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Hosea had been dead not three weeks. Someone had went back for his body and buried him, fashioned a headstone for him, did it with care or did not, Arthur didn’t know.
Hosea had been dead not three weeks and Arthur was incredibly lost. He’d lay in the dark, enveloped in the moonless night, thinking about the deceased man. About the many years they shared together, the worlds that they conquered. Could he cry? By himself, in his room or in a tent miles away, could he cry? The thought of it sounded like a betrayal. It sounded like letting everyone around him down a hundred times over.
So, one day, he left. He did not know how to carry such a weight, so he left and, while he thought about never coming back, he knew better. But maybe letting himself fantasize about a life under a new canopy of trees would fix him. As he walked his horse out of camp, a tiny voice in the back of his mind reminded him that there would be no one to bandage his wounds.
The world felt empty. Even as hogs black as oil squealed and groups of fantastical birds took to the sky, it felt strikingly barren and uninteresting. He would open his journal later and find no will in him to write or draw or mull about. At night, he wanted to lay. In the morning and afternoon, too. He wanted to be so still and unmoving that moss would knit a blanket over his body and trap him. That animals would walk atop him and carve burrows from his body, make nests of his hair.
In two days, he had ridden himself into a wide open meadow like a wound amidst thick forest. A serpent river coiled around the plain, fed on by huge bears and tiny squirrels alike. Once a place of deep interest for Arthur, it had now dawned a suffocating cloak of gray.
Letting his horse graze, he walked. Not to hunt, not to observe, but to learn how to live again. Maybe a walk under a sweltering, unforgiving sun would fix whatever was wrong with him. Maybe it would hold his hand and nurse his wounds.
When Arthur was seventeen, he’d gotten himself sick. Hosea said it was heat exhaustion, or something of the like. As Arthur’s fever climbed, the older man helped him to his cot, wet a rag, and tried to chase it away. If love alone could have defeated illness, Arthur would’ve never gotten sick in the first place. It took many hours, but Hosea was there the whole time; if not trying to siphon medicine or water into Arthur’s mouth, than to read aloud to him or sit in the sickly silence.
But now, there was no one to nurse him back to health, and Arthur did not know how to live with that. Two weeks ago, he kept waking in the night, his shoulder ablaze with a newfound aching, and he’d almost gotten up to ask Hosea if he had anything for pain. And that question upon his tongue was enough to keep him sewn to the bed, unable to pick the threads from his skin. The pain in his shoulder went away, but the wound on his heart did not.
In the meadow, he felt terrifyingly exposed. Grass climbed up to his shins, but there was no tree cover, and even the sky was empty of clouds. How disgustingly beautiful, Arthur thought. He stopped momentarily to cup his hands in the river and drink. The water was freezing and he could feel it as it splashed down his throat. A few yards off, spotted fish danced and dared the surface to eat sunning bugs. The light glinted off the restless water, blinding and bright and beautiful. He sat awhile.
It didn’t matter how much time had passed, but when Arthur came to his bones creaked as if he’d been sitting for ages. As if he was a mountain unfurling from itself. His spine cracked, and he was up, casting a long shadow on the water.
He turned back to look for his horse, sleep on his mind. He’d ventured nearly to the other end of the clearing and he could see her, her head down as she grazed. The weak, dying sunlight glinted off of her pelt and set it aflame, the red coloring on her looking like fire spreading down her sides. And, while admiring her glow, he realized that she was not alone. An appaloosa grazed next to her, and a figure outlined by the last light stood beside them.
Arthur felt himself dawn a second skin, a different demeanor that he wore when he knew he’d have to hear something he didn’t want to hear. Charles only found him when Dutch needed him, when there was some bloody sacrifice that needed to be made. He neared the horses unwillingly, packing every emotion away before it could show on his face.
“Arthur.” Charles said as the other man came to a stop by his respective horse. His tone of voice carried a certain tune, but Arthur could not decipher what it meant in that moment. Was it pity?
“Hey Charles.” The air between them anticipatory. “Dutch need me for somethin’?”
Charles shook his head, and the feeling of relief Arthur felt in that moment could never be explained in words.
“I wanted to check up on you.”
“Well, I’m okay, as you can see.”
Even in the growing dark, Arthur could imagine the look that crossed Charles’ face. The words sounded false the second he’d said them. Even if said to someone who didn’t know Arthur as well, they would’ve sounded false.
“Where have you been staying for the past few days?” Charles asked.
“Nowhere fancy.” admitted Arthur, who promptly grabbed his horses reins and led her to the humble campsite that he’d set up when he arrived.
A singular canvas tent lived just a few steps away from a dead fire. Its flaps were closed shut, and inside was a thin mattress and some, less crucial, belongings. The two men hitched their horses by a tree nearby, tying the reins around low hanging branches. Charles quietly helped Arthur revive the campfire. Only once there was a wall of flame between them did he speak again.
“I was worried about you.” Charles said.
“How come?”
There was a few moments of silence as Charles seemingly picked the right words to say. But Arthur knew what was coming before it had to be said.
“I feel fine about Hosea, if that’s what you were gonna say.”
“It’s okay if you don’t.”
“I know.”
They returned to the silence. Charles was staring at the fire, and Arthur was staring at Charles. The warm glow carved his features out of the dark. Arthur thought hard, the words that he needed forming in his mind. His thoughts, about Hosea and where he was, how someone can be here and then not be. He wanted to talk about the feeling of numbness that had taken over him, but how sometimes he cracked open and spewed a rainbow of different emotions. He wanted to say something that would somehow bring Hosea back from the dead, but he knew he couldn’t.
He wanted to tell Charles about the dreams he’s been having in which Hosea is alive, and how when he wakes up he feels so bitter, like he could tear the world apart with his disdain.
Instead, he starts slowly. He isn’t sure if Charles wants him to weep. Each word maps something new.
“Hosea was the one who found me.” he said, and he felt like grabbing the words from the air and stuffing them back down his throat. Charles turned his attention towards him.
“All those years ago, when I was just a boy. He saved me, but…” there was a lump in his throat. He looked away, into the dark. The fire could only light a path so far. “But in the end, when it mattered, I couldn’t…”
Saying the thoughts aloud made Arthur’s skin burn in a deeply rooted shame. It was not his job to wallow. His job was to make fists, to draw his gun, to be the human shield to something greater than himself. But the way Charles looked at him, like a god listening to the confessions of its disciple, pulled at the seams bound so tightly around Arthur. If he were given the grace of falling apart just a single time, let it be here, where he has someone that knows how to put him back together.
“I guess I…I guess I miss him. More than even I know.”
He doesn’t cry, but this is the closest he’s been to doing so in quite some time. It feels like cleaning an open wound, it feels like sticking a finger into it and feeling around. It feels like taking off his clothes and letting someone see the bare bones of him. And he hates it. He wants to run off, like a kid, he wants to disappear until Charles forgets this night. Arthur dares a glance towards him, fearful that his reaction will be one of disgust. How dare he. How dare he. This self-pity is not something he ever thought he’d know of.
But Charles doesn’t look disturbed, or angry, or anything Arthur had so deeply feared. He seems sad, sad for Arthur. He seems to know that nothing he can say will chase this grief away, but that he wants to try. Arthur has fallen apart, and he is ready to put him back together.
“It is not a bad thing, to miss someone.” he says. And that’s all, and that’s enough.
The two share the view of the fire for what seems like a few hours before Charles begins to set up his tent and Arthur, feeling a newfound tiredness, retires to his own tent after pouring water on the fire.
In the dark, he listens for Charles’ shuffling about. He ponders on how to thank the man, but a part of him knows he would never ask for something in return. Sleep comes easy, and he dreams of Hosea. But in the morning, he does not resent the world quite as much. It is not as hard to push away the flaps of the tent and stand to watch the sleepy sun roll up the blue sky.