Chapter Text
He watched his daddy hang.
A part of him hoped the old man would end with some kind of pride. Show some spine. Jut his chin at the sky and meet his maker like a man. But the bastard was whimpering by the end. Snot and tears all running down his face. Eyes wide and white. Begging the sheriff not to throw the lever. Promising all sorts. Making up all kinds of nonsense to try to save his sorry hide. Didn’t even look down at the crowd to see Arthur there. Probably would have tried to barter off his own son in exchange for his life if he had.
Arthur figured maybe that’s when you really saw what a person was made of - what stuffing they had inside of ‘em – right at the end, with nowhere to run. And, at eleven years old, an angry, choking lump in his throat, he made a promise that he would never go out like this. He’d keep himself a little dignity, keep a little fight in him to greet the reaper with.
He watched his daddy hang, and it was no different from any other hanging, except the man’s neck didn’t break right away and there was that awful long minute of struggling with the crowd holding its breath all together, waiting for the eyes to bulge and the tongue to turn black and the legs to stop kicking.
Arthur didn’t cry. He might’ve, if that corpse had suddenly taken breath again; got up and gone back to being his shit of a father. But to see the man’s glassy eyes staring up at the sky was like a good riddance; like an exhale. This world was a better place without Lyle Morgan in it.
The boy should have felt free. Should have felt something. But he still wore a patchwork of bruises from the dead man’s fists and they wouldn’t fade for another week or two, as if the old bastard was still taunting him from the grave. He could still hear that low voice, full of gravel and spite, even as he turned his back on the scaffold. Calling him out. Cursing his name for a coward and a traitor and a murderer:
You ran, boy. You saw them comin’ and you let ‘em take me. Ran like a dog. You’re the reason I got the rope. You’re the one who killed me.
Maybe it was true. Arthur couldn’t tell which way up anything was any more. If there was that much difference between right and wrong. If stealing counted if you were starving. If it was possible to still feel a primal kind of love for someone even while you hated ‘em with all your being. If killing someone and simply letting ‘em die amounted to the same thing.
There was water in his eyes, now, even though he tried to scrub it away. Behind him, he could hear the lawmen loading up his daddy’s body into a barrow and the thump of lifeless flesh sent a rush of bile up into his throat. He coughed, almost choked on it, and spit up into the dirt, bent double, hands braced on his knees. The crowd broke up around the boy, giving him a wide, distasteful berth. He knew he must look a mess and stink worse. Told himself he didn’t give two shits what anyone thought but still, it was a naked feeling. Being watched. Judged.
He looked up, feeling the crawl of eyes on him, and right into the face of a man on a tall black mare. Arthur readied himself to scramble out the way, expecting the whip, or a kick, or a harsh shout telling him to get the hell out of the thoroughfare. But the man just sat there, staring at him with a mild, curious kind of look.
“You alright there, son?”
The boy scowled and spat again, waiting for the churn of his stomach to calm. Ain’t nobody’s son no more.
“Don’t look the type to get queasy over a hanging,” the man observed. His gaze tracked thoughtfully across Arthur’s black eye, the dried blood caked on his collar, the swollen split where his lip had busted against his teeth; the last beating his daddy would ever give him – still fresh from a few nights before – and all because they’d run out of tobacco.
The boy didn’t reply. Gave his head a single shake, afraid to meet eyes with the soft-spoken horseman. There was a danger about the stranger, for all his finery – the tailored waistcoat, the silver pocket watch, the neatly-trimmed moustache – something of the wilderness in that unbroken stare, the way a wolf watches its prey. A lawman, maybe. Or a bounty hunter. Maybe something worse.
Arthur braced himself to run. He should never have come to see the hanging. Should’ve cut loose the moment the law had grabbed his daddy, kept on running, left him all the way behind and never looked back. But he had to know it was really over. Had to see them put the man in the ground, deep down, where he couldn’t hurt nobody ever again.
“You knew him,” the man decided quietly, glancing over at the body in the barrow. It wasn’t a question.
The boy forced himself not to look, too. “No, Sir,” he managed.
“No? Well…” The stranger gave a lazy kind of sigh, “I did.”
And Arthur found himself fixed in place with fear, not sure if he were about to piss his pants or pass out right there in the street. It was all he could do to try to keep breathing, short and fast, in and out, like a coney twitching in the grass, hoping it might turn invisible if it stayed still enough.
The man leaned forward over the pommel with a creak of leather, pointing over Arthur’s shoulder. “That there dear departed soul was one Lyle Morgan,” he said, pretending not to notice when the boy flinched at the name, “Knew him a long time back. Going on a decade, in fact. Had himself a pretty wife. A little infant child. Was savin’ up for a patch of land…”
A brief, sorrowful expression passed over the man’s face. Deepened when he looked back down at the boy. “Seems like he got himself in a whole heap of trouble since then, huh?”
The boy still couldn’t move. He kept his eyes on the ground, on the horse’s shuffling hooves. He knew when to stay quiet. When to listen. Some men just enjoyed the sound of their own voice. His daddy had been that way, too, except mostly he liked to shout. This one didn’t need to – he commanded attention like a preacher, with a deep, smooth baritone that you felt in your chest more than heard it.
“Always was a hot-headed bastard,” the man continued, “A little too heavy on the drink. Little too short on temper. Quick to use his fists...” His eyes flicked over the boy once more – a cool, disapproving appraisal – his voice slow and careful. “Some say that’s how he lost his wife. Or maybe it was a fever. I don’t rightly recall now.”
Arthur bit his tongue so hard he tasted blood.
The horseman gave another sigh. “Either way, a loss like that? Well, it’ll change a man. Turn him cold, if he’s not careful. Make him weak.”
He practically spat the last word, which made the gentleness of what he said next all the more startling: “You know, it takes strength to stay upright when this world beats you down, son. To keep looking for beauty when all you’re shown is dirt.”
A heavy silence followed, as if the man was waiting for an answer. The words were so pretty but they somehow hurt, too.
“Yessir,” the boy whispered. His heartbeat flapped in his chest like a fish out of water.
“You know what they got him for?” the man asked, all conversational-like, as if he hadn’t just told the boy the story of his own life.
“Nossir,” he lied.
“Grand larceny,” the stranger proclaimed with a scathing laugh, “As if that son-of-a-bitch was ever anything more than a petty thief. Heard he got so drunk after hitting the Baxter payroll the posse could hear him singing The Streets of Laredo from a mile away.”
Arthur swallowed the lump in his throat. He couldn’t tell what kind of man this was, jumping between cruelty and kindness from one word to another. Didn’t know what the joke was – if there was a joke – or if maybe Arthur was the joke.
The man’s voice dropped conspiratorially, “But you know… They’re saying he must’ve had an accomplice…”
At this, the boy’s head snapped up, eyes wide with panic. And that must have been the punchline, because the stranger smiled wide, with his teeth, and Arthur tried to bolt, only to discover a firm hand holding onto a fistful of his collar, locking him in place. He knew struggling would only get him into deeper trouble, catch too many other eyes, so he fought the instinct to fight. Went stark stiff in the man’s grip, his face almost pressed into the flank of the mare, breathing in its musty scent, and the stranger leant right down to talk soft in the boy’s ear, nice and easy, the way you’d calm a spooked horse.
“Now then, son, no need to go makin’ a spectacle of ourselves. Why don’t you climb on up here and we’ll have ourselves a little talk someplace a little less… public?”
The boy had no choice in the matter. The man hauled him up in front of the saddle, caging him in with his arms, and nudged the mare forward faster than Arthur could gather his balance.
Outside of town, the hills looked down over the cluster of buildings; the scaffold at the far end of main street, empty now; the winding path that led to a little shack-church with its yard peppered with crosses. Even from here, the boy could see the freshly-dug grave, waiting like an open mouth for his father’s corpse.
The stranger stopped to let his horse graze for a moment, far enough away that the figures in the town looked like tiny tin soldiers. No chance of prying eyes or ears out here. No one to witness if he chose to let out that wolf behind his smile. But the man’s voice stayed soft and calm – almost apologetic. “I know you wanted to say goodbye. But it’s best you stay clear of there for a while…”
The stranger put a finger to the boy’s chin and lifted it an inch. “All them colourful bruises on your face… Well, they might raise a few questions if you stick around. You understand me?”
The boy nodded dumbly.
“Good boy. I could tell you was a smart one the moment I saw you,” the stranger said, and even though Arthur thought he might be poking fun at him, a blush warmed his chest.
With a tug of the reins, the man set his horse back on the track away from town and they fell into a comfortable trot.
“Now then, son,” the man said, in that same smooth voice that made compliance so easy, “Why don’t you tell me what you remember about the night your pappy stole the Baxter payroll?”
He remembered the afterwards. Remembered his daddy singing too loud, all buoyed up with his own self-importance, and the sound echoing all around. Remembered crouching by a pitiful fire in a copse up near the railroad, wood smoke in his eyes, wishing they’d bought a little food instead of moonshine. Wishing he’d thought to check the tobacco pouch before his daddy found it empty and got his blood all fired up.
Wishing he’d seen the torches on the road sooner.
By the time he noticed it was already too late. His father was deep in his cups – too far gone to get on the horse, but not so far gone he couldn’t lash out with an open fist when the boy tried to pull on his arm. He knocked the child down for the second time that evening and roared out another verse. Never even saw the posse crest the hill behind him until there was a rifle barrel pressed into the back of his neck.
And the boy had run. Like hell. Like the coward his father told him he was. Slipped into the darkness beyond the trees and run blind with tears and terror, ears ringing with snatches of a song that turned into a yell so furious, so full of betrayal, that he expected the earth to crack and swallow him up for his sins…
But that wasn’t what the stranger wanted to know.
And Arthur wasn’t stupid enough to think the man was acting purely out of kindness, no matter how sweetly he spoke.
The stranger wanted to know if there was any money left; anything that hadn’t been collected by the posse; some secret stash hidden somewhere – in the hollow of an old tree, under a fence post, inside a chimney. But there was never anything left. The boy’s father was not a man who knew how to save for a rainy day. For Lyle Morgan, it was always raining, even when the sun shone, and better to spend it while you have it. Better to drink tonight than worry about tomorrow.
The boy didn’t know what the horseman would do when he found out there was no profit to be had. He felt like a ragdoll in the saddle, his bones rattling inside him as they rode on.
But the stranger didn’t seem to be bothered by his silence. He fed the boy simple questions, gently nudging the facts out of him, piece by piece.
“Just the two of you, then?”
The boy nodded.
“Held ‘em up at the bridge, that right?”
Another nod.
“They see you? Or just your pop?”
A shake of his head. He’d been waiting in the woods with the horse, a grimy old cattleman revolver in his hands, wishing and praying to a god he already knew didn’t exist that it would be his daddy come crashing through the undergrowth and not the payroll guards. He’d only ever shot at birds before, and mostly missed them.
“Well, that’s something,” the man sighed. He sounded impatient. The boy cringed smaller in the saddle.
“And the posse caught up before you could hide the money?” One last hopeful interrogation.
The boy nodded miserably. There was a long silence, punctuated by the muted thudding of the horse’s hooves on the dirt road.
“Shame,” the man said at last, and he didn’t sound bitter, or angry – just regretful. “Haul like that – could’ve been a fresh start.”
The boy didn’t know what that meant. Or where they were going or why he was on the man’s horse. How far he might get if he tried to run. How quick the stranger could draw that ornate pistol on his hip. If he’d be joining his daddy in the ground before the day was out.
He jolted as the man lay a warm hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. About your father. Sorry for what he did to you.”
And Arthur didn’t know which part brought on the lump in his throat. Or why he couldn’t stop tears from burning his eyes. Why he cared at all about a father who had clearly cared so little about his own son. Why this stranger had shown him more compassion than anyone he could remember since his mother.
He realised he didn’t even know the man’s name. Tried to ask, but his voice was stuck, and the stranger took it for a sob, squeezed his shoulder and made it all worse with that calming tone of his. “Easy now. You’ll be alright.”
The boy let the tears dry on his face. Too ashamed to brush them away. Too exhausted to do much else but lean into the stranger’s hand as they rode on. He threaded his own fingers into the horse’s mane, teasing out the tangles and burrs, smoothing it down over the mare’s fine neck. It was a peaceful silence, and for a moment he let himself believe the man’s words. For a moment he wished they could just keep on riding – right on into the horizon, off the edge of the land – and the world might never catch up.
But it was only a moment. And moments pass. And the world is always at your back.
The boy hadn’t been paying any attention to where they were headed and he flinched when the squeal of a steam engine split the air. The railroad stretched out before them like a ladder as the stranger steered the horse towards a squat shack of a station at the bottom of the valley.
It was an empty shell of a place – a nowhere place, halfway between here and there – a place for the train to fill up on water and coal and a few scattered passengers. Smoke in the distance and another piercing shriek of steam announced an incoming locomotive.
A man waited by the hitching post, watching them approach – sandy-haired and serious-looking. His eyebrows raised in query when he saw the boy.
“You took your time, Dutch” he said in a dry voice, like cracking twigs. “What on earth you got there?”
The horseman – Dutch, he called him, though he didn’t look or sound like a foreigner – swung himself off the horse and gestured for the boy to follow. Arthur slid down after him, reluctant to leave the warmth of the animal’s back. He ran a hand down the mare’s nose and she gave him an appreciative nudge.
“Lyle’s boy,” Dutch said, in an emphatic undertone that made the other man’s eyes flit over the kid uncertainly.
“They got him then?”
A meaningful nod from Dutch, who was busying himself digging in the other man’s saddlebags.
“And what happened to you?” the other man asked the boy, wincing a little as he took in the marks of violence, the red-rimmed eyes, the sullen lip.
Arthur still couldn’t find his voice. It was buried somewhere in his chest now, and it ached there.
The man called Dutch saved him from answering, pressed a parcel of bread and cheese into his hands and sat him down on the station deck.
“Now you just set there for a spell. Get some food in you, alright, boy?”
The boy ate mechanically at first, then with increasing urgency, in case it might be taken away from him at any moment. The sandy-haired man was still staring at him, and continued to do so, even when Dutch grabbed him by the arm and pulled him a ways away to mutter in low tones they thought the boy couldn’t hear.
“Hosea, listen-”
The other man shook his head wearily. “Don’t have time for this, Dutch. Morgan might’ve distracted them for a while but they’re still on our trail.”
“They’d’ve taken him too, if I’d left him there.”
“Looks like a simpleton to me. Does he speak?”
“He’s had a shock. A hard life.”
“Well, ain’t we all?”
The man named Hosea gave a sigh but his eyes turned a touch softer as he looked back at the boy. “What’s your name, son?” he asked.
The boy swallowed a chunk of bread and it seemed to clear the lump in his throat enough for him to reply, albeit hesitantly: “Arthur?” as if he wasn’t sure himself.
Hosea nodded. “You got any other family, Arthur? Someplace to go?”
The boy shrugged, shrinking into his shoulders. His mother was years in the ground, his only memory of her locked away in a photograph he kept in his satchel. It’d been just him and his daddy for a long while, and even then they’d never had a place of their own – always moving on, always running. And now there was no one and nothing. The enormity of it was too much to comprehend. The boy’s hands tightened around the parcel of food, as if it was all he had left to cling to.
Dutch stepped past the other man and dropped down to one knee to put himself on eye level with the kid. “Your daddy ever run with anyone? A group?”
There had been times Arthur’s father had worked with other outlaws – not quite a gang, more a handful of desperate men who happened to find themselves together – but they were one-off jobs. No one wanted a child dragging behind them, slowing them down. Not even his daddy, it seemed. He shook his head.
Dutch straightened up and turned back to Hosea, palms spread wide in a gesture of helplessness.
Hosea rolled his eyes to the heavens. “We’re not a charity, Dutch,” he said, not even trying to keep his voice low now. “Can’t be hauling a kid around. We need to get the hell out of this damn state. And it’s certainly not fair to drag him right back into a life he just got free of…”
The boy stared at his feet. The sound of the approaching train was building into a thunder. He could feel it through the ground, smell the choking smog in the air. He let the bread and cheese drop into the dirt. They could beat him for it, he didn’t care. They meant to leave him here, anyway.
The two men were muttering together now, most of what they were saying lost under the unholy noise of the engine powering into the station. The one called Dutch looked frustrated. Angry, even. The one called Hosea was calm as a lake but kept one eye on the road, one eye on the boy, like he expected trouble at any minute.
The train rolled in and hissed itself to a stop, cutting off any further discussion, but it seemed something had been decided as Dutch pulled the boy to his feet and began piling things into his arms – a blanket, a waterskin, a couple of tins that’d lost their labels, a pouch of coins. Hosea added the stub of a train ticket to the pile and retrieved the food the boy had dropped, dusting it off carefully and wrapping it back up again without a word.
Dutch took the boy by the shoulders, fixing him to the earth with a stern look. “Now, you listen to me, Arthur. Here’s what you’re gonna do. Three stops down the line, you’ll find a little town called Westbury,” he said, pointing along the train track. “There’s a saloon there. A… ‘house of pleasure’. You know what that is?”
The boy blinked back at him. He’d always been made to sit outside whenever his daddy visited a place like that, but he got the general gist. He nodded. Saw Hosea hide a smirk.
“Ask for Grimshaw,” Dutch continued, “She’ll give you a hot meal. A bath. Somewhere to sleep. Tell her Dutch sent you and she’s to take care of you ‘til you get back on your feet.”
The boy looked from one face to the other. At the stack of gifts in his arms. He didn’t want to start crying again. He wanted to scream himself hoarse. Wanted to drop it all to the ground, stamp it into the dust and beg for them to take him with them. But he was too slow and too dumb and it was too late to say all the things that were bubbling up into his throat.
“You’ll be alright, son,” Dutch said, as he herded him up onto the nearest carriage, but it sounded as if the man was trying to convince himself as much as the boy, “You just need to have a little faith.”
The words rang in the boy’s head like a bell. How? And faith in what? he wanted to ask. Faith in who?
And he’d never needed an answer to a question so bad in his life. Never would stop seeking it from this moment on.
He tried to grip hold of Dutch’s sleeve as the man made to turn away, but the train whistle sliced through the air once more and the boy let go, startled.
A smile crossed the stranger’s face and he touched a finger to his hat. “Safe travels, Arthur Morgan."
The great monstrous machine beneath the boy’s feet juddered forward, and it was all he could do to clutch onto his ticket with cold fingers and watch as the landscape shifted sideways and the two figures shrank into nothingness.
And he realised he hadn't even thanked the man. Realised he didn't even know the name of the town his daddy was buried in. Realised then that no good would ever come from looking backward.