by Anna North
“Shut up,” the sheriff said, giving me a shove.
I tried a different tack.
“Surely the sheriffs of Fairchild and Fiddleback want to hang me in their town squares too. How did you win the privilege?”
“They didn’t catch you,” he said. “I did. They can hang your friends if they want to. I’m sure Sheriff Donnelly will be excited to string up a gelding in front of his jailhouse.”
When he said the word I understood. The wrinkled face of the woman in the jail came back to me clear as if she stood before me on the grass. She must have heard everything I’d said to Lark, and I had said everything to him, about Hole in the Wall and Fiddleback and myself and my family. After our escape attempt she must have traded the information to the sheriff in exchange for her freedom. I almost laughed, almost cried. My marriage had been so costly, and I had barely gotten to enjoy it.
The sheriff and I were the same height, about the same build. But I remembered what Lo had taught me about fighting with men, how I’d have to fight dirty. I broke into a run, as though trying to break free of his grasp. He had to run to keep up with me. Then I stopped short, and when I felt his breath on the back of my neck I brought my head back fast and hard into his face. He yelled and dropped my hands—it was all I needed. I drew my gun and cracked it as hard as I could against his skull. I did not wait to find out if he was dead. I ran.
Soon I had to slow to a walk, then a hop, dragging my hurt leg behind me. The sun seemed to swell in the sky. The birds went silent in the midday heat. Sweat and dust turned to mud on my skin. On foot it would take me another day at least to reach the wall, longer in my injured state. Knowing how much ground I had left to cover made the pain worse; I grew dizzy with it. On a hill above a salt flat I sat down to rest.
I must have been dozing when a sound roused me, a single, high yip from the flat below. At first I thought I saw a wolf crossing the cracked, red earth, and my blood pounded in my ears. But as my eyes adjusted to the sun, I saw from the animal’s hunched posture, the sly sneakiness in its movements, that it was not a wolf but a coyote. My heart slowed and I watched the animal without fear. I began to make calculations—if I alternated walking and resting, an hour each, I could make it to the wall in two days, maybe a day and a half. But by then my friends might be dead or captured. And of course, Sheriff Branch or the sheriff of Fiddleback or one of their men might find me before then. The best thing might be to hide and wait the battle out, but the flat open space of the valley yielded few if any places where I could conceal myself. This was part of the strength of Hole in the Wall—from its perch you could see everything and everyone in the open space below. But until you got there, you were totally exposed, vulnerable to whoever might come upon you.
The coyote was nosing its way along the flat, slowly working its way toward the hill. It was a big animal, not as big as a wolf but bigger and more powerful than a dog, the ruff of red-gold fur at its shoulders concealing a girdle of muscle. As I watched, it must have caught my scent on the wind: it raised its head and opened its lips in what would have been, in a dog, a smile of recognition. It began to come near.
I knew a lone coyote would not attack a healthy human. But if it took me for dead, or too sick to move, it might nose around me and take an exploratory bite. I got painfully to my feet. The coyote stopped, but did not back off.
“Hey,” I yelled.
The coyote stood its ground. I began to hop-walk in the direction of the wall. The sun was reaching its high point and the shadows on the rock were shrinking, dark giving way to red. I looked behind me. The coyote was following, its mouth still slightly open. It gave another yip, the sound loud in the silent afternoon, and this time I heard an answer—to my left, in the tall grass south of the hill, another coyote was approaching. This one was smaller, and its fur had the soft, bushy look common to young animals. A yearling, I guessed, traveling with its mother.
I hopped faster. The coyotes yipped back and forth to each other, their calls increasing in frequency and excitement.
The third coyote was invisible until I was almost upon it. It stood motionless in the tall grass, silvery where the others were red, and with a heaviness around its head and jaws that marked it as a male. I was close enough to see into its eyes, which were golden, intelligent, and unafraid. I began to run.
The sound that went up around me was one of exultation—high and musical, almost like singing. It would have been beautiful had I not been the injured animal at its center, the prey whose fear-smell set the wild dogs racing through the grass, baying with joy.
The mother and father coyotes were running alongside me, waiting for my first stumble so they could close in, and I felt that stumble in my injured leg, I felt my muscles giving way, when another sound broke through the coyote song.
I did not see the source of the hoofbeats until she was galloping past the coyotes, powerful as a thundercloud, scaring them twenty paces off to either side of her, where they resumed their normal postures, their shamefaced scavengers’ crouch. Then she circled back and slowed, just long enough for me to clamber onto her back, where my saddle waited for me as though I’d never left it.
As I gathered the reins and guided Amity toward the wall, I saw blood drying along her left flank. Its source was a raw wound across her gray shoulder, angry red but shallow, easily healed. I thought of the flesh wound Lark had sustained in Casper, and the deeper, more terrible one he’d suffered in Mobridge—I thought of all the wounds that hadn’t killed him, and the wound that had. For a moment I bent low to Amity’s mane and inhaled her smell of hay and dust and something sweet, like mother’s milk. I told her I loved her. She dropped her head and covered the miles of grassland like they were inches, and we reached the rocky outskirts of the red wall with the sun still high in the sky.
The air was eerily quiet, and for a moment I feared the worst: my friends all dead, or, more likely, captured and parceled out among the remaining sheriffs for hanging in their respective towns. But then I saw movement above me, in the shadowed notch where two rock faces met, the Hole in the Wall itself. I tied Amity up to an aspen and began to climb on foot. I rounded a switchback and came face to face with the barrel of a gun.
“Doc, Jesus,” said Texas, lowering the pistol. “I thought you were one of them.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“They’re dug in down by the sentries.”
Texas pointed to the tall outcroppings of rock to the south. There I saw men and horses. Sheriff Branch’s hat shone in the sunlight.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We wait,” said Texas.
Where she and I had sat, many months ago, now the others had set up camp. Elzy gave me bullets for my gun. Cassie gave me a stick of pemmican and a canteen of water. News touched my shoulder.
“We thought you were gone,” she said.
The afternoon aged. We watched the men at the foot of the wall as they paced back and forth among the sentry rocks with their guns. A mixture of boredom and fear got hold of me. The valley below me took on the quality of a painting, its greens and reds and golds all flattening out against the sky. Agnes Rose began to sing, very quietly, in her low, pretty voice,
Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam,
Sunbeams were never made like me.
“Hush,” said Cassie. “They’re on the move.”
The men below were fanning out. One group of them had begun to scale the rocks just uphill from the sentries. Another was climbing south, and another made its way straight up the path to the hole. I could no longer see Sheriff Branch.
“Let them come,” said News. “We’ll pick them off as they get here.”
Cassie shook her head.
“They’re trying to surround us. We have to split up. Stay high, hide among the rocks and fire on them as they get close. News, Aggie, you go south. Doc, Texas, you take north. Elzy and I will stay here and face the ones coming up the trail.”
She paused. “If they take you, keep your
head up. Don’t beg for your life. Don’t confess to any sin. If you die without shame, the shame is all theirs.”
I thought of the woman the sheriff of Casper had talked about, who had died in the stocks at Salida. I wondered if she had pleaded for release with her last breaths, or if she’d held firm until the end. To the people gathered round her, hurling stones and rotten fruit and feces, I wondered if it had mattered.
Texas and I climbed the flat rocks north of Hole in the Wall. They were laid atop each other layer on layer, carved and stacked long ago by some great disaster. Some layers were thin as pastry leaves, others thick as tree trunks. As we climbed across them, the valley floor grew hazy with distance. Below us, falcons were diving for their prey.
Near the crest of the wall we reached a notch, smaller than the hole, and just large enough for one person to shelter with a gun. We nodded to each other, Texas installed herself, and I walked on alone.
North of the notch, the layers of rock were stacked nearly flush on one another. I had to turn my body toward the face of the wall and scuttle sideways along a narrow lip, just wide enough for my boots. The wall smelled of old rainstorms, water turning into rock and washing rock away. I knew how fast a determined man could climb, and so every few steps I peeled my face away from the rock to look dizzily over my shoulder for anyone approaching from below.
But I was not prepared for gunshots from above. They shattered the lip of rock behind me, then before me, leaving me trapped on a ledge no longer than my own stride. I drew my gun and looked up to see Sheriff Branch lying belly-down on a layer of rock not ten yards above my head. The sun was dipping down behind him; his hat glittered like a crown.
“Drop your gun,” he shouted down the barrel of his own.
Instead I fired, but the sun ruined my aim and the shot sailed wide.
“If you do that again,” the sheriff called, “I’ll have to shoot you. And I think you know I’m not liable to miss.”
The sheriff was famous in Fairchild for his hunting skills; it was said he had once leaned out the jailhouse window and picked a dove off a branch at the end of the street. I holstered the gun and lifted my hands. Then I saw the sheriff had tears in his eyes.
“Ada,” he said, “little one, I’m sorry it’s come to this.”
“Then leave us alone,” I said.
The sheriff shook his head.
“Come back to Fairchild with me,” he said. “I promise you, the judge will show you mercy. You’ll live out your days in the town jail. You can see your sisters on Sundays.”
Behind me I heard shouts and gunshots, my friends and his allies at war with one another.
“I don’t believe you,” I shouted. “The sheriff of Casper wanted to put me in the stocks.”
“I never would have let that happen,” said Sheriff Branch. “I know you’re in pain. I know what it is not to have a child. It can make you do terrible things.”
I wanted to tell him I had done nothing terrible. That had been true when I left Fairchild, but it wasn’t true now.
“I never hurt Ulla,” I said instead. “I never cast a spell on anyone. It’s all gossip and nonsense.”
The sheriff removed his hat and wiped his brow with his sleeve. Bareheaded he looked older, weary, his bald scalp reddening in the sun.
“I know that, Ada,” he said.
“Then why would you do this? Why chase me all this way?”
I felt tears welling in my eyes. More shots rang out behind me. I heard bootsteps and hoofbeats. I heard News shouting but I couldn’t make out the words. There was something strange in her voice—it sounded like joy.
“It’s such a hard world,” the sheriff said. “People need some way of making sense of it. You know that as well as I do. You and your mother, when you said ‘rheumatism’ or ‘hay fever’ or ‘liver trouble,’ half the time the patient got better just from knowing what was wrong.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“When a child dies, or two people in love can’t conceive, or a man loses his wife in childbirth—these things aren’t bearable, Ada, not without help. But if you know why it happened, if you have someone or somebody to blame, then sometimes that’s enough to keep going. Do you understand now?”
“You’d let me rot in jail just so Ulla has someone to blame?”
“Not just Ulla,” the sheriff said. “Everyone in town was lighter in their hearts when I announced you’d been charged with witchcraft. They’ll be lighter still when I bring you back. We all have to make sacrifices, Ada. I’m sorry, but this is yours.”
My tears dried and contempt welled up hot in my throat. At the same time I knew he was telling the truth—he wouldn’t hurt me. He would take me back to the town jail and let me see my mama and my sisters every Sunday. I would see Bee grow up and have children of her own.
But, I realized, I would not see them born. Someone else would attend my sisters’ births and I would be kept far away from pregnant women and babies, even—especially—those who were sick and desperately needed expert care. Women would die when I could save them. And I would sit useless in a cell, my hands aging and curling in on themselves, my knowledge growing outdated, while others, elsewhere, learned what I would never know. I looked over my shoulder at the valley spread out in greens and golds. It was especially beautiful in the late afternoon light, opening up below me like a bowl, like a pair of hands. I could simply step back and drop into it. I would die without shame.
“Please, Ada,” the sheriff shouted. “Let me take you home.”
I shut my eyes. I took half a step back. I heard a gunshot so close I thought I was hit. And when I opened my eyes and looked up, I saw the Kid standing over the sheriff’s body, gazing down at me with a face both alert and at peace.
CHAPTER 12
We fought the posse all night and into the next day, but by the time I saw the Kid, the tide had already turned. The Kid knew all the hiding places in the wall, all the routes and trails, and wherever the men tried to climb, we were there first to shoot them down. The sheriff of Fiddleback was the last one alive. Cassie and the Kid found him at the base of the wall, readying a horse to flee back to his town, and Cassie put a bullet in his chest. Then the Kid staggered and collapsed into her arms.
Weak and skinny, with a mind still weary from illness, the Kid had to be wrapped in blankets back at the camp and fed hearty soups with beetroot and marrow bones. I made a tonic of lemon, dandelion, and nettles boiled to blunt their sting, and I thought of what Sheriff Branch had said. I did not know what ailed the Kid, and I could not promise it would not come again. All I knew was that visiting the Kid’s bedside had seemed to speed healing, and so I made sure someone sat with the Kid every moment, reading or talking or simply looking out the bunkhouse window as the Kid slept.
After five days the Kid was feeling strong enough to sit up and eat pemmican and biscuits, and Cassie asked the question on all of our minds:
“What are we going to do now?”
The Kid smiled.
“I was thinking of taking a walk.”
“That’s good to hear,” Cassie said, “but you know what I mean. We can’t very well buy the bank now. If any of us go to Fiddleback we’ll be shot on sight. And there’ll be a price on all of our heads—I’d be willing to bet someone’s already putting together another posse, bigger and better-armed than the last.”
“I know,” the Kid said. “I’ll think of something.”
But the days went on without a new plan, all of us in a kind of stasis. The nights began to crisp; autumn was coming. We rotated patrol duty up at the pass, waiting for the day when the townsfolk whose sheriffs we’d slaughtered got together a new posse to capture us. It would take time, we reasoned—after the Battle of Hole in the Wall, our gang would be even more feared than before—but it would not take forever.
On the seventh day after the Kid’s return, I was kneeling by the side of the road, digging up coneflower plants to dry for the winter. When I heard footstep
s behind me I wheeled around, drawing the pistol I now carried with me every day. Before me was a woman, her feet bleeding through flimsy house shoes, her hands empty except for a sheet of crumpled paper.
“Please,” she said, “I’m looking for Hole in the Wall.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Who told you to come here?”
She handed the paper to me without a word, and through the red road dust, I saw my own face staring back. Next to mine were the faces of my friends—remarkable likenesses, as we’d appeared the day we robbed the bank. Below the drawings, the poster bore the following words:
WANTED
HOLE IN THE WALL GANG
Held up the FARMERS’ AND MERCHANTS’ BANK OF FIDDLEBACK on MAY the THIRTIETH, 1895, stealing THIRTY THOUSAND in GOLD and ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND in SILVER COIN.
These VERY DANGEROUS CRIMINALS are known to harbor among them WITCHES and people of MIXED BREED, and to engage in UNNATURAL BEHAVIOR and DRESS. They are capable of all manner of DECEPTION and TRICKERY and should be approached with GREAT CARE.
A REWARD of FIVE HUNDRED GOLD EAGLES shall be paid for any information leading to the capture of these DEPRAVED PERSONS.
“Please,” the woman said again. “They were going to hang me for a witch in Sturgiss. I saw these and I thought maybe you could help me.”
Another woman came the next week, and two the week after that. By the end of August we had half a dozen people staying with us, most barren but some run out of their towns for lying with other women or otherwise corrupting moral character. All of them carried the poster in their hands or in their heads. The Kid sent Agnes Rose to Nótkon for enough flour, lard, and ammunition to feed and garrison an army for the winter. We did not have a town, but we had money, and we had land, and now, it seemed, a town might be coming to us.
One night I sat with the Kid at the firepit. Around us was chaos, everyone meeting one another, talking and arguing.
“Cassie was right,” the Kid said. “This is dangerous.”
“You don’t trust them?” I asked, casting my hand around at the new faces.