The Book of Murdock

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I’ll take that with thanks.”

  “I’m not doing it for you. If it comes down to you or Richard—well, you cannot make me believe you ever expected to die in bed.”

  “What happened in Montana Territory?”

  “Why are you in Texas?”

  We’d come around in a circle. She knew now that by mentioning the place at all she’d given me more information than I’d come with, but the only victory I could take from that was partial acceptance of my pledge that Freemason wasn’t my target. She’d be dealing no more lucky hands.

  I cradled my drink in my palms. “What do you do all day, besides make sure Fielo stays out of the liquor?”

  “I keep the books for the ranch, sign the draughts for payroll and expenditures, threaten suppliers with legal action when they short us. With what’s left I maintain the household accounts. It’s not that much different from operating a card concession.”

  “This house alone would be more challenging. I heard about the chandelier from Italy.”

  “Venice,” she said. “We hung it in the upstairs ballroom. Actually it sat in a crate on a dock in New Orleans for fourteen months before Richard bought it from a cotton merchant in St. Louis for less than the cost of shipping. The man managed to go broke while it was crossing the Atlantic. Everything in this house was acquired for a fraction of its value, including the building materials, scavenged from the failure of others, and we’ve borrowed against all of it, every penny. I’ll bet you the price of this hideous desk you have more cash available than Richard and I.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with the desk. All the paperwork I’ve ever done would be lost in the top row of pigeonholes. What keeps you from going under with the others?”

  “The future of the sheep market. Sheep are cheaper to graze than cattle, because they don’t have to be fat to produce wool, and the wool is less expensive to ship. We invest little in breeding, because the same flock continues to produce without replacement; shearing isn’t fatal, like skinning and butchering. When we’ve gotten all the coats and mufflers and mittens we can from a ewe or a ram, we sell it for the hide and meat. Anyone with half a head for figures can see there’s less maintenance and more profit in sheep. I’m not saying the cattle will go the way of the buffalo, but in a generation the worst enemies of the trade will have to run sheep just to subsidize the cost of maintaining a meat herd. Richard’s associates know that, and are willing to let their investments ride for a few years until the sheep wars come to an end. You’ve heard what’s happening in Austin?”

  “I heard he had a hand in it. How many more gunmen will he have to snatch from the gallows before you’re in the black?”

  She leaned forward slightly in her seat, a maneuver I remembered from sitting across a table from her. It was a rare male player who could divide his concentration between the shadows inside her bodice and the suits he was holding. “We’ve begun to hear the same argument from the beef barons,” she said. “In nearly the same words sheepmen used back when the horse was in the other stall. It’s a cry for mercy. By now you’ve read enough of the Old Testament to know the traditional answer to that.”

  “I didn’t know you’d read it.”

  “My father was a choirmaster. I won’t tell you where or with which church; I play close and don’t allow anyone to stand behind me. He expected his children to be theosophical prodigies—encouraged it with the flat of his belt, and sometimes the buckle. You’ve seen the scars.”

  I had. I’d thought it ungentlemanly to inquire.

  “God entered into a wager with Satan that His most faithful servant could not be shaken from his faith. It cost Job everything: property, wife, children, sanity. He cried, ‘Why has Thou forsaken me?’ God could not answer because of the terms of the bet. Even then, Job refused to forsake God, Who once He’d collected His winnings rewarded his loyalty with property, a new wife, and a litter of children to replace what he’d lost. He thought by that stroke to have compensated Job in full for his dead wife and slain children, incidentally ignoring what they’d lost. The story had a great influence on me. When I ran away from home I pledged always to be the one who placed the bet, not the one who was bet upon.” She sat back smiling. “That’s why I’m with Richard. In Waco I saw his wager and raised him me.”

  “It’s not a bet in the Bible,” I said. “There wasn’t a pot for God to scoop into His hat.”

  “Ask Job’s wife and children if there’s a distinction.”

  I shook my head and put aside my glass. “I’m an evangelical. My message is one of redemption and forgiveness.”

  “That’s the New Testament. First came the slaughter.”

  FOURTEEN

  She asked me when I was taking up my duties.

  “Right away, provided you give me a recommendation.”

  “It’s a partnership, not a matriarchy. That system always fails. I’ve promised you my silence and given you my conditions. I’ve no reservations about your ability. I’ve seen you turn a lynch mob into a hospitality committee without even drawing your pistol. Are you wearing it, by the way? There must be a reason for that dreadful sack you have on.”

  “I left it in my valise at the freight office. I didn’t seem to need it to get past a seventy-year-old Mexican.”

  “You thought you’d be searched.”

  “The man went to the trouble and expense of constructing a hill so he could look down and see who’s coming. I spotted that even before I found out the place was built like a fort. An ordinary preacher might be able to explain why he was armed. I can’t afford it.”

  “That won’t always be the case, will it?”

  “I didn’t bring it all this way to leave it with Wells, Fargo.”

  “Richard took precautions that were wise when he built the house. Once that fence-cutting bill becomes law, I’ll have the shutters taken down and plant roses. There won’t be any invading armies to use them for cover.”

  “In your place I’d wait until someone cuts a fence and see what happens. There’s a new lawyer in town with a trunk full of laws and less than half of them with teeth.”

  She lifted her brows; she didn’t pluck them close and they made strong apostrophes above her already expressive eyes. “You’ve met young Mr. Cherry. You don’t waste time.”

  “I haven’t it to waste.”

  “He doesn’t approve of me, but then he’s his wife’s creature. She’s one of those mouse-faced tyrants men wear in lockets around their necks in place of a leash.”

  “We met on the stage from Wichita Falls, where he went to retrieve his trunk. He didn’t show me a likeness.”

  “Nor me. I spotted it, from as far away as you spotted this house. Depend upon it, he wears one, and he wouldn’t part with it any more than a broke horse would stray far from a loose bridle. I expect that in a horse but I despise it in a man.”

  “I always wondered what attracted you to me.”

  “You’re too arrogant for the ministry, Page, but that will change. You just haven’t met a woman who will stay as long as it takes.” Her lips twitched at the corners; her Irish puck was up. “Thank you for the advice about the law. With whose welfare are you concerned, Richard’s or mine?”

  I picked up my drink and finished it. “He has good taste in whiskey, and the panhandle’s ugly enough even with you around for distraction. If something happened to you both I couldn’t stand the place.”

  “It has its virtues. When you find the time to spare you must ride out to Palo Duro Canyon and spend the day. Such country is the real reason Adam left Eden.”

  “Your father had more influence than you think. You know Scripture better than I do, and I’ve had a steady diet of it for three weeks.”

  “I had it for sixteen years. I’ve had opportunity to go back to the table. Someday you must ask me about Memphis.”

  “I will,” I said. “When I find the time.”

  She emptied her glass and said nothing, which I interpreted as a dismiss
al. I stood. “Freemason says I’ll be comfortable behind the church. Does that mean no snakes?”

  “Mrs. McIlvaine won’t have them. She wouldn’t have me if I weren’t Richard’s choice. Women don’t approve of me any more than house-trained men. They see in me what they gave up when they set out to train them.”

  “I think we almost met.” I described the woman I’d seen sweeping the church steps.

  “I don’t suppose she was cordial. She saves the energy she might spend on the social graces to assault the dust in the church and parsonage. She seems to tolerate it outdoors, but only because she’s life-size and Texas is so big. Texas avoids direct confrontation, however. You’ll find less sand in your sheets than anywhere else this side of the gulf.”

  I turned the glass knob on the door but didn’t pull on it. “You said Freemason knows everything about you. What does he know about me? I don’t mean Brother Bernard. If he suspected who I was, he wouldn’t have left me alone in the house with you.”

  “He knows I’m no tame blossom.” From her loose right sleeve she drew a trim American Arms pistol hardly bigger than my thumb, then slid it back. It was secured by a rubberized strap to her wrist; a quick flick would have placed it in her palm ready to fire. It’s not a comfortable thing to carry around the house, so I guessed she’d taken it from the cabinet with the whiskey. “As for my past, I didn’t bore him with details,” she said. “I look forward to hearing your sermon Sunday.”

  “I’ll select it with you in mind.”

  “No Magdalens or Jezebels, I hope. I’ve always given you credit for being an original thinker.”

  In the hallway, the old Mexican appeared from the woodwork with my hat and led me to the door. A bolt shot behind me.

  I went from there to the freight office for my valise. The friendly clerk asked what I’d thought of the Freemason mansion, as he called it.

  “I found it grand, but I’m a man of simple tastes.”

  “Did you meet Mrs. Freemason?”

  “She was quite gracious.”

  “The wife thinks she’s stuck up. I say she’s shy. A lot of folks who don’t talk much in society are just nervous about saying the wrong thing.”

  “That’s a very Christian thing to say.”

  He beamed, as if he’d just been baptized. He had a face designed for beaming, red and round between black side-whiskers. He didn’t seem eager for me to leave, so I took a chance and asked about the shotgun messenger who’d been shot trying to guard a stage from bandits.

  “That’s Sweeney,” he said. “Charlie Sweet, and he’s right named. They all take the work seriously, but I don’t think I ever saw him without a smile on his face. He was smiling when they pulled out the slug, I heard. He’s helping out in his sister’s restaurant, dishing out soup and washing crockery, till he can sit a coach, on account of his back. The Pan Handle, she calls it: two words.”

  “A clever woman. I thought I might be able to bring him cheer, but from what you say it may be the reverse.”

  “He’d welcome a visit just the same. He and Jane are papists, but I don’t suppose she’d object to Charlie sitting down with any man of the cloth. Between you and me, she works him like a horse. It’s a chore to call her Miss Sweet, so most of us just tip our hats or take them off when we visit her establishment, not that it improves her disposition. Good biscuits,” he added.

  “I’ll look in on them first chance I get.” I offered him a nickel for looking after the bag, but he shook his head and smiled.

  The door to the First Unitarian church was unlocked. I went inside. The place was clean and unremarkable, with a flight of open steps to the bell tower, bare planks between two rows of polished-pine pews, and a plain pulpit on a platform with two steps leading up to it. A parlor stove was placed just where it needed to be to dry out the coats and hats that would hang from a row of pegs when it rained or snowed; apart from that it was out of place in that simple room, with filigree and mica through which the flame would glow whenever the mercury dipped below broiling. It stood on three elegantly curved legs like a Chippendale chest.

  “It was a gift from Mr. Freemason. A common barrel stove would’ve heated the place just as well.”

  It was a woman’s voice barely, deeper even than Colleen Freemason’s, with a burr that might have been smuggled from Scotland and kept in storage to preserve it until that moment. She’d come in through a door that opened onto the raised platform and stood holding her broom bristles up, like a rake. All these many years later, Mrs. McIlvaine remains one of my strongest memories of Owen, although we never exchanged more than a hundred words in all. I still see her with that broom. I never saw her without it.

  She took me through that side door and across a patch of burned-out grass behind the church to a saltbox that stood on the same lot, an afterthought assembled from lumber left over after the church was finished and generously referred to as the parsonage. The sitting room held a rocking chair, a straightback with a caned seat that rocked more predictably on its short leg, and a small laundry stove that could warm a bowl of soup or brew a pot of coffee but not both at the same time, in a space about the size of Eldred Griffin’s grim study in the caretaker’s shack in Helena. A single partition separated it decently from the pastor’s sleeping quarters, where I could lie on the iron-framed bed with a pencil in each hand and write my name on both opposing walls. In ugly weather a white enamel chamber pot under the bed spared the necessity to visit the gaunt little outhouse in the corner of the lot.

  The place was spotless, and no wonder. There was little in it to impede the progress of Mrs. McIlvaine’s ruthless broom. The Reverend Rose, it developed, had taken his small personal library with him when he went west, leaving me with nothing to occupy my time that first night except the Bible and a brown page of advertising from a newspaper of unknown vintage someone had used to line the drawer in the spavined nightstand. When I tired of the Book of books I learned that at some point in history, gentlemen’s English worsted suits of clothes had been available at J. Pearson’s General Merchandise for eight dollars.

  FIFTEEN

  I awoke at dawn for the twelfth time since retiring, famished and stiff. I hadn’t eaten since noon yesterday, at a station stop where boiled beef and tinned peas made up the bill of fare, but I’d been too tired from the trip to venture out from the parsonage once I’d established residence. I was in possession of a new set of aches on top of those I’d acquired from the Overland. The bed needed slats and a mattress whose horsehair stuffing hadn’t migrated to the outer edges. Someone—I learned later it was the fourteen-year-old son of one of the lay readers who had taken up the slack between pastors—had stocked the woodbox beside the stove; I built a fire, warmed a kettle I filled from the pump outside, and used it to freshen up and shave over an enamel dishpan that served as a basin, then finished dressing and went out to greet my first full day in Owen.

  It greeted me back with a sixty-mile-an-hour gust, the first of many that had me chasing my old slouch hat across the Staked Plain all day long. You have to train a hat. I was sorry I’d left my regular one behind, even if the quality was too good for a penniless preacher. I wondered if a stampede string would look out of place on a pedestrian headpiece, but in the end I decided that the sight of a scarecrow leaning into the wind holding down the crown with one hand was humble enough to help the disguise.

  I put my hunger to dual advantage and stepped into the Pan Handle, where the freight office clerk had told me I’d find Charlie Sweet helping out his sister while he recovered from his bullet wound. As I leaned the door shut against the gale from outside, the smell of hot grease scraped at my empty stomach. Six tables covered with oilcloth took up most of the space in the small room, leaving only a narrow crooked path for the server to pass carrying his steaming tray. Fortunately he was rail thin, and fresh-looking hollows in his cheeks suggested that the ordeal of recuperation had swindled him out of pounds he could ill spare. He walked with the stiff gait of a man with
a bad back; that was where the bullet had entered, but from experience I gathered he was less concerned with pain than with preserving stitches. A pair of rugged boots stuck out beneath the hem of his long apron.

  It was early, and only two tables were occupied. When he finished setting out plates of food on one, he turned my way with the empty tray under one arm. “Sit anyplace, Parson. You got your choice of sausage and eggs or eggs and sausage. Flapjacks if you like, but I wouldn’t today: weevils in the batter.”

  “Sausage and eggs, then, please, and black coffee. Scrambled,” I added. That was the easiest way to prepare eggs and Brother Bernard wasn’t a man to create inconvenience.

  He nodded curtly and pushed through a door that swung on a pivot into the sizzling chamber of the kitchen. I selected a table in a corner by a window to cut down on eavesdroppers. In less than five minutes, he returned bearing my order on the tray and a two-gallon coffeepot in the other hand. He put the plate in front of me, its contents still cooking furiously, and filled a thick stoneware mug with the densest, blackest brew I’d seen in more than a week. His face, which had lost much of what appeared to have been a lifelong burn, flushed deep copper in appreciation when I expressed pleasure at the sight.

  “Mud’s my department,” he said. “Janey’s Wild Bill with a skillet, but she never made coffee the same way twice in a row and always weak as a drownded kitten.”

  “I understand you’re more accustomed to sitting on top of a stagecoach than waiting on tables.”

  “I am for a fact, and I’ll be back up there soon. This ceiling’s commencing to come down on me.”

  “Not too soon, I hope. I’m told a bullet wound is not a thing to rush healing.”

  He regarded me through eyesockets brambled with creases. Three inches of fair whiskers circled his lower face in the Mormon manner, but the tiny crucifix he wore at his throat supported the reports that he was a Roman Catholic. I’d begun to take note of such things. “You come educated. You the new fellow over at the Unitarian?”