Outlawed

by Anna North

  When the light returned, Lark’s face and the way he held his body made sense to me in a way they hadn’t before. That combination of caution and confidence—I imagined the old veterinarian slowly training the sick horse to walk again, to trot, to canter, knowing where her weak points were but knowing, too, how she could become strong. I wished I could think of my own failed body with that kind of care. Instead I was full of shame and fear.

  “We’re going to die in here,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Lark said. “But we’re not dead yet.”

  We knew morning only by the changing of the guard, the new one tall and young, the kerosene lamp revealing a soft, hairless face. He had brought along a bag of hard-boiled eggs in bright colors, which he peeled and ate as he paced. I had been lying with my head on the bench and my eyes shut, but I had not been asleep. I had been turning plans over and over in my mind.

  “If I throw myself against the window—” I said to Lark as he began to stir.

  “Save your energy,” the woman said. When the light crossed her, I saw her eyes remained shut, her body relaxed in its sleeping posture. And yet her voice was fully awake and alert. I wondered how long she’d been listening.

  “There’s no way out of here,” she said. “That glass is double-paned, with metal wires in between. This might not be a big town but the sheriff comes up from Telluride. He’s caught some of the worst outlaws west of the Mississippi. He made sure this jail was watertight.”

  “So that’s it then?” I asked. “We’re just going to rot in here?”

  I regretted my words immediately. This woman had served twenty years for the misfortunes of her sisters-in-law, and here I was panicking after a single night. But when the light came back, she was smiling. With her missing tooth she reminded me of Ulla suddenly, that mischievous gap in her grin.

  “There is one thing you can try,” she said. “I’d do it myself, but I haven’t found anybody willing. You can ask to get married.”

  “I’m not sure our young friend out there is going to be keen on marrying either of us,” Lark said, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “It’s not,” the woman said. “The sheriff here is very serious about the holiness of the family. If you request a marriage, he’ll have you taken to a church for the ceremony. And then he’ll give you a private place to consummate the union. If you can manage to conceive a child—well then you might just save both your lives.”

  “I can’t have children,” I told her. There seemed little risk in admitting it now.

  “Even so,” she said. “You’ll have the trip to the church and the wedding ceremony to figure something out. You’ll be under armed guard, of course, but our little church is a lot easier to bust out of than this jail.”

  The mirth in the woman’s voice felt out of place in the dark and airless room.

  “Why are you telling us this?” I asked, suspicious.

  The woman sat up and stretched.

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think about how much I hate the sheriff,” she said. “Anything that hurts him is reward enough for me.”

  I could feel Lark’s smile in the dark.

  “What do you think, Ada?” he asked. “Will you marry me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” the sheriff said. “Of course I won’t take you to the church. You’re wanted for grand theft. And you,” he said, looking at me—“I don’t even know what crime the judge will want to charge you with. If it weren’t Easter week, you’d be dead by now.”

  He held his own kerosene lamp as he spoke to us, illuminating the room with a flickering light. I could see the marks on the walls where other prisoners—probably now long dead—had scratched their names and prayers and curses with dirty fingernails.

  “With all due respect, sir,” said Lark, “our marriage won’t be holy in the eyes of baby Jesus unless we consecrate it in a church.”

  “And the trip to church will give you plenty of chances to give my guards the slip,” said the sheriff. “I know how your kind thinks. No, if you want to get married I won’t stop you. But you’ll be having the ceremony in here.”

  “And afterward?” Lark asked.

  “Afterward, what?”

  Lark took my hand. Before I knew what I was doing, I squeezed his palm, and he squeezed back. The memory of the dance under the tent came back to me.

  “I don’t mean to be indelicate,” he said, “but my bride and I will need somewhere private to consummate our marriage.”

  The sheriff looked away from us with a prudish embarrassment that, under other circumstances, I might have found sweet.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “We’ll put you in the gentlemen’s quarters.”

  The priest came the following morning—I knew it only because the night guard had come and gone and the young day guard had returned. By my figuring, we had another day left of Easter week, another day before we had to meet the judge.

  The woman had shrugged when I asked what we should do now that we wouldn’t be going to church.

  “I learned long ago not to get my hopes up,” she said. “At least you’ll get to spend an afternoon in the nice part of this place. Usually it’s only for folks who can pay.”

  Lark and I decided our best move was to wait until the guard took us to the gentlemen’s quarters. Then Lark would try to knock the lamp out of his hand. While the guard scrambled to put out the flames, we’d try to make a run for it. It wasn’t a particularly good plan, but it was the only one we had. And first we had to get married.

  The priest was middle-aged, with a handsome, strong-jawed face and black hair going gray. He walked with two canes; in the lamplight I saw that though his shoulders and chest were powerful, his legs were as short and slender as a child’s. He lowered himself onto the bench next to us, the guard shut the door behind him, and the dark, for the moment, erased us all.

  “I’m Father Daniel,” the priest said. “Ordinarily, when I meet with couples before their wedding day, my purpose is to make sure they understand the gravity of the marriage sacrament, and to prepare them for their lives together. In this case, unfortunately, I have another task: to ensure that both of you enter into this marriage with godly intentions, and not merely as a way of delaying whatever justice is due for your crimes. It’s undignified, I’m sure you’ll agree, for a man of God to play the role of investigator, but that is the situation in which we find ourselves.”

  At the convent, we had been instructed to show great deference to the priests who visited us occasionally to preach a sermon or conduct a special Mass. I had been unimpressed with them, as a general rule—old men who droned about the proper responsibilities of women. But this priest’s manner—weary but good-humored, as though the marriage of two convicts was by no means the most unusual or unpleasant task he’d had to perform that week—endeared him to me.

  “Thank you for visiting us, Father,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “Now, let’s begin with the groom. Why don’t you tell me how the two of you met?”

  My whole body went tense. I did not know how the two of us would construct a love story that would satisfy this man, who was clearly no fool.

  But Lark did not hesitate.

  “It was in the town of Fiddleback, in Powder River country,” he said. “My friend and I were passing through on our way to Crooked Creek to do some cattle rustling. Ada came through with an associate of hers, a man we’d done business with in the past. She was dressed as a man then, and she looked very handsome—a fine young cowboy with a straight back and an intelligent eye. We spoke a little, and she told me she was bent on traveling to Colorado to practice medicine. I’m a suspicious sort ordinarily, but I found myself taken with her. She had—I’d call it a vehemence about her that made me want to know her more. A few months later—”

  “That’s enough,” Father Daniel said. “Now it’s the bride’s turn. Young lady, you can tell me how you fell in love.”

  The guard’s light passed across us. The s
ly smile on Lark’s face, and the empty-headed man moldering in the corner, and the probability of either my impending death or my slow, agonizing deterioration in this dark and airless room—all of these made me bold.

  “The day we met,” I said, “I thought he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. I had no mind to marry or have anything to do with a man, but after we came back from Fiddleback, my thoughts kept returning to him. So imagine my happiness when I found out that my associates wanted his help stealing a wagon at the Easter Market so we could sell it on and reap the profits.

  “My associates and I are careful thieves,” I went on. “We met with Lark many times before the market to plan and scheme. He and I found ourselves becoming fast friends. One night when Lark and I were sewing our disguises—the women’s clothes we’d wear to pass ourselves off as revelers on Easter Monday—I decided I couldn’t hide it anymore.

  “ ‘I used to have a dress like that,’ I said, pointing to the gingham frock he was stitching. And when he looked up from his work I saw he was not entirely surprised.

  “ ‘You know me as Adam,’ I said, ‘but I was born Ada Magnusson, the eldest of four daughters. I’m an outlaw and a fugitive, and when I left my home I thought I’d left my woman’s heart behind.’

  “ ‘But now,’ I said, ‘I find it beats inside me still.’ ”

  I looked at Lark, and waited for the guard’s lamp to illuminate us so he could see me looking. He picked up where I had left off.

  “I told her that I’d taken her at first for a resolute young man, his speech direct and his aim true, with a fine hand for horses and a proud set to his jaw. And I said that at some moment, I’d become aware that walking in her men’s boots was a young woman, hiding a part of herself and yet showing quite clearly the strength and anger and consuming curiosity that animated her being. And at some other moment, I told her, I’d fallen in love. I couldn’t say when each occurred, I told her, but now that neither of us was hiding from the other, I said my heart was hers if she would have it, and that if she was agreeable we ought to marry as soon as our thievery was completed and the wagon safely sold.”

  “And tell me,” Father Daniel asked, “how had you determined to set up your household, had your theft come off as you had planned?”

  “We planned to travel to Colorado country,” I answered, “so I could apprentice with a master midwife there. Once I had learned all I could, my husband and I would travel all throughout the mountain and prairie towns. I would deliver babies and treat women with female ailments, and he would offer his services as a veterinarian, a trade for which he trained in his youth. We would leave the outlaw life and live quietly, and yet remain adventurers still, waking every week in a new bed, a new vista outside our windows.”

  The door opened and the guard peered in, his lamp making a cone of light with his fist at the apex.

  “Get a move on,” he said. “How long can it take to marry two thieves?”

  “By all rights it should take longer to marry thieves than honest men and women,” Father Daniel replied, “because the presiding priest must take more time to ensure they are responsible and upstanding enough to marry. But don’t worry. I have just one question left before I determine whether I will perform the ceremony.”

  The guard rolled his eyes and shut the door.

  “Sometimes I think a priest is only just above a thief himself in terms of the respect of his fellow man,” Father Daniel said. “My last question, in any case, is this: In your adventuring life, how had you planned to bring up children?”

  Before this question, my pulse had been quick with excitement. I was not naïve enough to think that Lark really felt all the things he said about me—I knew we were engaged in a game of make-believe. But I liked the game, despite the circumstances under which I had to play it, and I was reasonably sure Lark did too. In the blackness of the jail it was easy to imagine our flirtation over sewing implements, Lark’s proposal, our life together delivering babies and tending to animals—easy to imagine all this in our future, rather than in an invented past. And yet when Father Daniel mentioned children I remembered that none of what we had spun was possible for us, and that I would probably never see the outside of a jail again, let alone the clear sky of mountain country out my window.

  “We assumed we’d manage somehow,” I said, unable to think of anything better.

  “What my love means to say,” Lark cut in, “is that we’d train our children in our trades, just as we had been trained by our elders. I would teach them to care for lame horses and sick dogs. And my wife, she would instruct them in the ways of midwifery, so that her knowledge would travel farther than she ever could, and live on long after her death.”

  “A quarter of an hour in a jail cell is hardly enough time or space to learn a person’s real motives,” the priest said. “The truth is, you may well be deceiving me as to your intentions toward one another. But I prefer to believe the best of people when I can, and I choose to believe the best of you: that if you were free now, you would indeed marry and lead a godly life together, not travel on separate paths to further thievery. I will perform the ceremony.”

  At my first wedding, I wore an eyelet lace gown and wild roses in my hair. At my second wedding, I wore a dress filthy with road dust and the sweat of several frightened days and nights. At my first wedding, everyone I had ever loved sat in pews at our church, smiling up at me as I spoke my vows. At my second wedding, the only guests were a catatonic man and a mysterious old woman, the latter of whom had agreed to act as a witness. At my first wedding, I believed my life was about to begin. At my second wedding, I was reasonably sure it had already ended.

  And yet after my second husband kissed me for the first time, when our faces were still close together in the dark, the smell of his sweat and breath firing every nerve in me, I began to laugh—not because our wedding was funny, although the solemnity with which the priest read the vows and we said our “I do’s” and the woman scrawled her mark on a marriage license the priest produced from his satchel were all funny in their way, but because even in that place, facing lifelong imprisonment and possible death, I felt that the two of us had gotten away with something.

  As soon as the priest left, the guard returned.

  “Ready for your wedding night?” he asked, not entirely unkindly.

  In the lamplight, Lark and I locked eyes, getting ready for what we were about to do. The guard cuffed us both and chained us together, then motioned with his gun for us to walk ahead of him down the corridor. Lark acted quickly. As he passed in front of the guard he wheeled around and, with both cuffed wrists, knocked the lamp out of the guard’s hand.

  For a moment all was shattered glass and shouting. The oil blazed on the cell floor; the woman jumped onto a bench to avoid it. Lark ran; I ran with him, dragged by the chain between us. He looked back at me and on his face I saw what I felt—that improbable, unlooked-for exhilaration. Then I heard the shots.

  A strange thing about pain is how slowly it travels. Here are all the things that happened after the guard’s bullet hit me and before I crumpled to the ground: Lark and I ran two more paces down the corridor, toward the door to the outside world, which stood ajar slightly, as though the guard was so sure of his power that he needed no backup measures, not even the precaution of an additional lock; my heart lifted like a bird to see the open air in such close reach; in the sunlight streaming in through the door, Lark saw the blood streaming down my leg; I ran three paces, outstripping Lark; I had a memory, clearer and more vivid than the jail itself, of the day I broke my arm falling out of a tree just a few months after Mama got better and began caring for us again, how she scooped me up and held me to her chest, and how she fed me broth and barley candy and made much of me for weeks while I healed, and never reproached me even though I was clearly too big for the tree branch I’d been standing on, and old enough to know better; I wondered what had brought that memory to mind; I felt a wave of nausea; I called Lark’s name. />
  By the time the pain overtook me, a terrible cold grinding, a feeling of great wrongness deep in the core of me, the guard was already dragging me and Lark down the corridor and back into the room where we’d been married.

  When the haze of pain cleared enough for me to reason and perceive again, I heard Lark’s voice in my ear.

  “It’s all right,” Lark was saying. “Try to breathe. Breathe in and out as slowly as you can.”

  I breathed, and the pain did not lessen, but the breathing made some space inside my mind which I found was enough to allow for speech.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “Only a little,” Lark said. “I’m fine, but you’re not. I need you to tell me how to help you.”

  I touched my right pantleg and felt the blood soaking through the fabric. For a moment my mind went white with panic.

  “Ada,” Lark said. “You need to focus. You’re the doctor. Tell me what to do.”

  With great effort I imagined myself out of my own body, tending to that body at a remove. A badly bleeding leg wound in a place with no water, no iodine, no needles and no thread—all a doctor could do in such a situation was bind the leg tightly and hope for the best.

  “Tear me off a piece of your shirt,” I said.

  I heard the fabric rip.

  “Now wrap it around my leg as tight as you can.”

  I saw white again.

  “You’re screaming.”

  “Good. That means it’s tight enough. Now keep pressure on it.”

  A whiteness, and then a return to the intense, specific pain, broadened and deepened slightly by the weight of Lark’s hands.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “You’re still bleeding, I can feel it.”

  “There’s nothing else to do,” I said. “With any luck, the blood will start to clot before I lose too much.”