Outlawed(26)

She tousled what was left of my hair and blew on the back of my neck. A few stray clippings fell in the dirt.

“Come on,” she said, leading me to Lo’s shed.

In the cracked mirror I looked wholly different—ugly was my first thought, all the softness gone from my face now that my hair no longer hung around it. But Agnes Rose told me to straighten my back and lift my chin, and I could see something dimly then, a new way of looking and being.

“Handsome,” she said. “Don’t worry. Just listen to your gut. You know more than you think you do.”





CHAPTER 4




Sutton’s Gulch was southwest of the valley, but on the morning we set out, the Kid led us due south instead.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To the wall,” the Kid said cheerily. “I want you to see the view.”

The morning was gray and cool and I could smell the sage under the horses’ hooves. But as we rode south the sun burned through the clouds, then shone so bright it seemed to bleach the landscape of its color. Dust caught in my throat and sweat soaked my shirt; coming from everywhere at once was the sound of locusts sawing.

At the base of the red wall the horse path narrowed to a footpath. A little way’s up, maybe a half hour’s hard hiking, I saw the notch, the Hole in the Wall. The Kid dismounted and tied Grace to a hitching post, its wood gone silvery with weather. Elzy and I tied our horses too. We climbed on foot up the rocky path until my thigh muscles screamed, and then we climbed some more. The path switched back on itself again and again. It was far longer than it had seemed from the ground, and far harder going, and I began to think the Hole in the Wall was a kind of illusion or mirage, and we would never reach it, and that the Kid would simply march us ever skyward as some kind of test or punishment, until our legs gave out and we dropped to the dust, begging for mercy. Then we rounded a bend and scrambled up a pebbled scree, and there we were in the cool darkness of it, the two rock faces slanting inward on either side of us, cradling us like hands with interlacing fingers. We sat in the dirt, wiping our faces and panting.

“Take a look, Doc,” said the Kid, with a sweep of the hand. “Take it all in.”

Down below, the valley shocked me with its glory. The grass shone silver-green in the sunlight, deepening to aquamarine where the creeks ran, parching out to gray in the dry flats where the red dirt peeked through. I saw stands of birch and aspen quivering in the breeze, and a herd of pronghorn drinking from the heart-shaped pond. We were so high that I could see the coal-black backs of buzzards circling.

“Do you know why we came here, Doctor?” the Kid asked.

“Because we can see in every direction,” I said, childishly happy to have the right answer.

Indeed I could see the firepit far in the distance, a pock in the silver grass, and beside it the bunkhouse, the barn, and the pasture. Above them were the pass and the road north, where I had come from.

“That’s one reason,” the Kid said. “But it’s not the only one. Look again.”

I wanted badly to understand what the Kid meant, and I searched the landscape for secret meanings. I saw the cowboy shack in the creek’s glittering elbow, and the cracked expanse of dry earth where coyotes and hawks hunted prairie dogs. Directly below us, so far down it made my head swim to look at them, were a row of red rocks shaped into tall columns by wind and weather, standing like sentries guarding the wall.

“There are a lot of good hiding places—” I began.

The Kid’s voice changed, taking on the soaring quality I remembered from the first night I’d come to Hole in the Wall.

“The Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘Unto thy seed have I given this land,’ ” the Kid said, “ ‘from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates: the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’ ”

I was lost, but the Kid’s face held my attention, the Kid’s eyes dancing with excitement.

“When I met Cassie, we had nothing and no one. We cleaved to one another as a husband to his wife. For three hundred and seventy-eight days we wandered the Powder River country, looking for a place where we could make a home, where we could live in freedom without fear. And on the three hundred and seventy-ninth day we came over the red wall and saw this valley spread out before us, the land between two rivers that God promised to Abram.

“ ‘I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession,’ God said. And I knew that this land was to be ours, an everlasting possession for generations and generations.”

I tasted the same stale bitterness in my mouth, like tea gone cold in the cup overnight, that I’d tasted every time the Mother Superior read us Psalm 127, and reminded us that even though we would never have children, we must honor and respect the greater holiness of those who could.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but what generations? Aren’t all of us here the last of our lines?”

The Kid’s eyes only glowed brighter at this.

“Don’t you remember your catechism, Doctor? Abram and his wife Sarai were barren. But God promised Abram the land of Canaan, and he gave him a new name. ‘Thy name shall be Abraham,’ God said, ‘for a father of many nations have I made thee. And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.’ ”