“Get Ter Horst. His wife teaches Sunday school, and that sheep face of his belongs at the Last Supper.”
“I considered him first, but he thought the plan profane. He threatened to resign.”
“Whereas my soul’s up for grabs. The star draws fire like a bottle on a fence rail, but I put it on when you ask. I won’t reverse my collar for you. I never met a man struck by lightning who was decent company after we got past the obvious.”
He smiled then, close-lipped without the teeth he wore only in the courtroom. “I felt certain once I scratched that infidel’s hide I’d find a believer. You’re too hard on yourself, Page. You have an ecclesiastical mien when you discuss a subject that arouses your passion. The rest is costuming.”
That was when I knew I was beaten, although I argued my case a few more minutes just to make the conversation as disagreeable for him as it was for me. When Judge Blackthorne addressed me by my given name, there was no slack left in the leash.
TWO
I asked how long I’d be in seminary. He said I was leaving for Texas in two weeks.
I stared. “That’s barely time to get through Genesis.”
“Once again you undervalue your abilities, and you know I regard false modesty a mortal sin. I’ve seen you plow through a thick field report without pausing to lick your thumb. Genesis is only sixty-six pages in the standard King James edition, and the whole thing’s shorter than Ben-Hur by two hundred sixty. But then Lew Wallace always was prone to wander.”
“How did you know that?”
“Every schoolboy knows he got lost on the way to Shiloh, leading to huge Union losses. It was a great victory for the army when he turned toward literature.”
“I mean how did you know the number of pages in King James? I’ve met men who can recite it front to back who couldn’t tell you that.”
“As can I. As can a magpie, with as much comprehension of the spirit behind the words. Annex to that in my case a talent for figures.” He tugged out his fine platinum watch, engraved with his name by President Polk for distinguished service during the war with Mexico; I assume a medal had come with it, but the watch and the bullet-chewed tricolor flag that hung on the wall of his chambers were the only souvenirs he displayed from that episode. “I know, for example, that of this moment you have eleven thousand, three hundred and forty-four minutes to make yourself intimate with the Book of Books before your train leaves. I caution you to use them all. There are Texans who can barely write their names but who will drag you through cactus if you overlook a comma in Ezekiel; again, a feat of exhibition rather than of faith. That panhandle country is undiverting and made to order for scholarly study.”
“There’s more to being a minister than reading and regurgitating verses. You haven’t even told me my denomination.”
“The vacancy you’re filling was left by a Unitarian, which is the nearest thing established doctrine offers to religion à la carte. We’ll go one step further from popery and make you an evangelist. That way there will be no truck with arcane ceremony and personal strictures. You’re free to take strong drink and fornicate, although I advise more than usual discretion in both pursuits. You’re aware of el ley del fugo?”
“La ley de la fuga. The law of flight applies only to fleeing suspects. It’s a license to slaughter.”
“I sense error in both constructions, but I keep forgetting your season in New Mexico. It’s been many years since I laid siege to Montezuma.” The ends of his moustache turned down steeply. He hated to be caught in a mistake in the midst of a dissertation, and had found more than one attorney in contempt for correcting him in court. “The interpretation of the law becomes broader the farther one travels west or south of the more populous settlements. Your discovery alighting from the back porch of a married rancher upon his return home would not overstretch its spirit. Letter is another matter, but by the time a judgment was reached it would be unlikely to do you any material good.”
“I can be killed for that here, and spend my last night in my own bed.”
“Not yours, to be technical, but the point is moot in any case, since you’re making the journey. Texas is the only state that retains the privilege of secession, and some of the natives behave as if it’s exercised it already. They’re savages in silk hats.”
“I know Texas, or most of it. That’s why I came back to Montana.”
“Riding herd, no doubt, upon its indigenous unchewable bovines.” He tapped the arm of his chair with the edge of the watch as if it were his gavel. “A pulpit is not a saddle. You’ll require a tutor for the public parts, as well as in the niceties of the rectory and parlor.”
“I’m fresh out of suggestions. I don’t know any of the ministers in town, and I’m not sure they’d take kindly to a stranger asking them how to defraud a flock of the faithful.”
“I know an Episcopalian who’d shoot you as like as not with the pistol he uses to protect the sacramental wine. But I’d not send you out cold even in Helena on so delicate a mission. You’ll want Eldred Griffin; Father Griffin, though I’d sound him out before I employed the title. I’m not certain if the custom of addressing ex officios as ‘President’ and ‘Governor’ extends to the clergy, and this fellow may take it amiss whatever the protocol.” He rang for the steward and asked for envelopes and writing paper. The man withdrew, taking with him the big atlas, which he’d retrieved without asking—a veiled reference, I thought, to the Judge’s desecration of its contents.
“A Catholic priest?” I asked.
“Defrocked. Distasteful term. One pictures a bishop tearing off the man’s vestments in the churchyard and stomping his chalice flat.”
“I hope he’s not a colorful old character. I draw them like flies.”
“You’ll have no difficulty on that account. He’s not many years older than you, and according to the Reverend Clay of the Presbyterian church, he suffers from chronic melancholia. Mr. Webster defines black as the absence of color.”
The steward returned with a sheaf of foolscap and some envelopes. Blackthorne took two of each, sent him away with the rest, and shook ink into the business end of his pen. Using the table at his elbow, he spent some minutes writing, signed both pages in his elaborate hand, waved them dry, folded them into envelopes, and addressed each. He tucked in the flaps and held them out.
“The first will introduce you to Griffin. Don’t lose the second; it’s for the captain of the Texas Rangers in Wichita Falls, who will prepare you for what to expect in Owen. I know I can trust you not to steal a look at them.”
I opened each of the envelopes in turn and read the letters while he seethed. They were headed by the name of the Helena Stockmen’s Association in halftone letters and a steel-point engraving of the club’s brick headquarters. I refolded them and put them back, tapping the Texas-bound envelope with a finger. “Judge Blackthorne’s Epistle to the Texicans?”
“You try my patience, Deputy. Did you think they contained instructions to assassinate you?”
“Anytime someone says he can trust me it means I can’t trust him. What are the odds the thought never crossed your mind?”
“It’s crossing it now.”
“Am I really one of the most reliable officers in the federal system?”
“That depends on the area in which one relies upon you. Captain Jordan has slain sixteen men in the line of duty, whereas I’m told former Father Griffin is drawn to straight talk with no embroidery. For those reasons you may get along with both. Then again, you may not for the very same reasons. I still receive letters from the White House in response to calls for your extradition to Canada on behalf of the North West Mounted Police.”
“It doesn’t sound like this Captain Jordan wastes much time writing letters.” I slid the envelopes into my inside breast pocket next to the underarm rig I wore in town.
“Were I you, I would cosset him at every opportunity. The Rangers are known for recruiting their officers on the basis of results rather than strict c
onformity to the rule of law.”
“Cosset Jordan, talk turkey with Griffin. So long as I don’t mix them up I can’t go wrong.”
Blackthorne smiled. I preferred it when he wore his teeth. I asked where I could find Griffin.
“In the Catholic cemetery.”
Every time I returned to Helena, it seemed, more brick buildings had been erected to replace frame structures built on the same sites. This was because the city burned down every few years, and fireproofing is more effective than reeducating residents in the proper use of flame. One day the whole place would be brick, like Chicago, and it would be time for me to move on, because there’s no room in civilization for a fellow with bark left on him.
The Cathedral of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was one of the oldest local landmarks constructed of that sturdy material, and had sheltered many refugees from blazes under its spiky-crowned bell tower. I climbed Catholic Hill and discovered something new since I was there last: a large structure—brick, of course—risen in place of the wooden boarding school of Saint Vincent’s Academy, where the nuns of the order taught children their letters as well as Numbers. It had burned or been torn down and replaced. But Sacred Hearts still dominated the hill.
I swore they’d done the work during my brief visit to Oregon, but then a lot more time had passed since I’d been near that church or any other. I didn’t even know for sure what faith I’d fallen out of; my father never told me just Who he prayed to when he set his trap line in Blackfoot country, and my mother had kept her old gods to herself. I would be a challenge to instruct. My knuckles hurt just thinking about it.
Farther down the street, inside a grille fence topped with iron fleurs-de-lis, slumber the Catholic settlers of Last Chance Gulch, along with others of the same persuasion, under crosses and tablets and the odd bugling angel. But cemetery populations are continually expanding without attrition, and a larger lot had been purchased on the edge of town to accommodate later arrivals and marble vaults for the well-heeled.
Even old graves need tending, however, and vandals and thieves with spades need to be discouraged. A dwelling had been built for caretakers and their families on the last plot of unturned earth—some said atop the bones of forgotten pioneers whose wooden markers had burned or been carried away. It was a doll’s house really, designed along the lines of the stately mansions of the suddenly rich on Benton Avenue and Lawrence Street, but scaled down to proportions more appropriate to its humble tenants. It was the same mansard roof, the same mullioned panes in Roman arches, the same gracious wraparound porch; but twelve paces would take you from the front door into the backyard, and even from the outside you could tell that a man not much taller than myself would have to duck when he climbed the stairs to the second story. And I am not tall.
I worked the bell pull and took off my hat when the door opened, as I would have upon entering a place of worship. The man who opened it was in his middle forties, my height (I wondered if he’d been hired for his slight stature, to preserve the plaster ceilings), and to my observation the owner of the only other shaven male chin and upper lip west of Pennsylvania. His cheeks were high ovals, his hair cut short and black without gray, and his eyes were that pale shade of blue that photographers have to touch up on the glass plate to keep them from reproducing dead white. He wore neither coat nor collar, but with his black waistcoat buttoned and white shirt fastened to the throat he appeared fitted out to preach the gospel in any church I’d ever entered.
“Father Griffin?”
“Eldred Griffin.” He had a low, even voice that never strayed above or below a straight line—or so I thought then. It had the quality of a chant. “You’re Page Murdock.” He touched a pocket in his waistcoat. I’d sent him Judge Blackthorne’s letter by way of a messenger, with a note of my own, but I hadn’t expected him to keep either on his person. The way he touched it made me think of an amulet to ward off—well, me.
I showed him the simple six-pointed star. “Am I interrupting anything?”
“Only my retirement.”
I pocketed the star and took out his response. “You invited me here.”
He glanced at it without interest. “It isn’t my hand.”
“Eldred, you know very well it’s mine.” This was a new voice.
He half turned from the doorway, giving me a straight shot across the shallow entryway at a small woman standing framed in an arch leading to the rest of the house. Her hair, brown with streamers of gray, was skinned back and fastened behind her head, and her face was round, without a single feature that called attention to itself. She wore a dark brown dress, nearly black, and plain to the point of pride; a placket concealed the buttons. An egg-shaped stone the color of slate in an old-fashioned setting showed on the index finger of her right hand, folded over its mate at her waist. It was her only ornament.
Griffin didn’t forget his manners. “My wife, Esther. Page Murdock.”
My hat was already off, so all I could do was incline my head. I had the impression she was older than her husband. Her gaze acknowledged my gesture, then went to him. “How often have you said you wanted to pass on what you know?” she asked. “I thought it an opportunity to learn whether you have the gift.”
“You might have discussed it with me before you acted.”
“Oh, Eldred. When have you ever discussed anything with anyone? If I hadn’t acted, you would still be clipping weeds ten years from now.”
“It’s honest labor.”
“Not if it’s not what God intended.”
“He speaks to you, whereas with me He is silent.”
“Mr. Murdock did not come here to listen to us quarrel. Invite him in.”
“You know what he wants. To pose as a man of the cloth in order to catch a rogue. Sin for sin, and I am to be his accomplice. ‘Speak not in the ears of a fool: for he will despise the wisdom of thy words.’”
“‘The integrity of the upright shall guide them,’” she said.
“‘ … but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them.’”
“Should I be taking notes?” I asked.
THREE
“In which faith were you raised?” Griffin asked.
“Christianity,” I said. “I’m pretty sure.”
“I meant which church.”
“I was born six thousand feet up in the Bitterroots. I never saw a church until I was almost grown.”
His pale eyes clouded. “Your parents were savages?”
“Only my father. My mother was some part Indian.”
“Which tribe?”
“Nez Perce, I think.”
“You don’t know?”
“I wasn’t encouraged to ask questions.”
“And so with those qualifications you chose to enter law enforcement.”
“No one chooses that. I just sort of drifted into it after the buffalo ran out. In between I punched cows and shot wolves in the winter for the bounty, but I made too thorough a job of it. When wolves got scarce I became a drunk for a while and got to know a few jails. In one of them the sheriff turned out to be an old bunkmate. He told me the U.S. marshal was hiring here in Helena. It was the only work I could get where my recent history didn’t count against me.”
“And how long have you been about it?”
“Ten years last April. Felons don’t seem to run dry like buffalo and wolves and whiskey.”
“A fortunate turn for the citizenry. Road agentry is the only calling you haven’t answered.”
“I disagree. The frontier keeps changing. There’s always a paying position that didn’t exist last week. What did you do before you became a priest?”
“I was an altar boy.”
We were seated in a pair of split-bottom chairs in a room he called his study, a dim cell at the top of a flight of stairs you practically had to crawl up on hands and knees to keep from cracking your skull on the square timber across the top. One wall slanted with the roof and the rest were a jumble of books stuck in
at every angle between two-inch-thick pine shelves. More books and loose papers climbed corners to the low papered ceiling. A lamp with a blackened chimney smoked on a small writing table near his chair, stinging my eyes while illuminating little but itself. The room smelled of coal oil and moldy bindings.
One queer thing I’d noticed: None of the rooms I’d passed through on the way there contained a visible religious symbol of any kind. The study was no exception. I’d never been in a Catholic household that didn’t display a large crucifix or a picture of Jesus somewhere prominent.
He returned to my origins. He would be one of those biblical scholars who cut Methusaleh in half to count the rings. “The Nez Perce are an intelligent people. Large cranial capacity. I taught them at the Saint Ignatius Mission when I was in seminary. You favor them in the jaw. In the forehead, not so much.”
“My father came from Aberdeen. He used to smash stoneware jugs with his head to win bets.”
“You must have been proud.”
“Grateful for the inheritance. I’ve stopped more than my share of pistol butts and I can still walk a straight line.”
“You and I are not of the same flesh,” he said. “I cannot think of any other circumstances that would place us both in one room.” He leaned forward as if to rise. “I’m not going to help you. The only reason I didn’t turn you away at the door is I’d never be quit of it as long as Esther is around to remind me.”
As if in response to her name, his wife knocked and entered, carrying a brass lamp and a silver tea set on a tray. She was the only one of us who didn’t have to lower her head to clear the doorway. She set the tray on a squat square footstool stacked with volumes—there wasn’t a bare horizontal space in the room, but this one at least was level—traded lamps, and blew out the one that had been fouling the air. The room brightened immediately. I don’t know that it had entirely to do with a clear chimney and a well-trimmed wick.
The Book of Murdock Page 2
