Ring-a-ding, baby!

Courier, hiding in the shadows and about to assassinate him:

Jack, sad and depressed and bitter and alone in the run-down ruin of Beecher’s Hope, finding the journal Arthur and John ended up sharing. Reading it. He doesn’t remember much of what they talk about, he was only four, but there are very faint memories of moving a lot. Names that seem vaguely familiar.

It becomes a bit of an obsession with him. Like vengeance but a little lighter, a little more hopeful. He transcribes everything in the journal because the thing’s falling a part a fair bit, and then starts trying to figure out who these people are.

One thing leads to another and suddenly he’s running around to Valentine and Strawberry and Blackwater and Saint Denis, or the places that hold the historical archives of those towns. He’s pawing through paperwork and going through slides of newspapers finding scraps about the Van Der Linde Gang. 

He finds out where Mary-Beth is first, since she’s a writer with a mailbox for fan letters and official correspondence. He writes her a letter that he’s rewritten a hundred times or more and gets one back within a week bubbling with joy and excitement and inviting him to meet her. He gets a haircut, shaves, takes a bath. He didn’t do any of those things much before but recently he’s found it’s easier to get into places if you don’t look like a deranged hobo.

Mary-Beth is beautiful and elegant and kind and has an excellent memory. She tells him about Arthur and John and Dutch and the gang. She remembers Kieran fondly and Lenny and Hosea with grief and love and Micah with disdain. She tells him about Miss Grimshaw and Pearson and Karen and Javier and Bill. She directs him to Tilly, who she keeps in touch with.

Tilly is older now, but still kind and understanding and with no patience for nonsense. She’s married to a good man with two children who scurry underfoot as she and Jack talk about the gang. He’s taking notes. He’s always taking notes. Sometimes he forgets, he’s so engrossed in what she’s saying, but she’s good about gently reminding him to. She directs him to Reverend Swanson.

The Reverend’s the easiest to find but maybe the hardest to get a hold of, being a respected reverend with a large congregation, but when Jack sheepishly approaches him after a sermon, he enthusiastically ushers the young man into his office. Swanson wasn’t young during the heyday of the gang and he’s old now, his red hair and mustache grayed out and joints achy enough to need the support of a cane but he’s still remarkably sharp.

Reverend Swanson and Jack talk for a very long time about more than just the gang. Jack didn’t tell Mary-Beth or Tilly about Ross and the riverbank. He told them about Uncle and Abigail and John but not Ross. Not Ricketts or the family he left as broken as his own out of spite. He tells Reverend Swanson though. And Reverend Swanson takes the same stories that Tilly and Mary-Beth told, the ones that Abigail and John were too heartbroken or angry about to tell, and turns them into words of encouragement. Faith. Hope. How men with violent pasts can move past them, live good lives, redeem themselves, live and die with honor and dignity. He recites a piece of scripture he would say often to the gang, eyes a little soft with memory and sadness and wistfulness. 

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings of eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.”

Will you read me that passage Reverend Swanson used to read? You remember that?

Jack Marston did a lot of things after his father died, and a lot of things after his mother died, but he never cried. He’d had to be strong for his mother, so he’d grit his teeth and blinked past them and by the time she’d died and he’d buried her next to John on the hill above Beecher’s Hope, they’d all fossilized in his chest, locked at the base of his throat like a scream. 

Here, though, he feels something snap like a wishbone in his chest, and they just spill out.

“Jack?” Reverend Swanson asks gently.

“I couldn’t remember it,” Jack says. “M-Mama asked me to read that and I… I couldn’t remember.”

That’s not quite it but it’s close enough. Reverend Swanson seems to have some experience with men like Jack. He smiles and nods and reaches over and takes Jack’s hand in his and lets him weep.

Charles is harder to find, in a reservation far up north in the Canadian Yukon. People there aren’t terribly interested in telling him where Charles lives and don’t really seem to buy that he’s an old friend, so he just asks them to let Charles know where he’s staying. 

Charles finds him a day later, still a bear of a man, still surrounded by this air of silent, simple serenity. Jack wonders if he’ll ever be able to do that. He doubts it.

Charles speaks softly and simply. He doesn’t gush the way Mary-Beth did or meander the way the Reverend did. He doesn’t beat around the bush or shy away from harsher memories. The treatment of the Wapiti tribe is still a bitter thing, something sharp around the edges that Jack hesitates to press, but he offers details the others didn’t have. He was a rider when the others were at camp. 

Like with Reverend Swanson, Jack feels an instinctive need to speak. To tell Charles things he didn’t tell the others out of shame or fear or a desperate need to forget. Maybe because Charles offers details like that of his own, things that he clearly doesn’t enjoy talking about but because it’s Jack…

“I killed Edgar Ross,” Jack says quietly when Charles mentions Hosea. Charles pauses.

“Why?” He asks, and that brings Jack up short.

“Because… because he killed my pa!” he stammers. “He hunted us down and, and…” Bile rises in his throat, that old scream that he didn’t let out, the smell of blood and his mother’s sobs and the screams of horses and guns and…

“Is it over now?” Charles asks, cutting off his thoughts easily. Jack doesn’t know what to say. Charles smiles slightly, sadly. “Let it be over now. It’s what they wanted for you.” 

Jack feels tears tearing at him again but this time he fights them back.

“You deserved better,” he says, his throat tightening and betraying everything he’s trying to hide. “You all deserved better.”

And he finds that he isn’t just talking about the Van Der Linde Gang,  who all died somehow, either grandly or softly or in some small, dark way that left them waking up at night in a cold sweat. He’s talking about the Wapiti Tribe, and Eagle Flies, and Rains Fall. He’s talking about Beau Gray and Penelope Braithwaite. He’s talking about those legendary gunslingers who lived on the run or died in the dirt. He’s talking about Lyndon Monroe and Thomas Downs and Luisa Fortuna and Nastas and everyone but himself, who was too stupid to let things go, too stupid to do what his mother begged him to on her deathbed and just find a quiet place to live and grow old and die.