By the next morning Thomas had a steady job to properly propose to her.
“Did you know the ones who were stolen?”
Decker was too sun-touched and lost to hear Mr. Lane’s heartbeat until he stood next to him.
Not as well as I should have.
“A ranch hand and one of the dancing girls,” Decker murmured, his gaze fixed down on the Haven’s graves. “They have no one to miss them.”
Mr. Lane eased closer, smoothing a hand over the edge of the white marble with sudden tenderness. “You knew these two, didn’t you?”
More than I wanted to.
He couldn’t tell him they worked a saloon together in Denver until the Havens saved up enough to homestead land and start a small ranch in Dakota Territory.
Or that once he’d settled in Ender’s Ridge, he sent them a letter and received nothing back—Thomas had relegated him to a relic of the past.
Decker cleared his throat. “They died of consumption. Safine couldn’t do much but make ‘em comfortable.” Their focus had been on restoring theLoose Goose;there was no time for her to learn cures for an incurable disease.
Thomas never questioned why Decker looked the same as he had years ago when he and Abigail stumbled into town, already half-dead, but maybe Thomas knew if anyone could cure their sickness, it was going to be his odd companion. Maybe, deep down, he knew Decker helped their company, helpedhimsurvive the war.
Safine’s cures couldn’t help, and Decker could have only turned one of them. Thomas would have spent an eternity gnashing his teeth in anguish if he was remade. So, Decker bought them two headstones and laid them in an early grave.
Death was kinder than what he was.
The preacher looked as if he very much wanted to ask more questions, but—mercifully—refrained.
“Their headstones are beautiful,” he said, once again toeing the line as carefully as he’d ever been. “Some aren’t as lucky. My aunt was buried in an unmarked grave outside the city limits. There was talk of her death not being an accident and the church wouldn’t stand for it.”
Religion was words on a page with the promise of eternal damnation. One slip and the pages gaped wide, spewing fire and brimstone as if all passages could be applied instead of understanding the lesson within the book; love thy neighbor, love thy mother and thy father, judge not.
Often, he craved the faith he’d lost years ago, wandering across the new, war-torn America. No amount of puja or dhyana could repair the rift within him. Separation from the world he’d known dug a pit into his chest that sweet, well-meaning Thomas tried to fill. But other gods, other rituals, other strange, stifling beliefs couldn’t begin to weave him back together.
“Your aunt likely wasn’t the first parishioner to be thrown out of her community because of a book,” Decker said.
“You hold a grudge towards faith, Decker.”
“Religion.”
Mr. Lane’s voice softened. “Why?”
Thomas had found a Bible at one of the shelled houses they passed by. Blackened at the edges, but readable. Between his knowledge and Decker’s understanding, he stumbled through the pages, and when his mind was tired, he played away the heaviness with his guitar.
“Thomas read the Bible four times over in thetime I knew him.”
He read it again, and again, and again, and took each damned passage to heart until it pierced between us like the spear in the savior’s ribs.
There was no way for him to explain how a man reading the Bible came between them so thoroughly unless he bared himself to a stranger.
But something about lying further to the preacher didn’t sit well with him. “He was a zealot. And I stood in his way.”
If Decker could have read the Bible, touched the pages that touched so many, maybe he could have understood why Thomas slept with a woman he did not want, while he ignored the creature who was his companion, who protected him. Loved him. Decker had waited for the time when Thomas realized the right path was beside him, but it had never come.
Thomas seeded and nurtured his own path with brambles that grew and choked out their love with each dismissed conversation and averted gaze until Decker could no longer recognize him through the thorns.
Bibles burned like holy fire, and the church wasn’t kind to men who had no interest in women, who drank their communion from a pulsing vein, who weren’t the color of priest’s robes.
But Mr. Lane was kind.
“I have my own struggles with the faith. That’s who my chapel is for,” he said as if he believed it.
Decker was also starting to believe it.
Sincerity softened his tone. “Maybe your chapel will be of some use to our town after all, Mr. Lane.”
As his face lit up in the soft morning light, Decker waited for him to stray from his righteous path, to slip and stumble so he could be rid of him and the uncomfortably familiar feeling stirring in his chest.