Well, you've got your pick. We could look at what happens at the end of the madcap chase to avenge Frank Ross's killer—or we could look at the very end fifty years later, when Rooster Cogburn has been dead for twenty years; Mattie is about sixty-two-years old; and LaBoeuf is about seventy-eight-years old. (Remember from "Narrator Point-of-View," Mattie is reporting mostly on events that happened in 1875, almost fifty years before.)
Aw, fine, we'll do both.
After the Hunt for Tom Chaney
After the blood baths, snake-pit of doom, and harrowing chase scene, it's still not over. Mattie has one more ordeal to pass: losing her hand. Just check out the gritty way she describes it:
My hand was swelled and turned black, and then my wrist. On the third day Dr. Medill gave me a sizeable dose of morphine and amputated my arm just above the elbow with a little surgical saw. (7.315)
Obviously she doesn't complain about this (remember that next time you're whining because you have to clean your room before going to the movies), but she does suggest that it played a role in keeping her on the family land and caring for her mother while her siblings Little Frank and Victoria both moved away. She seems to do pretty well for herself—we gather that she works as something like a land baroness—or one-woman bank—but she also seems to feel some intense loneliness and isolation. In spite of the hi-larious jokes ("I would marry an ugly baboon if I wanted to and make him cashier" (7.337), we realize that Mattie has sacrificed to do what she thought was right by her father.
Remembering Rooster
Mattie tries to keep tabs on Rooster over the years, and the ending includes a rough sketch of his life (see his "Character Analysis" for more). We gather that, like the rest of his life, it was rough and hard. But we can't really tell how she feels about him until we learn that she moves his body: "I had Rooster's body removed to Dardanelle on the train. […] He was reburied in our family plot. Rooster had a small C.S.A. headstone coming to him but it was so small that I put up another one beside it, a sixty-five dollar slab of Batesville marble […]" (7.334).
This is a sweeping, Mattie-like gesture for sure, and it tells us that she feels something like love, or at least deep kinship for Rooster. Is it romantic? Her brother teases her that it is—but we don't know. All we know is that someone must be cutting onions in here. Sniff.
Reaching Out to LaBoeuf
Now let's get into the details. The nitty-gritty, if you will. (We sure will.) Right after we read what Mattie inscribes on Rooster's headstone, we learn that she has never married. She claims this is because she didn't have time. She hints that her missing arm might have had something to do with it. But—since she brings this up right after she's been talking about Rooster for pages, it makes us think she might have had romantic ideas about him. Maybe she's even been waiting for him all these years.
But—then she starts talking about LaBoeuf, all "if he is yet alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be pleased to hear from him. I judge he is in his seventies by now, and nearer eighty than seventy" (7.337). Mm-hm. Mattie admits she found LaBoeuf attractive when she first met him, and this ending gives us the idea that it might be LaBoeuf, not Rooster, who she has romantic feelings for. Either way, we love that the novel leaves open the possibility of a reunion.
Okay, okay we admit it, we're Mattie/ LaBoeuf 'shippers. What can we say? We're romantics.