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~*~
As he returned across the river, leaving the land that now held his deepest sorrow, the sky was an ornery opulence of velveteen mauve. The stars picked impatiently through the darker stretch of the sky’s endless basin, eager to be seen at the inky origin point of its westward crawl.
Arthur wished it was dishwater gray instead, ugly as anything, poorly enough to make all this misery seem worth a damn.
But no—the sky was lovely tonight, and Eliza Bloom and that precious little boy would never look up and see another again.
It was enough to make a man cynical, this; not the ubiquity of violence happening or the cruel disregard of how a life can be ripped from another without consulting the other party’s concern, but rather the ease with which the same world capable of such tragedy could simply turn itself inside-out and be beautiful again on the other side of the river.
~*~
The others didn’t mind Arthur’s frowning when he got back to camp, tacked his horse, and slapped the dust from his jacket. They hadn’t packed off and moved yet—north, as summer rolled out with sticky steps from the gulf; all the good jobbing went north this time of year along with people making stupid choices, so they followed it.
Hosea greeted him with a flask and paused halfway through a swig when Arthur held up a hand to demur it for his own instead. “Back early?”
He asked it carefully, with a lilt of concern stumbling on unsure footing as Arthur’s face came into the light.
“Yeah.”
“She put you out?” Asked a hanger-on, leering over the crackling edges of the fire at the center of the gang’s tight circle. Arthur didn’t bother remembering his name—this one carried himself with the air of one who’d end up gut-shot and dead in someone else’s wheel ruts within a month. “What, didn’t want you firing off another whelp in her belly?”
Hosea aimed a hobbling glare at the upstart before fixing Arthur with angling concern. The stiffness of the long ride had settled hot in Arthur’s knees now that he was standing—he’d been so upset by seeing the graves, wandering bereft through the skeletal house that still smelled of fresh pines plundered to nothing by rovers, he hadn’t bothered to stop at all on the way back. There was a fine, high ringing persistent in Arthur’s ears.
I won’t be long, he’d promised Dutch. Back before sundown on the third day. Then we can keep on.
Dutch had given him a tart smile and a tidy sign of the cross and kissed the bent knuckle of his forefinger at Arthur in response. Eliza had loved the Bible.
She tried to get Arthur keen on it more than a couple times, and Isaac’s head was filled with the happier stories from it. He’d been named after a character Eliza told Arthur once was the gentlest son, the one his own father was prepared to sacrifice in the name of a wanting god.
Arthur didn’t rise to the bait of the horse-faced fuck with a ticking clock behind his eyes and stared instead for several long moments at the glow of Dutch’s tent. His silhouette inside was bent to the task of writing letters, the quick scratching of his pen evident in the flickering lantern propped on his traveling desk—the facsimile of a gentleman.
“Need a drink,” Arthur grunted, and stalked off to where the little hillock into which their camp was tucked gave way to a stand of pines that overlooked the black valley below.
Nobody followed him. The night was deep and still, empty as Eliza’s house and dark as her grave, and the sky was still beautiful.
~*~
Dutch came over with a bottle and his lantern, preternaturally punctual as Arthur swallowed down the next-to-last mouthful of his flask.
Arthur took the offering without saying anything. Dutch was silent as well, keeping in any comment to be had about the way the caged yellow glow threw itself with abandon across Arthur’s bruisy eyes all red and wet from private mourning.
Don’t cry, boy, Dutch had coached him the first time Arthur shot to kill, thumping him on the shoulder and brisking a hand through the back of his tangled hair in lieu of hurrying him along the trail—a kindness so subtle Arthur didn’t register it until he wondered that same night why the nape of his neck was tingling.
Don’t cry. Waste all your tears on the ones who deserve to be dead, you won’t have any left for the ones who don’t someday.
Arthur sucked down a greedy pull from the neck of the bottle. He swiped the heel of his hand across his mouth and stared at the toes of his boots. The edges of his vision had blessedly begun to blur with drink instead of tears.
“If you ask my earnest opinion,” Dutch said, seated neatly beside Arthur with his knees drawn up and the lantern light dancing between his feet, “you didn’t really love her.
It should have hit like a stone in Arthur’s belly, but all the plain statement did was tangle itself up somewhere south of Arthur’s lungs and sit between the notches of his spine. He shifted, as though intending to itch at it.
“How’s that?” he rasped. He stole another swig.
“I know you better than you know yourself, Arthur. You love the work more than you’ll ever be able to love anything, anyone in this pigshit world.”
Arthur considered that. He pushed the bottle into Dutch’s hands without looking and blew a low, shaky breath out through his mouth. He shook his head, clenched his jaw, flexed and unflexed his fingers. “You got anything nice to say about my son, too?”
The bottle sloshed gently with Dutch’s clean nip. In Arthur’s periphery, he smoothed down the tails of his mustache with slow, thoughtful passes of his thumb. “What is it you want to hear about him?”
Arthur thought on that for a few limping heartbeats. “That he’ll grow up to be smarter than his daddy,” he whispered, his voice reedy and rinsed-out, “but I don’t think he’ll be growing much past four years old anymore, and I haven’t the stomach right now for lying.”
He turned to face Dutch with a glare, his top lip nearly curling up over the edges of his teeth, which was the most of this aimless grief he’d dare let up to the surface in front of the man looking at him like he was still a boy who cried when small things died.
Dutch didn’t blink or look away with his next swig. He passed the bottle back to Arthur. “You’re scowling at me like this is my fault.” He nodded up at the endless batter-flecked reel of the sky. “You wanna blame anyone, blame the blue streak up there made you better at taking life than tending it.”
Arthur studied him for a good long while. Dutch sat unflinching under his stare, unbothered and amused if Arthur was looking sideways at the expression.
“Sometimes,” Arthur said to his hands, “I don’t much remember why I like you, Dutch.”
“Well now, you know why, son. You’re the sugar to my coffee. I’d be an even more bitter son of a bitch without you here to make me soft, don’t tell me that’s something you’d soon forget.”
Arthur’s inner ear rang with the syllable like the fading echoes of a bell finished tolling the midnight hour—son, son, son.
When Arthur said nothing in return, Dutch leaned back and plucked his cigarette case from the pocket of his vest. He put a handroll in his mouth, struck a match on the brim of his hat, and lit one end before sucking a second punk to light from the end of it. He passed one to Arthur, who accepted it with no hesitation.
They smoked in a stiff silence, hanging above them like the frozen surface of a lake where the cold made fish lazy beneath the ice; swimming slowly, only to keep their alien hearts beating until spring.
“It ain’t your fault,” Arthur murmured.
“Ain’t yours either,” Dutch said, shrugging and easing his seat with a shift. He gestured with a flat hand at the valley below them, the end of his cigarette held between two fingers winnowing red in the dark. “This is simply an unkind country.”
Arthur sniffed. “More fool us for staying.”
He glanced at Dutch and found him peering with a keen look, challenging Arthur for more of an answer. “And where else would you go?” he asked with that sleek levity of his, as though even warnings so flinty they could break teeth might be made into a joke; a proverb; a teachable fable about the foolhardy nature of men.
Arthur took a slow inhale, let it plume out through his nose, and swigged another mouthful of Dutch’s good booze. “Somewhere with better coffee.”