The Book of Murdock

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I got in yesterday. People have been most helpful in acquainting me with the community. I hope I didn’t upset you with what I heard.”

  “There’s no shame in getting shot. I intend to turn the shame on them that done it, soon as I’m in a position to. I reckon you’d say that’s taking the Lord’s own vengeance unto myself.”

  “‘Judge not lest ye be judged.’”I took a bite of sausage. It was spicier than I like it, but when I swallowed, the acids in my belly pounced on it like sitting prey. I wasn’t looking at him. “Would you like to talk about it?”

  “Well, Parson, I’m not just your denomination.”

  “You may think of me as a sympathetic stranger, and disregard the collar. I’m here to make friends, not poach on my neighbor’s property.”

  He stroked the underside of the fringe on his chin. “You best tie in. That lard sets up like tar when it gets cold. I’ll go see what’s keeping them biscuits.” He returned to the kitchen, stopping on the way to make sure the other diners were contented.

  I ate my eggs, which were just right, and drenched my self-recrimination in the strong coffee. I’d come on just as strong and chased away my first best source of direct information on the Blue Bandannas, as I’d come to think of them.

  Shortly after the door swung shut on him I heard raised voices, a man’s and a woman’s. They were hushed quickly and he came back out carrying three steaming bowls covered with checked cloths, one in his right hand, the other two lined up along his left arm from the crook of his elbow to the base of his palm. He set one on each of the other occupied tables, placed the third before me, drew out the chair facing me, and sat down.

  “Janey’s more of a chore to work for than Wells, Fargo,” he said, taking a biscuit for himself, “but if blessed Mary had an oven, she couldn’t bake better.”

  I took one and broke it apart. It was as light as a banknote and piping hot. I’d noticed there was no butter on any of the tables, but when I bit into it I realized why. It melted on my tongue. “The next time I encounter an atheist I’ll send him here. He’ll not question miracles again.”

  He winked, chewing. “We’re powerful close to blaspheming here, Reverend. They’re better than most, but they won’t smuggle a sinner past Saint Peter.”

  “That was my hunger speaking, from its impiety. I missed supper.” I had been ladling it out with a shovel; the mark was dangerous to fall short of, but just as bad to overshoot. I wiped my hands with my napkin and held one out, introducing myself. “Brother, not Reverend. I have no claim to any title not granted by the fraternity of man.”

  He took it in a palm ridged with calluses from the lines. “Circuit rider. Well, Father Cress may not approve, but he’s a thorny old bush. Charlie Sweet. Sweeney to friends and such.”

  “I hope to earn that honor. Are you much in pain since your ordeal?”

  “It hurt worse coming out than it did going in. I’d be back in the traces by now if it wasn’t for the risk I’d start bleeding again. Then it’s three more weeks on my belly and Janey changing the dressing two times a day and calling me all kinds of a damn fool while she’s about it. Pardon my language, Reverend—Brother. I ain’t in gentle company so frequent.” He crossed himself and popped the rest of his biscuit into his mouth.

  “Have those men been captured?” I used mine to swab grease off my plate, putting concentration into it.

  “They ain’t, and it’s thanks to the governor that’s so. Now that the sheep trouble’s let up, all he and the Rangers care about is what Pablo and Jose are up to down on the border. I say let ’em snatch a few head and stick up riders fool enough to carry more’n a cartwheel dollar that close to old Mexico. They’ll just spend what they get in Texas, because there ain’t a thing worth buying where they come from. Sow it around.”

  “One might say the same about the men who waylaid you.”

  “No, sir, that’s false. This bunch buries its money, or goes up to Denver or somesuch other place that needs it like a hen needs a pecker. Pardon my coarse language.” He crossed himself again. “If I had a five-cent piece for every double eagle that showed up on a bar or a store counter anywhere in a hundred miles, I’d have a dime. I can abide a thief, though I’m pledged to lay down my hide to stop them in their taking ways and by God I will, but a miser’s bad for business.” He pardoned himself and made the sign a third time.

  “What makes you think they’re not still in Denver or someplace like that?”

  “That fellow that told Randy to throw down the box had West Texas all through his speech. I heard that even laying on the ground with a slug in my back. You can’t put that on, not when a West Texan’s on the other end of it. You ever meet anyone from West Texas?”

  “Not until I got here. I’ve led a sheltered life.”

  “Not the reason. You didn’t on account of no West Texas boy ever leaves it for long. It gets in you like a tapeworm; you can’t stay away even if you was wanted here for topping a nun.” His theme had him so worked up he forgot to ask forgiveness from me or the pope. “He’s here, count on it, and so’s his crew. They rustled a thousand head of Herefords outside White Horse just last week.”

  Captain Jordan had said it was five hundred. Rumors seemed to grow faster in that arid soil than other places, but I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the rustling so I didn’t correct him. His was the first statement I’d heard that corroborated Judge Blackthorne’s conviction that the gang operated close to home. “Did you tell the authorities the man was local?”

  “I told everyone that bothered to listen, but it skidded off ’em like spit. Bad hats come from Missuri and Kansas and from down below the Rio Grande. Nobody wants to hear we’re growing our own.”

  I doubted that was the reason. As far as I could tell he’d spoken of this to Texans exclusively, who might be expected to regard one of their own as less than sensitive to differences in dialect; but shotgun messengers crossed state and territorial lines and guarded passengers from all over the country. They might not be connoisseurs of geographical speech patterns, but they would know domestic from imported. “Why West? Don’t all the natives of this state sound the same?”

  “To you, maybe, but you’re green. Much east of San Saba they could pass for Virginia, though not to a Virginian, like as not. I don’t claim special powers, just good hearing.”

  “What about the driver; Randy, was that his name? Didn’t he back you up?”

  “Randy’s from Connecticut originally. He thinks everyone talks funny once you get past New Haven.”

  “Does he live here in town?”

  “His wife got spooked after the robbery and made him move to Louisiana and clerk in a freight office. You ask a lot of questions for a preaching man.”

  I could have played that two ways: emphasize my willingness to bring comfort to the stricken or fall back on Brother Bernard’s past. I chose the one less holy. “I’m sorry to pry. This is the first time I’ve been more than five miles from where I was born. I’m overcome with the strangeness of it all. I never realized this country was so big.”

  He laughed then, and helped himself to another biscuit. I’d scored with his provincial pride. “Oh, well, Brother, if the panhandle’s as big as you think it gets, wait till you take the train to El Paso. You can hide all of New England and most of Michigan between there and where we’re sitting.”

  Other diners had begun to file in. The kitchen door opened and a woman nearly as thin as Sweet leaned in, wiping her hands on her apron. She stared at the back of his head until he turned her way, started, and rose. “Thanks for the palaver, Brother. It saved me scrubbing pots.”

  I stood and shook his hand again. “I can see you’re both busy. I’d like to come by sometime and meet your sister.”

  “You wouldn’t like it long. She lumps in Protestants with pagans and Chinamen.”

  I took out my wallet, but he stopped me with a palm. “Put it in the poor box on me,” he said. “I’m not so certain as Janey. I like t
o back the other fellow’s hand just in case.”

  I thanked him and left. I was in the right place, I was sure of that now. I just didn’t know what for.

  SIXTEEN

  The First Unitarian Church of Owen was filled nearly to capacity that first Sunday, but having made few contacts during my brief time in town, I put it down less to personal impression than to plain curiosity. A medicine show or a company of dwarves would have filled the place as efficiently.

  I’d committed a professional blunder early, when Mrs. McIlvaine hastened in at my first pull on the bell rope, flung down her broom, and seized the rope from my hands. No one had told me bell ringing was one of her duties, and from the alien serenity in her expression while she tugged away I concluded it was her favorite. She said not a word to me the rest of the day; which when you factored in how few she measured out all told made for a profound silence.

  Almost all the pews were filled when Richard and Colleen Freemason arrived and walked all the way up the aisle without stopping to a space in front that had been conspicuously left vacant. He wore a black morning coat with piped lapels over a gray double-breasted waistcoat and gray trousers without a crease to indicate that it had ever spent time on a shelf with the ready-mades, she an unadorned velour dress with her hair gathered beneath a tricorne hat angled slightly with a small feather. The dress looked black until she crossed through a sunbeam slanting in through a window, when it proved to be a very dark maroon. Freemason shook the odd hand, scarcely slowing his pace. Standing at the pulpit, I took mental note of the hands he didn’t shake because they weren’t offered, and the faces that went with them; they were stony as a rule and turned straight ahead as he passed. In this way I managed to catalogue those acquaintances connected with or sympathetic to the cattle trade. Colleen kept her gaze forward. I remembered what the clerk in the Wells, Fargo office had said about her aloof reputation. That friendly fellow sat near the center of a pew halfway down, next to a woman close to his age whose expression was as grim as those of Freemason’s enemies. I’d seen that same look on many female faces over the years when Colleen was present. The women were always respectable in appearance and nearly always less attractive.

  When the couple was seated, Freemason with his banker’s tile in his lap, I ventured a look from my notes and met Colleen’s eyes, blue and cool and casually friendly, fully in keeping with the wife of a church director who wished the new pastor well on his first day. To this day she remains the best poker player I ever met, and I’ve played with Luke Short and Arnold Rothstein.

  I broke contact to put my pages in order. I was as nervous as a cat. Everything Eldred Griffin had told me about when and where to pause, how often to look up, and where to look fled from memory. Speaking in an empty church to a stern taskmaster of a tutor had been unsettling; pretending wisdom of things spiritual before a packed house put bats in my stomach, and the certain knowledge that at least one of my listeners knew me for a fraud made my throat dry as Texas. I took too hearty a drink from the tumbler of water Mrs. McIlvaine had set out for me on the shelf beneath the lectern and had to fight back an explosive cough, which I covered by clearing my throat noisily into a fist. This was worse than facing a pistol in a hostile hand, because I knew what to do if mine misfired. There was nothing to duck behind that would spare me from scorn and only ignominious retreat through the side door for escape. I thought of Judge Blackthorne in his pew in the Presbyterian Church in Helena and wondered if he paused in his devotions to consider my situation and allow himself a smile with his cumbersome teeth.

  I was wearing the fine shirt Esther Griffin had stitched for me with her husband’s cutthroat collar, and had spent the previous evening brushing my coat and trousers and blacking my town shoes, which pinched and made me yearn for my good broken-in boots, but which at least distracted my attention from the terror of the moment. With unsteady fingers I opened my hymnal, as worn and grubby as any that had been placed in the racks, held it flat atop my notes, took a deep breath, and led the parishioners in a hymn. I’ve a strong voice and had been told I could sing without embarrassing myself unduly, but I was grateful for the baritones in the gallery that drowned out the wobble.

  The hymn had a calming influence, as of course it was intended to; by the time the last stanza finished in the rafters I felt a little less like bolting. Someone coughed in the silence. I took that as my downstroke and began my sermon.

  I’d moved the hymnal to the shelf beside the tumbler and brought up the Bible I’d carried from Montana Territory, opening it to the passage I’d marked with a strip I’d torn from the old newspaper lining the drawer in the parsonage. I wet my throat again—a small sip this time—and read:

  “‘Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.

  “‘And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

  “‘And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

  “‘Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?

  “‘Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

  “‘But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.

  “‘And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand.’”

  Hereupon I closed the book with as much reverberation as I could muster, wishing it were as substantial as the one in Griffin’s study, which boomed like a rebel four-pounder when he slammed it shut. I was, however, aware of a sudden awakening in my audience; I’d been correct in guessing that the succession of lay readers who’d been putting them to sleep with rote had not deigned to depart from the text, and from the reaction I made bold to ponder whether the Reverend Rose had been in the practice of delivering sermons from his own hand. What I did wasn’t heresy, not yet, but I felt an edge of uncertainty in the air, heavily tinged as it was with furniture oil and Sunday-suit mothballs, and uncertainty was something I knew a thing or two about.

  “My friends,” I said, “you know this story: In his desperation to turn Job against God and prove his point, Satan rustled his sheep and oxen, dropped a house on his seven sons and three daughters, and afflicted him with boils. Job was no more than mortal, complaining bitterly of his losses and his miseries, which he professed he had done nothing to bring upon him. But he maintained his faith in his Lord even when his wife counseled him to curse God and die, and so the Lord restored his chattel twofold, granted him seven new sons and three new daughters, and gave him twice his threescore and ten in years as a reward for his unshakeable faith while Satan crept away beaten, with his forked tail tucked between his legs.”

  To illustrate this image, which does not appear in the Book of Job, I walked two fingers across the top of the pulpit, staggering a little. Amusement rippled through the crowd. I let it die down, then continued.

  “Some would say that God was flattering Himself when He declared that justice had been rendered unto His servant, that seven new sons and seven new daughters did not replace the lives of the first seven sons and three daughters, and that doubling the span of Job’s days denied him reunion with those he had lost at the end of his threescore and ten. They’re right, of course.”

  That drew a gasp and a murmur, but I was concentrating on Colleen, who met my gaze with polite interest, nothing more. It was as if we hadn’t discussed the subject only the day before yesterday.

  I said, “One sheep looks pretty much like another, and an ox is just a steer broken to harness. Even Charles Goodnight would be hard pressed to distinguish between two longhorns standing side by side.
” More chuckles. Goodnight had brought prosperity to the region when he established his ranch near Palo Duro Canyon, and was a popular subject locally. “Children are another matter. Nothing but the resurrection of Job’s original sons and daughters would serve as adequate compensation for his sufferings.

  “God knew this. He wept for Job’s great loss, and rendered unto him the only justice available; for there can be but one mortal resurrection in the Holy Book, and that must be performed by His son.”

  I rearranged my pages, pretending to read them. I’d committed the text solidly to memory. I looked up and smiled. “Owen has been kind to this pilgrim, cleansing him and giving him bread and protecting his small heap of belongings, refusing to accept anything in return. Nowhere have I seen greater evidence of faith in God. I’m told that before I came, this country had been afflicted with range wars and highwaymen, stricken by murderers and forsaken by those who were pledged to keep it from evil. Yet you welcomed a stranger not with suspicion or malice, but with love. And so Satan has lost again, and must go to and fro in the earth in search of some other victim to prove his false theory; for the Book of Owen is a work still in progress.”

  There was no applause, naturally, but when I called for another hymn, the house responded with energy, basses booming, sopranos trilling, and the inevitable tone-deaf howls enthusiastic. It wasn’t exactly the equivalent of a standing ovation, but I had the impression I’d passed my first test. I added points by bringing the services to a close after reading the community announcements I’d been given and reciting the forty-first psalm.

  I took my place beside the door to the street as the parishioners filed out, shaking hands with the men and bowing to the women. My notices were mostly positive, although one red-faced fellow who’d slept through most of the morning, stirring just long enough to hear me refer to myself as a pilgrim, expressed the opinion that I should have withheld Plymouth Rock until Thanksgiving. An old woman in rusty weeds told me she wished her husband had lived to hear me speak, and spent five minutes cataloguing his trials while others grew impatient and left the line behind her.