And there he stood, quietly defiant in the rotted husk of faith as Decker closed the doors behind him.
Decker knew the small, dusty roads in Ender’s Ridge as intimately as the scars on his hand. Past the abandoned bank, a right at the closed barber shop with the hotel at the left led him to the ruins of the first chapel.
The town’s founder, Cleveland Ender, built a church to watch over the dead. In a town first populated with outlaws and ill-intentioned travelers, the cemetery was well-used. Seventy years after the birth of Ender’s Ridge, the first church was now a collapsed skeleton of timber and nails with a twisted fence marching around its corpse.
Tumbleweeds drifted against the iron gate as Decker eased it open. Rust flaked into his gloved palm as he clutched the metal, a sudden wave of nausea rolling through him as the sun beat down over his shoulders.
He never left the safety of shade without a damn good reason for inviting a splitting headache and aching bones.
Thomas Haven’s grave was a damn good reason.
White marble headstones lay tucked away in a peaceful corner of the cemetery, their simple inscriptions stark and new:
Thomas Haven
Beloved Husband
Abigail Haven
Beloved Wife
Sunset stones formed a pattern across their graves.
Undisturbed.
Their ghostly neighbors weren’t as lucky—two empty graves pitted the ground, broken open and screaming. The grave robbers struck a few days ago, if the dried clay from the bottom gave him an answer.
Decker groaned raggedly and leaned on the headstone, scrubbing his hand over his beard. Thomas wouldn’t have wanted him to spend money on frivolous things, but it seemed wrong to mark the grave of the man he loved with plain grey stone.
Fine things for fine people.
The years after the Revolutionary War dissolved into a haze of blood and survival. In the North the fur trade flourished, and thehunters became the hunted; their flimsy cabins were no match for his hunger and he gorged himself, losing his mind in his killing.
When unrest flared between the states, Decker gathered his wits about him enough to be pulled into another war—this one just beginning instead of ending. Battlefields wept with the blood of men destined to die, and for the second time in seventy-five years, purpose fueled Decker instead of hunger.
Black soldiers camped in the rear of Union war camps, and Decker joined their ranks, as there was no difference between them in the eyes of the government. Thomas met him with a broad smile, pressing a threadbare blanket into his hands and making room in their mildewed tent. For a sense of normalcy, Decker accepted, but in the frigid nights when he couldn’t feel the cold, he draped his blanket over Thomas and kept watch until the morning.
We have to stick together, Thomas muttered in the calm before battle, cried it over thesnapof musket fire, and bellowed it from deep in his lungs when the final cannonball lodged in the sodden muck.
When Lincoln’s Proclamation declared Thomas a free man—though neither of them expected much would change apart from a handful of laws—Decker joined him instead of returning to haunt the North woods. Freedom wouldn’t be linear for a nation that built itself on the backs of enslaved people, and a signed paper didn’t change the prejudice snarling at their heels.
From the West they heard whispers of a better life, where folks didn’t care so much, and they left for Jefferson Territory.
Isolation had a way of cracking open hearts, and the two of them talked their way across grass plains, forded rivers, anddodged towns. Campfires were always accompanied by the guitar Decker took for him from an abandoned house—another victim of war.
Strummed notes often fell flat as Thomas learned the gut strings, but by the time they reached Denver, Decker had never heard a nicer sound than his companion plucking away on a blistering summer night.
They never talked about what happened on the battlefield, how all fifty-five members of their company survived without a scratch. When Decker disappeared and returned with different, clean clothes, stronger, more alive, Thomas welcomed him with that broad smile and said he’d missed him.
Identity was another unspoken agreement between them, like their wariness with white folks and the care they took telling strangers where they were headed.
Decker found peace on the road with Thomas.
Peace in a sense of humanity he hadn’t known since he was turned.
Then they found Abigail.
Abigail was a sweet-faced woman who could cook a mean meal and wring a cow’s neck with her bare hands if she felt inclined to. A recently freed city woman working at a boarding house, the arrival of Decker and his handsome companion with a daring smile and a guitar slung across his back quickly caught her twinkling eyes.
