Read Sanctuary for Free Online Page B

Jasper from abusing Judd, and some of the other men nodded, too.
    â€œNow,” the preacher said, “I’d like two livers and a beef heart and a front quarter. You can take the quarter out of Jasper’s wages.
    â€œRight, Jasper?”
    The heap on the ground moaned.
    Judd and the preacher walked toward the camp, the preacher listing a bit under the weight of the beef, and Judd carrying the livers and the heart in an old flour sack they found hanging in the slaughterhouse.
    â€œWhy did you come?” Judd asked.
    â€œJust walking,” the preacher replied. “And once I was there, I couldn’t let him do that to you.”
    â€œI didn’t see you come,” Judd continued, his voice stretched a bit with the effort of carrying the meat. “You weren’t there, and then you were.”
    â€œThere was a lot going on. You just missed me in all the hullabaloo.”
    Judd’s eyes narrowed, and they walked in silence for a few moments.
    â€œThank you,” Judd whispered.
    â€œThat’s not something I like to do,” the preacher said. “But you can’t talk to a man like Jasper, at least not when he’s on the prod. He shouldn’t bother you for a while.”
    A fire was burning in the dump, and Judd’s nose wrinkled. He had lived in that smell most of his life and still he hated it.
    â€œYou can leave the meat,” Judd said. “I can get help to carry it from here.”
    â€œCame this far. Might as well go the rest of the way.”
    The shacks hung in the haze on the far side of the dump. The Old Hawk children were rummaging through the garbage, looking for toys and anything else they might sell or use. Some of the older people picked through the dump, too, looking for scrap metal and clothing, cast-off goods for cast-off lives.
    There were eight shacks, mostly logs accented here and there with mismatched boards of varying colors. Old tubs, buckets, flowerpots, and shovels worn flat and dull from Montana gumbo lay scattered around the buildings. Years of feet had worn the grass away, leaving dirt corrupted by broken glass, tin cans, and toys worn out long before the Indian children had gotten them.
    Three men squatted in front of one shack, smoking.
    â€œDon’t look at them,” Judd muttered quietly, “or they will take this meat and your money.” He hesitated a moment. “They might hurt you, too.”
    Here and there a child’s face, nose flattened against a windowpane, peered out at them with eyes too deep and dark to fathom.
    Judd and the preacher marched through the tiny village, carrying raw meat and the villagers’ attention with them. Judd stopped at the step of one of the shacks, totally unremarkable from the others, and called, in Cree, low and insistent.
    â€œGrandmother, we have meat—and a visitor.”
    There was stirring inside the shack. Judd and the preacher could hear it in the creak of floorboards and the clatter of something inadvertently kicked, skittering along the floor. Judd waited a long moment, then opened the door.
    Grandmother was sitting in the rocking chair where she spent most of her time. Later, as the sun warmed the Montana prairie, she would move it outside, sitting in the sun as her hands moved by memory over one project or another.
    The old woman was as wrinkled as her clothing, and it seemed in the dim light that they were one, that someone had dropped a bundle of rags on the chair and set them to rocking.
    Her eyes, black as a river slough on a summer night, followed the meat to the table, her nose wrinkling. Judd knew that she smelled the meat, and the scent set her belly on edge.
    â€œGrandmother, we are not invisible to him,” Judd whispered. “He can see you.”
    She thought about that a moment, still as a rabbit listening for the quiet pad of a coyote.
    â€œWhere did you get the meat?” she asked in Cree, her eyes still on the table.
    â€œAt the