by Anna North
“Luck?” Lark asked. “That’s all we have to go on?”
I felt the warmth of his hands pressing into me, as though they could hold my body together.
“Agnes Rose says I’m lucky,” I said.
“Who?” he asked, but I was drifting, floating somewhere beyond pain and hope, where future, present, and past melted together and I was forever opening my eyes on a Colorado morning, breathing Lark’s breath into my mouth, gazing down at baby Bee as she smiled her first smile.
CHAPTER 9
My mama’s house in Fairchild stood on a dirt road, on either side of which someone had planted flowering dogwood trees. Whenever I came back anxious or ill at ease—after a hard birth, or a difficult day at school, or a dance where no boys noticed me—the sight and smell of the dogwoods calmed me. As soon as I turned onto that road, I felt like I was home.
I had the same feeling on the Sunday after Easter, when Amity reached the top of the pass above Hole in the Wall and I saw the entire valley spread out below. The feeling was so strong and so wholly unexpected that I nearly wept.
“Thank you,” I said to News, who rode behind me and held Amity’s reins.
“Stop thanking me,” News said. “What you did was stupid, and you deserved to suffer for it. But I wasn’t going to let you hang, and neither was the Kid.”
“Anyway,” said Agnes Rose, “that guard was an easy mark. I never get tired of sweet-talking stupid men.”
By now, I reasoned, the day guard had probably arrived to find the night guard sharing the jail cell with the catatonic man, and the rest of us long gone. The woman had bolted out the cell door with a speed that made me wonder again if she was much younger than she looked.
“No offense,” Agnes Rose added to Lark.
“None taken,” he said. “I’m not stupid.”
“You’re funny,” Agnes Rose said. “Piece of advice: don’t try to be funny with the others. Especially not Cassie. They’re not going to like us bringing you home, and the quieter you are, the better.”
Lark’s wound was smaller than mine—a graze along his left thigh—but I could tell from his face that he was in pain. Texas, who rode ahead of us on Faith, had been against bringing Lark to Hole in the Wall, and had only been persuaded when News had vouched for him. Now Lark rode behind Agnes Rose on Prudence, bleeding into his boot, both of us awaiting the Kid’s final decision on whether he should stay or go.
Through the fog of my injury—my wound had stopped bleeding, but the whiskey, water, and pemmican News had offered me had only partially restored my strength—I could tell that something was troubling Agnes Rose. Her voice was loud with artificial cheer, and her words increased in frequency and decreased in importance as we drew closer to Hole in the Wall, as though she was trying to fill the silence.
Finally, as we rounded the last bend in the road and the bunkhouse came into view, she said, “The Kid’s been a little ill lately.”
“Ill how?” I asked.
“Bloodshot eyes, never sleeping. And then—” She paused. “That’s the main thing. Just not sleeping very much. Maybe you can help.”
I didn’t tell Agnes Rose I had already been helping the Kid sleep, or that her words made the back of my neck prickle with dread. I remembered the story of the Kid’s father, shut away in the house with the curtains drawn until he could preach again.
“There’s something else,” I said.
“Last night,” Agnes Rose said, “the Kid lit a suit on fire.”
I wasn’t sure I understood. “What suit?”
“Well,” said Agnes Rose, “the Kid was wearing a fine woolen suit, and then the Kid lit that suit on fire.”
“Mother Mary,” I said.
“Everyone else had gone to bed, and the Kid started telling me about what we’d do when the job was done. It started out normal enough—like how we’d need to get the people in Fiddleback on our side. But then it got strange. The Kid was talking about how once we took Fiddleback, then we could take Casper, then Telluride, then Chicago. We’d remake America, the Kid said, but we’d do it right, and no Flu or fever would harm us, because we’d be protected by God.”
I tried to be careful, so as not to give the Kid’s secret away.
“That does sound strange,” I said. “Did the Kid say how we were going to accomplish all that?”
“No,” said Agnes Rose. “I asked, and the Kid accused me of doubting. Then the Kid said we’d accomplish it as we accomplished everything, through the power of the infant Lord Jesus. And that if I didn’t believe, perhaps I needed a sign of His favor. And before I could do anything, the Kid simply dipped an arm into the fire.
“I think the point was to show that even flames were powerless against us. But of course, they aren’t. And as soon as the sleeve caught it was like a spell was broken, and the Kid looked at me in absolute terror.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Luckily I had a blanket about my shoulders. I leapt on the Kid and rolled the arm up until the fire went out. The Kid made me promise not to tell anyone. The burn isn’t bad—I bandaged it myself, though you’ll want to check it for infection. But the rest of it—I’ve seen the Kid do and say a lot of outlandish things, Ada. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”
It was evening when we arrived, and the others were circled around the firepit eating tin cups of stew. As soon as we came into view with a stranger in our midst, Cassie and the Kid rose to meet the horses. Cassie, as Agnes Rose had predicted, looked angry and suspicious, but the Kid seemed strong and at ease, a bandage peeking out of a shirtsleeve the only sign that anything was amiss.
“This is Lark,” I said. “He helped us steal the wagon, and he kept me from bleeding to death when we were in jail. He’s hurt, and he needs rest. Can he stay here a few days with us?”
“Doing a job with him is one thing,” Cassie said, “but bringing him here? News, what were you thinking? We’ve never had a man here before.”
“What does that matter?” News asked. “Out in the world, I’m as much a man as he is. I don’t see you kicking me out.”
“News, you know what I mean,” Cassie said.
“I don’t,” News said. “We needed help, I found someone trustworthy to help us. Now he needs our help, and you’re going to turn him away?”
“Is he really trustworthy?” Cassie asked. “What reason does he have not to lead some sheriff or bounty hunter right to our doorstep as soon as it suits him?”
“You don’t understand—” I said.
But before I could finish the Kid shouted, “Stop!” loudly enough that Lo and Elzy looked up startled from the firepit. I saw fear cross Cassie’s face. But when the Kid spoke again, the words were measured and calm.
“Sir, I want to hear from you,” the Kid said to Lark. “Surely you understand why some of us might have difficulty trusting you. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Lark paused. I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging look.
“Probably you shouldn’t,” Lark said finally. “But if you don’t, wouldn’t you rather have me here where you can keep an eye on me?”
“The man has a point, Cassie,” the Kid said. “Now that he knows where we are, we either keep him or we kill him. And I’m not inclined to shoot someone who helped our doctor. Not yet, anyway.”
I was lucky—the bullet had missed my shinbone, passing through the flesh and out the other side. Under my direction, Texas disinfected the wound with a rag dipped in a basin full of whiskey and hot water, then stitched and dressed it while I lay on my cot, biting down on a leather bridle to distract myself from the pain.
“Your turn,” said Texas to Lark when it was done. “Let’s get these off you.”
She moved to unbutton Lark’s bloodstained pants, but Lark took hold of his belt and shook his head.
“I’m all right,” he said.
“You’re not all right,” said Texas. “You’re bleeding onto the quilt.”
“I think the b
leeding’s stopped.”
Texas turned to me. “Tell your friend here he needs his wound dressed,” she said. “Otherwise he’ll get gangrene, and I’m not spending my days looking after a one-legged man.”
“I’ll do it, Texas,” I said. “Now that mine’s closed I feel better already.”
“You look terrible,” Texas said. “Your face is the color of mashed potatoes.” She turned to Lark. “I wouldn’t want her working on me in this state,” she said.
“I’ll take my chances,” said Lark.
Texas shrugged. “Suit yourself. If she passes out while she’s stitching you, I’m not coming to help.”
“Why not tell them about what happened to you?” I asked Lark when Texas was gone. “It might make them trust you more.”
“It’s not their business,” Lark said.
“You told me,” I said. “Is it my business?”
Lark smiled. “Of course it is. You’re my wife.”
I dropped my eyes.
“Very funny,” I said.
I was not sure where I stood with him. I believed he had meant at least some of what he said in the jail—he had not kissed me like someone merely playing a role. But I knew, too, that he was a thief who made much of his living fooling people. I thought of how Agnes Rose must have spoken to the jailhouse guard, and looked at him up from under her eyelashes—she must have made him believe that she found him interesting and handsome and that she wanted him. If Agnes Rose could do it then surely Lark could do it too.
“Texas is right,” I said. “You need your wound cleaned. Is it okay if I take off your pants?”
“I’ll do it,” Lark said.
The wound was not deep but it had bled copiously, coating his thigh and soaking the right half of his underwear.
“I’m sorry,” I said, pointing awkwardly. “You should probably take those off too.”
He nodded, but instead began unbuttoning his shirt. His chest was long and lean, his skin the color of honey. A trail of black hair led from his navel under the waistband of his undershorts. He locked eyes with me, then removed them.
What I saw was ugly, there is no denying it. Lark’s scrotum was intact, but above it was a tiny stump, puckered like a belly button. I could tell the wound had become badly infected after it was dealt, because it was surrounded by a starburst of scar tissue as big as a man’s hand, still pinkish and shining as though it was fresh. What I saw was not just disfigurement; it was the record of terrible pain. I had the instinct to look away.
But I had been fighting that instinct all my life. I had not looked away when my mama had taken me to my first birth, when a woman groaned from deep down in her belly and a screaming, blood-covered head spurted out between her thighs. I had not looked away when another woman’s flesh ripped from birth canal to anus so her baby could be born. I had not looked away when my neighbors brought us their broken bodies: their weeping sores, their crusted rashes, their breasts rock-hard and bright red with mastitis, their vaginas leaking clumpy yeast. I had not looked away when Mama washed and dressed and tended their most inflamed, infected parts, and I had not looked away when I was older and it became my job to tend them. I had not looked away when it came time to learn where God or Nature had strayed from the normal path to make my body; I was looking still. I dipped a rag in the basin of water. I let my eyes travel the length of his whole body, taking it all in.
“You’re very beautiful,” I told him.
In his face I saw relief.
“So are you,” he said.
That day was the first time I had sex without the thought of conceiving a child. What we did, my first husband and I had never done—young as he was, I don’t think he knew you could put your tongue between a woman’s legs—and what I felt, I had never felt with my first husband. It was not only the feeling in my body that was different—all that wanting stirred up to fury and then released, my stomach dropping as though I was falling from a great height. It was also the feeling of doing something solely for its own sake, each moment not the beginning of the future, but its own, solitary now. Afterward I felt a stillness in my body I had never felt before, as though for a moment I was complete in myself, I was all that was needed.
We could lie together only for a short while, our wounded bodies pressed against each other, before I heard voices outside and knew that the others would be coming in soon. We began to struggle back into our clothes, remembering the pain we’d put aside.
Agnes Rose entered the bunkhouse as we were buttoning our shirts, a small smile on her face the only acknowledgement of what she’d seen. She held out a walking stick made of an oak branch.
“Come on, Doc,” she said. “The Kid’s calling a meeting.”
Lark rose to help me up, but Agnes shook her head.
“I’ll help her,” she said. “You stay here. No offense, but this meeting’s not for you.”
The Kid looked powerful in a silver-gray silk suit jacket with a black shirt and black riding pants, all of it spotless even amid the red dust.
“Now is the time when all of our work comes to fruition,” the Kid said. “Tomorrow, we ride for Fiddleback. We take what should be ours.”
Cassie looked taken aback.
“We can’t go tomorrow,” she said. “Doc can’t even walk. And we haven’t found the right spot for the fire yet. We need at least another week.”
“We don’t have another week,” the Kid said. “People are counting on us.”
“Who’s counting on us?” Cassie asked. “Nobody even knows we exist.”
“Our nation is counting on us,” the Kid said. “The barren women of this country, from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. They’re all counting on us, whether they know it or not. If we don’t help them, no one will.”
“The Pacific Ocean?” Cassie said. “I didn’t like this plan when it was just Fiddleback, and now it’s—well, I don’t even know what you’re saying. There are only eight of us, Kid.”
The Kid crossed to where Cassie sat.
“Do you remember what Christ said to Martha?” the Kid asked.
“You always do this, Kid,” Cassie said. “Don’t do this.”
“Christ said to Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.’ Do you understand, Cassie?”
“You know I’m not a good Christian, Kid,” Cassie said. “You need rest.”
“Christian?” the Kid shouted. “Christian? Cassie, Christ was only an example, a messenger if you will. He came to teach us that when we have righteousness within us, we can never be killed, because what is right can never die. You see, don’t you, Agnes Rose? News? We are the resurrection and the life.”
The Kid’s speech was fast and breathless; the Kid’s eyes made me think of a fire burning itself out. Lo and Texas looked at each other, and Elzy looked at Cassie, all their gazes crackling with unease. Finally Agnes Rose spoke.
“All those people counting on us,” she said, “they need us to be smart. We can’t rush off without a finished plan. Let’s take two days. By then Doc might be healed enough to ride, and News can pick a place for the fire. Just one extra day, Kid. I guarantee you won’t regret it.” As she finished, she gave me a pointed look.
“I agree,” I said. “I feel the calling you’re talking about, Kid. I’ve felt it since I got here. If you go tomorrow, I’ll have to stay behind. I won’t be able to do what I’m called to do.”
The Kid walked around the firepit to stare down at me with violent eyes. I braced myself as though for a kick or punch.
“You’re right,” the Kid said. “It should be all of us. Two days. Two days, and then we ride to Fiddleback. Who’s ready to remake the world?”
There was a split-second of silence, and then Agnes Rose led the circle in a half-hearted cheer.
When everyone else was asleep—Lark on a makeshift bed of feed sacks and horse blankets—I found the Kid in the orchard,
sitting on the stump where I’d first learned to shoot. The pear trees were blooming, white blossoms in frothy clusters that shone in the moonlight. You’d never know the fruit was rock-hard and bitter as medicine. I sat next to the Kid in the cold grass.
“How long has it been since you slept?” I asked.
“I’ve been sleeping just fine,” the Kid said. “I just came out here to do some thinking.”
The Kid sounded so ordinary, I almost believed it.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“Same as ever,” the Kid said. “Fiddleback. What can go wrong. What will go wrong. How to remedy it when it does.”
“You sounded a lot more confident earlier tonight,” I said. “It sounded like you thought we couldn’t possibly fail.”
“Of course we can fail,” the Kid said. “The fire might not catch, or the safe might be too sturdy for our bombs, or the wagon might lose a wheel, or the sheriff’s posse might run us down and hang all of us. I’d wager we’re far more likely to fail than to succeed.”
“But back at the firepit, you said—”
“I know what I said!”
The Kid’s voice was loud in the quiet night. Something took off from one of the pear trees and flapped away on dark wings.
“I just get a little carried away sometimes,” the Kid said, a bit more quietly. “They all understand that. They know not to take what I say as gospel.”
The Kid’s face was indignant and defensive, but also weary and anxious. I could tell we were both worried about what I would say next.
“Do you remember what you told me before I left?” I asked. “About your father?”
The Kid stood up.
“Don’t patronize me. Of course I remember. But you don’t have to worry about that anymore. I thought I might be going that way, but it turns out I’m not. I’ll be all right in the morning.”
“Kid,” I said slowly, “you said that if you began to speak as though you were not a mortal human, and no man or beast could harm you, I should take you to the cowboy shack and let you stay out there until you recovered your senses.”