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Part of him had already known. He’d felt it deep in his bones, an ache so far beyond something as simple as heartbreak he thought it might stop beating all together. He had tried to convince himself it was no more than his own worries, Arthur had been sick when they last met but he was still fighting, always fighting. He’d never give up, not until John, Abigail, Jack, and the girls were safe and free. So long as John remained in danger, Arthur would remain alive. This was the thought that kept Charles afloat as he escorted the natives away from their home towards whatever modicum of safety could be found for a people destroyed by the country that had been stolen from them. They had barely crossed the border when the news finally reached Charles. The sun rose over the eastern mountains and Charles knew. Arthur was dead.
He had wanted to leave right then but he couldn’t, not until the Wapiti were safe, or as safe as they could get in this world. Once they were finally settled into a new camp he left with Taima but the journey back into the Grizzlies was not a short one. He rode through rain and snow in sixteen hour stretches, stopping only to sleep and allow Taima much needed breaks. He needed to know, to see it for certain. To see him for certain. Arthur always said he was a bad man, yet for all he was, all he did and all he helped— all the moments of him Charles held so closely to his heart, he could not leave him to rot.
It was raining lightly when he finally walked into the deserted camp. In the end it had taken over a month to reach Beaver Hallow. It was a ruin, bullet holes had torn through the canvas of their tents leaving bits of broken wood spread over the muddy ground, as if the tables and crates they had once sat and laughed and drank and sung together around had been used as cover from gunfire. There was a body on the ground, there was blood everywhere but all the bodies had been cleared away– all but this one. Slowly, he stepped towards it, one hand rested on the handle of his shotgun as if the corpse could jump up and attack him. Charles was not a stranger to death, not to suffering, not to loss, or grief, or pain but this, this. Usually death was clean, blood could be wiped away and eyes could be closed, bodies buried or burned to seep into the earth and leave no trace of what they once were. This was not clean. At first he couldn’t even recognize the body. He should’ve expected it, bodies don’t keep long– especially not this deep into the woods– yet still he couldn’t help flinching away from the sight when he finally did connect what was left of her black dress to Miss Grimshaw.
She'd been shot, curled over on her side as she was he could see where the bullet had torn its way through her stomach and out her back. He’d never been close with Miss Grimshaw, he’d only come back for Arthur, but even still, she deserved better than to be left rotting among these blood soaked stones. Charles turned away and went to pull down one of the less destroyed canvas tarps. He gently pulled it over her body and rolled her into it, using his rope to tie the canvas closed over her at the feet and chest. It’ve been easier to just pull her over his shoulder but at this level of decomposition he was afraid that if he touched her the cold blackened skin would fall apart beneath his hands. Once she was tucked away into the canvas he started forward into the darkness of the cave. He’d come back to bury her soon, but there was someone he needed to find first.
The world seemed to slow down as he walked through the cave. Like every fall of his foot was sinking him into the stone and the air had stopped circulating around him. He wanted to stop when he caught the trail of two horses, he wanted to turn around and leave with Taima when he found what was left of John’s horse, Old Boy, and Arthur’s, Betty, both left rotted and picked over with their saddles still on. He wanted and wished and begged and prayed to the god he did not even believe in to simply lie down and sink into the deep dark crevices of the mountain when finally he crested that edge and saw the outline of a body against the rocks.
He did not want to continue. He couldn’t see his face from here; if he stayed here, Arthur was still alive. He could turn around, return to the camp, bury Miss Grimshaw and Arthur could stay alive. It wouldn’t be hard to pretend.. Arthur was back in the west— California, he’d always wanted to go there. He’d have a house by the water with his own stables and a rocking chair out front. Charles could see it so clearly in his mind, Arthur was older, his hair streaked with gray and his eyes decorated with crows feet from a lifetime filled with smiles. He rocked slowly in his chair on the porch, sketching quietly in his journal. There would be no Pinkertons, no law, no bounty hunters, no gang, and no sickness.
Charles did not have a word for what he and Arthur were to one another. There was the ghost of a kiss once, when Arthur was drunk and happy after they rescued Sean— he hadn’t remembered it in the morning, Charles pretended he couldn’t either. There were whispers of brushed hands and thighs, a hand on Arthur’s forehead back in Clemens Point while the fever that burned through him raged after he’d escaped the O’Driscolls, a thumb dipped into the waistband of his pants late into a night spent shared in an all too small tent. Once, right at the end, Charles had taken Arthur’s wrist and pulled him away from watching eyes of camp to ask, beg him, to help. I ain’t got much fight left in me, Charles, he’d said. He had been exhausted, thin and tired with what was left of his breath rattling in his chest. Dying. I know, he told him. They laced their fingers together, and Arthur closed his eyes, feeling a hundred things Charles couldn’t see, yet somehow there never needed to be words between them; he understood. You really should have taken that money, Arthur said when he relented to help. Charles wished he had known; he could have savored it more— he could have allowed it to linger longer, memorizing every detail of Arthur’s face. He would have, if he’d known. He would never touch his Arthur again.
This Arthur, this Arthur was not Arthur at all. It was a body, blackened and husked with decay. Picked over by animals and nested with maggots. It was not his Arthur Charles wrapped carefully in the bed roll he took from Betty’s saddle. It was not his Arthur he carried down that mountain and placed on the back of Taima. His Arthur was somewhere else, somewhere safe and free by the water.
He allowed himself to imagine, just for a second, that he could be there with him too. He resolved himself not to torture himself with what if’s. Maybe the imagining of a better life was the most they could’ve ever had, maybe that was the most there could ever be for two men.
After he buried Miss Grimshaw it took time to find the right spot for Arthur. Charles would have taken him west if he could but after Cornwall and the train there were still Pinkertons everywhere who would shoot before asking questions. Eventually, he settled on a quiet mountain in Ambarino just north of Cumberland Forest. It was beautiful, the kind of view Arthur would have stopped to sketch. Charles buried him beneath the setting sun.
When he finished, he planted some of the pretty orange flowers dotted over the grass on the grave and marked it with his name and a simple message carved into wood:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
——
There comes a day, years after, when Charles can no longer remember the sound of Arthur's voice or if the tiny flecks of gold and green in his eyes had ever actually been there that he realizes he had spent more time knowing Arthur as a grave than he had as a person. And there comes a day, not long after this, when Charles realizes he will spend the rest of his life loving a memory.
He thought killing Micah would help. He should’ve known better. Revenge is a fool's game, Arthur had said once. If only Charles could have listened. All it does is reopen a wound he thought healed. On the night of John’s wedding, he brings Charles a journal. It’s a worn thing, warped and bent and unmistakable. He’d spent hours watching Arthur buried deep into that journal, writing and drawing to the point that even in Arthur’s death, it almost felt like a violation to read through it. Yet, the moment he laid his eyes upon that first page he couldn’t tear himself away. He reads the entire thing in a single night and for the first time in so long he cannot remember the last time, he begins to weep. Quietly into the night, he reads, and cries, and devours every morsel of Arthur left on those yellowing pages.
In the morning, he leaves Beecher’s Hope and pretends he cannot see the quiet look of pity in John’s eyes that says I know your secret. Because Arthur wrote of Charles in his journal. He’d decorated a dozen pages with stolen sketches of stolen glances and writings of hunting trips and brushing fingers and a drunken kiss he pretended he could not remember in the morning. All this time Charles thought it had just been him. He thought Arthur saw him as a friend, a confidant maybe after he’d gotten drunk and sad and told him about Issac. Charles had spent so many months beside him daring not even to acknowledge the presence of something more between them, because the thought that Arthur might have felt even a whisper of what Charles did was simply forbidden. He’d seen men swing for loving the way Charles did, the way they did. All that time– It always came back to that, didn’t it? Time. There was never enough of it and by the end, they hadn’t had any at all.
He tries to tuck him away again. In all those years he spent getting his face pummeled for a few dollars, Arthur had remained tucked away in Charles’ mind. Safe in his unacknowledged grief. Now he was out, it was almost cruel how similar it felt to those first days of falling desperately and idiotically in love with him. Arthur always did know how to make a fool of him.
Still, Charles keeps on. He moves up north where the lands are kinder and does his best to begin again- properly this time. In late May he meets Anna, and by January 1908 they are husband and wife. She is kind and good, the daughter of a white man and a native woman, Charles does his best to love her as a husband should. John still writes to him often, he speaks of the ranch, of Jack, and of any and everything else. They have daughters in the same month, Charles and Anna name their first girl Noya, for the earth. Three months later a new letter from John comes. This one is shorter and says little of substance, at the end there is a short scribbled sentence so hastily written Charles can barely make out the words: The girl’s passed. The letters became more sporadic after that until late 1910 when they stopped entirely. When news of a dangerous outlaw shot down in an old ranch out in West Elizabeth hits his morning paper in late April 1911 he cannot explain to his wife why for a moment, he cannot breathe. He cannot explain why the pain comes, and why it will never go away.
He thinks about Arthur often, in the quiet peace of his home. Charles is all that is left, now. After John the Van Der Linde gang is no more than a distant memory. Whispers around Blackwater of a massacre long ago. Ghost stories in Rhodes of the outlaws who left the Braithwaites in ashes. Soon, even that would be gone too.
He does the best he can with his girls, tries to keep them clean and soft, tries to give them a better life. This world is so cruel and scary, he would do anything to protect them from the life he lived.
And so he lived. And he hated. Hated any higher power left listening for creating him to love as he did, because his wife was good and kind and loving but she was not him. She never could be. And even if he had lived, he never could have had anything more with him. If the two of them had ever been brave enough to love one another properly, as men they could never do it openly. Maybe one day there would be a world where love was not a thing to be feared, if there ever was Charles would have to miss it. It had been decades, and it wouldn’t be long now. Arthur was waiting for him. So one night, when his children are grown and gone, he closes his eyes and when he wakes it is to the sound of crashing waves over a calloused hand tucking him safely away into the life they began after.