Outlawed

by Anna North

  The Kid sighed and smiled. “I should’ve known I’d get the bad part too.”

  “What helped your daddy?” I asked. “If there’s a medicine, I can make it or we can get it from Nótkon, I’m sure of it.”

  “Nothing helped. In the beginning the doctor or the midwife would come to look at him, but the only thing that ever worked was waiting. Mama would tell the church elders Daddy was very sick, and arrange for the assistant pastor to give the Sunday sermon. Then she’d draw all the curtains and keep everyone away from Daddy, visitor or family, until he was himself again.”

  The owl called again, farther away this time. Clouds were massing around the moon. The Kid turned away from me to face the red wall, now harsh black and white in the moonlight.

  “I still have my wits about me,” the Kid said. “The laudanum helps. I’m being judicious with it, as you said. But if I forget myself, if I behave as though I’m not a mortal human, but a god on earth, and no man or woman can harm me, then you must take me to the cowboy shack down by the creek. I’ll stay there until the sickness passes.”

  “I can do that,” I said, “but shouldn’t you be talking to Cassie about all this?”

  “Cassie suspects,” the Kid said. “But she doesn’t know how ill I could become. If she knew—”

  The Kid took off the gray hat, passed an elegant hand over a close-cropped scalp. Bareheaded beneath the night sky, the Kid looked older and more weary than I’d ever seen.

  “Our friends in there”—the Kid said, gesturing at the bunkhouse—“they may not always like me or agree with me, but they rely on me. I’ve begun to falter, I know they see it. But I’m still myself, for now.”

  The Kid put the hat back on.

  “If I have to go away,” the Kid said, “tell them I’ve been taken with fever, tell them whatever you can think of. Just don’t tell them the truth.”

  I was afraid then—not of the Kid or whatever had ailed the Kid’s father, but of what would happen if I was responsible for holding the whole gang together. I was afraid, too, of what would happen if I couldn’t make a working bomb soon; every day we didn’t make progress on the Kid’s plan, I sensed, meant another sleepless night. But I knew it would do no good to let the Kid know I was scared.

  “You can count on me,” I said.

  “Good,” said the Kid. “Come on, time for bed. The night air’s been good for me. I should take these constitutionals more often.”

  The Kid began walking back to the bunkhouse, and I hurried to catch up. I had so many questions, and I didn’t want to let the moment pass without asking at least one.

  “Why didn’t you take over your father’s church?” I asked. “What happened?”

  The Kid gave me a smile and a shake of the head at the same time.

  “Another day,” the Kid said. “I’m tired.”

  I spent the next day with the field manual, looking for clues. I had read the section on bombs hundreds of times, but I had not read the whole book cover to cover. Much of it was not, strictly speaking, a manual at all, but instead a record of the accomplishments of Frederick Blunt himself. Through his negotiation skills, Blunt had apparently helped form the militia, bringing together the fighting-age men of three extended families who had fled northwest when the Flu came to the old city of St. Louis. Thanks to his cunning and military acumen, the men had been able to defeat or contract with several other bands of white settlers who had escaped the dying city, resulting in control of significant territory in Missouri River country, as well as the loyalty of nearly five hundred people. Blunt was then instrumental in establishing a town seat in the place they called Meeting of the Waters, and defending it against attacks by rival bands of refugees while simultaneously sending scouts west to treat with Osage leaders and to create satellite settlements against the day—soon, Blunt was sure—when the population of Meeting of the Waters would overwhelm its location on a peninsula between the rivers and necessitate a move.

  Amid all this, Blunt apparently remained secretary of the militia, never ascending to the rank of captain or becoming mayor of Meeting of the Waters, which suggested to me that many of the triumphs he attributed to himself had in fact been achieved by other people, or perhaps not achieved at all. Still, his account was very detailed, down to the number of bullets, musket balls and other ammunition the militia kept in their stockpile, the time it took to build a town hall out of lumber salvaged from nearby abandoned homes, and the type of grain the militiamen and their families fed their horses. It was this last that caught my eye.

  “The foals born in the spring of 1853 did not thrive as their elders had,” Blunt wrote, “suffering from broken bones and a number of other ailments. Andrew Langhorne, an experienced farmer who served as our farrier, speculated that since coming to Meeting of the Waters we had come to rely too heavily on oats and corn in the horse feed and not enough on pasture grass. Indeed, foals set to pasture the next spring and given oats and corn only as supplements were stronger, and this has been our practice ever since.”

  At Hole in the Wall the horses ate pasture grass in the summer and dry alfalfa and hay in the winter; most had never even tasted oats or corn. Luckily such feed was not expensive, and I was able to get several bags from Nótkon in exchange for one of our older guns and some of the herbal tinctures I’d put up in the fall.

  I was all but certain the experiment would be worthless, and so I didn’t even tell Texas what I was doing. I said I was supplementing Amity’s feed because she had seemed colicky lately, and when it came time to clean the barn I secretly stored her shit separately from the rest. When I had enough dried and bagged, I crept out of the bunkhouse early in the morning while everyone else slept, when the sky was just beginning to blue with sunlight.

  As I lit the fuse I was thinking about what I would do next, how I would tell the Kid that I could not make us any bombs. The Kid had been sleeping when I left—upright in a chair with hat and boots still on, but sleeping nonetheless. The day before, I had checked the laudanum in the trunk, and while it had certainly dwindled, the Kid had clearly used it sparingly. Probably the Kid was doing better, I told myself. You had to be very strong, after all, to pull together a gang from nothing and lead it for years through danger and privation, keeping eight people together in the face of all that could pull them apart.

  Without bombs, I knew, we’d have to get someone from the bank to open the vault for us. That would take time, in which the sheriff’s posse might arrive, or the rest of the bank employees might band together to rush us. The plan would become more dangerous—the Kid might need to call another vote, or at the very least convince Elzy and Cassie and Lo that the risks were not so great. Still, I told myself as the flame slid up the bootlace, the Kid could handle it. Surely the ability to make provisions for future sickness meant that the sickness was, at present, not so advanced.

  I heard a sound behind me then, something moving in the tall grass. I turned, thinking snake, thinking mountain lion, and so when the bomb went off with the sound of earth tearing open, I was looking right into the eyes of the Kid, who had not been sleeping at all.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Easter Market in Casper was like nothing I’d ever seen. At the center of the town fairgrounds was a canvas tent big enough to hold everyone in Fairchild. Inside, women in white bonnets and yellow dresses were getting ready for the Sunday service, hanging tapestries of baby Jesus leaving the tomb in the arms of Mary Magdalene; baby Jesus appearing before the disciples; baby Jesus ascending to Heaven, flanked by angels. Around the tent, merchants and traders from up and down the Powder sold their wares from the backs of their wagons: hollowed-out duck and chicken eggs painted with flowers or resurrection scenes; Babies’ Tears made of gelatin and sugar and flavored with berry juices or brandy; beaded moccasins and bags trimmed with porcupine quills; flower crowns; sweet pies with rhubarb and savory pies with lamb; fine Mexican silver; and last-minute costumes for Mothering Monday, baggy bright dresses for men and hats and mustach
es for women, along with gray wigs to turn children into old grannies.

  At the center of the fairgrounds were the livestock stalls, loud with the complaints of animals and noisome with their mingled smells. There I saw a hog the size of a steer and a steer the size of the kitchen cabin at Hole in the Wall; I saw a snow-white chicken with a long feathered tail like the train of a wedding gown, and a tame black bear that stood on its hind legs and wore a hat like a man.

  We met Henry and Lark among the horses. Henry was examining a beautiful roan mare, who held her head high as he walked around her stall, as though she knew her own worth. Lark was occupied with a smaller horse, dappled gray like river stones with wild, mistrustful eyes. He clucked to it softly with his tongue and it hesitated, then went to him and ate a sugar cube from his flat palm.

  When News had suggested to the Kid that Henry and Lark could help us steal a wagon to the carry the gold away from Fiddleback, I’d been too embarrassed to endorse the idea. Cassie, predictably, didn’t like it—we’d never needed outside help with a job before, she said. But News pointed out that wasn’t quite true—Henry and Lark and many others had given her tips and information in the past. And in any case, the biggest thing we’d ever stolen in the past was a horse. Henry and Lark had done a wagon job before, and knew how to manage a hitch and a team of new, scared horses. The Kid had agreed quickly, and it made sense for me to go with News. I already knew the two men, and by now News and I worked together well enough to make up, largely, for my lack of experience. When we walked among the horses as Nate and Adam, I felt, if not comfortable in my man’s stride, then at least hidden by it—no one who looked at me would guess I was a barren woman, a discarded wife, an outlaw wanted for cursing women’s wombs even though I had helped coax dozens of babies into the world.

  But as soon as I saw Lark, I felt exposed, as though anyone who saw me would be able to tell what I was thinking. He carried himself with more confidence than I remembered; what I had taken for unease in Fiddleback seemed now more like caution, as he held his body still while the shy horse licked his hand. When he turned to face me, I turned away as if I didn’t see him, and turned back only when Henry joined him and News greeted them both, clapping them on their backs and shaking their hands.

  “Should we find somewhere we can talk?” News asked.

  Henry shook his head.

  “Look around you,” he said. I did—I saw children chasing each other and jostling to pet the ponies; women in sensible bonnets or colorful fascinators haggling and flirting, laughing and whispering, a few selling cheap glass beaded jewelry right off their own plump arms; and men in Sunday suits and dungarees and buckskins and every combination thereof, measuring the horses’ backs and scrutinizing their hooves, waving notes and bags of coin in the air, arguing, shoving each other both in jest and in provocation, and generally conducting what seemed to be a combination of business, friendship, and war.

  “I guarantee you one in ten men here right now is a horse thief, and one in twenty women. There’s no place safer for us to talk; we blend right in.”

  We strolled down the line of horse stalls, Henry and News in front, Lark and I in the rear.

  “Tomorrow is Mothering Monday,” Henry said. “Everybody will be feasting and drinking and carrying on. We wait till the party’s in full swing, then we find an unattended wagon, hitch up our horses, and ride off with it.”

  “What do we do about the sheriff’s posse?” News asked. “Surely they’ll be on patrol.”

  “Of course,” said Henry, “but I’ve been to this Market before. At least in my experience, the men in the posse like to take a drink on Mothering Monday as much as anyone. And since everyone will be dressed up, they’ll be all turned around—odds are they won’t know we aren’t the ones who drove the wagon in on Good Friday in the first place. Lark and Adam will look like fine, upstanding young merchants, don’t you think? Especially in their Monday best.”

  We looped back around to the costume stalls.

  “I saw a pink housedress here with your name on it,” Henry said to News, pointing to the cheapest of the stalls, where a hand-lettered sign advertised a dress and hat together for a bargain price of five silver liberties.

  “Please,” said News, fingering a parrot-green ensemble. “You know pink isn’t my color.”

  I selected a blue dress with small white polka dots. It was pretty, like something I might have worn in Fairchild, and it made me think of dances before I was married, when Ulla and Susie and I would stand against the wall looking at boys and then looking away until they came up to ask us to dance.

  News took one look at it and put it back on the rack, picking out instead an ugly yellow one printed with huge pink roses, plus some garish red greasepaint.

  “You’re not supposed to look pretty,” she whispered as Henry and Lark browsed a nearby rack. “You’re supposed to look ridiculous.”

  The woman who took our money and wrapped our purchases in brown paper was very striking, with large green eyes and a determined jut to her chin. She kept her eyes locked on News’s face as she counted out our change, a gaze I thought was rude until I understood its meaning.

  “Will I see you at the dance tomorrow?” News asked as she pocketed the coins.

  “You’ll see me,” the woman said.

  “Tomorrow, then,” said News, tipping the brim of her hat.

  Henry smiled as we left the stall, shaking his head.

  “Swift work as always,” he said to News.

  “Just being friendly,” News replied.

  Our path next led us back to the tent, where a man was beginning to address the crowd. News and Henry took up a position behind a tentpole festooned with ribbon; I had to look around it in order to see. The man who spoke was short and slight, with a round, bald head and horn-rimmed glasses, but he had a loud, confident voice and a way of moving around the stage that made him seem to occupy a space bigger than his physical form.

  “Now some foals are strong and hardy and others are weak and sickly,” the preacher said. “Some grow up fast and sure-footed, and others are slow and clumsy, barely good for pulling a plow. Some weather every season and others succumb to fever their very first winter.”

  “Come on,” said Henry to News, his voice softer now. “Let’s go get a drink. They’re selling double whiskeys for five coppers over by the Babies’ Tears.”

  News shook her head. “You go if you want,” she said. “I want to hear this.”

  “Any good rancher knows that nine times out of ten, a strong horse comes from strong stock,” the preacher said. “A weak horse comes from weak stock. That’s just the way it is.

  “And we know that human beings are the same way. A fertile woman usually comes from a big family. A mother with a cleft lip or a clubfoot, like as not, will have children with the same ailment.”

  The man’s words were familiar to me, but I struggled to place them.

  “Now,” he went on, “I have something to show you that I believe will drive home my point.”

  A pleasant-faced young woman in a yellow dress and bonnet led onto the stage two goats, a brown nanny goat with short hair and a shaggy black billy goat with a long beard. Both were plump and vigorous, tugging on their leads, making the woman giggle as she tried to contain them.

  “This fine animal,” said the man, gesturing at the billy goat, “is of Colorado stock, a champion mountain climber. And this lass by his side is a lowland breed, called an Arizona red. The two come from entirely different climates and conditions, and under ordinary circumstances, they would never cross paths. But in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I have induced them to breed with one another.”

  The woman led them away, and came back with a miserable-looking animal, scrawny and pink-eyed, its hips twisted and gait painful to watch. On its head were not two but four horns, intertwined like the branches of a sticker bush. As soon as I saw it, I realized I must be watching Dr. Edward Lively.

  “Now this unfortunate beast,
” the doctor said, “is the product of two vibrant, beautiful animals, as you just saw. Bred with their own kind, both have produced many perfectly healthy kids. But bred, as you might say, against their kind, they have engendered this poor creature, who suffers a total of thirteen types of deformity, those you can see from where you sit being only the most obvious.”

  The crowd began to murmur with interest and approval. I saw something I had not noticed when I first entered the tent: while I had seen black buyers and sellers at the market, and heard Arapaho and other languages I didn’t recognize, almost everyone gathered to watch Dr. Lively was white.

  “Tell me now,” the doctor said, “if these animals, who are relatively simple in their bodily structure, revert to such monstrosity when bred against their nature, how much worse must it be when man, the most complex creature of all, takes up with a mate who is of different stock?”

  The murmur grew louder. Then a woman stood up, blonde and pink-cheeked, a little younger than my mother.

  “My son’s wife still hasn’t given him a child, and it’s been nearly two years,” she called out to Dr. Lively. “I suspect there’s mixed blood in her family. Could that be the reason?”

  “It could indeed, madam,” Dr. Lively said. “According to my research, nearly half of all cases of barrenness are caused by some form of racial mixing or another, sometimes quite far back in the family tree. And of course this is far from the only ailment—”

  “Nate,” Henry said.

  This time News nodded, and Lark and I followed them out of the tent.

  For a long time no one said anything. We bought moonshine from a wagon stall. News’s hand shook around the glass. The stall also sold patent medicines, bright blue and red and green, with labels that said things like “Pleasant Dreams” and “Vim and Virility.” Traveling salesmen had come through Fairchild with bottles like these from time to time; I knew they were colored water at best.