Chapter Text
The boy is wilder than a coyote and nearly twice as thin. Arthur wonders vaguely if he is being punished when Dutch rides the boy back to camp on the back of his Arabian, a prized seat Arthur hasn’t been allowed to occupy since his beard came in. But Hosea is all teeth and easy in his saddle, so something must be right, though Arthur still can’t shake the memory of the effort it all took; first to shoot the rope meant to strangle the boy by the neck until dead, then to shoot the homesteaders who were set on hanging him, and then to shoot the lawmen who were sore about the homesteaders who went and got themselves shot. What a waste it all seemed, to kill so many bystanders and make such a ruckus, when Dutch’s family could have done what they properly should have in the first place and simply rode on by the bad business entirely. But when Arthur and his fathers had crested the hill and seen the child with his legs kicking, and his teeth gnashing, and his black hair flying, Hosea had pulled up his Missouri Fox Trotter and given Dutch a look. They had collected him then and there, but Arthur could not stop wondering all the while at why exactly it is again he’s being punished.
When he clucks his skittish Appaloosa up parallel to Dutch to see what all this effort hath wrought, Arthur hears Hosea laugh behind him when the boy kicks out at his horse with a muddy boot and shoots him a look that stinks like shit. Dutch laughs too when the Appaloosa jerks away and dances to the side, nearly dumping Arthur on the ground. Dutch tells Arthur, who is now thoroughly incensed, in that Van Der Linde voice that’s calm and sure as morning light to stop being so sore, that everything will be just fine, son, in fact, it’ll be more than fine. “Have a little faith!” He sings, and Arthur cannot help but listen like he always does. “ Believe in me, Arthur, just like always, believe that everything is going just exactly according to my plan.”
The boy does not yet fully realize that he has just been snatched back from the jaws of death. That without Dutch, he would already be six feet under the dry earth, or abandoned whole for the vultures to come pick clean out in a field somewhere. Arthur wonders if collecting this child is a game for Dutch, like a rich man will sometimes play for low stakes on a whim; for a pocket watch, or a silver belt buckle, or a fine heirloom ring. But a boy is not a bauble , he thinks with a particularly undue level of personal investment. Arthur squints into the sun as he rides. He supposes he does not think he is going to much like whatever comes after this, and he frowns so darkly that Hosea tells Arthur by the look on his face he thinks that he has gone full idiot.
~
John is very bad at most things. At first, all of the horses are afraid of his strange, erratic movements, and he gets kicked in the head hard enough one day that Arthur is hopeful he may have gone mute and dumb, and that they can finally deposit him on a church step and never speak of him again. Under Hosea’s watchful eye, John heals. He is back to snapping at Arthur and knocking over water pails and burning coffee in no time at all.
The first time John nearly drowns while they’re out fishing together, Arthur considers just letting it happen. But even if he doesn’t want to listen, Hosea’s voice is always alive in Arthur’s mind, telling him to learn patience, that love is the thing that makes the plants grow, and the stars turn. He ends up wading into the stream and yanking John up out of the water by the collar like a scruffed and spitting cat. He gets punched as a reward for his heroics once they reach the shore. Arthur spends most of these kinds of nights grumbling and grousing at Hosea’s knee as they listen to Dutch read, but Hosea only ever really lends his son half an ear about John. It is obvious Hosea is unconcerned with the petty jealousies that go back and forth as often as moths between his children. Every time John is sent to gather wood for the campfire by himself, Arthur wonders if this is the time that a wolf will eat him.
Dutch and Hosea love John. It is an immediate and inescapable fact that Arthur has some trouble with. He feels it mostly in his stomach, but a little in his heart too, though he does not say this to anyone. It wouldn’t sting quite as keenly if Dutch in particular did not dote on John as if he were inexplicably not useless, like he once did to Arthur. Perhaps, Arthur thinks, it is a likeness in personality between Dutch and John that makes the difference, though he is loathe to compare Dutch to something as lowly as a greasy gutter tramp. Dutch loves John all the same, and Arthur cannot help but to love Dutch. Arthur has always known that Dutch has expressed a wish to expand their little family, saying that more hands would open different avenues for them to take, paths that could lead to a richer kind of lifestyle, both for them and for other poor drifters they might help along the way. They are still a small group after all, mostly women, though Miss Grimshaw and the soft-handed but hard-minded Annabelle are certainly more than capable. It’s just that John has the temper of a rattlesnake, and he shows no signs of possessing a brain insofar as Arthur has seen, and so he does not see the point in keeping the boy.
~
When John is fifteen, Dutch suggests putting a revolver in the boy’s hand. It seems a fool’s errand, and John is livid with the opinion that he can certainly be trusted, when earlier in the day he had accidentally let loose a valuable stolen Mustang Hosea had hobbled to sell, and then run off in shame by himself to pout about it afterward. The idea that John with a revolver in his hand might be the end of all of them is at the forefront of Arthur’s mind when Dutch comes close to his face, giving him a frown that Arthur knows is a command as he presses the gun into his palm. Dutch knows that Arthur is not a disobedient son, and so he takes the boy out for a lesson, despite his many worries.
They come back from the lesson that evening under a sky painted orange. Arthur is frowning even harder than Dutch this time, and John is in the saddle behind him, grinning like a crocodile.
If Arthur can say anything about Marston, it is this; the boy is a naturally serviceable shot.
~
Dutch laughs from outside his tent one day as Arthur and John are returning to camp with twin doe carcasses for Pearson. “What’s that, now?” Arthur demands, but Dutch only shakes his head with a grin, and lays a parentally heavy palm on Arthur’s shoulder for a moment to judge him. “Just admiring your shadow, my boy. ” He rumbles. When he is gone, Arthur turns around to look at John, who has a false look of innocence on his face that Arthur isn’t sure he likes, or understands.
He notices it only after a while. When Arthur takes his hat off and places it on the table as he sits, John takes his hat off too. When Arthur bends to help Miss Grimshaw lift the heavy camp stew cauldron up off the ground, John turns and finds Hosea and helps him heft his saddle up onto the hitching post for an oiling. When Arthur curries his mare and coos at her, John hauls hay bales and refills water troughs. When Arthur cocks his head to the side and considers a problem, John tilts his head too, and looks off in the distance like he’s pondering the mysteries of the universe.
~
When John is seventeen, and he has finally learned all his letters, Hosea takes him in the evenings to read aloud from some of the books he and Dutch keep in their heavy brass and leather chest. John’s voice has fully dropped, and about time for it, Arthur thinks. The boy has always been too skinny, like a rabbit you’d think twice about cleaning for a stew. He stayed lean even when the rest of him grew, making him seem girlish. He has a sound to him now like he’s been gargling gravel, which Arthur hopes John might use to his advantage in the game of talking off troublemakers. The feral kind of look he had as a boy is beginning to fade, less a whole-body exclamation and more every day like a wild flicker in his eye. He never did like to bathe much, and so in the glow of the campfire John’s greasy hair slicks down the sides of his dark face in shiny, twin black waterfalls. Hosea likes it best when he reads poetry, though Arthur has his doubts about if John fully understands their meaning.
John sits still during these sessions long enough for Arthur to get the shape of him down in his journal, scratching quietly on paper with his little nub of lead. Secretly, Arthur is just a little pleased that Hosea never suggested John try to learn the art of sketching. John is still John, after all, and even a prize pony can’t fake knowing in his soul the feel of a good line when he draws it.
~
The first time they take John robbing outside the little town of Bendelow, he’s got a Shoefield and a Granger’s and he puts six bullets in the skull of a concerned citizen about a foot away from blasting Hosea over with a double barreled shotgun. The take is incredible compared to some of their other recent jobs, two gold bars and $4,000 cash, stolen out of the safe of a greedy landowner responsible for leaving his tenants to the fate of a band of varmints much more devious in nature than Dutch’s Boys. Arthur’s soul soars when they circle back around to hand one of the gold bars over to a particularly deserving widow in the town, then tear off across the dry packed earth to drink and eat and dance and sing the night away. John gets good and fully drunk that night, and Arthur thinks for once that John is not as useless a stump of dry cactus as he had previously suspected.
John sits with Arthur by the fire, a bottle of whiskey loose in his fingers, and they regail each other with retellings of the victories of the day. When the whiskey bottle is empty, Dutch and Hosea join them and they sing camp songs, and Arthur claps his hands on his thighs and smiles as heat lightning makes the sky crackle while a storm approaches from the west. When it begins to rain somewhere through their third bottle, everybody retires, and Arthur helps John back to his tent. John’s arm holds fast around Arthur’s shoulder right up until the moment he is dumped out across his musty sleeping roll, and he is snoring before Arthur can even pull down the tent flap.
~
Once, by now so long ago that Arthur is not sure he remembers too much about it, he did not live with Dutch and Hosea. Arthur remembers being beaten black and blue, and hating the hand behind the strap more than the devil himself. The picture of that man he still keeps close to him, close enough to remember how low a man can fall, and the price that fall can cost others. Arthur does not truly believe in torturing folk who have no means of protection. He is a moral man, despite his current line of work, and he has tried to leave that past behind him insofar that he can. Every day, he tries to expel all those sad old memories, and grow some others that are good. But he clings to other old memories too, contradictory as that may be. He remembers a little of his mother, and of Copper, the first dog he ever owned, as a stupid gamboling puppy. Dutch is forever and always saying that it is only important to be faithful to what really matters, and Arthur is prone to agree.
Arthur remembers Hosea putting a journal into his hand the year they met, the year Arthur turned fifteen. It takes him a further year to learn from his newfound fathers to read and write, but he thinks this is what made the difference. He thinks he has never loved something so much, or someone, for giving him a single gift. After all, Arthur is a complete buffoon with his words. At least, he is with the words he speaks out loud. With his journal, Arthur is free to take his time. Hosea suggests he take a log of his experiences not only with sentences, but with pictures too, and gives him a number of books to read on the various structures and techniques of drawing. Arthur gets bored with the technical mumbo jumbo almost immediately, but takes his fill of the diagrams. Soon enough, he is immersed in this new language. Drawing seems like a sort of magical poetry. At first, he is no good at it at all, and the shapes he tries to depict are nothing more than oblong lumps. But for three long summers, every time Hosea takes him out hunting, or Dutch insists upon going into civilization for a short stint, Arthur draws what he sees in his journal. Time builds habits, and habits build muscle memory, and memory builds love. Soon enough, Arthur feels that he is happiest with a bit of lead in his hand, and he takes to drawing everything of any interest that he sees.
Years later, when John and Arthur go out together on a hunting trip that ends up with John’s horse getting mauled by a boar, the two of them spend an afternoon stuck up a tree while they wait for the danger to pass. John is haggard and irritated, and complains the whole time, farting over the tree branch he’s slung over and waxing poetic about the comforts of their camp town home. With nothing better to do, Arthur pulls his journal out of his sachell and draws him, lit all around by spots of sunshine through the dappled patchwork of leaves. Arthur thinks of Hosea saying that the pencil should be guided by love; that looking at a thing is not the same thing as seeing a thing, and that this is the difference between a hack job and a man with any real modicum of talent. Arthur thinks about how inextricably that loyalty, faith and love are all tangled up together inside his heart, and he draws John’s portrait up in the tree as faithfully as he can, faithful enough even to remember the bits of twigs stuck fast in his wild black mop of dirty hair.
This is the first time Arthur thinks that he loves John. That he loves him truly, in all his wily ugliness, with the sun shining on his face through the tree branches. He thinks at first that he loves John maybe a little like he loves his horse, undivided and loyal, a thing he wishes to protect, and not at all in the way he loves Dutch or Hosea, who will always stand above them. But then Arthur thinks that loving John like he loves his horse is also not quite right either, and as his pencil scratches lines across paper, he dwells steadfastly on the knowledge that no matter how their lives might one day divert them, that John will always be his brother.
John sings a bawdy song to pass the time, and then they climb out of the tree at sunset and ride Arthur’s horse back to the camp together like when John was a child. They are both more than a little embarrassed.
~
He hears it sometimes, late in the night. It is the breath before the dawn when the air is chill and the camp hangs on a slow exhalation. Nobody sings or yells or cries or laughs. There is only the sound of the fire dying down with a muted crackle, and a litany of soft snores that approach from every direction, and of course the noises of the world outside. Arthur likes this time like he likes some of Dutch’s speeches, lying in his cot and listening to the shape of the nighttime around them. Arthur likes to listen. He has always liked to listen. He likes the rustle of the wind through tall grass, through leaves, the yipping of coyotes, and the calm grunts and huffs of their nearby tethered horses. Of course, he also hears everyone talk in their sleep. There’s not much privacy among them, and they have all learned to keep a respectful mental distance from these things, because physical distance is impossible. But Arthur still somehow never expects it when he hears John restless in his tent, turning over and over as if a rock were lodged in his spine.
John is more and more restless, these days. The sound is broken up by intermittent snorts of sleep, and so Arthur knows the boy is dreaming. And yet it still shoots down Arthur’s gut like a knife whenever he hears John say his name. Sometimes the word is angry, an admonition from a frustrated brother in need of help. Other times, it is a quieter appeal, a lonely little thing that Arthur knows all too well from the reflection of it inside his own heart. This would be quite enough all by itself, but every now and again, John will sigh “Arthur,” and turn over in a way that Arthur is sure all the way down to the roots of his teeth is dangerous. It is on these nights that Arthur stops liking the quiet camp so much, and grows restless in his own bed too. He shifts ceaselessly, uneasy and heartsick, until dawn breaks apart the dream and he rises before anyone else to begin his chores for the day.
~
Snow is like a blanket across the hills by the time they ride into the next town. With a fresh camp and a fresh start, the gang splits up to range for supplies and the chance for new opportunities. Arthur figures it has been a decent enough length since he has seen a real barber, and he takes Marston with him too, to see about getting some of that ragged, girly mop of his hacked down to size. When they get there, Arthur pays for a clean shave down to the skin and enough of a trim to pull his hairline up off his neck again, but John shys away when it is his turn, then insists with vigor on keeping his hair long. “ You look like a goddamn oil slick! ” Arthur yells, and John offers him some choice words in return that end with the barber asking them both to kindly please remove themselves from his business.
Outside, they light cigarettes, and John stares with antsy anxiety at the whores leaning on the porch across the street. Arthur can’t unsee the way his eyes skate across them, up and down, then linger on the parts he likes better than others.
John is nineteen now, and though something in his stomach turns at the thought of it, Arthur knows the boy is long overdue for a visit with a woman of the night. His irrational bouts of anger have become far too commonplace. As a child, John was a terror, but John these days is a testosterone-addled brawling machine. He hits first, and rarely asks questions after, more interested in the white-hot satisfaction of landing a square punch than why exactly it is that he’s punching. By the time Arthur was John’s age he had already started a family, albeit by accident. Arthur thinks of those two crosses buried in the yard as well as he possibly can, if he can bear the hurt of thinking of them at all. But now, things are different. Arthur looks at John’s bristly profile as a cloud of cigarette smoke drifts up through the jut of his bangs, then collects beneath the brim of his hat.
Arthur pays a $3 whore to take John upstairs for two hours, and at first John protests. She’s dark haired and pretty enough, but bored with the men as John scrambles at Arthur’s arm to hold him back, every inch of him the nervous, nearly frightened brat that clung to Arthur’s back when Arthur used to take him out riding too fast, supposedly looking for rabbits or anything else to eat, though secretly it had always been just to give John a little bit of a scare.
“Arthur, please!” John insists, and Arthur laughs and says “there, there, boy” as if he were talking to a horse, and he shakes his head and turns John around and shoves him towards the stairs. But when John stops stubborn as a mule at the bottom step and turns to grip one of Arthur’s wrists, Arthur pauses, his grin fading. “Don’t leave.” John begs, and Arthur stops smiling entirely.
In the upstairs hall of the inn, Arthur leans against the wall next to the room John has entered with the whore. He folds his arms stiffly across his chest and tries not to listen to the stifled, breathy noises of John on the other side of the door as he finally becomes a man. Arthur thinks, with perhaps not quite as much conviction as he should, that he is not such a cruel man as to leave his little brother alone when he is scared, and certainly not after he has deigned to beg.
~
John is very good at some things. He is twenty years old and handsome in the kind of way a scraggly, beleaguered wolf might be, and by now he is excellent at getting whores to offer him their services for free. He has a certain dumb charm all women seem to like, and more than once Arthur has seen even townsfolk approach him with a twinkle of hope that John gladly accepts at every opportunity. Sometimes this behavior gets John thrown through the window of a saloon, but most times John pursues this particular physical endeavor with a gleeful vigor, and Arthur notices with a certain level of chagrin that releasing his seed on a regular basis has done nothing to cool down Marston’s generally scorching attitude. He is still dumber than a sack of hammers, but he has proven by this point that he is more than a competent marksman, and he rides as well as any man in the gang. It is the biggest sign of their transient nature that he is a real gunslinger now, that he can hold his own with the best of them, and it means that John is finally and truly one of them. These days, John and Arthur race for the sport of it when they can afford the time to rest the horses for a day or two afterward, and Arthur gets the feeling that Dutch likes seeing his two favorite sons return to camp sweat-slick as the horses and glowing with strength.
Arthur finds that he’s also growing hot headed these days. At least that’s the feel he has when he looks himself up and down in a mirror, whenever he’s got the chance. He tries to counteract this feeling with acts of charity, to temper the fire he feels burning inside him and to keep it from flashing out and burning anyone else. There are many more women in the camp now, after Annabelle’s death, after Bessie’s death, and he tries to be tender to them. He is too aware of them, of their fragility and their strength at once. Something about John is bleeding into him, and the cure only ever seems to be pulling himself up into the saddle and riding as fast and hard as he can, until some days he thinks if he keeps riding he can find the edge of the world. Other days, he thinks that the vast expanse of wide open country must go on forever, and that paradise must lie to the west, but he knows in theory that it is only California, though he has never seen it.
Though he is loathed to acknowledge it, something else is amiss as well these days. John has grown very good at looking at Arthur, especially when he thinks that Arthur is otherwise distracted. Most of the time, Arthur only catches John in the act as a flicker, an afterthought almost on the edge of his senses. But Arthur is a quick learner. He knows that John has always admired him, always looked up to him in many ways, but something has changed of late. He learns to feel John’s eyes on his back, and then he realizes with a startle that John is looking at him most of the time . If he stares too long, sometimes it seems that John froths up an attitude and goes off to read a book alone in the trees, or he volunteers for camp guard and grabs a Repeater and goes to stalk around the grounds in a protective circle. He is an outlier in physicality like Arthur has always felt like on the inside, and sometimes John only wants to be alone with his thoughts. Arthur wonders at what John wonders, and neither of them say a word about it.
There is a new girl in camp, Abigail, with dark hair like the woman who took John for the first time in the inn. Abigail was also a woman of service once, before Uncle of all people collected her away from her unfortunate old life. Arthur is more aware than ever of the eyes of the camp on him, and so when she begins to stare at him in much the same way that John has been staring, he invites her to go out riding with him. John invites Mary-Beth out riding with him the next day, and Arthur is not sure he likes the airy way John laughs a little too loud and parades her on his horse past him on their way back into camp, and so within the week Abigail is sleeping in Arthur’s tent.
~
Arthur is tired. He does not know where the fire has gone. He is not sure why he is so tired all the time, bone deep and weary, only that he is. He rises with the sun and rides to a stream where he jumps naked into the cold water, and the shock of it revives him a little. He returns to the camp as Mr. Pearson hangs the stew cauldron and begins dumping foraged vegetables into the basin off his chopping board. Arthur kicks Uncle as he passes him, and smirks a little when the old man startles, then begins to complain. Dutch is already awake, and crackling classical music pours out of his tent along with the wet sounds of Molly O’Shea paying Dutch his morning respects.
John and Abigail are sitting drinking coffee together on a log by the fire. Arthur wonders if they have become friends while he wasn’t looking, and a gentler part of him hopes a little that the answer is yes.
“It’s a fine mornin’, Arthur, ain’t it?” Abigail glows as she turns to smile up at him. Her life has much improved since her transition to the camp. She’s thankful, and Arthur can see it in her face. He can also feel it in his bedroll at night. And sometimes in the morning, though not this morning. He supposes leaving John to amuse her while he clears out the fog in his head is probably what’s for the best. Arthur is honest to a fault; he has never felt deserving of attention from a woman, or indeed anybody else, and briefly his guilt spikes for abandoning a duty he had taken on purely out of selfishness. It would be the proper, decent thing to release Abigail from any duty to him in return. The threat of getting her with child is often large enough to impede his nighttime conquests anyway. It is only that he is lonely. More lonely maybe than he can say.
Hosea is sitting at the camp table reading, with his book settled on one elegant knee. Hot coffee sits steaming in his tin cup, and he is sipping on it with a thoughtful look as Arthur comes up on him. Hosea has always known his son, and when Arthur doesn’t speak, the old man sets his cup down and looks up from beneath the maroon brim of his hat. They regard each other a long moment before Hosea suggests, “Suppose you and I go fishing today?”
Hosea has always known what to say.
~
That winter is especially difficult. The land is frozen as hard as glass beneath the snow, and wolves criss-cross the frontier in packs larger than Arthur can remember. He is afraid to let John go out riding alone, and insists everyone travel in pairs or more. Mac and Davey are trigger happy and in a brotherly competition for the pursuit of the largest wolf pelt, but their antics consistently scare away the scarce remaining elk, and eventually Dutch forbids them from joining any ranged hunting party until the first melt comes.
One day, Hosea takes John, Arthur, and Bill out on an excursion to track an out-of-season bear. It is an American Brown. Signs of it are everywhere, in bark-gouged trees and scat tracks and in broken branches, all evidence they had spotted initially while on other business. A bear awake in snow should be an easy kill, Hosea says, insisting it will have left it’s wits behind it in it’s den as some unnatural impulse spits it back out into the wintery world at entirely the wrong time. When Arthur sees the brown furry crest of it’s back in the distance, he takes the shot.
The body turns out to be only a woman in a bear pelt coat. Arthur is horrified, and they spend the next day searching the area for a residence from which she might have come. When they turn up nothing, Bill and Arthur chip a shallow hole into the frozen ground and they bury her without a christian name to mark her resting place.
Arthur is inconsolable, if not completely silent. He has taken the life of a woman before, in moments of danger when he was forced to make a choice between a stranger and his adoptive family. Arthur has killed, and he does not believe he will stop killing, but something about the shape of her, so small and twisted into her pelt as she laid bloody in the snow, will not leave Arthur alone. The weather gets worse, and he drinks more heavily for a while than he should, pressed in on all sides by cold and guilt and shame. He notices John’s staring until he cannot tolerate that either for a single moment more, but in the end it turns out that whiskey is the cure for that ailment too.
~
At the pit of his self-loathing, one evening Arthur breaks open the lid on his clothes chest and retrieves a stack of letters written to him in a delicate hand by Mary Linton. Sometimes he thinks he misses her fiercest of all, when she was still his Mary, Mary Gillis. He recalls loving her as he reads over her letters, letters that he has kept , despite the fact that all of them, each down to the very last, are tinged with accusations that Arthur will never be capable of living a normal life.
Arthur reads her words, and something colder than the winter settles into his chest as he comprehends their meaning. Even then, she could see what he could not, that Dutch’s gang would forever hold him in place by the bonds Arthur had forged within it. He had loved her something strong, but Mary was incapable of accept Arthur’s family obligations in the end, so she had eschewed his lifestyle and finally left him to marry another law abiding gentleman. In her eyes, Arthur would always be a criminal, not just physically, but morally as well. She could never see the value of his love for her as anything less than the most important point in his life. She had never been able to appreciate the love he harbored for his made family, or to have a care for the responsibilities that such a love required that he shoulder. She would call him a sentimental fool if she could see his heart now; about how he longed for her company, but also for the shape of this other life, of Dutch and Hosea, and of John astride his horse at his side, in a way the young son Arthur had left buried in the yard could never be.
Even now, Arthur sometimes likes to roll that old feeling over and over in his mind, the feeling of loving something so much it hurts. He burns for that old sensation. He thinks of loving something so utterly that he takes no further thought for consequence. He supposes, he has always been a sentimental man. It was a boy’s heart Mary had once upon a time fallen in love with, and Arthur is so very different now, except for only the fact that he hungers to give to his loyalty. He must always remember to be loyal to what matters. That, at least, he hopes will never change.
~
Summertime again, and they are nearing the foothills of the Grizzlies. The gang has grown larger still, and Abigail has grown bored of Arthur. He supposes it is because of his lack of interest in her nether regions, though he cannot deny he is the kind of man to tightly hold his feelings back. She is in Sean’s tent now, though Arthur has seen them arguing. He traces the outline of Sean in his journal, but makes no mention of it with words, other than to jot down a deceptively brief ‘Abigail moved along- suppose it is for the best.’ . He feels nothing other than friendship towards her, and a light relief at being left again to his own devices.
Now that he is more often alone than not, John joins Arthur out on his excursions at every available opportunity. At first, Arthur finds this annoying, barking at him again and again to find someplace else to be underfoot. But against his better judgement, eventually he relaxes into the new pattern.
John is surprisingly useful sometimes, and there’s the added bonus that he pays it no mind if Arthur chooses not to talk, unlike Dutch, or even Hosea, who are forever and always prompting Arthur to do something or say something. Instead, John fills the empty space up in the middle with mad ramblings of his own, of every sort of tone and color. Other times John is more than capable of holding his tongue too, and they move together in a comfortable unison to flank a buffalo midhunt, or to rifle through the drawers of an abandoned homestead, or to sit out a storm in a cave over a smoky fire full of pungent burning conifers. It is just the poultice Arthur’s disquieted, yearning heart requires, and it is in these quiet days that he thinks again, very privately, that he loves John Marston a little more than he properly should.
John is not Mary Linton after all, and John is not his dead son Isaac rotting away six feet below the earth, but Arthur supposes that to him, John is a little part of the both of them; that he is a collection of all of Arthur’s feelings on how to love. Until this point, this realization has struck Arthur with an acute sense of wrongness and discomfort, but one night when they have been out ranging for more than a week and John silently crawls into his tent, Arthur thinks that he does not care so much about propriety anymore. He doesn’t speak or move, but lets John curl protectively around his back, and as Arthur drifts to sleep he thinks that no woman has ever touched him in such a way.
~
Dutch and Hosea are arguing when Arthur and John return to camp after a three day ride that becomes a four day ride, after they pass a lake and John suggests Arthur teach him how to swim, to swim proper , for real this time, and not like any number of their other failed fishing excursions. It is an unmitigated disaster, but Arthur is now the proud bearer of the memory of hauling John’s skinny naked body up from the depths of the water and collecting him against his chest in a discombobulated sputter, so he thinks it was not a completely worthless effort.
“ -told you, it was always a bad idea! From the very beginning! ” Hosea’s voice is deadly sharp with accusation, and Dutch’s shadow cuts a mean slash across the white canvas of his tent as he storms away from the conversation entirely. “Where have you been? ” Dutch barks at his sons when he sees them, and a moment later Hosea appears around the corner of the tent to give them a long, lingering look tinged with worry.
It is not often that Arthur, much less anyone else, sees Dutch and Hosea arguing. They keep their disputes more private between them than the camp leger, and seeing any corner of a fight sends shivers up Arthur’s spine.
The next day Dutch declares that John and Karen and the Callander brothers will come with him to look into a lead about some property he has been eyeballing, a bit of earth in Montana of their very own to finally plant a steak in and claim as their savage utopia. In the meantime, Hosea will strike out with Arthur looking to befriend any local law enforcement. Any smoke screen will be better than none to cover their move as they plant the seeds of this proposed new life, and with a little gold left over in their coffers from their last bank job, Arthur and Hosea can afford to buy some decent clothes and really milk the part.
Hosea is a huckster of the highest caliber and so it is no wonder this will be his job, but Arthur wonders with a dark rumble in his stomach why he is being sent along too. Everybody knows Arthur is too honest, and no good at all at playing a farcical role if too many lines are required. But then he thinks, Bill and the Callanders are no good at play acting either on account of their blabbermouths, and John only stops blustering when he’s playing poker or trying to get up a woman’s skirt, and that after all Arthur might actually, really be the best choice. He thinks again that he should be worried when he sees Dutch speaking very close with John an hour later at the far edge of camp. And then he knows a worry for sure when he sees one, when Dutch’s words during their conversation turns the look in John’s eyes from concern straight into bitter embarrassment.
~
It is a month and a half before Hosea and Arthur make it back to camp. The local law it turns out had become embroiled with a faction of civil war deserters holed up in a camp outside the town of Obadiah, and Hosea could not quite help himself from the game of pitting them against one another. Arthur actively admires and appreciates Hosea’s craft, and when the gentleman thief is in his element it is a little like watching the devil’s own surgeon hard at work. When both factions concluded in a shoot-out that resulted in the death of every major player, Hosea declares it a draw and they ride out of town again with nobody the wiser other than the two of them, both knowing that they had yet again just successfully struck down two birds with one stone.
There is a new man in camp when they return, Javier Escuella, a former revolutionary and chicken thief with an appropriately dramatic affection for Dutch’s ethos, and he is settled enough by now for Arthur to notice that Dutch’s party must have returned a decent amount of time before them. He is struck again when he sees that Abigail has moved her things into John’s tent. Arthur lingers to stare at that for an uncharacteristic minute, entirely missing the sympathetic look shot at him from Miss Grimshaw, and then he is hit with a sick sink of the gut and thinks he knows the reason for Dutch and Hosea’s argument.
~
Arthur does not see John again for three days. When he spots him for the first time, he is sat on a log in the dark, far away at the outposter’s fire where the underside of his grisled chin has been lit ablaze with a glowing pool of yellow. He looks good and truly lost in thought, and so Arthur leaves him right where he is. He knows better than to interrupt the rare, original sight of John Marston’s brain working overtime when he sees it.
~
Javier Escuella turns out to be an excellent drinking buddy, and he is exactly the sort of robust fellow Arthur feels can keep up a conversation while also keeping his head up off the bar. He is also a talented musician, which Arthur greatly appreciates since he has sung the same fifteen camp songs he knows more times than he cares to count, and has heard Dutch’s five favorite classical melodies even more times than that. Javier brings a few new tawdry little ditties to the table, and quite a number of songs in Spanish that Arthur can only pick out the meaning of one or two words from, but they are vivacious and invigorating, and it is a good feeling Arthur hasn’t felt in months. They talk for hours about the revolution Javier has just fled, and the way all men go about the business of killing one another, and it is also a nicety that he seems to adore the ground Dutch walks on, so in that way again Arthur feels that they are also the same. He briefly wonders how this must all look, for John the grouser to sit in silence, and for Arthur the thinker to go on like a fool for hours about nothing, but in the end he decides it is better not to know or care.
~
Arthur is sitting with Bill and Javier playing dominoes in the evening when the noise of John and Abigail’s love making becomes unbearable. They pause to listen in a temporarily dumbstruck silence at Abigail’s increasingly high pitched screams of passion, and Javier exchanges a look with Arthur when it sounds like something wooden shatters. A ceramic something smashes in the tent quickly after, and then the whole debacle is abruptly cut off as John comes loud as a roaring bear.The whole camp grows quiet for a mortified pause, and Bill lets his eyes skate back to their game, a wily grin lit across his face. “ Ride ‘er hard and put ‘er away wet, huh, Johnnyboy?” he snorts quietly into his cup.
Later, when John has wandered out in his union suit past dinnertime to beg a scrap of bread and a turnip off of Pearson as a late night snack, he and Arthur finally see one another again. Arthur sits by the fire by himself, his rustler hat tilted far enough forward that it takes until he feels the familiar tingle of John’s eyes for him to look all the way up. His journal is temporarily forgotten as his hands go slack, and he doesn’t smile, though he doesn’t frown either. John apparently is prepared for a chastisement, and when nothing comes, instead he looks incensed. In fact, he grows so ornery under Arthur’s silence that he looks close to popping. Arthur is sure he is about to get a real earful, which has always been John’s way, but John says nothing, and so Arthur keeps saying nothing, and in the end John finally turns and walks away in a huff without a single spoken word.
Arthur thinks that this is a very childish game, and that John has not grown up so much as all that. He thinks that Dutch has taught John a certain egocentric bluster which does the moral shape of him no favors. But he also thinks about the afternoon he listened to the whore with the dark hair take John’s virginity, and how Arthur is almost sure somewhere among John’s moans and groans that he had heard his own name, and he wonders what sort of game John thinks all of this really is.
~
Half the time that John and Abigail are out and about, their conversation is loud and ill-mannered. It is almost funny how they are alike, both brutally pigheaded about some things to the point of screaming, and loving to a fault about others. Arthur forces himself to admit they make a good pair. He does not doubt that Abigail would not have made himself a good wife, and he wonders if she might do what she couldn’t for Arthur instead for John. Arthur tries to dwell on Dutch and Hosea’s relationship when he thinks of this. Both his fathers had women in their lives, women they loved, and at least in Hosea’s case, a woman he desired to start a family with. Because the world is singularly cruel, Arthur must now think of his aunts Anabelle and Bessie in the past tense, but through it all Dutch and Hosea’s bond had never wavered. Arthur does not know for sure, not really, but he suspects Hosea is the kind of man who is not above offering himself, personally , as penance for past indiscretions. And though he thinks this privately and would never speak it aloud, he does not think Dutch is the kind of man to turn that penance down. He has always had his share of questions about the curious couple, but Arthur has never felt he had the right to seek out those answers. That business is their own, but when they sit close together and Dutch lays a hand on Hosea’s, he thinks he does not need to ask. Perhaps, just maybe, Arthur and John will be just fine.
The other half of the time John and Abigail are violently audible, it is like before and they are fornicating loud enough to scare the birds out of the trees. At one point it grows annoying enough that Sean starts throwing pots at John’s tent, and Bill starts howling like a werewolf. Hosea takes John aside half a week into it and has a talk with him about self control and personal reservations, but John is in his twenties and apparently has something he’s spitting mad about that he needs proving, and so Hosea’s talk goes largely unheeded. Arthur pretends he knows nothing about it, and every time John puts Abigail through her paces and then goes to stalk like a virile lion around the camp, Arthur sighs and tries to push his guts back down out of his throat and reaches for a book. But then he sees Dutch cast John the fond glance of a proud father and he feels the bile rise right back up again, no matter what he does.
After that, it is always the fact that John won’t look at him anymore, not a once since that last time by the fire, that is what drives Arthur up on his horse. Every time he hears Abigail’s voice begin it’s evening litany, Arthur knows it is only a matter of time before he is up and out of camp for the duration of the evening.
~
It is late into the night again, that same time of night that Arthur used to love once, and he is returning from relieving himself in the woods when he is suddenly slammed into a tree. His first reaction is to reach for his guns before he remembers them sitting cold and far away back on his bed, but after a grappled moment with his dark interloper Arthur realizes with a start that it is only John. His fists relax their grip slightly in his duster jacket.
“Hellfire, Marston, you want me to rip you limb from limb?” Arthur chastises, but before he has the opportunity to work out any further argument, John’s tongue is in his mouth. It is a complete surprise, despite the fact that he knows deep down it should not be, and Arthur cannot collect himself before he feels John’s eager hands at the button of his pants. This alone is plenty enough motivation to wake up his limbs, and then he is grabbing John up between his hands and kissing him back without quite knowing his own actions, fast and hard enough that he hopes he can outrun the entire horrible momentous truth of it all.
John groans into Arthur’s mouth like he’s been sucker punched, and his arms wrangle around Arthur in complicated knots until he doesn’t wait for Arthur’s permission anymore and just stuffs one whole hand down the front of his pants. Arthur is not sure he has ever been this hard this fast, and he lets John grab onto him for a few rasping seconds, their faces rubbing sweat salt into each other in a moment that Arthur is sure he will remember for the rest of his life. But then he’s grunting again, “ -No- Listen to me, boy, I said no- ” and then he’s using his strength to wrench John’s body fully away from his own.
John is livid even in the dark. “ Damn it, Arthur, don’t make me say it!” He appeals, and it is the epitome of frustration. They breathe too hard on each other until Arthur lets the most jealously guarded part of himself call the foregone conclusion he knows he would never have been able to acknowledge in the broad light of day. He nods haltingly, only once, and when John makes to jerk back into action, Arthur only grips him harder, then turns them in a stumbling sidestep to press John’s back up against the tree. John’s silhouette broadcasts confusion until the moment Arthur sinks to his knees, and then the realization is a slow, rumbling groan that cuts past his teeth and hangs heavy with want and understanding.
More than anything from this night, Arthur thinks he will remember John’s hands on his face. Arthur wants so badly to love something, to direct his adoration through the proper channels. And he has wanted, for so long by now, to put a name to this thing between him and the other brother under Dutch that he had never asked for. Arthur thinks as John’s fingers trace his jaw and thread through his hair that it is no wonder the women always seem to leave him. Arthur is always afraid that he spoils things, every single time, and that his stupidity and his callousness mean he cannot be loved. But this time, with John, who he holds more precious than all before him, he wants to make an impression. He thinks if he worships just a little harder than the second before that something inside him will finally break, and that he will finally be able to understand what it really means to follow a credence all the way through to it’s natural conclusion. Every part of him sings to be loyal to the things that matter. It is all that Arthur believes in, it is all he has ever believed in, and he presses that mantra into John with his tongue and his voice and his heart, and with every single one of his fingers.
Because he is nothing like a woman, Arthur does not attempt to talk to John in this moment as if he were one. But he is also not so sure he quite remembers how to do this, having only learned once, long ago with an adventurous room of prostitutes in his earlier years. Everything is strange, but Arthur is committed to this moment, committed to John, and he knows that in future he will look back on this during many long, hungry nights alone and he will be nourished. He thinks back on his earliest impressions of John, and tries to coax him along with the only language he knows that’s left to him; “ You’re alright, boy, ” he reassures John, as gently as if he were taking a startled filly in hand. “ Easy ,” he murmurs, “ easy, easy.” And it is almost too soon that John spills himself with a moan across Arthur’s lips.
Enough, Arthur thinks. Enough. It is enough , the thought comes in with a contradictory pang of hunger. It is enough that this has happened at all. He insists to himself that even if they never see each other again, he can go to his grave satisfied with this. Just with this. But as Arthur thinks the words, and John’s hands trace his scalp with a sudden hidden tenderness, he knows deep down that this will never be true.
“Ain’t nothing fair.” John murmurs, and Arthur doesn’t yet know the half of it.