Outlawed

by Anna North

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she said. “Now, come on, hit me.”

  I jabbed with my left. She caught my fist with one hand, and with the other, punched me in the stomach hard enough to take my breath away.

  I gasped and staggered, my eyes watering.

  “What was that for?” I asked.

  “That was your first real fighting lesson,” Lo said. “Odds are, every time you fight, you’ll be fighting a man. He’ll be bigger than you, and he’ll be stronger. If you fight fair, you’ll lose every time. So you have to learn to fight dirty.”

  A week later I had learned how to gouge eyes and kick balls, how to punch a man in the throat and shatter his Adam’s apple, and how to use the back of my skull to break a man’s nose. A week after that News and Texas stole the cows.

  In the two days they were gone no one would tell me where they were.

  “On a job,” was all Lo would say.

  She was distracted that morning; everyone was. At breakfast we heard a rustling in the bushes by the firepit and the Kid leapt up, face alight with excitement or fear. Then a jackrabbit hopped across the red dirt and back into the scrub on the other side. At dinner I heard Cassie talking to the Kid about a search party.

  Then, just at sunset, the sound of hoofbeats. We ran up to the road to greet them. I had never found cattle beautiful before, but here they were, pink and gold in the dying light, at least a dozen of them, more, News riding tall at the center of the herd, Texas in back, her guidance holding them all together. In the upper pasture, the two dismounted and we held them, all of us together in a knot, the cattle grumbling around us. When we pulled apart News was crying a little.

  “Are you all right?” Agnes Rose removed her cowboy hat and stroked her cheek.

  “I’m just so happy we did it,” she said. She looked at the Kid, joy in her eyes. “You said we could do it and we did.”

  The Kid embraced her again, spun her around—though News was taller and bigger, the Kid lifted her as though she weighed nothing.

  “Of course you could do it,” the Kid said. “You can do anything, you know that.”

  The Kid threw an arm around Texas, too, crowing: “My loves, your powers are limitless.”

  It was past midnight when the moaning woke me from my sleep. I had forgotten where I was and I leapt out of bed, sure that Mama or one of my sisters was hurt. But when I blinked and rubbed my eyes I saw, not my mother scrubbing her hands in scalding water, but Texas pulling on her cowboy boots by the light of a kerosene lamp. I followed her down the stairs and out into the cool night.

  The cow’s keening rang loud in the dark pasture, a terrible desolate sound. The steers had formed a circle around her, mooing softly with concern.

  “Shit,” said Texas quietly.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I can manage a drive, but I don’t know anything about taking care of cows.”

  She laid her head against the cow’s belly, listened to her heart.

  “If she were a horse, I’d say colic,” Texas said.

  The cow moaned again, even louder this time. The sound was too familiar to ignore. I dropped to my knees and reached down, carefully, to feel her udders. They were hard as rocks.

  “Get me a bucket,” I said.

  At first she screamed when I tried to milk her. We had to warm water on the stove in the kitchen cabin, use it to soak rags, and apply those to her swollen udders, massaging downward, before her milk would flow.

  “You separated her from her calf?” I asked when the stream finally hit the bucket.

  “I didn’t think so,” Texas said. “I didn’t see any calves with her. But we peeled them off from the herd in the narrows out by Douglas. The calf must have gone on before.”

  We were both quiet for a moment, the only sound the milk fizzing against metal.

  “Will it die without her?” Texas asked.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “Another cow in the herd could nurse it.”

  Texas stroked the animal’s back. “I know we’re selling her off to slaughter,” she said, “but I hate to see her in pain.”

  I thought of Sigrid Williamson, whose baby had died at two months of a fever. How, as she wept, my mama brought her a neighbor’s baby to nurse so she wouldn’t develop mastitis.

  “I’ll milk her in the mornings till we sell her,” I said. “She’ll be all right.”

  Texas nodded and turned to walk back to the bunkhouse. I pressed the cooling rags to the cow’s udder one more time. Her moaning was a quiet lowing now. This cow was more woman than I would ever be.

  “Texas,” I said.

  She stopped.

  “What is it?”

  I paused, then rushed headlong into my question.

  “Do you ever wish you were a mother?”

  Texas laughed. “Baby Jesus, Ada,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” Texas said. “I used to. But I don’t think about it much anymore.”

  “What changed?” I asked.

  “I met the Kid,” she said.

  I remembered how the two had embraced, the pride with which the Kid praised her.

  “And now the gang is your family?” I asked.

  “That’s part of it, of course,” Texas said. “Before I came here, I was in a convent for a while, same as you. I was safe there. But I hated it—dawn till dusk, all I did was knit scarves. I was terrible at it. They didn’t even call me by my name there—I was Sister Catherine. I was nobody.”

  “And now?” I asked.

  I saw her draw her small body up a little taller in the darkness.

  “Well, now I’m the stable master for the Hole in the Wall Gang.”

  Later that week News and the Kid sold the cattle on to an unscrupulous rancher outside the Independent Town of Casper. In her reconnaissance at a nearby roadhouse, News heard about a wagon coming to Casper from Jackson, carrying a month’s payroll for forty cowboys and ranch hands, all in gold and silver pieces, with only the driver and one guard to protect it.

  “If we ride tomorrow morning we can hide out near Sutton’s Gulch and jump them when they come past,” News said. “Shouldn’t take more than three of us—Tex, Elzy, and I can go.”

  “You and Texas deserve a rest,” the Kid said. “I’ll command this one—who else feels like stretching her legs a little?”

  “I’ll go,” I said.

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  “What do you think, Lo?” asked the Kid, amused. “Is the good doctor ready?

  “If it were up to me, I’d wait a few more weeks,” Lo said. “But she understands the fundamentals.”

  “I think she’s ready,” Texas said.

  I saw how the others heeded her, because she spoke up so rarely.

  “Stand up,” the Kid said. “Let me look at you.”

  I stood. Again all their eyes were on me, and I wondered what they saw: an interloper, a greenhorn, a little girl, and maybe, in at least one case, someone with enough wisdom to make something of herself. I lifted my chin and met the Kid’s eyes. The Kid smiled.

  “Agnes,” the Kid said, “she’ll need a trim before we go.”

  A few mornings later, Agnes Rose cut my hair. She sat on the top step to the bunkhouse and I sat on the bottom one, leaning against her knees. Her touch reminded me of my sisters, the way I used to let them pin my hair into ridiculous styles, ribbons every which way, giggling as their little fingers tickled my scalp.

  The memory opened a pit of fear in my stomach. I told myself, again, that as long as Sheriff Branch was looking for me, my family would probably be safe. But I knew, too, that he might not search forever. And the longer I made myself hard to find, the more likely he would be to seek another outlet for my neighbors’ anger. I felt my back muscles harden against Agnes Rose’s legs.

  “Are you nervous about tomorrow?” she asked.

  She unwound my hair from its braid and began to sn
ip. The hair fell in skeins, light brown in the red dirt.

  “A little,” I said.

  The truth was I could not imagine what I was about to do. I knew what I wanted—to return to Hole in the Wall with the same triumph in my heart that I’d seen on the faces of News and Texas as they rode among the cattle. But of what it would take to hold up a wagon at gunpoint, I did not understand enough to be afraid.

  “I suppose I don’t know what to expect,” I added.

  “I didn’t either, the first time,” Agnes Rose said.

  I felt my hair at my shoulders now, a strange new lightness at my back where the braid was missing.

  “What was it like,” I asked, “your first job?”

  I felt her fingers at my ear and then the breeze at my neck where she’d cut the hair away.

  “It was a disaster,” she said. “I was intended to steal a horse. We were going to sell him on to a trader I know, make enough money to provision ourselves for the winter.

  “The stable hand was a drunk, News said I could walk right in and take the stallion, easy as shaking hands. I put on a cowboy hat and a binder and I set out. ‘Simple,’ News said. ‘A child could do it.’

  “I was actually excited. I thought I’d make us a boatload of money, and the Kid and everybody else would praise me.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  Another snip, and the back of my neck was bare.

  “The stable hand took a temperance pledge,” Agnes Rose said. “When I got there he was sitting out front of the barn with a shotgun, bloodshot eyes the size of dinner plates. I had to shoot him.”

  Snip. Meadow air on both ears, goosebumps on my neck.

  “The rancher heard the shot,” she went on. “He came out in his nightcap with a poker in his fist.”

  Agnes Rose was cutting close to my head now. I could feel the scissor blades on my scalp.

  “The horse spooked and threw me off. The rancher was on me before I knew it. He wrestled me to the ground and knocked the gun out of my hand.”

  I clenched my jaw. I could only imagine what would happen to a woman alone, dressed in men’s clothing, caught trying to steal a horse from someone else’s ranch.

  “How did you get away?” I asked.

  I heard a smile in her voice.

  “A trick I learned at Miss Meacham’s, for when the men got fresh,” she said. “You bite the inside of your lip until you taste blood, then you cough it into your hand. This time I smeared it right on the rancher’s nightshirt. I wheezed and sputtered and I told him I was only stealing horses to pay for a sanitorium.”

  “That worked?” I asked. “He let you go?”

  The smile disappeared.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But he lost his bearings for a minute. Long enough for me to find my gun and shoot him in the gut.”

  “Mother Mary,” I said quietly.

  “She wasn’t there,” Agnes Rose said, “I can tell you that. Two days later I staggered back into Hole in the Wall empty-handed. Cassie wanted to get rid of me. I think she still does.”

  “But you’re here,” I said.

  “The Kid knows how to spot the usefulness in people, even if it doesn’t present itself immediately. Maybe especially if it doesn’t. After that job I never tried to steal a horse again. Now I focus on subtler work. I’ve made enough money for us to buy a dozen horses, with some left over for saddles.”

  She tousled what was left of my hair and blew on the back of my neck. A few stray clippings fell in the dirt.

  “Come on,” she said, leading me to Lo’s shed.

  In the cracked mirror I looked wholly different—ugly was my first thought, all the softness gone from my face now that my hair no longer hung around it. But Agnes Rose told me to straighten my back and lift my chin, and I could see something dimly then, a new way of looking and being.

  “Handsome,” she said. “Don’t worry. Just listen to your gut. You know more than you think you do.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Sutton’s Gulch was southwest of the valley, but on the morning we set out, the Kid led us due south instead.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To the wall,” the Kid said cheerily. “I want you to see the view.”

  The morning was gray and cool and I could smell the sage under the horses’ hooves. But as we rode south the sun burned through the clouds, then shone so bright it seemed to bleach the landscape of its color. Dust caught in my throat and sweat soaked my shirt; coming from everywhere at once was the sound of locusts sawing.

  At the base of the red wall the horse path narrowed to a footpath. A little way’s up, maybe a half hour’s hard hiking, I saw the notch, the Hole in the Wall. The Kid dismounted and tied Grace to a hitching post, its wood gone silvery with weather. Elzy and I tied our horses too. We climbed on foot up the rocky path until my thigh muscles screamed, and then we climbed some more. The path switched back on itself again and again. It was far longer than it had seemed from the ground, and far harder going, and I began to think the Hole in the Wall was a kind of illusion or mirage, and we would never reach it, and that the Kid would simply march us ever skyward as some kind of test or punishment, until our legs gave out and we dropped to the dust, begging for mercy. Then we rounded a bend and scrambled up a pebbled scree, and there we were in the cool darkness of it, the two rock faces slanting inward on either side of us, cradling us like hands with interlacing fingers. We sat in the dirt, wiping our faces and panting.

  “Take a look, Doc,” said the Kid, with a sweep of the hand. “Take it all in.”

  Down below, the valley shocked me with its glory. The grass shone silver-green in the sunlight, deepening to aquamarine where the creeks ran, parching out to gray in the dry flats where the red dirt peeked through. I saw stands of birch and aspen quivering in the breeze, and a herd of pronghorn drinking from the heart-shaped pond. We were so high that I could see the coal-black backs of buzzards circling.

  “Do you know why we came here, Doctor?” the Kid asked.

  “Because we can see in every direction,” I said, childishly happy to have the right answer.

  Indeed I could see the firepit far in the distance, a pock in the silver grass, and beside it the bunkhouse, the barn, and the pasture. Above them were the pass and the road north, where I had come from.

  “That’s one reason,” the Kid said. “But it’s not the only one. Look again.”

  I wanted badly to understand what the Kid meant, and I searched the landscape for secret meanings. I saw the cowboy shack in the creek’s glittering elbow, and the cracked expanse of dry earth where coyotes and hawks hunted prairie dogs. Directly below us, so far down it made my head swim to look at them, were a row of red rocks shaped into tall columns by wind and weather, standing like sentries guarding the wall.

  “There are a lot of good hiding places—” I began.

  The Kid’s voice changed, taking on the soaring quality I remembered from the first night I’d come to Hole in the Wall.

  “The Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘Unto thy seed have I given this land,’ ” the Kid said, “ ‘from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’ ”

  I was lost, but the Kid’s face held my attention, the Kid’s eyes dancing with excitement.

  “When I met Cassie, we had nothing and no one. We cleaved to one another as a husband to his wife. For three hundred and seventy-eight days we wandered the Powder River country, looking for a place where we could make a home, where we could live in freedom without fear. And on the three hundred and seventy-ninth day we came over the red wall and saw this valley spread out before us, the land between two rivers that God promised to Abram.

  “ ‘I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan,
for an everlasting possession,’ God said. And I knew that this land was to be ours, an everlasting possession for generations and generations.”

  I tasted the same stale bitterness in my mouth, like tea gone cold in the cup overnight, that I’d tasted every time the Mother Superior read us Psalm 127, and reminded us that even though we would never have children, we must honor and respect the greater holiness of those who could.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but what generations? Aren’t all of us here the last of our lines?”

  The Kid’s eyes only glowed brighter at this.

  “Don’t you remember your catechism, Doctor? Abram and his wife Sarai were barren. But God promised Abram the land of Canaan, and he gave him a new name. ‘Thy name shall be Abraham,’ God said, ‘for a father of many nations have I made thee. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.’ ”

  “Amen,” said Elzy quietly. She looked up at the Kid with reverence but also with familiarity, the way one might look at a beloved older sibling.

  “We may be barren in body, dear Doctor, but we shall be fathers of many nations, fathers and mothers both. You see, when we found this land, I knew it was promised not just for us, but for the descendants of our minds and hearts, all those cast out of their homes and banished by their families, all those slandered and maligned, imprisoned and abused, for no crime but that God saw fit not to plant children in their wombs. I knew that we would build a nation of the dispossessed, where we would be not barren women, but kings.”

  The Kid’s words were exciting, and I wanted to feel carried away by them. But I remembered the power I’d felt in my fingers when setting a particularly difficult break, or guiding a baby headfirst into the world. That power had been taken from me, and I didn’t see how it could return.

  “I don’t mean to be impertinent,” I said, “but if God really cared about us, why wouldn’t He let us have children so we could stay in our homes, with our families?”

  The Kid looked at me for a moment in silence, and I saw Elzy’s shoulders tense. I wondered if I should be afraid.

  But then the Kid smiled, and spoke to me with a sweetness and sympathy I hadn’t heard since I left my mother’s house.