Reenactment to ending of the film Pearl Harbor (2001)
She didn’t think it would be like this. She didn’t think she’d make those kinds of decisions on a first time thought. She didn’t think her life would be this relaxing and carefree as if nothing in the entire universe could bother her. Mary had gotten everything she wished for. Everything she prayed about getting, she finally had it, and at last she was at peace with knowing who she was, and what her life came to be like with Chris Larabee, the infamous gunfighter, the hard man to get.
The man who grew cold toward her, who never wanted to look at her and believe that she was truly the one he was meant to be with for the rest of his life. To Love her as his wife, and help raise her son Billy and a little girl that just crushed him, breaking his heart in every way. A little girl Chris would like to call his own but can’t because she wasn’t. She didn’t come from his body, his blood, his being but from a friend, a good man he still thought about as the days passed. The bounty hunter he would never forget nor could Mary. A promise he had to take and keep.
One year had passed since that day in late August, and to her feel and gentle breathing, Mary could still feel his presence close by as she stood on the porch of her and Chris’s ranch just staring off into the fields and hills of the land.
She took a hard, deep breath then released seconds later before a rough gust of wind blew her loose blond hair back behind her shoulders. She tightened the shawl around her shoulders and shuttered against the cool winds. She closed her eyes for a moment then opened them to find she had been crying and the tears she had bottled up for so long released and rolled down her cheeks and dropped into the pasture absorbing the salty tang of her tear.
No matter how hard she tried to make herself forget how she felt the day when Chris and the others came back from their gun fighting expedition, with one man gone from the pack. Her stomach churned and her eyes quickly filled with sad, awful tears and she fell. She remembered she lost her balance after she saw the uncovered body taken to the undertaker. And she remembered she wanted to lose everything in her stomach and just cry out for Vin Tanner and the horrible knowing he had no idea she was carrying his child.
One year ago
“Vin! VIN!”
He didn’t want to see it happening. He didn’t want to. Chris dropped down from his horse in hysterics and began to run across Town of Greenfly’s open shooting range. His hopes were screaming inside him that maybe these men around him would lose interest if they saw they’d won the battle and give up, but Buck saw them too and said, “Damn, we got snipers everywhere!” The maps they had studied back in Four Corners had indicated this area of New Mexico was controlled neither by the enemy nor the jail breakers, but this was a no man’s town, and they hadn’t gotten lucky with an easy access in and out.
It had just been the three of them going to the town to retrieve the stolen goods and leave when able without getting a shot fired. Three in, three out just as the thieves were when they entered the Four Corners’ territory.
But someone had gotten hurt, and Vin had fallen victim to the wound. A sniper jumped off a roof to a building and landed right on Vin’s back, slamming him to the ground, breaking a wooden fence in half, and Chris did everything in his power to run across the town without being just the same as wounded as his comrade. And he was all alone. It was just he and Buck off to save the day and now that Vin was hurt…Chris had to take shelter immediately and saddle back up and head out.
Chris flew himself down in the mud and found Vin face down in a puddle of water, his hat crooked to the side, and his hair wet.
“Vin!” Chris said, rolling him over and trying to wipe the mud from his mouth. It was so dark Chris could not tell how hurt he was, or where he might be bleeding.
Vin’s eyes fluttered open; he saw Chris and mumbled, “I’ve taken worse.” Vin’s hand groped to his chest; Chris pulled open Vin’s shirt and found a V-shaped piece of fence, the oak wood, hooked into his side. The oak was the size of a grappling hook, biting into Vin’s ribs, and Chris, in a fit of grief and rage, grabbed the oak with his bare hands and tried to break it away from Vin’s flesh; the sharp oak cut his hands. He pulled his peacemaker from his holster and tried to use the leverage of the butt and barrel to pry the oak. When Vin moaned from the pain Chris tossed his pistol aside and grabbed the piece of wood again with his bare hands, and strained until the oak broke off enough for him to pull it from Vin’s side, though now in the darkness he could not tell if the new blood at the wound was from Vin or from his own hands.
Vin’s eyes squeezed shut, then opened again as he tried to breathe. “You hang on, Vin! You hang on! You’re gonna make it!” Chris said, just before his head snapped forward, crunched from behind by the butt of a rifle. As Chris sank from his sight, Vin saw more gang members, four men. Whether they were part of the group he started to strafed as he came into town or were a fresh gang he had no idea, but they were furious and frightened at the same time. As Buck emerged from a dark alley just a building away from them one of the men clubbed Buck down too, yelling and brandishing their rifles at the gunfighters on the ground, living and dead.
One of the men was the sheriff; he was barking orders. He found the buffalo skin attached to Vin’s jacket and began talking even more rapidly. From somewhere they found a twisted tree branch and used it as a yoke, binding Vin’s wrists to the wood as if to crucify him, and tying a wire around his neck to pin him back even farther.
Chris lay in the mud, slipping in and out of consciousness. He was dimly aware that Buck was there and they were tying him up too. The gang of men rolled Chris over, shook him, slapped his face, but he remained limp and appeared unconscious. It was easy to do; his head felt huge, his spine locked in pain, his arms numb. He couldn’t feel his legs, however, and knew his ankles were wired together. Chris felt strangely detached, as if he inhabited a dreamlike shadow of himself now, floating above the mud and looking down on everything.
Then Chris heard Vin choking. And suddenly Chris was no longer floating and detached, but was a boy again, watching his little brother Samuel being carried by the neck across the Indiana cornfields by an orphanage employee, the boy’s legs kicking in the air, his face turning red as he struggled to breathe against the bullying brutality that treated him as if he was nothing. How much he wanted to stay with him and their mother but she couldn’t support the two of them. Then Chris was no longer a boy full of fury because Sammy had to go away, but a man full of pain, being dragged along the mud, pulled by his ankles like a plow through a field. He opened his eyes and saw Vin ahead of him, being half-carried, half-dragged by the neck by two gang members. Their sheriff pulled Buck along, hands bound behind him.
The town was rocky, and maybe it was the smooth hard rocks mixed among the mud that reminded Chris of his peacemaker he had tossed aside in the darkness, before the gang had gotten him. Had they looked for the pistol? Why would they, if they had not seen him toss it aside? They seemed in a hurry to get off the streets. Maybe the pistol was still there. Chris spread his arms out to widen his trail….
And almost immediately his right forearm slid by something metallic and smooth on the black ground. He didn’t even have to clutch it; the men towing him slid him along until the pistol came right into his hand. The whole world slowed down. Chris gripped the peacemaker, lifted and swung it forward as if moving through the mud, and pointed it at the back of one of the men towing Vin. Chris pulled the trigger and the man’s spine split open. As the man dragging Chris turned around, Chris shot him in the face.
The corrupted sheriff spun, snatching at the rifle he had slung over his shoulder; at the same time the man who had been leading Buck along like a mule shoved Buck onto his face in the mud and unslung his rifle too.
Chris’s peacemaker jammed; mud had worked into its slide.
The sheriff deliberately aimed his rifle at Chris’s head and was pulling the trigger when Vin slammed him down from behind.
The fourth man shot Vin in the gut, then took aim at Chris’s heart…but before he could fire, bullets fired from behind him punched through his chest, and he fell like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
The sheriff rose in surprise, and was slashed across the shoulder with a farming scythe. Josiah---then there was Nathan and Ezra—and Josiah took the chance to finish his job on the sheriff and hacked him to death, then took a great interest in Chris and Vin.
Even before they could free his ankles from the wire, Chris struggled to Vin, moving Nathan aside. Vin lay on his back, clutching his wound as if to hold on to his life.
“Vin….” Chris said.
Vin’s words came in soft spurts. “I’m not…. I’m not….gonna….I’m so cold….not gonna make it.”
“Oh, yes you are. YES YOU ARE!” Chris shouted to him.
But Vin was silent. His eyes drifted shut, and in that moment Chris thought he was gone already. Then Vin’s eyes drifted open, finding him. “Do me…favor,” Vin whispered. “Don’t collect the $500 ransom fee on my body….please, Chris….please don’t.”
The words caught Chris off guard; for a moment he almost smiled. Then his eyes filled with grief. “Vin....listen to me, Vin. Listen…” he grabbed his jacket collar to make Vin look at him. “You can’t die, all right. You can’t!” Chris began to cry, unable to hold it in much longer. “You know why? Because you’re gonna be a father, Vin. You’re gonna be father.”
Vin looked over at Chris, “Mary?”
“I couldn’t tell you…”
A single tear dropped from Vin’s slit open eyes, thinking about a new baby, and Mary, the woman he had no idea he’d fall in love with over the years. A woman he wished about everyday, in this particular moment, he had gotten to know sooner.
“Chris…” Vin opened his eyes a little more. “Take care of her. Take care of her forever.”
Chris closed his eyes, blocking out any future right now without Vin Tanner, “You have to stay and be that father of her child. I can’t be that man anymore.”
“Chris….swear to me you…. do this… for me. Please…”
Chris released a batch of tears and they slid down his dirty face, knowing he had to keep this promise for Vin. Knowing it was his last request. “I swear to you, Vin. I swear I will.”
Did Vin hear? His eyes were closed again. But his head came up; Chris cradled his head in his arms, and Vin reached up with a hand that trembled, but had the strength to pull Chris even closer, so that Chris could hear Vin whisper….
“This is…. your second chance….to make it right…”
“Vin please….”
“No. You’re the father now.”
Chris kept Vin’s head nestled in his arms. Vin’s eyes were open, but Chris saw no light there.
“Vin….” He looked him over, not able to take the truth Vin was dead. “Vin….” Vin didn’t answer him, and Chris began to weep. “Vin!”
But Vin would never answer him again.
Present
Out by the open fields in a sun-caressed valley of New Mexico stands a small stone memorial, with a cross etched in the stone above the name Vin Tanner. Engraved below the name was his poem:
I stare across the solitary plain, each and every dawn.
Always searching for a hero’s heart.
A stranger bleeds, his hopes lay near death
Clutching a tangled wreath to crown a hero’s heart
Chris stood beside Mary on the front porch staring out at that monument in the New Mexico heartland. He held a baby girl in his arms; on the child’s head was an old hat---Vin’s hat.
The girl was always comfortable in Chris’s arms, but she squirmed now, restless to walk, and Chris let her down to the soft summer grass. He took wobbly steps pointing to the shiny red roses newly planted in front of the grave. Chris knelt beside the girl.
“Hey Samantha,” Chris said to her. “You wanna go up?”
The girl had no idea what the man she called daddy was saying. But she smiled, like the first time Vin once did, a smile full of wonderment, joy, and life eternal.
Mary leaned hard against the wooden post, staring at Chris and her baby. She let the wind blow on her and she closed her eyes, thinking about Vin and how he’d always tell her that when she was feeling at her worse to just close your eyes and think of me. She smiled at an ease then looked over at the monument. She never thought of it as a grave, so full of life was the daughter he had brought her—and watched Chris, her husband, lead the girl toward the corral, and knew she had found that one place on earth that she would always know as home.