'd met, and it was a testimony to how well I'd come to know him that I recognized it; the deep latitudinal lines that were so much a part of his forehead disappeared, the skin drawn taut by the movement of his scalp. It was a shape-shifting moment.

“God never deserted me,” he said. “In return for my earthly disgrace He gave me Esther. It's a debt I can never repay. No other mortal in Creation has been permitted to take an angel unto himself.”

“Have you said as much to Esther?”

“It would be superfluous. Angels know they're angels.”

I didn't wander any deeper into country where I had no jurisdiction. He might have been able to address a churchful
of people as if he were talking to one, but when it was just one he was wretched.

Our session ended and I went back to my room to look through the bundle. The undated pages were tanned and brittle and threatened to fall apart at the folds when I cut the cord. He'd filled them with a bold round hand with few crossouts and corrections and not a single blot. At first it seemed like poetry and I nearly gave up because I can't recite verse without sounding like a bored railroad conductor announcing the next stop, but when I tried one there in the privacy of my own quarters it came as easily as breathing. He'd found the difference between writing to be read and writing to be heard; what looked like broken pieces of sentences to the eye sounded like natural conversation when read aloud. Not surprisingly, because the Christian God is not the wrathful ogre of the Old Testament, there was little about flames that burned without consuming and much about forgiveness and mercy; but Eldred Griffin's Jesus was not the bearded lady I'd seen in picture books and in pasteboard frames on people's walls. Virile, decisive, and committed, his was the authority that hurled the money changers out of the temple and told the devil to go to hell with his kingdoms of gold. He reminded me of Griffin himself, who if he had not remade God in his own image had certainly placed his stamp upon Him.

I made my selection finally, and from sundown to well past midnight sat at the narrow drop-front desk that came with the room, transcribing the text onto a separate sheet, making small changes that suited my inferior breath control, and burning the phrases deep into my memory until
my eyes gave out and I couldn't turn up the lamp any more without smudging the glass chimney. I retired then and spent the rest of the dark hours dreaming I stood naked at the pulpit before pews packed with my enemies. It made for a full house.

Griffin greeted me at the door of the Cathedral of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and remarked that I hadn't slept well. I held up my pages of notes by way of answer.

“You're prepared, then. I expect much.”

Thus pressed, I crossed the cavernous room up the center aisle, with the sensation that I was following the echo of my footsteps rather than the reverse. The morning sun leaning in through the tall stained-glass windows cast colored reflections on the oiled pews, and the sparrows Griffin had predicted fluttered between the rafters, looking for a place to perch and take in the performance. The place smelled of candle wax and varnish.

I mounted the steps to the pulpit. Father Medavoy, the pastor, was tall, and had directed a volunteer to raise it with planks for his comfort, bringing it to the top of my sternum. I felt like an altar boy serving out some kind of humiliating punishment. Griffin, no help, took a seat in the very back, nearly out of pistol range from where I stood arranging my pages on a slantboard with a pencil rail at the base.

I cleared my throat and began.

“Louder!”

I started again, raising my voice.

“Louder!”

I shouted.

“Not so loud! It's a sermon, not a roll call.”

I made two more tries before he fell silent long enough for me to get to the body of the text. It was a parable of his own creation, about a boy whose brother had died before he was born, and who through a misunderstanding thought him an angel, to whom he prayed for an end to his parents' grief. It was guaranteed to wring tears from listeners, but acting upon some instinct I kept them from my own voice. It ended with the parents on their knees embracing their only child.

Silence struck like a bell. Even the light hiss of air stirring in the barnlike room had stopped. After a second (minute ?) or two I began to hope I'd lost my hearing.

“Why did you pause before the last line?” Griffin asked then, and the air resumed stirring. Outside the nearest window a creaking carriage, which had halted in its tracks, started moving again.

“I thought it needed a running start.”

“Leaps of faith don't. Why were you not moved by the tale?”

BOOK: The Book of Murdock

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