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The heat has wiped out a swath of people in Quebec. Factory workers line the streets, tied hand-in-hand by sweat bindings— Charles imagines, drinking watered-down coffee in the farmhand's quarters. He never made it farther than New York, for all his years of trying. Every so often, he reads an article in the morning paper that assuages the guilt, even if he has trouble picturing a worse summer than this one.
Charles would choose to be much farther west, if not for Falmouth's crooked leg. Broken and healed badly, sometime mid-state. The details have faded since those weeks ago. The horse is all that remains of Arthur and Susan, and by extension he is all that remains of something that was important, once, even if Charles is far too old to still care about it and far too young to begin reminiscing on days past.
He's grown selfish in any case. The merciful thing would've been to shoot instead of hoping. He's done it before.
He reasons that he labors day in and day out on this asshole's farm at the ripe age of forty to give Falmouth his last days in a nice, plentiful pasture full of other horses for no additional cost to himself. Forty, and still poor, still working for some white hick that thinks he is closer to Falmouth than himself. And the grace Charles gives this horse, since it's so difficult to come by nowadays, is for no reason beyond the animal refusing to leave his side once his leg had healed enough to walk on it; there is certainly no feeling of making lost things, lost time up. Nothing short of breaking another leg which would have stopped that skull-like face from following in Charles' shadow. Let death walk behind him, then. Falmouth has been good company.
He relented, that was. Charles has relented often in the last months. He picks his nails in free time, thinking of old friends who'd do the same, instead of studying if he's always relented this easily. When he was told he would room with a handful of other farmhands, he relented; they all wore skin darker than a farmer's tan and he knew at once why they were not given their own boardings. Hay-baling in the stagnant air, he's relented to for as long as he could. There's only so much needless neglect a man can look at, knowing full-well how to make it on his own. In some months' time, he will come to think of this excursion as punishing himself.
Luke had collapsed last and worst. He was an alright feller, looked younger than he were. Charles felt he walked on eggshells the rare times they spoke instead of sitting in rarely-broken silence, at no fault of Luke's and seemingly without any objection from him, either. He did not sense the connection that was forced upon them. Guilt ate at him for that, too, and made it difficult to speak if he felt inclined. For a man who wanted to belong somewhere, he could never make peace with where other people placed him.
It was a shame even before his fiancée came by to pay her weekly visit to him. No one realized the owner hadn't bothered to write a letter, though in retrospect, it was difficult to imagine why they thought he might. A nice girl, eyes like coals and skin nearly as deep brown. The couple were just short of their thirties. She lived in a tenement some thirty ride out from the farm, which Luke purported to help pay for with his few dollars a week. Even with the bare-bones comradery of being men of color that he'd found in the ones he slept by — one from Mexico, two from the Seneca reservation further west — Charles knew why he and Luke were boxed together, and why it was left to him to help Elizabeth bury a man he barely spoke to.
He decides, wiping his brow of sweat beneath the exhausting July sun, that he will leave Falmouth tonight. He's abandoned all he owns more times than he can count, doesn't mind leaving it on the farm. Items don't mean much when they are easily recreated. Cried out and distraught beneath her dark parasol, Elizabeth is too weak to put the last shovel of dirt over Luke's body. Small hands around a shovel, borrowed without asking from the farm, trembling and probably detesting being so close to the proof. He watches from a respectful few steps away, eyes darting between the toes of her shoes peaking from under a black dress and her soft cheek pinning the handle of her parasol against her shoulder. All black, thick cloth; he doubts shade does very much to relieve the heat.
Grabbing the shovel right beneath her handhold, Charles pays her some mercy. It strains his arm, some, to shovel a handful more or less single-handedly, but there is no world in which Elizabeth is finishing it herself. A spill of dirt finishes the seventh grave he's ever dug. She steps away, brushes her hands off on one another and retakes the parasol. There's a solidness about her composure, now, that he figures will crumble again in a few moments.
"I have to owe you," Elizabeth is saying.
Charles spreads the dirt more evenly before sticking the shovel in the ground, leaning on it. He doubts he'll pay the farm a last visit once he's done here. "Don't owe me a thing." Reassurance, or a demand; he's unsure which it ought to be, and which it is.
In her small circle of shade, Elizabeth's face is dark with flush, eyes still watering despite the even set of them. He hates to see people cry, if only because he hasn't got a clue what to do. Something is tugging at his nerves, trying to urge him towards her, but Charles stays rooted where he is.
"At least come have supper with me," she says. Swallows a choked noise, and then she snivels and shakes her head. For how young she is, she's got a good hold on keeping her features set how she wants them. "Got enough for two. Please, Mister Smith?"
He can only guess that she had planned to have dinner with Luke this evening.
Maybe he has grown as soft as he has selfish. Dinner with a fresh-made widow is about the last thing he could imagine himself taking up, and yet Charles finds himself spending his final evening in New York unenjoying the best meal he has ate in years. Supposes there's something additive about it being cooked within four walls and worth a little more than fuel. He was never really a fan of the idea, found it too-rich, and it feels wrong to share the minute domesticity with her.
The comfortableness in believing he may have a place was gone as soon as it came, guilt for having shared anything with a dead man's betrothed gnawing what he did not eat of his plate. Charles bid her farewell in an awkward stand-off on the threshold of her door. One who knows she cannot have a guest forever, and one who would've liked to have been gone yesterday. She would be alright, even if she teared up before closing the door, and he hoped Falmouth would, too. Given the heat, a shot to the head may as well be considered mercy for the boy. Selfishness weighs more than softness.
Charles is awake, thinking, both nights since. In southern Missouri, tucked into a sorry coach at the end of a train, is when it squeezes at his heart the hardest. Different from the ache of loneliness, the questions that he tosses around every time he encounters death. A warning in his ribs that lacks the urgency of one— a knowing, more like it.
Falmouth must be dead, or else he hasn't got a clue what's been turning his stomach for the last ten minutes. Measured in how it presses in from all sides, a hand on either side of his head, his neck. He'd been busy wondering who might miss him when he is gone and even busier coming up empty handed. Charles is glad the rest of the train coach is asleep, stares wide-eyed at the back of the seat that's encroaching heavily on his legroom and pretends that he's considering moving around instead of inviting the shadows at the corner of his vision to dance.
This came over him the day Luke died in the field, and before that it had been vacant for ten years or more. Both times, he'd buried a man. Charles feigns as though it's the calling to bury his horse and finds no relief. He knows himself to be a solemn sort, but where the title of gravedigger is tattooed on his skin is beyond him.
Falmouth must be dead, because he doesn't know who is left to die. The seatback before him is ripped, threads flying away around dark holes that lead into missing stuffing. Maroon cloth painted black in the far-reaches by struggling sconces along the walls. John is a worse answer, but Charles has been unable to place that man's feelings on him for a long, long time. When he tries, the place the answer lands always seems worse than the last: too pitiful or too fond. The carpeted floor of the coach is torn in places and stretched odd in others, not enough in some. Javier is the only other person he was last very close with. He thinks that whatever tied them together must've broken under the weight of spit on his boot. Both seem too long ago to be true, but then, years feel like days and days feel like years, don't they?
It could be John. Reckless, uncalculated John; flesh-and-nurture Van der Linde. It could be John, and he would try not to care. Even though there is some part of him that wonders, it has been so long since Charles' writing hand seized up with depression, then the guilt. His right to care has decayed alongside the last letters John sent. Charles punished himself with the farmhand job, and he left John's letters in his quarters as one last arm-twist.
It could be Javier. He was more of the same, when Charles really thinks about it. Old wounds sting under the bleak light of a kerosene lamp going out. Smoke curling dark carries oil-smell towards him on the air. His view of the seatback goes black until his eyes adjust to the moonlight through the window. Shuffling as a few passengers rouse from sleep alarmed, then merely disappointed. Javier, of course, had never written. Charles hadn't known where he would write to, if he ever found the words.
There's nerves setting into his arms that were not there before, have not been there in a long, long time. He thinks of the rough day he spent with the Wapiti medicine man choking down ginger and bison broth until the color returned to his face. A neurasthenic moment that left him uneasy for its suddenness rather than its ferocity. He knew himself solemn, but never nervous. He was alright, really, with a lot of things; nerves came over people who could not accept things, Charles believed, and that was why nervous people aggravated him so much.
A week later, he found Susan slowly liquefying at the base of a mountain. The chill had preserved what the animals did not piece over, enough for him to wonder what got her shot. In the darkness, the fabric stretched over the seatback begins to remind him of the singed hole of a bullet in the tatters of her dress. Days later, he found Arthur near the peak. The dread had lifted the tremor it'd put into his fingers just in time to bury him, and now the final truth lays beneath lavenders. That Arthur had been shot in the head was the first real lie he ever told John. Not a shred of truth, no white specks. Charles begins to imagine, with too much color, the corpse of a man beaten within an inch of his life— he looks out the window, instead, at woodlands passing by. Death has never bothered him, but that had.
Nowadays, Charles feels as married to his old love of nature as an unhappy Catholic couple feels to one another. In the evening outside, he sees only shapes. The cycle of life has lost its beauty and gained whatever minuscule elegance maggots maintain. It can't be the commonplace face of death, for it's always been there, and if he contemplates it too long, he begins to walk the line of appreciating it again in a way that feels like disrespecting his own life. Growing into a sour old man is not what he envisioned for himself — granted, he doesn't envision much past the next three months at any given time — but there's an aversion growing to the comfort it used to bring him to think there needn't be a reason for death. His own is growing warmer all the time.
A pessimist where once he was only a survivalist, he must disappoint his mother. Surely, there's no worse fate for a boy so bright in youth. Charles might dare to say becoming a violent man, but he has done that, too. The frown lines on his face are heavy, pulling his mouth down further. He's unsure if he ever had very much love in his heart, though he doubts his mother would have mourned sweetness as hard, anyways.
Charles balls his trembling fists and rests them beneath his arms, twists his head around to release the tension sprouted in his neck. He dislikes how aware of himself he must be in these populated areas, in these close quarters, and if he were any dumber he could reasonably blame this spark of anxiety on proximity. His mother would be disappointed in his penchant for isolation, too.
Even a lonesome hotel room sounds good, stuffy four-walls and all, but he had spent the last of his spare cash on the ticket down here. Longest train ride there was; he'd have the want to get off the locomotive before it hit the border, probably, and then he'd find work somewhere or curl away in some corner of the woods to gestate. He inched west enough to have an idea he might, at least, find something old and abandoned to fix for a while. Rotting cabins out in the trees are becoming a goddamned commodity. A handful of money to keep himself in shape is all that sits in the inner breast pocket of his vest.
The feeling eases, slightly, lingering echo of a gunshot fired in a valley. His eyes settle into the darkness completely, and he finds it easier to pick apart thinner lines in the trees, clumps of branches tangling together. He'll go as far as El Paso, Charles decides, if nowhere else pulls him. Ignoring the sensation of pulling he feels now, and ignoring the follow-up question of why deal with these people, then? that begs him to answer for a baseless decision to head past the Mason-Dixon. The air, still reeking of burnt-out kerosene lamp, already reminds him of the turn of the century— he considers street-fighting again, giving in to the nostalgic smell. He can't think of any other purpose he's got.
If he nods off or simply disassociates until dawn breaks, Charles cannot tell. Exhaustion lingers either way, the side of his head pressed against smudged, stained glass. Across the aisle, where one of the few other passengers lays sleeping with his feet propped on the seats, the window looks as though it might be forming a crack. Frown lines pull at his mouth and he can feel the wrinkles by his eyes cracking his cheeks, the bags beneath weighing him down. He can't remember his parents ever looking this old, and then he sobers realizing they simply never were this old. Of all the things he's shed, the photo burning a hole in his inner breast pocket was never one of them. He wonders if John and Abigail or Sadie miss him at times. He would take Uncle, even. Jack.
Blinking to adjust his focus, trying to scramble his mind back into it, Charles raises from the window with a start. Deer have trailed behind the train, wanting to chase the empty space left by the smog and the noise and sometimes riding up close enough to poke silhouettes into the far side of the small window— now, he sees the small, tan figure of a canine pawing through the brush lining the tracks.
If not for the renewed anxiety, he wouldn't take special note. Seeing any animal so close to the tracks is strange, but not improbable. They've been growing curious, the more cities expand; he's seen the carcasses to prove it. His hands feel numb, again, just as they had around the clay bowl of broth, and he finds them fallen to his lap, twisting around one another to try and reawaken the nerves. Dread comes over him, and he looks away, cannot close his lids despite how badly he wants to.
Disassociating, folding back in onto himself inside his mind as he fixes dry eyes on another hole in the seatback chafing his knees. Something off with that coyote. Not a threat, not like the times he's felt alarmed enough to pack up base camp and leave over a rabbit hopping too far or too short, but— a knowing, more like it.
His memory is bad, and it's good. A little too good, as far as the long-term ones go. He will remember the last month of his life only once a few years have gone past, for now only a blur of sweating on the hay farm payroll and playing cards in silence with a man he barely knew. Even the stop in El Paso and the initial ride in any direction his stolen steed pleased is beginning to blur at the edges. A good strong Palomino, what a shame it was unattended outside a saloon's backdoor long enough for him to garner confidence. Charles' habit of dwelling keeps what has long since past alive, is what he figures, because it seems his recollections of yesterday get worse all the time.
Though he can't recall the exact moment he realized his proximity to the Mexican border, the familiarity of Flat Iron brings him backwards in time. Yesterdays had been clearer in eighteen ninety-eight and beyond. As a boy with no interest in socializing, he had watched his mother doing beadwork most days of his childhood. Her voice is lost in the thickets of his mind, but with that kind of precise detail, he remembers carving his first necklace some months after joining the Van der Linde gang; Javier noticing it, for some reason, the way he snickered when Charles smacked his hand away from reaching out to touch it as though his offense was funny; trading the knife, engraved with flowers and name, that is still tucked into a holster on his hip for a bracelet carved from bird bones. Finding the mess of them the very same week Javier had offered to carve the hilt had felt like winning a lottery.
An easy, meditative gift that would take his mind off of how disturbingly quiet life was in camp. This area is nowhere like that camp had been, the only grass dried yellow and sparse, poking up from near-red sand. In the distance, plateaus rise up and remind him, again, of years ago. Sweat gathers in pools, worse than it ever had under New York's heatwave, along his spine and the stallion he borrowed stops walking before he even reaches the dark heap ahead in the road. Not rearing but perturbed, anticipatory.
No ambushes here; it is too open. Must be a man fallen off a horse, maybe one that rode out of dodge in search of someone with a fuller canteen. He ignores the pressing sensation at his temples, can barely tell it from the racing heartbeat that the overwhelming summer inspires in him. This far south, it's a more oppressive kind of swelter. Charles slides from the saddle to dump a small pool from his canteen into his cupped hand, letting the horse wet his lips and have a pitiful drink before shaking it off and relishing in a brief moment of almost-cool along his palm. Water dries fast in the creases.
He hadn't planned for it to be quite this bad, and so suddenly. It was a half day's ride here, and he will make it back towards the lake by moon-up so long as the horse pushes through. He's unsure when or if they will part yet. Water slung back around his neck and the horse antsily pawing at the sandy ground, Charles moves towards the sprawled corpse and weighs the morality of looting it as if he has not long-since abandoned any goal of being good in life. That compass has led to nowhere but more trouble.
He knows this body because of the bone beads, mottled with smoke-stains and built-up oils, stitched into the inner, soft layer of a half torn-off belt that is flaccidly bent over. The gutstring must've broken, but Charles knows it is the one he made same as he knows what had possessed him on the train that night, why the heat-induced pounding behind his temples becomes more tolerable. Weathered down and chewed, the loops of his trousers didn't hold the leather in place against some animal with a curiosity. If the beads could not convince him, the ring of still-thickened scar tissue around his throat and the familiar, unchanged trim of his facial hair would, even if the deep black is bleaching into an ashen brown beneath the sun; leave it to Javier to act twenty-something for the rest of his days.
He realizes he doesn't know how old he would've been this year, or when. That sort of thing had never been important between them, when things still were important between them. Regret springs up, then tempers. There are some things he cannot imagine the times for, even if they would've been nice.
Charles looks at the beads instead of Javier's wrists which are bent the wrong ways; the ankles, one boot torn off and the other likely just-emptied of maggots; the bone protruding where snaggle teeth once hid behind lips and a rounded, scarred nose once sneered; certainly not the short hair matted and tangled near the exit of a bullet hole in the center of his forehead, skull fragments stuck in the mummified mess. Blood crusted and dried around skin that has turned black beneath the beating sun overshadows the unfamiliar scars that had been earned in years apart, barely visible where the flesh has become a dried-out husk of an excuse for skin. Blessedly, the sunken torso is hidden beneath layers of tattered, insect- and scavenger- holed clothes.
When he does swallow the fear enough to look at it, the shot seems executional in nature. A new sense of dread takes root where the other, pressing anxiety has left, but Charles ignores it. Clearly, he has been laying here for a while now. The smell of Arthur had clung to Charles' clothes and skin for weeks, but there is only a musty sweetness poisoning the air around Javier. Whoever shot him is gone, and whoever they left his body for has certainly gotten the message.
A message. Charles focuses on this instead of the wave of heat that rushes beneath the skin of his face, passes over his cheeks and temples and stings behind his eyes, in his nostrils. Tears, shame he cannot find the roots of. Javier and himself had understood one another until they did not, and it was as simple as that. The way it ached, for a long time, to no longer be brother was an entirely Charles-based hurt for all that it bittered him. Still, it makes him angry to see his body dumped in the name of— what? Of warning not to mess with someone they already know not to mess with? A mob, a gang, a government. Charles does not know.
He rarely knows what has gone on, only buries the dead. It sears beneath his skin, this idea that life does not respect him enough to offer a clue.
Kneeling beside the mummifying body, he takes his knife from his hip to snap the uneven, unpracticed stitching that holds the beads in place. It's harder to ignore the question of why Javier would keep those sorry things after the string broke, considering how vitriolic he had been towards Charles the last they spoke. His sewing skills must've nosedived, looking at how red stitches zig-zag like a child's running. He won't know if, God forbid, Javier got a tremor in the steady hands he was so proud of.
Anger bristles his skin.
First, anger that he would dare to have memories of Charles after making it clear he would dislike any that remained. He tucks the beads into the only good pocket of the trousers, and holsters his knife. Where to begin with picking the body up is a question he wouldn't like to answer. Taking a look back at the face of the man he'd once known, shriveled and mummified, is worse, even, than the half-eaten stare of Arthur had been. He's angry that Javier thought of him at all. To think it'd be fondly was worse yet. Charles covers his mouth with his wrist and looks away again, pressing the side into his nose to stop it up.
Then, anger that there is never something calling him to people before they die. Where is John? Would he be turned away if he wrote to the last address he had? Probably, and for good reason. Whatever connection that roots itself inside of Charles and those he loves — loved, given that he's ceased cursing people this way — seems only to serve as a way to hurt them both. The skin of the corpse is nearly black with sun. Picking up a sleeve with his fingers, delicacy not out of fear but preservation, proves that moving Javier's body very far will likely disassemble it altogether.
Charles stands. Javier should have traded or sold that bracelet before it even began to yellow. He had given Arthur the necklace he made himself, and he has no reason to think that Javier does not deserve the same besides his own unresolved emotions. Should have sold it so that Charles would not need to see it, so that what came for him would have no way of finding him through the veil of life and death. Arthur had angered him but it hadn't been so easy to place onto his shoulders as this, even if the man chose to keep running towards Dutch through all the good sense in the world— Javier was easy because he had spit on Charles and sewn those goddamned beads in one of the only places that they might never be noticed, or touched, by anyone besides himself and a prostitute.
He hadn't only kept them. He had meant to keep them.
Charles wonders just how many unwitting pieces of his heart have been eaten and shit out by wildlife. Arthur's eyes, what was left in his pockets, his neckerchief; Javier's nose, his fingers, whatever useless personal affects of his satchel that must have been dumped into brush after his body was left to bake here. What of John? If he has died already, he must have had someone to carry the weight of his remains.
Charles can only find this through-thread, the loneliness. Maybe love would be enough to stop the ache from finding him, all the way across a country, tugging him down until he kicks bone. He is too hollow to have a chance at that. Years ago, he had come to the conclusion that Javier never understood nor deserved his respect, and then backtracked to the truth that he did it the best and deserved it the most. He has taken and re-given his heart, in these moons apart, to the first man he must leave to rot.
There is no way to dig a good grave out here, and nothing to do the job with, either. Charles takes the beads, considers all of the clothing he can and then settles for sliding the belt easily from his pants loops. He finds no comfort in the idea Javier will feed the scavengers, although the idea his own body would be useful in death had once helped him sleep at night. Taking his knife out again, palm pressing hard around the carved flowers, Charles cuts a chunk of Javier's jacket as if one more, impersonal piece could ever suffice.
The earth is miles softer a days' ride back into Texas, though Charles has always liked how faux-soft sandy ground feels. He crossed the border once more as far from town as he could manage, the beads and belt tucked into a saddle bag. Carved bone wrapped and tied into a bundle of jacket-cloth, Charles places it into the grave alongside Javier's belt, the inside fraying where he had cut the stitching and the edges marred and ruined from years of clear use.
So unlike himself.
Charles has come to realize how much Javier had to have changed to leave the visible marks of it on his own body. It is selfish to think he would've remained the same, tight-knit, seamlessly put-together man he was when he knew him. After all, life continues out of sight and out of mind, as much as he dislikes the knowledge. Things get scuffed. Faces get scarred. Charles wishes he had found him a little sooner, if only to have a hint.
Fitting, at least, is the fact Javier will be carried away and consumed by the piece. He had told Charles time and again that he was not without a place anymore because he had joined the gang. As long as Dutch's shadow would serve as a good enough home, that was, but he had never outright said this observation to Javier. Thinking it now, knelt in a patch of woods beside a hole in the ground, feels as close to being entirely honest with Javier as he's ever come.
Charles is glad that he found him before vultures realized there were organs beneath the layers of clothing— luck. He had not beaten them to Arthur. Guilt wafts through him as he leaves the grave to fashion gathered sticks into a makeshift cross for it. If he had taken Arthur's sprawled leftovers in his hands long enough to gather his body up in his arms—
But it wouldn't have been worth it. He would've come undone, and there was no respect in that. The incompleteness will always remain. Charles must bite his tongue before he blames Javier for robbing them both of the closure of a real grave.
Catholic, he was, but Charles does not know any prayers and he cannot remember a single one of the Wapiti's to offer to a God he doesn't believe in himself. When all is said and done, he sits cross-legged beside the fresh-turned dirt and laments internally the few wildflowers he was able to find. Digging holes with his fingers, then tucking the bottoms of the stems in as though they had any chance of sitting upright. Some lean on the cross wedged into the ground, but most fall towards the green behind it. Even if it isn't loyalty, he can share one last silence with him.