Jacob was thirty that summer, and finally felt like a man. He’d been married nearly eleven months. He’d mended fences with his father, been welcomed home like the prodigal son, and thrown himself willingly into the family farm. The years he’d spent on cattle ranches out west had taught him a few things about the new breeds and ways to improve stock, and Aloysius—perhaps as eager as his son to smooth over the years of ugliness between them—had been surprisingly receptive to Jacob’s ideas.
In the past year, since meeting Dorie, he had not seen a single spirit. Not one. And while some deep, intuitive part of him attributed the miracle to her bright and intoxicating presence—she kept his head so turned around he hardly noticed where his feet were, much less any sinister goings-on—with his rational mind he chose to believe that he had finally grown up, put away childish things, overcome the weakness of mind and spirit that had needed to see death and horror all around him.
The old man had been right, the thirty-year-old Jacob Tracy told himself. He’d spent too many years with his head in the clouds, dreaming of some grand calling instead of settling to mundane reality. At least there was no more talk of his becoming a priest. Getting married had put paid to that idea. And his brother Warrick was twenty-two and already a corporal in the army. The irony of Aloysius’s pride in his younger son’s career was not lost on Jacob.
That was probably what had prompted the confession, now that he thought about it. Aloysius had been reading one of Warrick’s letters, and boasting about the younger brother’s achievements. Jacob had felt compelled to remind them that he, too, had been in the army and there was nothing distinguished about it, from an enlisted man’s point of view. That had goaded Aloysius to declare that fighting in support of such wickedness as slavery and rebellion was bound to bring on God’s judgment.
And then the familiar litany, delivered not in a scold but in a rational, triumphant tone, as if Aloysius was imparting some higher wisdom that his son was finally old enough to grasp: that defying one’s elders and falling in with ungodly companions were the first steps on the road to vice, intemperance, and insanity. It was only through God’s grace, Aloysius reminded them all, that Jacob had recovered from possession by the demons morphine and madness.
Dorothea had gasped at that, her eyes darting from her father-in-law’s face to her husband’s. Jacob felt frozen with shame and fury; he had told her little about the two years after he’d been wounded.
Rachel, alone of them, had the detachment and grace to turn the moment. “Now Al,” she said—the only person Jacob had ever heard chide his father and get away with it. “You know Jacob was badly wounded. Of course he spent time in hospital. We should thank God he survived at all. And let’s not discount his own character in maintaining his temperate ways. Why, you know even Father Gilham has a greater fondness for the bottle than he ought. It’s the curse of the Irish, my grandmother always said.”
“I was never mad,” Jacob said, looking his father in the eye. “I was out of my head with pain and fever, and yes, with the medicine they gave me. But I know what was what. I saw things out there on the battlefield, and for years after.”
Aloysius looked stony. Rachel seemed poised, as if to grab for a knickknack in harm’s way. Dorie stared at Jacob, big-eyed. “What things?” she whispered.
And so he told them. About lying there on the battlefield and seeing the tear in the sky, and watching his fallen comrades march up through it. About the hospital, later, and noticing how some of the dead seemed to linger, confused, and how they began to congregate around his bed, asking him for directions, for explanations, to carry messages to loved ones. How he had argued with them and then raved at them in his pain and fever, until the nurses, not knowing what else to do, loaded him up with so much dope he could hardly move, and the ghosts mingled with his opiate dreams and began to seem like demons.
By the time he was healed enough to be moved he was already known as a derangement case (Dorie’s eyes were growing bigger and bigger) and the dope had its hooks in him. They’d transferred him, along with a few other ravers and cataleptics, to the sanitarium at Richmond, where he eventually came to the attention of Dr. Hardinger.
But he knew it would do no good to tell Aloysius Tracy that his saving physician had been a devout Spiritualist, who had tried to persuade the younger Jacob that he’d been favored by God to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead. So the thirty-year-old Jacob caught his breath and summed up weakly, “He helped me stop seein them so often.”
“But you still see them?” Dorie insisted, her eyes darting around the room, as if reconsidering all the shadowy corners.
“No,” Jacob said, taking her hand. She was a delicate little thing, afraid of horses and lightning and overly large dogs. It was one of the things he loved about her—that she made him feel brave and strong. “Not for some time now. Certainly not since I met you. You think I’d let anything evil near you?”
“But you did see spirits,” Aloysius persisted, “after leaving the hospital. I saw it in your eyes, when you came here. The Devil’s curse was on you, and his imps pursuing you.”
Anger boiled up in Jacob. “Yeah, Da, they were. And you gave me no respite from them. You threw me out of here like Cain—”
“Jacob,” Rachel interrupted. “Let it be. Your father has long regretted his treatment of you. Don’t undo the goodwill you’ve built between you. And this quarrelling isn’t good for the baby.”
Jacob glanced at Dorie, who had a hand spread over her belly and was white as a sheet. Instantly contrite, he helped her out of the chair and to their room, where he spent another hour or more assuring her there were no ghosts in the house, no demons coming to harm her or their baby.
But three weeks later they were all dead.
* * *
ON THE EIGHT-YEAR anniversary of those deaths, Trace was going over the books with Boss Miller when Red stuck his head around the office door and delivered the news that they’d found another dead horse.
“Well, hell,” Miller said, and Trace asked, “Where?”
“Up at the creek,” Red said, breathless, the freckles standing out on his cheeks from running in the cool air. “Me an’ Hanky found ’er, riding the fence line first thing this morning, and Preacher, you said you wanted to see the next one so we hauled ’er back up here—”
“I wanted to see it where it fell,” Trace said testily. “Go fetch Boz, he’s down in the paddock.”
Red ran off obediently and Trace and Miller grabbed their hats to go outside.
“What’s that, four?” Trace said.
“Four since you got here,” Miller grunted. “Seven this spring. That dad-blamed wolf-hunter better get his ass up here.”
Trace said nothing. He was yet to be convinced that wolves were the culprit.
They crossed the ranch proper, past the cook-shack where the boys were queued up for breakfast, past the dairy barn and the corral for the remuda horses, toward the edge of the north pasture where Hanky sat astride his fidgety pony, still holding the tow-line of the dead filly they’d roped and hauled back. Which had been a damn fool waste of time and effort, but Trace had long ago learned that the young and eager could foul up instructions in ways so creative that the old and seasoned would just drive himself mad trying to forestall them all.
Trace dropped to his haunches to survey the carnage, grimacing at the smell and the waste of a good horse. Miller swore when he recognized her—the three-year-old filly had been one of several he’d marked for breeding, having the broad quarters and fine head he was looking for. Miller’s stock wasn’t yet of the lineage or reputation of some of the Texas breeders, but he was getting there, and this was a setback.
“Slashed the legs to bring her down,” Miller said, pointing. “Just like the others.”
Trace could see that, but he could see also that the flesh of the throat and belly had not been eaten, merely shredded. After viewing the last two corpses, Boz had opined that their killer was a mountain lion: cats were
known to kill for the fun of it. But lions usually jumped a horse from above and bit its neck, forcing its head into the ground. None of the wounds Trace had seen were conclusive, and that was why he’d wanted to see the corpse in situ, to get a look at the surrounding ground.
“Where’d you find her?” Trace asked Hanky.
At nineteen, Hanky resembled a coiled whip—lean, brown, and tough, already a seasoned cowhand, with a light way of sitting in the saddle and a young man’s disconcern toward life. He jerked a thumb back north, toward the creek. “By that pool at the waterfall. An’ I saw somethin big out there last night, movin up the cliff. Horse didn’t like it either. Big as a bear, walkin on two legs. I shot at it and it ran.”
“Best not to shoot at a bear unless it’s coming toward you, son,” Miller said, and Hanky looked as if he would argue, but he was interrupted by the jingling of tack and the thud of hooves coming toward them—Boz’s horse, Nate, with Blackjack on a lead behind him.
“Hanky, go put that horse away and get breakfast,” Trace said. “Then after, you and Red can haul this carcass down to the gully and dump it. I won’t be an hour,” he added, to Miller.
The rancher waved dismissal, and started his trek back across the yard. Trace untied the tow-ropes from the carcass and tossed them up to Hanky, who looped them over his saddle-horn.
“It wasn’t a bear, Preacher,” Hanky said in an undertone to Trace. “It didn’t move like a bear.”
“How clear did you see it?” Trace asked.
“Pretty clear. Looked like a man—a big man, with a buffalo coat on. Or with a bundle of furs on his back.”
“Maybe it was,” Boz said. “Some trapper, poachin beaver out of the creek.”
“I never saw a man jump like that,” Hanky argued. “Musta cleared twenty feet up’n over that waterfall.”
“Hunh,” Boz said, but no more; Hanky frankly worshipped Boz—all the boys did, since Boz was the best horse-trainer on the place—and Boz was careful with their pride.
“Breakfast,” Trace said. “Chores. Get to it.”
Hanky scoffed, but lightly; he wheeled his horse around and headed back to the ranch proper. Trace guessed his silence would not last long once he was there—ranch work was frequently tedious, so any minor adventure or curiosity must be told and retold, embroidered and exaggerated to the limits of credulity and beyond.
“He’ll have ’em sayin there’s a wen-di-go out here by suppertime,” Boz said, their thoughts running in tandem as usual.
“Don’t let’s joke about that,” Trace said, and swung up into Blackjack’s saddle.
They followed the drag-trail Hanky and Red had left, back across the north pasture three miles or so, to the creek that bisected Miller’s land. Most of the valley was gently rolling and grassy, but if a body followed the creek back into the trees, the terrain got steep and rocky, fast. At one point land and water took a leap upwards, forming a ten-foot cascade with a pool at its base. It was no difficult thing to find the site of the murder, there on the round-washed rocks beside that pool.
Trace dismounted, handed Blackjack’s reins to Boz, and crouched in the middle of that arterial spray, laid his hands on the bloody rocks. He’d tried a couple times to get an impression of the killer through the dead horses’ eyes, but apparently equine minds were not open to his power the way men’s were. He and Boz had debated whether this meant horses had no souls, or if their brains weren’t clever enough to retain memories, or if Trace’s brain was simply different enough from a beast’s that the memories wouldn’t translate. It didn’t matter; he had discovered he could sometimes get brief visions from a place, as if the very earth and timbers trapped vestiges of time and emotion. He had read about psychics who could “read” the possessions of the dead, and he supposed this amounted to the same thing.
Boz leaned on his saddle-horn, eyes raking the ground and Trace with dispassionate interest. “Anything?”
There was, a little. Like a vibration, or a scent, very faint. “Just the horse, here…” He could see the animal, edgy but not alarmed, flicking its ears back in the knowledge that something was close. “Doesn’t seem too shook up.”
The attack came without warning, and Trace recoiled from it; he seldom felt anything so violent in the spirit world, where sensations were blunted and everything had a dreamlike quality. He couldn’t get a look at the attacker, but he felt the poignancy of its rage, the hopelessness in its blood-lust. It had enough self-awareness to hate what it did, and hate itself for relishing the task.
Trace shook himself out of the trance and found all his muscles knotted with that frenzied fury. He looked at his hands and was almost surprised to find them muddy, rather than slick with blood.
“Well?” Boz said.
“Still can’t get a look at it. But it was plenty mad.”
“At the horse? For wanderin into its territory?”
“I don’t think it’s an animal.”
Boz sucked his teeth. “A man, then. Tearin up the wounds to make ’em look like claws.”
“Could be.” Trace squatted to wash his hands at the edge of the pool.
“It ain’t wolves, for damn sure.” Boz swung down from Nate’s saddle and paced carefully around the blood-spatter. “Wolves don’t cut the hind legs like people say. Too much risk of gettin kicked. Whoever did this prob’ly heard that’s what wolves do, and don’t know any better … Look.” Boz planted himself like a tree, pointing to the ground on either side of himself, where there was a gap in the blood-spray. “Horse was facin this way, first gusher of blood came whsst.” He drew a line in the air across his chest. “Killer was standin here, got splattered.”
“Standing?” Trace repeated. “Taller than a wolf?”
“Have to be. Man-sized. Also explain why the horse didn’t bolt.”
Trace nodded. All of Miller’s horses, even the unbroken ones, were well used to men and not shy around them. “Well, Hanky did say it looked like a man. Could be an Indian renegade, slipped off the Agency.”
“Or somebody’s got a beef with Miller,” Boz said, which was more likely. Water and grazing rights were a constant bone of contention these days, and Miller had fired his last foreman, not long after Trace showed up to take his place.
Trace combed through the bruised foliage along the edge of the pool, and found a pair of tracks, deep and skewed, as if something big had pushed off in a leap toward the top of the waterfall. “Look at this.”
Boz came and looked. He hunkered over the tracks a long time, and then stood up and nudged his hat back, scratched under the band with one thumb.
“Just say it,” Trace taunted. “You don’t know what it is, either.”
“Looks like a cat, to me.”
“With five toes?”
“I ain’t sure that last one is a toe.” Boz eyed the rock face above the pool. “You gonna go up there and check, or am I?”
So Trace scrambled up the slippery rocks on the downhill edge, until he was standing at the top and looking at some muddy smears where the killer had landed—on two feet. “Looks like Hanky was tellin the truth.”
“Tracks any clearer?”
“Nope. Too wet.”
“Can you see where it went?”
“Into the creek.” Trace stood there a moment longer, measuring the distance by eye. Hanky had not exaggerated for once: it had to be twenty feet from where the thing had pushed off. “You remember those bloodsuckers on the train?”
“Aw, for the love o’—I knew you were gonna say that.”
“You ever seen a man make a jump like that?”
“Those things were pack hunters,” Boz argued. “And they weren’t shy of men or guns. If Hanky ran up on one of those things, you think he’d be alive to tell us about it?”
“Probably not,” Trace conceded. He climbed back down the rise, mounted up, and turned Blackjack’s head toward home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was a cool, clear, bright morning, promising a gorgeous s
ummer day. Today was the twentieth, Trace reminded himself, mentally going over all the chores that needed parceling out. They’d been up to Evanston on the Fourth of July—that was the summer’s big horse-fair, with races and exhibitions and prizes, and the ranch had acquitted itself nicely—but Miller wanted another batch of animals ready for the first of August, and that meant ferrying, exercising, training checks on some of the four-year-olds. Plus there was fence and tack to be mended, the chicken coop to be moved, repairs done on the bunk-house roof … Seemed like there was something else he was supposed to remember, about today. Something unpleasant.
“You, ah, you ain’t maybe seen somethin out there, nights?” Boz ventured after a while.
Trace had confessed some weeks ago about his nighttime meditations. He had been careful to give Boz credit for his idea about the Indians and their spirit quests.
Boz had been equally careful to take the news with equanimity. “I figured it was somethin like that,” he’d said, after Trace explained why he still took a turn on the night watch, two or three times a week, and how he’d learned to meditate in the saddle. “You been a lot more even-keel since we been out here. I just thought maybe there weren’t so many spirits around these parts.”
There were a few—murdered Indians, lost soldiers, a family of settlers who’d been slaughtered down by the creek—but Trace was keeping the power at a low enough ebb that none of them made trouble. And so far he’d seen no demons loitering about, no visits from sinister Russians. He was starting to think he’d dodged that bullet.
“Nothin out of the ordinary,” Trace said thoughtfully. “I guess I could take a turn tonight, see if there’s anything new in the area.”
“How much do you see? In the dark?”
“A lot,” Trace admitted.
“Like what?”
“Like every live thing from here to the bunk-house.” He nodded at the horizon, where the smoke from the cook-shack was just visible. “In the spirit world everything is sort of gray and still and quiet—like bein in the woods during a snow. All the live things show up like fireflies, but white. Every mouse, every screech-owl. I can tell every horse at a distance, tell you each one by name and where it is. The men, too.”
The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel Page 26
