Outlawed

by Anna North

  I unwound the scarf from Cassie’s neck. I felt a tiny, weak warming across my wrist, which I realized was her breath. I began to undo the buttons of her parka.

  “What are you doing?” Elzy shouted, turning away from the stove. She had lit the kindling; it crackled but I couldn’t yet feel the heat.

  “She needs warmth right against her skin,” I said. “I have to get her undressed.”

  “You can’t undress her,” Elzy said. “Then she’ll freeze for sure. Are you trying to kill her?”

  I remembered how Mama had explained it to me, how the body freezes and shuts down.

  “Cassie’s body is out of heat,” I told Elzy, “and we need to put it back. Until then, all her warm clothes won’t do any good.”

  Elzy shook her head.

  “You should go,” she said. “I’ll take care of her myself. I don’t need you.”

  Cassie’s lips had turned a bruisy purplish color. I felt a chill down my spine that I recognized from really bad births—the feeling of death not just in the room but close by, ready.

  I looked up at Elzy.

  “I know you don’t trust me,” I said. “I know it’s my fault you got hurt, and I’m sorry. But if I leave now, Cassie’s going to die.” Then I made the kind of promise Mama had told me never to make.

  “If I stay,” I said, “she’ll live.”

  Elzy stared into my face. I saw the fear in her. I saw that what I’d said had worked.

  “Here,” I said, softer now. “I’ll finish the fire. You strip down, as much as you can stand. Then I’m going to wrap you up together. You’re going to be her warmth.”

  Elzy nodded. She began undoing the buttons of her parka with her left hand. I piled fresh wood on top of the kindling in the stove. Thin flames licked up around the logs.

  When Elzy was undressed down to a pair of homespun underdrawers—her winter skin pale as a tooth, the scar at her shoulder livid against it—I helped her take off Cassie’s parka and sweater and pants. Each layer was cold, cold, cold. I let Elzy remove Cassie’s undershirt, which she did so tenderly, even with just one good hand, that I felt a stab of loneliness in my chest.

  I spread Cassie’s parka on the ground and together we rolled Cassie onto it. Then Elzy lay beside her and wound her long body around Cassie’s body. Cassie was stout and sturdy but today she looked small. I laid Elzy’s parka on top of them both, then wrapped them as best I could, adding sweaters on top for extra warmth. Elzy nestled Cassie’s head against her chest, then shut her eyes.

  I don’t know how long they lay like that, the room slowly warming. Outside the wind died down but the snow kept falling; everything was soft and muffled and white. I was afraid Cassie would die and my promise would be broken, and my fear continued without worsening or abating, seeming to stretch back and forward across my life, infinite. Memories began to play in my mind vividly, as though they were still happening. In particular I remembered a day in the winter of Bee’s first year, when Mama was still so sick she never got out of bed. Ulla’s mama and the other town ladies sometimes came to help me with Bee, but that day snow had been falling thickly for hours and no one wanted to venture out. Janie and Jessamine both had the flu and were bundled in their beds, sleeping off their fevers. Bee was six months old—out of her dreamy newborn days and awake to the full horror of living.

  That morning as I tried to give her a bottle, she opened her eyes wide, stared at me, and screamed without end. Nothing would quiet her, she spat out the bottle’s nipple, she screamed as I walked her back and forth, bounced her, sang, and recited the names of all the major bones in the human body, all things that had calmed her in the past. In time I became used to her screaming, it seemed like the new condition of my life, I would always be holding her, she would always be screaming, no one was coming to help us, we would be alone forever. I felt desolate but also peaceful. Eventually she quieted, she took the bottle, the snow stopped and spring came and Mama got out of bed and I grew up and got married and was driven away. But in the cabin with the snow falling outside, it was as though I had never left that room, that time of fear and calm together, that child who needed me but whom I could not soothe.

  What brought me back was a change in the quality of the silence. Mama said the stories the old ladies told about the evil eye were ignorant, and I know she was right. I don’t believe you can feel a person’s gaze, but I believe you can hear it. When sleeping people open their eyes, their breathing changes, and so do the tiny movements of their bodies, even if they are very sick or tired and can barely move at all. It was this change that I heard in the cabin that day, and so I knew before Elzy, maybe even before Cassie herself, that Cassie was awake.

  For the next few days, no one talked about the plan the Kid had proposed. All of us were occupied with caring for Cassie. Texas took over cooking and spoon-fed her warm grits. Lo combed her hair and wrapped her in blankets. Elzy held her hand, and the Kid kept circling and fretting over her, with an anxiety I’d never seen, asking me repeatedly if she was going to be all right.

  “She’ll be fine,” I said.

  Cassie was fully conscious and speaking, and while her toes were frostbitten, I did not think she would lose any of them. I made a footbath of warm water and feverfew to ease the stinging as her blood came back into her snow-burnt skin, and then I wrapped her feet loosely in lengths of clean cotton. She didn’t talk to me as I cared for her, only responding yes or no when I asked if something hurt, and even then she refused to meet my eyes. The others, however, especially Texas and the Kid, treated me with a new gravity, asking my opinion on what was best to feed Cassie or whether we should use up more of our limited firewood to give the bunkhouse extra warmth. I tried not to think about what would’ve happened if Cassie had died in Elzy’s arms in the kitchen cabin, if I’d promised to save her and had failed.

  On the fourth day of Cassie’s convalescence she could walk a little, and the sun came out over the valley. We shoveled a path from the bunkhouse to the kitchen cabin and the horse barn. I visited Amity and stroked her watchful face, and Texas let me feed her a wizened carrot she’d been saving. A little joy crept in around the edges of that day—Cassie laughed at something the Kid told her, too quiet for anyone else to hear; News got out her fiddle for the first time in weeks and played “My Pretty Jane” and “Shinbone Alley”; while we were shoveling, Texas and Lo threw snowballs at each other and then, as though deciding something, at me.

  That night, after a dinner of beans lightly burned by Texas, the Kid stood and faced Cassie.

  “Cass, friend of my heart, for many years it was just the two of us at Hole in the Wall. Those were blessed years; everything we reap now was sown then. And even as we began to grow, we grew slowly—News, you came to us, and then Elzy, then Texas, then Lo, then Agnes Rose. And then the good doctor, who I think has earned an apology for the skepticism with which we initially treated her.”

  News began to clap, and the others joined in. I felt a surprising warmth in my chest; it had been so long since I had been surrounded by people who cared for me. Only Cassie did not clap. Instead she looked down at her bandaged feet.

  “When we were few, we rarely disagreed,” the Kid went on. News and Agnes Rose exchanged an amused glance.

  “But as we become many, we will encounter more differences of opinion. And so I propose this course of action for the consideration of my plan regarding the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback, and all such matters in future, should they prove controversial:

  “Take three days. Speak among yourselves. I promise not to try to sway you any more than I’ve already done. If at the end of that time the better part of you disapprove of my proposal, I’ll accept your decision and I won’t seek to change it. But if a majority supports the proposition, then we’ll start the preparations right away. And I’ll endeavor to make sure you never regret putting your trust in me.”

  The next day we ran out of beans, so News and I butchered a pair of leather riding pants
. I laid them out flat on a clean sheet, and News cut along the seams until the legs came apart, then sliced each one into thin strips.

  “I’m not cooking that,” Cassie said, so we carried the pile of leather to the kitchen cabin ourselves and set a pot to boiling.

  Hunger made us crazed and giddy.

  “Should we add turpentine?” News asked. “Or look, here are some roofing nails.”

  “If we wait long enough,” I said, “we might catch some mice to put in.”

  “You think you’re joking,” said News, stirring the strips into the water. “We ate mice in eighty-nine. Lo didn’t want to, she said they spread diseases. So the Kid ate one first. Nothing happened, so we all ate them, and we survived that winter.”

  A smell of sweat came wafting up from the pot. It was disgusting, but it still made me hungry.

  “What do you think of the Kid’s plan?” I asked.

  News laughed. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. She rummaged through the packets and jars on Cassie’s spice shelf, found some oregano, and dumped it in the boiling water.

  “Then again, if it works, think of it. A whole town. The Kid could be the mayor. Maybe I’d be the sheriff. We could live out in the open, no more hiding, no more running away.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “My town wasn’t so kind to me. I’m not sure I’m eager to go back to one.”

  “I wish I could go back to Elmyra,” News said. “I miss it every day.”

  “Even though they ran you out?” I asked.

  News examined a cloudy jar of dried mushrooms. “Who says they ran me out?” she asked. “Our sheriff used to come over for dinner every second Sunday. He knew I was barren, everybody did. Nobody cared. I helped take care of my sister-in-law’s children. We were happy.”

  I took the jar from News, sniffed the contents, and put it back on the shelf. “Don’t use that,” I said. “So what happened?”

  Her voice took on a hard edge.

  “Dr. Lively happened.”

  I remembered the book I’d seen in the convent library, about the mixing of bloodlines.

  “He came to your town?” I asked.

  “He didn’t have to. The mayor became a devotee. Black and white people lived together in Elmyra, they had for generations. Abolitionists founded our town, before the Flu—those were our ancestors. Then Mayor Miller got it into his head that racial mixing caused barrenness. Next thing we knew he had annulled a dozen marriages. The sheriff showed up at my parents’ house at night and made my mama move out. And of course, as a barren woman and the child of a mixed marriage, I was the mayor’s new favorite science experiment. He wanted to bring me with him to different towns to help him convince other mayors to adopt Lively’s ideas.”

  News added a liberal shaking of pepper to the pot.

  “For a long time after I left I thought, maybe when Mayor Miller dies I can go home. Then I heard his son took over, so I gave that up. But now—” She tasted the leather soup, made a face, and added more oregano. “I know it’s crazy,” she said. “We’ll be killed for sure. But on the off chance that we survive, I keep thinking, maybe it could be like home.”

  “Do you remember what you told me up at Hole in the Wall?” I asked Elzy.

  She was sitting cross-legged on her cot on the bunkhouse’s upper level, cleaning and oiling all the hunting rifles. I saw she had developed a system, gripping the barrel with her right hand and operating the brush and cloth with her left. Unless you knew what to look for—the way she turned to watch her right hand every time she moved it, the way she occasionally used her left hand to readjust the fingers—you would not have known she had ever been injured.

  “Remind me,” Elzy said. “I’ve had a lot on my mind since then.”

  “You told me the Kid didn’t mean it literally, all that about the promised land. You said it was a way of holding us together.”

  Elzy didn’t look up from her work. “That sounds like me,” she said.

  I knelt by the gun parts laid out on clean cotton. “What do you say now?”

  Elzy put the barrel down on the cloth. She moved to run her good hand through her hair, noticed the oil on it, and wrapped both arms around her knees. Sitting like that, she looked sweet and scrawny, like a boy in ninth or tenth form, before manhood has fully descended upon him.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” Elzy said. “Maybe the Kid was always serious and I just wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe something’s different now. I don’t know.”

  Elzy shook her head and went back to oiling a barrel. “But you know, I was right about one thing. It did hold us together for a long time, all that high-flown talk. That dream about who we could be. Even if we didn’t believe it.”

  “And now?” I asked.

  “Well, now it might get us killed.”

  After a day and a half I had a good idea of where most of the gang stood: Agnes Rose and News in favor of the plan despite their reservations; Cassie, Elzy, and Lo against. Texas was the only one I wasn’t sure about. When she rode out the day before the vote to gather birch bark, I volunteered to go along.

  The day was overcast, white on white. The land was muffled. We crossed the grasslands where pronghorn jumped and meadowlarks sang in the summertime; now our horses were the only things that moved.

  We found a stand of birch and tied up Faith and Amity. Texas approached a trunk and plunged her knife in deep, past the outer layer of bark to the pale starch beneath that we could chew to sate our hunger. Then, with the deftness of an expert, she sliced away a footlong narrow strip, rolled it up, and put it in the pocket of her parka.

  “Did you learn this on the farm?” I asked her.

  She looked at me like I was very stupid.

  “My daddy was the biggest horse breeder between Abilene and Cheyenne country. We never had to live on birchbark.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wondered how you learned to harvest it so well.”

  “I was on my own for a winter before I found the convent,” Texas said. “I wasn’t used to fending for myself, but I had to learn real quick.”

  I stabbed the nearest tree and tried to slice away a strip, but I was clumsy with my gloves and soon dropped the knife into the deep snow.

  “Do you think Cassie’s right?” I asked as I searched.

  “That the Kid’s gone wrong in the head? I don’t know,” Texas said, “but it doesn’t matter. Wrong or right, the Kid’s dreaming bigger than this place now, and it’s going to end in war.”

  “So you’re voting no?” I asked. I found the knife and lifted it to the tree, then dropped it again.

  “I’m voting yes,” she said.

  I had not figured Texas for someone with a death wish.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She pulled free another slick strip of bark, her third in the time I’d been trying to cut one.

  “The sheriff who hanged my family—” she said, “I promised myself one day I’d come back and kill him. But I can’t do it alone. I need someone to ride down to Amarillo with me and keep lookout, back me up if anything goes wrong.”

  Texas reached into the snow, fished out my knife, and put it in her pocket. I looked at my boots, chastened.

  “I told the Kid I’d back the Fiddleback plan. If it works, the Kid will help me with the sheriff.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “I’ll try something else.”

  She sounded utterly calm.

  “Elzy thinks we’ll all get killed,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t plan to get killed,” she said. “But if I do, so be it. At least I’ll have done my best.”

  The next day a warm chinook wind came up from the south, and the temperature climbed—it might have been twenty-five degrees, but it felt like spring to us after so many days at zero or below, and we forgot even our hunger, piling outside to play like puppies in the snowdrifts. The Kid joined in for a while, making an angel in the smooth snow in front of the bunkhouse, but then peeled off toward the
horse pasture, hands in pockets. I followed.

  “We’re out of valerian,” the Kid said, turning around.

  I was caught off guard.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We can get some more as soon as the pass is open.”

  “Is there anything else that works the same?”

  “Chamomile,” I said. “It’s not as good, but it’s something. I think Cassie has some dried in the kitchen cabin.”

  The Kid nodded, then turned away from me, looking out across the pasture at the red wall now white with snow.

  “The man your Mama treated,” the Kid said after a moment, “the one who couldn’t sleep. Was he troubled by terrors?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  The Kid sounded impatient. “Did he have night terrors? Fears he couldn’t name? Did he see shapes out of the corner of his eye, phantoms that disappeared when he turned to look at them?”

  “No,” I said. “He never described anything like that.”

  The Kid began walking away from me across the pasture. Even in the warm wind it looked desolate—horseless and trackless, flat snow sweeping down to the fences and then beyond into the valley. So recently a confident leader, the Kid was a lonely figure now, shoulders tensed up to the ears, eyes on the ground. I thought again of what Elzy had said, but it was too late now—I’d made my decision. I caught up with the Kid.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “The laudanum I used on Bixby. I still have some left in the trunk under my bed. A single drop will help you sleep. More is dangerous. And you should only take a drop if you really need it—too many nights in a row and you’ll start to need more and more. You’ll—a person can become dependent.”

  “Should anyone require such a remedy,” the Kid said, “I’ll be sure to dispense it carefully.”