Outlawed

by Anna North

  I was barefoot, I discovered, and the sturdy clogs I’d been wearing were nowhere to be seen. I had no choice but to walk shoeless down the creaking staircase and out to the firepit, where the company had gathered as on the night before, but altogether more subdued.

  No one was wearing flowers anymore. The acrobat with the braids had on a simple dress of brown muslin picked out with white dots; Agnes Rose wore a high-necked frock of sky-blue cotton. The lovers, the fiddler, and the dancer with the beautiful voice were dressed in men’s dungarees and work shirts, and the Kid had traded tails for a wool suit in a slim cut, its jet black clouded only slightly at the hem of the pants with red dust. All sat around a fire much reduced from its stature the night before, a small, tame blaze for heat, not light.

  “Sit,” said the Kid. “Cassie, give Sister Ada some breakfast.”

  Cassie stood reluctantly, went into a smaller cabin next to the bunkhouse I’d just exited, and came back out with a cracked blue china bowl of porridge. It was salty and savory, flavored with bacon fat, and I ate it hungrily, until I noticed that everyone around me was staring. I looked around the circle. It was clear to me now that the dancer with the beautiful voice was a woman: she was tall as a man, with broad shoulders, but I saw the curve of breasts beneath her cotton shirt, and she had a fluid, graceful way of moving that reminded me of some of the older girls back home, the ones who had already had one or two children and seemed more at home in their bodies than I would ever be. Looking at some of the others, I was not as sure. Whispering something to Agnes Rose, the fiddler looked one moment like a roguish young man, the next like a gossiping girl. And I saw now that the person I’d taken for Cassie’s beau wore a diamond earring in each ear.

  “Thank you again—” I began, hoping to give an accounting of myself, but the Kid cut me off.

  “Can you shoot?”

  “I can clean and load and unload a rifle,” I said.

  “So no. Can you ride?”

  “I used to ride my neighbor’s pony sometimes.”

  “No again. What can you do, little Sister?”

  I began to grow nervous.

  “I can milk a cow,” I said. “I can make soft cheese and I’m learning to make hard cheese.”

  “We don’t have cows here,” Cassie said.

  Until now, I had not thought of the possibility that the gang might turn me away. If they did, I knew I’d never find the bookseller again. Sheriff Branch was looking for me. And even if I hadn’t had a price on my head, a woman traveling alone makes everyone suspicious. I couldn’t pass near a town without attracting the attention of the sheriff or, worse, a gang of young men out looking for trouble. Once Lucas Saint Joseph and the two younger Petersen boys had come upon a woman on the Buffalo Gap Road, and even though she told them she was running from her husband who beat her, even though she showed them the bruises on the sides of her neck, the boys raped her one by one to break her of her witchcraft. They would have gone free, too—the mayor was on their side—except she had people in Fairchild who vouched she was a mother of three back in Buffalo Gap, and pledged to take her in and find her a better husband. I was many days’ ride from home now, with no one to vouch for me. I had to think of what would make me worth feeding and protecting.

  “My mama is a midwife,” I said.

  “What luck,” said Cassie. “We’ll be sure to call you when we want to deliver a baby.”

  In the convent they had tried to teach me humility. Sister Dolores told us worldly knowledge and accomplishments are nothing to baby Jesus; they are like a cloth that falls away, leaving us naked as infants before him. But she also said baby Jesus would use us to do good in the world, and I didn’t understand how He could use us if our knowledge didn’t matter to Him, if we were nothing more than defenseless babies in His eyes. And so when the sisters asked us to pray for humility, to ask forgiveness for our pride and self-love, I said my own prayers to remind myself who I was and where I came from, so I would remember even if I pretended to forget, even if I took the vows and habit and lived my life under another name.

  “I can set a bone,” I said to the Kid. “I can bind a wound. If you get a chill, I know the herbs to warm you, and if you get a fever, I know the herbs to cool you down. I can stitch a cut, I can drain a boil, I can dress a burn so the skin heals clean. I can grind a medicine to put a man to sleep, and if I grind enough, I can make him sleep forever.”

  The strangers were quiet. The Kid looked at me for a minute, like measuring, then smiled.

  “Texas, find the good doctor a horse she can handle.”

  And that’s how I joined the Hole in the Wall Gang, in 1894 when I was eighteen years old.

  At first it seemed like I might make a decent outlaw. Texas made me clean the stables and wash and brush all the horses before she would teach me to ride, and even then she was surly and expected me to be terrible, but we were both surprised at how good I was with the horses. They weren’t so different from children, I realized, and I’d spent years convincing children to trust me enough that I could take their temperature or remove their splinters or lead them away from the room where their mother lay laboring.

  Soon I learned the horses’ names and their idiosyncrasies, the way they liked to be brushed and talked to and fed. Prudence, a black mare with a white blaze across her forehead and snout, was strong-willed and stubborn. Temperance, a bay, was sweet but flighty, afraid of loud noises and sudden moves. Charity, a sorrel, was sociable but could be jealous, grumbling in her stall when we tended to the others instead of her. Faith, the horse Texas rode most often, was small and brown-haired like her, but boisterous where Texas was quiet. Every morning Faith greeted Texas with a great whinnying and shaking of her mane, at which Texas only nodded and patted her flank. But when the two went out on a ride, Texas’s whole face seemed to open up, her joints to loosen, and I saw in her the same joy I’d seen when she danced with Lo at the firepit, a joy at all other times obscured by her furrowed forehead and her clipped and parsimonious speech.

  One horse in particular took to me, a dappled gray mare named Amity. She was alert, always the first horse to notice when someone new came into the barn, or when a field mouse skittered across the floor. She reminded me of Bee, the way she seemed to be always watching and listening.

  Within three weeks I could guide Amity through a passable walk, trot, and gallop, and Texas, though still not exactly warm toward me, was forced to admit I was a better student than Agnes Rose.

  One morning she woke me when it was still dark out, and handed me a chunk of the pressed, cured meat they called pemmican.

  “Come on,” she said, “time for a trail ride.”

  Texas hadn’t mentioned anything about a trail ride before, and I was nervous as I saddled Amity. I could tell she noticed—she shifted back and forth on her graceful hooves, and shied her head away when I tried to adjust her bridle. I whispered to her and stroked her neck, and eventually she let me pull the straps tight.

  Out in the summer air—still morning-cool, but with the promise of heat in it—Amity seemed to calm. We rode north, down into the valley and away from the towns the bookseller had carried me through. The road narrowed to no more than a horse path, dotted everywhere with stones and punctured by prairie dog burrows. Tall grass grew on either side, obscuring the way forward, and the path kept twisting and forking and crossing over dry streambeds that looked like paths, so it was all I could do to keep Amity on track. I held her reins tightly, trying to prevent her from tripping on a rock or turning her ankle in a burrow. But she rewarded my caution with annoyance, stopping and starting and finally, at a place where the road forked and Texas guided Faith down the left-hand path, refusing to move at all.

  I leaned forward and squeezed with my legs the way Texas had taught me, but Amity wouldn’t budge.

  “Come on,” I said, then felt ridiculous.

  I squeezed again. Texas and Faith were receding in the morning twilight. Behind me, I could no longer see the bunkho
use or the stables, just grass and scrub and red rocks rising in the violet sky. I started to panic. I did what Texas had told me never to do, which was to kick Amity in the sides with my heels. I didn’t do it hard, but she whinnied in rage and I could feel her whole body stiffen beneath me, resisting my very presence on her back. Texas turned Faith around and began making her way back to us.

  “Look at your hands,” she said when she was back in earshot. “Why are you choked up on the reins so much?”

  “The path doesn’t look so good,” I said. “I just don’t want her to hurt herself.”

  Texas came alongside me, rolling her eyes.

  “How long have you been in this valley?” she asked.

  “About a month,” I said, “a little less. Why?”

  Amity shifted angrily from hoof to hoof. Faith switched her tail but stood obediently in place.

  “I brought Amity here when she was a foal. That was four years ago. She grew up on this land. You learn it from her, not the other way around.”

  I loosened my grip on the reins. Texas nodded.

  “Okay, Am,” she said. The horse relaxed beneath me.

  Texas clucked her tongue and Faith began to walk. With no prompting from me, Amity followed.

  “Horses hate a know-it-all,” Texas said over her shoulder.

  After that I held the reins as loosely as I could, just enough to let Amity know I was paying attention, and let the horse do the rest. Texas was right; Amity easily avoided the holes and hillocks that dotted the path. What was more, she clearly knew the way, ignoring the false paths cut by rainwater and choosing without hesitation when the way forked, even when Faith was too far in the distance to easily follow.

  For the next week, Texas took me on a trail ride every morning, and Amity drew a map of the valley in my mind. At the northern end, where the valley floor sloped up to meet the pass, were the horse pastures and the bunkhouse and the other buildings where the gang kept their gear. Two creeks flowed through the valley, one along its western edge and the other to the east, bending at the valley’s halfway point and running westward about a mile before ending in a heart-shaped pond. Near the bend was a small cabin where Texas kept some shoeing equipment and an extra bridle and saddle; she called it the cowboy shack. Beyond the shack was a small rise overlooking a wide salt flat where we sometimes spotted a badger or coyote, and once, a family of grouse, moving fussily with their heads held high like fancy, overdressed ladies. And always, rising above it all, was something that still shows up in my dreams: a wall of bright red rock many stories high, stretching from one edge of the valley to the other.

  The wall kept its own time, its own matins, lauds, and vespers. The rock rose in jagged layers, each casting shade across the one below, so that even when the valley floor was bright with morning, the wall was striped and splotched with shadow. The shadows stretched and slid as the day wore on; with each quarter hour a new section of rock blazed flame red, and another plunged into ochre darkness. In the evening, the setting sun made the stone glow a living pink as though blood coursed through it, even as the warmth and light drained away from the valley floor.

  I had been studying the wall and its transformations for a few days when I asked Texas, “Where’s the hole?”

  Texas looked at me like the question surprised her. Then she pointed.

  “See that notch?” she asked.

  Wind and water had carved chutes and furrows down the height of the wall, and I could see five or ten things that might qualify as a notch.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes you do,” said Texas. “About three o’clock, the place where the shadow is.”

  We were watering the horses at the bend in the creek. To the southwest, I thought I could make out a spot where two rock faces, bending backward, met each other in darkness.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” I said. “Not to name a gang after.”

  Texas shook her head.

  “Cassie and the Kid didn’t pick this place for looks,” she said. “You climb up to that notch, you can see everything and everyone for ten miles in any direction. It’s the best place in all of Powder River country to defend against an attack.”

  “Why did they come here?” I asked.

  Texas looked annoyed.

  “I just told you,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I mean why did they start the gang? Why did they become outlaws?”

  Texas took a breath.

  “I don’t know the whole story,” she said. “What I do know is they traveled for a while as husband and wife. Then something happened, and they decided they needed somewhere safe, far away from any towns or people. So they came here. They hunted and fished for a while, but the Kid always had big plans. And big plans mean money. So they started stealing from people, and people turned into stagecoaches, and stagecoaches turned into banks. Now we spend every spring and summer robbing up and down the Powder, and then we come back here and hope nobody follows us.”

  The wind was picking up. I could see the shadows of clouds racing across the valley floor.

  “Have you ever been attacked?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” said Texas.

  She looked up at the sky.

  “We should get going,” she said. “It’s going to storm.”

  Once I had become a passable rider, it was time for me to learn to shoot. Elzy, whose tall form I remembered embracing Cassie against the tree the night I arrived, was the gang’s best sharpshooter, so the Kid assigned her to be my teacher. At first she was kind, if unconventional.

  “Look, this is easy,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  We practiced in the tiny orchard behind the bunkhouse, planted by some optimistic farmer in the days before the Flu. On a stump in the middle of the orchard she placed two rock-hard pears from a tree nearby. She stepped back about thirty paces, then lifted her revolver—so sleek and handsome compared to Mama’s old shotgun—cocked it, and fired. The pear on the left exploded. It did look easy. It looked so easy anyone could do it.

  Elzy showed me how to cock the gun. She showed me how to hold it and how to use the sights.

  “Whenever you’re ready, just pull the trigger,” she said.

  I had never longed to hold a revolver, never argued about Colts and Eagletons like the boys in school, or made my fingers into a gun to shoot noises at my friends. But now, the gun smooth and heavy in my grip, I felt like Justice herself, the blindfolded woman who stood cast in bronze outside the courthouse in Fairchild. I would not sentence barren women to die like Judge Hammond, whose mind was addled by drink and age and who did whatever the mayor and the sheriff told him to do. My gun would protect the innocent. I would be dangerous only to the wicked.

  At first I thought I might have fired from an empty chamber. I pressed the trigger and a sound came out and then nothing, the pear and the stump unscathed, a few birds complaining in the summer air.

  “Okay,” Elzy said, “let’s try a little closer.”

  I couldn’t hit the pear at twenty paces, or at fifteen, and at ten Elzy began rolling her eyes and looking up at the bright blue sky like she was praying to baby Jesus to make me less useless. When I finally hit it—the bullet blowing the stem and neck off the pear, leaving an apple shape behind—I turned grinning to Elzy to receive her approval.

  “The pear could grab that gun out of your hand from here,” she said. “Now try farther back.”

  But all that day and the next I could only hit the stump from ten paces—even eleven threw my aim wild and I peppered the ground with bullets. On the third day Elzy showed me how to load and unload the gun, then gave me a box of bullets.

  “Shoot until you finish these,” she said. “Then I’ll give you more.”

  Three days later I could hit the pear at eleven paces about a third of the time, but firing still felt like rolling dice—I looked at the sights and tried to hold the gun straight, but whether I hit the target was up to the bullet, not to me.

  “How did y
ou learn?” I asked Elzy at the firepit on the third night. We were all gathered drinking dandelion wine as News, the fiddler, played a lively rendition of “Simple Gifts.”

  “My daddy showed me when I was small. ‘In case a fox comes for the chickens,’ he said.”

  “And he taught you the same way you’re teaching me?” I asked.

  Elzy knitted her brows.

  “He didn’t really have to do much teaching,” she said. “I suppose I took to it naturally.”

  The answer annoyed me. When Mama was training me, she had made me memorize the four stages and ten stations of labor, the seven medicinal herbs, and the four phases of the menstrual cycle before I was even allowed to go with her on a visit. Once I asked her how she had become so skilled in so many ways of healing the body, and she said she had always kept her eyes and ears open, and never missed a chance to learn. Mama did not believe in natural talent; she believed in wisdom.

  “How about the others?” I asked. “How did they learn?”

  “Well, News learned from cowboying, I know that. Texas grew up on a horse farm so she learned from her daddy, same as me. Lo, I showed her when she came, but she was a quick study. Aggie Rose, I tried to show, but honestly her marksmanship is still shit. The Kid learned from the Kid’s husband.”

  “He—she—the Kid had a husband?” I asked, trying to keep my voice low.

  “Not he, not she,” Elzy said. “The Kid is just the Kid. And of course. Most of us here were married. Otherwise how do you think we found out we were barren?”

  She reached out to rub Cassie’s back, and Cassie briefly dropped her head to Elzy’s shoulder. Elzy kissed her hair. I knew Elzy was a woman now—the others called her “she” and I’d heard Cassie refer to her once or twice as Elizabeth.