Doc - Mary Doria Russell [39]
Deacon opened the door to a room at the end of the corridor, then stepped back with a sweep of his hand. Alexander entered and crossed to the window, pulling a coarse lace curtain aside, hardly listening as the hotelier pointed out amenities. The room was on the far side of the building, away from the street and the railroad and the stockyards, overlooking an expanse of buffalo grass that stretched northward into Canada. It was quiet, apart from the occasional report of a pistol shot and Deacon Cox’s chatter.
“We told people you’d be hearing confession this afternoon. That’s how you say it, right? Hearing confession? Four o’clock, we told them. That’s when the dago priest always does it. Father Poncy—? Damn, I can never say that fella’s name! Something Eye-talian—”
“Ponziglione.” The room was generously sized, with an ornate woven wicker screen to divide a sitting area from a bedroom with a washstand and a dresser. He could use the screen to shield penitents. “Thank you. This will do very well. Four o’clock will be fine.”
There was more talk, including a promise to knock on the door at three forty-five, but at long last, the hotelier bid him a good afternoon and left.
Staring dumbly at the door, Alexander listened as Deacon Cox’s footsteps retreated down the corridor. Belatedly it came to him that he should have asked about Dr. Holliday and why he was being so generous.
Too late, too late, too late …
With a long, shuddering sigh, Alexander von Angensperg stretched flat on the bed, exhausted and empty. Since Tuesday morning, when he’d stood in the mission doorway and read that awful telegram, each passing hour had required all the self-discipline he could muster.
Placing one foot before the other.
Going through the motions.
Getting himself to this moment: when he could be alone at last, cover his face with his hands, and cry.
As promised, the knock came at a quarter to four. “I hope you got some rest,” Deacon Cox said through the door. “You got quite a line out here.”
Alexander straightened the bed linens and left the room to use the privy, keeping his eyes down so he would not recognize anyone waiting in the hallway. When he returned, he rolled up a blanket, put it on the floor as a kneeler, placed a purple stole over his shoulders, and settled himself in the chair behind the dressing screen.
“We may begin now, if you please,” he called out quietly.
For the rest of his long and eventful life, Alexander von Angensperg might have topped just about any war story told in a Jesuit residence. He could have listened, and nodded, and acknowledged each man’s most colorful adventure, and then achieved an awed, respectful silence with just six words: “I heard confessions in Dodge City.”
The seal of confession imposed silence, so he never told a soul. Had others tried to imagine the litany of violence, greed, deceit, and debauchery, they could not have come close. The average priest would rarely hear in all his days what Alexander did in a single memorable afternoon.
Everything but sloth, he realized afterward. Dodge was diligent in sin.
Nearly all the women were whores, most of them Irish girls hardly more than children. “A hooker’s never worth more than she is on her first night,” a tired young voice began. “I told my pimp I’m thirteen. Sure, if he finds out the truth, I’ll be working the cribs that much sooner, then, won’t I. So I lie.”
“And what was I going to do with a baby? I’d be out of work for months, wouldn’t I! It was get rid of it or starve. So