Sanctuary by Gary D. Svee Page B

lifted her supine above the water. The evangelist who had come with the tent was shouting something, and so were the people on the bank, but Judd couldn’t understand what they were saying and he shook his head to drain the water from his ears.
    Then the men thrust the woman beneath the surface of the river, and Judd’s eyes grew wide. They were going to kill her, sacrifice her to their God as the Cree sacrificed their pain in the Thirst Dance to the great manitou.
    Judd was horrified and fascinated at once. The woman was fighting the men. He could see her body thrashing under the water like a huge fish fighting for its life. And then she stopped fighting and was still.
    Judd wanted to scream, but before the sound left his throat, the men pulled the woman from the water. She was limp, her face white and dead, the white robe clinging to her body.
    Judd couldn’t take his eyes from her face, bleached white in the water. He saw her eyes flicker just before she coughed, a stream of river water flowing back into the Milk.
    A chorus of hosannahs and hallelujahs swept the crowd, and the music swelled as the men and women surged into the water to meet their new sister.
    There was electricity in the air. Judd could feel it. It tugged at him as it had tugged at the young woman, and he felt compelled, too, to offer himself to the black-robed man, to be sacrificed for his people.
    But he knew he wouldn’t be welcome there, so he slipped off the branch and into the water, down deep where the current played with the bottom, down where the catfish lie waiting for dead chickens and young boys to come floating by.
    Judd felt suspended in time and space, in a world more real and primitive than any he had known. He felt weightless and shameless and sinless, and he tried to hold that, tried to stay in the safety and solace of the cool waters, but his breath hissed out and he was drawn to the surface by his primal need for life.
    He broke through the water, gasping for air, and discovered he was alone. The sound of singing pulled his eyes toward the huge tent pitched on the grass in the shade of the cottonwood trees. The assembly from the river was nearing the tent, two of the men holding the arms of the baptized woman, helping her in her disjointed walk toward salvation.
    A great shout greeted the people inside the tent, and more than anything in his life, Judd wanted to be part of what was going on there.
    He walked out of the river on the trunk of the cotton-wood, steadying himself with the branches that seemed always to be where he needed them whenever he began to lose his balance. Water cascaded in sheets from his body, and he shivered a bit in the tree’s shade.
    On the riverbank, he slipped behind tree after tree, making his way toward the tent, quiet and cautious. He reached the corner of the tent just as the congregation inside burst into “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and Judd was caught in the triumphant strains of the music as certainly as a fish in a net. He stood, his feet shuffling softly against the earth.
    And then gently—ever so gently—Judd pulled apart the corner of the tent and peeked inside.
    Suddenly the wall of the tent shoved against him. Judd would have fallen, but he was held upright, his wrist caught in the gnarled hand of the Reverend Eli.
    Judd struggled as the rabbits struggled in his snares before the thongs took their lives, but he was helpless in the Reverend’s grip.
    The corner of the tent parted, and Judd was jerked inside, visible: the focus of a hundred eyes and the Reverend Eli’s hate.
    At first Judd couldn’t understand the words. They reverberated through the tent like the boom of a cannon fired in the town park on the Fourth of July. Then he heard, and the words seethed at him, cut him clean as a knife.
    â€œGod has sent us a lesson,” the Reverend Eli shouted. “There will be many like this sinner who will want to enter the tent of salvation