Outlawed

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Outlawed Page 22

by Anna North


  “It’s terrible what happened,” Elzy said, “but Cassie, we did it. We got the gold. I never thought we’d do it, you know that. And at least all of us made it out alive.”

  Cassie raised her head.

  “He risked his life for us,” she said, “and I let him die.”

  His head in my lap, Lark looked now as he had in life—slightly sorrowful, slightly amused, very beautiful. But when I’d gotten him safely into the wagon, I’d immediately shut his eyes with my fingers—they were wide and staring, and full of fear.

  Cassie looked me full in the eye.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I extended my hand, she took it, and we held each other there.

  We had no coffin, but Agnes Rose made a shroud of fine white muslin from Lo’s steamer trunk. She offered to help me prepare Lark’s body, but I shook my head. I wanted to protect his privacy, even now, and I wanted to be alone with him one more time.

  In the bunkhouse, in the early morning light, I looked, once more, at his oldest wound. The whorled scarring, the stub where his penis once had been—they no longer disgusted me. Instead they made me angry and guilty—that Lark should have survived this, only to die by a stranger’s gun in a bank robbery gone wrong, all to help me get where I wanted to go. I had not cried yet for Lark; now I shed tears of frustration and self-blame.

  There was only one thing I could do for Lark now, and so I washed the blood from each of the wounds in his chest and bandaged them as though he were alive. I cleaned the dirt from under his fingernails. I washed and combed his hair. I treated his body with the same care and attention that I imagined the veterinarian lavishing on his animals, and I swore to myself that from now on I would treat every body I touched that way, living or dead, patient or lover. Then I wrapped Lark in his shroud, and News and I carried him out to the orchard to be buried.

  The days that followed were slow, strange ones. The job was half-finished—the gold was piled high in the barn, where the horses periodically nuzzled it and then lost interest since it had no smell except that of the musty burlap bags in which it was stored. Now we had to wait.

  Seven days, the Kid had said, would be enough for the bank president to get desperate. If at first the residents of Fiddleback had been sympathetic to the plight of an innocent businessman robbed by thugs, their fellow-feeling would turn to rage once they realized that the president kept his large house on a hill above town while their life savings—the gold that kept food on their tables and cattle in their pastures, that fixed their roofs and shod their horses and paid the midwife when their babies were born—rode away in a stranger’s wagon. They would gather outside the president’s house with eggs, with rocks, and eventually with guns. The president would be eager to sell.

  At least, so the Kid had told us—but now the Kid was gone. On the second day of the week, Cassie rode out to the cowboy shack with a satchel of food and a canteen of fresh water, and returned a few hours later with the news that the Kid was much better and looking forward to rejoining us soon. But when she spoke she looked at a point above our heads, avoiding all our eyes. Later, she followed me to the barn when I went to brush Amity.

  “The Kid’s sleeping again,” she said.

  “That’s a good sign, right?” I asked as I worked the currycomb across Amity’s flank.

  But Cassie looked worried.

  “I mean only sleeping. Won’t eat, won’t speak. Barely even looks at me. I almost miss the ranting and raving. Maybe you could come and do an examination.”

  The cowboy shack contained little—a narrow bed, a pitcher for water, a few old saddles and bridles piled against the wall. When I came in, the Kid was lying facing the wall, wearing a wrinkled, off-white nightshirt.

  I remembered all the ways I’d tried to rouse Mama the year that she was sick. I’d made her favorite foods—biscuits and gravy, strawberries with sugar on them, corn pie loaded with butter and cheese. I’d brewed strong hot coffee, teas with lemon balm and hawthorn, broth with beef bones I convinced the butcher to give me for free. Nothing seemed to work and then, one day, she got out of bed for a little while, and the next day a little while longer, and the next day a little while longer, until one day I got up and she was already awake, laughing and playing on the floor with baby Bee. Later, when I asked her what had finally healed her, she shrugged and said, “Time.”

  Then she thought for a moment and added, “When you talked to me, that helped.”

  I told the Kid about the weather outside, what Cassie had made for breakfast that morning and dinner the night before, which horses were acting ornery and which people weren’t getting along. The Kid said nothing.

  “Would you like to take a walk outside?” I asked.

  The Kid said nothing.

  “Would you like to eat some soup?”

  The Kid said nothing.

  Then I began simply to talk for talking’s sake, telling the Kid the story of my life, from its beginning in my mother’s house, through my sojourn at Holy Child, all the way to the moment when I sat at the Kid’s bedside.

  The Kid said nothing.

  Finally I decided to ask the Kid a question to which I actually wanted the answer.

  “Why didn’t you become a preacher?” I asked.

  The Kid sighed, turned to face me, and began to speak.

  “I was married at sixteen to a man from our congregation, someone my daddy picked out for me. He was a kind man, and liberal in his thinking. He didn’t mind that I was to be a preacher one day. We tried for a year, but we couldn’t have a child.”

  “Did he kick you out?” I asked.

  The Kid held up a hand. I saw the burn across the wrist and arm; it had begun to heal, leaving new raw skin behind.

  “At the end of the year, my mama took me to see a master midwife. She gave me an herb to regulate my monthlies. I fell pregnant and we had a little girl.”

  “You have a child?” I asked.

  The Kid held up a hand again.

  “The birth was difficult. For weeks afterward I couldn’t walk. That was when the sickness came for the first time. I was awake thirty nights, then asleep thirty days, at least it felt that way to me. Then my husband’s family brought in a doctor from San Antonio. He looked at my tongue and the soles of my feet and the whites of my eyes.

  “He told my husband there was nothing the matter with my body, but that my mind was diseased. He said the disease was contagious. If my daughter was exposed to me, she would catch it. So my husband was to keep us apart as much as possible—a single visit on Sundays, at most, was permitted.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said.

  The Kid held up a hand a third time.

  “The doctor said that the best treatment for me would be pregnancy. He said I should continue to bear children as many times as I was able, but they should be taken from me, until such time as I could show myself cured.”

  This time I did not speak, but tried to look the Kid in the eye. The Kid looked away.

  “I made it three months,” the Kid said. “Every day I curse myself that I couldn’t make it one week longer, to see my daughter a final time. But it was pure torture, lying with my husband, knowing I’d lose whatever child I had. One night in the spring I climbed out our window and hitched a ride to Holy Child, where I’d heard they took in barren women. But the memory of my daughter wouldn’t let me rest.

  “Years I wandered, cowboying, rustling. I lived as a man and as a woman; no life suited me. Then I met Cassie. As long as I could protect her, I told myself, I would be worth something.”

  The Kid turned to face the wall again.

  “Now I can’t even do that.”

  CHAPTER 11

  On the morning we’d chosen for the purchase of the bank and the beginning of our careers as landlords, I lay awake in my bunk. The stars were still out, and it was hours before we’d start for Fiddleback, but I couldn’t sleep. Cassie had cleared away the blankets that had been Lark’s bed, but a clean space remained
on the bunkhouse floor where he had slept, the red dust not yet settled over it. His death made me miss my family freshly, the new injury opening up the old wound.

  It was Bee’s birthday in August—she would be turning ten. I still remembered the smell of her scalp as a baby, the way her tiny fingers wrapped around a hank of my hair. The way her head would grow heavier and heavier against my chest as she drifted into sleep.

  As our plan drew closer to fruition I found myself increasingly restless. I visited the Kid every day. Some days were better and some days were worse, but every day I left feeling exhausted, as though the strength had been drained from me.

  When Mama attended a birth she often developed a closeness with the mother. When she was sick, many of these women dropped by to help, bringing food or baby clothes. After she got better, she explained it to me. Even if before the birth she’d thought of the mother as silly or small-minded or mean, afterward they had something in common: they’d faced death together, and they’d survived. But the Kid was still facing whatever had to be faced, was not yet on the other side. And so I crawled out of my bed and went to sit by the firepit in the dark.

  Night had reached its low point, that time just before dawn when the memory of sunshine is dimmest. The rocks around the firepit were cold, the birds and insects silent. I sat staring at the ashes and found I had an urge to pray. But I had forgotten all the prayers I’d learned at the convent, as though after I left, my mind had expelled them in a kind of protest. Instead I sang to myself, softly, under my breath, my arms wrapped around my knees, rocking myself the way a mother rocks a weeping child.

  In a cavern, in a canyon,

  Excavating for a mine—

  A small animal or bird rustled in the alders to the south of the firepit, where the road was. A jackrabbit, perhaps, that had evaded Elzy’s snares.

  Dwelt a rich old copper miner,

  And his daughter Clementine—

  The rustling grew louder. I got to my feet. The wolves who howled from the mountains at night sometimes came down into the valley to hunt, but Texas had assured me they were cautious and would never approach humans. Bears, on the other hand, were a danger—especially in spring or summer. A mother bear might come down to the flats with her cub, and there was no predicting what she might do if you got between them. The best thing, Texas had said, was to make a lot of noise, to let her know where you were and give her plenty of time to avoid you.

  “She went shopping at the market,” I sang, walking back toward the bunkhouse,

  Every morning just at nine,

  Met a man with Flu and fever—

  The gunshot was so close that I felt the wind of it on my cheek. I wheeled around to see, standing among our alder trees, the sheriff of Fiddleback, the barrel of his pistol picking up the first rays of the rising sun.

  My mind blanked out and my body took over. My arms pushed open the bunkhouse door, my throat and lungs bellowed out a cry to rouse my friends.

  Cassie opened her eyes first. I saw a flash of terror in her face. This was the thing she’d been most afraid of, all her years in the valley—our hideout breached, strange men invading our home. I saw fear turn for a moment to anguish and grief, as though someone she loved had died. Then she swallowed it down. Her eyes hardened. When she spoke, her voice was a command:

  “We have to get to the Wall.”

  Panicked and shooting we ran to the barn. The sheriff was not alone—shots came at us from the pasture, from the grove of trees where, so long ago, I had seen Cassie and Elzy pressed together in an embrace. If I had sat at the firepit a moment longer, we would have been surrounded.

  Where we had been caught by surprise, the horses—their ears keen, their muscles tuned to vibrations in the earth—had been ready. Amity was out the door as fast as I could throw a saddle over her back and myself into the saddle, and then tearing along the path to the wall as though the two of us were of one mind. Gunshots rang around us as we rode, and the calls of birds who had lived their whole lives in peacetime, now frightened out of their sleep by the sounds of war. As we crested a hill I heard a cry behind me, a high, helpless noise like an infant in pain, and I turned my head to see Faith dropping to her knees, blood pouring down her flank. I felt pity for the horse, whose tail I had sometimes brushed after I brushed Amity’s, who had loved to eat cubes of barley sugar out of my palm. But what sent a spike of icy fear through my mind and heart was what I saw behind Faith, behind Temperance and Elzy, Prudence and Cassie, Charity and News.

  As any good outlaw knows, the size of a sheriff’s posse changes from one day to the next. It depends on the number of able-bodied men with working pistols and ready horses who can spare the time away from their farms, ranches, or stores, and on the popularity of the sheriff with said men. Perhaps most importantly, it depends on the nature of the crime the posse is gathered to punish. The theft of a cow might raise one or two men; the theft of a prize stud bull three or four. The murder of a derelict or a woman of questionable character might bring out one generous man, or none at all, while the killing of a mother or a pillar of the community might inspire half a dozen.

  Behind my friends on the Hole in the Wall Road, pouring over the hill rank upon rank, tall on their horses, pistols drawn, was a posse some two dozen strong. Among them I recognized not only the sheriffs of Fiddleback and Casper, but also Sheriff Branch, wearing his white hat and riding the horse I’d fed as a little girl. To see him alongside these others, after fearing our meeting for so long, gave me a kind of unstable feeling, as though the very ground were buckling and folding beneath me, and distances that had once seemed vast were now so small that my enemies could cross them in an instant. How these men had joined together I did not know, how they had tracked us here I could not guess, but their combined influence had raised a force that outnumbered us three to one, whose horses galloped at our horses’ heels and whose gunshots startled flights of meadowlarks into the morning air of our valley.

  Elzy rode past Faith, and with her good arm scooped Texas off her back and onto Temperance’s. From behind them, Cassie shouted, “Scatter!”

  I took Amity off the road and into the tall grass. She bounded, sure-footed as a pronghorn, across the valley floor. Red dust came up in clouds around us, coating my throat and making me choke, but I kept my eyes fixed on the wall. I knew that Cassie, Elzy, News, Agnes Rose, and Texas were all doing the same. If we could get to the hole, we’d have a vantage from which to dig in and defend ourselves, with a clear view of everything in the valley below.

  Amity leapt over the creek and in the distance to the east I saw the cowboy shack, the morning sun glinting off its windows. I hoped the Kid would know to stay inside, and that the posse would not think to look there. I remembered how when she was sick, my mama had let a rat crawl all the way up the bedpost and gnaw a hole in the quilt at her feet; I was afraid that if the posse burst into the shack, the Kid would simply let them shoot.

  When we reached the stand of alders in the middle of the valley, I let myself look behind me once again. Far in the distance I heard gunshots, but I saw no one. I let Amity slow to a trot, and caressed her gray neck. She was so fast and sure. The sun was already hot, and I wiped my forehead with the back of a dust-coated hand. The air smelled like new grass and sage. All around us the grasshoppers were humming their summer song.

  The shot came just as I let myself breathe. Amity bucked and reared and I, unprepared, fell backward into the dirt. I called out to her like she was a child, but she was galloping north, fast as any wild horse. She must be hit, I knew, or she would never throw me. But I had only a moment to worry for her when I heard the other horse approaching, its hooves loud on the hard pan of the valley.

  I did the only thing I could think to do—I climbed into the alder tree and sheltered as best I could among the leaves. I was there only a moment before the man came into view. I recognized his narrow frame and blood-colored hat—the sheriff of Casper. I waited until I thought he was twenty paces away. I
fired.

  The bullet served only to tell him where I was. He raised his eyes to mine and fired, but he missed, too, the lead lodging itself in the bark of the tree. I dropped to the ground. He fired again and missed again, and then I heard the click of an empty chamber in his hands. I looked at his narrow chest and the broad body of his horse bearing down on me, and I knew where my best chance lay. I said a silent apology and fired.

  The horse made a sound like Faith had, reared, and crumpled in the dirt. The sheriff came off cursing and running. I aimed at his chest and fired, but this time I felt the click of emptiness in my own fist.

  I tried to run through the long grass, but without Amity I was slow, my leg still wounded. I hobbled, and crumpled, and then the sheriff was on me from behind, pinning my hands together behind my back, pushing my face into the dirt. I braced myself for the blow of the pistol butt to the back of my head. I thought of all the people I would never see again—my family, Agnes Rose, News, the Kid—and all the questions I would never answer. I would never know why some babies were born with a cleft lip or a clubfoot, how two brown-eyed parents could have a blue-eyed child, or why I was barren. I was angry at the knowledge the sheriff was stealing from me, and as I realized I was angry, I realized the blow of the pistol had not come. The sheriff yanked me to my feet. Lacking cuffs or a rope to bind me, he had to keep both hands on my wrists and shove me ahead of him, like I was a piece of furniture he was trying to move.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “We built stocks in the town square just for you,” he said. “You’ll stay there three days. Then, if you’re still alive, you’ll hang.”

  I heard in his voice a kind of contemptuous familiarity. He had been thinking about me since News and Agnes Rose had sprung me from his jail a few weeks before, and I had been thinking about him. Hate, I saw, breeds a kind of closeness. I fell in step with him.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

 

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