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Bess can still feel the cool breeze kissing the back of her neck. It was odd that she could feel anything at all, of course; she was no longer a corporal entity, had no nerves, no lungs, no teeth.
And yet she can feel him come around from his day on the road, cool as the breeze, every night time.
They meet under the dogwood tree where he was killed. It has a different meaning for them now. Children play under this tree; lovers commune there. Parents lie their babies out under the sunlight and let them play beneath the branches where they blood once dripped. It’s brought so much more joy into the lives of others that she can’t begrudge its existence in nature.
That night, she wanted to burn it down.
But now he leans against it, tilting his hat, as she comes to kiss him. He still feels warm against her mouth somehow, the press of his lips firm but gentle. Everything feels as it did when they’d meet and stroll together under the moon, still, though centuries have passed. Where the inn stood a group of houses had sprouted up, filled with families who struggle daily to get food on the table. They argue and cry and laugh and love and fight. Cars own the now-paved road instead of horses, but there are still farms and ranches nearby. Bess does get attached to these young ones, as she did the bobbed-haired girls who came before them, but she also knows she will lose them to time, to dissipation, and their own ghosts. She focuses on him instead - feels as warm as tar baked in the sunlight when she holds him. They are no longer voyeurs while they journey through the evening mist side by side. The story is theirs again, and they are quite alone with the stardust.
“How did it go?” he asks. They never do see each other during the day or spend any time together until the moon crests over the side of the mountains. They are separated in their daily gamboling. During the day she walks the roads, looking out for young people in love. She guides their steps true and firm upon the road of life, leading them toward bliss instead of pain. He was a guardian angel to every thief on the lam, making sure that they got home with their haul, but abandoning them if they hurt the innocent, if they steal from the poor. The whole point of being a highwayman, he told her once, was to steal from the wealthy and fat-walleted and then give part of what he cached to the needy and the poor. Greed had never been an attractive notion to him, and when others practice it he becomes near to apoplectic. You took enough to help others, to survive, but you did not take cruelly. That was the way to damnation. And he is not damned, nor is she. Not yet.
“They’re going to be fine,” she says. “Susan thinks she’s taking Bob to the sock hop, but she’s probably going to go with Jim. And she doesn’t know that she really wants to go out with Pam.”
“When do you think she’ll figure that one out?” he asks.
“Oh, she won’t figure that out for a few decades,” says Bess. Time, again, remained immemorable when you existed but had no body to tend to. The ultimate question was whether or not Susan would stay on the block long enough for her to figure out who she really is.
They sit under the moonlight, kissing and talking, when walking feels like it’s going to crack their nonexistent bones to shreds. Time becomes thin when there’s no stopwatch in your pocket. She’s not sure when the moon moves further to the west and the sky turns from indigo to pale blue. But they still have one another to lean on, and in the happy silence between them there’s so much to say, and so many kisses to share.
The year doesn’t matter but the hour does. If there’s moonlight on her shoulder and the smell of autumn fires burning, then she’s exactly where she belongs. The summer heat, the winter chill, the spring evenings; they all pass by but none of them touch her the way her autumnal memories do. And while she lies in debt to the children she ministers to she is still cossetted and held by the fact that he will always return to her. She stands up a little straighter and pulls the hem of her blue skirt down until it reaches the rusty, dried, sunblasted grass at her ankles.
She thinks she can smell the blood in the air, sometimes. But that might be her nose creating some mythology, trying to convince itself that she flooded the ground scarlet with her love, her rage, her unforgiving ways.
“I think we ought to leave some trinkets behind for the kids,” he says. “Just so they know we’re real. Just in case we get called on someday.”
They hadn’t, yet, but Bess supposes it’s only a matter of time before they are. It would be so nice to be thought of as more than a legend, like a helper, like a fairy godmother. Not a cautionary tale who warns children away from mixing with the law. But she nods thoughtfully at the idea. “Bullets and beads. They’ll know us from our stories and the bullets and the beads we leave behind.”
He does better than that. There are some small coins he had hidden under one of the dogwood trees. It doesn’t take long to dig them up. They scatter the coins about like children, running through the mist, laughing at their own foolishness. The gold lands in flower beds and potter’s sheds, and lodges in bird’s nests and children’s toys. They laugh like fools, like the innocents they once were.
And at the dawn’s first, full light, they part and walk down their separate roads, moving toward their destinies.
This is her domain. It will be her domain as long as the earth spins and the sun shines in the sky. But it will be nothing without him beside her, riding in tandem with her, and holding her up.