Chapter Text
On November 12, 1918, Strawberry, Big Valley got word of the armistice agreement. On November 13, two days after the rest of the world, so did Arthur Morgan and John Marston. The war was over.
It changed nothing, of course. They still knew no more than they did from their last letter. Jack had lice and two broken fingers, neither of which were on his trigger hand. He remained unbeaten at all betting games, and both of his buddies from training camp were still breathing, though Spud had been shipped off to the hospital after a gas attack.
But their steps were lighter, their banter easier, their days happier.
When they got his letter saying he was finally coming home, he also said he had a surprise.
On March 21, 1919, Jack Marston parked his car in front of their house and opened the passenger side door for a petite redhead.
“This is my wife,” Jack had bobbled proudly on the word, “Nora. Nora, this is my father, John, and my Uncle Arthur.”
Nora had pincurls, a slight stammer, and a sweet smile. She had been a combat nurse for the British Army, and Jack had met her while visiting Spud in the medical tent. She had been taking a smoke break out back at the same time he had, her hands bloody and shaky, her mouth profane. She had just watched a failed operation on a kid who barely looked old enough to enlist.
“I didn’t make a very good impression,” Nora explained. “I… apologized.”
“I told her if I lived to the end, I’d come find her in England and let her make a better one.” Jack was sheepish. “There’s a lot of Noras there. It took a while.”
The story would have been too sickeningly sweet for most people, but for the two old fools who had been hungry for the sight of their boy, it was a fast favorite.
Jack and Nora stayed nearly a month, and if the young lovers had any secrets from each other, Arthur and John never stumbled upon them. She called John “Pa” too, and some mornings, in the barn, she had on John’s hat, pulled from the bedside table, worn as casually as any other.
It was hard to see the couple go, the kind of hard Arthur and John liked, like saying “Catch you later” to Bonnie MacFarlane Walters.
In December that same year, they sent a letter to Canada. Jack had called in some favors with some buddies from the service and had gotten in touch with a Charles Smith who just might be a grizzled old outlaw. They worded the letter a little recklessly, using their real names, taking a risk in hopes of a reward.
Charles Smith wrote back, and within a few weeks, they had gotten themselves train tickets and paid the Strawberry shopkeeper’s son to watch the farm.
When they got off at the train station in Saskatchewan, Arthur and John saw him at the arrival bench. His braids had gray threaded through, his skin lined with new wrinkles, but his face was the same they had known.
“Arthur,” Charles said it with all the affection of a time gone by. They hugged for a long time.
It was the month-long vacation none of them had ever had before. They met Charles’ wife and their two children, smart, quick-tongued girls. They fished for Northern Pike in frigid waters, talking in the long stretches between bites, and went to see The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the local cinema. They argued over its merits while drinking late-night coffee.
They told Charles what happened to Javier and Dutch and Abigail. They told him about their farm and their horses. They told him about Jack and Nora.
They shared the guest bedroom at the Smith house.
In 1921, the next phase of their lives began with a sharp, piercing cry in the middle of the night halfway across the country from them. Jack and Nora welcomed their first child, a girl named Abigail Elizabeth. Wallace burst with pride, sending out birth announcements to everyone, even Jack’s old employers, the Callahan brothers.
Arthur and John had hung the announcement on their wall with a chuckle, though it arrived after they had already had their first visit from the little family.
Jack brought them another surprise a few weeks after that: the papers he had just signed for a little house in West Elizabeth, near Blackwater.
“I am going to write for the Ledger,” he told them. “It’s a small paper, but it’s a good safe place for Nora and Lizzie and... I just think it’s a good start.”
It was a day’s ride on horseback, less than that by car.
By the time Lizzie was ten and joined by two younger sisters and a younger brother, she had been known to sneak out and make the trip by herself to see her Grampa and Pops. They had bought her first pony, a reliable little paint gelding, and they trusted him completely. They were good with first ponies; they had trained Sarah Grace Walters’ little chestnut only a few years before.
Arthur taught the grandchildren how to ride. John taught them how to milk cows and train puppies. They both read old favorite stories for long indulgent hours and talked Jack and Nora into sleepovers in Big Valley as Christmas tradition. They filled the stockings together with handmade toys and store-bought playing cards. Arthur ate Santa’s cookies on his own.
Their hands got shaky, their knees got creaky, and by the time he was white-headed and bent, Arthur’s tobacco cough became more sinister. The cancer spread so quickly as to be merciful.
In his own bed at home, John holding his hand and whispering the Lord’s prayer, Jack in the bedside chair with tears in his eyes, Arthur said his goodbyes. Nora and the children waited in the living room, having already received their blessings from the old sinner.
At 76, Arthur went first. As he had insisted.
They buried him out by Abigail’s cross and Grim and Buell’s graves. Abigail might not have wanted to be laid to rest beside a stubborn old gelding for all eternity, but it would have suited Arthur just fine. There was no pastor at the graveside, just the family and Bonnie MacFarlane.
John wrote to Charles Smith afterward. Then he decided it was worth a shot and wrote up an obituary for Arthur Tacitus Callahan. Jack edited it for him. John sent it to newspapers from Saint Denis to New York in hopes that anyone still out there might be able to read the kind words about the surprisingly gentle man.
Jack and Nora expected John to fall apart. They both visited more often, spent more nights, insisted they needed Ada and Finn out of their hair at least three times a month.
But John stayed steady. He took extra care of Devil who had grown long of tooth and tolerant enough for grandkids to lead. He still hunted on foot and kept his own table full. They had given up client horses years ago.
When Arthur had been gone a few months, John pulled Jack aside. They sat down after dinner, and John placed the old leatherbound journal they all knew so well into Jack’s hands.
“Listen, me and Arthur talked it over. Go ahead. It’s yours.” John poured himself a glass of whiskey and gulped a shot’s worth down.
“Pa, I…”
“Don’t interrupt me,” John said. “You never wanted to write for a newspaper. You wanted to write books. You wanted to be an author. This is the story you wanted to tell.”
“No, it’s your story, and…”
“It’s your story now.”
Jack stared down at the journal as if it were a ticket to paradise. “Okay, Pa. Thank you.”
It took him a couple of years to write it. Nora complained about the late nights, the bedside lamp burning brightly while he wrote it all out by hand in his own little black book. World War II slowed them down, their Lizzie taking off to work in a factory, bright pink kerchief tied in her hair and men’s boots on her feet.
“Do you think Dutch went crazy before Hosea died?” Jack would ask Nora over morning coffee. “Or do you think he lost his sanity after?”
“I have to do something about the way I’m writing Micah,” Jack lamented to Lizzie as he threw a ball for their pup in the yard. “He’s a mustache-twirling caricature in my work, but that can’t be how it really was.”
“I don’t want to make the connection between Arthur and Ma seem like a romance,” Jack explained, asking Nora to read over yet another revision of a fishing scene.
By the time he finished the third draft, he asked his father if he wanted to read it. John declined.
“I’m sure you did a fine job, but I lived it. You don’t want me picking at what you’ve done,” John said.
He asked his other father to read it, and Wallace pronounced it would be the next great American novel. He might have been a little biased.
In 1946, Jack got a publisher for his novel who would agree to keep his identity secret. In 1947, the little Western debuted to little attention. It began simply,
This story is all true. Names cannot be changed to protect the innocent, for there were none. It was an outlaw’s west, and Arthur Morgan was the best shot in the famed Van der Linde gang.
But not long after its release, The New York Times wrote a review about its dubious reliability, said “J. Marston, whoever he really is, writes lies dressed in the poorly-made costumes of truth. No one should read this spurious rubbish.”
Thanks to their scathing indictment, Red Dead rose to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there. Jack batted away requests his publisher forwarded to him for motion picture rights. He even ignored a letter from the head of Columbia Pictures promising him John Wayne for the part of Arthur Morgan.
“It can’t ever be a movie,” Jack explained to Nora. “They gave me the story to tell, not anyone else.”
She understood.
A few years later, John Marston dropped dead of a heart attack in his own kitchen. The attending physician Jack called said it would have been instant. The old outlaw was 80.
His family laid him to rest next to Arthur, but it was hard to shed many tears. There was no one left who had ever known a world where Arthur Morgan and John Marston weren’t together. Jack knew somewhere they were glad to be reunited.
He and Nora sold their house and moved onto the Owanjila property.
The Marstons were happy there, just as the man who built it had been, just as the man he had built it for had been. They worked every day to live up to its legacy of love and redemption.
Sometimes Jack would have sworn he could hear the song they taught him all those years ago, whispering through the purple-flowered fields as he rode the property. Of course, he knew that meant he was a fool, for he didn’t even recognize half of the voices he heard singing,
“I’ve rambled and trampled this wide world around, raising hell with the gang that’s where I am bound.”
Jack liked to hum along.