Evergreen Forevermore

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Sadie Adler would've been just as famous. She was a gunslinger like the real life Calamity Jane and Anne Oakley and she was an outlaw at one point like Laura Bullion, Pearl Hart, Belle Star, The Cassidy Sisters, and more.

The other women of the camp would've probably been less popular but still very intriguing figures to people in the future.

In the newspapers, we see that there are songs about Dutch's boys and books too. Trelawny mentions them being on dime novels. In the future, the pieced together story of the Van Dir Linde gang might've gotten adapted into a movie, similar to "Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid" or "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". They could've gotten biopics, documentaries, and more.

Historians and fans of the wild West era would dig up records, find pictures, and maybe even track down people who were apart of the gang, accomplices to the gang, or victims of the gang. They would try to piece together stories to figure out the mystery of what actually happened to the gang.

People would argue over things that happened in the gang and have their evidence to back it up. Letters written by gang members would become so valuable. If they ever someone come across Arthur's journal, it would probably be considered one of the most valuable pieces of documentation to ever exist for that time period.

The guns of the gang would probably be kept in museums if found. Albert Mason's portrait of Arthur Morgan would be found in history books, same as other pictures.

Dutch would probably be a very controversial figure in history- some would hail him as a failed hero and others would condemn his violence no matter the reason- they wouldn't know what the people in the gang knew- especially in the end. Same with the rest of the gang members.

They'd probably all get romanticized. Hosea and Dutch's friendship, the raising of the boys, Dutch and Annabelle and his fued with Colm, Mary and Arthur, John and his family, Javier being a revolutionary- no one would know the full story.

And then there is Jack- he may live to see the 1960s and 70s and 80s. He may have grandchildren who'd pull him into a theater to watch a retelling of the gang that he was a part of at one point. He'd be amused. He'd think that the actor playing his father was too clean looking, too pretty. He'd think that the movie Arthur was too skinny. He'd think that the man playing Dutch had a funny voice as he tried to mimic the accent. He'd laugh and make notes in his head of the historical accuracy. He'd feel sorrowful at the deaths of the characters- he knew them at some point. And no one at the theater would know that the old man with the rowdy bright eyed boys who brought him there was Jack Marston, the last of the Van Dir Linde gang.

Jack might talk about it to the public. He might do interviews. He might even write a book about his father, the infamous John Marston. Those would be priceless. Even Beecher's Hope might be kept around and visited as a historical site for history goers.

Arthur offers his hand to Mary to help her get on the train, he's helping her going away from him again once more, he's not fighting it. He wants her to be happy and he's aware that wouldn't be possible if she stays or they go back together.

When Mary tells Arthur that he's never going to change, he's assimilating those words; something has broken inside of him once again, something that was already shattered. Mary's giving up on a life with Arthur despite having been away from each other years before this moment.

Arthur's shadow represents the man he could have been if he had gotten on the train with Mary in that exact moment or the many times Mary told him to run away together. He stays there thinking about the life he could have had if he packed the few things he owned and left the gang behind. But loyalty to Dutch and the others is something he cannot betray.

Saying goodbye to her in the trolley station here and in the train station later in the game. He looks at the window as the train goes and stays there once it's gone. It's as if it's written in the stars for her to move forward while he stays still in the present. Because Arthur can't afford to dwell on the past, he can't begin to think about his future. His days were numbered even before the TB, and he was aware of that. It's foolish to expect to live a long, fulfilling life when you've been an outlaw almost all your life, when you've been on the run for as long as you can remember.

Look at that expression, waiting patiently to hear something he already knows. That he's not going to live happily ever after with Mary, that her family will never accept him as he is, and that, at the end of the day, he can't escape the person he has become.

As he says at the end of the video, Mary is the only person that could convince him to give everything up, and she has given up on it and given up on him. Their love story represented in a 1 minute clip; a cowboy who wanted more than anything to be with his beloved, but absolutely everything was against them.

How we say in Spanish, "the train only passes once".

The art for the original soundtrack and the original score are telling an interesting story: the original soundtrack shows us Arthur on the cover itself, and in the inside of the vinyl, are the gang in their prime riding together - all of the iconic imagery we're used to see during the game.

However, the art of the original score is almost exclusively Micah related: the cover is a clear contrast to the original soundtrack (black and white vs. colour, villain vs. hero), but what I personally find most interesting is the art inside of the vinyl:

From what I've seen, the internet seems to be in disagreement over who Micah might be shooting; while it makes sense it is Arthur given the story of the game, seeing him in a pitiful position feels out of character.

To me, this art looks like Arthur's portrayal from Micah's eyes; there are 6 graves, possibly to represent past gang members who died during the game? (aka Sean, Kieran Lenny, Hosea, Molly, and Grimshaw).

Micah was not responsible for all of them, but it was his mission to try and get cut as many gang members as he could "loose."

There's also 7th grave being dug (represented by the shovel), presumably prepared for Arthur, given their relationship and his ending.