Outlawed(24)

A week later I had learned how to gouge eyes and kick balls, how to punch a man in the throat and shatter his Adam’s apple, and how to use the back of my skull to break a man’s nose. A week after that News and Texas stole the cows.

In the two days they were gone no one would tell me where they were.

“On a job,” was all Lo would say.

She was distracted that morning; everyone was. At breakfast we heard a rustling in the bushes by the firepit and the Kid leapt up, face alight with excitement or fear. Then a jackrabbit hopped across the red dirt and back into the scrub on the other side. At dinner I heard Cassie talking to the Kid about a search party.

Then, just at sunset, the sound of hoofbeats. We ran up to the road to greet them. I had never found cattle beautiful before, but here they were, pink and gold in the dying light, at least a dozen of them, more, News riding tall at the center of the herd, Texas in back, her guidance holding them all together. In the upper pasture, the two dismounted and we held them, all of us together in a knot, the cattle grumbling around us. When we pulled apart News was crying a little.

“Are you all right?” Agnes Rose removed her cowboy hat and stroked her cheek.

“I’m just so happy we did it,” she said. She looked at the Kid, joy in her eyes. “You said we could do it and we did.”

The Kid embraced her again, spun her around—though News was taller and bigger, the Kid lifted her as though she weighed nothing.

“Of course you could do it,” the Kid said. “You can do anything, you know that.”

The Kid threw an arm around Texas, too, crowing: “My loves, your powers are limitless.”

It was past midnight when the moaning woke me from my sleep. I had forgotten where I was and I leapt out of bed, sure that Mama or one of my sisters was hurt. But when I blinked and rubbed my eyes I saw, not my mother scrubbing her hands in scalding water, but Texas pulling on her cowboy boots by the light of a kerosene lamp. I followed her down the stairs and out into the cool night.

The cow’s keening rang loud in the dark pasture, a terrible desolate sound. The steers had formed a circle around her, mooing softly with concern.

“Shit,” said Texas quietly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I can manage a drive, but I don’t know anything about taking care of cows.”

She laid her head against the cow’s belly, listened to her heart.

“If she were a horse, I’d say colic,” Texas said.

The cow moaned again, even louder this time. The sound was too familiar to ignore. I dropped to my knees and reached down, carefully, to feel her udders. They were hard as rocks.

“Get me a bucket,” I said.

At first she screamed when I tried to milk her. We had to warm water on the stove in the kitchen cabin, use it to soak rags, and apply those to her swollen udders, massaging downward, before her milk would flow.

“You separated her from her calf?” I asked when the stream finally hit the bucket.

“I didn’t think so,” Texas said. “I didn’t see any calves with her. But we peeled them off from the herd in the narrows out by Douglas. The calf must have gone on before.”

We were both quiet for a moment, the only sound the milk fizzing against metal.

“Will it die without her?” Texas asked.

“Maybe not,” I said. “Another cow in the herd could nurse it.”

Texas stroked the animal’s back. “I know we’re selling her off to slaughter,” she said, “but I hate to see her in pain.”

I thought of Sigrid Williamson, whose baby had died at two months of a fever. How, as she wept, my mama brought her a neighbor’s baby to nurse so she wouldn’t develop mastitis.

“I’ll milk her in the mornings till we sell her,” I said. “She’ll be all right.”

Texas nodded and turned to walk back to the bunkhouse. I pressed the cooling rags to the cow’s udder one more time. Her moaning was a quiet lowing now. This cow was more woman than I would ever be.

“Texas,” I said.

She stopped.

“What is it?”

I paused, then rushed headlong into my question.

“Do you ever wish you were a mother?”

Texas laughed. “Baby Jesus, Ada,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right,” Texas said. “I used to. But I don’t think about it much anymore.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“I met the Kid,” she said.

I remembered how the two had embraced, the pride with which the Kid praised her.

“And now the gang is your family?” I asked.

“That’s part of it, of course,” Texas said. “Before I came here, I was in a convent for a while, same as you. I was safe there. But I hated it—dawn till dusk, all I did was knit scarves. I was terrible at it. They didn’t even call me by my name there—I was Sister Catherine. I was nobody.”

“And now?” I asked.

I saw her draw her small body up a little taller in the darkness.

“Well, now I’m the stable master for the Hole in the Wall Gang.”

Later that week News and the Kid sold the cattle on to an unscrupulous rancher outside the Independent Town of Casper. In her reconnaissance at a nearby roadhouse, News heard about a wagon coming to Casper from Jackson, carrying a month’s payroll for forty cowboys and ranch hands, all in gold and silver pieces, with only the driver and one guard to protect it.