Outlawed

by Anna North

  “I understand,” I said, even though I didn’t.

  She waved her hand to shut me up.

  “You have a choice,” she said. “You can stay here and try to lead a godly life, or you can go up to the high country, to Hole in the Wall.”

  I thought of the stories I’d heard about the Hole in the Wall Gang, outlaws who robbed banks and wagons all around the territories.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “How could I go to Hole in the Wall?”

  “Soon after we got back to Holy Child, a young man came to us, maybe twenty years old. He asked for sanctuary. We didn’t know what to call him—he refused to accept a Christian name or tell us his given one—so we hit upon the Kid.”

  I remembered Sheriff Branch’s stories about the Kid, a man tall as a pine tree and as strong as a grizzly bear, who once shot a deputy’s hat off his head while riding backward on his horse.

  “Did he rob you?” I asked.

  The Mother looked annoyed.

  “Why would he rob us? We had nothing of value except food and shelter, which we gave him freely. He stayed with us a few months, then he went on his way. But we haven’t forgotten him, or he us. Every now and again I send someone out to Hole in the Wall. You’re young and healthy and stubborn—they might take you.”

  I was not sure what the Hole in the Wall Gang would want with a young girl, but none of my guesses were pleasant ones.

  “I mean no disrespect, Mother, but I can’t be a proper wife to any man, even an outlaw.”

  The Mother smiled a little then.

  “You wouldn’t be a wife, Sister Ada. You’d be an outlaw too.”

  She stood up then, so I stood up with her.

  “It sounds like you’ve already been doing some business with the bookseller,” she said. “He can take you up there if that’s what you decide. I hear his rates are reasonable.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said. “I’m not doing you a favor. And remember, before you go: You may not like this place, but you’re safe here. If you go up to Hole in the Wall, you won’t be safe anymore. And other people won’t be safe from you.”

  I smiled. “I don’t think I’m much of a threat,” I said.

  “Take your prayer book with you,” she said. “I’d like to feel we taught you something.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I rode to Hole in the Wall with two hundred copies of A Young Bride’s Tale by Mrs. Eglantine Cooper (a woman’s new husband turns out to have five brothers, each more strapping and depraved than the last; many acts depicted were anatomically improbable or even impossible but I read it very quickly), one hundred copies of A Season in the Rocky Mountains by Geoffrey Cragg (boring, except for the chapter about killing and eating a marmot), assorted less prominent works of fiction and nonfiction, and fifty-nine copies of On the Regulation of the Monthlies, all of which I’d copied myself. In my satchel I had a copy of Mrs. Schaeffer’s Handbook of Feminine Complaints, which Sister Tom had let me take and which I held close to me, the way Bee used to hold a doll that Mama had stuffed with dried lavender and pine needles to give it a calming smell.

  Three nights I slept hidden among the books while the bookseller drank beer and ate potpie at roadhouses. On the morning of the fourth day he woke me from a dream in which I still lived with my husband, who had locked me in the henhouse until I gave him a child. All around me the hens were clucking and fighting, pecking each other to pieces. One hen was pecked almost clean.

  “You know a Sheriff Branch?” the bookseller was asking me.

  The name frightened me fully awake.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Somebody in there at Albertine’s said there’s a Sheriff Branch from Fairchild offering three hundred golden eagles for the capture of a witch. Said she goes by Ada. Isn’t your name Ada?”

  I tried to think quickly.

  “I’m from Spearfish,” I said. “And Ada’s not my birth name, it’s my convent name. For Saint Ada, the patron saint of midwives.”

  I had no idea if Saint Ada existed, and hoped the bookseller didn’t either. He had a slender, nervous face, and he was looking at me with a new scrutiny, his eyes narrowed.

  “If I was running from a sheriff, I might go to a convent,” he said. “Or I might go to Hole in the Wall.”

  I had no money to offer the bookseller, certainly not three hundred eagles.

  “I told you, I don’t know any Sheriff Branch,” I said, buying time.

  All I knew about the bookseller was that he bought Sister Tom’s books, and that not very many people owned books like On the Regulation of the Monthlies, much less were willing to copy them. Such books, I realized, might be valuable—perhaps worth far more than what Sister Tom was getting for them.

  “Listen,” I said, “say I am the witch he’s looking for. Say you manage to find Sheriff Branch, and you turn me over to him. That’s ten gold pieces you just made. But do you think Sister Tom’s going to be happy when she finds out she paid you to take me someplace, and you sold me instead? There are other booksellers, you know. She can find another buyer for what she’s selling, maybe at a better rate. Can you find someone else to make what you need?”

  I tried not to show my fear as he considered. I thought about whether I could hurt him if he tried to grab me, gouge out his eyes or knee him between the legs and make an escape. But then where would I go?

  “Get back behind the Bride’s Tales,” he said finally. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover today.”

  All that day I crouched in the wagon worrying. On the one hand, if Sheriff Branch was looking for me, maybe that meant I still had the town’s attention, and my neighbors had not yet transferred their anger over to my mother and sisters. But on the other, if the sheriff was searching this far afield—farther from home than I or my sisters or any of my friends had ever been—then he might not stop until he found me. Even Hole in the Wall might not be far enough away.

  Toward nightfall, I heard wooden slats beneath the horse’s hooves, and peeked out the back of the wagon to see that we were crossing a wide, calm river. Past the far bank—powdery gravel that crunched as we passed—the land began to climb. Red rocks jumped out of the prairie at strange angles, and large birds wheeled between the hills, dark above, light below, and songless. The road grew narrow and poorly kept, and for hours the wagon shuddered over rock and scrub in land so wild I saw not even a fence post to mark a man’s claim to it. Finally we stopped, and the bookseller turned in his seat and said, “This is where we part company.”

  I looked out. Behind the wagon was all darkness, the only light coming from a cat’s claw moon.

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” I said.

  “They don’t allow me to approach their camp,” the bookseller said. “Usually they send a scout up to the road to meet me. Tonight they didn’t. You’ll have to find your way down there on your own.”

  “How do I even know which way to go?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s not that way,” he said, pointing back to the road behind us. “So it’s probably that way.”

  He let me take two strips of pronghorn jerky and a handful of dried buffalo berries.

  “Baby Jesus keep you,” he said, not unkindly, and then I was walking in the blackness.

  After a while my eyes adjusted, and I saw that to my left the roadside fell away into a silkier, deeper black, a valley whose depth I couldn’t measure. I kept close to the right, on the rocky margin where the road met the hill. I heard the hoofbeats of the bookseller’s horse in the distance, then nothing but the sawing of summer locusts and the pounding of my own blood in my ears.

  The road seemed to wind down toward the valley floor, and after a while the hillside gave way to flatter land. I felt a chill in the air and a change in the shape of the darkness; I saw the stars reflected in the still surface of a pond. I had not had a drink of water since the bookseller had come back from the roadhouse that morning.
I knelt with cupped hands. The pond tasted like dirt but I drank deep. I sat on the soft ground by the water’s edge and ate the berries and one of the strips of jerky. A frog hopped away from me, its croak like a plucked string. Then I heard the rustling of something much larger in the tall grass, something that scared more frogs into the water and sent a duck flapping and quacking into the air.

  Mama always said wild animals were afraid of human voices, so I shouted and waved my arms. But in town the only wild animals were black bears and the occasional coyote—out here could be grizzlies and wolves and mountain lions. I had been walking for what felt like hours and I had seen no sign so far of any human life. I began to wonder if the bookseller had lied to me, if it had always been his plan to collect my books, drop me off in the middle of nowhere, and move on.

  “Hello?” I called.

  Nothing but a scuffling in the scrub near the road, more night animals fleeing or approaching. I began to run. I called and ran and ran and called until my throat was hoarse and my legs were spent. Then I knelt on the road—by now a horse track just wide enough for my two knees together—and gasped and ate the second piece of dry jerky, and ran and called some more.

  My throat was scraped raw and my whole body aching when, out in the black to the left of the road, I heard someone playing a fiddle. The music was lively and dreamy at the same time, a tune I’d never heard but that reminded me of stories Mama told us when we were very little, about pirate ships in the time before America, about elves and goblins meeting at midnight in the woods. I was afraid my senses might have left me and I might be dreaming or imagining the sound, but with nothing else to guide me I had no choice but to follow the song.

  I scrambled down a steep hill and through thick brush that scratched my legs, but the fiddle grew louder, and soon I saw a flicker of firelight in the distance and even heard voices shouting and laughing. A few minutes more and I saw the fire, tall as a man and wide as a wagon, and the fiddler, standing in its light, eyes shut and face upturned as though in prayer, bow hand moving furiously. The fiddler was black-haired and brown-skinned, and garlanded head to toe with wildflowers, black-eyed Susans and bluets and sweet William. I took a few steps nearer, not sure how or if I should announce myself, and against a tree not ten yards from my shoulder I saw two people kissing and touching each other with a hunger I remembered only dimly from the early days of my marriage. The woman was short and wide-hipped, with thick dark hair and a crown made of flowers. Her lover was tall and slim and pale, his fingers in her hair almost delicate in their movements.

  I ducked behind a tree; I knew enough not to surprise a pair of kissing strangers in a place I’d never been. Peeking out around the trunk, I could see the shadows of dancers cast giant-size by the firelight on the ground below, and then the dancers themselves: a tall man in a buckskin jacket trimmed with bells, and a woman in a calico dress with her hair in two neat braids. The woman, in particular, was a masterful dancer, leaping and twirling in her partner’s arms and then, when he released her, turning a series of backflips that had even the lovers turning around to cheer. When she finished her acrobatic routine she landed as easily on both feet as though she’d been playing hopscotch, her face in the light of the bonfire both serious and full of joy.

  Finally, sitting in a wooden rocking chair at the edge of the firelight, I saw a handsome, dark-skinned person dressed in a top hat and tails like the mayor of Fairchild wore on festival days. Flowing around this person’s shoulders and down onto the ground below was a cape made entirely of flowers, yellow and orange and blue and purple, so large and complex that it must have taken many days and many hands to stitch it all together.

  The person was drinking from a champagne glass, and when the dancer with the bells approached to refill it, and both leaned a little into the firelight as he poured, I saw that the person’s hat was a Colorado pinch-front like the one the Kid was said to wear. The person took a sip, laughed at something the dancer with the bells said, and gave a theatrical roll of the eyes. Was this the Kid, and these people his gang? Or had I stumbled upon some other group celebrating in Hole in the Wall territory? I was planning how to approach to resolve these questions when someone grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me into the firelight.

  “Look at this,” she shouted, a redheaded woman with a brightly made-up face and the low-necked, full-skirted dress of a showgirl. “I’ve captured an infiltrator!”

  The fiddler stopped. The dancers stared. The couple turned from each other’s faces to look at me.

  “I’m not an infiltrator,” I said. “My name is Ada. I come from the Sisters of the Holy Child. The Mother Superior sent me. She said—”

  The person in the cape set the champagne glass down in the dirt. “Agnes Rose, be neighborly. I’ve been expecting this young lady a long time.” The person stood and extended an elegant, long-fingered hand.

  “Sister Ada, welcome to Hole in the Wall.”

  “Are you the Kid?” I asked.

  The person laughed, a full and mellifluous sound.

  “I have gone by many names,” the person said, “but that is the one by which, today, I am most commonly known.”

  “And the others?” I asked. In the stories I’d heard, the Kid rode with a gang of at least a dozen strong men—hardened outlaws, the reward for whose capture was five hundred gold eagles each.

  “We are as you see us,” said the Kid, arms spreading wide, “in all our glory.”

  “Who is this?” asked one of the lovers, the woman with the flower crown. “You didn’t tell us anything about a new recruit.”

  “That’s because she’s not a new recruit yet,” the Kid said. “I told the Mother we’d receive her as a guest, and consider whether to keep her on.”

  “And you didn’t think maybe you should tell the rest of us?” she asked. “If we do keep her, that’s one more mouth to feed, and one more person riding around the territories on our horses, getting spotted by ranchers and lawmen and who knows who else. And that’s if she’s trustworthy. How do you know she’s not one of Sheriff Dempsey’s people? After what you pulled last month, he’s sure to have bounty hunters on us.”

  “I like the look of her,” said Agnes Rose, the one who had dragged me out of the dark. “I could teach her a thing or two. You ever play cards, convent girl?”

  “I’m not teaching her how to ride,” said the acrobat. “It took me three months to teach Aggie and she’s still terrible. I’m not going through that again.”

  The Kid stood, flower cape swirling in the night breeze.

  “Cassie, Lo, my comrades, my friends,” the Kid said, “do you remember what Christ says in Luke about judgment?”

  “It’s not Sunday, Kid,” said the woman with the flower crown. But the others had gone still and silent, as though on command, though no such command had been uttered.

  “ ‘Judge not,’ ” the Kid went on, “ ‘and ye shall not be judged. Condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned. Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.’ ”

  Though high, the Kid’s voice was rich, loud, and soaring, fit for a great cathedral. The woman with the flower crown looked on in frustration.

  “ ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you,’ ” the Kid said, “ ‘good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.’ ”

  The Kid turned to the woman with the flower crown. “Whenever we’ve had a new mouth to feed, haven’t we found the means to do so? And haven’t we always gained more than we laid out? Look around, Cassie,” the Kid said, gesturing at the champagne glasses and flowers. “Good measure, wouldn’t you say?”

  “We’ve had a run of luck,” said Cassie. “But if we keep growing—”

  The Kid went to Cassie and lifted her up by both hands, danced her around the fire.

  “If, if, if,” the Kid said, one arm around Cassie’s back, the other leading her by the left hand. “ ‘Suffic
ient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ Cassie. ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow’ ”—the Kid dipped Cassie low and her flower crown slid into the dirt—“ ‘for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.’ ”

  The Kid released Cassie, bent to retrieve the crown, dusted it off, and replaced it on her head.

  “You’re right, of course,” the Kid said. “You’re always right. We must be judicious in our growth, we must be cautious in our charity. Tomorrow we’ll decide what to do with Sister Ada here, whether to make her one of us or send her back out from whence she came. But tonight—surely tonight we can spare a little champagne for our guest.”

  Cassie looked at the Kid with a helpless expression—exasperated, affectionate, resigned. She rose, disappeared into the dark, and returned with a bottle and a glass.

  Mama had always told me never to drink anything offered to me by a stranger, but I was thirsty and exhausted and confused and I took the glass and drank. I’d had champagne only once before, on my wedding day, and this was different—sweeter, spicier, with a strong poisonous scent like paint thinner. I drained the glass and Agnes Rose cheered. She took the bottle from Cassie and refilled my glass. The others seemed, if not to accept, then at least to ignore my presence. The fiddler began to play again, slower this time, and the dancer with the bells began to sing in a rich contralto, very beautiful, with humor and sorrow in it.

  O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?

  O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,

  That can sing both high and low.

  Trip no further pretty sweeting.

  Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,

  Every wise man’s son doth know.

  That’s the last thing I remember clearly from that night: the dancer’s mournful, beguiling voice, the bells on that jacket glinting in the firelight.

  When I woke, the sun was already high in the sky. I was lying on top of a bandanna quilt below a sloped ceiling of knotty pine; reaching up, I could brush it at its lowest point with my fingers. As I gathered my wits, I saw I was on a kind of lofted sleeping porch, so narrow that if I rolled to one side I would plunge down into the great room below. Wooden beds lined the porch, some made up and some disheveled; below in the great room were more beds and a cast-iron stove and a long couch over which was draped the Kid’s flower cape, its colors beginning to fade. Heavy-shuttered windows on the ground floor let in the late-morning light. Both porch and great room were deserted.