by Anna North
News brought the wagon to a stop and without speaking, I got out to unlatch the gate. It was crude—lengths of barbed wire stretched between two heavy wooden posts, one of which fit through a metal ring at the bottom to form the latch. The wire was pulled so tight that I had trouble sliding the post out of the ring. Lark jumped down from the back of the wagon to help me, and we had just pulled the post free, allowing the wagon to pass through, when three men on fast horses came around the bend with guns drawn.
Lark didn’t hesitate.
“Go!” he shouted to News.
News gave him a single nod, then cracked the reins and set the horses galloping, leaving us behind in a cloud of gravel and garbage and dust.
The sheriff’s deputy searched me. He was a big man with meaty, careless hands, and at first I thought he might miss what I was hiding. He felt my ankles, knees, hips, waist, and found nothing amiss there, but then his hands slid under my arms and found the thick fabric I had used to bind my breasts.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I was wounded in a barfight,” I said. “I just have a bandage there, that’s all.”
“Show me,” the deputy said.
I unbuttoned the first two buttons of my ridiculous flowered dress to reveal the very top of the binder.
“I have to wear it for a few more weeks,” I said, “until the wound heals.”
We caught the attention of the sheriff then, a skinny man with pockmarked skin and a dark red cowboy hat who had been searching Lark.
“Show us the whole thing,” he said.
My heart was pounding in my ears as I unbuttoned the dress and laid the binder bare.
“That’s not like any bandage I’ve ever seen,” the deputy said.
“It’s no bandage,” the sheriff said, recognition and disgust mingling on his face. “Take it off.”
The evening air was cold on my naked skin. The deputy looked confused.
“What’s a woman doing thieving on the Powder River Road?” he asked the sheriff. “Is this some kind of Easter foolery?”
“She’s no woman,” the sheriff said. “I’ve seen this before, back in Colorado country. I knew a young man down there, very popular with the ladies. But when he seduced the mayor’s wife we arrested him for adultery—and we found one of these ‘bandages’ under his clothes. He, or she, or it, whatever you like, had a woman’s breasts, a woman’s body. Turned out her real name was Caroline and she’d escaped from jail in Salida, where she’d been held on suspicion of witchcraft. She’d been posing as a man ever since, leading unsuspecting women into wickedness.”
“What did you do with her?” the deputy asked, staring openly now at my breasts.
“We put her in the stocks for three days and three nights,” the sheriff said. “After that, we would have released her, but she was already dead.”
“We don’t have stocks here,” the deputy said, still staring.
“The judge will think of something,” the sheriff said. “You know what surprised me? When people came to cast their stones and shoes and whatnot at Caroline, the women were twice as savage as the men. If it weren’t for the women, she might have survived.”
I had not thought of my mother-in-law in months, but I thought of her as I buttoned the dress over my naked chest. The way she looked at me on the kitchen the day she sent me away, the loathing in her eyes, and the satisfaction at being able to punish me—I saw both now in the faces of the sheriff and his deputy.
I had not hated my mother-in-law for kicking me out, my husband for failing to stop her, or Sheriff Branch for treating me like a contagion when he had known me all my life. I had been angry and afraid, but not hateful. Now my hatred reached back from the two men before me all the way to Fairchild, where I imagined my husband’s family sitting down to dinner with their new daughter-in-law. I imagined my hate as a flame racing along the dirt road until it licked at their door.
I did not look at the sheriff or his deputy again as they cuffed our wrists and chained us to the deputy’s horse. My fate was sealed; I did not care what they thought of me or what they said. Instead I watched Lark. He met my eyes with a look that was warm and steady and calm, as though nothing he had seen that day disturbed or even surprised him. The look confused me, but it also sustained me, keeping the worst of my fears from overwhelming me as the men marched us down the road and into town.
The jail was a long, low building arranged around a central corridor down which a twitch-eyed guard paced, carrying a kerosene lantern and stopping periodically to sip something from a copper mug. The first room on the left, the one to which we were brought, held two other prisoners, a man and a woman, lying on long wooden benches above a dirt floor. It was separated from the corridor by a padlocked door with a window—too small for a man to crawl through, but large enough for the guard to keep an eye on the prisoners, and for us to watch him. Night had fallen and the only light in the room came from his lamp, passing across our faces as he paced by, then leaving us in darkness.
“What did you do?” the woman asked when the sheriff and his deputy had left.
Her voice in the darkness sounded young, but when the lamplight tracked across her face I saw her skin was weathered, like a year-old apple gone puckered and wrinkly in the storeroom.
“We stole a wagon,” Lark said, but the woman was looking at me.
My binder gone, the shape of my breasts was visible through my clothes. And I had stopped trying to walk and gesture like a man; no point in keeping up the deception now. I looked like what I was: a woman in an ugly dress, sitting in a jail awaiting her fate.
“Where’s your Easter costume?” she asked, looking at Lark in his purple frock, wondering no doubt why I wasn’t in dungarees.
I was wary of telling her anything about myself. Even here, it seemed like a mistake to reveal too much.
“What are you in here for?” I asked instead.
“Why,” she said, “can’t you tell? I’m a witch!”
When the light crossed her again she was sitting up and smiling at me. One of her front teeth was missing, giving her an impish appearance.
“Are you barren?” I asked.
“I have five sons, each one more good-for-nothing than the last,” she said. “But my sisters-in-law, neither of them could have babies after I married their brother. So they pointed the finger and here I sit, twenty years next month.”
I felt a kinship with her, so strong in that dark place that I had to fight the urge to reach out and take her hand.
“My mama is a midwife,” I said. “She says there’s not the slightest truth to what people say about witches making women barren. It’s just a silly story told by silly people.”
“And what, pray tell, does cause barrenness, Miss Daughter-of-a-Midwife?” the woman asked me.
“Nobody really knows,” I said. “But one day, I aim to find out.”
“Well, then you can tell the sheriff and I’m sure he’ll have me released,” the woman said, not unkindly. “Until then, I’m going to get some rest. You should do the same. The judge is off for Easter week, so you have another day in here, maybe two, before you find out what’s to become of you. You should make the most of it.”
The woman curled up on her bench and shut her eyes. The man had not spoken a word; he seemed to be sleeping too. I waited until the woman’s breathing went slow and even with sleep, and then I whispered to Lark.
“How did you know?” I asked.
His voice came closer than I’d thought in the flat dark.
“I didn’t know,” he said, “but I suspected. You’re doing a good job—an ordinary person would never guess. But there’s a lightness in the way you move, especially when you dance. Men are heavier in their bones than women, even when they’re slim, and you can see it if you know how to look.”
“And you know how to look?” I asked.
“I do.”
The guard passed in front of the window and the lamplight gave Lark’s face to me like a
present. I searched it for clues—that pretty mouth, yes, but also a day’s growth of beard on his cheeks and chin, a man’s prominent brow. I decided there was no reason anymore not to ask.
“Are you a woman?”
The light left his face before I could see his reaction.
“No,” he said.
“I saw you at the outhouse on the fairgrounds,” I said. “You were the only man there.”
“And?” he asked.
“And there must be something you don’t want people to see.”
For a moment he was quiet in the darkness and I thought maybe I’d offended him. Then the lamp passed by the window and I saw his face was amused, resigned.
“Fair enough,” he said, “we can trade secrets. When we met I told you I left Mobridge because I was in love with a married woman, right? Well it wasn’t a woman, it was a man. And I didn’t leave of my own accord.”
That explained why Lark had been so interested in me in Fiddleback. And presumably he wouldn’t be interested in me now—even in the dark of the jail I found I cared about this. I tasted disappointment like metal in my mouth.
Back home I had known two boys who were rumored to like other boys. Both were married to women by the time I left, with children on the way. Neither had ever had to leave town.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The man I loved, he stopped sleeping with his wife. They only had one child. His wife’s family found out about us and set the sheriff’s posse on me. In Mobridge, the usual penalty for interfering in the conception of children was gelding.”
“Gelding?” I asked. I thought I understood what he was saying, but I hoped I didn’t.
“Sometimes they used a red-hot poker to do the job. I was lucky—on me they used ordinary castrating shears. Oh, and then they threw me in jail. That’s where I got the name Lark.”
The light passed across him, but I looked away; I could not match what I was learning with what I felt for him, the thrum of desire in my belly that persisted even now.
“Why ‘Lark’?” I asked.
“Because eunuchs are supposed to be beautiful singers,” he said, “with high clear voices like meadowlarks.”
“Your voice isn’t high,” I said.
“They didn’t take everything from me,” he said. “A lot, but not everything.”
I wanted to know exactly what they’d taken, and what was left; if he could still feel pleasure when he went to bed with someone; and what it felt like, to go through the world with such a wound. I didn’t know how to ask any of those questions.
“How did you get out of jail?” I asked instead.
He laughed in the dark.
“Don’t get excited,” he said. “I don’t have any special knack for escape. My parents got together the money to pay the sheriff to release me, on the condition that I leave town and never come back. Don’t suppose you have any rich relatives around here.”
“No one except News and the others,” I said. “And I’m not sure they’ll come back for me. I wasn’t universally popular before today, and now—”
“Who are the others?” Lark asked. “Nate—News?—gave us the impression he worked solo. Even you were a surprise.”
The guard’s lamp washed over the room, catching the silent man for a moment clearly in its light. I saw now that his eyes were open but pointed blankly at empty space, nothing animating behind them. His mouth hung slack, moving slightly as he breathed. One of his hands trailed on the dirt floor; its nails curled all the way over the fingertips in filthy grayish claws. I understood clearly then that I could die in this jail, that it might in fact be better if I was hanged.
“There are eight of us,” I told Lark. There seemed no sense in keeping secrets now. “All of us are barren. For now we hide out in the mountains, up at Hole in the Wall. But we’re trying to make Fiddleback into a place where people like us can live in safety. The wagon was part of that—is part of that.”
I realized for the first time that the Kid’s plan had become my plan. I wanted it to succeed, not just because it would get me to Pagosa Springs but because I wanted the town the Kid imagined to exist in Powder country. I imagined treating a barren woman at the surgery in Pagosa Springs and telling her I knew of a place she could go and live without fear.
For a moment we sat in silence and darkness. Then Lark asked, “Is that why you left Dakota? Because you’re barren?”
The light came across his face and I saw him watching me so closely I dropped my eyes in embarrassment.
“I was married,” I said. “After a year I didn’t get pregnant, so my husband’s family threw me out. Now the sheriff in Fairchild wants me hanged for witchcraft. I can never go back there.”
“Do you miss it?” Lark asked. “I can’t say I miss Mobridge.”
“I miss my family,” I said. “Don’t you miss yours?”
He paused in the soft dark.
“My mama used to take me with her to forage for morels and fiddleheads to sell at market,” he said finally. “I had six brothers and sisters and I wasn’t my mama’s favorite—that was my sister Tilly. But my mama said I had the best eye for growing things. Every time I spotted a mushroom on the forest floor, her face would light up. She’d say, ‘See, James? You have a gift.’ ”
“James,” I said.
“That’s right. It was my daddy’s daddy’s name. Nobody’s called me that for a long time, though. I’ve gotten to like Lark. I’m not ashamed of what I did, or what happened to me. I used to be, but not anymore.”
I thought about the winter dance the year before I got married, me and Ulla and Susie and the other girls from school running outside in our dresses in the freezing air just for the shock of it, then running back inside gasping and falling all over one another, the boys looking at us in what I knew was jealousy, wishing we loved them as much as we loved each other. I thought about Bee running in from the garden in springtime to tell me that the mourning dove eggs had hatched and the tiny pink babies were reaching up to their mother with open mouths. I thought of the last birth I attended with my mother, a long labor, the baby faceup inside the birth canal, and how I was able to get the mother in position to push the baby out without my mama’s help, and how she cried afterward, her baby on her naked chest, and kept saying “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“I’ll never see my mama or my sisters again,” I said. “My littlest sister, Bee—I was like a second mama to her. Now she’ll think I abandoned her. I don’t even know if she’s safe. How can I not hate what I am, if this is what it’s brought me?”
I had never spoken such a thing aloud, but I felt it now as keenly as I’d felt it for the sheriff and his deputy on the Powder River Road. I hated my uselessness, the way my body had taken my family and my calling from me. I had thought the gang might give me a purpose, but here I was in a jail cell while the others, no doubt, readied themselves for the Fiddleback job without me. I had trained from childhood to heal sick people and bring babies and their mothers safely through birth, and now I would die, more likely than not, in a jail far from my home, and in more than a year I’d delivered no babies and healed just two people, one of them suffering from a wound I’d caused.
The light returned, and this time I looked Lark full in the face. It made me angry, even if we were both about to die, that he had come this far with no contempt for himself and no regret. It made me jealous.
“After I got out of Mobridge,” he said as the dark fell on us again, “I wanted to kill myself. I got a job in a roadhouse and I cut my wrists with a bread knife.”
I heard a rustle of fabric.
“Here,” he said, “feel.”
The scar was wide and slippery on the muscle of his forearm. Underneath it I could feel his pulse.
“Some part of me must not have been serious, because I didn’t cut deep enough. The owner found me ruining his kitchen floor with my blood. He was kind, but I was a liability. When I was healed he sent me away. After that I didn’t try
again, but that didn’t mean the desire wasn’t there. For five years I thought about it every day.”
“And then?” I asked.
“And then I got a job with a traveling veterinarian. He was getting old and needed someone strong to help him with the larger animals, the cows and horses. At first I hated him—he was mean and demanding and he scolded me over every little thing.
“But one day we were called to examine a horse with founder. The rancher had waited too long to call and the horse could barely walk—when the vet diagnosed her, the rancher was going to shoot her. So the vet took her himself. Over the next three months I saw him nurse her—he soaked her feet in ice baths, trimmed her hooves, and when she was ready, he rode her a little more every day until she was almost as good as new. He could never sell her—she’d be a little bit lame for the rest of her life—but he kept her on his own farm and fed her and cared for her along with his other horses. Once I asked him why he hadn’t let the rancher euthanize her, and he looked at me like I was crazy.
“ ‘She’s a living thing,’ he said.
“Afterward I watched how he was with all the animals, from the most beautiful prize stallion to the scrawniest chicken, as though each was worthy of his utmost care and attention. On the rare occasions when he had to put an animal down, he did it quickly, and took care to calm the animal first, so it didn’t die in fear and pain.
“In the whole time I worked for him, he never warmed up to me. In fact I think he hated me. But I knew if I ever tried anything like I’d done at the roadhouse, he’d do anything he had to do to save me—he’d consider my life worth any amount of effort, dislike me though he did. And so I never tried anything, and when I’d been working for him for a year, I discovered I didn’t think about it anymore. Except for a few dark times, I haven’t since.”