The Book of Murdock

by Loren D. Estleman

  “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 ‘The 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!”

&nbs
p; 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?”

  “I was, although I didn’t expect to be when it started.”

  “I saw no tears and heard no sobs.”

  “I practiced to eliminate them. I heard somewhere that a humorous story sacrifices its effect when the speaker laughs. I gambled that the same holds true when the story’s tragic.”

  “Indeed.” Silence set back in. “Well, you won your gamble. You must let the listener draw from his own well. Why did you look up so seldom? Did you not commit your text to memory?”

  “I did, but I got nervous.”

  “A display of fear is a confession of sin. You must speak as if each word has just occurred to you, and engage the eye of some random member of the audience. If he appears hostile, challenge him with your gaze to find fault with your point. If friendly, invite him into your exclusive tabernacle as One Who Understands. Leave the sheets at home and banish the temptation to steal a look.”

  I knew I could never do that, any more than I could go into a fight unarmed. “Am I as bad as all that?”

  “I’ve heard worse right where you’re standing. Do not interpret that to mean I consider you any better than scarcely adequate. However, only Our Father can grow wings on a frog in a fortnight. Step down.”

  I did, and started down the aisle, my knees wobbling like a broken spoke now that the ordeal was over. As I neared his pew he slid out and gave me a parcel wrapped in brown paper tied with string. It was bigger than the bundle of sermons but much lighter. “From Esther.”

  I unwrapped a folded shirt made of good simple gray linen. At first glance it looked like ordinary homespun, but the seams were double-stitched with uncommon skill. It was work more than worthy of a woman who took in sewing simply to help with the household accounts.

  Such garments have attached collars generally, but a heavily starched white band had been fastened to it with studs. It was a preacher’s clerical collar. I touched it. I’d never felt one.

  “My last,” Griffin said. “I thought I’d thrown them all out, but she said I overlooked this one, which happened to be my best. I suspect she squirreled it away.”

  The gift touched me. I thought I’d outgrown the emotion. “I’ll try not to bring shame on it.”

  “It’s blasphemous to promise miracles. I’ll be satisfied if you don’t get blood on it.”

  I thought of what he’d said the next day—my forty-third birthday—as I lay in a muck of dirt and dung waiting for a pair of my fellow pioneers to stir themselves to carry me to Dr. Alexander’s office. I was saving my new shirt for the trip, and good job, because the one I had on was soaked through with blood.

  At length I was collected and borne up the outside stairs to the little room above the hardware store, leaving behind the crowd that always gathers around medicine shows and shootings. Alexander, a wiry, excitable man of thirty, directed the volunteers to stretch me out on the cot and herded them outside. He locked the door, drew the window shade, and resumed his study of the Herald at his rolltop.

  A moment later Judge Blackthorne came in from the private quarters in back. I was sitting now on the edge of the cot. He contemplated the stain on my shirt. “What did you use?”

  “Calves’ blood, from the meat shop. Matthews put it in a fish bladder. All I had to do was hang it around my neck under my shirt and give it a smack when I heard the shot.”

  “He’ll keep silent?”

  “He’d better. Half his business comes from the jail, and there are other markets in town. Where’s Bullard?” Roy Bullard was the mail robber who was supposed to have been gunning for me.

  “California, last I heard. That was Deputy Leffler behind the Winchester. He’s a crack shot.”

  “He’s too confident. The slug took a piece out of a porch post not two feet away. If he misjudged the wind, or I dove the wrong way, that’s money wasted getting Griffin to make me a reformed character.”

  “It had to look convincing, and blank cartridges lack the authoritative report of a live round. We discussed all this. You need to be dead on the off chance someone recognizes you in Texas. The more witnesses the better, to make him doubt his own suspicions.”

  “If you wanted to make it credible you should have had ten men ambush me with shotguns.”

  “You’ve been reading dime novels about your exploits when you should have been studying Holy Writ.” He unslung his watch and sprang the lid. “Ten minutes from now, the doctor will announce your demise to your admirers outside.”

  “Twenty,” put in Alexander. “I have a reputation as well.”

  “Twenty it is. You will then be carried under cover of a sheet to Wilson’s New Method Undertaking Parlor, where you will spend the next eighteen hours out of sight; the jail does business with Wilson as well, so his discretion is reasonably assured.”

  “Where out of sight?”

  “The preparation room. I’m told there are no corpses there at present, but should the situation change, your natural stoic disposition will see you through any discomfort. I’m scheduling your services for tomorrow morning at nine: closed coffin, of course. By then you’ll be in the baggage car of the eight-forty to Denver. After you change trains, you can ride to Amarillo with the rest of the human cargo, under the name Sebastian. Brother Bernard Sebastian of the Church of Evangelical Truth.”

  My lips twisted. I couldn’t help it. “Saint Bernard?”

  “Two saints, to be precise. Double the benediction.”

  “Your faith in numbers is misplaced. You’ve already dealt too many in on the hand.”

  “Death is a committee affair; but we must trust the cards. Rumors fuel the West. The deceased walk, the quick are dead. Last month Jesse James was seen coming out of an ice cream parlor in Chicago, and he’s been worm fodder for two years. No one eats what’s set before him without seasoning it heavily with irony. A bit of gaseous legend can only contribute to verisimilitude.”

  “I don’t know that word, but if it means going off half-cocked, I agree with it.”

  He traded his watch for a thick wallet and held it out. I took it from habit; people had been giving me things for days. It was made of shoddy brown leather, fraying through at the fold. “Banknotes?”

  “Personal effects: a letter from the fictitious Sebastian’s dear dead mother, scribbled accounts of travel expenses, receipts for provisions, the usual mortal debris. They’ll address questions about your identity. The devil is in the details.” He smiled, lips tight.

  II

  The Parable of the Pilgrim

  EIGHT

  As it happened, Bucephalus Wilson, the undertaker, had a rush job, to improve the complexion of an old man who’d died of jaundice, and do it in time to ship him to Denver in the same baggage car Blackthorne had reserved for me. Since I had nothing better to do while waiting I helped out by handing things to Wilson, chiefly a pot of aluminum paste he applied as a sort of primer and a tin of pink powder to lend his customer the glow of health. It was interesting work, and the undertaker was good company, as
might be expected since the Judge’s deputies brought him so much business.

  I won’t dwell on that cold lonely ride across the High Plains, because it’s as boring to tell as it was to experience. The old man’s coffin gave me a seat, and I had a railroad lantern to warm my hands over until a porter came to tell me to put it out. A clerk had arranged to have my valise carried aboard, so I had my extra suit coat to keep me from freezing. I’d bought it, with black trousers to match, from a back room of the Drew Emporium where reclaimed and mended clothing sold for poverty prices. The coat was big enough to hide my revolver and shabby enough for a minister who survived on Christian charity.

  As far as the train personnel were concerned I’d requested the windowless coach to flee an angry wife; boarding early under cover of darkness supported the story. I doubt they believed a word of it, but enough money had changed hands to keep their curiosity in check. In any case they didn’t know where I was going after Denver, and they saw so much in the course of a working day to lower their opinion of the human race the odds were they forgot about me as soon as they finished unloading.

  I didn’t like the odds. A secret parsed more than two ways is like three men on one horse: You know it will collapse, but you’re not sure when. But that was an inept comparison, because I was the only one in danger of falling. In Denver I went to the water closet three times to make sure I wasn’t being followed. The other people waiting in the station looked at me sympathetically. It was obvious to them I had a medical problem.

  It’s a shuddery stretch from the Rockies to the desert Southwest, but the chair car felt like a private Pullman after the journey in baggage. I sank with a sigh of pleasure into horsehair stuffing that had shifted to accommodate backsides shaped very differently from mine and made myself intimate with the contents of Brother Bernard’s wallet, and with the fabled Mr. Sebastian himself.