Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Matthew Garth is fourteen years old, he emerges squinting from a rude cabin to see Thomas Dunson silhouetted against the sky. Matt has yet to get his full growth, and he always runs to skinniness, so Dunson is a tremendous, looming figure, even taller than the red sandstone buttes and spires in the distance. Years later, remembering it, Matt has his growth and Dunson is not so big but Matt still sees him that way. He supposes it's like what happens to a horse. One part of raising a foal is picking him up every so often, doing it less as time goes by and the foal gets bigger. The principle of the thing is that once the horse has the idea that you are bigger than he is, it sticks. That's how it is with Matt and Dunson.

Dunson has finished putting up a new hitching rail. The old one was bad wood and fell apart. He puts down his tools and leans forward with his arms on the rail, looking into the distance. Matt comes up beside him. Dunson says nothing, so Matt leans forward with his arms on the rail, too, and is silent beside him. They don't say anything for several minutes. Then Dunson laughs, and so Matt does too. "Outwait me, will you?" says Dunson.

"I can."

"No, you can't. If you could, you wouldn't've said anything back to me."

Matt smiles. He knows Dunson is right. He looks down at Dunson's arms on the rail. There is a bracelet around Dunson's wrist. Matt has seen it before but has never asked about it. Now he does.

"My mother's," Dunson says.

It is a surprise that Dunson is wearing a woman's bracelet. "You haven't given it to somebody by now?" says Matt. He is funning. Dunson does not have a wife, and he doesn't know where Dunson would get one around here. He would have to send away for one.

"Gave it to somebody once," said Dunson.

"What happened?"

"She gave it back."

The bracelet is heavy, and gold. "If it was me," says Matt, "I wouldn't."

Dunson laughs. Then he straightens up and pulls the bracelet off his wrist.

"Oh," says Matt, "hold on. I wasn't meaning -- "

"Shut up and stay still." Dunson grabs Matt's wrist in one hand. It is a big hand, worn by age and work and weather, and strong. He lays Matt's hand on the rail and then uses both his hands to put the bracelet on Matt.

"There," he says. He looks at Matt hard. It is almost a glare. "Now, you gonna give that back?"

Matt didn't know Dunson when Dunson took him in. He knows Dunson now. If Matt does not accept the bracelet, Dunson will accuse him of being a liar for saying he wouldn't give it back. Dunson does not take kindly to half-heartedness or regrets. Matt says, "Hell, no."

Dunson laughs and claps Matt on the back. The blow near drives the breath out of him.

The bracelet encircles Matt's wrist. It is heavy and he feels its weight on his arm, but more than that he feels Dunson's hand, even when the bracelet has been there for an hour and Dunson isn't near him anymore.

The wardroom is bright, at least. The bunkroom where the other men are staying is low and dark, like every other bunkroom, but the room in back of the doctor's office has a window with a view of the street so Cherry Valance can watch everyone who goes by. Matt leaves the door open behind him. He has asked the doctor to make himself scarce for a few minutes so he and Cherry can speak privately. He owes Cherry that much. When Dunson went maddened and cruel and they had to force him off the trail, Matt could not have kept the herd going if not for Cherry. He could not have kept himself going if not for Cherry.

Matt leaves the door open to make sure he knows if somebody comes into the office.

Matt says, "Dunson asks how you're doing."

Cherry Valance says, "He shot me. That's how I'm doing."

"He's apologized about that. He's paying for the doctor, isn't he? And for the morphia?"

"The latter is what does me the most good. He ain't gonna pay if I heal up and it turns out this leg means I can't get on a horse again. What happens to me then, Matt? You and your wife gonna take care of me?"

Tess is not Matt's wife yet. "She worries about you. She knows you matter to me."

Cherry smirks. "She's broad-minded."

"You're my friend, Cherry."

"Oh," says Cherry. "Is that what you call it?" His lips curl up further in a mocking smile, and Matt's blood runs cold to think of the things Cherry could tell about if he wanted to, about things that had happened after Dunson was driven from the trail and Matt and Cherry had taken the herd on to Abilene.

"Yes," says Matt. "It is. Please don't make me ask myself why I'm even talking to you."

Cherry laughs. It is not a cruel laugh, and while it has only a shadow of his usual charm it is real. "Matt, old son," he says, "I'm the only person you don't have to pretend to. I know exactly what I am. I relish the delight I take in all creatures of the earth. I hide it no more than I have to. Whereas you vacillate. All these years, you don't know if you want to be him or --" Fuck him, Cherry doesn't say, because he doesn't have to and because it isn't right. Matt has never thought about fucking Dunson, because it seems like such an impossibility. It is true that he vividly remembers the time Dunson forced Matt to drop trousers for a good strapping when he'd caught Matt stealing his cigars, and that Matt has subsisted for years on thoughts that it might have gone another way. He never told Cherry this. He didn't have to. Cherry had had his number early on. "Now you're trying being him on for size. Gonna make him an adoptive grandfather. Well, that's just fine."

"Yes," says Matt. "It is fine." He can live like this; he can even be happy like this. It is stable, and it is important, and it is what Dunson would want; it is what is best for Dunson, and it is what is best for Matt too.

"Ah," Cherry says. "Ah, well." His gaze drops below Matt's waist, and Matt feels a surge of fright and something else, but Cherry is looking to one side. "I believe that's my gun riding in your off-hand holster," Cherry says.

"Just keeping it warm for you."

"You could leave it here."

"I wouldn't want you to do something foolish."

"Oh, Matt," says Cherry. "Do you think I'd really do something foolish over you?"

"You might."

"Yeah," Cherry says. "I might at that."

Matt steps out onto the boardwalk after a little while. Cherry is looking out the window as he leaves, and Matt is a little relieved to be leaving him. Tess is on the boardwalk when Matt comes out. The bracelet Dunson gave Matt gleams upon her wrist as she takes his hand.

"What did Cherry say to you as you stepped out the door?" she says. "I heard his voice, but couldn't make it out."

Matt says, "He said, 'All you need now is a good Swiss watch.'"

"What does that mean?"

"Private joke."

It hadn't been, of course, not the way Cherry had said it the first time. He and Matt had been looking at each other's guns, and Cherry had said, "Y'know, there are only two things more beautiful than a good gun -- a Swiss watch or a woman from anywhere." Then he'd shot Matt a sly grin. "You ever have a good Swiss watch?"

Tess's hand is soft. A woman's work gives her calluses, but they are fewer and in different places than his, or Dunson's, or Cherry's. It's strange that the softness of her hand gives Matt strength; perhaps it does because he knows of the inner strength that lies behind it. Matt has spent so much of his life in the company of men that intimacy with a woman seems strange to him. And yet in the years ahead he will unburden himself to her, support her, share her bed, build with her help and support on what Dunson had started. He should begin to unburden himself, really, but he is not certain how. Dunson has never shown any inclination to unburden himself to anyone, and Matt has tried to emulate him for so long that he isn't sure he can shake off the habit.

"Don't get all brooding again," Tess says. "You and Dunson have made peace. He added you to the brand. You were right; he was wrong. You're going to be in charge of a lot more now."

"Am I?"

"He said so."

"When?"

"We spoke this morning. Didn't he -- oh, no, he wouldn't. I have to say, I see why men admire him, but for a woman he is a source of profound irritation." Matt laughs. "It'll be hard for you, I think. You've deferred to him for so long. You broke away, you and Cherry; that was good. But you can't defer to him again just because that's what you've always done. Or he'll break your heart again."

"I know," says Matt. "But you'll stick with me."

"I will," she says. "I have the feeling Cherry will, too."

Matt grimaces. "That's what I'm afraid of," he says. He wishes, now, that Cherry would go away. He's glad Dunson did not kill him; he would have mourned Cherry's death, but now that he has money and a position to lose, he fears scandal and ruin. Tess, who had screamed sense into him and Dunson like they were two schoolboys in a classroom, would leave him, and Dunson -- well, at the very least, Dunson would probably shoot Cherry again.

"You will know your own mind," says Tess, "even if you've sometimes been slow to make it up. But if you want, I'll make him welcome."

For an instant, Matt knows fear. He can't ask what she means, of course; he cannot even imagine having her tacit assent. It is too much to think about, and he does not want to. Because Cherry loves all the creatures of the earth, and if he were welcome in their home, he probably would not be content to stop with Matt.

And there is Dunson. Tess is right that Matt cannot simply defer to him again, but what Dunson thinks matters to Matt, even though he knows that Dunson can and has been cruelly and wildly wrong about men before. It is as if there is a part of Matt -- the part that hesitated to resist Dunson's tyranny on the trail -- that believes that if Tom Dunson thinks it, it must be so.

Matt realizes that Tess has stopped. He follows her gaze. Dunson is across the street. He is leaning on the top rail of the stockyard fence, the way he had leaned against that hitching post years ago. The buildings are closer than the buttes were, and so although they are lower they appear larger in relation to Dunson than the buttes did. Yet Dunson looks no smaller.

He doesn't seem like a man -- even now that Matt has seen him maddened, then humbled -- but a force. Thomas Dunson has carved wealth for himself and for Matt out of the West through nothing more than years of work and a prodigious will. Matt has seen him run cattle, and kill men, and bury them -- Dunson was always one for burying men he'd shot, on the grounds that if you did something you'd better finish it right -- and Matt still has the awe for him that a man always keeps for his childhood heroes.

Matt loves Dunson. He almost worships him, even now that he's seen his flaws. He could not imagine a life without him, and is grateful that he doesn't have to. He is Dunson's man, and belongs to him in a way, like the cattle and like the land. Matt will belong to him however he can, perhaps in ways that Cherry would smirk about to think on. But Dunson wouldn't do that, and so there it is.

It feels a little blasphemous even to think such things.

He exchanges a glance with Tess. She lets go of his hand, touches his back -- gently, with a little push -- and walks on.

Matt walks across the street. He comes up next to Dunson, maybe six feet away, and leans on the top rail of the fence next to him. They don't say anything for ten minutes.

"You've learned to wait," Dunson says.

Matt doesn't say anything.

"That's good."

Matt doesn't say anything.

"You can start talking at any time."

Matt smiles a little. Then Dunson grunts. "All right, god damn it," Dunson says. "You win."

"I know," says Matt.

"Well, don't make a habit of it. It's gettin' to be aggravating."

"You've been fed up with me before. Hell, you threatened to brand my rear end when we started this whole thing. You seemed like you were relishing the prospect."

"I might've been at that!" Dunson says.

Matt has always had a vivid imagination. Sometimes this is a curse.

"Surprised you didn't take me on sooner," Dunson says. "You 'n' Cherry must've been thinkin' about it. One a' you on either side."

Matt hides a smile. "I told Cherry I thought he'd find you more than a handful by himself."

Dunson pulls out a tobacco pouch and rolling papers. He makes a cigarette. Matt has often made cigarettes for Dunson, and part of him is a little sad to see Dunson roll his own. But then Dunson hands the cigarette to Matt, and when Matt takes it, Dunson scratches a match and lights it for him.

"Tess says you and her had a talk," says Matt.

"Ayup."

"You gonna tell me what you told her?"

"I'm thinkin' on it."

"Don't think too long. I might say no."

"You got any other prospects?"

"I'm the man who opened the Chisholm Trail," says Matt. "I got nothing but prospects. Also, I have your entire payment for those beef in my name at the bank in town. So it'd behoove you to be friendly."

Dunson stares. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "And that's why I gotta quit the game!" he says. "Right when I get to the top. You beat me, Matt. You're faster and smarter. All I got is grit. You can go a ways on grit. But you gotta finish with somethin' else." He dips into his tobacco pouch and fishes out the makings of another cigarette. He sprinkles the tobacco, moistens the flap, rolls it up and lights it. "You got your name on the brand," says Dunson. "You wanna run things?"

Matt says, "I'll run things. All the things."

"Big responsibility."

Matt scratches his nose with a thumb, slowly. "I reckon I can handle it."

"All right, then," says Dunson. "Consider me semi-retired."

"Good," says Matt. "Tess'll be looking over the accounts when we get back. I figure I'll leave Cherry here as our agent, until he gets tired of it or his leg heals up. We got a lot of money for this herd. Now we got to get back, buy up some more beef with that cash, and come back this way again. And this time, you ain't coming."

"That so?"

"It is."

Dunson sets his jaw. He nods, then spits once into the center of his palm. Matt does the same, and they shake. Strangely, he hasn't shaken Dunson's hand often. He remembers doing it as a boy. Dunson's hand was large then, and it is large now, but Matt is larger, too.

"Do I get some money at some point?" Dunson says.

"You and me both," says Matt. "I got a purchase or two to make."

"An engagement ring?" says Dunson, grinning.

"Sure," says Matt. "And while I'm at it, a Swiss watch."

They turn and walk toward the bank, and this time it's Matt who leads the way.