Sanctuary (4 page)

Eyes shut tight against that painful light, his fingers probed his pockets, one after another. Nothing! He didn't have the letter about Emma or the voucher. His old suit! He had left the letter in his old suit!

Charley the barber had picked up Doc's ragtag suit, holding it away from himself in two fingers, nose wrinkled. “I'll burn these for you, Doc,” he had said. And Doc agreed, glad to be shut of that piece of his life. But he had left Marcus's letter in that suit! He had no way out now; he would die of cirrhosis in Sanctuary and be buried in a potter's grave.

Doc wailed, a high-pitched keening, his misery leaking from him like blood from a shrapnel wound. He had killed himself, and now he was mourning because no one else would.

“Awake, Doc?” someone called.

Doc forced his eyes open. The preacher was towering above him, black suit drawn sharp in the morning light, face shining in the sun.

“The gold piece was yours, wasn't it?” Doc asked.

The preacher nodded.

“I haven't got it anymore.”

“I know.”

“Going to throw me in jail, preacher?”

“No, I meant for you to have the money.”

Doc shook his head, trying to make his mind work.

“I don't understand.”

“You will. But first we have to get you cleaned up. I've got a room for you in the hotel.”

Mordecai reached down to help Doc to his feet, but Doc waved him away. He clambered to his feet and lurched to the door, leaning against the frame while he vomited, emptying his belly of all the poisons he had pumped into it.

The next three days were hidden in a haze. Occasionally the fog cleared and Doc could see the hotel room, single bed against one wall, commode and wardrobe against the other, a thunder mug beneath the bed.

But mostly Doc remembered the preacher forcing water into him and cleaning up the mess when he couldn't hold it down, sitting beside the bed in the soft light of the kerosene lamp at night and silhouetted in the sunlight streaming through the south window by day.

Doc had tried to jar himself awake, to make sense of what was happening, but whenever he tried to talk, the preacher told him to sleep, and he would close his eyes and plunge into darkness.

Sleep was a blessing. Gut-wrenching pain had broken his resolve in earlier attempts to shake loose from the bottle. But there was no pain in the deep sleep, only peace splintering into confusion as he edged toward consciousness. The preacher must be giving him a sedative, but Doc couldn't remember taking any.

Doc had been awake now since dawn, trying to put the pieces of his mind back together. He wanted a drink, but he was too weak to walk to the Silver Dollar. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, his belly wanted food more than whiskey.

As his mind mulled that, he heard a rap at the door.

The preacher stepped in, carrying a coffeepot and two mugs. “Thought you might need a cup of coffee.”

“What I need is a drink.”

“No, what you need is to get yourself straightened out.”

Doc glared. “What is it about preachers that makes them think they can poke into your life without invitation?”

“What is it about you, Doc,” the preacher replied softly, “that makes you drink yourself senseless so you lay in a shack and wet your pants?”

Doc's face went white.

“You'd drink, too, if you'd been through what I have.”

“Tell me about it, Doc. Tell me what you've been through.”

And Doc did. He opened himself to the preacher, tentatively at first, as he might have opened a patient's belly in search of a tumor. He told the preacher about Emma. She glowed with life and love, Doc said, and he would have been happy simply to spend his life near her, watching her, warmed by her.

But then, Marcus had won Emma's hand, and Raleigh had fled to the army in 1874, his romantic spirit driving him to the frontier and to the command of Colonel Nelson A. Miles. Miles was tough and resourceful, and Doc admired him greatly until that day in the Bear Paws when the colonel ran Chief Joseph to the ground.

It was man against man for a while, and the soldiers were unable to crack the nut Joseph and his people had set in the Montana mountains just forty miles south of the Canadian border.

So Miles had laid siege to the camp, pounding it with artillery, and when General Oliver O. Howard arrived, the Nez Percés surrendered.

Surgeon Raleigh J. Benjamin had been one of the first into the camp, picking and choosing among the wounded men, women, and children. This one would survive without immediate treatment. This one would die regardless. This one would die without immediate treatment.

There was great pain and blood and hatred and resignation in that camp, and Benjamin strode through it like an angel of the Lord, dispensing life and death.

He spent the next week cutting the limbs from the bodies of infants and children, shutting the eyes of mothers as their children looked on, and treating the wounds of men who had no room in their souls for anything but hatred.

And at the end of that week, Army Surgeon Raleigh J. Benjamin had resigned his commission and buried himself in a bottle. He wasn't sure how long he had wandered before he found Sanctuary, he said. He'd tried to resurrect himself in a practice there, but alcohol and the eyes of those children haunted him, and finally he had hidden, had become a geek, a swamper in the Silver Dollar Saloon.

By the time Doc finished his story he was weeping, tears testament to his lost love and lost life.

“Do you see now why I drink?” he sobbed.

“Yes, I see,” the preacher said. “But you don't.”

Doc stopped sobbing for a moment, eyebrows raised to give his eyes freedom to range over this man in black coat and clerical collar.

“Doc, you drink because you're a coward. You've run from every challenge in your life. You have taken God's gifts and traded them for the oblivion of alcohol. You're a coward, Doc, pure and simple.”

Doc raged at Mordecai, desperately trying to hurt the preacher as the preacher had hurt him, but his fists fell softly as a child's.

Mordecai took the blows without defending himself, waiting for Doc's exhaustion to cool the rage within him.

When the last feeble blows had struck, the preacher said, “Best that you get some rest now,” and Doc fell as if he'd been rapped with an axe handle.

He didn't even dream. His mind shut down until the knock at the door nudged him into consciousness. The preacher edged into the room, this time carrying a mug of soup and a pot of coffee.

“Thought you might be ready for breakfast,” the preacher said.

Doc glared at the preacher, trying to reconstruct his rage. But the sleep had eased his rancor, and he sighed. “You must have been reading my mind.”

The preacher grinned. “Doesn't take much guesswork to figure that a man who's been asleep for three days would want something to eat.”

“Three days?”

“That's what the calendar says. You needed to get your strength back.”

“How long have I been here?”

“This is the fifth day.”

Doc pushed his legs over the edge of the bed and struggled to sit up. “I've got to get moving.”

“Where are you going, Doc? Back to the Silver Dollar?”

“Damn you, preacher!”

“Are you going to blame your cowardice on me now, Doc? What will you do when you run out of other people to blame?”

“Leave me alone.”

“To die, Doc?”

Doc's eyes jerked around to settle on the preacher.

“I've seen cirrhosis before, Doc. If you don't stop drinking, you're going to die. That's not an easy way to go.”

Doc burst into tears. “What can I do?”

The preacher put his hand on the old man's shoulder.

“Doc,” he said gently. “You've spent all your life digging a hole. You're down to bedrock now, and you can't go any deeper. The walls are starting to give way, and when they do, you'll be buried down there at the end of a wasted life.

“There's no way you can scramble out by yourself. But if you really want out, all you have to do is ask, and a rope will come curling down from above. You can pull yourself out with that rope. It'll be some work, but you can do it.”

“Do you want that rope, Doc?”

Doc nodded, tears erupting again and streaming down his face.

“Let us pray,” the preacher said, taking Doc's hands in his own.

Three

Judd sat on the step in front of his shack, picking pebbles from beneath his feet and chucking them half-heartedly at opportune targets. But his attention was focused on the slaughterhouse, red lead and rough lumber, perched on a knoll above the camp.

The boy had awakened that morning to the crack of a .22 rifle from above: once, twice, three times, four and five. Five steers with bullets in their brains, enough work to keep the meat plant operating all day. By the time he climbed from bed, two of the steers were hanging from a crossbar in front of the building, opened and swaying a bit in the fresh spring breeze.

Judd might have gone up to the slaughterhouse then, but he had heard the low rumble of Jasper's voice. He couldn't understand the words, but he didn't have to. Jasper had only one mood—ugly—and to go to the slaughterhouse now was to … Judd shuddered.

Judd's stomach rumbled to protest its emptiness. He and his grandmother had shared the steak the preacher had given him with the Old Hawk family. The Old Hawk children were young and didn't understand hunger yet, so it was best to give them most of the meat.

The steak bone and beans given them by the Old Hawks had taken the edge off, but now his hunger had returned and the time had come to spend the quarter.

Through the cracks in the door behind him Judd heard his grandmother stirring. She would be rising soon, and she would be hungry. It is not easy to awaken hungry and know that you will go to bed hungry, too.

Judd sighed.

Holding the quarter clenched tightly in his hand, he walked up the hill toward the slaughterhouse, but there was no spring in his step and only resignation in his eyes.

Jasper and the others had trimmed around the steer's hind-quarters, and they were trying to strip the hide off the animal, tugging at it like ants tugging a grasshopper back to their hill. Entrails lay in a pool beneath the steer, and occasionally one of the men would step in them, grunting as he slipped.

“Son of a bitch doesn't want to give it up, does he?” one man asked, wiping the sweat from his forehead on a blood-soaked sleeve.

“Probably figures there's still some cold left this spring,” another replied, and the men chuckled, still grunting from the effort.

Judd had walked up behind the group, and he stood there waiting for one of them to notice him, but no one did.

Finally the hide peeled off, prodded along here and there by the fine edge of a knife. The skin was pulled off the animal's neck and draped for a moment over the steer's head, as though the animal were embarrassed by its nakedness.

Jasper grabbed a saw from a nearby table and began cutting the animal's head off. He was through the spine in a matter of minutes and his knife made short work of the rest of the steer's throat.

The men draped the hide, hair down, on a fence. One bent over the animal's head, grunting as he dug the steer's tongue free from its skull. He held it up, gray and rough as a rasp, before dropping it in a galvanized tub with the heart and liver.

The others had stopped for a moment, breathing deeply, their breath painting plumes in the air.

It was then that Judd cleared his throat.

The boy's heart was racing, and even in the cold he could feel a drop of sweat course down his back, but he attempted to carve his face from stone as the men looked up.

“You can count on it, can't you, boys?” Jasper said. “Butcher, and the smell will bring out all the dogs within sniffing distance. Sorry-looking mutt, ain't he.”

“I have money,” Judd said, holding out the quarter.

Jasper slapped the bottom of Judd's hand, and the coin sailed into the air beyond his reach but not beyond Jasper's. He snatched it like a rainbow trout chasing a stone fly.

“I'll be damned,” Jasper said in mock amazement, pocketing the coin. “It can talk, just like it was a real person. What's this world coming to?”

Sniggers rippled through the men. They had watched Jasper play this game before.

“Wonder if this talking dog knows any tricks? You'd think a smart dog like him would know something.”

Jasper leaned down and sliced a handful of meat off a fresh liver. He held the meat shoulder high.

“Let's see you beg. Smart dog like you ought to be able to beg.”

Judd knew the routine. He tried to turn off his mind, focusing only on the hunger he had seen etched on his grandmother's face. He tried to remember the thin faces and the big black eyes of the Old Hawk children. And then he dropped to his knees, holding his hands in front of him as a begging dog might hold his paws.

“See,” Jasper said. “That dog ain't as stupid as he looks. He picked up begging right off. Now, let's see another trick, dog. Let's see you roll over.”

The ground was stained with the blood of a thousand steers. Weeds and maggots shared that bloody brew, but Judd did as he was told, his eyes open and staring, seeing only the face of his grandmother.

“Now this is the tough trick,” Jasper hissed, and the grin on his face was a terrible thing to see. “This dog's going to have to catch this liver in his teeth, or he's going away empty-handed.

“You understand that, dog?”

Judd kneeled on the ground, his face hard as granite and pale as a winter moon. Tears ran down his cheeks and dripped on his shirt, but he felt nothing, nothing at all.

“That's enough fun,” one of the men whispered. “Just give him the meat, Jasper, and we'll get back to work.”