The Angel Butcher of Rio Bravo: An RDR2 Story

xxxiv. Decisions, decisions

John.

Arthur had all but ordered him back to camp after blowing the train tracks, but John had his horse gallop past the turn that would take him north to Fairvale and kept on riding. He found reasons to stay out; he collected the camp's mail, reshoed Old Boy at the stable. Even with those errands completed, he still pressed on, running his Halfbred in a neat circle around a small pond, accomplishing a few jumps, shooting at the crows that deigned to squawk overhead, poking a couple of their glossy feathers into the band of his hat.

Anything to stave off that same thrum of exhilarated fear he'd felt on the night he left the gang, a deafening, persistent buzz in his ears. I know love when I see it, the Adler widow had said to him. If he searched his heart enough, was there space for another? Did he want there to be?

On the one hand, Tine intoxicated him; could that have been what Mrs. Adler saw and mistook for love? He remembered the countless times he was left alone to collect himself, Tine brushing off his dominance after they fucked like errant ashes from a fire she alone was warmed by. But he couldn't deny, too, her small kindnesses, dispensed when he least expected them; a brush of a kiss to his frozen cheek in the mountains, after he was sure he was dead, her gentle fingers combing through his hair, drunk in her lap. And when she held him to her, a lifebuoy in uncertain waters, when his son was taken and Abigail was too sick with him to offer any comfort.

But it didn't make him want to fight for Abigail any less. He lived for the sweetness that came naturally to her when he deserved it; for her beautiful face, especially when it was full of love for both him and for Jack, the son they'd made. He relished the crushing grasp of her embraces, how she clung to him renewed just as it seemed like she was about to let go, how she ran for the horses each and every time he returned from a job, to make sure he and Old Boy were among them.

It ain't a question of who I'm loyal to, but who I want to be, he thought. With Tine, John was the man he'd always bragged about becoming to Dutch, Hosea, and Arthur when he was just a boy; a fearsome outlaw who could drink, ride, and shoot with the best of them. And with Abigail, John was the man he dreamed of being when his boyhood self lay down to sleep, in cots and orphanages and one terrifying night right on the street, imagining instead that he was surrounded by a family who loved and counted on him. It was something he'd wished for long before becoming an outlaw, and still wanted, since. Resolution blossomed in his heart and he made for camp, the night sky waning for oranges and lavenders by the time he crossed into Fairvale.

John hitched Old Boy and had barely dropped off the camp's mail with Miss Grimshaw before Abigail thundered toward him, her beautiful features distorted with rage, each chestnut-brown flyaway on static end.

"Where the hell have you been?" She hissed, mere inches from him.

"C'mon, Abigail, don't start," he said soothingly, placing his hands on her shoulders in the beginnings of an embrace. But, she shoved him off.

"You don't start," she said, and then, lower, so that only he could hear it, "Something's off about Dutch."

John rolled his eyes. "That ain't news, 'course there is. He lost Molly, lost Hosea. There's someone leaving every day." It wasn't an exaggeration. Strauss had packed up and left, the gang too far from civil society to moneylend effectively; the Reverend had been missing for days; Trelawny hadn't come around in over a month. And, he thought to himself, morale was pretty low among those who remained, Dutch included.