by Anna North
Agnes Rose untied the ribbon from the end of one braid, then the other.
“I don’t talk about this much,” she said, “but I loved my first husband. We were very happy together. I wanted badly to have his children. We tried for years; he was patient with me. When he finally kicked me out, I knew how to keep from getting hanged, that’s true enough. I knew how to make money. It’s like I told you—I’m a swimmer. But my grief nearly dragged me under.”
She began to unwind her left braid, the locks emerging in glossy curls.
“The year I met the Kid, I’d tried to kill myself twice. The second time I would’ve succeeded if one of the other girls hadn’t been quick with the ipecac. The Kid couldn’t promise me money or safety, but when the Kid talked about making a place in the world for people like us—well, for the first time since I’d left home, I saw my way to some kind of purpose in my life.”
“I understand,” I said.
She gave me a long look.
“Then you’ll understand why I can’t just strike out on my own again,” she said.
She shook her hair out, a wild lion’s mane, glowing in the firelight.
“Anyway,” she said, “A plan is a good thing, but it’s not the only thing. We’ve survived this long because the Kid knows how to improvise. Whatever happens in Fiddleback, the Kid will find a way to turn it to our advantage.”
“If the Kid recovers,” I said.
“The Kid is going to recover,” Agnes Rose said.
She stood and held out both her hands. “Come on,” she said, “dance with me.”
We waited until the afternoon of the next day to ride into Fiddleback proper, so as to catch the clerks sleepy from their lunchtime ale. On the ranchlands, the spring calves had grown tall and leggy on their mothers’ milk. In the cornfields, the plants were high as a five-year-old child, nearly ready for the harvest. We slowed down on a side street a few blocks from Main Street, and Agnes Rose and I climbed out.
In the weeks prior, News had mapped out the bank and the establishments that abutted it down to the cracks in the window glass. She’d found that while Madame Trumbull’s lingerie store seemed like an ideal site for a fire—all that lace and tulle—in fact Madame was very diligent about securing her wares, and the back entrance was locked at all times with a sturdy dead bolt. The proprietor of Stewart’s Meats, on the other hand, routinely left the back door unlocked, and was an assiduous but disorderly record keeper. His back storeroom was piled floor to ceiling with paper ledgers, some lightly stained with meat drippings, detailing every aspect of the operations of his business from the purchase of steers at market to complaints lodged by customers about rancid pork. It was there, amid the accumulated history of the butcher’s entire career, that the robbery of the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback began.
At that moment, Texas was driving the wagon in at a leisurely pace along the town’s back streets, dressed in the cheap hat and waxed mustache of a traveling salesman. In case anyone stopped her, the back of the wagon was packed with an assortment of cheap cotton and cracked pottery purchased from Nótkon at a steep discount, which we’d jettison to make room for the gold.
Once the fire was set, Agnes Rose, News, Elzy, and I would enter the bank through the front door. We were dressed as young housewives in bonnets and cotton frocks. We would engage the clerks in complex financial transactions, augmented by flirtation, while Lark and Cassie simply strolled through the lobby of the bank into the side room where the vault sat, unguarded and ready to be blown wide open. As soon as we heard the sound, the four of us in the front of the bank would draw our pistols from our petticoats and instruct the clerks to empty the tills. We’d load up the wagon and, if all went well, drive the horses back to Hole in the Wall with all the liquid assets of the Farmers’ and Merchants’ on their backs, while the sheriff and his posse fought the fire and the clerks tried to understand what had just happened to them.
“I feel sorry for the butcher,” I said, hesitating with the matchbook in my hands. “He never did anything to us.”
“He’ll smell the smoke long before he’s in any danger,” Agnes Rose said. “He won’t get hurt.”
“He’ll lose his shop,” I said.
“Think about it this way,” Agnes Rose said. “If you were climbing the steps to the gallows in the town square right now, about to be hanged for a witch, do you think the butcher would raise a hand to help you? Or do you think he’d be cheering with all the rest?”
“Everybody cheers the hanging of a witch,” I said.
Agnes Rose looked at her dainty watch.
“Everybody but us,” she said, and she took the matches from me and set one of the ledgers alight.
The fire caught with shocking speed. One moment it played with the corners of the pages and the next it engulfed an entire column of ledgers—decades of beef prices and chicken sales, measures of flesh and bone, consumed by flames in an instant. Agnes Rose and I watched it burn for a moment; then we turned and walked out of the shop.
News and Elzy were on Main Street already, pretending to evaluate the petticoats in the window of Madame Trumbull’s. Elzy wore a blonde wig with her bonnet and a light brown dress cinched close around her narrow waist. Both of them walked differently from the way they did at Hole in the Wall; their steps, as they spotted us and proceeded into the bank, had a careful, tentative quality that, to me, was both familiar and strange. Another woman passed by in the opposite direction with the same peculiar gait, and I recognized it: the walk of women in public, who know they are being watched.
The inside of the bank was very beautiful. The lobby was not large, but it had been made to look more spacious by means of a high vaulted ceiling, on which was painted a blue sky with clouds and cherubs in the old European style. The floor was marble tile, alternating between white with gray veins and black shot through with the subtlest hint of gold. It had probably been salvaged from the house of some rich man felled by Flu—or perhaps the bank had been his house, one of the many cleared of corpses and put to new use in the years and decades that followed the disease. Perhaps the wealth of Fiddleback today was kept in the same room where the wealthiest resident of some prior town had breathed his last some hundred years ago.
On one side of the lobby were four clerk windows behind a high counter—as Henry had said, only two of the windows were manned. On the other side of the lobby was an open corridor leading to the bank’s back offices and the vault. The corridor and the windows faced one another, so that the clerks could easily see anyone passing into the corridor—we would have to see to it that their attention was occupied elsewhere.
So far, the clerks appeared to be having a quiet morning. One, his red hair grown long and unkempt over his ears, his glasses marked with fingerprints, was giving an old man in a grocer’s apron change for a silver piece in coppers. The other was using an emery board to file his nails. Agnes Rose and I queued up behind the grocer, while Elzy went straight for the fastidious clerk, and News fell in line behind her. I was relieved. With two people ahead of me, one of them Agnes Rose, it was unlikely I would have to put my powers of distraction to the test.
“I’d like to open a savings account for my son,” Elzy said to the clerk with the nail file. He was young and handsome, clearly proud of his appearance—his blond mustache and beard were as carefully tended as his nails. Over his crisp white shirt he wore a pair of red suspenders.
“Very good, ma’am,” he said to Elzy. “To start, I’ll need his name.”
“He doesn’t have a name,” Elzy said.
“I beg your pardon?” the clerk asked.
From where I stood behind Agnes Rose, I could clearly see the bank’s front door and the foot traffic on the street outside. Any moment, I knew, Lark would enter, and from that moment he would be in danger, from which it would fall to me, at least in part, to protect him. I was surprised by the force of my fear for him. I had never felt such a thing for my first husband, my spouse before my fam
ily and the law. But of course, I had never had cause to fear for him—I could not imagine him in Lark’s place now, just as I could not compare any aspect of my old life to its counterpart in the new. The two were connected only by my body, and the failing within it that had made the old life impossible and ushered the new one in.
“You see, his father and I can’t agree on a name,” Elzy said. “I want to name him Albert, for my grandfather, but my husband wants to name him Christopher, for Saint Christopher. No matter what I say, he won’t budge. So I thought, if I open a savings account in the name of Albert, and put some money in it, then my husband will have to agree, won’t he? Or my son can’t get the money?”
The fastidious clerk cast a panicked look at his colleague, who studiously ignored him, still busily counting coppers for the grocer.
“Ma’am,” the clerk said, “I’m afraid there are a couple of problems with your strategy.”
The front door opened. A man who was not Lark entered the bank and queued up behind me.
“In the first place, we can’t open an account for someone who doesn’t exist. And since your son is not, in fact, named Albert—”
The other clerk finished counting coppers and sent the grocer on his way with well-wishes. Agnes Rose stepped up to the counter. A man who was not Lark entered the bank.
“But he will be named Albert,” Elzy said. “I just need to make my husband see reason. My grandfather was a great man, you know. He owned two dry-goods stores and was a deacon in his church.”
The second man who was not Lark looked at the queues at both windows and left the bank. Agnes Rose removed a torn fragment of a promissory note from her handbag. Cassie entered the bank and stood behind News.
“In the second place, it’s not the bank’s business to get involved in a dispute between husband and wife. Now, if you’d like to open the account in your own name and simply change the name once you agree—”
Agnes Rose smiled her most winning smile and told the clerk that the remainder of the note had been bitten off by a dog. A woman entered the bank and stood behind Cassie. A man who was not Lark entered the bank. I began to be afraid that he was not coming. Perhaps someone had stopped him in the street and somehow realized what we were planning. Perhaps the sheriff from Casper had come looking for him. Perhaps Cassie was right, and he had betrayed us all.
“But the account isn’t for me, it’s for my son, who will be named Albert.”
The clerk explained to Agnes Rose that she would need more than half the note in order to redeem it. She pretended not to understand him. Sweat soaked the armpits of my blue gingham dress. A man who was not Lark entered the bank.
“Here’s what I can do,” the clerk said. “I can open an account with no name for now, just a number. And then when you’re ready with a name, we can add it to the account. All we’ll need is a deposit of five silver liberties.
“Oh, I don’t have any money,” said Elzy. “My husband keeps track of the money.”
Lark entered the bank.
At that moment several things happened at once. Lark and I exchanged a single glance, no longer than the blink of an eye. Elzy’s conversation with the fastidious clerk escalated into an argument. Cassie quietly stepped out of line. And the unkempt clerk, having politely but firmly dismissed Agnes Rose, looked at me with a smile.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
I had come with a specific story to tell—we all had—but in that moment, the knowledge that Lark was passing behind me down the bank’s corridor, and that his life was in my hands, drove my plans completely out of my head.
“I need to open an account,” I said, parroting Elzy.
“Wonderful,” said the clerk. He was middle-aged, with a round face and small, warm, gray eyes behind the smudged lenses. “Will you be needing one just for savings, or one you can write notes against?”
I willed myself not to turn around and look at the corridor.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had a bank account before. Can you explain the different types?”
“I’d be glad to,” he said. “A savings account is where you put money for a rainy day. You put money in, and at the end of every month the bank adds a little bit extra on top. That’s the interest.”
The other clerk raised his voice.
“Madam,” he said, “I’ve been very patient with you. But the fact is, you have no business coming in here and wasting my time with your silly questions when you should be at home with your baby.”
The unkempt clerk looked in their direction, so I allowed myself to glance around the lobby. Cassie and Lark were gone. I felt a momentary sense of relief, tempered by the heaviness of the gun in my left skirt pocket and the knowledge that in minutes I would have to use it.
The unkempt clerk shook his head and spoke to me in a low, conspiratorial voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said, inclining his head in the other clerk’s direction. “The fact is, we’re stretched a bit thin today. Some of our colleagues are, ah, busy at the moment, and it’s just the three of us here.”
My stomach fell.
“Three?” I asked.
The bombs were so much louder than I had imagined. In the valley their force had dissipated in empty air, but inside the bank I could hear them rip through wood and stone and steel. In the chaos that followed I was not sure who was screaming, how the bank’s patrons went from racing for the door to lined up against the wall with their hands behind their heads, or when exactly I drew my revolver and began shouting at the unkempt clerk to empty his till. But I was sure of one thing: just before the bombs had gone off, I had heard the sound of gunshots.
Against the wall, one of the women was praying: “Baby Jesus, deliver us from danger. Care for us as your holy Mother cared for you.” The fastidious clerk began to cry as he loaded cardboard tubes of gold and silver pieces into a cloth bag. The unkempt clerk wasn’t moving.
“I can’t give you this money,” he said. “It isn’t my money to give.”
I had no idea what to say to him. His gray eyes were full of defiance, and also full of fear.
“Empty the till,” I said, “or I’ll shoot you.”
“You see those people over there against the wall?” the clerk asked. “This is their savings. They need it to feed their families. If you take it, what will become of them?”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “we’ll take care of them. But first we need the money.”
“Just give it to her!” the other clerk shouted. He passed the heavy bag through the window into Elzy’s free hand.
“I’m sorry,” said the unkempt clerk. “You’ll have to shoot me.”
I thought of the wagon driver, the way he had crumpled in the dirt, the way his father had keened over his body. I knew I would never shoot this man.
“You don’t want that,” I said. “What about your family? They need you alive.”
I could feel the fear cracking the edges of my voice.
“I don’t have any family,” the man said. “It’s just me. If you’re going to shoot me, do it now.”
He was looking me square in the eye.
“Andrew,” sobbed the fastidious clerk, “please just give them the money.”
“Baby Jesus, deliver us into your arms,” the woman prayed, “as you were delivered into the arms of your holy Mother.”
Cassie appeared in the entrance to the corridor. I took my eyes off the clerk and turned to her. Her face was ashen. Her shirt was covered in blood. The clerk tried to reach for something below the window. Elzy shot him in the chest.
Some people believe that when a person dies, the body is nothing but a shell the soul leaves behind. I have never believed this. The first time I touched a dead body, I was thirteen years old. Irma Love was eighty—had been eighty—the night her heart stopped working and her lungs filled with fluid and she died. The next day, Mama brought me with her to wash and lay out the body.
Mrs. Love had worked in the dry-goods store
and taught piano lessons to children. She played very beautifully and was very mean and I and all the other children in Fairchild were afraid of her, but she had a sardonic sense of humor, too, and as I got older I liked to go to the dry-goods store to hear her talk about other adults she thought were stupid or self-satisfied. All of that was still there when Mrs. Love died—the meanness stamped on the corners of her mouth, the laughter in the wrinkles round her eyes, those long fingers still limber after a lifetime of stretching across the keys. Mama taught me to treat a body with respect, like a person, and Mrs. Love was a person to me, her body no less her own just because she was dead.
And so when I saw Lark lying in the corridor in front of the blasted vault, his chest blown open with bullet holes, and when Cassie shouted in a ragged voice to leave him behind, that the sheriff’s posse would surely catch us if we delayed any longer, I ignored her, and I bent low and slipped my arms under his limp arms and half-carried, half-dragged him to the wagon, where Texas was waiting to bear us all away.
In the dark back of the wagon, Cassie put her head in her hands.
“I should have been ready for the clerk to be there,” she said. “The Kid would’ve been ready.”
The third clerk, a square-bodied, apple-cheeked young man who looked full of life even in death, was likely now being prepared for burial in the Fiddleback churchyard, Cassie’s bullet already corroding at his heart. We’d never know what unlucky impulse had made him decide to stay at his post that day instead of drinking with his friends at Veronica’s, where he would have been rewarded for his shirking with his life. We knew only that after Lark and Cassie had placed the bombs all around the door to the vault, just as they were lighting the fuses, he had entered the corridor from the bank’s back office; that, perhaps having heard a commotion, he was already carrying his revolver in his hand; that on seeing him, Lark reached for his own revolver; and that the clerk shot him three times before Cassie was able to draw her weapon and shoot the clerk. As we carried the gold out of the vault—more bags than we could count, each as heavy as a three-year-old child—we had to step over his body.