The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel (20 page)

“It’s ten dollars a day, for each of us,” Trace coaxed. “We’ll make a hundred apiece, easy.”

“You know, if
she’s
interested in it, can’t be somethin as simple as animals.”

“You want simple, I reckon you got it, here. I’ll be happy to leave you to your four bits a day.”

Boz looked as if he was going to take issue, but at that moment the pit boss passed by and snapped, “Fifteen minutes for lunch, boy. No extra for standin ’round jawin.”

Boz’s face took on the non-expression he used to conceal contempt, in the interest of self-preservation. “How we gettin there?”

“Train. Take us about eight days, through Ogden. Got cash for the trip right here. And I’ll
front
you four bits for a bath.”

Boz gave his hands a last swipe with the handkerchief and tossed it into the bloody sawdust. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The planks of the depot trembled under Trace’s boots, as thirty tons of iron and steam shuddered and screamed to a halt along the platform. The crowd surged toward the train like cattle scenting water, but the conductor held up a hand and a clipboard, shouting orders no one could hear. Trace held back; he knew from experience the third-class car would be loaded first, as the most unruly cargo the railroad had to handle.

Boz nudged him with an elbow. “That them?”

Trace followed his line of sight down the platform, where Kingsley and his sister were driving a gaggle of drab-clad, smiling followers toward the second-class car. “That’s them. Kingsley’s the short bald one.”

“That his wife?”

“Sister. Spinster.”

Boz looked again, assessingly. “She ain’t bad, for the strait-laced type.”

Trace had to agree. Eliza Kingsley wore a plain, sensible dress and a plain, sensible coat, but they did fit her well. Where Kingsley was stocky and stout, Miss Eliza was round and shapely. And there was a dignified grace about her, even doing the thankless job of herding a score of well-meaning fools onto a train. She had her work cut out for her—Kingsley kept calling out platitudes and conflicting instructions, and some over-enthusiastic soul was trying to whip up a chorus of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which only added to the general noise and chaos.

Gradually the gaggle of Baptists funneled into the car. Boz swept up his saddlebags with a stoic glance at Trace, and the two of them ambled toward the train.

The conductor punched their tickets without a word or a second glance, and they climbed aboard, bringing up the rear of the shuffle of passengers—everybody negotiating seats, juggling luggage, and the idiot in the broadcloth suit still singing battle hymns. Trace made for a pair of empty seats near the back, knowing there would be less fuss if everyone else was seated first.

It might’ve worked, except the man in the broadcloth suit chanced to turn in the aisle, militantly conducting his choir with both arms, and cut off mid-note in a squawk when his eye landed on Boz. “You can’t be in here!”

“He’s all right,” Trace said, in the tone of bland nonchalance that usually could embarrass minor complainants into holding their tongues. “He’s with me.” He bullied the little man back in the aisle so Boz could move into the seat, but Boz stood where he was, wearing that blank expression that suggested he had nothing to do with the madness of the white folks around him.

The missionary went quite red in the face. “Young man, I can tell by your clothes you live a rough life, no doubt squandering your earnings on drink and vice, but even
you
must have some respect for the virtue of womanhood! Can you condone the mingling of an inferior race among the purity of Christian females?”

“Well I know he’s a fine specimen and all, but I reckon I can hold them off him,” Trace said.

This drew a horse-laugh from the gangly fellow across the aisle, and a splutter from the little missionary. But their hold-up had attracted attention from Miss Eliza, who came up behind the indignant Christian soldier.

“Brother Clark, perhaps we could let these gentlemen go about their business?” Miss Eliza said. “Mr. Tracy and his partner are respectable trail guides and we may be in need of their services when we reach Idaho.”

“Sister Eliza, I have no doubt of their qualifications in the wild, but the conventions of civilization must be observed—”

“What’s the matter here?” the conductor said, coming up behind Boz from the back of the car. “Take your seats, boys.”

“Good sir!” Brother Clark pounced on him. “Is there not designated seating for Negroes on this train?”

The conductor looked at him with dislike, and then at Boz. He jerked his chin toward the front of the train. “Smoking car is two cars forward. Or you can ride in the stock car with the drovers.”

“Excuse me, but there’s laws against that in this city,” Trace argued. “We paid for second-class seats and this is the second-class car.”

“Unless you want to
stay
in this city I suggest you find yourself a seat, son,” the conductor snapped.

Miss Eliza and the gangly man tried to protest that they had seen nothing untoward in Boz’s demeanor and they were quite certain he could behave himself, but Boz took the matter into his own hands. He shouldered past Brother Clark and continued toward the front of the car. Trace ground his teeth and followed, caught up to him on the balcony between the cars.

“Hey!” he said, and Boz stopped on the gangplank, one hand on the door of the emigrant car. The switchman working over the linkage below glanced up, but quickly decided it was none of his business. “Don’t you take that from the likes of him. You paid for a second-class ticket—”

“Waddya gonna do, Trace?” Boz said. “You gonna fight the railroad, the passengers, the whole world? That might make us late gettin out to Idaho, and I wouldn’t count on Her Ladyship bailin you out of jail too many more times.”

“Well what am I supposed to do, stand by and take it? I don’t like seein you treated like that, it ain’t right—” Trace broke off as the switchman finished his chore and stood upright, staring up at Trace as if to offer the full effect of his mangled torso—the dragging of the leg from the crushed pelvis, the chest pinched nearly in two when a foot had slipped, or the signal came too late, or the eye misjudged.

Trace looked away, suppressing a shudder. The spirits had been drawing close again the past few days, especially when he was distracted by other things. He pushed the power down into the back of his mind, and the switchman vanished.

“What?” Boz demanded.

“Railroads,” Trace said shortly. “Graveyards on wheels.”

Boz inhaled and took a step forward, poked a finger in Trace’s chest. “That’s what
I
don’t like—you flinchin at things I can’t see. But if I can’t do nothin about it, least I can keep my mouth shut while you deal with it.” He backed up, groping for the door handle. “You picked your battle, Trace. Let me pick mine.”

*   *   *

M
ARTIN
K
INGSLEY AND
Miss Eliza both apologized to Trace about Brother Clark’s behavior. And when the train stopped in St. Joseph the next morning, while Trace and Boz were grabbing biscuits and coffee at the back door of the depot kitchen, the Kingsleys sought them out, with Clark in tow, to assure them that both men were welcome to join their party in Idaho, should they find themselves in need of lodging or company. Brother Clark did his best to look penitent and forbearing, but it came out gassy.

Boz swallowed his bile and said he appreciated the hospitality. Trace concurred. The men went away, but Miss Eliza lingered a moment.

“The offer presumes, of course, that you are going to Butte,” she said. “Martin assumed you were, but I don’t remember you mentioning your destination, Mr. Tracy.” Her eyes rested on him, warmly. “I would not, of course, pry into your business.”

Boz lifted an eyebrow and became very interested in his coffee, turning discreetly away from the conversation.

“More speculation than business, ma’am,” Trace said. “I’m not sure yet where we’ll end up.”

“Well, I hope you will consider joining us. Martin thinks highly of you, and we could use a man of your … ah, worldly experience. My brother means well but sometimes I think his zeal outweighs his good sense.” Her lips pursed in amusement. “Now you mustn’t tell him I said that.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, ma’am.”

“Yes.” Miss Eliza looked at him closely. “You’re good at keeping secrets, aren’t you?”

Trace smiled. “What are you, a mind-reader?”

“I used to know a man like you.”

“You’ve got a few secrets of your own, then,” he said, and she met his eyes for a brief, bold moment. Not so innocent as one might expect, he thought, and his opinion of her warmed a few degrees.

She lowered her gaze, retreating behind the serene missionary’s smile. “Good morning, Mr. Tracy … Mr. Bosley?”

“Ma’am,” Boz said, and they watched her walk off, to rejoin her flock. “Guess now you’re glad I wasn’t bunkin with you last night.”

If only the sleeping arrangements had been quite that agreeable, Trace thought. “I’d take you over that scarecrow across the way. Fella talks in his sleep.”

“Which one’s that?” Boz asked, and Trace pointed out the man who had stuck up for them the day before: gangling and concave, with ears that stuck out from his head, a nose like a lumpy potato, and skin rough as a Colorado creekbed.

Sylvane Ferris was the man’s name, and he did love to talk. He had introduced himself to Trace—and everyone else in the car—as a lifelong circus performer: “Ferris the Fire-Master! I don’t expect you to have heard of me. I haven’t performed in six years.” He was between jobs at the moment, he said, and on his way to Sacramento in hopes of joining a new outfit. It was hard to imagine Ferris having any kind of charisma onstage, but he was gracious and intelligent as well as loquacious, and Trace found him curiously appealing.

By the time they reached Ogden he had figured out why.

The train was positively lousy with spirits—a dead brakeman at every exit; an old woman sitting forever silent and patient in the dining car; a black man who’d been knifed and left to bleed out on the floor of the smoking car. Three days into the journey, Trace was starting to have a hard time blocking them out. If he didn’t pay attention to keeping that wall up around his thoughts, he knew they would start talking at him, pawing at him, wanting him to do things.

On the fourth day of the trip, Trace was in the smoking car, playing cards with Boz and a couple of young cowboys, when Ferris came on board. Ferris looked directly at the place where the knifed man lay, his lip curled with distaste, and made a surreptitious sidle around the invisible body before choosing a seat at Trace’s elbow and asking to be dealt in. Trace tossed him five cards, meeting Ferris’s eyes briefly; the scarecrow said nothing for once but the expression on his face was eloquent enough. And Trace noted the sensation in his own head—like passing a hand through a candle flame—and understood that his power, for the first time, had recognized another like himself.

It was also perhaps the first time he’d felt the power as a
part
of himself. Not some harness he carried around on his back, but something as integral and familiar as a muscle. He could remember passing through an awkward growth spurt at fourteen, feeling gawky and out of control for a while, but somewhere around his nineteenth birthday—it must’ve been after he’d enlisted, and saw himself in comparison to the other recruits—he’d realized he was taller and stronger than most of them, that this long lean body was
his,
and it was not a bad hand he’d been dealt, at all.

“I call,” Boz said. “What you got?”

Trace laid down his cards. “Full house.”

*   *   *

T
HE AIR GOT
cooler and thinner as they passed into Utah, and Trace’s power got pricklier with each passing mile. It wasn’t just the ghosts gathering near; his curse was sending out those alarm-twinges, just as it had in the presence of Reynolds and the other demons. His dreams had turned sinister, full of weeping statues and dark, faceless monks. In one particularly lurid vision, the leathery, preserved corpses of saints and martyrs, stiff with bindings and ornamental robes, had left their sarcophagi to hop ludicrously and yet menacingly toward some dreadful purpose. Meanwhile Trace knelt before the altar, alongside his old classmates and not a few of his long-dead company mates—all of them oblivious to danger, and he unable to move or cry out a warning.

“You doin all right?” Boz asked, the first evening out of Ogden.

They were having a smoke on the balcony outside the smoking car. It was windy and loud out there, but it was the one spot on the train where there didn’t seem to be a lingering ghost to muck up his psychic compass.

“We’re gettin close,” Trace said. “I can feel it.” The words sounded vague and pompous even to himself, like something Miss Fairweather might say.

“You, ah, you got any better idea what we’re lookin for?”

“No, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Boz said. “Ain’t like that woman gives you much to go on.”

Trace didn’t answer. He had not told Boz about the vision that had prompted this trip. There was no better source of information there, and hearing about it would just make Boz worry.

“That Miss Eliza,” Boz said. “Kingsley’s sister?”

As if he didn’t know who she was. “Yeah?”

“Seems to have a good head on her shoulders.”

“She’s a good Christian woman. Even if she is a Baptist.”

“Aw, when did that stop you? What about that Mrs. Robards, out to Santa Fe last season?
She
wasn’t Catholic.”

Trace half-grinned. “Not even sure she was a missus.” The lady in question had claimed to be a widow, but he had not demanded the details. They’d had a discreet, friendly arrangement for a couple of months, and parted on amiable terms when the wagon party reached Santa Fe. “But Miss Eliza ain’t the kind you dally with.”

“I ain’t talkin bout dallyin,” Boz said, and Trace looked at him in surprise. “I’m just sayin, if you want to go on to Butte, I reckon either of us could find work out there, just as easy.”