by Anna North
Elzy wasn’t just our best sharpshooter; she was also our best hunter. Cassie and Texas and the Kid went out to try to supplement our rations, but none of them could bring down the valley’s skittish pronghorn like Elzy could—all they managed to shoot were a couple of turkeys, already scrawny from winter starving. Their stringy flesh barely flavored that night’s watery stew. When we ate it, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me.
At first I tried to come up with plans.
“The horse market in Sweetwater,” I said to News one below-freezing morning, when we all huddled around the woodstove in the kitchen cabin, the cold only sharpening our hunger. “There must be a lot of money changing hands there. We could find someone flush from a sale and rob him on his way out of town.”
Texas and Lo and Cassie rolled their eyes. News sighed. It was the third idea I’d floated that morning.
“Go saddle up Amity,” News said. “I need to show you something.”
I pulled a fur hat down low over my forehead and a wool scarf over my face; outside in the white day, the slice of skin between them burned. The snow was so cold it squeaked under our boots. The horses snuffled in the freezing air but were willing, their coats long and dense for the winter. The sun shone weak and yellow behind a flat layer of cloud, like it was going out.
We rode south in silence, up the path out of the valley. The horses’ hooves left a crisp trail in the fresh snow. We’d been riding only a few minutes when I saw what News wanted to show me: ahead of us, the road was not just snowed over, it was gone. Where once we had been able to ride between two hills, now a single, smooth snowfield stretched unbroken from hilltop to hilltop, many times higher than the roof of the bunkhouse.
“Can we ride over it?” I asked.
“Sure,” said News, “if you want Amity to get stuck in the snow and die.”
I reached down to rub Amity’s neck with my gloved hand, chastened.
“It’ll be like this through March at least, maybe April,” News said. “No raids till then.”
In the dead of winter only the Kid was happy. While the others slept or drank fennel tea to keep their hunger pangs at bay—my only contribution to the winter so far, made with crushed fennel seeds from Cassie’s pantry—the Kid sat in a corner of the bunkhouse surrounded by maps and papers, getting up only to pace around the great room and stare out at the snow. One morning we woke at dawn to the Kid banging on a saucepan with a spoon, shouting, “Wake up, my beauties, my heroes, wake up!”
As we sat all together in the great room, wrapped in parkas and bedclothes and dishtowels and rags, I saw how much we’d lost since winter began, the hollows in our cheeks and the stains around our eyes. I knew the course of malnutrition—soon our teeth would loosen from our spongy gums, and the beds of our fingernails begin to bleed.
“Before I explain why I’ve gathered us all here this morning,” the Kid began, “I want to give thanks to each of you, for all that you have given of yourselves. Elzy, of course, you have given the strength of your right hand. We are all humbled by your sacrifice.”
Elzy looked out the window, grim-faced.
“News and Agnes, you went out among strangers for weeks upon weeks without the rest of us to help you. I know how living under a false name depletes the storehouse of the heart; I know what you gave for us and I am grateful.”
Agnes smiled; News didn’t, but she looked at the Kid with a devotion I’d never seen before.
“And Doc—I know some of you are still angry with her. But remember Matthew: ‘If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ ”
“The Father will just have to stay mad at me,” Cassie said.
“Think,” the Kid went on, ignoring her, “without our doctor, we wouldn’t have been able to do the Fiddleback job at all.”
“And?” Cassie asked. “I mean no disrespect to News and Agnes, but Fiddleback was supposed to hold us for the winter. Now we’ve got nothing until the pass opens up.”
“Not nothing,” the Kid said. “We have this.”
I recognized the envelope from Bixby’s satchel. The Kid opened it and read the letter aloud.
“We’ve all seen that,” Cassie said. “So McBride’s in debt. If we’d known that, we wouldn’t have tried to rob him in the first place.”
“That’s right,” said the Kid. “We wouldn’t have tried to rob McBride.”
“So I fail to see why—” Cassie began.
“McBride doesn’t own Fiddleback,” the Kid said. “The bank does.”
Agnes Rose caught on first. “We’re going to rob the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank?” she asked.
The Kid smiled. “We’re going to buy it.”
The Kid’s plan had many steps. First, we would, in fact, have to rob the bank. Thanks to Henry, we knew we’d only have to get past two men instead of the usual four. But it wouldn’t be enough just to clean out the tills—we’d have to empty the bank’s reserves, which meant robbing the vault. That would take time, not just to get the vault open but also to unload the heavy gold inside. The horses alone wouldn’t be able to carry it in their saddlebags; we’d have to get a wagon. All of that meant we’d need a distraction, so before we even went into the bank, we’d set fire to one of the buildings next door—either a butcher shop or a store that sold ladies’ necessaries, according to the Kid’s maps.
Amid the noise and commotion caused by the fire, we’d break into the bank from the back and dynamite open the vault—faster and surer, the Kid said, than forcing someone at gunpoint to unlock it for us. Then, as we loaded the gold into the wagon, a few of us would hold up the clerks and steal whatever was in the tills at the front of the bank. When we’d scoured the premises for every note, coin, and gold bar, we’d ride away and wait seven days.
During that week, the Kid said, the ranchers in Casper wouldn’t be able to pay their cowboys. The shop owners wouldn’t be able to take out money to buy cotton or shovels or sugar. Every grandmother who tried to withdraw from her life savings would find out there was nothing left. Panic would set in.
Then, when the owners of the bank were afraid to show their faces to their neighbors, when they were holed up in the bank with revolvers to protect not their money but themselves, one of us would show up in the guise of a wealthy landowner from Chicago. This rich man would offer to buy the bank, and all its remaining assets, including its deeds to any lands and properties in Powder River country, for a sum around half of what had been stolen. He would be prepared to haggle—even three-quarters would be acceptable—but in their desperation, the owners were sure to accept eventually. The Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback would be ours.
“And then we’ll own the town of Fiddleback,” the Kid finished, “down to the grain in the silos and the cattle in the fields. It will be ours, as God gave Canaan to Abraham, and we will use it to build our nation.”
In the silence that followed I could hear the snow ticking against the windows. Lo looked confused. News and Agnes Rose looked intrigued. Elzy turned to Cassie and opened her mouth, then shut it again.
Her small body bundled in a pinwheel quilt, Texas was the first to speak.
“I thought this was Canaan,” she said.
The Kid’s voice went cold. “What did you say?”
Texas held the Kid’s gaze, her gray eyes steady.
“You heard me,” she said. “I thought this was Canaan, Kid. Our promised land. Now you’re talking about Fiddleback?”
The Kid paused, as though considering, then smiled.
“Canaan was large, sweet Texas. Remember what the Lord told Moses: ‘The border shall fetch a compass from Azmon unto the river of Egypt, and the goings out of it shall be at the sea.’ ”
“I don’t remember what the Lord told Moses,” Texas said. “All I know is this plan sounds liable to get us killed. And for what, I don’t understand.”
“How long have we lived in this valley?” the Kid asked.
Texas lo
oked confused.
“I’ve been here seven years,” she said. “I understand that you and Cassie were here a good five years before that. So thirteen years, give or take.”
“And in those thirteen years,” the Kid asked, “how much have we profited from thieving?”
Texas turned to Lo, who shrugged. News and Agnes Rose were whispering to one another.
“Well,” Texas said, “we have ten horses—I assume you started with one or two. We have the bunkhouse and the sheds, and the barn I built, and our pots and pans and other effects—”
“You see,” said the Kid, addressing all of us again. “We’ve been raiding and robbing more than a dozen years, and our profit is ten horses and the roof over our heads, nothing more. If we go along as we have been, we’ll never be able to shelter many more than we have now—and even what we have, we struggle to maintain. We must set our sights higher. We must reach out and claim our due.”
“Even if we survive the robbery,” Elzy cut in, “and we’re somehow able to con the bankers into selling, do you think the good people of Fiddleback are going to welcome us with open arms? Are they going to rejoice that their new landlords are a gang of barren women?”
“You’re right,” the Kid said. “Buying the bank will be only the beginning.”
The Kid said this as though it was exciting, eyes ablaze with nervous energy.
“The bank in Hannibal took half my daddy’s wages every single month,” Lo said. “Then they took all of it. Then they took our house. Are we going to do that?”
News spoke up before the Kid could. “In my town ordinary people ran the bank,” she said. “There was a board and every year we had elections. One year my daddy served. That year everyone in town got a dividend. We spent ours on new storm shutters.”
Lo rolled her eyes. “I’m sure they were very nice,” she said. “I hope they kept you dry while my family was begging on the Blackwater River Road.”
“You know what happened to my family, Lois Ann,” News shot back. “Don’t pretend you’re the only one who knows about suffering.”
The Kid’s voice cut through their argument. “Cassie, I want to hear what you think.”
Cassie squeezed Elzy’s hand, and let it go. She took a breath.
“You know I never liked this idea in the first place, trying to bring more people in. But I listened to you, I looked at your maps, I fed everyone while you made your plans. I did it out of respect, and I did it out of love. And now this—”
She paused, choosing her words. Elzy watched her.
“These thirteen years, when I’ve fallen into despair, your spirit has sustained me. You saw this place when I couldn’t. You built it in your mind, and now we live here. But this, Kid, it’s a castle in the air—there’s no foundation to it.”
The Kid nodded curtly. “Very well, you’ve registered your opposition. Is everyone else so unwilling to take a chance?”
Then Agnes Rose was talking over Elzy and Lo was yelling at News and Texas was trying to calm Lo but then yelling at News too.
“Doc,” the Kid said through the chatter. “You’ve been keeping your own counsel. Will you join us as we take the land that was promised to us?”
“Oh no,” said Cassie. Her voice had been calm before but now I could hear the rage rumbling underneath it. “Don’t you call on her to help you now.”
“The doctor is an equal member of our company,” the Kid said evenly.
Cassie shook her head. “I’m starting to see why you wanted more people here in the first place,” she said.
I was ashamed—even now Elzy was worrying at her bad hand with her good hand, moving the thumb back and forth as though she could wake up the nerves. And I knew that no one here owed me any particular kindness. But also I was angry. For months, I’d been accepting the smallest bowl of grits and the sludgy dregs of the coffee; I’d been silent when Cassie passed Lo the whiskey right across me at the firepit, when Texas piled other horses’ shit into Amity’s stall for me to clean. I’d done nothing but try to make up for what I’d done, and I’d asked for nothing, not even respect or consideration, in return. I was tired of asking for nothing.
“Do you want me to leave, Cassie?” I asked. “If you want me to go, you should say so.”
Cassie didn’t even look at me. She kept talking to the Kid.
“I think perhaps you just want people you can easily control,” she said.
“Friend of my heart,” said the Kid, “you shouldn’t say things you can’t take back.”
“You’re leading us astray, Kid,” Cassie said quietly. There were tears in her eyes. “I think you know it.”
The two stared at each other across the great room. For a moment the blaze behind the Kid’s eyes faltered.
Then the Kid turned away from Cassie to look at me, Agnes Rose, and News. “Some among us may not want to share our haven with others,” the Kid said. “Some of us believe that having secured a measure of comfort for ourselves, we should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.”
“Kid, that’s not—” Cassie began.
The Kid talked over her.
“But surely there are enough of us with the generosity of spirit to do better. Surely some of us want to aid others who suffer the way we have suffered. And surely some of us know that though we may fail in our attempt, we at least have the obligation to try.”
Cassie stood up from her cot.
“I’m going to make some grits so we can all eat,” she said. “Go ahead and decide without me. You clearly don’t care what I think anyway.”
She left the door swinging on its hinges so that Lo had to jump up to close it, and by then a half inch of snow had settled over the floor.
Cassie’s words rang in my ears. Looking around at the others who remained in the great room, I could almost see them begin to pull apart from one another and from the Kid. I felt fear rise in my throat—if the gang were to split in some sort of mutiny, what would become of me?
“Perhaps we could all use some time to reflect,” the Kid said. “Let’s pause in our deliberations and resume after breakfast.”
After that a lassitude descended over the bunkhouse. Lo pulled the covers up over her chin and went back to sleep. Agnes Rose picked at a stray thread in her sock until the whole thing began to unravel. Elzy squeezed her bad hand into a fist again and again and again; it made me sick to watch her.
The snow whited-out the windows. The minutes stretched and sagged. Texas got up to check on Cassie, but Elzy shook her head. “Give her some time,” she said.
Hunger dug a hole inside me. Lo reached under her bed, pulled out her bell-trimmed buckskin jacket, and began sucking on the fringe. Everyone politely ignored her. I was a little jealous. I put a finger in my mouth just to taste the salt of my skin.
Finally Elzy got out of bed and started putting on her boots.
“Tell her—” the Kid began.
“I’ll decide what to tell her,” Elzy said.
Elzy left; the day wore on. Almost immediately it was hard to tell how long she’d been gone—five minutes, ten, an hour. After the wind howled particularly loudly, Texas got up and looked outside. Then I did. The air was so thick with snow I couldn’t see the kitchen cabin.
“I’ll go after them,” Texas said, pulling on her boots.
By the feathers of ice on the windows and the bitterness of the wind coming in around the door, I could tell it wasn’t much above zero outside. If Cassie or Elzy had somehow failed to make it to the kitchen cabin or back, if they’d gotten stuck in the snow, then they didn’t have long. I had never treated someone with hypothermia before, but I was sure I knew more about it than anyone else there.
“You stay here,” I told Texas. “I’ll go.”
The snow was piled so high I could barely get out the door. I followed in what must have been Elzy’s tracks, but already they were softened over by several inches of fresh powder. I guessed the temperature at around five degrees—any colder than that and i
t would have been too cold to snow. Every time the wind gusted, it burned my face and stole my breath from my throat. I could see less than two feet ahead of me. I only made it to the kitchen cabin by following Elzy’s trail.
Inside it was terribly cold, barely warmer than out in the snow. The cabin was dark, and at first I thought it was empty. Then I saw Elzy and Cassie huddled together in a corner. Elzy was crying. She looked up at me, and I saw whoever she had been before she came to Hole in the Wall, someone frightened and alone.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave her.”
I knelt in front of them. Cassie’s head was slumped forward. I lifted her chin; her skin was cold and her neck was limp. But when I worked my fingers under her scarf and pressed them against her throat, I felt the weakest of pulses there.
“No,” I said. “She’s alive.”
I shut my eyes as I’d seen Mama do when she needed to make a plan. Between the two of us, we could carry Cassie back to the bunkhouse where it was already warm. But that would take time and a trip back through the snow and wind, during which Cassie’s body temperature would drop even further.
“You need to get a fire going,” I said to Elzy.
The stove’s iron belly was empty—Cassie hadn’t even tried to make grits. Probably she had come to the cabin to sulk and then the cold had caught her by surprise.
Mama had explained to us one especially cold winter how freezing could sneak up on you—how after a while you would stop shivering and feel almost warm, then calm, like someone had wrapped you in a blanket. “But that’s when you’re in the most danger,” Mama said.
If we were out playing and one of my sisters stopped shivering, or if her lips turned blue or she didn’t make sense when she talked, I was supposed to bring her home immediately. But if we were too far, then Mama said I should find any warm place—a neighbor’s house, even a horse barn would do. Then I would strip my sister down, naked or close to it, and myself also, and then get someone else to wrap us tight together, swaddling us like a baby so that the heat of my body could enter her body and warm her from the outside in.