Outlawed

by Anna North

  “It’s not that,” the Kid said. “Look around you: soon they’ll outnumber us. Keeping us together, keeping all of us safe—it’s going to be harder than I ever dreamed.”

  But the Kid was smiling. Every time something had to be decided, some question of provisions or strategy, some feud between two factions of new arrivals, the Kid seemed to grow in stature, shepherding all parties toward a solution with deftness and confidence. The Kid was a born mayor.

  “I made you a promise,” the Kid said then. “And I’ll honor it. But we need a doctor more than ever. Rosie over there, I hear she brought in lice.”

  I laughed. The truth was, I had thought many times over the last few months of staying at Hole in the Wall. I had not felt so at home since I left Fairchild, and I was loath to give up the feeling for the uncertainty of Pagosa Springs.

  “Give me a few nights to think about it,” I said. “It’ll take that long to wash everyone’s hair with turpentine anyway.”

  The next night, Agnes Rose was combing through News’s hair while I searched the brown locks of a new recruit named Daisy. At first Agnes had been chatty with the new women, telling them how she’d liberated two hundred eagles from a lawyer near Spearfish and separated a young deputy in Cody from his billfold and his pride, but as the weeks wore on she’d grown quieter and quieter, and now she was nearly silent.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “I can’t stop thinking about the butcher,” she said.

  “From Fiddleback?” I asked. “You said he’d be cheering if they hanged us.”

  “And that he would,” said Agnes Rose. “Still, I thought either we’d die, or we’d come back and put all the gold back into the town. I never thought we’d just take all those people’s gold and keep it.”

  “Aggie,” I said as gently as I could, “you’ve robbed people before.”

  “Don’t insult me,” she said. “I’m not stupid, I know what I am.” Then her voice softened. “But there’s always something you tell yourself, before every job. And in Fiddleback I told myself, if we survive this, we’re coming back and repaying these men and women ten-thousand-fold, by showing them a new way to live. And now I know that we won’t do that—it just eats at me, that’s all.”

  “I understand,” I said. “It eats at me too.”

  “Ouch,” Daisy complained. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Here,” Agnes said. “Let me. News is clear anyway.”

  Daisy got up, scowling. News stood too, but paused, her hand shading her eyes.

  “Looks like Cassie found a new recruit,” she said.

  Cassie had not warmed to the new women, exactly, but she had begun drawing up plans for planting and ranching in the valley to feed a larger number for years to come.

  “We have to be self-sufficient,” I’d heard her telling the Kid one night.

  Now as she approached the firepit, my heart rose in my chest. Behind her in the saddle was the woman with the birthmark, whom I’d met at the patent medicine stall on Easter Sunday, all those months ago. I was dressed in dungarees and a man’s shirt; as I helped her down from the horse, I saw recognition in her eyes.

  “Sweet Mother Mary,” she said when we were face to face.

  “My name is Ada,” I said. “We have a lot to explain to you.”

  She looked around the firepit at News, Agnes Rose, Daisy, a few more straggling in to get a look at the new arrival. She gave a little laugh of exhaustion and sorrow and relief.

  “I suppose you do,” she said. “But you were right. I should have saved my liberties for the wagon ride to Holy Child.”

  “Did the Mother Superior send you here?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” the woman said. “I didn’t mind reading scripture, but I couldn’t put aside my anger. Or maybe I could, but I don’t want to. The Mother said I wasn’t suited to be a nun. She said if I came here, maybe I’d find what I was suited for.”

  The night after that, I went to visit Texas in the barn. When I arrived she was leaning close to Prudence, combing her mane and singing to her in a low voice.

  “Aren’t you worried about giving her lice?” I asked.

  “Horses can’t get human lice,” she said. “I’m thinking of bringing my cot out here till the cold weather comes in. It’s quiet, it’s clean, and nobody asks questions.”

  I laughed.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Too late,” said Texas. “What do you want?”

  “Are you still going to Amarillo?”

  “Yes,” Texas said, giving Prudence’s mane another brush. “One day. When I’m finished here.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “Hard to say. We have more people now, we need more horses. More horses need more care.”

  “Someone else could care for them,” I said.

  Texas moved on to Temperance’s stall. The bay horse gave a whinny of recognition and nuzzled her nose against Texas’s hand.

  “Not as well as me,” Texas said.

  The following night I found the Kid walking the pasture. I hoped the Kid’s heart was lighter than it had been; mine was heavy. I would miss my cot on the upper level of the bunkhouse, overlooking the woodstove. But it was as clear to me now as it had ever been: I was not a sharpshooter, a con artist, or a horsewoman. My mastery, when it came, would be of a different sort.

  “Keep up the turpentine for another three days,” I said. “And make sure Agnes checks everyone over for a week. Lice are tricky.”

  “I’ll pass along your prescription,” said the Kid. “Take News and Texas with you to Colorado country, if they’re willing. And Amity, of course. She won’t let anyone else ride her.”

  It was September when News, Texas, and I set out for Pagosa Springs. We traveled as itinerant cowboys, heavily disguised with false beards and hats pulled low over our eyes. The story of the Hole in the Wall Gang had preceded us: everywhere we stayed, we heard of our own exploits, already twisted and magnified into legend. The Hole in the Wall Gang had reduced an entire town to rubble. The Hole in the Wall Gang could make rain fall from a clear sky. The Hole in the Wall Gang roasted babies on a spit. The members of the Hole in the Wall Gang were male and female both, with breasts and a penis, and could make themselves pregnant at will. The stories both amused and frightened us—we saw how large a target we made now, how attractive for someone with the ambition to bring down a villain. But as we traveled, even among the posters bearing our likenesses, no one recognized us, because Lo had trained us well to disappear into new suits of clothes so that someone could look right at us and see only the ordinary men we wanted them to see.

  After ten days on the road we began to climb through Rocky Mountain country. The air took on a new quality, clean and coniferous, and when I woke in the mornings I thought of Lark and the plans we’d made on our wedding day, no less sweet and sad in my mind for being part of a charade. We climbed up past the tree line where all life was low to the ground, the lichens drinking cloudwater, the marmots and pika scuttling from rock to rock. Only the birds there seemed still to have their freedom—the bluebirds singing brightly in the autumn sun, the falcons hurtling fast as bullets between the mountain peaks.

  When we reached the other side of the mountain range, and the trees began to grow again and the forests quicken with deer and moose, I knew we must be close. On the fifteenth day of our journey, I smelled something different on the wind, a mineral scent like liquid rock. The springs themselves ran underground along the road for miles before the town appeared; when we stopped to rest the horses we could hear them, like the whispers of ghosts. Where they bubbled up, finally, in pools and falls, bathers gathered singly and in groups, floating up to the neck in the water, anointing their faces with it, soaking feet and hands, dipping children and babies, wheeling the old and sick down in chairs and cradling their bodies in its warmth.

  There was no roadhouse in Pagosa Springs, only a bathhouse with rooms arranged around a central pool. News and Texas an
d I could not remove our clothes, so we sat in the sunroom, where men and women could sit together on folding chairs and drink tonics made with the town’s waters. A young woman, chubby, with very healthy-looking skin, brought us foul-smelling drinks in heavy glasses.

  “We’re looking for Mrs. Alice Schaeffer,” I told her.

  The woman shook her head.

  “Never heard of anyone by that name,” she said.

  “Who runs the surgery here?” I asked.

  “There’s no surgery,” she said. “We don’t need it. The waters cure everything that ails you.”

  As she left I sipped my tonic; it tasted like saltwater.

  “There was a surgery,” said the woman next to me.

  She was impossibly ancient, so old she was young again, her skin soft-looking as a baby’s, her hair like dandelion fluff. Her eyes, staring blindly into space, were the very lightest blue.

  “What happened to it?” News asked.

  “It closed down three years ago now. Maybe more. The midwife had to leave town very suddenly.”

  “Alice Schaeffer?” I asked.

  “That might have been her name. She had women coming in and out, you see—women who couldn’t have children. There was an outbreak of something—maybe spotted fever, it’s hard to remember now. Suspicion fell on her. The sheriff was involved.”

  “Do you know where she went?” I asked.

  The woman fixed me with her blue eyes, and I realized she could see after all.

  “Wherever it is,” she said, “I imagine she wouldn’t want anyone to find her.”

  The sunroom was lined with glass windows looking out on the pool. A young couple in blue bathing costumes kissed each other ceremonially on the lips, then stepped into the water.

  “Where was the surgery?” I asked the old woman.

  “On the eastern edge of town, if I remember right,” she said, “opposite the school.”

  It was late afternoon when we reached the spot, and school was just letting out. I saw three girls walking hand in hand in hand, and thought of Ulla and Susie and me. By now both Ulla and Susie must be mothers, I knew; perhaps their children would play with my sisters’ children. The thought did not even make me sad anymore. It was like an image seen through very thick glass, its impact muted and distorted.

  The building opposite the schoolhouse was low and small, its roof clearly damaged in a hailstorm. But inside, I saw it had been designed for calm and comfort. The windows were large and looked out on the mountains, and even through the dust that lay thick on the glass, the light in every room had a sweetness to it, like cool water.

  “We should stay the night here,” Texas said. “We can start back in the morning. I’m sorry, Ada. I know you must be disappointed.”

  I nodded, but I could not quite believe that Mrs. Alice Schaeffer was gone. Her presence filled the surgery. The front room was large with a wide bed, a washbasin, and a variety of cushions of different shapes and sizes. I recognized them from the handbook—Mrs. Schaeffer had recommended a peanut-shaped pillow for back labor, and a smaller, cylindrical one between the knees to help with the pain of transition, and I saw both set neatly next to the bed, along with others whose uses I had not yet learned.

  In the back room was a narrower bed and three dark-wood cabinets. One was full of instruments—a speculum, forceps, a scalpel, an assortment of needles—many now ruined with rust. A second held bottles and jars of tinctures, ointments, and tonics, some familiar and some new to me. The third was full of notebooks, ordered by date, each one containing details of observations, operations, births, and deaths. I was reading Mrs. Schaeffer’s records of a series of women who had suffered miscarriages in the winter of 1889 when I heard the knock at the back door.

  It was past midnight. The woman who stood before me had come on foot, alone. She was young, probably younger than me, with dark eyes and a forward jut to her lower jaw that made her look determined.

  “Are you Mrs. Schaeffer?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry to tell you,” I said, “but Mrs. Schaeffer’s gone.”

  “All right then,” the young woman said, quickly as though the words were casual, but with a catch in the back of her throat. She turned to walk back into the night.

  “Wait,” I called after her. “Do you need a midwife?”

  She turned back to me, her face sad and sardonic, the smallest hint of hope playing about her mouth.

  “I wish what I needed was a midwife,” she said.

  “Come inside,” I told her.

  In the morning the others found us seated together at the desk in the back room. The young woman had told me the history of her family, who was barren and who had many children, and now she was telling me about her town, the illnesses that had passed through when she was younger, and the ones that had sickened her in the past year.

  “Who is this?” Texas asked.

  “This is Minnie Parrish,” I said. “She’s my patient.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry up and treat her,” Texas said. “If we don’t get on the road soon we’ll lose the light.”

  But I had already stripped the bed and set a pot of water boiling to sterilize the bedsheets and instruments. I had made a preliminary inventory of the cabinets, finding all the ointments parched and the herbs dusty, but a few seed packets tucked behind the camphor from which I could start a little garden. I had found an empty notebook, a fountain pen, and an inkwell with a little ink still liquid inside it, and I had opened the notebook to the first page and written that day’s date at the very top. Below it I had written down everything Minnie Parrish said.

  I was afraid, and I was uncertain—I thought it distinctly possible that what had befallen Mrs. Schaeffer would also befall me. But I had received, in the preceding months, an excellent education in how to evade suspicion—and, once it could be evaded no further, how to fight for my life. Now, I reasoned, was the time to employ what I had learned.

  “Tell the Kid thank you,” I said. “If any of your number needs a doctor, you can always send them to me. And if any of my patients needs safety, I hope I can send them to you.”

  I want to tell you about the years that followed, about the births I witnessed and the deaths, about the women I treated and the books I wrote, about what I learned from the notebooks and what, eventually, other midwives learned from me. But those are other stories for other days. This story ends in September in the year of our Lord 1895, when I came over the mountains a wife and a widow, a doctor and an outlaw, a robber and a killer and ever my mother’s daughter, and set up shop in the surgery of Mrs. Alice Schaeffer and got to work.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe enormous thanks to Julie Barer for her expert guidance, Callie Garnett for her probing questions, Barbara Darko for her wise help with copyediting, Nicole Cunningham for all her help over the years, and Liese Mayer and everyone at Bloomsbury for their enthusiasm about this project. Thanks to JoEllen Anderson, Andrew Cowell, and Phoebe Hart for sharing their expertise, and to everyone at Willow Creek Ranch at the Hole-in-the-Wall for welcoming me and giving excellent directions. Thanks, as always, to my writing group: Anthony Ha, Alice Sola Kim, Karan Mahajan, Tony Tulathimutte, Annie Julia Wyman, James Yeh, and Jenny Zhang. Utmost thanks to my family, especially Toby, for advising, listening, reading, and driving.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Anna North is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of two previous novels, America Pacifica and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, which received a Lambda Literary Award. She has been a writer and editor at Jezebel, BuzzFeed, Salon, and the New York Times, and she is now a senior reporter at Vox. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn.

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  This electronic edition first published in the United St
ates 2021

  Copyright © Anna North, 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

  Names: North, Anna, author.

  Title: Outlawed : a novel / Anna North.

  Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020023175 (print) | LCCN 2020023176 (ebook) | ISBN 9781635575422 (hardback) | ISBN 9781635575439 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Western stories. | Adventure fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3614.O774 O88 2021 (print) | LCC PS3614.O774 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023175

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023176

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