Scapegoat
By Holly Messinger
May, 1880
A baby’s cry, thin and lost in the wind of the prairie, woke Boz to a dying fire and the gray light of false dawn. He knew it was a dream, but for a few bittersweet seconds he was back in Illinois, twenty-two years younger, waiting with dread hope to feel Sarah’s weight leave the bed to go check on their baby girl.
Then he heard Trace grunt and turn over in his own bedroll, heard one of the horses stomp and smelled the sharp tang of horse piss, and knew it was morning.
Breakfast was bacon, biscuits fried in the grease, and coffee. Boz cooked while Trace watered the horses and saddled up, a pattern established over five years of working together leading emigrants out to Oregon and Montana. Boz was the better cook, having spent some time as a supplies sergeant in the Tenth, and before that had been an aide to Captain Lyons in St. Louis during the war. He knew how to wrangle edibles out of a paucity of supplies.
Still, there were limits. “We’re ‘bout out of coffee,” he told Trace, while they were eating.
Trace seemed not to hear. He had that haunted look again this morning, staring away into the horizon, and Boz never knew if his partner was seeing some awful memory or some bloody screaming haint that Boz could not see. He’d seemed steadier since they’d left St. Louis—there were fewer ghosts outside of cities, he said—but now and again he would drift away, and Boz knew Trace’s mind was out spirit-walking or back in St. Louis with that rich witch he was so twisted up over.
“How you doin?” Boz asked.
“Huh?” Trace looked up, frowning. “Fine.”
“You woolgatherin this morning.”
“Didn’t sleep good.”
“Yeah I heard you tossin and turnin.” Boz cocked an eyebrow. “Dreamin about Her Worship?”
Trace glowered at him, and Boz figured he oughtn’t push it. Trace liked to insist there was only a professional interest between himself and Miss Fairweather, but Boz had seen the way they looked at each other.
“Seems we oughtta be comin up on a town,” Trace said, “past this river fork.”
“Hamilton,” Boz agreed. “Black.” He scraped his plate. “Tho’ they’re not likely to have much in the way of vittles to spare.”
“Well, they’re on our way,” Trace said.
A small town in the middle of the prairie had reason to be wary of two strange men riding up at dusk. With no recourse to law, and little or no access to medicine, food, or supplies, the town could be ruined by a single bushwacker raid. And this being a black town, there were plenty of good Christian folk who might burn them out just on general principle.
Boz rode slightly in the lead, his hat off so they could see his skin. He and Trace kept their hands in the open and tried to look friendly.
Calling Hamilton a town was doing it a kindness. Boz counted six above-ground buildings clustered around a main street that looked like a hog wallow. The sole brick structure had a cross on top. The other buildings were wood-frame and tar paper. Two had canvas roofs salvaged from Conestoga wagons.
Cowering behind the buildings were the timid mounds of sod-houses, distinguished by the occasional chimney-pipe. The plots where the sod had been scraped back were raw wounds on the prairie, scabbed over with a straggly crust of green. Boz saw no cow or goat staked out, no chickens scratching, no children playing, no adults working or lounging. The place had a sad, sagging look about it, but he got no feeling of deadness like the ghost towns further west.
On the contrary: he felt eyes on them.
“Seemed they was doin better last time we came through,” Trace remarked.
“Probably rather not show themselves to strangers,” Boz said.
“Them crops ain’t been hoed in weeks. No fresh manure, either.”
“Maybe the animals sicked off and died.”
“Not all of ‘em,” Trace argued. “Cattle and horses die of drought, maybe, but the pigs and chickens shoulda scratched by, and they had plenty of both last year.”
Boz had a feeling all this chatter was smoke for another conversation they weren’t having. “You see anything?”
Trace gave him the side-eye. They hadn’t talked much about Trace’s spirit-sight, in the three months since Boz had found out about it. For one thing Trace was as touchy about his Sight as a hen over her eggs. For another, Boz was still sore that Trace had been seeing dead folks for all the years he’d known him and never let on. The recent revelation that his partner was constantly surrounded by haunts and demons was a bit unsettling.
“If you mean dead folks, no,” Trace said, with the edgy calm that meant Leave me alone about it.
“Dead folks is one thing,” Boz insisted. “Or any other thing ain’t right.”
“I don’t always see things, Boz.”
“Look, even I can tell somethin ain’t right here, so I’m askin—do you got any precious insights into matters, or not?”
Trace inhaled strongly, nostrils flaring as if he was about to make an issue of it, and then his head turned abruptly to the right, toward the sound of a goat bleating. Boz heard it, too.
The door of the church was open and it was dim inside, but there was a half-arc of candles lit across the top of the altar, enough to see people kneeling and a billy goat standing in the aisle, chewing placidly.
They rode on for a few seconds of perplexed silence.
“Was that—?” Boz said.
“The Holy Goat?” Trace finished, and they busted up laughing. “I think it must’ve been.”
They crossed the hog wallow of Main Street to the last building on the south corner, which had been a general mercantile when last they passed this way. The front door was open and there were lamps lit, showing several people inside.
They dismounted at the rail. Boz tossed Nate’s reins over and Trace did the same with Blackjack’s. Trace turned toward the stoop but stopped when Boz stood in his way. “What?”
“Maybe you better let me go in alone,” Boz said.
He couldn’t have said why. Trace was one of the few white men Boz knew who understood there were places he wasn’t welcome, and he wasn’t the type to charge in and stomp on everyone’s toes. But there was something about the quiet and... and heaviness of the place that was making Boz nervous. Like the wet-quilt weight of a bad dream that had dogged him since he’d got up that morning.
Trace blinked, but after five years together they knew better than to distrust each other’s instincts. “You think?”
Boz reconsidered. “Well, keep to the back. And don’t touch anything.”
“Whatever you say, boss. I mean, Boz.”
Boz gave him a sneering half-grin and led the way into the store.
It was dark in there, and the place stank of kerosene. In the gloom it seemed there were six or seven man-shaped shadows hunkered over a table near the stove and one leaning on the counter. They stared, sullenly, little more than their eyes and shining foreheads visible in the low light.
The one behind the counter, gray-headed and wearing an apron, came forward to meet Boz at the cash register. It was a fancy new machine, all cast brass and scrollwork. Boz automatically calculated how much weight and space it would take up in a Conestoga wagon.
“Welcome to Reparation, sir,” the man in the apron said. “Can I help you?”
Boz took a half-eagle from his vest pocket and laid it on the counter. Gold always softened people up, and the shopkeep was no exception. “Yeah, we’ll take some coffee and sugar if you got it.”
“Yessir, we just got some sugar in yesterday. Plenty coffee, too. You want it ground, or not?”
�
�Ground is fine.”
While the shopkeep weighed out the coffee, Boz couldn’t help noticing that the shelves looked pitifully bare for the amount of effort that had gone into building the place. The display counters had glass fronts, and a skilled carpenter had fitted the walls with dozens of drawers and bins. Yet the few goods that sat on the shelves had a shabby look, as if they’d already been through an owner or two.
“Who brought the sugar?” Trace’s voice sounded too loud, behind him.
There was a subtle shift in the place, almost an odor, as attention turned on him. The storekeeper looked over with a frown on his face.
“Don’t look like they brought much else,” Trace remarked. “Wouldn’t’a thought you’d see the stage out here.”
Chair legs scraped back from the table, and one of the men rose and ambled across the floor. Boz had been well over six feet from the time he was fifteen, and Trace was no slouch himself, but the fellow who brushed past Boz to loom over his partner was roughly the size and shape of a Kodiak grizzly.
He wore patchy bib overalls, a flannel shirt, and split leather boots held together around the instep with old scraps of harness. He also wore a shining new top hat that looked as though a stove-pipe had chanced to land on his head.
“You got no business here,” Top Hat said in a low rumble.
Trace inclined his head slightly in Boz’s direction. “Just waitin on my partner.”
“Maybe you should wait quiet-like,” Top Hat said.
Trace touched the brim of his own hat, took a step backwards, and circled away, closer to the door.
Top Hat seemed to feel that the proper ground had been conceded and went back to his chair, but he didn’t sit down; he leaned over the table on his elbows, and he didn’t stop staring. Trace looked over at Boz, eyes inviting him to share the what-the-hell sentiment, but Boz was not feeling particularly sympathetic. He’d told Trace to wait outside. In fact, he felt a mean sort of justification that was quite unlike him.
All the same, the men at the table were behaving strangely. They were dividing up something, counting out little chits of wood. From time to time one of them popped a head up, like prairie dogs watching a hawk. The oldest man, a shriveled fellow with white hair and a brand on one cheek, seemed to be getting most of the markers, and after some low negotiation, Top Hat got up and brought a handful of markers to the shopkeep as well. The shopkeep put them in his apron pocket, and they both eyed Boz, and Trace, with some speculation.
“You travel alone with that cracker?” the shopkeeper said to Boz, plenty loud enough for Trace to hear.
This rudeness was off-putting. It was one thing to talk about white folks in general—hell, Boz did it with Trace all the time, they both took brickbats for their partnership—but to have another black man presume that his judgment was faulty was insulting. One thing Boz did not take from anybody was over-familiarity.
“Yeah, he’s my partner,” he said, in the tone that usually put an end to it.
Not this time.
“You can’t trust ‘em for a minute, you know,” the shopkeep said. “They can seem all friendly and mild for years, and then one day come after you with an ax. Whzzt!” The man made a violent chopping gesture, but his hand touched gingerly on the countertop, and Boz saw for the first time that the hand was only half: a thumb and the first bend of knuckles, gnarled with scar tissue.
Dual outrages clashed in Boz’s gut. He’d seen far too many abuses and injuries inflicted on his own kind. One would think he’d develop a callus over time, yet every fresh insult seemed to build his anger rather than diminish it.
And yet it had nothing to do with him or who he chose to ride with. “I hear you, man. Now if I can get my coffee we’ll be out of your way.”
The shopkeep sniffed as if to say he washed his hands of it. He went on wrapping up the goods in paper and string, while Boz fidgeted and wished to hell he’d hurry it up. The smell in the place was getting stronger, like the aluminum scent of hail coming, and he wanted to get out of there. But just as the shopkeep was finally handing over his parcels there was a creak on the threshold that made them all turn and look.
The new arrival was a young woman—a girl, really—doelike with her slender bare feet and long neck. Her big brown eyes took in the men gazing at her with mingled curiosity and reserve, which might have been fear or sullenness. She wore a yellow silk dress that was far too fine for the prairie desolation surrounding her, and also a bit too big. Hand-me-down, maybe.
The girl’s eyes met Boz’s, and even at the distance he saw the glint of woman’s knowledge in her, the way she sized him up and tilted her chin—not quite invitation but appreciation. She took in Trace’s long lean frame the same way, measuring up and up until she found his face, and the look in her eyes became more speculative.
“Chloe!” the shopkeeper said. “What’re you up to, girl?”
“I saw horses out front,” she said. “I came to see who else was in town.”
The shopkeeper made a move as if to come around the counter, but it was Top Hat who stepped forward and took the girl by the elbow. “This’s man’s business, girl, you go on home now.”
The pretty mouth twisted in resentment and she jerked out of his grip. “You shut up, Henry Thomas! You’re not my pa—”
“Well I am and you don’t mind me,” said the shopkeeper. “You been down in the cellar again, ain’t you? I found it unlocked this morning.”
“Yeah I was,” the girl argued, “since they been down there all night and day without water, and the lil ones was cryin fit to keep me awake.”
“Ain’t no way you coulda heard ‘em if you’d been where you was supposed to be.”
“You stay up top where you belong an’ you won’t hear nothin,” Top Hat added, and put her firmly outside the door, though there was a lingering in the way he manhandled her that spoke of possession. Through the window Boz saw her throw back a look of poison toward the big man and spit at the ground.
Then she turned her head sharply, as if sensing she was being watched, and looked through the window at Trace, who was definitely looking out at her.
She was a pretty girl. There was no denying that. Trace had never been the kind of man who chased tail—if anything, Boz thought Trace could stand to pursue it a little more vigorously, to let off some steam now and then—but there was no mistaking the way the two of them looked at each other in that brief moment.
And unexpectedly, it made Boz’s blood boil. For a second Trace looked like every damned peckerwood who had ever turned his lust on a colored woman, and that was a little more territory than Boz was willing to concede.
“Waddayou lookin at, boy?” Top Hat barked, and Trace seemed to jump before a guilty look came over his face.
“Nothin,” he said, which was the worst possible answer a man in his position could give.
For a second Trace looked like himself again. But then he turned to Boz, and it was like the change that happens in dreams, where you realize the person you thought you knew was really someone else.
Trace’s lean blue-eyed mug seemed to become sinister and squinty, his whole frame shorter and stooped, like two mismatched images of a stereoscope sliding over each other.
He leaned over and spit—which Trace never did, he didn’t even chew—and said to Boz, “Ain’t you ready to go yet, boy?”
And then damned if it wasn’t pig-faced Ned Johnson standing there—same unshaven jowls, same mossy teeth and mean glint in his eyes as that long-ago day on the street, when he’d spit at Boz’s feet and said it was of no account to him if the mongrol bitch had gone missing.
Rage, pure and distilled, rose up in Boz’s nostrils. His left hand dropped to the butt of one of the Scofields on his belt, and he saw Ned’s eyes widen, felt the bolstering presence of the men at his back ready and eager to settle some scores of their own—
“Maybe you the one ought to think about leavin,” Top Hat said, and two of the other men got up from the table and
started across the floor. Top Hat picked up an axe-handle that was leaning against the counter, and one of the others flipped back his coat to show the hog-leg on his hip. “Maybe he ain’t at your beck and call no more.”
Trace’s eyes darted from Top Hat to the shopkeep to Boz. For a minute he looked like himself again, but as his eyes met Boz’s, the expression on Trace’s face went well beyond What the hell? to Holy Christ.
Without another word Trace turned on his heel and left the shop.
“Yeah you better run, cracker,” Top Hat muttered after him.
Through the window Boz saw Trace catch up the reins of both horses and loop them around his fist. He got up on Blackjack and nudged him into motion, tugging Nate alongside.
“Hey he’s stealin your horse,” the shopkeep said to Boz, but it was the damnedest thing—as soon as Trace had left the store, the dream broke apart like a fever, and suddenly Boz realized he was being abandoned with these crazies.
Boz snatched up his purchases and made for the door. Trace was not galloping away, but he was losing no time, either. Boz broke into a run and hot-footed in silence for the length of two houses before he drew in enough breath to whistle—their familiar signal, at which Nate faltered and tossed his head.
Trace reined up, turned in the saddle, and looked back.
“It’s all right!” Boz called. “Hold up a sec! I got the coffee!”
It seemed like the important point—the normal thing, to counter the strangeness that had taken hold of him back there. Boz heaved his parcels into Trace’s lap and swung himself into Nate’s saddle.
They looked across at each other, confused and worried.
Boz shook his head. “Just ride.”
They rode until it was dark and then turned off the trail to ride close along the treeline by the river. The moon was high and no one seemed to be coming after them, but they were both spooked.
Boz did not want to ask Trace what had happened back there. They were supposed to have left all that spirit nonsense behind them in St. Louis. That had been the whole point of high-tailing it out of there.
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