Outlawed

by Anna North

  Lark was the first of us to speak. “That man is nobody,” he said. “The main event today is the Reverend Delano, from Laramie. He won’t preach until long after nightfall. The crowd will be five times the size.”

  “Lark—” said Henry, a warning. I wondered how much he knew of News’s past.

  “No, Lark’s right,” News said. “He’s nobody.”

  She was smiling, but her eyes glittered with rage. She drained her glass.

  “Adam,” she said, “why don’t you get us another round?”

  As I stood, a young woman approached the stall. Her stride was purposeful but when she reached the makeshift counter where the owner stood, she hesitated as though nervous. “Do you have anything for fertility?” she asked finally, lowering her voice on the last word.

  “Absolutely,” the stall owner said. “You’ll want our Fruitful Womb tonic. I’ve sold all the bottles, but we have more in the back. I’ll just bottle some up for you now.”

  He came out from behind the counter—no more than a pine board balanced on sawhorses—and disappeared around the back of his wagon.

  “I’d save your money if I were you,” I said to the woman when he was gone.

  She was short and strong-bodied, with a raspberry-colored birthmark at her throat. When I spoke, she looked frightened, and I remembered that to her I was a strange man, interrupting what must be, for her, a sensitive transaction.

  “I don’t mean to intrude,” I said. “It’s just that I’m a doctor. And these tonics are a waste of money. How long have you been married?”

  The woman still looked suspicious, but she answered, “Nine months.”

  “Give it a year,” I said. “If you’re not pregnant by then, there’s no medicine can help you. The safest thing is to get away. There’s a convent, the Sisters of the Holy Child—”

  The stall owner came back with two large glass bottles, one full of blue liquid and one full of green. “Either one of these is effective on its own,” he told the woman, “but for the quickest results, I’d advise you to take two tablespoons of the Fruitful Womb every morning”—he held up the blue bottle—“and then a tablespoon of this one, the Mother’s Friend, before you go to sleep.”

  He tapped on the green bottle with his index finger. “They work together, you see, to regulate the feminine fluids.”

  The woman looked at me as she opened her pocketbook.

  “I’ll take both,” she said.

  That night the four of us pitched a tent alongside dozens of others on the outskirts of the fairgrounds by the banks of the river. While Lark and Henry looked for a spot, News spoke to me under her breath.

  “We’ll sleep in our clothes tonight,” she said. “Henry’s camped with me before—he won’t say anything. If Lark does, you get cold easy. Let him rib you a little bit if he wants to. If you’re easygoing about it he’ll forget it soon enough.”

  Lark and Henry looked like they had settled on a place. Henry removed mallet, pegs, and thick canvas from his horse’s saddlebags.

  “If you need to piss,” News went on, “go to the outhouse by the big tent. Don’t go down by the river or into the trees—someone might see you. It’s not your period, is it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Good. It’s mine. If yours starts, I have some clean rags.”

  Later that night I waited for one of the outhouses. The others in the long line kept looking at me with curiosity, even suspicion. Whenever I’d been among people in my men’s clothes before, I’d always been afraid of being found out. Now that I was clearly taken for someone I wasn’t, I felt a wave of something uncanny pass through me, almost but not quite dizziness. I thought of a feeling Ulla used to talk about, a shivering strangeness that would come on her without warning, the sense that she was outside her body looking in. “Somebody walking over your grave,” she used to say.

  I took News’s advice and tried to seem calm and loose, holding my head high, absently kicking an eggshell with my boot. The feeling ebbed but didn’t pass, hanging on in the corner of my mind, a low but insistent buzz.

  Up ahead the outhouse door swung open. I felt the attention of the waiting women turn away from me, and I followed the line of their gaze. Lark met my eyes when I looked at him, and, for a moment before he nodded curtly and walked on back to the tents, I saw in his face what I knew he saw in mine: the recognition that both of us must have something to hide.

  By the time we got to the big tent around three o’clock the next afternoon, the day was already wild. A short woman wearing a man’s shirt unbuttoned to show the tops of her round breasts pulled me in to dance with her. News grinned and gave me a thumbs-up; I rolled my eyes. We’d all agreed we’d spend an hour at the dance to blend in with the crowd and so we were convincingly sweaty and boozy and flushed when it came time to drive a wagon out. News had succeeded in making me look ridiculous in my yellow dress, the greasepaint giving my lips and cheeks a cartoonish brightness.

  And yet she managed to look dashing in the green frock she threw over her dungarees, her hat adorned with feathers and cloth flowers. In the crowd I saw the young woman from the costume stall, now dressed as a handsome boy in a slim dark suit, with a mustache drawn in kohl above her lips. News approached her quickly, as though merely walking past, then paused and tipped her hat again, slowly this time. As she raised the brim I saw her smile below it. Then she turned and walked out of the tent. I saw the woman in the dark suit wait a moment, then follow.

  I had never danced a man’s part before but it didn’t seem to matter—the tent was too crowded and the people too drunk to do much beyond the clumsiest reel. My dance partner pressed her breasts against my stomach and looked up at me, inviting—when I took a step away from her she shrugged, released my hands, and moved on to the man next to me, who had a bonnet and a black beard and a dotted Swiss apron straining over his belly.

  A young woman wearing a gray mustache and eyeglasses without lenses carried a tray full of sloshing golden beers—I bought one and drank deep. On the stage where Dr. Lively had been preaching the day before, now two fiddlers and a short man with a tall bass guitar were playing at furious speed.

  Looking around at the other dancers, I saw Lark—almost elegant in his purple-checked housedress—dancing close with a redheaded woman who threw back her head and laughed at something he said. My jealousy was no weaker for being pointless. The night before we’d slept next to each other as two men. He’d said nothing when I crawled into my bedroll fully dressed. He, meanwhile, had unbuttoned his shirt while I tried not to look. Only when he turned his long back away from me to sleep did I let myself glance, and then the image stayed with me as I shut my eyes. I was no closer to knowing what he had to conceal, but I knew it was not what I was hiding.

  Another woman—this one older, an expert dancer—took my free hand in hers. With her I found my feet and began to lead, or at least collaborate. The beer entered my blood and my hips and shoulders relaxed. I knew that none of these people were my friends—I was going to steal from them, and if they knew what I was, some would have me hanged for a witch, while others would have my family expelled from town, or worse, in order to keep the poison of me from spreading to other bloodlines. And yet the woman who danced with me smelled like apples and wine. The fiddlers were laughing to each other as they played. Someone refilled my beer glass without asking for money. The woman and I parted and another took her place, and then the music changed and we joined a circle with other dancers, all of us holding hands, all of us moving in toward the center and back out again, singing and shouting.

  I dropped the hand of the man next to me—chest hair, the low-necked red gown of a barmaid—to clap along with the music, and when I tried to take it again I felt a squeeze, a familiar firmness. I turned to see Lark, his cheeks flushed, his eyes shining. I squeezed back, then regretted it—a single squeeze could be a friendly greeting, but surely a second was too much, surely I’d given myself away. I dropped his hand and turned away from him
.

  I had never been so aware of anyone as I was for the next few minutes as Lark danced next to me. The band kept playing and the crowd kept clapping and I kept moving along with them, but all my mind was consumed with the circumstances of his body, where it was in relation to mine. I did not look back at him. I thought it safest to pretend to ignore him until he got tired of my rudeness and found another woman to dance with.

  Then the music changed again. The crowd whooped. Our circle began moving, three steps left, three steps right. On the second set I could see out of the corner of my eye that Lark was dropping out of the circle to pass behind me; I was both relieved and bereft to see him go. Then, as he passed by, he placed a hand on the small of my back and left it there. It was a gesture that would seem like nothing from the outside, if anyone bothered to look—one man pushing past another on a crowded dance floor. But to me its meaning was so clear that my body pushed right past my mind’s surprise; I leaned back into him, pressing the full length of my back into his chest. I felt his breath on my neck. Then he was gone.

  A fat man wearing nothing but a baby blanket and an enormous cloth diaper took the stage.

  “Mothers and fathers, boys and girls, cowboys and … ladies of the evening, gather round,” he shouted. “Quit your dancing and carrying on for a moment and listen to me. It’s time for the most important part of our day’s festivities. It’s time to crown the Mother of the Year!”

  This was our cue. As the man-baby called men in elaborate costumes up to the stage (“Mrs. Winifred Higginbotham” had five baby dolls strapped to him, including one, for some reason, on his left forearm), I squeezed through the crowd to the edge of the tent and out into the evening air.

  News and Henry and Lark were already at our meeting place, a stall that had once sold brightly colored eggs and now provided a modicum of privacy for four separate couples, one in each corner, the women’s hands catching in the folds of the men’s dresses, the men struggling with the buttons on the women’s pants.

  I stole a glance at Lark but he was laughing with Henry about something, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I must have misinterpreted his touch in the tent, I thought. He’d meant it as a friendly gesture, man to man, and I’d put myself in danger by responding in a way he’d never intended. After all, I’d seen him laughing and flirting with the redheaded woman. There was no reason to think he’d be interested in what I appeared to be: a nervous young man in an ugly dress.

  “Ready?” News asked.

  We fetched the horses and walked the lines of wagons. As Henry had predicted, all of them were unguarded, save a few selling valuable wares—icons of baby Jesus trimmed in gold leaf, cardamom and cinnamon and perfumes that hung in the cooling air. We chose a modest wagon near the edge of the fairgrounds—from the flour dusting the seats in front, it seemed the owner was a baker. Under the canvas canopy I could still smell hot cross buns.

  I was trying to buckle Amity into the wagon traces when the women came strolling by. One was tall, pretty, with long caramel-colored hair down her back. Her broadcloth shirt was modestly buttoned, but her trousers were tight, revealing more of her body than a dress ever would.

  The other woman was shorter and softer, with dark hair pinned up in braids under a man’s black hat. She had wide brown eyes and a round, childlike face. Both women were young, not much older than me.

  The round-faced woman became captivated by Amity, stroking her gray flank and looking into her dark eyes. Amity regarded her with a mix of tolerance and caution. Meanwhile, the loose-haired woman approached me.

  “Shouldn’t you be dancing?” she asked.

  Her voice was teasing and playful. I tried to respond in kind.

  “I could ask you the same question,” I said.

  “Audrey and I are married women,” she said, holding up her left hand to show me her gold ring. “We don’t dance with strange men.”

  “Well,” I said, thinking quickly, “I guess we have the same excuse. I’m engaged.”

  “Congratulations,” the woman cooed, drawing closer to me. I could smell her sweat and her perfume—men’s clothing notwithstanding, she was wearing paintbrush flower oil, the kind Ulla’s mama used to make in the springtime and mix into women’s paints and powders. The smell was sweet but with a darkness to it, and I felt drawn to the woman in a way that surprised me. I imagined leaning close to her and inhaling the scent of her hair.

  “So who’s the lucky woman?” she asked.

  “Her name is Ada,” I said. “She’s studying to be a midwife back in Fairchild, where I’m from.”

  It made me smile to think of myself as a wife to myself, the woman I could’ve been and the man I was pretending to be. Both of them luckier in life than the person I really was.

  “Does she come from a good family?” asked the woman called Audrey, turning from Amity to me. She spoke softly, but her voice had a kind of urgency behind it.

  “Of course,” I said. “She’s one of four children and her mother is the best midwife in all of Dakota country.”

  “But”—Audrey glanced at Henry and News and then leaned close to me, almost whispering—“is her bloodline pure?”

  From what I had learned about deceiving strangers, I knew I should say yes, so I could maintain whatever rosy image they had of me. But I also knew that no one learns anything without being taught. I had failed with the woman with the birthmark, but I had gotten off on the wrong foot with her. These women seemed to like and feel at ease with me; perhaps they would be easier to sway.

  “I don’t go in for that nonsense,” I said. “Some babies are sickly, some babies are healthy. It’s got nothing to do with whether the parents are black or white.”

  “Not just the parents,” Audrey said in her ardent whisper. “It’s like Dr. Lively was saying about horses. Your horse here, she must come from good stock all the way back. Just one ancestor with a lame foot or a weak back is enough to ruin the blood.”

  “Our husbands are traders,” said the loose-haired woman, pride making her voice go stiff and proper. “We’ve been all up and down this country from the Bighorns to the Rockies. We know what bad blood can do.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “My fiancée has attended over fifty births. She could tell you—babies from mixed families are just as healthy as babies with a pure bloodline, or whatever you call it. There’s no difference.”

  News gave me a warning look.

  “You’re wrong,” Audrey said. “Dr. Lively has seen hundreds of babies deformed by the mixing of blood. He once saw a doctor in Laramie poison a cat by feeding it the blood of a black woman and a white man mixed together.”

  “If Dr. Lively believes that,” I said, “he’s stupider than he looks.”

  “Dr. Lively learned to read and write before he could walk,” Audrey said. “He’s a prodigy. Maybe you don’t like what he has to say because of the company you keep.”

  She looked at Henry and News and back at me again.

  “If you don’t like my associates,” I said, “you’re free to leave us alone.”

  “We will,” said the loose-haired woman. “And we’ll tell our friends to stay away from your stall too. What are you selling, anyway? I don’t remember you from last year.”

  “Hot cross buns,” I said quickly, the first thing that came to mind. “But we’re sold out.”

  “Lucky for you,” said the loose-haired woman. “My advice? Don’t come back here next year. We don’t have any use for ignorant people here.”

  As she spoke, I saw her peer past me into the back of the wagon, which I only now saw was full of farm implements—hoes and scythes and plow blades, each one clearly marked with a price.

  No one said anything as we drove the wagon toward the outskirts of the fairgrounds. News held the reins and I sat up front with her; Henry and Lark rode behind with the farm equipment. News drove the horses as fast as she could without exciting suspicion. Evening was shading into night and the shadows were long on the campgrou
nd as we rode past, attenuated shapes of men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes, embracing in tents and against trees and on the cooling ground. No one looked up to take notice of us, and we passed out of the fairgrounds and onto the road to town without incident, the only sound the jingling of the wagon hitches and the occasional huff of one of the horses as they pulled us out of danger.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to News. “I should’ve looked in the back of the wagon right away.”

  “You should’ve kept your mouth shut,” News said. “What was that? Your fiancée? Haven’t you learned anything about how to talk to people?”

  “I thought maybe I could change their minds,” I said. “I thought if they heard it from a midwife, maybe they’d listen.”

  “To them you’re not a midwife,” News said. “You’re just a strange man who insulted their precious doctor. You must be pretty convinced of your powers of persuasion if you thought that was going to work.”

  Her tone was snide and cynical; I’d never heard her speak like that before.

  “I just wanted to help,” I said. “I thought you’d appreciate it.”

  “Oh, I see,” said News. “You wanted to help. You figured that if only someone with a bit of education explained things clearly to these Lively people, they’d stop looking at me like I was a deformed goat and start treating me like a person. Do I have that right?”

  “That’s not—” I began.

  “And if only somebody’d had the presence of mind to explain things to the mayor back home in Elmyra, perhaps I’d be with my family right now. It’s just too bad no one with your intelligence and education was around to help us. What a relief that you’re here now!”

  “I’m sorry for trying to stand up for you,” I said, angry now. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “I don’t need anyone to stand up for me, Doctor. Certainly not you.”

  The road from the fairgrounds into the town of Casper was narrow and paved with gravel; our teeth chattered as the horses pulled us over it. All along the roadsides lay refuse from the market: empty bags that had once held Babies’ Tears or fruit tarts or other sweets; eggshells; chicken bones; discarded Easter bonnets and men’s hats and even a false beard, lying in the road like an animal. After what felt like miles of silence while I chewed over my anger at News—could I really be in the wrong when I had done what I thought was the braver thing to do?—we rounded a bend in the road and came upon a gate meant to keep cows from wandering from the fairgrounds into town. The gate had been open when we arrived at the market the day before, but now it was latched, and anyone who wanted to pass through would have to dismount and pull it open by hand.