Read The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel for Free Online

hot to have?”
    “I think,” the priest said, “evil men are like locusts. They can only stay and feed in one place for so long until the soil is barren to them, and they must move on or starve. But I think they leave seeds in the earth, to lay fallow until the land is again ripe for plunder.”
    Boz sucked his teeth. “Um- hm, ” he said, and leaned forward to set his tin cup on the table. “Thanks for the visit, Padre, but I got to tend to my horse fore we ride out of here, so I’ll say good mornin.”
    “Hey,” Trace said, but Boz walked out through the narrow door into the sanctuary. Trace went after him. “Hey! Where you goin?”
    “Stables,” Boz said. “Figure on doin somethin useful.”
    “You don’t—” Trace began, but was interrupted by the man arranging hymnals on the front pew, who looked up at the two of them in affronted amazement.
    “Can I help you gentlemen?” he said.
    “Just talkin with the Father, here, Deacon,” Trace said.
    “The pastor won’t be back until Thursday,” the deacon said. “That room is off-limits to—”
    “It’s all right,” Trace said, “he invited us.”
    “ Who invited you?”
    “The priest,” Trace said patiently. “Father—what was his name?” He looked at Boz, but Boz was staring past him with a slack-jawed expression. Trace turned around.
    The room was empty. The bed slats were naked, the table clear, the stove cold. There was a damp place on the floor beside the bed, where Trace’s feet had rested.
    Trace blinked. And then an odd feeling of exultation swelled his chest, as if he’d just been absolved of all kinds of things. He glanced at Boz, whose eyes were showing the whites all around, like a spooked horse. “Older feller. Snow on top. Long and tall. Dignified-lookin.”
    “That’s Father Barrett,” the deacon said, looking likely to faint. “He died three months ago.”
    *   *   *
    “Y OU ALL RIGHT? ” Trace asked after a while, stirring the chaff on the barn floor with his boot heel.
    Boz lifted his head from between his knees. His face was darker than usual, from the blood running to his head, but it was an improvement over the ashy color he had been upon leaving the church. “Just tell me one thing,” he said. “Did you know that old fella was … was—”
    “Dead?”
    “— not real —when we went in there?”
    “He was real. He was just dead. And no, sometimes I don’t know right off.”
    “So they just do that? Pop up and talk to you when they feel like it?”
    “On occasion. More often they don’t know where they are or who they’re talkin to. They’re just echoin what they did when they were alive. The ones around here seem to have more of an agenda.”
    Boz stood up, jerkily, paced a few steps away. His eyes were troubled and far-seeing, and Trace guessed he was revisiting the craggy badlands of their relationship, certain questionable events of the past five years had been cached and marked but never discussed. “So all this time … those stories you told about the fella who saw ghosts in the hospital…”
    “Yeah,” Trace said unhappily.
    “And that time out at Hell Creek—”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “And that business about bein wounded at Antietam…?”
    “That was true, Boz. It was all true. It just wasn’t the whole of it.” Trace felt the cold around his nostrils, the sick-fearful relief of telling this story again, after eight long years of silence. “Lyin there in that ditch was the first time I saw ’em … I guess it’s common for folks close to death to see those who’ve crossed over. But then when I woke up in hospital, they were still around me.” He’d thought he was in Hell, at first. Then he’d thought he was crazy. Then he’d sunk down into morphine purgatory and stayed there for a couple of years.
    Boz ran a hand down his mouth. “Does she know? That Englishwoman?”
    “I think she does. I think that’s why she came lookin for me.”
    “ How? ”
    “Damned if I