The Christmas feast had hit the spot for all of them, and to Sadie's eyes, it was more than full bellies. It seemed like a needed bit of cheer for people who struggled so hard each day under the shadow of death. Even this next morning, she saw some brighter eyes and easier smiles when going about her business of helping around the convent. That business seemed like it could be anything these days. Helping with the cooking, the laundry, the stables. Hauling water, hauling food, teaching reading, helping weaker patients to and from their rooms.
It might have chafed her more three months ago when she'd effectively been boss of what was left of the gang, calling the shots, and keeping everyone as safe as she could. Six weeks ago, she'd still been running with the men as a gun hand, holding her own, riding out on jobs and making plans of her own to help the Marstons besides. Now she was back to taking orders and doing domestic chores like washing laundry, including ample amounts of depressingly blood and pus stained handkerchiefs and linens, in boiling hot water and strong lye soap.
But strangely, it didn't bother her that much. Yes, it being a convent meant there were more women overall. There were a few men living here staying with sick wives or sisters or kids, but mostly the men were TB patients of varying strength, all the way from clinging to life with their fingernails, to able bodied ones so near to getting their ticket to leave and go back to a mostly normal life. So that meant most of the rougher chores still fell to the women, including her. She'd seen that a man recently off near-total bed rest might not be able to muck out a stall or haul a sack of coffee beans or water buckets, but he could hold his own on something like peeling potatoes in the kitchen to earn his keep. From what she'd seen, most of them were surprisingly free of outraged manly pride about that, eager to pitch in even on so-called "women's work", given they were bored out of their minds by the time they got off bed rest. Being grateful for the care they'd had here while they were so helpless and wanting to help contribute didn't hurt either. She expected Arthur would join those ranks in a couple of months himself, given his need to feel like he was being useful.
Having drawn water up from the well, she poured the buckets out into the barrel in the bathing room next to the kitchen for Sister Lupe to draw upon and heat. Glancing into the kitchen, she saw the kettle already on the iron stove, getting ready for whoever had their weekly baths scheduled today, a Tuesday. They kept a strict schedule on that. When there were probably close to fifty people to consider in this place between nuns, a few charity orphan girls like Juanita had been, and the TB patients and their kin, there was almost no jumping turns except in desperate circumstances. She and Arthur had been assigned to Friday, and laundry done on Monday. Other days of the week than their bath day, people could at least get warm water to wash up back in their rooms. The two of them had politely made their own private schedule on that. Sharing a room they might be, but keeping some semblance of privacy and dignity between them helped. He mostly stayed in the pajamas that one of the nuns had produced from a supply somewhere, given most of the bed rest patients didn't bother dressing for the rare times they were out of bed. It hardly seemed worth the effort, and he seemed more comfortable in the light, loose cotton pajamas anyway. But he'd very pointedly turn away while she got dressed in the mornings, and undressed in the evenings. She'd wash up after he was out for the morning, busy getting his Spanish lessons or resting in the fresh air. If it was a rare rainy day and he couldn't go outdoors, he'd still disappear off somewhere for a few minutes. He took care of himself in the afternoon after they ate, took a mid-day siesta, and she headed back to chores, leaving him privacy to strip off and wash himself down. It had been an awkward negotiation of privacy and boundaries to begin, particularly with him in the room more than twenty hours of the day right now, but they'd quickly found the rhythm of it.
Passing along the corridor, meaning to go find Sister Ursula and see if she needed more help hauling heavier food supplies, she saw Sisters Veronica and Abarca carrying a bundle wrapped in white sheets out from one of the first floor rooms. They moved along the narrow adobe corridor, carefully avoiding the courtyard. She could see why. Thin and wasted away as their burden probably was, there was no mistaking something that general size and shape. Someone had died of their TB. She didn't know whose room that had been. She tried to think. She hadn't been to that room to lend her strength to help anyone to or from the courtyard, clinic, bathing room, or anywhere else. Chances were they'd been confined in bed passing through their final days since before she and Arthur got here.
Instinctively she stepped up towards them. She expected the body didn't weigh as much given the ravages of tuberculosis, but it was still a considerable weight and bulk for two smaller women. "Do you need some help with--"
Abarca looked at her with big, sad dark eyes, shaking her head silently, carrying on. She heard a voice behind her. "No, it will be all right. We nuns handle everything for the dead, Señora Griffith." She turned, looking at the speaker coming out of the room where someone had finally lost the battle against TB.
She recognized this particular nun, somewhere in her fifties. She had seen her talking with Arthur in the courtyard or on the rooftop a few times these past couple of weeks when she'd passed by. This was Sister Calderón, the one he'd told her he knew from before, had met back in St. Denis. The one who'd apparently been some kind of infamous outlaw herself in a former life. She's a safe one to talk to, if you need it. Good at making some sense of the life we was living. She lost her boy to it. Lost her husband to it. He'd given her a significant glance at that last remark, as if she might have missed the point.
She'd restrained herself from pointing out that Jacob George Adler hadn't been any kind of outlaw himself, thank you very much, so he certainly hadn't done anything to provoke getting murdered by a pack of evil savage bastards one winter night. It wouldn't do any good. It would only let out a mere candle flame's worth of heat from the inferno raging inside her. Plus it would hurt Arthur by reminding him Jake had been no outlaw, that Arthur had been, when he was only trying to be kind. What the hell is wrong with you? Turned so mean you're ready to bite any hand put out towards you, whether it's to hurt or to help?
She couldn't help a wry smile. "What, we normal folk ain't holy enough to help carry and wash bodies and dig graves?" She'd buried Hosea and Lenny just a few months ago, after all. She would have buried Arthur.
Sadie heard something sad and tired in the nun's voice as she answered, closing the door behind her. "No. It has nothing to do with holiness. I'm sure you would help, and others would as well. But Dr. Garcia and Mother Super Miguela agreed that it should be nuns only handling preparing bodies and conducting the burial. Patients and their families shouldn't see someone who's died of tuberculosis. Their struggle is already terrible. They don't need to be haunted by that sight making their fears all the more vivid. It's also why we try to take them from their room at night, but Dr. Garcia let us know we'll have another patient tomorrow morning already. So Sister Anita will have to clean and prepare this room in a hurry."
With it explained that plainly, she couldn't argue that notion. Catching a glimpse of that sheet-wrapped bundle, a man by the size of it, that already seared the image into her mind. She already had to do her best to shut out the thought of someone coming to the room she slept in someday, coming to carry Arthur out like that, gone still and silent and wrapped in white linen. Thought about watching him struggle to breathe his last, or even that ever present fear she had of waking up one morning to find that he'd never wake up again. The fear that had overcome her the first night when he slept so deeply for so long, and it still had her often stealing silently over to his bed when she woke, needing to reassure herself that he was merely sleeping, not dead. She'd done it early on with a hand on his chest, able to do it because he slept so soundly, feeling for the reassuring beat of his heart. But now some mornings she could see him breathing, and that was enough. It was necessary, because that haunting image of him dead was all too easy to imagine even now, remembering him lying there on the cold stone of Bluestone Ridge, so terribly still. That turned into remembering Jake slumped there on the scuffed floorboards in a spreading pool of blood, his chest blown open by a shotgun blast, and that same awful stillness.
The specter of two graves in Ambarino mountains had dug into her, and it haunted her soul. The grave she hadn't had to dig in the end but feared might have chased them here to Nuevo Paraiso all the same, and the one that others, Arthur included, had dug for her, and which she hadn't seen yet and might never see.
She couldn't save Jake. She'd done everything she could for Arthur, but she was helpless now against that fight. It was up to Garcia's plan, and luck or God or both. Given how badly God had failed her in Pinetree Gulch, failed Jake who'd been a preacher's boy giving such goodness and kindness to most everyone he met, she wasn't putting much trust in any kind of divine favor these days.
She looked at Calderón, seeing the tiredness in the woman's eyes and body. Maybe she wasn't his family, but she'd known the dead man all the same, had helped care for him in his slow march towards death. "Did he...have anyone here?"
She shook her head. "No family came with him. And he knew he wouldn't survive when he got here in October. But he didn't die alone. We took turns sitting with him. We always do for those that come here by themselves, when it's clear the end is near."
"That's good." They shouldn't die alone, especially not after suffering like that. She couldn't pretend the forlorn awfulness of knowing Arthur had supposedly died alone hadn't helped move her to go back to see to his body. So perhaps she understood Calderón and the other nuns well enough.
"His name was Miguel Alvarez. He was fifty-three. From Ciudad Juarez." At Sadie's questioning look, she explained, "You looked as though you wanted to know." Sadie supposed she had. It made Miguel Alvarez something more than a sad nameless corpse who'd died after a hard struggle with his TB. "But Mother Miguela will be the one overseeing his burial preparations. I'm meant to go to Chuparosa for supplies today. I was going to find Francesco Trujillo to come with me, get his mind off his wife, and yet, here you are. So, would you like to come with me to town, Mrs. Griffith?" A spark of humor in her dark-circled eyes lit up her weary, lined face. "I imagine a structured life in these walls isn't as easy for you now, and perhaps you could use an afternoon away."
Sadie had the sneaking suspicion Sister Calderón meant to meddle somehow, but the chance to get out of this place for a few hours, away out into the wilderness, felt too enticing to pass up. "Sure."
The wagon was already hitched, so she hopped on, grabbing the reins, starting them on the trail to Chuparosa. She felt herself waiting for the other shoe to drop, and Calderón didn't disappoint. It took only a few minutes until they were out on the road through the desert for her to speak up. "I understand from your husband that you're handy with a gun. So I expect that the two of us should be able to protect ourselves from any danger."
Something in her gently playful tone grated on Sadie's nerves, and she wasn't entirely sure why. She kept her eyes fixed on the road, on the backs of the horses. "Maybe I got to pretend things at Las Hermanas, but no need for that right now. You met Arthur back in St. Denis, you been talking these past weeks. So you sure as hell know that he ain't actually my husband. And maybe you rode as some kind of outlaw yourself back a long time ago, but that don't mean nothing. You don't know me, and you don't know my life."
Calderón took those hard and angry words like waving a fly off in annoyance, serene as anything. "No, I don't know your life. But I know plenty about loss, and grief, and bitterness from it."
"Do you? We was good people. I could always try to fight, but there's a difference in fighting and in hunting men down. I couldn't do that before. Couldn't imagine myself as someone who would. And he was a preacher's boy, my Jakey. He believed in God. In goodness, in mercy. He said us waiting for eight years to be married, fighting to save the farms as we was, it was all right. He joked that Jacob from the Bible waited seven years for his Rachel, and all that it meant was I was worth even an extra year beyond her. I told him--" Her words caught in her throat, and she gave another brisk snap of the reins, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. "I told him there better not be a Leah in the picture in addition, or he'd catch hell for it."
She'd been only teasing him, known that there was no Leah or anyone else. Known that they were it for each other, that he had waited so that she'd be his first lover just as he'd be hers, and she'd believed they would be each others' last and only too. Yes, she'd known one of them would bury the other someday, but she'd believed it would be so many years down the road with both of them with grey hairs and grandchildren, not that she'd be a late bride of twenty-eight and an early widow of thirty-one. "Eight years of waiting. Then that God that Jake and me loved let me have him for less than three. And all our goodness and mercy weren't nothing when six men broke into our home while we was sleeping. We would have given them anything they asked, but they wasn't only after food, or money, or our horses. We realized that quick enough. They dragged him out from bed and shot him in front of me before he could even fight. They...every night, they took turns with me, over and over, in that same bed that was his and mine. Took breaks from their poker game to do it." That somehow felt like the worst part of the insult and shame of it. They'd killed him. They'd ruined her, smeared filth all over the joy she'd had in making love with Jake, just like their horseshit stained boots had left filth on the floorboards. But doing that to her in that bed where she and Jake had slept and loved made for one more cruel wound. It felt like it ground that already-stained part of her right into dust. She'd told Arthur her memories of Jake were still pure, and so many of them were, but those ones weren't anymore and they never could be.
"I'm sorry. For all your suffering. For all the pain that you've had to bear."
"I don't much want your pity, Sister. I want to know where our fucking ever-merciful God was when it happened."
Still staring fixedly ahead as she was, fingers gripping the reins tightly, she heard Calderón's soft sigh next to her, but didn't look. "If I might be honest? I wonder that sometimes myself. And I don't have a good answer. I lost my husband Julio, my son Manuel. The things I saw in St. Denis with so many lost and orphaned children, the cruelties and depravities they endured, and the things that some of them then did to others. Watching people die slowly from tuberculosis here. I don't know exactly why God allows suffering like that. I don't know its purpose. All I know is that I can either give in to despair and hatred, or fight against them. I try to believe I'm strong enough to see all that's terrible in this world, and yet I choose to serve goodness and love where I can. Because if I don't, that evil wins. I suppose that's the nature of faith."
She sounded so calm, so sure, in a way that Sadie all at once hated and envied. But at least she wasn't preaching something about God's grand plan, and how everything had its purpose. "Ain't got much faith to claim these days. Faith in myself most of all. I was good. I did good. And then I became something else. I started killing every miserable O'Driscoll bastard I found. Other outlaws too. O'Driscoll Boys, Lemoyne Raiders, Murfree Brood. Didn't much matter. I knew their ways. Knew they was all sons of bitches making excuses to hurt and terrorize people. Dutch's gang, the things they was doing--the things I done with them, by the end--we hurt people. Some of them innocent. But still. We didn't do nothing like that sort did." Though she wouldn't put it beyond Micah, at that. "So I guess I made my choice. I became a bad woman, and I went hunting for even worse men. But I tried, where I could. To hold folk together after that business in St. Denis. To look after them, because Charles and me were the only ones left fit to go hunt and the like." Karen would have been able to step up into it, maybe, if she hadn't been so lost in the bottle. Abigail as well, if she hadn't had Jack to look after. And she'd been unable to do much about anything like that, scrambling as she was to look after all of them.
"They were the family you had. Of course you looked after them. I did the same." Calderón's voice kept low and soothing, and some part of Sadie wanted to believe in that. Wanted to believe that here was a woman who understood some of what it had been like, the anger and the bitterness and the shame and regret. "But that's who you are, isn't it? A woman who lived only for killing couldn't have done what you did to save a man's life, to bring him all the way here in hopes he'll survive."
"It ain't all charitable, Sister. I expect that most of that came out as me saving Arthur to try to make myself feel better. To give myself some purpose." She had to be honest about that, because she couldn't accept that kind of praise.
"That's quite a lot of effort for that."
"Yeah, well, I got a lot of sins now on my account. Donating a few bucks to the poor didn't seem like it would clear that."
"And yet here you are helping out at the convent, far beyond daily chores. I've seen you. On Tuesday you were reading to Mr. Baumgartner because he can't read himself yet. You've been fetching things for patients. Helping the unsteady ones on the stairs. Playing with children to give their parents some rest."
"No reason not to do all that. I got thoroughly exposed to the TB already. Not like I got to fear them." But she'd seen the look on their faces, the mute gratitude at someone who wouldn't treat them like nothing more than a walking contagion, a pathetic figure barely existing while hoping to survive and slowly get back to living. She'd been so careful to try to not make Arthur into a pariah or invalid, to not give him pity she knew he couldn't bear or to show fear that he couldn't bear either.
"They need kindness. They're afraid. They're in pain. They've been isolated from the world like lepers used to be. It's one thing for nuns to care for them, or their families, but to have an ordinary woman so recently arrived not fear them or treat them differently--that means something to them. You've done bad things, but so have we all. I think there's plenty of goodness in you still. You offer them love and kindness so freely, and I've seen you smiling more often of late. What happened to you was very painful and awful. So perhaps some things in you have changed. But it doesn't need to have changed the entirety of you into someone you no longer recognize, don't you think? Isn't there room for some state in between goodness and damnation?"
"I'd expect that's purgatory, and as I understand it, you Catholics came up with the notion," she answered dryly, but felt guilty for the sarcastic remark. But the notion of living in purgatory wasn't that far off. They turned me into a monster, Arthur. She'd been so sure they took everything good and fine in her. The aching part of her wanted to reach out and take that offered grace, feel like there was some way back from the woman who'd hunted bad men with such relentless fervor, who'd stabbed Tom Watkins to death because shooting wasn't nearly intimate enough, to give him some kind of pain to match what he'd given her. Who'd kept it somewhat together near Arthur, a vision of horror all dressed in blood, grateful that he didn't treat her differently having seen it, that he understood her need to be alone before she completely fell apart. She'd walked away from Hanging Dog Ranch, cried at the shore of Little Creek River like she hadn't cried in months, washing off the blood, knowing the rest of it wouldn't wash away so easily. Then she'd changed her clothes, gone back, found Arthur, and they'd rode off back east. He had asked no questions.
She should have figured the nun would have a ready response to that, irrepressible as she seemed. "If you feel you're in purgatory, that still means there's a way out."
Arriving at Chuparosa spared her having to come up with a response to that immediately, and she silently parked the wagon near the fountain. Calderón headed to Garcia's office to check in on things, and she went to the store to pick up the order. Doing a little browsing herself, she grabbed some chocolate and a couple more books for Arthur, and another couple pairs of pajamas to keep him comfortable. He could stand some sweets, given how thin he still was, and she'd call the books a belated Christmas present. She still felt guilty she hadn't thought to get him something, given he'd obviously spent time and care to make that sketch for her. It was rolled up in her things now, because she wasn't sure what to do with it. Could she frame it? On the other hand, some part of her liked keeping it private between them. He didn't show that artist's ability off freely, and the fact he'd let her into that meant something.
The shopkeeper, Esteban Ramirez by his shingle outside, rang up her purchases. He said something in Spanish, something about a big cat and some cows and some wolves, but she didn't catch much more than one word in three. She was studying Spanish, same as Arthur, and asking people at Las Hermanas to speak it around her as they worked together to force her to learn faster had borne some fruit. But it hadn't taken root enough yet to follow all of that.
She heard Calderón's voice behind her, and then the little black-clad nun was there, standing at her elbow. "Mr. Ramirez said we should look out on the way back. There's been a jaguar on the loose in the area, who's killed some cows at Primera Quebrada in the last week. There also have been a few bandits roaming the roads. Apparently calling themselves 'Del Lobos', so he believes there may be an actual gang forming." She nodded to Ramirez, rattled off her own order, which proved to be a sack of wintergreen candies. She grinned at Sadie's confusion. "Even nuns have our own little vices, Mrs. Griffith."
Shaking her head, unable to help a bit of a smile at it, she headed outside. Seeing Ramirez' boy finishing loading the order into the back of the wagon, she nodded to him in gratitude. "Gracias." She flipped him a coin for the help, and from the grin he gave her, she might have given him too much. She wasn't used to the cost of things here in Mexico yet, given this was the first she'd had to actually buy something in a store since arriving. Everything was provided for them at Las Hermanas. Oh well. If she'd been good to this kid, it'd make up for that sour-faced prick in Rhodes who'd sniffed at the tip she'd given him.
More cautious now on the lookout for bloodthirsty beasts, either spotted cats or human, she grabbed the reins. She paused for a moment, took the repeater from over her shoulder, and handed it to Calderón. "If you was riding with a gang once, you know what you're doing with this. Might as well keep lookout for us."
She knew the look of someone confident with a gun, and clearly, Calderón was one of those people, handling the repeater with a casual, comfortable ease. Eyeing that pose, Sadie asked, "Do folk at the convent know about all that, what you was back then?"
"No. I'm not sure it would matter. I'm hardly that person anymore. But I'm not sure I want all the fuss about it, either the horror or the fascination." She shot Sadie another of those looks of mischievous amusement. "So it seems you, Arthur, and I are all keepers of each other's secrets on those particulars."
If she'd known who he was even back in St. Denis, and hadn't called the law for the bounty on his head, Sadie supposed she wasn't going to do it now. Plus he trusted her enough to have told her to call him by his first name. "Fair enough. Though I guess if he's 'Arthur', you might as well call me 'Sadie'." She'd been kind enough, and well meaning albeit meddling, that Sadie felt like she could extend that courtesy and trust.
"Calderón, then, to you." She nodded to acknowledge that, eyes on the road still on the way back, but this time sweeping for danger, not fixedly staring to ignore the woman at her side. Arthur said she had a way of talking sense. Maybe he wasn't wrong on that. She'd said some things that felt like they ought to make sense, even if something in her instinctively protested that they couldn't apply to her. "The things I told you today, you ain't gonna go and tell him? Don't Catholics have some kind of sacred vow about that?"
"That's the sanctity of the confessional. I'm not a priest, Sadie. Though we have no priest here regularly, so I suppose my sisters and I hear enough confessions. And yes, I keep that in confidence. I don't need to be commanded by doctrine for that."
She fidgeted for a moment, bunching the reins in one hand, trying to think of how to put this. If this was her chance to get some things off her chest with someone who knew and didn't judge, maybe she'd best take it. Relieve some of the pressure that had been building the past weeks. "Maybe I like being around folk and helping them. You ain't wrong about that. But every single day I'm at that convent, it's all a lie. Not just feeling like not a single one of them truly knows me, and the things I done, except Arthur. It's...my fault, I know. I'm the one who started it, claiming we was married so nobody would look twice at us on the way here. I'm stuck in it now. I'm living with a man, and he's a good man, a better man than he thinks he is. But we ain't married, we ain't even in love. I got a wedding picture of a husband I loved that I need to keep hidden, cause it clearly ain't Arthur in it by my side. I got a husband I can't mourn properly cause I supposedly have a living husband. I wake up some mornings and for just one fine moment, I'm back in Pinetree Gulch, thinking I'm finally waking from a nightmare. That got my life back, that any second now I'll see Jake smiling at me again. But then I wake up enough to realize. I know that I'm in Mexico sleeping in this bed of my own, and it's Arthur there across the room in his own bed, and I lose Jake all over again." She couldn't help but feel some pride that she'd kept her voice steady.
"From what I've heard, you had no time to mourn your husband even before this. You were too busy running and fighting and surviving."
"I...maybe not. There was stuff that needed doing, always. Kept my mind busy."
"So now it's finally hitting you."
"Yeah." Her voice cracked a bit on the word. "He's gone. He's gone forever. And...I don't resent Arthur, don't think that. Not his fault he's alive. Hell, I can't save a man and then be angry with him for living. But still...if God or Satan or some magician showed up some morning and offered to trade them, Jake for Arthur, I ain't sure I'm good enough a person to say 'no'."
"I'm not sure any of us are. Especially not when the pain is still so fresh."
"And the worst part is, Arthur, he wouldn't even hate me. He'd make that trade in a heartbeat, cause he don't think nothing of himself."
"I've noticed that."
"I guess he's stuck in his own way. I see how frustrated he is, not being able to do anything. And I did what had to be done to get him here, and then to stay with him so I wouldn't be just one more bastard who abandoned him. He's my friend. My best friend, in truth. He needs someone to look after him, and I suppose I need him too. I couldn't make it on my own, not in my soul, I mean. He's easy to be around. But I'm...it's still hard, seeing him where Jake should be. And I can't say that, not to him, cause I know him. He'll blame himself. Think it's cause he ain't worth what I done. If any one of us deserved to get out of that whole disaster, it's that man. That life trapped him from the time he was a kid. Never gave him a choice to be anything different, and when he got one finally, Lord, did he make the most of it. I seen it happening. It was like--he finally let go of pretending and became his real self. Scared for all of us, you could see it, but underneath that, there was this calm he didn't have before." She'd envied him that serenity, that confidence, but not at the price he'd bought it. She shook her head, giving a short, sharp laugh. "He told me anytime I want free of this to be with someone else, just say the word."
She glanced off the road to look at Calderón then, seeing the nun turn to her, put a hand on her shoulder. "I know you don't think much of God having a deliberate purpose. And I don't claim to make sense of your suffering by that. All I can speak to is where you are now. He needs to heal physically. But I'd say both of you have some healing of your hearts to do besides. Maybe Las Hermanas is where you were meant to be for that, rather than struggling to survive with just the two of you alone."
"Maybe." Maybe there was some way to try to believe again in things, and in herself too. Though if God was pitiless enough to take Arthur too, trust twice broken seemed sign enough to not give it a third chance. So she'd see.
"You have the time to grieve. But except for when you're out alone hunting, I expect you have no privacy for it. And I suppose hunting alone will be discouraged if there's indeed a gang forming out there."
"No." Arthur would give her that space in their room, but she didn't want to put the burden of it on him. She took a few minutes sometimes when he was gone, but it was never enough. She needed to be alone for it. But the nun was right. With those Del Lobos out there, the nuns might be more reluctant to let her go hunting alone now. Losing even that small respite made something go tight in her chest.
"Anytime you need that privacy, please come see me. I'm sure I can find some task around the convent that needs doing that you can do in privacy. So that you can be alone with your mourning, and not have to pretend for at least a little while."
So perhaps she had an ally, and that eased her mind a little. Driving the wagon in through the convent gates, she remembered her courtesies. She'd been raised to them. "Thank you for that. And for inviting me along. You was right. I needed it." It had helped, as wary as she'd been of it.
Calderón smiled, and patted her hand, in a gentle way that reminded Sadie of her mother, and that both healed and hurt all at once. "Of course. Come find me if you need to talk again. I hope you believe that I'll listen."
~~~~~~~~~~
He couldn't quite escape the feeling that if he went beyond an hour of standing or sitting up each day, someone would somehow know, appear like some supernatural creature summoned by it, and yell at him for it. They'd gotten him well trained, it seemed. Though he suspected that like him, most of the other bedridden lungers took to keeping cautious, almost superstitious track of that free hour themselves, reining in voluntarily when need be. The chapel bells made that easy enough. After all, if they didn't do it, they only hurt themselves by it by delaying the healing. By this point he couldn't deny that as utterly Goddamn stultifying as lying there in bed like a log for week after week was, it had helped. He could feel that fire in his chest, the racking pain, much reduced. He coughed less, wheezed less, and the blood and other crap came up less when he did. Those lesions were apparently starting to heal. He was getting more energy back, which only made bed rest all the more frustrating.
But having such a short time to do things meant making the most of it, and carefully choosing and prioritizing. At least a few times a week he made sure to eat sitting at the table with Sadie, rather than awkwardly half-propped up in bed, trying to not make a mess of it. That was his own rule. He still recalled all too well when he sat down to that first dinner Dutch, Hosea, Bessie, and Susan had bought him long ago. Watching them eat with no hurry and using proper silverware like he'd once known, he'd realized with dread and sick humiliation that living as a street brat, eating with his hands and learning to gulp his food as quickly as possible to avoid fighting for it, meant he now ate embarrassingly like an animal. He didn't want to lose that again. Sitting at a table eating like a normal human being helped him remember, helped him keep that small sense of pride.
Once a week, he spent some of that precious freedom heading down to the stables. Garcia might not love him taking such a long walk, and it honestly exhausted him. He might have more energy, but he'd lost even more strength. But he had to do it. He wasn't the only one trapped by his TB. Sadie was trapped by it now, in her own way, and he did his best to give her as much space as possible. Couldn't be easy for her having to smile and lie and call him her husband to everyone here, all with the ghost of her actual beloved husband still there clear as day. He'd seen her pull that wedding picture out from where she hid it, looking at it sometimes, expression all wistful and soft. Remembered trudging back from Colter to bury a man whose first name he hadn't even known because in the end, of course Hosea had sent him, and Lenny, and Javier, because he knew they could be trusted to do the decent thing. Digging that grave in heavy, wet soil for a frozen corpse, dark-haired and very dead, with everything that Sadie Adler had loved in him gone. Chest blown open by a point blank shotgun blast. Poor bastard hadn't even been able to fight.
He couldn't fix that, beyond telling her she was free to cut herself free from the lie they'd spun any moment she chose. He wondered if she took some time in their room alone when he was on the roof for lessons or resting and reading to do her grieving. He hoped so. He'd tried to give her that, even knowing it wasn't much. As for Buell, the horse was stuck too, and he couldn't do much about that either. Heading into the stable, breathing in the scent of hay and horseshit, he was glad of the mask tugged up over his face against the hay and dust in the air.
Bob wasn't in his stall, so Sadie was out with someone else given people weren't allowed out alone now, either riding or hunting or something. He tried to not resent her that ability to just take off and ride, tried to not resent the lucky bastard who'd been able to go out with her. It wasn't her fault he was sick. But seeing normal healthy people casually doing all those things he'd taken for granted for so many years wasn't easy, not with his oh-so-carefully rationed hour of freedom each day. Though if he hadn't wanted to suffer like this, not beating Thomas Downes within an inch of his already-fragile life for Strauss' stupid debt would have been a good start.
He'd felt like he hadn't had much choice, his dawdling causing Strauss and Dutch to both nag him to get to those damn debt collections, to the point he'd ridden into camp after dark and there was Dutch right there at Arthur's cot, immediately telling him to go help Strauss out. Making it clear he wasn't even to be allowed to sleep there until he agreed to do what they demanded. Trying to protest he was busy, he'd been working hard. But in the end, he went the very next morning, only because Dutch had probably realized Arthur could hardly show up in the middle of the night. All those ties of guilt and obligation and feeling like he couldn't balk and be hesitant, not right now when things were so uncertain and desperate, not when so many people depended on him to help hold it together. All the while some part of him hating it so much, wanting to make anyone else do it, but him and his damn fair play notion of Don't ask anyone to do a thing you ain't willing to do yourself. And I should be the first one to do it so they never look at me and wonder what use I am. Guess he hadn't learned either of those from Dutch and his life of leisure as leader. In the end, he was big, so he could scare the shit out of the people or beat them properly should it come to that, and he wouldn't come back without the job done, and they knew all that. So of course they sent him. Vigor, Strauss called it with a smirk. Hurrying to get the awfulness of it done, to his mind.
But in the end, something deep within him knew that the money lending wasn't right, even before he could admit to himself how wrong everything they were doing now was. So he'd had a choice, and like every other time, he'd buckled under the pressure, and made the wrong choices for far too long. Looking back now, he'd seen things changing for years, not just after Blackwater. Dutch becoming some exaggerated version of himself, talking even more like some fiery street preacher, taking in more folks, pulling bigger and riskier jobs the bigger the gang got. Doing things like taking on Strauss and his cold-blooded schemes. Before he knew it, there they were, pulling jobs just to spit in the eyes of Uncle Sam and the law and then congratulate themselves on how clever they were, still spouting the same bullshit about it being all about defiant freedom from the evils of government and civilization. Truthfully, he'd acknowledged that they hadn't helped anyone in years except themselves. That they'd started hurting more people, and doing it casually. Taking lives became nothing unusual, when many years ago even leaving a man with a broken arm during a robbery had felt like a failure.
It felt like he'd lived with that growing unease slowly churning in his gut for longer than he could remember. He'd known it had gone bad somewhere along the line, and so had Hosea from his remarks. But Arthur, always loyal Arthur, wasn't going to question, wasn't going to examine it straight on and drag it into the light, for fear of what he would find. Because if he let himself see it, he couldn't deny it, couldn't deny that being loyal to that was no virtue. That would mean accepting himself as well and truly damned by knowingly following that path, or leaving or confronting Dutch, and neither of those was an option. Coward. Though at least he'd had the honesty to loathe himself for it, as well as the things he'd done.
All the bed rest left him more energetic, but made his body weaker. His withered muscles trembled with fatigue, and just the stairs and the walk out here already made his heart beat faster, made him a bit lightheaded. Hand braced on the door of the next stall down from Bob, he waited until he caught his breath again, finding a stool to sit on in the aisle until he felt clear-headed again. Reaching in his pocket, he slipped Buell a peppermint, eyeing him when he stamped a hoof impatiently, tossing his head. "If you'd behave for Sadie, she'd take you out. Until then, all you get is corral time." She'd tried to ride him once when Arthur had asked, knowing poor Buell had to be going crazy from a lack of exercise. The stubborn bastard apparently stood there like a statue and refused to go anywhere with her, and wouldn't even let anyone else on his back. More polite than bucking her off, he supposed, but meant there wasn't much anyone could do for the horse because of it. Letting him out into the corral each day so he could blow off steam and exercise was the best he'd get.
This was the best Arthur could do for him with that small sliver of time he had. Come down here, talk to Buell, pat him a bit. He couldn't even properly brush down that creamy pale gold coat himself and make it truly shine, because that was above the exertion he was allowed just now. Though he was grateful Buell allowed Sadie that much.
Today was the last day of December, the last year of 1899, the last year of the nineteenth century. Apparently that put him a reflective mood, or a brooding one. Either way, he found himself talking honestly to the horse rather than the usual cheerful praise and endearment. "Yeah, it's been a strange time for you, all right. Hamish died, left you to some new fella. Then I leave you in Valentine and disappear." He'd taken Zenobia, because honored as he was by the gift of Buell and the esteem and trust implied in that, much like Rains Falls' talisman, he knew it would be hard days ahead. He and Buell didn't have that trust and instinct between them yet. The last thing he'd needed was an opinionated horse taking a notion to buck him off right when the situation was critical, and he'd sensed with Hamish's rueful tales that Buell was crafty enough to sense weakness, and enjoy testing his rider.
Though he could have thrown Arthur a dozen times over on the ride from Wapiti without even trying much, and he'd felt this horse sensing how vulnerable and weak the man on his back was, and deliberately choosing to go easy on him, giving as gentle a ride as possible. He'd been grateful for that kindness, prepared to have to fight Buell along the way with what little strength he'd had. "Then I show up again, drag you across all them different states and a country border besides, shove you on several trains along the way, and after all that fuss, we get here and you get shut up in a stable. I know, boy. I know. Got to be confusing. Got to be frustrating."
Buell's ears relaxed, his obvious irritation fading at this strange bastard showing up once again only to vanish shortly after arriving. He was sure Sadie gave him treats and kind words and a pat here and there along with the brush downs, but Buell must be confused and lonely. Probably still struggling to understand the various alarming turns of his life these past few months. They had that in common. He knew how smart horses were, how easily they recognized their people. Suspected something in Buell still looked for a man who wasn't there, and that confusion and grief was part of why he stubbornly balked at anyone riding him. He'd had too much that went strange and unfamiliar on him all at once. "You missing Hamish, boy? Me too. Hamish, and a whole lot of other folk."
He felt Buell leaning into the pats and caresses, lowering his head. Trusting Arthur, all the same, despite his comings and goings, despite everything he'd been and done. But what other hope did this horse have? He breathed out slowly, careful to not breathe too deeply again on the inhalation. "Believe me. I want out as much as you. Wish you and me both could just go, right now. Leave this place and go, nowhere in mind at all. Just ride like the wind, and feel free again."
His body still hurt more often than not. But lately, the harder, sharper hurt in him nothing to do with TB. That talk with Calderón let some genie out of the bottle, all that pain he'd had stoppered up, and there was no taking it back. It had done him good to let it go, lance the whole festering mess of it, but that didn't heal the thing immediately. The ache still remained, as would the eventual scar. There were still too many things he had to look at honestly, ugly as they were. "When I get a bit better," hoping so much that it truly was when and not if, "I promise you, we'll go out. Just you and me. Maybe we ain't gonna go too far or too fast, not yet. But it'll still be a fine day riding out past the walls, won't it?"
That soft nicker of Buell's response felt like answer enough, and he smiled at that, giving one last stroke to the horse's nose, slipping him another peppermint while he was at it. Hearing the bell tolling, he calculated. He'd been out for half an hour, and he wanted to save the other half for tonight. So he started the slow shamble back up to his room, ready to sleep off his sudden weariness for a few hours.
His watch sufficed when the nuns laid off the bells in the night. It had been a bit of a chore keeping correct time when they'd been zigging and zagging across time zones, and knowing exactly where those arbitrary map lines cut across was no mean feat anyway. But he'd kept up on it all the same, needing that little bit of certainty. Here in Las Hermanas was no different. So he checked his watch again, seeing it was now 11:45. He glanced over at Sadie, sitting at the table, scribbling something in her own journal. He had to admit with the shoe on the other foot now, that he held some curiosity in wondering what she was writing. But of course he never sneaked a peek, even if it would be easy enough with her out as much as she was. It would be too much a breach of trust, and given he didn't have many people he could trust right now, and certainly not as deeply as Sadie, he wouldn't sacrifice it for something that trivial.
He closed the book he'd been reading: Kate Chopin's "The Awakening". One of the books Sadie got him for a bit of a late Christmas. Told him, with a wink, that the shopkeeper in Chuparosa said it was both new and apparently pretty racy. He couldn't much relate to a woman's lot in this life, true, but he knew they had plenty to be miserable about. He could sympathize with Edna Pontelier's realizing how unhappy and small her life truly was, how she'd bent and twisted herself to fit a thing she didn't want to be, and then trying so hard to break free and become someone more true. And in the end, she chose to die rather than go back to her cage. So maybe he did it by defying Dutch rather than taking an adulterous lover like Pontelier--well, there was the racy bit--but he guessed he'd had his own awakening of sorts. "We're near midnight. You want to go up to the roof for a bit?" Interpreting her intent, quizzical glance, he assured her, "I got half an hour left." Sometimes he felt like this had to be a bit what prison felt like, all rules and strict schedules and whatnot. Though he hadn't asked John about Sisika. There were more pressing matters, and some things it didn't do to prod a person on only to fulfill idle curiosity.
"You was fast asleep this afternoon when I came in. Slept a good while. You sure you ain't pushing too hard?"
"I'm fine. It's a short walk up there, that's all." She apparently took that without doubt or criticism, trusting him on it, putting her journal aside and heading for the door, trusting him to follow.
Though the moment they got up to the roof, she pointed at one of the cots there with an emphatic jab of her finger. "Fine. You made it up here. Now lie down. You can watch the year change over like that just as good as sitting up."
He could hear the soft murmur of other folks down in the courtyard, obviously having similar thoughts to greet the new year anywhere but stuck in their rooms. "Sure, you got it, boss. Lie back and think of America, is that how it goes?"
He heard her soft chuckle. "Just about." Though he'd never been up here after dark like this. Stretched out, looking up at the night sky, he couldn't help but admire the scattering of the stars in the darkness. They shone as bright and beautiful as ever. How many nights had he passed in various camps like that, or out in the wild, gazing up at the stars like this? They made for a surprisingly reassuring comfort of something not changing, when so much had for him. That felt like its own small piece of freedom. No matter what, those same stars would be there, and TB or no, he could lie there and look at them and feel some peace to think about things.
"Grab a cot yourself and have a look," he gestured upwards. "It's fine and clear, the stars are good viewing tonight." Sensing her hesitation, he gave a snort of amusement. "You can watch the year change over like that just as good as sitting up," gently teasing her with her own words.
"Shut up, you." But she did it, and he heard the soft creak of metal and canvas as she moved from sitting on the wooden bench against the wall to the cot right next to his. "All right, maybe you was onto something with this idea."
He stole a look at his watch again, leaving it open on his chest so he could easily look again. Ten minutes to go. There was a sudden strange compulsion in him to say some things, maybe clear some of it out before the clock turned things over to a clean page. "You're a good woman, you know that?"
"I been trying to believe that. I guess you're trying just as hard to believe hearing you're a good man. It ain't easy, after all we been through, all we done."
So she did understand. "Yeah. I'm sorry. I ain't glad to be here like this, and I ain't glad it's put on you what it has. All the lying and pretending, like Jake weren't nothing. I know that's not fair to you. But...all the same, I'm glad you're here."
He heard her draw in a slow, uneven breath. Heard the shakiness in her voice for a moment. "Thank you, Arthur. I'm glad you're here too." The silence drew on, but it wasn't uncomfortable. She finally ventured, voice oddly calm, "I think if you'd died I might be dead too."
"Me? Nothing in me worth anyone dying over."
"No, you're only worth killing yourself for everyone else, that it?" He couldn't help but smile at that tart tongue of hers, even as something in his heart twisted at remembering all of it. "You seen how I was towards the end. Folk didn't need me to lead things after Dutch got back. We got John back. Took out them O'Driscolls. Got out the folk we could. After that? Nothing much left, and me left as somebody I didn't much know anymore."
"I know. I seen you fighting, how you was about it." Nothing held back, rushing in with nothing but towering rage and resolve, taking on insane amounts of risk. "Nobody needed you so now you went out to die, was that it?" He asked it as softly as he could. She didn't answer, which seemed answer enough. She'd always been easy to talk to, and some things hadn't needed saying anyway. But all the same, it was simpler to lie there and look up at those distant stars and how small they made all the problems of people seem, and talk about things like that rather than to directly look right at her while they did it. "We make a proper pair of fools, Sadie, you and me. Think I ain't done it, getting all reckless and hoping someone would put a bullet in me? Couldn't this year, too many folk depending on me, but other times, when things was better for the gang? Dutch, he thought I was fearless, thought I was just ready to take on anything. Didn't see the forest for the trees. I got this TB and maybe I was almost glad because there's something in me that's always been longing to die, so I wasn't gonna have to keep living with who I was, the things I done. You get so damn tired, fighting a war inside yourself all the time, wishing you was different, hating that you ain't." Feeling like he'd carved his chest open and left himself vulnerable as anything by saying it but compelled to it all the same. He was tired of hiding and pretending, and she understood.
She listened to that, and she finally spoke up, voice hushed. "Yeah, that's just about right. But me, I think that's how you know there's a good person in you, even if it's struggling hard. Bad folk, they don't worry or feel guilty. They got no concerns about whether what they're doing is right. They just assume it is." There's a good man in you, Arthur, but he's wrestling with a giant. Mary had seen that, even if she never could say it that kindly except in a farewell letter. "Maybe that fight to be good gets easier, eventually."
"I think Calderón's got some sense on that. It ain't about choosing it once, and suddenly you're good forever. It's got to be every day. And maybe you keep choosing it, get further away from all them things you regret, that fight does get easier. The good in you, it gets stronger. It already seems simpler now to do want to do good things than it did six months ago." Though of course the idea of running into a wall where there was no more good in him to grow troubled him. He expected that day would come.
"Yeah, she does talk some good sense. Expected her to come at me with all sorts of religious platitudes and I'd tell her to go to hell for it, but damn, she's a wily one."
"You and me both, cause that was what I expected too." That was Calderón's gift--coming at folks with love, and somehow making things OK. "Who I was back in Colter when we met, you ever expect that fella to be talking with a nun?"
"Being honest, I didn't take much notice of you or anyone else then. Not enough to say I truly knew you."
"Fair enough."
"But you was kind, even then. As much as you'd let yourself be. Every day you was in camp, Colter and Horseshoe both, you'd come and see if I was OK. Trying to cheer me up and all. I took a snap at you sometimes, I know, cause I wanted to be left alone, or I thought I did. But you still tried. And you cared. You didn't need to, but you did."
"I worry about folk. In my nature, I guess." It felt good to admit that openly, to stop pretending that he had only nonchalance for anyone. "Never thought seeing you then that you'd go gunslinger yourself, let alone be leading the whole thing for a time." He recalled the pale, near-silent ghost of a woman from those early days at Horseshoe who'd go retreat to the edge of camp to cry and had few words for anyone. It startled him still to see the woman who had emerged from beneath that deep dark shroud of grief, fine and angry and determined and foolhardy and funny and kind. "You did a damn fine job keeping them together. Better than probably any of us could have." There was a notion in his mind now, and he turned it over, examining closely. Yes, he should say it. "Might have been best for everyone if we hadn't come back from Guarma at all. Cause Dutch took charge again, and we fell in line while he dragged us right back into the mess. I expect if we was gone for good you would have led them out from Lakay, found them someplace safe. Gotten them away from all of it, in time." After all, everyone left behind aside from perhaps Charles had been the people the lawmen weren't looking for, so they could have escaped in time. He checked his watch again. Five minutes left now.
"About the others who went with you, I'd say you got a point. But don't say things would have been better if you hadn't come back." She exhaled in a slow sigh. "You'd be dead on that island from whatever mess you ended up in, or the TB, and all them folk you helped after you got back would be worse off for it. Maybe you and me could have tried to push Dutch out. Folk always believed in you. At least the camp folk had started believing in me. But we was too loyal. And I guess with Dutch, Bill, Micah, and Javier back with no respect for me, and it being just you, me, and Charles, and then John in jail, Karen in the bottle, and you taking sick? I don't think we could have done it and won. Probably would have got killed for it."
He couldn't deny that when she put it like that, he had to agree. "Damn near did anyway in the end. All of us pointing guns at each other, and if not for them Pinkertons, there would have been more dead folk in that camp than poor Susan. Javier, maybe he would have turned back if things was a bit different. I ain't sure. But the rest?"
Her voice went suddenly soft. "You wouldn't let me go with you. You know that I would have."
"I know. But Charles was gone already, and John was supposedly dead. It would have been you and me, and Sadie, we done a lot with just the two of us, but there was no winning that one." He'd wanted her far away from it, bound her with that promise made to help the Marstons, even knowing full well that Abigail could handle things herself without Sadie to hold her hand. That vow made for a good reason to force her to leave, so he didn't feel guilty about doing it. "It wasn't gonna be nothing nice. I wanted the rest of you to live. To have something beyond that." He'd gone planning to either convince Dutch to get rid of Micah, or far more likely, just make his stand on principle and die in trying. No illusions that a single sick man could take on the rest of them by himself.
"Maybe. But you deserved to live too, Arthur. I wish you'd see that." That hit him hard, breathing catching for a moment in a way that had nothing to do with the TB. "I know you wanted to take care of Micah, but--"
"I should have taken care of him long before that. I should have stuck to my guns even at Horseshoe, and refused to let Dutch bully me into breaking him out from jail. He'd have hanged and perhaps it wouldn't have all gone so bad. We all got our responsibility for what happened. We went along with it far too long. But that little fork-tongued viper whispering in Dutch's ear, he sure helped it turn real ugly, even without selling us out."
"Are you planning to go after Micah?" Her voice was now strangely steady and even, like asking if he'd prefer butter or jam on his bread. He heard the rustle and creak of her shifting on her cot. "Look at me. Arthur...please."
Compelled to obey, he hitched over onto his side. He saw she'd turned to him as well, looking straight at him, head propped up on one hand. Close enough to touch, if either of them reached out, but in that moment it felt wrong to do so. "I ain't doing much of anything right now, mind."
She made a little sound of what he took to be mingled amusement and irritation. "Just answer the question."
He got one arm under under his head, settling in more comfortably. "Look, I'm hoping the law finds him, hangs him, and the whole business is done. But he's gone to ground somewhere, and he's slippery and dangerous. They might not manage to run him down. And if they don't--then yes, when I'm better, and when I know where he's hiding, I got to go after him." Simple as that. It was his failing and he needed to fix it, or else none of all this business about being good or pushing himself to be better mattered if he'd just be a coward in the end and turn away from that failure.
"Thought you wasn't in the business of revenge?"
"I ain't. It ain't pride. I'm talking about fixing a thing I should have done." As far as he saw it, Micah had become a debt of honor, and if he could, he needed to pay that someday. "I let that bastard walk in and do what he did to all of us. Cause I could have pushed harder with Dutch. I should have. But I didn't, until Micah weaseled his way into becoming the one Dutch trusted most, and by then it was too late. I didn't do what needed doing when I could help things, and other folk paid for it. I got to make that right, if I can."
Somehow he wasn't surprised she didn't protest, tell him that he was wrong. She understood debts of honor herself. Harder to see the look in her eyes in the moonlight, but he could imagine it all the same, that fierce determination that burned in her. Oh, he shouldn't ask, but there was nobody else he'd rather have with him for it, nobody in this world he would trust more. "If I have to go against him someday, will you ride with me?"
She didn't even hesitate, which didn't surprise him at all. "Of course. I ride with you, you ride with me. That's how it goes with us, ain't it?"
"It is." He felt a strange relief at that promise made between them. If it ever came to it with Micah, he wouldn't stand alone like he had last month.
"But even if we hear about where he is tomorrow, that ain't happening until you're better. Promise me that."
"I promise." It was only sensible. He could hardly go after Micah sick and weak again. He'd seen how that led nowhere good. Grabbing the watch again, he caught it just in time. "Less than a minute left." Watching the seconds tick down, midnight finally hit. "Here we are, 1900. Ain't that something. New year, and a new century." A year and a century he hadn't believed that he'd see, and somehow it was all at once full of so much possibility and the realization that the world he'd loved and understood, that Old West, that thirty-six years of life as a nomad and outlaw, that was just a little bit more gone now. Bittersweet, then, but he'd told that greasy slave catcher Compson that some legacies weren't fit for anything but burning. He shouldn't be waxing nostalgic for the bank robberies and the killings and all that, turn it into some false romantic notion. But the wide open spaces, the sense of freedom, yes, he'd always miss that as civilization and order and all of that gobbled it up bit by bit. Though even the supposed untouched simplicity of that country they'd ridden and hidden in was its own myth. They'd stolen it all from the Indians to begin. Maybe few things were ever simple.
Caught up in that thought as he was, Sadie surprised him by reaching out, taking his hand in hers for just a moment. "You OK?"
"It was nothing bad on my mind, not really. Just miles away for a minute. You want to head back down?"
"No. I sort of like it up here. You was right. It's real pretty." She let go his hand and turned onto her back again, looking up at the sky. He did the same, and soon enough he found himself peacefully falling asleep under those stars, knowing he'd wake to what felt like this new chance to get it right.