The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel

by Holly Messinger

“Boz is a good tracker, huh?” the Kid said, interrupting Trace’s scrutiny.

  “One of the best I ever met,” Trace agreed.

  “My father always said Negroes and Indians made the best trackers because their animal natures were more attuned to the wild.”

  And the sad thing about that, Trace thought, was the boy actually believed he was paying Boz a compliment. “A man is a man, Kid. A beast is a beast. If it walks upright and uses words, everything else is just a matter of schoolin. And you shouldn’t be lookin down on Hanky and the others just cause they were schooled different from you. If you were to get caught in a stampede or a blizzard, you’d be glad to have one of ’em with you. They might keep you alive.”

  “I’d rather die pure than take help from those heathens.” The boy scowled at his plate, stirring the mush of cornbread and beans with his fork, and then burst out, “How do you stand it, Preacher? Doesn’t it offend you, how ignorant and ungodly they are?”

  Trace took his time about answering, both to consider the question and to dampen the Kid’s ardor. “I suppose it did, when I was your age. But that’s cause I hadn’t seen anything outside of the seminary since I was fourteen. When the time came to make my own way in the world, I had to get along with all kinds of people. Came to find out there’s good and bad in all camps, not just the ones who call themselves godly.”

  “Why’d you leave seminary?”

  “My old man was set on me being a priest, but by the time I was your age I knew I didn’t want to be. Then the war started up, and a friend of mine got a letter that his father was going off to fight.” Jack Mallory had been from North Carolina, the son of a well-to-do farmholder, and chock-full of Confederate pride. “He decided to leave school and enlist, and I went with him.”

  “So you went to war?”

  “Yeah. Served about a year before I was wounded, went into the hospital. After I got better, I went home, but my father told me I was a godless good-for-nothing, and threw me off his land. Said I wasn’t his son anymore.”

  The Kid nodded, eyes intense behind the glasses. “What did you do?”

  “Came out here. Worked cattle for a few years. Met a girl and got married. After we were wed I took her back home. My father was remarried by then and had a young daughter, and he’d softened up in his old age. He took us in and allowed as how he’d been too hard on me. So all you got to do, Kid, is meet a nice girl and settle down. I reckon your folks couldn’t say no to a new convert, if you brought one home.”

  The Kid looked away, across the yard. “They’re dead.”

  “Your folks are?”

  Shrug.

  “When did that happen?”

  “Four months ago.”

  Trace looked at him for a long moment. “You wanna tell me about that?”

  But the Kid had gone still, nose pointed into the wind, north toward the Big House. Miller was coming across the yard with a stranger, a rough-looking fellow in a shaggy black coat and top hat.

  Fear suddenly rolled off the Kid—fear, and a whiff of that dark wildness that made Trace’s alarms prickle.

  “You know that man?” Trace asked.

  “No, sir. I mean, I’ve seen him before. In Evanston, maybe. I don’t remember.” The Kid stood and slung his uneaten breakfast into the grass. “I better get to work.”

  He made for the ranch office. Trace thought about following, but Miller and the stranger were headed toward the corral, and Boz.

  Trace decided to beat them there. He found Boz standing over poor Nate’s scalped head, coiling a length of rope into a lasso, preparing to drag off the carcass. “Help you with that.”

  “No need,” Boz grunted.

  “You got company comin.”

  “I see ’em.”

  “You see anything worth tellin me, ’fore they get here?”

  “Yeah,” Boz said. “There’s two of ’em.”

  He slid a wry look at Trace’s startled expression, but there was no time to say more, as Miller and the stranger came through the gate.

  “Preacher. Boz.” Miller nodded a greeting. “This here’s our wolf-hunter, Etienne Remy.”

  The man in the top hat ignored them both. He approached the dead horse and dropped to his heels in a squat, doffed the hat and set it upside-down in the dust. He scratched at his short black hair, loosening a shower of dandruff onto his shoulders. He hunkered for a long moment, neck craning as he surveyed the damage, taking in long sniffs as if he had a case of catarrh.

  At length he stood up, rummaging in his pockets. He came out with a long machine-rolled cheroot and stuck it between his teeth. He struck a match on the seam of his trousers, cupped dirty hands around his smoke, and sucked in short, prissy puffs to get it going. Once this was accomplished, he put one hand behind his back in a curiously aristocratic pose, and turned to Miller.

  “Eez wolves,” he announced.

  Miller gave a satisfied nod. “Figured as much.”

  “Dey cut de heels, there, bring ’im down, chew the rest.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Miller said, as Trace and Boz exchanged glances.

  “Dis same big damn wolf as d’others. Been tracking him for months. Guess you have more kills round here dis week?”

  “Last night,” Miller said.

  “Ah, oui. And more last month? Two-three in the same week?”

  “That’s right.”

  Remy nodded. “Is same damn thing south of here. Sheeps, down by Salt Lake.”

  “Is that where you been trackin him?” Trace asked. “Cause he’s been doggin this ranch for weeks, but I haven’t seen you round here.”

  Remy’s gaze slid over Trace and then cocked toward Miller, inquiring why he was being importuned by this cochon.

  “This is my foreman, Jacob Tracy,” Miller said. “We call him Preacher.”

  “Prêtre, eh?” Remy exhaled more smoke than a steam engine. “You got un ange on your shoulder? Steer you from harm?”

  The wolf-hunter’s eyes were a queer, clear hazel, almost gold. His black brows nearly met in the middle, his teeth were long and startlingly white in the blackness of his beard. But more telling—to Trace, at least—was the shadow that seemed to cling to his skin, like a second aura. There was a hint of restless aggression in the man’s gaze, as if he knew he could handle himself and was not averse to proving it.

  “Sometime Remy not be seen when he don’ wanna be seen, eh?” he said, with a slow, insolent smile. He thrust out a hand. “Plaisir, Prêtre.”

  Trace shook, but not with pleasure. The wolf-hunter’s hand was rough as rawhide, nails black with filth. There was a fearsome strength behind that grip, and Remy held on just long enough to make the point.

  Then he dropped Trace’s hand, gestured languidly toward the dead horse. “Don’ worry—You cut dat up for bait, Remy catch him two days, mebbe three.”

  “No,” Boz said, the first word he had spoken during this exchange. “Nobody’s butcherin this horse. You want meat, have Hanky show you where he dumped that mare yesterday.”

  Remy’s eyebrows went up, but Miller said, “That’ll do. Remy, whyn’t you have yourself some breakfast, it’s early yet.”

  The two men left the corral, Miller describing the animal attacks this spring, and Remy assuring the rancher he’d seen the same thing south of here, and he was getting close to catching the culprit.

  Boz looked at Trace, mouth curled with distaste. “He’s one of ’em, ain’t he?”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Cuz you ain’t got no poker face when you get one o’ your hunches. He knew it, too, the sonuvabitch. He was laughin at us.”

  “Course he was. He figures even if we know, we can’t do anything about it.”

  “We can catch him out on the range come nightfall and fill ’im full of lead,” Boz said curtly. “He may not’ve killed my horse, but he helped the one who did.”

  Trace waved a hand at the blood-spatter. “Show me.”

  So Boz walked him through
the story on the ground: how one of the beasts had come from the west and stalked the horses outside the fence, until he could separate out the one he wanted, and then jumped poor Nate beside the barn.

  “But then you came upon him, there—” Boz pointed to the place outside the corral where Trace had spotted the killer “—and he jumped and ran. You went south, toward the smithy, and if you’d kept goin you woulda run into him. But the other one jumped you.”

  Boz led him to the spot where Trace had tussled with the man-beast. “Goliath and the boys took after that one, toward the creek. But the one that killed Nate, the little one, kept going toward the water mill.”

  They walked around the back of the bunk-house and the bath-house behind it, where there was a windmill to draw up water and a pump for accessing it. The well-cover was a five-foot-square platform, about twelve inches off the ground. Trace could see the clawed, five-toed tracks of the beast that had approached the pump; he could see a faint stain of blood at the edges of the boards. And he could see the bare human tracks walking away from the platform and disappearing into the grass.

  “He came over here and washed up after I spooked him in the corral,” Trace said.

  “Ayup.” Boz nodded toward the bath-house. “Then he goes in there, gets dressed. Boot-prints mixed in with everybody else’s.”

  “Small feet,” Trace observed.

  “Reckon you were right about it bein the Kid. Any of the others would be smarter bout coverin their tracks.”

  Trace rubbed a hand over his face, tired and aware of an irrational anger building on his mental horizon. Because this bullshit was not supposed to happen out here. He’d thought things would be quiet in Wyoming.

  Though he had not quite believed that, had he? He’d kept up with the meditation, pushing his boundaries in the gray space, testing himself. Because he’d feared Miss Fairweather’s warnings about being followed. Because he knew his eyes were opened now, and he was bound to see things most people wouldn’t. He supposed it was possible these monsters might’ve wandered onto Miller’s ranch this summer whether he had been here or not, but it didn’t feel that way. Not with the dream he’d had. Not with the alarms the Kid set off in his head.

  “Boz, are you sure Nate was singled out, special? You think it was a message?”

  “More like payback to the nigger for layin hands on his lily-white flesh.”

  “But if he really wanted payback, wouldn’t he go for Hanky’s horse? Or mine? You weren’t hardly a part of it.”

  “I don’t care why he did it,” Boz snapped. “Little bastard killed my horse and that’s a hanging offense in this territory, whether he’s got a demon in him or not!”

  Trace gestured for him to lower his voice. “Listen to me. We gotta tread careful here. Even if the Kid’s the killer, I ain’t sure he knows that he’s doin it. If he’s anything like those folks we’ve seen possessed, he may not be able to control it.”

  Boz opened his mouth, closed it, and looked contentious.

  “And we don’t know if the pair of these critters—whoever they are—are in cahoots, or even know each other.”

  “That’s some pretty long odds if they don’t!”

  “Not necessarily. Last night’s the first time we’ve found more than one set of tracks. And I know Remy was the one jumped down in front of me—”

  “If you can tell it’s him so clear, how come you can’t tell who’s the other one?”

  “I don’t know. I only got a good look at the big one last night. And Remy just now … Hell, you know well enough when people are lyin to you. And the feel I get from unnatural things, spirits and monsters, it’s the same sort of—” He made a frustrated gesture. “I can’t describe it. It just is. And whatever’s in the Kid, it ain’t so clear. It’s confused. Like maybe it’s new, and it don’t have a good hold on him.”

  “So again … whaddya want to do about it?”

  What he wanted to do was talk to Miss Fairweather, but he knew that saying so would only make things worse. He rubbed at the scar in his palm with the other thumb. “Last night when I came out here, it wasn’t cause I heard noises. I had a dream. A vision, I think.” Boz looked at him warily. “I saw the werewolf attackin you.”

  Boz stared at him for a second, and then dropped his head, shook it. A tight little smirk twisted his mouth. “I knew you were gonna say that. You god-damned son of a bitch.”

  “I didn’t tell you that to spook you,” Trace said, stung.

  “Well what am I supposed to do with that?” Boz’s voice rose. “Damn it, I knew you were gonna do that to me, sooner or later.”

  “You think I choose to get these visions?”

  “And now I guess you wanna wire Her Worship and throw us both on her mercy.”

  “I didn’t say a word about it!”

  “You were thinkin it.” Boz pointed with his chin. “You know every time you think about her, you start scratchin at that hand, where she cut you?”

  Trace felt the back of his neck flush. He put both hands on his hips and struck a belligerent attitude.

  “And if you go tellin her I’m in peril, she’ll have the bit in your teeth again. That’s how she does, first with the Jews, then with the Baptists—”

  “Now hang on. I was the one went to her about the Baptists—”

  “I know it. I know you gotta have some kinda holy mission weighin you down. But I’m damned if I’ll be the next one. I’m not your pickaninny to look after.”

  Trace was shocked cold. “You can go to hell, then!”

  “You first,” Boz shot back, and then retreated, turning in a half circle, raising one hand to crimp the bridge of his nose. “Look—if you wanna write to her about the Kid, fine. Tell her we got werewolf problems. Just leave me out of it.”

  “Boz—”

  “I ain’t doin this again, Trace. I can’t keep thinkin this time I won’t be quick enough, or smart enough, or there’s somethin you ain’t told me. I just … can’t.”

  He made a throw-down gesture and stalked away toward the corral.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The rest of the morning was busy. A hundred and twelve calves had to be branded and wormed. Twenty-two horses needed their feet shod or trimmed before the trip to town next week. One of the men working on the barn roof fell off and dislocated his shoulder.

  Trace hardly stopped moving all day. And yet he could not, as he had done all the weeks previous, lose himself in the busyness. He was constantly aware of that nether-world moving just at the edges of his senses. Part of him was keeping an ear tuned toward Boz, and the Kid, and Remy. And another part of him was thinking about St. Louis, and the telegraph office in Evanston.

  He’d been a fool to come out here. And a fool to run from Miss Fairweather, when all she’d done was show him the truth he’d asked for. It was the same old tired altar-boy reflex: anything new or inexplicable must be evil, and therefore avoided.

  Is it so threatening to your tiny Christian mind, that you must deny the possibility, rather than accept it, and learn to fight it?

  It was hard to think of himself as a coward. Miss Fairweather had said he was not, and he did not think he behaved like one when faced with a clear and immediate threat—like the keung-si. But he had to be honest with himself: he’d been pulling away from Miss Fairweather all spring, half-fascinated and half-fearful, because he was afraid of what she wanted from him. Because he was afraid of the something worse he’d always known was out there. Because he dreaded the gulf he could see widening between himself and Boz.

  Boz kept to the training paddock most of the day. He turned up for dinner at noon with a nod and a nonchalant attitude, as if the quarrel had never happened. “Saw our wolf-hunter down at the bath-house this morning,” he said in a low voice, sopping up bean juice with a bit of rye’n’injun bread. “He was markin out those tracks around the pump.”

  “You say anything to him?”

  “Nope. Saw all I needed to see. But he don’t know that.”
Boz jerked his chin. “Watch out.”

  Trace glanced over to see Remy ambling toward the fire-pit, a bloody mare’s leg slung across his shoulders, and a burlap bag dangling from one hand.

  The Kid was sitting alone; he too had lain low all morning, sequestering himself in the office, diligently completing every task Trace set him to. The others ignored him as if he had ceased to exist.

  Remy straddled the bench across from the Kid, dropped his burdens on the ground. He upended the burlap sack and shook out a tangle of heavy steel traps, which scattered in the dirt like a giant’s game of knucklebones. Remy leaned the mare’s leg against his knee, drew a skinning-knife from his boot, and peeled off a fatty strip of hide. He began to grease the springs and hinges of the traps with the bloody rag.

  The wolf-hunter whistled as he worked. The ranch hands, though hardly sensitive to blood and dead meat, cast puckered-up glances at Remy’s breach of etiquette and turned away to their own meals.

  Remy exhausted the greasy scrap, tossed it aside, and used the knife to peel off another flap of skin, then a bit of meat, which he stuffed in his mouth.

  “Eez good for the blood, raw,” the wolf-hunter said, to the Kid’s stare. “Make you strong, so you never catch la grippe.”

  The Kid got up, dumped his plate for the second time that day, and stalked off toward the office. Remy’s eyes followed him, as he took a cheroot from his pocket and lit it. The smell was like damp socks, rot under a log. Remy fished in the other pocket and pulled out an old, smudged bottle, full of something that resembled the specimens Trace had fetched for Miss Fairweather: dark amber, cloudy, and clotted. Remy took a much-stained handkerchief, uncorked the bottle, and upended it over the cloth.

  The waft of scent nearly made Trace gag, even from ten feet away. Boz made a low sound of disgust and the wolf-hunter looked up, smirking.

  “Remy’s secret receet,” he said. “Wolf piss an’ beaver-musk. Let it brew a few weeks. Wolfs come from a mile away, thinking they on the trail of some love-ly lady wolf. Aroo!” He howled lasciviously, and then laughed.

  That was enough for the rest of the diners. The remaining cowboys vacated the fire-pit, some of them grumbling under their breath. Trace got up and went over to the wolf-hunter, stood there with plate in hand, and made an effort to speak without breathing.