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She thought about LaBoeuf’s bully shot less and less as the years passed; but still, Mattie thought of it.
*
She owned a Sharps carbine herself; had bought one in the days after her eighteenth birthday, from a mouthy small arms dealer in Danville, who ignored her specific request and spent thirteen useless minutes trying to sell her a flashy rifle she neither wanted nor would pay for. “I have come here for a Sharps carbine,” she said, after he had finished his showpiece, “and I shall leave with one, or I shall leave with nothing at all.”
It was the only gun she had ever fired - though admittedly from a pool of just two - that had not let her down. It was the only gun with which she had killed a man.
Once she was sure her body was grown as much as it ever would, she drew up plans for a kind of firm sling, with a rest for the side of her chin, to help her steady the rifle with her sole hand. A local leathersmith, smelling strongly of tar, gave her an idiotic price to make the piece, and she smoothed her blueprints upon his workbench, snapped that she had done most of his work for him, and told him he need only charge for labour and parts.
She taught herself a wide-legged stance to help with the kickback that her brother little Frank, now eleven and thinking himself a man, told her loudly and often was unladylike. Mattie took it upon herself to teach Victoria, in theory, how to load, clean and fire the gun. This, too, Frank complained, was not the kind of thing a lady had any business learning. “And here is a lady doing such a thing nonetheless,” Mattie told him blithely, sending little Frank into an ungainly sulk.
He moved out of the family home, once he was sixteen and their mother had passed. Victoria, two years younger, was quite happy to stay under Mattie’s sturdy wing.
Every now and then, with the early afternoon sun giving her clear sight across the plains, Mattie would set an apple upon the border fence of the Ross estate and then walk at an even pace, counting yards under her breath, until she reached at least four hundred. Then she would turn, and set the butt of her rifle against her shoulder, plant her feet and stretch out her arm, utter the same prayer under her breath she had heard LaBoeuf whisper, and fire off a single round. Anything more would be wasteful.
She never hit that apple. Most often she ate it afterwards, tart and unblemished.
She liked the reminder that LaBoeuf, and by extension man, on the whole, had some proof of skill in him. She found so little daily evidence otherwise.
By her early thirties, Mattie Ross had been courted more times than she could count on her remaining fingers. Perhaps some of them considered themselves serious, but she never did. She had a magpie’s eye, a fault in her character she had always loathed, and her habit of offering a second-glance to a handsome face no doubt convinced them they had a chance with her. There was a dearth of well-to-do folk in Yell County, and wealthy women rarer still: as a landowner, a savvy investor, and a proficient haggler to boot, Mattie was a fine enough prospect for bachelors who had given up chasing more comely skirts. She had been eulogised at length for her practicalities, in a way she assumed men must think romantic; despite, they always said, the dual disadvantages of her arm and her countenance. Yes, they would say, as though realising it as they stood before her: in many ways a practical wife would be almost as worthy as a pretty one.
“If you think your veiled insults could be mistaken for flattery, I am quite content to disabuse you of the notion,” Mattie said dryly, and let none of her would-be suitors beyond the house’s porch.
There was one she took a flicker of fancy to. He was not pretty to look at, but he had pleasingly untamed hair, quite blonde, and took pride in his work as a hunting guide for lazy menfolk who considered shooting a sport rather than a necessity. He sat upright in his saddle and Mattie did once accompany him on a walkabout - he raised his brow when she did not sit side-saddle, but said nothing of it - and he sought to impress her by raising his rifle to a dozing lark sparrow some two hundred and fifty yards across and up on a skinny sloping bough. His shot did not find its mark, though he was pleased that he had even managed to startle the poor bird, which darted, skittish, across the late afternoon miasma.
Mattie found his enthusiasm for such a small feat distasteful. Even Rooster Cogburn had managed to hit a moving target by luck, to say nothing of LaBoeuf’s fine killing blow.
She thought about that shot once more; and declined the hunter’s further affections.
*
It was twenty years before she had word of either of her travelling companions, and would be another five before Rooster Cogburn thought, belatedly, to get in touch; but she did come home from the hardware store one day, after fetching nails and wire to fix the worn bolt on the outhouse before it became useless altogether - she did come home to find dainty Victoria playing maid for the ranger LaBoeuf, there in the parlour.
“Mr. LaBoeuf,” she muttered, as if to herself. “In the very flesh.”
Still in his thick hide coat with spurs on his boots.
He had kept some of his old handsomeness, though his hair was far more salty than sugar-spun now, and his crow’s feet were craggy and thick around his eyes from squinting too often along the Texas horizon. He smoked his pipe and did not look her up and down, but glanced briefly at the empty space below her elbow, and then kept as steady a gaze as he always had, somewhere just below her chin.
He did not get up to greet her.
“Mattie Ross,” he said. His voice was molasses-like, not in that it was smooth but that words stuck fast in his mouth. She had forgotten his maimed tongue, and in her memory always had a warm twang. The reality was a thickened slurring. She pitied him at once. “No more a little girl, I see.”
“I should only be either grown or dead, Mr. LaBoeuf.”
“Then I’m pleased to see you grown.” He got to his feet with no spring in his step, tapping his pipe in a telling way until Victoria ran to find a small plate for him to use for an ashtray. “Let us find a place to talk.”
“I have errands.”
He seemed momentarily put out. “Then leave them. I have travelled far.”
“It is you who have interrupted my day, Mr. LaBoeuf, not the other way around.”
“Come now, you cannot spare a half day for an old trailmate?”
“Marshall Cogburn was my trailmate,” Mattie told him. “You were an unfortunate obstacle, Mr. LaBoeuf.”
He had never smiled at her pronouncements then, but did so now, self-satisfied, as if she had secured some wager he’d bet against himself. “You have lost none of your spit, Miss Mattie.”
“And you your cowlick,” she retorted; though she smiled also. There was still some shadow of the girl in her who had been intimidated by his smart look and his confidence. It fooled her into thinking him some kind of beauty, back then, and she was in danger of slipping up a second time.
That would be a rare occurrence.
“I passed a coffee house on the road up.”
“Yes, I know it, and the girls it employs, and yet you have Victoria here fetching and carrying for you free of charge.”
“Stow your spirit a while and come take my arm,” he grunted briskly. She realised he could not walk well, though he was not old enough yet to be entirely cowed. Still, Mattie offered him a hand, though she had but the one to spare. She was already in her coat and walking boots, and she suspected their dalliance would not take up much of her day.
She was as tall as him, now, with his slight stoop and her steadfast uprightness. Victoria bristled as Mattie listed the chores she would need to pick up, now that Mattie herself was indisposed, and LaBoeuf did not even have the self-awareness to apologise. Not wholly unwelcome, but he had always been in an intruder in Mattie’s business nonetheless.
Some things changed; not all.
Mattie loathed the way heads turned to see her with a gentleman at her side, as they traversed the placid streets. People would chatter so and when LaBoeuf took his leave, she would be the one left to slop up those gossipy dregs. He walked slow, and with a bow-leggedness from a lifetime in the saddle, and Mattie felt more like she was escorting an elderly uncle than an old sharp-shooter. She was quietly glad her father had not lived to this age, that she had never seen him as anything other than a gentle and noble gelding; never buckled, never bent.
She was angry at herself for the thought.
LaBoeuf, she realised, was talking.
“I heard you had lost the hand,” he said as they passed along the main street; a thought mid-stream in a one-sided conversation she had missed. “But it is a shock to see it nonetheless.”
“You have been nosing around about me, I see,” Mattie said, dismissive, “though it has taken you two lengthy decades to seek me out.”
“Life has not given me ample opportunity to go about at my leisure,” he replied, gruff, and she appreciated his bitter honesty, even if it was uncouth to voice it.
She did still pity him.
They chatted a while; or rather, Mattie let the ranger talk about himself. They both drank tea, which he spiked liberally from a silvery hip-flask he took out from his thick coat - which he did not care to shrug off - and Mattie pursed her lips. His habits had grown lax. He had never drunk while they were on the trail, and had prided himself noisily on his clarity and vision while on pursuit.
He spoke now, at length and with his treacly slur, of how thoroughly that pride had been knocked. “You will note, of course, my words are not as succinct as they once were, and I have endured fits of vertigo which I can only blame on the blow to the head I sustain as your--” he nodded sharply towards her “--unwitting protector. As such my horse became mistrustful. You will have heard of the devastation at San Elizario, back in ‘77?” Mattie had not, and gave no indication that she had. “I do not blame my horse but if he had not bolted and thrown me, perhaps the outcome would have been otherwise.”
His wistful tone made her figure the skirmish ended in surrender.
“My confidence did not fully recover,” he said, that bitter honesty again, the same tone, she remembered, with which he had accused Chaney of a craftiness Mattie never once noticed.
Mattie sipped her tea and wondered if Victoria would remember to feed the chickens. She was a sweet girl but addle-minded, and could leave them unattended days at a time until they had nothing to peck at but each other and the walls of their hutch.
“The Sharps carbine--” LaBoeuf said, and Mattie’s attention, much to her annoyance, swung back to him at once. Clearly, he noticed. “Yes, a fine gun.”
“And you handled it very finely,” Mattie murmured. She regretted saying it, but it gave LaBoeuf a more sweetened smile than he had managed all afternoon, and that she could not regret.
“I picked up a handsome reward for the killing of Ned Pepper. Unfortunately the bounty was split fifty-fifty between Marshall Cogburn and myself, for the gang on the whole, even though the greater compensation ought to have gone in my hand, for downing the figurehead.”
“I’m sure it was fair,” Mattie told him.
“Fair doesn’t feature into it so much,” he griped. “As Cogburn had your fifty dollars in his pocket and I could claim nothing of the bounty on Chaney.”
“In fact I promised Marshall Cogburn a second fifty, which I duly sent him.”
“You have always loved to rub salt in a wound,” LaBoeuf complained. Mattie thought this unfair: she merely prefered facts over petty insinuation.
“And how is that fine gun of yours?” she asked, circling him back around.
“Mounted above my empty fireplace,” he snapped. “Long unused, both the rifle and the fire. I have little spare for coal. The Texas rangers assume their men to die on the job, and have never had provision for pensions.”
This was too sour, Mattie thought. A man cannot have but one path in life available to him, and be damned if his footsteps falter half way down it; she certainly did not spend her remaining years, after her fourteenth, hunting murderers in the territories, despite all evidence to suggest she had some kind of proficiency in the matter. She had made her home, kept her privacy, raised her young sister, invested, farmed, taught, and had struggled on in a world which could be cruel to a woman of stout health and plain features.
Her pity now was so much that it managed to stay her sharp tongue, though it did not keep her from interrupting. “Why have you come here, Mr. LaBoeuf? To tell me your sorrows? I’m sure there are plenty of erstwhile Texan ladies who would fawn over such a tale, and those would not take you across state lines. Tell me, why have you come?”
Mattie’s bluntness gave the ranger some discomfort. He was not the kind of man to shift unhappily in his chair or cast his eyes about the tea room, but he did finish the last of his tea - sheer liquor by now, she assumed - and put his gloved hands on his thighs and took in a deep breath through his nose.
“I have heard that you have kept yourself in decent money, Miss Ross,” he said, his words more awkward than ever.
“And you have come to ask me for a loan, is that the sum of it?”
“No, I--” he seemed flustered. “No, let me speak, girl. I have heard--” he took another short breath, and seemed to steel himself. It was a look that Mattie was quite familiar with, from men in her presence. “We are not as unalike, you and I, as I presume you to think. Yes, you have kept yourself in better wealth than I and that is to your credit. But we are both lonesome folk, without much in the way of family or companions, and bullheaded, I should say, to boot. Now, I would not mind your pride in your independence, Mattie Ross, nor that you would not care to indulge me or care for me as is expected of a wife--”
“Mr. LaBoeuf--!”
He held up his hand to her, quite rudely, and barrelled on. “I too like to do things in my own way, and am quite capable of looking after myself. Why there were times, on the trail, when I made do with lapping dirty water from a horse’s hoofprint--”
Mattie could not help but let out a bark of laughter. She stifled it at once. People complained that she had no humour in her, but she had always been tickled by farce.
It quieted him, more harshly than she had intended.
“I did not come here to seek mockery," he said, with some difficulty. "My proposal is a decent one, and honest besides. We might do each other some good, girl."
"You have always been honest with me, Mr. LaBoeuf," Mattie told him, trying to soften her edges. Nonetheless, her smile was thin. “I would apologise to you for your coming all this way for no gain, but it was your own presumption that brought you here and expected me to marry you. I have nothing for which to say sorry."
He chewed on the inside of his cheek a little, wasting time. "That is your answer then?"
"It is. I hope, with great earnestness, Mr. LaBoeuf, that our paths may cross again in another twenty years or more.”
He might have expected her to kiss his cheek, our of politeness or pity. But she could not, and would not. Instead, she let him pay their cheque and hold the door for her on the way out; some balm to sooth his pride, perhaps, and make him feel a man again.
Perhaps.
*
Mattie thought about LaBoeuf, twenty years younger, blonde and sharp-jawed, shooting a man from his horse from 400 yards with a fine-tuned Sharps carbine. She would never bet on anything as flimsy as a dream, idly romanticised memories, but it was a small indulgence she allowed herself.
Now and then.
Less now, though, than she had then.