SLOWLY THE WEST–

it would be awfully silly of them to give up that ghost now, to squander this miracle of a third chance after everything they've been through respectively. there's so much to say, but where to begin? the disappointment mary had expressed in that farewell letter after he'd returned from guarma echoes at the back of his mind, each word as plaintive and painful as ever; the feeling of dread, the way his throat had constricted with swelling emotion. his mind swimming, and then nothing at all.

so, why not go through life together from here on out? and so what if he is charity work? at least he's a work that's wanted and loved at the end of the day, and not just by any old individual, but the woman he'd set himself on marrying a lifetime ago. the one he'd let slip through his fingers time and time again, but if there's one thing he knows he is, it's that he is a fool and he's played the role for most of his life. so why not be her fool?

she needn't explain any further. just the confirmation that he's been yearning for is enough to elicit movement, sure-footed as ever, to meet her where she stands, hand registering hand and slipping palm to palm, perfectly imperfect. he decides not to plant his hat atop his head, but to set it aside, forfeiting it for in favor of both of mary's hands. this is what hosea was referring to so many years ago with bessie, and since then he'd always wanted that for himself.

always at odds with himself.

' well, miss gillis, ' arthur begins, brushing his knuckle against the height of her cheekbone and regarding her with a unique tenderness that is and has only ever been reserved for her and her alone. somewhere within the crow's feet that delineate both of his eyes is that same young man who'd fallen irrevocably in love with her, and never ceased thereafter. never entirely.

arthur smiles lopsidedly, as if harkening back to their yesteryear. ' i'd say you you're awful at quittin' in general. you see things through, and i dunno .. i don't think too many people care to. but then again, what do i know? ' he brushes against strands of dark hair framing her face, and then thumbs thoughtfully over the shell of her ear.

And there, then, is the intercession their paths have led them to, entwined in this moment as they seek for an absolution they have never dared hope for. What sweet, what bittersweet revelation: to know it's been in their hands all along. That to absolve is to wash clean, the way Arthur's words wash over her, the way a simple I'll stay becomes the river she can take her regrets to for a drowning.

But what will the neighbors think?

There are no neighbors worth the mention.

What will Daddy say?

Daddy is in his grave, may God and the Devil do battle over his soul.

What will the word be in town?

To hell with town. To hell with anyone who wants to have words.

The only person in the world whose good opinion matters to her now is Jamie, and Jamie's gone west. If she ever sees him again, he'll be a different man than the boy who set out nigh a fortnight ago. And whatever ruts life will groove into his face, she prays it won't carve the kindness out of him.

It's a kindness he learned from her, mostly, but essentially from Arthur too. She stands still and meets the honest gaze of his eyes then, lets his hands trace her face and lets herself tremble under them but disallows herself the notion of closing her eyes. She looks, instead, at him – into his soul, it feels like, where that selfsame kindness he's often denied himself has tried to blossom time and again. That good man inside him that she's once told him is fighting a giant.

"I would have you." A third time then, for the charm it is. Her hand slips against the nape of his neck, pulls him close. Miss Gillis, he called her in lieu her wedded name, and with her lips on his Mary seals the end of a chapter and the start of a new one.

No, they ain't young anymore; but that kiss is still like a homecoming. He tastes like Arthur. He tastes like freedom. Mary lets him engulf her and then pulls back before she dissolves completely.

Her forehead against his.

He looked like half a god and half a creature made to bend. He held himself tall, all straight and tense and strummed taut, a dignity in bones that had to be bred, not learned. Arthur knew this. Arthur had been taught this – and then the world had moved on. 

That was what they had failed to see, in Gilead fair in the high spires and in cold parlors: that what they feared, had already come to pass. Not for them, no; but for the common folk? Was nobody out here wouldn’t set their watch and warrant on it. And what was bred into bones could be broken, unmade and made anew. 

how strange it is to belong to one place. to be stationary. to belong to only one person of which to answer, but perhaps a piece of him had always belonged to her. how strange it is not to discover himself under some stretch of canvas, the interminable wheeling of the heavens overhead, or laid out upon the unforgiving ground, his bones aching for somewhere gentle to rest his head. his mind rattling with a deluge of unanswered questions.

he doesn't remember precisely when, but at some point he'd stopped sleeping altogether. days bled into weeks and time had been hemorrhaging at such a rapid pace that he had felt as if any second might have been his last. & then came an endless dream, and then a hopeless nothingness, just the pitch of death behind shuttering eyelids.

at the end of it, arthur had considered who he was if he wasn't under dutch's thumb, peddling his rhetoric about freedom and the evils of the modern world. all of those hats he'd been encouraged to wear to the benefit of others, and yes, sometimes even to himself. a prison, he discovered, comes in all shapes and sizes and with a variety of life sentences. like mary, in her own prison for years, living at the behest of those around her and making do with what little she could within the confines of her own station.

' mary, i .. it don't sound unreasonable, don't get me wrong now. i mean, why the hell'd i come all this way—to die on your doorstep? no .. i just .. ' arthur fumbles to pitch the right words, swallows any remnants of protestations that could easily slip forth in the heat of the moment. he begins searching anew, determined to make sense of things instead up giving up.

deepset creases reveal themselves in the lay of his forehead, in the frown lines abutting his wind-chapped mouth. who else knows him that isn't hundreds of miles away or six feet under? with mary, words aren't necessarily a necessity. with mary, he's rediscovered the boy he'd left behind in that field so many years ago, wrestling with a broken heart and wanting something that had never been meant for him in the first place.

arthur wrings at the brim of his gambler out of nervous habit, searching for the known grooves, the nicks, the wear and tear often attributed with living multiple lives, with the grazing of thumbprint. the floorboards upon which he'd been loitering for the past several minutes have apparently grown tired of his indecision and have begun to lament their plight with a more persistent groaning. decide. ' i wanna stay. i would like to stay, if you'd have me. '

sister calderon's words are slow to percolate to the surface. he's ashamed of considering the easy way out, to leave a good woman like mary, a good thing for a conscience that might not ever be clean, as he's come to terms with, but more importantly, a second chance at life.

' i am too .. ' he sweeps his hat from side to side before clutching it again. ' tired, i mean, ' he adds. ' and i just want you to know that i do wanna be here with you. properly with you, like maybe we oughta done, but maybe a little less naive about things? ' arthur laughs breathlessly. ' i just needed to know, i guess, that i'm not some .. charity work or—uh .. just someone to settle for. i don't think you could do any worse. '

This man's haunted me for nigh twenty years, Mary thinks. And I him.

Perhaps it's time to put the haunting to rest. Let their ghosts sort out any grievances they still hold.

But the souls, captained by a present mind?

Like maybe we oughta done.

"We ain't children anymore, Arthur. I believe 'less naive' is in the cards now. Whatever it entails." It's Mary's turn to be predictable, in the way she wrings her hands under the pretense of wiping off the last of the corn starch. Arthur knows her just as well as she knows him – does he anticipate the way she opens her palms to him, a gesture of universal benevolence and supplication? Does he know her words before they come to her lips on account of how they're written all over her face? Does he fear, for a moment, that the same wild gleam in her eye comes over her that burnt him to a cinder in that wildflower field half a lifetime ago?

Not children anymore, she's told him, and stands by it: cannot but. There's a deep-seated weariness in her that only age can spring on you, and – 

Yes, she's tired too.

"You're not charity work." Her voice is low but firm. "Not to me, you're not."

She reckons he mighta been, once upon a time; perhaps not all too long ago if she's awful honest with herself. Mary's been ever a masochist like that; it was Arthur's folly to mistake her cruelty as a weapon pointed at him, and it was her own to not correct him. Now, she's the woman who waits with a rag in her hands when he brings his bloodied footprints to her door.

Age. Perspective. Whatever the opposite of naive is.

It's Mary who reaches for his hand first, gentle so as not to spook him, like she does with yearlings when she first puts a halter on them. "I'd like that." And yet it's her voice that's easily spooked by two little words. "If you stayed with me."

What's done is done and what's said is said and if she knows her Arthur, he won't say more than needs said, but she's ever been voracious in her appetite to express herself. Hence the letters. Hence the wringing hands.

"Only I'm an old woman now, Arthur." Thirty-seven. "I'm tired too. I do wanna settle, only – no, hear me out, it ain't like I'm settling on you, just – with you, maybe. If you stayed. I mean it, Arthur – how could I ever quit you now?"

Here, together, tucked away between the sweeping plains and rolling hills of the homestead that's her inheritance, her life's lodestone. There's horses in the barn outside – and not a day goes by she looks at them and fails to think about the man who was once a boy who raced her for the fun of it, for the joy of it. For the zest of life.

Perhaps she ain't so old after all, if she thinks about that.

It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody’s. You don’t start over. That’s what it’s about. Every step you take is forever. You can’t make it go away. None of it.