"You ever been in some place you couldn't leave but you couldn't stay, both at the same time?" and one for HORSEA. requested.
What came to him was something his father, once-met and forever-loved, had told him.
"The difference between man and animal," Hosea Matthews spoke into the dust-mottled light falling through the colonial windows of Shady Belle, without looking up from the maps of a bank that he had spread out on a large desk over which he stood hunched, "is that an animal will bite its own leg off to get out of a trap. But a man might master the pain and think through it, so that he might come out of it in a wiser manner."
He did look up then. Son, in no way diminished by the absence of his blood in Arthur's veins. Son, on account of the myriad ways in which Hosea saw his teachings reflected in the way the boy wove his thoughts and actions into the tapestry of this world. Boy, because he could never not look at the man and think him that, for all that he raised him and so, in part, counts himself accountable for leading him to where they were now.
Maybe it was staunch optimism blinded by the bonds of trust between them all, but Hosea couldn't shake the grip that perseverance had on his soul. Nowhere had they yet gone where Dutch wouldn't find a way to see them through darker roads, so long as they stuck together. Some had come and gone over the years, Hosea himself among them once, and he wondered if half of the crowd as was with them now might not be with them anymore come year's end … but he did see an end to this troublesome year – and didn't that count for something?
"Don't give up hope yet," he asked of Arthur now, as he had time and time again, and all the more so since Blackwater. A different kind of grief, that – but one he thought he could easily master with years of trust rewarded. But he knew one thing also, a thing life on the road and on the run had taught him: "If you can't stay, though, maybe you can … wander? Go clear your head in the mountains for a bit, Arthur, and come back to us when we need you." Because boy, do we need you. "It ain't leaving if you come back."












