Sanctuary

Sanctuary

Gary D. Svee

I dedicate this book to my mother, Beatrice Evelyn Svee,
who spoke no English as a young child and has spoken
only kindness since.

One

The train was late, but Judd Medicine Elk didn't know that, nor did he care. He had been pulled from his blankets by the cold and the ache in his belly and habit. That was all he needed to know. So he waited, dancing from one foot to the other for warmth and to ease the hunger that coursed from his belly to his brain.

Perhaps he would be lucky today. Strangers on the train might give him a nickel or a dime for carrying their luggage from the depot to a waiting buggy or to Sanctuary's only hotel.

Perhaps, too, the agent would open the door of a freight car and he could steal something of value, something he could trade for food for himself and his grandmother.

The cold hung on the land like a curse, and Judd tried to chase it away with the magic of his dance. The sole of one shoe—several sizes too big for his twelve-year-old foot—was peeled back to the heel, and it slapped first the platform and then his foot, beating a crude cadence.

Slap, slap, flop. Slap, slap, flop.

The rhythm stirred Judd, and his dance changed tone and tempo, his feet, nerves, muscles, sinews hearing the shuffling steps of moccasined feet on ancient plains. No longer did the men of the Cree tie their bleeding flesh to a pole or a buffalo skull with skewers and thongs to sacrifice their pain to their god in the Thirst Dance. Now they danced only when they could find a bottle of whiskey, but still they danced in great pain.

Slap, slap, flop. Slap, slap, flop.

Judd danced now to thank the manitou for the threadbare clothing that kept him warm except when the cruel north wind howled through Sanctuary. He thanked the Cree god for the food he hoped to have today.

His grandmother had told him about the manitou and the Christian God. She had become a Christian when the white man's God had driven the manitou from the plains. She knew the Cree god had gone away, because he would not have allowed his people to suffer so.

But the Christ God seemed uninterested in old Cree women, and now she believed in nothing. Judd prayed to the manitou because he believed himself to be invisible to the white man's God. Judd believed he was invisible to all white men.

Light flooded the railroad station, and Judd froze. If the agent saw the boy waiting on the platform, he would chase him away.

The agent stepped out on the platform, and Judd stopped breathing so that the plume that followed his breath into the cold air would not give him away.

But the agent was looking down the track. He pulled a gold pocket watch from his vest and read it for the second time in five minutes. The watch slipped back into the agent's pocket, and his eyes flicked across the platform, hesitating for no more than a blink on Judd. He shook his head and walked back into the station, shivering.

Judd's breath hissed into the air through clenched teeth. Safe! He was still invisible. Sometimes dancing made him visible.

The train came sharp, black, and shiny, fleeing a cloud of white steam and coal smoke. It howled then, lonesome as a coyote, and sparks flew from the wheels as the engineer set the brakes.

Judd was fascinated by this great beast. He dreamed sometimes of stepping aboard one of the cars and riding it to someplace where he had never been, someplace different from where he was.

But that was only a dream, and his hunger was a gnawing reality. He shook away the pain in his gut and focused his attention on the train, stepping closer to the engine, closer to the heat and the steam.

The redolence of burning coal sifted over the boy, and Judd breathed deeply. Sometimes coal spilled along the track and he carried it to his grandmother's one-room shanty where it burned the barrel stove dull red on cold winter days. Coal was warmth and rabbit stew simmering in a cast-off, cast-iron pot.

Judd stiffened. A black porter stepped down from a Pullman and put the step in place for detraining passengers. He peered for a moment at the skinny kid in cast-off, ragtag clothes and long, stringy hair—Montana Indians were as much a mystery to him as black men were to Judd. The glance pacified the porter's curiosity, and he went back to his work.

A drummer followed the porter from the train. He was scowling, and Judd stepped deeper into the steam. Drummers were good—sometimes. One had given him a quarter for carrying only two bags to the hotel. But sometimes with drummers, it was better to be invisible.

This drummer sauntered into the station, slamming the door behind him. He reappeared a moment later and grabbed his bags, glaring at Judd as he stalked back into the building.

Judd was left alone on the platform. He watched the train take on water so alkaline it had to be seasoned with chemicals to make it potable for the steam engine. The engine drank in one long steady pull from the tank perched on wooden legs above the track. Then it stood like a huge, contented animal, breathing steam and hissing.

The boy jumped just a little as the locomotive whistled its warning. Then a shudder rattled the train, traveling from car to car down the track until it reached the caboose, where the conductor leaned out to watch the cars and the track ahead. The locomotive blew a huge cloud of steam and edged away, wheels slipping at first and then taking hold. Judd stepped back to watch, listening as the
clickety-clack
of steel striking steel built to a crescendo.

The caboose emerged from the cloud and passed Judd, pulling some of the steam and Judd's thoughts after it. He watched it until it disappeared around the bend where the track ran between the bluff and the Milk.

As Judd turned for the stairs, he saw a shape emerging from the steam. Tall, he was, and slim in a dark suit and a clerical collar. A preacher had come to town. At first Judd thought the man might have been riding the rods, hanging beneath a car for a wild trip across the Montana prairie.

But even as the thought crossed his mind, he discarded it.

No railroad bull had ever pulled this man from a train. There was a sense of certainty about him, but gentleness, too.

The preacher looked at Judd and smiled. The smile warmed the boy, taking the sting from the cold spring morning. Still Judd poised to run, wary as that coyote last winter. The coyote, torn between hunger and fear that the dead rabbit in Judd's snare was bait for a trap, had worn a circle in the snow. When Judd came that morning to check the snare, the animal plunged away.

Was the preacher's smile a promise or a trap?

The preacher's hair hung just over his collar, his face was thin, ascetic, and topped by a high forehead too deeply tanned for this time of year. The stranger's eyes were brown and warm, yet piercing. Judd felt drawn to the man—and afraid.

“Follow me,” the preacher said, and Judd picked up the stranger's valise, light as a thought on a warm spring day, and followed him down the steps and into the street.

Judd didn't know if the stranger had been in Sanctuary before, or if he just had a sense for small Montana towns, where hotels would be and what they would look like. But he walked directly to the hotel, Judd following behind on the boardwalk.

Slap, slap, flop. Slap, slap, flop.

Judd usually avoided the town's main street. He was vulnerable there, glaring eyes shucking him of his invisibility as one shucks the husk from an ear of corn. Open to the townsfolk's eyes, he was open to their contempt. But now he was carrying the preacher's valise. Surely they would not object to that.

The preacher stopped at the hotel's front door and dropped a coin into Judd's hand. A quarter! Judd held the coin tightly, not trusting the pockets in his patched and repatched pants to hold the treasure. At the slaughterhouse, he could buy two livers and perhaps a beef heart for a quarter unless Jasper was there; then the price would be high—too high. Judd shuddered.

Today, he and his grandmother would eat, and he thanked the manitou for that great blessing.

The preacher was staring at him, a gentle smile on his face, and Judd was torn between running back to the safety of his shack and staying in the warmth of that smile.

“Name's Mordecai,” the preacher said, holding out his hand. Judd took it tentatively, never having shaken hands before.

“Your name?”

“Judd.” The boy spoke as though in apology.

“That isn't all of it, is it?”

Judd's eyes narrowed. “Medicine Elk,” he whispered.

“You stick close, Judd. I'm likely to have need of you before I get shut of this.”

Judd's eyes darted up the street and down. Not many people out yet. Sunday morning like this most folks were in church listening to the Reverend Eli Timpkins scare the hell out of them. But after services, the boardwalks would fill with bonnets and tight collars and righteousness, and the people of Sanctuary would try to kill Judd with their eyes.

He didn't want to stay, but he didn't want to leave either—like that dog last winter.

Judd's mind drifted back to early December. A border collie had streaked away from the step as Judd pushed open the door of the shack, carving a wide, deep arc in the new-fallen snow.

The dog, for reasons unfathomable to Judd, had bedded on an old burlap sack on the step. He streaked away as Judd opened the door, snow spraying from each of his leaps.

The slaughterhouse hadn't operated for nearly a week. Soup gleaned from deer bones and grain scraped from the ground near the railroad tracks had carried them for several days, but now even that was gone. Certainly no scraps were lying about to attract the animal.

Judd had spent the past two days huddled beside a stove, feeble against the cold that had blown in from the Arctic and was hanging like a specter over the land. And all that time he watched his grandmother, her face gaunt with hunger, pale, as though life were draining from her, belly first.

Judd didn't know if the snowstorm had followed the dog or the dog had followed the storm, but they both arrived the same night, both haunting the shack like hunger.

Each morning the dog would be curled at the corner of the step, only to bolt away when Judd, shaking with cold, opened the door and made his way to the woodpile.

And as Judd loaded his arms with branches cast off by cottonwoods on the river bottom, the dog would sit and watch fifty feet away as though that distance made him invisible. Sometimes Judd talked to the animal about how cold it was and what his grandmother had said and how he wished he had food to share with the dog.

The dog, belly pulled tight to backbone, played in Judd's thoughts during the day and in his dreams at night. Judd knew what it was to be hungry and invisible, and he wanted to feed the dog almost as much as he wanted to feed his grandmother.

Then, when Judd thought he could no longer tolerate the cold and the hunger and the cries of younger children howling nearby like the wind around the shacks, the sky cleared to a day so cold that century-old cottonwoods split with the crack of cannon fire on the river bottom.

The boy felt his grandmother's eyes on him as he dressed, and he sensed the weight of her need. He strapped on his makeshift snowshoes and shuffled toward the Milk through snow squeaking its protest of the cold. The dog followed for a while, whining but coming no closer than fifty feet, and Judd talked to the animal about the cold that burned his face red and then white and how he hoped rabbits had found his snares because
the people
were so hungry.

But the dog followed only a little way before the whining stopped, and Judd turned to watch the animal limp back toward the shack, following the trail they had carved in the deep snow. The boy pushed on.

The river bottom was crisscrossed with rabbit tracks, but the snares were empty, buried under three feet of snow. He reset the simple devices with fingers stiff and clumsy as sticks. Then he trudged back to the shack, weak with hunger and despair.

As he leaned against the shack to shake the snow from his snowshoes, Benjamin Two Teeth stepped out, carrying fresh, bloody meat. He avoided Judd's eyes and waded through the snow to his own shack, where the children had been crying for two days.