Sanctuary (7 page)

He broke through the water, gasping for air, and discovered he was alone. The sound of singing pulled his eyes toward the huge tent pitched on the grass in the shade of the cottonwood trees. The assembly from the river was nearing the tent, two of the men holding the arms of the baptized woman, helping her in her disjointed walk toward salvation.

A great shout greeted the people inside the tent, and more than anything in his life, Judd wanted to be part of what was going on there.

He walked out of the river on the trunk of the cotton-wood, steadying himself with the branches that seemed always to be where he needed them whenever he began to lose his balance. Water cascaded in sheets from his body, and he shivered a bit in the tree's shade.

On the riverbank, he slipped behind tree after tree, making his way toward the tent, quiet and cautious. He reached the corner of the tent just as the congregation inside burst into “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and Judd was caught in the triumphant strains of the music as certainly as a fish in a net. He stood, his feet shuffling softly against the earth.

And then gently—ever so gently—Judd pulled apart the corner of the tent and peeked inside.

Suddenly the wall of the tent shoved against him. Judd would have fallen, but he was held upright, his wrist caught in the gnarled hand of the Reverend Eli.

Judd struggled as the rabbits struggled in his snares before the thongs took their lives, but he was helpless in the Reverend's grip.

The corner of the tent parted, and Judd was jerked inside, visible: the focus of a hundred eyes and the Reverend Eli's hate.

At first Judd couldn't understand the words. They reverberated through the tent like the boom of a cannon fired in the town park on the Fourth of July. Then he heard, and the words seethed at him, cut him clean as a knife.

“God has sent us a lesson,” the Reverend Eli shouted. “There will be many like this sinner who will want to enter the tent of salvation when the end of the world has come.

“But God will reject them, just as I reject this sinner. There is no room for you among believers,” the Reverend shouted, shaking Judd by the shoulders. “You are a sinner and the wages of sin is death!…”

Judd knew his fate if he were to be caught in Sanctuary without the preacher.

The back door of the print shop scuffed open, and Mordecai stepped through the door, framed for a moment by the unpainted wood.

“Know where the school is, Judd?”

Judd nodded, his eyes probing the alley for ears that might hear the preacher speaking.

“You hold a lot of store in being able to move around without being noticed, don't you, Judd?”

Judd looked at the preacher from the corner of his eye.

“No trick in being invisible, boy.” The preacher put his hand on Judd's shoulder, the first time Judd remembered being touched by another person except in anger.

Judd walked stiffly along the alley, aware of nothing but the hand on his shoulder, uncomfortable. But by the time the two reached the end of the alley, Judd felt more at ease.

Judd hesitated before walking into the street, pulling back against the pressure of the preacher's hand.

“Don't worry, boy. Nobody can see us. We can walk across this street slick as can be as long as we're quiet. You know how to be quiet, don't you, boy?”

Judd nodded. He knew about being invisible. He knew, too, that it flickered like a candle on a windy night. Sometimes when he most wanted to be invisible—like that time at the revival tent—it didn't work. He didn't want to step into this street now and be paid the
wages of sin.

But the pressure on his shoulder was firm, and he couldn't resist, so he stepped into the street, his only sound the protest of the dust beneath his feet.

There were a few rigs on the street and some people, but only a horse seemed to notice the two as they crossed. The off-horse on a team pulling a wagonload of cream to the creamery rolled his eyes as he passed and snorted. Muttered curses spouted from the driver, as gray and round as the cans behind. The driver discussed the horse's heritage and future and was still muttering as the rig pulled out of hearing up the street.

When they had reached the darkness and safety of the alley beyond, the preacher whispered.

“Elder in the Reverend Eli's congregation. The good folk of the Church of Righteousness would be surprised that those words crossed his lips. He's mighty careful that no one hears him when he's carrying on like that.”

The backs of businesses along Main Street butted against the south side of the alley, but the north half of the block was made up of long, narrow residential lots. Grass and trees in front of most of the homes faded to clotheslines and doghouses and piles of gray, rotting boards in the back. Yet some of the yards were neat, shovels stuck blade deep in gardens almost a month away from seed.

“You can tell more about a person by his backyard than his front,” the preacher whispered.

“Quiet, now.”

A woman on the long side of sixty slumped in a chair beside a low table that held her washtub and rinse water, sheets snapping on the clothesline in the fresh spring air.

Occasionally her breath would rasp through her adenoids, and jerked awake by the sound, she would stare again at the mountain of wash that she was expected to do.

The woman's chair—back to the alley—was within reaching distance from the fence for a tall man, and the preacher stopped behind the woman, picked up a feather lying in the alley, and drew it lightly across the nape of her neck. She started a bit, her hand moving reflexively to the itch.

The preacher waited a moment and then ran the feather again across the woman's neck. She jerked, hunched up her shoulders, and turned her neck, rubbing it against the muscles of her shoulders. She reached up and scratched her head.

The preacher waited until a tentative snore escaped the woman, and then reached across the fence again. Judd, who had been greatly enjoying the show, could contain himself no longer. Giggles squeaked through his fingers, sounding more like the snort of a pig than laughter.

The woman jerked around just as the preacher dropped the feather and let go of Judd's shoulder.

“You must excuse me, my good lady,” the preacher said, sweeping his hat from his head and bowing to her. “I was trying to teach my young friend here the mating call of the bull moose, and I'm afraid we didn't see you sitting there. My heartfelt apologies, madam.”

The woman's face was drawn in a knot of suspicion, but it eased as she spotted the preacher's collar. She tried to smile, but the effort was lost to a bone-deep weariness.

“Wasn't sleeping,” she said, finally. “Just waiting for the wind to take the moisture from one load.”

“That's plain to see,” Mordecai said, tipping his hat again.

“We'll leave you to your work, Mrs. Finney. Sorry we bothered you.”

They left her staring after them as they walked up the alley, Mordecai saying loudly, “Why don't you try the call, now, Judd?” Judd broke into muffled laughter again, the sound squeezing between his fingers.

“Not bad, my boy. Not bad, at all. Call like that would certainly draw in a lovesick moose.” They both laughed then, the sound echoing between the walls lining the alley.

And when they were a block away, the preacher stopped and turned to Judd. “No trick to being invisible. The trick is to make yourself visible. You understand that?”

Judd nodded.

“Wouldn't do now, would it, to have Mrs. Finney turn around to find out she heard a moose call, and not a moose to be seen. She'd be talking about haunts.”

“But she'll have a story now that she can share with her neighbors about a preacher man and an Indian boy hunting moose in her alley. She'll have a good laugh over that.”

The preacher paused, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “She deserves another good laugh before she goes.”

Judd stared at the preacher as they walked toward the school, but the preacher didn't notice, his mind on other matters.

Five

The school lay a full mile from the edge of town as though knowledge were under quarantine in Sanctuary, but Mary Dickens didn't mind the isolation, preferring it to the company of most of the townsfolk, and Sanctuary was there when she needed it.

She walked to town on a more or less regular schedule for city council and Women's Christian Temperance Union meetings. When mood and weather meshed, she poked through Sanctuary stores for material for dresses and sewed evenings when she wasn't reading by the light of a kerosene lamp.

On free afternoons when the winter sun was more promise than fraud, she walked through frost-rimed cottonwoods lining the banks of the Milk, enjoying the quiet beauty of the river bottom. But most of her time she spent teaching or worrying about “her” children.

She would see them in the morning walking single file, the older children up front, breaking a path through the snow, the smaller children at the end of the line, bundled as heavily as their bodies and their parents' budgets would allow.

Sometimes she stood on the step of the school and peered into a world turned white. It seemed then that only the school had substance, that to leave it was to step into the void. Then she'd see a vague shape through the whiteout, and one of the older children would appear, ephemeral as a ghost, then the others, hand-in-hand, a train of life trudging through a hostile world.

The children came to school stiff and cut to the bone by the wind, their faces carved stoic and painted red—and sometimes white—by that bitter cold.

It was after one of those days that she had the older boys run rope wings on either side of the school so that the children would not wander past in a storm, dropping one by one as the cold overtook them.

The first minutes of school were spent unwrapping the children and shuffling them swiftly and soundlessly to the potbellied stove glowing red in the back of the room. It was there that she took inventory, determining who was missing and why, checking numb bodies for white or black flesh, sure signs of frostbite.

Miss Dickens had become expert at treating flesh bitten by those bitter winds. Stricken students were given seats at the back of the room, where they could hide their pain and tears as frostbitten feet warmed in water put on the stove early that morning.

As Miss Dickens faced them from the front of the room, holding tight to the reading book, she tried to drive the children's quiet tears from her mind.

It had been her habit during that first winter to watch for the children as they came to school in the morning and again as they trudged home at night. She didn't know what she could do if windblown snow engulfed her students on their way home, but she watched anyway.

That habit had carried over to early spring, especially after her friend Sarah White explained that spring storms with their soft white flakes were dreaded most by ranchers. Calves and lambs were on the ground and vulnerable.

The children were vulnerable, too, Mary had said, and even though mud was beginning to ooze through the frostbitten soil, she stood in the doorway of the school, watching the children come in the morning and go in the afternoon.

As the children passed a man and a young boy on the trail, Mary caught the flash of white against black. The man was a preacher, tall and slender and wearing a black suit and inverted collar that hung on him like crepe. The boy was a younger version of the preacher, tall and slender, and they both walked easy on the earth.

As they approached, the preacher tipped his hat, the spring sun revealing his face—thin, sun-browned skin stretched tight over fine bones—and Mary wondered for a moment why he had left the warmth of that sun to journey to Montana.

His eyes were brown and warm, belying the hawkish aspect of the rest of his face. He looked, she decided, as a conscripted poet might look in the midst of a long, bloody war.

Mary ran that description past her tongue a couple of times, deciding she would use it in one of the novellas she puttered with in her spare time.

“Mordecai,” the preacher said, doffing his hat and holding it across his breast. “This young gentleman is Judd Medicine Elk.”

Judd held himself absolutely motionless so that his drab clothing would become one with the raw prairie dirt and the teacher wouldn't see him.

“Mary Dickens,” the teacher replied, returning the preacher's grin. “What can I do for you two gentlemen?”

“Wanted to talk to you about renting some city land down by the dump.”

“I was about to have tea,” Mary said. “Would you like some?”

The preacher nodded, and they stepped toward the teacherage, Judd hanging back.

“Come on, Judd. You can be the chaperon.”

“A chaperon isn't needed. It's doubtful my reputation can be damaged any further,” Mary whispered as she led the two into the teacherage.

The front room, kitchen, and dining room were all jammed into a space about ten feet square. A huge wood-burning stove dominated the south wall, totally eclipsing a table and two chairs parked next to it. A withered geranium poked from a flowerpot like a sentry posted to watch for the sun.

A rocker with hand-stitched pads on the seat and back stood in the light of the setting sun that eased through the room's only other window.

Mary threw a couple of sticks into the stove, and embers left from its noon feeding licked at the wood as though savoring the taste. Mary moved the rocker over to the table and invited the preacher and Judd to sit down.

Then she bustled around the stove, arranging cookies on a plate and carrying them over to the table.

“Don't wait for me,” she said, offering the cookies. “You start and I'll catch up in a minute.”

The preacher took one and passed the plate to Judd. The boy shook his head, trying still to be as inconspicuous as possible.

“Take one,” the preacher whispered. “You'll hurt her feelings if you don't.”