by Anna North
Part of me felt guilty making my next request, but another part knew now was the time, when the Kid was already beholden to me for my discretion.
“There’s something I need to do,” I said. “I’ve been planning it ever since I joined the sisters. There’s a master midwife down in Pagosa Springs, and she knows more than anyone I’ve ever heard of about barrenness and childbirth, and I need to go and work with her. I think I can help her.”
I had never said the last part before, and I was surprised to find I believed it.
“Each one among us joined our number freely,” the Kid said, “and each is free to depart. You know that.”
“I can’t get there on my own,” I said. “I need a horse, and money, and someone to ride down with me so I don’t get killed. And I think—” I paused, unused to such brazenness. “I think you need my vote or you’ll lose the Fiddleback plan.”
The Kid’s smile had no joy in it.
“You’ve been talking to Texas.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well, fair enough. What you want will be easily accomplished when we’ve taken possession of Fiddleback. But you have to swear your loyalty until then. Can you promise to fight for our nation, no matter what comes?”
“I promise,” I said.
The Kid reached out a hand and we shook. Through our thick gloves the gesture felt strange, like the Kid was far away.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’ll accept your gratitude one day,” the Kid said. “But I haven’t earned it yet.”
We voted that night. News and Texas and I had gone out to look at the stars. News and I knew the simple constellations—the dippers and Orion—but Texas could point out fish and crabs and women in the sky, and even showed us stars that shone red or blue instead of white. She was tracing Gemini with her index finger when Lo called us back to the bunkhouse. Inside, the Kid was already speaking.
“My friends,” the Kid said, “I won’t insult you by repeating myself. I will only remind you that ‘Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.’ Now is the time for our good works, my beauties, my heroes. Now is the time for justice on Earth.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment and I thought of Holy Child, the Mother Superior holding us all in silence with her Sunday sermon.
“All in favor of buying the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback, raise a hand.”
News and Agnes voted right away. Texas waited a moment, then joined them. Lo stared straight ahead, hands in her pockets. Elzy and Cassie clasped hands and didn’t move. I looked at the Kid for some kind of confirmation of our agreement, but the Kid was now totally unlike the Kid earlier that day—shoulders back, head high, voice full of strength and bravado. I lifted my hand. I was going to have to take my chances.
CHAPTER 7
It was early April when Agnes Rose and I rode out of the valley. The snow was melting; if you listened you could hear it, running back into the earth. The smell of wet soil was sweet after so many sterile months, and the scrawny pronghorns and jackrabbits looked surprised by the sunlight, as if they’d forgotten it existed.
Our first stop was Nótkon’s trading post, but he did not have what we wanted.
“Who would buy dynamite from me?” he asked, pushing our pile of bullets and spices—the last valuables we had left after the long winter—back across the counter. “Only someone crazy. I never took you for crazy, Agnes Rose.”
“Maybe one of your suppliers could find some?” Agnes asked. “We could come back in two weeks or a month, with some gold—”
Nótkon shook his head.
“If I sell you a gun, and you shoot somebody, no one’s going to trace that back to me, because everyone sells guns. But nobody sells dynamite. So if I manage to find you some, and you blow something up, the sheriff’s posse is going to come straight to my door—after they’ve taken care of you, that is.”
“We understand,” said Agnes Rose, gathering up our motley offerings. “Thanks anyway.”
But I was not finished. “What if I wanted to make some dynamite?” I asked. “Could I do that?”
Nótkon looked at me the same way he had when I told him about Mrs. Alice Schaeffer, like he was impressed and maybe a little disturbed.
“Dynamite? No,” he said. “But you can make an explosive that will do the trick.”
“What do I need?” I asked.
“That’s outside my purview, I’m afraid,” Nótkon said. “But you seem like a resourceful sort. I’m sure you’ll get the information you’re looking for.”
We met the bookseller at a roadhouse a day’s ride west of the valley, in pine country. The place made Veronica’s look like a palace. It was the remnant of an old house, probably built before the Flu and torn nearly apart for firewood in the years after, when so many houses stood empty. Now only the kitchen and a single bedroom remained. The proprietor, a drained-looking woman named Wilma, had set up the bar on the old sideboard next to the stove, and the whiskey she poured us was warm from the burning wood.
The bookseller looked nervous, as always. Over the winter he had grown a sandy-colored mustache, and he took quick careful sips of whiskey from beneath it, eyes darting over the room. Ten or twelve men sat with us at the long wooden table, once handsome, now riven with cracks from its abandoned years and stained with liquor and tallow from its renaissance. At least ten more men drank standing up, leaning against the walls. This was an older, harder clientele than at Veronica’s—trappers and traders, men from forest country who went weeks at a time without seeing another human being. Now brought together, some were silent still as though they’d forgotten how to speak, or perhaps ordered their lives specifically to avoid it. But a few had been released from solitude into jolliness or belligerence, and they were loud enough to make up for everyone else, to cover our voices as we talked.
“I have what you need,” the bookseller said. “The field manual of the St. Louis Militia. Has everything you need to know about homemade explosives, plus combat drills, camouflage, and how to survive in the wilderness for up to thirty days with no food or fresh water. I can give it to you for fifty silver liberties.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Come on,” I said. “You think I’ve forgotten what books cost? We’ll give you a box of good bullets, and I think Agnes Rose has some jewelry she can throw in.”
Agnes Rose opened her leather travel pouch to show him the brooches and earrings we were selling.
“All of that plus the pouch it comes in,” the bookseller said. “And I’ll have to give you the cheaper copy, without the diagrams.”
I looked at Agnes Rose. She nodded.
“We don’t need diagrams,” I said, raising my glass. “Deal.”
The bookseller clinked his glass with mine, avoiding eye contact, then finished his warm drink and pushed back his chair.
“Before you go,” I said, trying to get myself ready for the answer, “have you heard any news of Sheriff Branch recently?”
He shook his head.
“I knew you were lying to me. I should charge you more just for putting me in danger. If he’d found me with you in my wagon—”
“But he didn’t,” I said. “Look, he doesn’t know where I am now, I’m sure of that.” (I was sure of no such thing.) “I’m only curious if he’s still on the lookout.”
“There’s still a price on your head, if that’s what you mean,” said the bookseller. “I’ve had two different bounty hunters ask me about you this year. Apparently you’re wanted in Fairchild for deceiving a young man into marriage, as well as for the stillbirth of a neighbor’s baby and for giving another baby a cleft lip by sharing a bottle of wine with the mother.”
Agnes Rose pushed her drink away. “You don’t believe that kind of garbage, do you?” she asked. “An educated man like you?”
The bookseller shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what I believe. But I’ll tell you this.” He leaned over the table and lowered his voice. “I met Branch a
couple of months ago. In Rapid City, before the winter. He was out there helping a family with their cattle drive, because the father was taken ill. He was a kind man, intelligent. It made me think, probably this Ada person could have reasoned with him. Probably if they just sat down together, they could have come to an understanding. And sitting here with you now, talking about explosives—sometimes I think you women up in the valley like making trouble, that’s all.”
I saw Agnes Rose reach for the false pocket in her dress that led to her gun. I reached for mine, too, holstered on my belt.
“Don’t worry,” the bookseller went on. “I didn’t tell him anything. I’ve known the Kid for years, and you were right, the money’s good. But maybe you should try breaking bread with people from time to time instead of fighting them. It’s a good deal safer.”
Ten minutes later, as the bookseller searched in his wagon for the un-illustrated version of the St. Louis Militia field manual, Agnes Rose whispered that we should kill him.
“I don’t know how we can trust him now,” she said.
“Everyone here saw us with him,” I whispered back. “If we kill him here, they’ll know it was us.”
“Maybe we can ask him to give us a lift somewhere,” Agnes said. “Pretend our horse lost a shoe.”
“Both of our horses?” I asked. “He’ll see through it.”
The truth was, I didn’t want to kill the bookseller in cold blood. I still saw the face of the young wagon driver when I tried to sleep at night. And he had been a total stranger to me. I’d spent days with the bookseller—I knew the way he hummed a tuneless song to himself when he thought no one was listening, the way he chewed his cuticles down to blood, the left hand and then the right. I did not like him, and Agnes was right, I did not trust him, but I was not sure I could bring myself to end his life.
“I have another idea,” I said.
I raised my voice just loud enough for the bookseller to hear inside the wagon.
“We’ll have to test it first,” I said. “We don’t want to get all the way to Casper with dud explosives.”
“Casper?” asked Agnes Rose.
I gave her a look, and she caught on.
“We should buy whatever we need down south and test it at Badger Hollow,” Agnes said. “That way, we won’t have to ride all the way from the valley to Casper with explosives in our saddlebags.”
The bookseller climbed out of the wagon with the book in his hands.
“You won’t need to buy much,” he said. “From what I remember, the main ingredient is horseshit.”
The bookseller was right. Frederick Blunt, the secretary of the St. Louis Militia in the year 1857, when the field manual was published, recommended five pounds of horse manure, a half pound of saltpeter, and a long fuse.
“These materials, if properly assembled, will make a bomb sufficient to destroy a small wagon or outbuilding,” Blunt wrote. “Two bombs will flatten a full-size wooden house. With four bombs, the militia was able to destroy a fort occupied by the Vinegar Boys, thus strengthening our position at the junction of the Illinois and Missouri Rivers, where we hope to establish a seat of government.”
I started with a single bomb—what I hoped was five pounds of shit from the barn, mixed in a feed bag with saltpeter and lit with a bootlace. I tested it far from the bunkhouse, near a snowmelt stream in case it started a fire. Marsh marigolds were just beginning to open their white blooms, and the place smelled earthy and vegetal. I thought of Mama’s garden; her calendulas and coneflowers would be blooming soon.
The bookseller was right that in his way, Sheriff Branch was kind and intelligent. I kept telling myself that he would never harm my family, that he would be satisfied with searching for me. Perhaps it would protect them, I thought, that they truly did not know where I was. No one did—no one who had known me in Fairchild knew that I was an outlaw now, that I was kneeling before a makeshift bomb with a lit match, hoping to rob a bank and buy a town. It was a lonely but exhilarating feeling.
The bomb was a disappointment. The flame ran obediently up the bootlace and caught the feed bag, which crackled merrily on the damp earth, but produced nothing you could call an explosion. We waited a minute, two minutes, five.
“Does the manual say how long it takes?” Agnes asked.
“No,” I said, “but it’s not much good if it’s this slow. Somebody’s going to notice if there’s a bunch of burning shit in the bank vault.”
The next time I spread the manure out first to dry all day in the sun. When it was baked hard and had attracted a black crust of flies, I scooped it into a new feed bag and tried again. This time Lo joined News and Agnes to watch the experiment. This time, again, the experiment failed.
“If we can’t get the bombs to work,” Lo said, trying to sound casual, “we’ll have to abandon the plan.”
“They’ll work,” I said, though I did not know how.
I tried more saltpeter and less saltpeter, more manure and less. I tried longer fuses and shorter fuses, leaving the bag open to the air and tying it tight. Once I got desperate and lit the mouth of the bag without even tying a fuse on. Luckily that attempt failed like all the others.
I stopped telling people when I was testing bombs, but they found out anyway, and by the time of my fuseless test everyone but Cassie and the Kid was coming out to watch. The rivalry between the ones who wanted the tests to succeed and the ones who wanted them to fail was obvious, lighthearted on its surface but serious at its core. After I stamped out the bomb and the crowd dispersed, Elzy approached me.
“How much longer are you going to do this?” she asked.
“Until it works,” I said, though I had no ideas left.
“It doesn’t look like you’re getting any closer,” she said. “Why not tell the Kid it can’t be done?”
“Because it can,” I said.
Elzy sighed and wiped sweat from her brow with her good hand. It was nearly May and warm in the sun, though the shade still held the memory of winter.
“I’m sure you have your reasons for wanting to try the Kid’s plan,” she said. “I’m sure you think they’re good ones. But you and I both know how dangerous it is. Maybe this is a chance for you to reconsider your vote. If you tell the Kid the explosives don’t work, the Kid will have to call everything off.”
“Think about it,” she said, this time running her bad hand through her hair, a gesture whose clumsiness seemed intentional. “You could still save all of our lives.”
For a moment I said nothing. Since the vote I had begun to feel like part of the gang in ways I had not expected. In the mornings, I had started helping Texas feed and water the horses, and though we spoke little I felt a calm with her that I hadn’t felt since I walked to school with Susie, before we picked up Ulla and the day filled up with her jokes and gossip. In the evenings, Lo was continuing my fighting lessons, and in return I was teaching her about medicines and poisons, what we had to buy from traders and what we could gather around the bunkhouse, which herbs we could dry and suspend in tea or oil to cure coughs and fevers and clean infected skin.
I saw how the valley, now blooming into beauty after the long winter, could feel like home. What I had planned instead was so amorphous and uncertain. Mrs. Alice Schaeffer might want nothing to do with me. She might have closed her surgery. She might have died.
But if I stayed in the valley, I would learn no more about myself or people like me than I had known when I left the convent. I would die without knowing what made me the way I was.
“The Kid won’t give up that easily,” I told Elzy. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll find something that does.”
That night, while the rest of the gang bickered and played dominoes and drifted off to bed, the Kid sat brooding over maps and papers, eyes unfocused and bloodshot. I stayed up as the others went to sleep, and once Cassie began to breathe rhythmically in her cot, the Kid motioned me outside.
The spring moon was bright and high, the shadows of the rock w
alls sharp on the valley floor. An owl hooted, close and loud. The fine gray fabric of the Kid’s coat and hat took on a soft sheen in the moonlight.
“Have you been sleeping?” I asked.
The Kid looked at the moon and shrugged.
“What about the—” I paused, trying to find the most respectful way to ask about night terrors and fears with no names. “What about the other symptoms?” I finished.
“Have you ever been responsible for other people, Doctor? Have you held their lives in your hands?”
“You know I have,” I said.
The Kid nodded.
“My daddy was a pastor,” the Kid said. “Our town had a mayor, but really he was in charge. He baptized every single baby. He married a new couple nearly every Sunday. And when a wife was being beaten by her husband, when a widower broke down and thought about joining his dead wife, when a child was sick or missing or a grandfather was entering his second childhood and losing his mind, my daddy was there with counsel, day and night, and sometimes with food or money or a bed, whatever was needed, because every person in the congregation was like part of him and when they suffered, he suffered.”
“He sounds like a great man,” I said.
“He was very strong,” the Kid said. “Three hundred and sixty days a year, he held everyone up. And then for a week, he fell apart. He didn’t sleep. He saw things and heard voices. He accused us of things we didn’t do. He never hit us, but he would break things—once he smashed every dish in the kitchen, and we ate cold bread and cheese off of napkins until we saved up enough to replace them.”
“Are you worried that’s going to happen to you?” I asked. “That you’re going to have an attack like he did?”
“I was supposed to take over the church,” the Kid said. “Not my older brother or my younger brother—me. I started preaching before the congregation when I was eleven years old and I was more popular than the assistant pastor. I knew how to listen to people—when my daddy was busy visiting someone else, the parishioners started pouring out their hearts to me. Everyone said I was just like my daddy.”