Arthur Morgan was twenty-three the last time he wore a short sleeved shirt.
It had been the first time Dutch and Hosea had been out of camp at the same time since Eliza and Isaac had died, and he supposed they had done it on purpose to keep him from doing something stupid. And, in retrospect, they had been right to do so.
He hadn't been left alone. John Marston had been Little Johnny Marston back then, only
thirteen years old and full of hate for the world. He had only been with the Gang for a handful of months, and had only ever known Arthur to be a pathetic, forlorn drunk. So he hadn't said a word when Arthur curled up next to the campfire, nursing a bottle of whisky in his hand. It hadn't even been noon, but the man's eyes were bloodshot, and his breath reeked of alcohol. When the boy had said he was going to play down at the nearby creek (asking permission without actually saying the words, as he always did), Arthur had merely grunted, sending him on his way. If John needed him, he'd yell, and Arthur would hear him. Arthur'd become rather proficient at shooting while drunk, after all, so he could help John if worse came to worst.
Arthur had sat there for an hour, then an hour and a half, staring blankly at the flickering flames, a pile of bottles sprouting like weeds on the ground beside him. And, the more drunk he became, the sorrier for himself he felt. Why him? Why his son? Why his Eliza? Had he really been such a horrible man as to deserve to lose them, too? Along with his Ma? His Pa?
He was cursed, surely. Everyone he loved died. Ma, from sickness. Pa, hanged. Eliza and Isaac, robbed and shot. If they hadn't know him, if he hadn't been born… they'd still be alive, surely. Eliza, still sweet and innocent but strong, working as a waitress, no outlaw darkening her doorstep. Ma wouldn't have gotten weak, weak enough to die of her sickness. Pa wouldn't have had to turn to stealing to support them, wouldn't have gotten caught and hanged.
Arthur tilted his head back, gulping down the last of the whiskey in the bottle before throwing it down to join the others with a loud clatter. If he died now… if he were shot, or stabbed, or drowned, or hanged, then he wouldn't be around to curse anyone else. No one else would die just for the crime of knowing him. John would be as safe as anyone could be in their lifestyle, protected by Dutch and Hosea. And Dutch and Hosea… he wouldn't be around to ruin their streak of good luck, to drag them down. But he couldn't do that to them, not after all they'd done for him. He couldn't waste the blood, sweat, and tears they'd squandered on him; he didn't know why, but they loved him, and he couldn't hurt him as he'd been hurt, leave them to find his corpse and have to bury him. They'd blame themselves, he knew. The first time they went out without him, left him alone with John, and they come back to a corpse? They'd never forgive themselves. And Johnny, too, he'd be trapped with a corpse for however long it took the two to come back. The boy couldn't ride a horse, yet, and so he'd be stuck at camp until Dutch and Hosea came back. He'd remember that for the rest of his life.
How was it fair, though, that he, a monster who had killed and robbed more men than he could count, lived while they, an innocent woman and a child who had only ever stolen candy from his satchel, died?
It wasn't.
He didn't remember picking up another bottle, or opening it, but he was holding an empty bottle in his hands. Throwing it down, he reached for another.
And then another.
And another.
The flames warped and twisted before his eyes, slowly becoming a pair of crackling crosses. Isaac Beckett - a beloved son , the smaller read, and suddenly he wasn't holding a bottle of whisky, but one of Isaac's toy swords, turning it over and over in his hands. Eliza Beckett - a beloved daughter, led astray . In the end, her parents had been right. He turned the sword, over and over, staring at the crosses crafted from flames. 'A beloved son' his gravestone had said, nothing more. It hadn't spoken of how much he loved running around, pretending to be a swashbuckling pirate from one of Grandpa Hosea's stories. How his face lit up when Arthur would grab him and throw him up on his horse for an impromptu riding lesson. The way he loved with all his heart, loved his Ma and his worthless Pa, his pampering Grandpas even though he seldom saw them.
'A beloved daughter, led astray' . He should have hated her parents for it, but all he could do was feel numb. They had trashed her even on her gravestone, reducing her to nothing more than their daughter, a feeble woman misled by an outlaw. They hadn't bothered to write a single word of how bold she could be, how brave. How she could get a bar brawl under control with only a handful of words, raising her voice without yelling. How she would spend hours sitting with him, cradling Isaac, whispering as they spoke of everything and nothing, careful not to wake their boy. How smart she was, how she was able to be a mother, and a waitress, but also herself like so many mothers fail to do.
The top of the bottle finally came off, and dumped the contents onto his lap. Suddenly he wasn't holding Isaac's toy sword, but a mostly empty bottle of whisky. The fire before him was just that—a fire, tongues of flame with no crosses to climb. Rage burned, white-hot, in his chest, and with a yell that had his and Jack's horses reared and shrieking with alarm, he flung the bottle to the ground. It shattered, shards scattering this way and that, drops of alcohol glistening in the firelight.
"Shit!" he glowered down at the shards, before kneeling down to pick them up. One's jagged edge gashed his fingers and he hissed, drawing back, sucking on his fingers to stem the bleeding. For a long moment, he stared down at the chunk of glass, edge stained red with his blood. That had hurt… really good. For just a moment, he hadn't thought about how sorry he felt for himself, but how badly his fingers hurt. More carefully, he scooped up the curved glass, cradling it in his hands as he sat back down.
It wasn't right, that Eliza and Isaac were dead.
It wasn't right that he was still alive.
It wasn't right that he would eventually forget. Would be able to go about his day without thinking of them, only remembering them every once and a while, when something reminded him of them. A particular shade of green, children mock-sword-fighting, one of the books that Hosea had given Isaac, or any of the many things that were truly them .
So he brought the sharpest point of the glass to his wrist, took a deep breath to still his trembling hands, and pressed down. Skin parted easily, blood dripping down as he began to drag the shard down, from the bottom of his palm to his elbow, a single straight line, moving as slow as he could to make sure the line would be as straight as possible. If it was to remind him of Eliza and Isaac, then it needed to be perfect . He was as far from perfect as you could get, ruined everything he touched, but he was determined to get this one thing right. The shard was stopped just before the crease of his elbow, to keep it from interfering with his range of motion—he still had enough of his wits about him to do that.
He couldn't get the image of the crosses out of his head—every time he blinked, they flashed behind his eyelids—and he brought the shard up again, finding the closest to the middle of his wrist as he could get. Pressing down, the skin gave way, and he drew a clear line across it, gritting his teeth against the pain.
When he pulled the glass away, it was soaked with his blood, and his arm looked to have been flayed. The skin was split open in a nasty way, and he was bleeding like a stuck pig.
Later that day, when Hosea asked where the blood near the campfire had come from, Arthur would say he had caught and butchered a rabbit.
He laid his arm out, flat across his thigh, looking it over. There, through the blood, he could make out an almost perfect cross. Almost , he sneered. Couldn't even do that right. But now, every time he took off his shirt, he would see it and remember.
Reaching for the box of whiskey, he pulled out another bottle, cracking it open on his boot before dumping it out on his arm. It burned , but it washed away the majority of the blood, and what was left in the bottle he was quick to drink. He threw it into the pile before standing, staggering—from blood loss or alcohol, or some mix of the two, he didn't know, nor did he care. But he wasn't sure when Hosea or Dutch would be back, so he returned to his tent, bloodied shard of glass in hand.
They had bandages in the supply wagon, but if he took as many as he needed it would be almost immediately noticed. So he took the shirt he had been wearing, bloodied to uselessness, and shredded it to rags, wrapping it around his flayed arm. Throwing the shard of glass beneath his bed, where it would remain until they picked up and moved camp, shattered to dust beneath his boot as he folded up his cot, he found one of his few long-sleeved shirts, and pulled it on.
When Hosea and Dutch returned, they wouldn't question the pile of bottles, or the shards of glass, thinking them merely from a dropped bottle. They would ask after his long-sleeved shirt, baggy sleeves hiding the bulk of the bandages, and he would say that he had caught a chill from the lake, and they would accept it—the wind that came off the lake could, on occasion, be very cold, after all. Over the next few weeks, his drinking would lessen dramatically, and stop altogether within a few months.
But he never wore a short-sleeved shirt again.