Outlawed

by Anna North

  “From another book,” I said, “that only the boys have.”

  “Really?” Ulla asked. “What book?”

  “It’s called Fruitful Marriage for Men,” I said, cursing myself even as I said it. “It’s quite rare. One of my husband’s visiting cousins had a copy.”

  Ulla took another drink, all the while looking me in the eye.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll have to track it down. Ned could use a copy.”

  I’ll never know who put two and two together, whether it was Ulla or Susie or both who understood that the experience I was describing was much more likely with an outsider than with one of our town boys, young and inexperienced and raised on all the same folk wisdom as we had been. All I know is that when I came back to my husband’s family’s house after my rounds with Mama one evening, my husband was gone and his mother and father were sitting at the kitchen table.

  “You know,” said my mother-in-law, “I stuck up for you.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Mama’s old suitcase, the one I’d used to bring my clothes and medical books to my husband’s house, was standing next to the stove.

  “Malcolm thought you’d be a bad match. He said your mama was unstable. He said if it wasn’t for the charity of your neighbors, your little sister would have died.”

  My father-in-law looked vaguely pained. He had never spoken more than three words to me. It was hard for me to imagine him saying all this to his wife.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I took care of Bee myself while Mama was sick. She was never in any danger.”

  “That’s what I said,” my mother-in-law went on. “And I told him your mama still delivers every baby within ten miles of here. That has to count for something, I said.”

  She waited like she expected me to thank her. I didn’t say anything.

  “Are you listening?” she asked. “I’m trying to tell you why it hurt me so much to find out you betrayed us. To find out you chose to be with another man when my son loves you so much, he was willing to wait another year if that was how long it took.”

  I imagined the conversations they must have had about my failure to conceive, the same ones in which she told him to save himself for my fertile days. I doubted either he or she would have waited a year.

  “I didn’t want to sleep with him,” I said. “I just wanted to give you a grandchild.”

  My mother-in-law rolled her eyes.

  “Well, did it work? Are you pregnant now?”

  I shook my head. I’d started to bleed that morning, while I was mixing mallow and beeswax for a baby’s rash.

  “Of course not,” she said.

  Was she disappointed? What would have happened if I’d said yes? Would we have raised the child, my husband and I, together? Would I have done it again? Sometimes I still wish for that life, and everything it would mean.

  My mother-in-law nodded at her husband and he picked up my suitcase and handed it to me.

  “Leave your wedding ring on the table,” she said.

  That night I had dinner with my mama and sisters like nothing was wrong. Janie and Jessamine were excited to see me and told me everything that was happening in seventh form: how Arthur Howe said his daddy had gone to the high country to join the Hole in the Wall Gang, but everybody knew he had just taken up with a woman two towns away, how Agnes Fetterly had started her monthlies already but nobody wanted to court her because she was an only child, how Lila Phelps had tried to fake hers with chicken blood so her mama would let Nils Johansson come to court her, but her mama caught her pouring the blood onto her bedsheets and made her do all the laundry in the house for a month. It hurt, almost, to remember what I’d been like at their age, not so long ago, a woman-child—my body beginning to change, my mind, like theirs, still full of tricks and gossip. The darkness of the grown-up world just starting to seep in.

  All the time our sisters were talking, Bee was stealing looks at me. I could tell she already knew something was wrong. Bee was eight years old that spring. Mama said we were like two sides of the same coin. When I was her age I’d been chatty, always asking questions. Bee was quiet—she picked up what she needed to know by watching and listening.

  Jessamine and I were washing the dinner dishes when Sheriff Branch came to call. He was friends with Mama and often came just to chat, bringing barley candy or Babies’ Tears for my sisters. He’d tell us stories, too, tall tales about Jesse James or the Kid, the leader of the mysterious Hole in the Wall Gang. The Kid was nearly seven feet tall, the sheriff said, and as strong as three ordinary men put together. His eye was so keen he could shoot a man dead from a mile away, and his heart was so cold he’d steal the wedding ring from a widow or the silver spoon from a baby’s mouth. Unlike the common cattle rustlers who plied their trade in sweat-stained hats and filthy dungarees, the Kid was known for his vanity—he wore a wide-brimmed pinch-front hat in the Colorado style, and his face was always covered with a fine silk scarf.

  The sheriff himself had never personally squared off against the Kid. But he assured us that when they finally met, that villain’s days of riding roughshod over the laws of the Dakotas would be over.

  Susie’s daddy and some of the other men in town told stories about outlaws to scare their children. But Sheriff Branch never aimed to terrify us; he always promised that while he was the law in Fairchild, no outlaw or anyone else would harm a hair on our heads.

  “As long as you mind your mama,” he’d add, winking. “If I hear you’ve been giving her a moment’s trouble, I’ll drag you down to the courthouse to stand trial.”

  I had always loved Sheriff Branch and his visits. He rode a quiet horse named Maudie, and when he came to call he let us pet her mane and feed her lumps of sugar or carrots from the garden. But this time I remembered Lucy McGarry, and I was afraid. I knew I was right to worry when the sheriff refused coffee and Mama’s spice cake.

  “I can’t stay long,” he said. “Maybe the three of us grown-ups could talk?”

  Mama told Janie and Jessamine to take Bee upstairs, and only then did Sheriff Branch accept a seat at our table. He took off the white hat he always wore when he was working, stared at the brim of it, and made as though to brush some dirt away although there was no dirt there. Despite his work, Sheriff Branch was a shy man.

  “I heard there’s been trouble in your marriage,” he said finally.

  Mama didn’t wait for me to answer.

  “It’s Claudine,” she said. “She never liked Ada. She made that house a hell for her. Stress isn’t good for conceiving children, Sheriff. You know that.”

  Sheriff Branch had just one child, a daughter. He would have had no children and maybe no wife if not for Mama. The sheriff was friends with Dr. Carlisle, and had asked him to attend the birth of his first baby. But Dr. Carlisle had little experience with births, and when Liza Branch’s labor stalled, the baby’s head halfway down the birth canal, he began to panic, pacing around the house and muttering to himself while Liza howled in pain. Finally he called Mama, who was able to turn the baby’s head from front to back so Liza could push her into the world. Sophia was born blue and barely breathing, but Mama revived her; another half hour stuck inside Liza, Mama said, and the baby would have been beyond help.

  Since the birth, Liza had been unable to conceive again. Mama had visited many times to give tonics and massages, but nothing had worked—finally, she had told the Branches that perhaps they were not meant to have more children. Sheriff Branch became distant from his wife after that, but doted on his daughter as if she were five children.

  “Claudine can be a handful,” the sheriff said. “But I’ve started hearing complaints. Greta Thorsdottir says she saw Ada walking the fields at night carrying a dead hare. Agatha Dupuy says she and her daughters have all come down with womanly ailments in the last month.”

  Mama shook her head. She looked completely calm.

  “Sheriff,” she said, “you’ve known Ada since she was a child.
How could you possibly suspect her of what those women are suggesting? You know Aggie and her daughters are always coming down with something, usually imaginary.”

  The sheriff nodded. His brows were knit. He kept twisting his wedding ring around on his finger.

  “True enough,” he said. “Ada, you’ve always been a good girl. As long as you stay with your mama, and stay out of trouble, you won’t hear any more from me.”

  He turned back to Mama.

  “Of course, she can’t attend births anymore,” he said. “She’ll have to find something else to do.”

  Bee came down the stairs as Mama was seeing him off.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Mama said, “but all right. She’ll help me at home with the herbs and tinctures.”

  The sheriff stood, taking his hat in his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to make this call.”

  “So why did you make it?” Mama asked. She kept her voice even but I could see how angry she was.

  “Evelyn, you know what I always say is the most important part of my job.”

  “Protecting children,” Mama said. “But my daughter hasn’t harmed anyone. She’s barely out of childhood herself.”

  The sheriff nodded. “And hopefully she never will harm anyone. But if there’s even a chance that she’ll hurt a baby, or keep a baby from being born—I couldn’t live with myself.”

  His voice was cracking.

  “You understand, don’t you, Evelyn? Of all people?”

  “We’ll do what you ask, Sheriff,” Mama said, standing up and moving toward the door. “That’s all I can promise.”

  For weeks I lived under a kind of house arrest. In the mornings I woke, made breakfast for my sisters, then sat and read in my bedroom while Mama went out on calls. Sometimes in the afternoons I’d bake corn muffins so that the house would smell good when my family came home. It was not an unpleasant life, especially after my husband’s house, and I might have lived a long time that way, except that at the beginning of March, the town had an outbreak of German measles. In one week, three pregnant women lost their babies. One was Lisbeth, the mayor’s niece; one was Mrs. Covell, who taught the lower forms at the school; and one was Rebecca, the new wife of Albert Camp, who worked in the bank, and who had been widowed the year before.

  School was canceled; my sisters stayed home. Janie and Jessamine plaited each other’s hair and told increasingly outlandish stories about what they would do once they were allowed outside. Bee sat by the window and watched the empty street. Mama still made her rounds, but when she came home at night she was troubled, and circled the house doing small tasks as though trying to outrun her mind.

  “The general store is closed,” she said, “and the bank. The church is empty—Father Simon visits once a day to light candles for the babies. Even the saloon is deserted.”

  She didn’t say it, but I knew what she was afraid of: too many lost babies at once, and people would start looking for the witch. I was not the only barren woman in town. Maisie Carter was still alive, still young even; if she’d been fertile she would still be having children. But no one saw her, she came into town only rarely and bothered no one. I was the one whose expulsion from my husband’s home was a fresh scandal, whose barrenness was news.

  After a week, though, the sick began to improve. None of them died; the measles that had been so deadly for babies in the womb turned out mild for those already on the earth. The saloon started serving again, the congregants returned to church. The general store and the bank reopened for business. Then Mama came home ashen-faced: Ulla had lost her baby.

  “I didn’t even know she was pregnant,” I said.

  Mama ignored me. “They sent me away,” she said, shaking her head. “They had Dr. Carlisle attending her. If she bleeds out, it will serve her stupid mother right.”

  “Why did they send you away?” I asked.

  Mama looked at me with weariness and sorrow in her eyes and I saw the answer before I heard it.

  “Ulla is saying you put a curse on her. She’s saying you made her lose the baby.”

  “I haven’t seen Ulla in months,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mama. “Now her family will want you charged with witchcraft. And with the others, too, the sheriff won’t be able to protect you.”

  I knew it was useless to argue. I saw already that my time was up and what little I had left would be taken from me. But I argued anyway.

  “You said it was the measles. You always say German measles is dangerous for pregnant women. You tell everyone about it. Why would they think it was witchcraft?”

  “They want to know what caused the measles,” Mama said. “Maybe if it had been just one woman, two, even three. I thought for a day or two we might be all right. But another loss right when people were starting to catch their breath—they’ll want someone to pay, Ada. They’ll want it to be you.”

  We sat on the bed Bee’s daddy had bought for Mama before he left in the third month of her sickness. It was twice the size of her old one, with a heavy headboard made of rock maple all the way from Vermont. Bee and Janie and Jessamine loved to pile into Mama’s bed, but it always made me think of the nights of her sickness, when I sat with her after Bee was asleep, terrified to be with her in the dark when she had become almost a stranger to me, but terrified that if I took my eyes off her she might just give up, just quit breathing the way she’d quit dressing and cooking and getting out of bed. Every night I fell asleep in the chair next to Mama’s bed, and every morning I woke up and she was just the same, until one morning I woke up and she was better.

  “So what do I do?” I asked Mama.

  She smoothed a strand of hair behind my ear.

  “I know a place,” she said. “You won’t like it, but you’ll be safe there.”

  That night as I tucked Bee in, I told her I was going away for a while. She just nodded, those wide eyes taking everything in.

  “You’re going to have to help Mama,” I said. “In a few years, you’re going to have to start learning the business from her.”

  “Janie and Jess are older,” Bee said.

  “Jess faints at the sight of blood,” I said. “And Janie can’t focus long enough to darn a sock, let alone stitch a wound. It has to be you.”

  Bee nodded. She had dark brows like her daddy, who was half Polish, half Ojibwe and handsome—not like my daddy, whose long pale hatchet face I still remembered, though I remembered little else about him. Bee’s daddy had tried with her in the beginning, he really had, but only I could soothe her. And he still sent money every couple of months, and letters for Bee, which was more than my daddy ever had.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll be good at it. Most of it is just listening to people, and you already know how to do that.”

  I wanted to give her a head start, so that in time, when she started to learn in earnest, she’d remember me. I taught her the song Mama had taught me to memorize the seven most important medicinal herbs and their uses. I showed her how to count a pulse and explained what it meant if it was fast or slow. I was halfway through explaining the early symptoms of the six childhood fevers when I saw that her eyes were wandering and her brows were knitted close.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “Aren’t you scared?” she asked.

  “Scared of what, Honeybee?”

  She dropped her eyes from my face.

  “I know people die sometimes,” she said. “Mama didn’t talk about it, but I know Sally Temple died.”

  Sally Temple had lived on the outskirts of town with her husband, who was a ratcatcher. She was very young—just fifteen, some people said—and her baby came so fast that he ripped her all apart inside. Mama was finally able to stop the bleeding, but Sally had lost too much, and she died in her childbed with her new son screaming in the next room. I was there when she died and for weeks I dreamed of her, her little pointed face draining of color, the confusion and then anger and
then panic in her eyes. Then Mama explained to me how she went on, knowing it could happen anytime.

  “Mama says at every birth, death is in the room. You can try to ignore it, or you can acknowledge it, and greet it like a guest, and then you won’t be so afraid anymore.”

  Bee looked skeptical.

  “How do you greet it? ‘Hello, Death’?”

  “She pictures the last patient she lost,” I said. “The death that’s freshest in her mind. She pictures that woman standing right there in the room with her. She looks the woman up and down. She doesn’t say anything, but sometimes she gives a little nod. Then she’s ready for the birth.”

  “Does it work?” Bee asked.

  I had seen Mama enter a birth with fear in her heart, if the baby was early or breach or the mother was sick with sugar or high blood pressure. Mama’s face was as confident as ever but still everyone in the room could feel something was wrong; the aunties’ hands would begin to shake as they wiped the laboring mother’s brow. And then Mama’s eyes would focus on a point in the empty air, and she would nod, and then the whole room would pull together around her, and the birth would go as well as it could possibly go, because she was in charge.

  “It works,” I said.

  I bent to hug Bee, more for myself than for her. She smelled like soap and cedar, just like she had ever since she was a baby.

  “When I’m grown,” she said into my shoulder, “I’m going to come find you.”

  I pulled back to look her in the face.

  “Bee,” I said, “I’ll be back before you’re grown.”

  “Okay,” she said, not believing. “But if you’re not, I’ll get a horse, and a map, and I’ll come help you, wherever you are.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Mother Superior of the Sisters of the Holy Child said I could have sanctuary as long as I accepted baby Jesus into my heart. Baby Jesus had not helped me conceive a child, but neither had drinking four glasses of milk every day or keeping my legs above my head or lying down with Sam or anything else I had tried. I had nothing against baby Jesus.