by Anna North
I surmised that the two must be like Diana Jesperson and Katie Carr, who were inseparable when they were in ninth form, always holding hands and, it was rumored, doing more under cover of night—though at the time, none of us understood what more might be. Both were from good, big families, so they were married when the time came, and then Diana’s mother-in-law forbade her from seeing Katie, believing that Katie was distracting her from her wifely duties. Soon both were pregnant, and then mothers, and no one talked about their friendship any longer, but Diana especially lost the sense of humor she’d had as a girl, and frequently called on Mama for medicine to help her sleep. I wondered, for the first time, what would have become of them if they had not married, if they would be inseparable still.
“Did you have a husband?” I asked Elzy.
“ ‘Did you have a husband?’ ” She parroted my question back to me with mock incredulity. “Did anyone ever tell you that you ask too many questions, Doctor?”
“Yes,” I said, chastened. “I’m sorry.”
Elzy laughed then, a sweet sound, and tickled me beneath the ribs.
“I’m teasing you,” she said. “No, in fact, I never had a husband. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”
It did not begin to. Across the firepit, the Kid was showing Texas something on a map. Texas was watching and nodding; the Kid wore a suit, a silk cravat printed with roses, and an expression of complete self-assuredness. It was impossible to picture the Kid as someone like me, a frightened wife, cast out of the house for failing to bear a child. I did not understand how any of them had become what they appeared to be now: strong, high-spirited, masters of their various crafts. It made my heart lift to think of it—perhaps I would not be green forever.
Elzy stretched and reached for the wine bottle.
“You’re just going to have to keep practicing,” she said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
I was out by the stump with a fresh box of bullets the next afternoon when I saw the Kid walking up the path from the bunkhouse. The Kid always looked tall to me from far away. Up close I was taller, but the effect remained, something about the Kid’s carriage and stride that made you want to look up instead of down.
“What’s Elzy been teaching you?” the Kid asked.
“She showed me how to aim and shoot,” I said. “I’m just not very good at it.”
“How exactly did she show you?”
“She shot a pear from thirty paces,” I said. “Then she had me try. I’ve been trying ever since.”
The Kid smiled. “Like asking a wild horse to teach someone to run. Very well. Show me your progress, Doctor.”
I fired a shot off somewhere into the orchard.
“Again,” the Kid said.
This time I saw the bullet hit a hummock of dirt and grass behind and about six feet to the left of the stump.
“Again,” the Kid said.
I shot the rest of the magazine.
“I see what we’re up against,” the Kid said. “Tell me something, Doctor. If a young medical professional like yourself hopes to assassinate an underripe pear, where should she rest her eyes as she takes aim?”
The Kid’s voice both beguiled and confused me.
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
The Kid sighed.
“Where do you look when you shoot?”
“At the pear?” I ventured.
“Wrong,” the Kid said, unholstering a revolver with a handle made of bone.
“This is the front sight,” the Kid said, pointing to a small crest of metal at the mouth of the barrel. “And this”—the Kid pointed to a notched piece of metal where the barrel met the handle—“is the rear sight. Now, when you take your aim, you line the front sight up with your target, in this case your pear. Then you line the notch in the rear sight up with the front sight. Then you forget the pear exists. The front sight is all that matters. You watch that front sight like it’s the only water in an endless desert, and you’re dying of thirst.”
The Kid lifted the revolver and squinted an eye. “Now, once you have your enemy—in this case your pear—in your sights, what do you do next?”
“Pull the trigger?” I asked.
“Very good,” the Kid said. “You pull the trigger. But when you do, you don’t move your hand—if you do, the gun will move, and you’ll miss your shot. You don’t move your arm—if you do, the gun will move, and you’ll miss your shot. You don’t move your shoulder—if you do, the gun will move, and you’ll miss your shot. The only part of your whole God-given body that moves is your solitary index finger, and if you can manage that, and you keep your eye on the front sight like it’s water in the desert, why then your unlucky pear will soon have breathed his last.”
The Kid’s shot rang in the quiet orchard. It was not as perfect as Elzy’s—the bullet clipped the side of the pear, sending it spinning off the stump and onto the ground. But it was much better than anything I could manage.
“Your turn,” the Kid said.
I set up a fresh pear and took eleven paces back. This time I lined up the sights and tried to forget about the pear. I tried to hold my hand still.
My shot fell low, boring into the soft wood of the stump, leaving a pale scar behind.
“Again,” the Kid said.
This time the bullet sailed above the pear and into the trees at the edge of the clearing, frightening a squirrel.
“Stop,” the Kid said. “At this rate, your pear’s friends are going to form up a posse and capture you before you harm a hair on their leader’s head.”
I would have found the Kid amusing if I wasn’t so exhausted from trying to do something I clearly couldn’t do.
“I’m sorry,” I said, tears gathering in my throat.
“Assassins never apologize,” the Kid said. “Time to try another tack, Doctor. Put down your gun and point at the pear.”
I didn’t understand, but I did as the Kid asked.
“Now focus your eyes on the tip of your finger. Desert, water, et cetera.”
I looked at my fingernail, black-rimmed from cleaning the firepit the night before.
“Now focus on the pear.”
I looked at the fruit, pale green splotched with scabby brown, a small thing grown tough in a hard place.
“Now your finger again.”
Back and forth we went, I don’t know how many times, but I know that when the Kid finally told me to try again with the gun, I understood how to let the target go and focus only on the sight, and I hit the pear square in the belly.
“Excellent,” said the Kid. “Your first kill. Now do it again.”
I had forgotten the calm of it, another person’s voice guiding me. The Kid sounded nothing like Mama—Mama’s voice was soft, with a roughness in it that she said came from childhood whooping cough, and the Kid’s was clear and loud, like the voices of the twelfth-form boys who got picked to read aloud from the almanac at the beginning of every school day. But unlike those boys, both the Kid and Mama could make me feel hypnotized, as though their words moved my very limbs, as though my hands were their hands.
Hours passed in the orchard and when dark began to fall I could hit a pear at fifteen paces nine times out of ten. I didn’t think I would ever be a great shot, and I was right about that, but now I knew how it felt to aim and fire true, and I sensed—and I was right about this, too—that the knowledge would never leave me.
Soon after the sun fell behind the rocks, I heard Cassie banging a pan lid with a spoon to call everyone to the firepit for dinner.
“Just a moment,” the Kid said to me. “I have a question for you.”
I holstered the gun and came close. The Kid’s expression was difficult to read—layers of bluster and confidence slipped to reveal something softer and more uncertain below.
“Your medical experience,” the Kid said. “Does it extend to the treatment of insomnia?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s one of the most common problems durin
g pregnancy. Usually we’d tell the woman to start with hot milk before bed—”
The Kid cut me off.
“But suppose, hypothetically speaking, a person were to suffer from insomnia of a chronic nature. Suppose that this person found it impossible to sleep for months, even years. Suppose it seemed, at times, that this person had never slept.”
I remembered now that I’d woken more than once in the middle of the night to see the Kid’s bunk in the great room empty.
“One man in our town had terrible insomnia,” I said. “Mama made him a tea out of valerian root. She also told him to stop drinking whiskey—it makes you drowsy, but then you wake up in the middle of the night, worse off than you were before.”
“Did it help?” the Kid asked.
“It did,” I said. “But this man—”
I paused. I wasn’t sure how to explain what had troubled Edward Carrier. It was not unlike the sickness Mama had suffered after Bee was born, except that Edward Carrier was not a mother, and instead of lying in his bed all day he paced his house all night, frightening his children.
“This man was sick at heart,” I said finally. “Nothing brought him any joy, not even his baby son. Once he told Mama that the flowers his wife planted smelled ugly to him, that they smelled like vomit.”
A look crossed the Kid’s face. It was fleeting, but I recognized it as fear.
“What happened to this man?” the Kid asked.
“He was sick for months,” I said. Actually Edward had suffered for two years, but I didn’t want to tell the Kid that. “Then he started to get better. By the time I left town he was sleeping well and playing with his children again.”
The Kid nodded and began walking back to the firepit.
“Tell Agnes Rose to get some valerian next time she goes to see the trader,” the Kid said. “And any other herbs you need to treat common ailments. You should have a fully stocked pharmacy at your disposal.”
My last lessons came from Lo. In the storage shed between the bunkhouse and the barn, I stood shirtless in my dungarees as she looped a measuring tape around my chest above, then across my breasts.
“It’s good you’re so flat,” she said. “You won’t need much binding.”
Half of the shed was given over to ammunition and other gun paraphernalia: a case of bullets, another of gunpowder, a third of rods and rags for cleaning. The other half was Lo’s country: a makeshift wardrobe, knocked together out of rough pine boards, held fur-lined parkas, a crinoline, leather chaps, several women’s traveling coats, and countless dresses of muslin, gingham, and lace—tucked between two of them I noticed the Kid’s suit and tails. On pegs were hats of every kind and character: cowboy hats with wide and narrow brims, folded in cattleman’s and cutter styles; several winter hats of beaver fur; and ladies’ hats and fascinators trimmed in ostrich and peacock. Shirts, dungarees, and lacy underthings peeked out of trunks lined up along the walls. Lo rummaged in one of these and extracted a strip of sturdy cotton, six inches wide and several feet long.
“Hold still,” she said.
She wound until the cotton was tight against my skin, then secured it under my arm with safety pins.
“Can you breathe?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Good,” she said, sliding a finger under the cloth to test the snugness. “Too loose and it’ll slide off. Too tight and you’re liable to pass out on us.”
I buttoned my shirt and looked at myself in the mirror hanging on the wardrobe’s door.
“I look like a little girl,” I said.
“That’s because you carry yourself like a little girl,” Lo said. “You have to learn to move like a man.”
I thought of my husband, how when he was nervous, he would scratch one forearm, then the other. How he would wash his face and then run the water backward with his fingers through his hair. I looked at myself in the mirror again. Nothing I remembered seemed like enough to go on.
“First things first,” Lo said. “You have to stand on both feet.”
“I am standing on both feet,” I said.
Lo kicked my left heel. I lost my balance and stumbled forward into the wardrobe, clinging to the coats to keep from falling on my face.
“Sorry, little colt,” said Lo, laughing. “But you see what I mean now. Your weight’s all in your right foot. Men stand with their weight on both feet equally.”
With both feet planted I felt both too heavy and too casual, a big clumsy kid about to barrel down a hill.
“It feels strange,” I said.
“It’s supposed to feel strange,” said Lo, crossing behind me. “Now hook your left thumb in your belt loop.”
I did what I thought I had seen boys and men do, talking to one another at the feed store, loitering against the wall at a dance. Then I felt another kick and stumbled again, this time backward, pinwheeling my arms before regaining my balance.
“You took the weight off your left leg,” Lo said.
“I didn’t.”
“If you hadn’t, little colt, you wouldn’t have fallen over. Now go ahead: do it again.”
This time I was slower and more deliberate.
“Good. Now the right—”
Again I concentrated on holding my body in its odd new shape.
“Very good. Now both thumbs.”
The kick made me jump.
“Ow!” I shouted. “Is this how you taught the others?”
“It’s how I learned,” Lo said.
“Who taught you,” I asked. “The Kid?”
Lo laughed. “Please,” she said, “I taught the Kid and everyone else here. It’s a wonder they weren’t all hanged for witches before I came along. No, I learned from the best—Naaman Theophilus Harrow and his traveling players.”
“They came to Fairchild when I was twelve,” I said. “I saw them do Antigone!”
“That was one of my favorites,” Lo said, coming alongside me and smiling into the mirror. “Do you recognize me?”
A visit from a troupe of traveling performers was a big event in Fairchild—once or twice every summer, a group of jugglers, dancers, or actors would set up tents on the riverbank south of Coralton and put on a show for two or three days before moving on. For those few days a festival atmosphere would take hold, almost as wild as Mothering Monday—Edgar Winchell and his sons John and Jonas would sell beer and sweet wine outside the dancehall before the show, and afterward couples would stagger off into the woods together. The spring after a show typically brought at least one fatherless baby, its mother watching it as it grew for signs of skill with pirouettes or juggling pins.
I remembered Antigone well—I had seen it twice, once with Ulla and once with Janie and Jessamine, who grew bored and began playing baby’s cradle with a loop of string they’d found on the floor of the hall. Antigone and Ismene had been played by women so alike they might really have been sisters: tall and raven-haired, they were sought after by local boys and men and warded them off with identical wedding bands. Eurydice and the nurse, meanwhile, were played by old women, their faces deeply lined.
Lo looked to be around Mama’s age, not old and not young. She was a head shorter than me, large-breasted and broad-hipped, and she wore her hair in blonde curls cut close to her scalp.
Lo saw my confusion. As quick as slipping on a coat, she changed the set of her shoulders and the focus of her eyes, stooping over and gazing above the frame of the mirror as though at something far away.
“ ‘This is the way the blind man comes,’ ” she said. “ ‘Lock-step, two heads lit by the eyes of one.’ ”
I laughed aloud. In the play, the old prophet Tiresias had worn a long white beard and hobbled across the stage supported on one side by a cane and on the other by a young boy, chosen from the fifth form at our school for the privilege. He had worn long, flowing robes that concealed his body, but I had never thought to wonder if he might have been played by a woman.
“They let you play a man?” I asked.
&nb
sp; “The male roles were the most prestigious,” Lo said. “Lean your shoulders back and pitch your hips forward.”
I squared off my legs and, trying to keep them square, hooked a thumb in each belt loop. I braced myself but the kick didn’t come.
“And I was the best of all the players,” Lo went on.
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
Lo gave me a sad smile. “You know why I left, little colt,” she said.
I had known girls who had babies by traveling players, but I had never thought about the players themselves marrying and having babies, or marrying and failing to have them.
“Did your husband kick you out?” I asked.
Lo chuckled to herself. “I didn’t have a husband,” she said. “None of us did. We believed in free love, or at least Naaman did. Make a fist for me.”
I showed her my clenched hand.
She shook her head.
“Thumb outside your fingers,” she said. “Good. Now put your fists up.”
I delayed, wanting to hear the story.
“So, did Naaman—”
“Come on,” she said. I assumed what I thought was a fighting stance.
She came close, lifted my left fist a little, then my right.
“My mama taught me, same as yours,” she said. “Don’t sleep with the same man too many times without a wedding ring, just in case. But I was young and dumb, and I was so in awe of him. Show me a punch.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Come on,” she said. “Hit me in the stomach.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.
“You won’t, little colt. Come on.”
I jabbed half-heartedly at her red plaid shirt with my right hand. She caught my fist with her hand.
“He always told me the troupe would never survive without me,” she said. “ ‘You’re our soul,’ he said. But when it came time for me to go he couldn’t even tell me himself. He had one of the new girls bring me my things in an old feed sack.”
She released my fist. “Hit me again,” she said.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.