Outlawed

by Anna North

  “We might be able to throw in some hatpins,” Agnes Rose said, but I could tell she was stalling, and Nótkon was unimpressed. I looked around at his wares, the glint of the ruby in the hat, the sheen on a pair of snakeskin boots. A leather-bound Bible from before the Flu with gilt-edged pages and a scarlet ribbon to mark your place. I had an idea.

  “I have something you might like,” I said. “It’s a medical manual.”

  Nótkon looked amused.

  “No offense,” he said, “but I don’t have much use for American medicine. I seem to remember something about a Flu.”

  “This is new medicine,” I said. “Mrs. Alice Schaeffer has a surgery down in Rocky Mountain country where she sees hundreds of women a year. She can cure things that killed women and babies in my town. She knows how to cut a baby from its mother’s womb and sew the mother back up so both survive.”

  Nótkon tried not to show it, but I could tell he was intrigued. I took the book out of my satchel and laid it on the counter before him, open to the diagram of the woman sliced open to reveal the baby inside. He recoiled, then leaned closer. He began flipping pages. The minute hand of the grandfather clock ticked once, then twice.

  Agnes Rose took the book away.

  “Can’t let you read all the secrets until you pay for it,” she said.

  Nótkon looked at me, then at Agnes Rose, then back at me again.

  All the way back to Hole in the Wall, the tiny bottle of laudanum light in my satchel where the book had been, I repeated Mrs. Schaeffer’s treatments to myself so I wouldn’t forget them.

  Fiddleback Ranch was the biggest cattle operation between Casper and the Bighorns. It was so big that a town had grown up around it, where all the cowboys and ranch hands lived in bungalows and rooming houses and bought coffee and sugar at the general store and drank in the evenings at the saloon and roadhouse, Veronica’s. The owner of the ranch was a man named Roger McBride, the youngest son of a poor farmer from out east in corn country. McBride had come to the Powder River Valley with nothing but a horse and a knack for business, and now he owned not just the ranch but the mayor of the Independent Town of Fiddleback (who was widely rumored to be on his payroll), the sheriff (same rumors), half the houses in town (his agent collected rent on the first Saturday of the month, and was harsh in evicting those who couldn’t pay), and a roving crew of bounty hunters who chased down cattle rustlers and generally protected his interests in Powder country and beyond (their numbers were said to be in the dozens).

  News had been watching and listening at Fiddleback Ranch for a month, posing as a journeyman cowboy on a temporary job. She had learned that McBride sent one of his most trusted men to the bank in town—the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback, owned by the only man in town as rich as McBride, a Swede named Karl Nystrom—every Friday to deposit the ranch’s income from cattle sales, stud, and other operations, and withdraw enough in small coin to pay his many employees. It would be nearly impossible to rob the man at gunpoint—throughout his short journey he was surrounded by people loyal to McBride. But with a little guile and expertise, it might be possible to waylay him.

  Agnes Rose had been spending time in Fiddleback too. She’d been flirting with and flattering the bagman, one Alexander Bixby, for a matter of weeks. She had convinced him that she was a virginal young woman from a poor family who had been jilted by her fiancé after he got another woman pregnant. Punished for her virtue—her mama had taught her not to sleep with a man before her wedding night—and far from home, she was forced to take in piecework and live at a ladies’ boardinghouse near Crooked Creek, coming to Fiddleback only to sell her quilts and doilies. Bixby was taken with her sad story and her habit of telling him how impressed she was with the importance of his work. He liked to visit Veronica’s for a single drink on his way back from the bank, and this time Agnes Rose had given him to understand that if he wanted to take her upstairs, she might be willing to forget her mama’s lesson for the duration of an afternoon.

  All we needed to do was get enough laudanum into Bixby’s drink that he fell fast asleep once he got to the bedroom. Then Agnes Rose would take his satchel, climb out the back window, and we’d be half a day’s ride away before he woke up.

  The morning we set out, the first frost of fall was on the pasture. Agnes Rose wore a blonde wig with side curls, a long cloth coat with patches at the elbows (Lo had sewn them on at the last minute to add to Agnes’s air of poverty and resourcefulness), and a threadbare pink traveling dress with a low neckline. News and I wore false mustaches that Lo had affixed to our upper lips with spirit gum—she had chatted easily with News while gluing hers in place, but tended to mine in silence. There had been some discussion around the firepit of whether I should be allowed to go on the job at all, but Agnes Rose argued that I would be needed to advise her on the timing of the laudanum, and to help administer additional drops should the first dose fail to take effect. The Kid was convinced, under one condition: I surrendered my gun before we set out. I’d be going in my capacity as a doctor, not an outlaw.

  Fiddleback was a little more than a day’s ride south, on the wide floodplain of the Powder. Our journey took us through flat country, the grass gone tawny in the cooling air. As we rode, the sky changed more than the land did, banks of cloud rolling fast across the blue, spattering us with rain before massing in the east in tall gray towers. The rain tamped the dust down and filled the air with the smell of sage—even though I felt alone and alien still in Powder country, that smell was becoming as familiar as the scent of my mother’s cornbread or my sisters’ hair.

  When the sun was high in the sky and the air was warm enough I could almost pretend it was summer still, I heard a rumble in the distance. At first I thought it was thunder—the foothills to the east were gray with rain—but instead of dissipating it got louder, and then I felt the ground begin to shake under Amity’s hooves.

  “Shit,” News said.

  “What do we do?” Agnes Rose asked.

  “Find the highest ground we can.”

  “What’s happening?” I asked, but they both ignored me.

  News led us northwest, back in the direction we’d come from, toward a serviceberry tree on a gentle hillock a few feet above the flatland.

  “This is going to have to do,” she said.

  “What’s happening?” I asked again.

  Then I saw a dark patch growing in the northeast. My first thought was locusts, but soon I could see individual forms within the darkness, woolly and huge—buffalo.

  “Keep a tight hold on Amity,” said News, “or she’ll spook and they’ll trample you both.”

  I choked up on the reins. Amity’s ears shivered back and forth like leaves.

  “There, baby,” I said, patting her neck, trying to keep my fingers from shaking.

  When I looked up the herd was almost on top of us. In a cloud of red dust I saw the enormous heads of the buffalo. I had never seen something so heavy move so fast. They were like the giants in the stories Mama used to tell. They were like something from an older world.

  Then they were all around us. The dust made me choke. The herd was its own weather. I saw News open her mouth but the hoofbeats drowned out her voice. Then Agnes Rose’s horse, Prudence, began to twist and buck beneath her. Even through the dust I could see the fear on Agnes’s face, I could see she had let her body go frozen. Prudence reared up on her hind legs, the whole bright black length of her rising above the herd. Agnes Rose clung to her back and hung on, but barely. The buffalo were so close to us that if Agnes lost her grip on Prudence she would be trampled for sure. They streamed around us with no sign of stopping, their hoofbeats rattling the teeth in my jaw. Only one thing was steady: underneath me I felt Amity’s calm like a human hand in mine. I remembered what Texas had told me—the horse knew the country better than I did. Maybe, I thought, she knew what to do now.

  I loosened my grip on the reins just enough to give her freedom of movement. She paced very slowly
until she was neck and neck with Prudence. The horse’s eyes were wild and her muzzle foamy, and I knew she could knock me or Amity unconscious with one kick, but Amity didn’t stumble or shy. Instead she began to nuzzle Prudence along her snout and neck in a gesture so tender it made me miss my sisters, the way they would lean in to butterfly-kiss my cheeks with their eyelashes. Following Amity’s lead, I reached over to Agnes Rose and put my hand on her shoulder. I tried to press all the steadying weight of Amity and me down into her body.

  I felt the change in Agnes Rose before I saw it, the shoulders falling from the ears, the muscles working where once they’d quivered. She choked up on the reins, lifting Prudence’s head so she couldn’t buck. The horse huffed and twitched and began to quiet.

  As quickly as it had reached us, the stampede left us behind. The herd thinned out—I could see red dirt between the animals again; then a few straggling beasts, thinner and more pallid than the rest; then nothing. News looked back at me and Agnes Rose. Already her face was clear of worry.

  “Shall we?” she asked, and we rode away.

  We camped overnight by a small lake about a mile outside of Fiddleback. News watered the horses while Agnes Rose and I went to gather firewood.

  “Thanks for your help back there,” Agnes Rose said. “You’re a good rider.”

  The compliment washed over me like warm water. It had been days since anyone had said a kind word to me.

  “How come you’re helping me?” I asked. “You didn’t have to push for me to come along. Why did you do that?”

  “Like I told the Kid,” Agnes Rose said, “we need you to handle the laudanum.”

  “I could have measured it out for you,” I said. “It would have been easy enough.”

  We were scavenging in a stand of cottonwood trees half-burnt by lightning some time ago. Agnes Rose picked up a blackened branch, decided it was too burnt, and let it fall.

  “You know what I did before Hole in the Wall?”

  “I heard you were in jail,” I said.

  She smiled. “Only for a little while. I got married at fifteen and my husband’s family threw me out on my seventeenth birthday. I ended up at a brothel in Telluride, but the work was hard and the madam took most of my money, and after two years I struck out on my own.”

  “How?” I asked. I had never heard of a barren woman doing much of anything on her own.

  “You find a man to cover you,” she said. “Sometimes he’s your ally, sometimes he’s your mark. If you’re smart, and you don’t stay with the same man or in the same town for too long, you can survive. You can even do well. I was a wealthy woman when I got arrested.”

  “What did you get arrested for?” I asked.

  Agnes Rose hefted a last branch, fire-scarred but still bearing a few leaves, onto her pile.

  “Bigamy,” she said. “But that’s another story. The point is, you live like I did, you start being able to spot what makes some people sink and other people swim. There’s a quality, I don’t even know how to describe it—sometimes it looks like luck and sometimes it looks like skill and sometimes it doesn’t look like either one. But you have it, I saw it when I met you. You’ve made a lot of mistakes, but you’re a good bet. You’ll swim.”

  The town of Fiddleback emerged slowly from the grassy flats. First came the ranchlands, marked off with barbed wire and, every mile, a post bearing McBride’s fiddleback brand. The cows grazed in placid clusters—roan, black, and dusty white—and every mile or two a solitary bull loomed hulking and heavy-shouldered, presiding over his herd. Then came the cornfields, green with the spring planting, the delicate shoots peeking a few inches out of the earth. Then the modest clapboard homes of the shopkeepers and ranch hands, and the boardinghouses where the cowboys lived on their way to somewhere else, arranged around a carefully watered green. Then, on a small rise above the flats, the homes of the town’s wealthiest residents, built with fluted columns or else with peaked roofs and gabled windows, in the style of mansions from before the Flu. And then, below the rise, the town’s main street, with a bank and a butcher shop, a few shops selling men’s and women’s clothing, a general store, and at its eastern end, the large roadhouse known as Veronica’s.

  Inside, Veronica’s was full of spills and smells and jostling, the most crowded place I’d been in more than a year. To get to the bar we had to push past more cowboys than I could count, and three women dressed like Agnes Rose but more provocatively, their breasts pushed up into the necklines of their dresses. The room was large but the ceilings were low; some of the taller men had to stoop to stand at the bar.

  Agnes Rose ordered her drink first, then took a seat at the bar to wait for her man. After a few moments News followed. I went last, but when I pushed my way through the crush of men to rest my elbows on the bar’s sticky wood, News was still waiting.

  “What can I get for you?” Veronica asked me immediately.

  She was an imposing woman of mysterious age, wearing a foot-tall chestnut wig and thick pancake makeup. Her eyes and her mouth moved separately as she looked me up and down while smiling.

  I ordered a whiskey in what I hoped was a passable man’s voice, and Veronica poured it and set it in front of me. Only then, and only after searching the bar for other men to serve, did Veronica turn to News, as though seeing her for the first time, and without the smile she’d put on for me. At first I was confused. Then I looked around the room and saw that nearly everyone in the bar—the other cowboys, the women giggling at their jokes, and Veronica herself—was white.

  News and I took our drinks to a table in the middle of the room with a decent view of the bar.

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “About what?” she asked, and her voice, though light, held a warning.

  As we drank, I watched the cowboys. Most looked ordinary, like men I might have known back in Fairchild if I’d stayed there long enough to move among grown people. A few wore ostentatious hats or spurs or giant belt buckles, and one had a long, full beard as bright as an orange that he stroked theatrically as he talked. No one held my attention until I saw, at a table two away from ours, a very beautiful man. He had a long smooth face and heavy eyebrows and his lips were full in a way that made him look solemn, even when he laughed. I had not seen a man I found beautiful since I left my husband’s house, and this man’s mere presence in the room heated the skin on my face and between my legs. I was almost angry at him for being there, at a time when I could not afford to find anyone or anything lovely, and I turned my back to him as I sat, even though I had to twist my body slightly and was not sure how to do so in a manly way.

  Bixby was late. We had gotten to Veronica’s a half hour before he usually arrived, but the half hour passed and then another quarter. I could tell that News was nervous even though she kept up a steady patter about the horses we were going to buy, and I could see that Agnes Rose was worried even though she was laughing and flirting with the other men at the bar. I thought again, as I had for weeks, that I should have stayed in the convent where I could have done useful work, learned what I could from the library, and harmed no one.

  As I turned over my regrets in my mind, the man whose face I’d been avoiding stood up from his table. I couldn’t help but watch him. He was tall but he didn’t move with the ease of a tall, handsome man. There was something tentative about him. When he and a friend—short and broad, with a wide smile but a searching eye—brought their beers to our table, I felt both joy and panic.

  Several men, I noticed, refused to stand aside for them as they came, and one seemed intentionally to jostle the shorter man, who was brown-skinned like News, so that some of his beer sloshed on the floor. His face clouded for an instant, but brightened again as he saw News and clapped her on the shoulder like an old friend.

  “Nate,” he said. “Good to see you. Who’s the new kid?”

  “This is Adam,” News said. “He’s working with me up north this season. I’m trying to teach him how to drink.”
>
  “You couldn’t have a better teacher,” the cowboy said, extending his hand. “I’m Henry, this is Lark. Pleased to meet you.”

  Henry’s handshake was firm and friendly, Lark’s almost harsh, a quick clasp and then release. I had not touched a man since my husband and I had forgotten the size of their hands, the way their calluses scratched against your skin.

  “Lark,” News said. “Your mama give you that name?”

  The man’s smile was embarrassed, a little weary.

  “I got it working out in Idaho country when I was younger,” he said. “I’ve always been an early riser. The boys used to give me a hard time for being out working when everyone else was still in bed. ‘Up with the meadowlarks,’ they’d say.”

  He looked at me instead of News when he answered, like he was curious about me. I knew to be afraid of curiosity—my act was not good enough to withstand much scrutiny. And yet I met his eyes, just for a moment. They were very light brown, almost yellow, like a cat’s, with a burst of green at the center.

  “It’s good you brought your friend here,” Henry said, taking a seat. “I have a proposition for the both of you.”

  “What is it?” I asked. I realized I knew almost nothing about the lives of cowboys, the people I was supposed to be imitating.

  “The clerks from the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank over on Main Street like to come here for their whiskey,” Henry said. “There are eight of them, and ordinarily, they work four to a watch—three in the front, and one in back to guard the vault. But their boss, the bank president, just left to visit his baby grandson in Wichita, and he doesn’t return until June. So the men from the Farmers’ and Merchants’ have instituted their own version of bankers’ hours—two of them man the front of the bank, while the other six drink or loaf or do whatever they like. Four enterprising souls—five to be safe—could take everything in the till if they visit between now and midsummer.”

  I wondered what News had told Henry about herself. Clearly he was aware News was a thief, or at least ready to become so if the opportunity struck.