Outlawed(27)

“Amen,” said Elzy quietly. She looked up at the Kid with reverence but also with familiarity, the way one might look at a beloved older sibling.

“We may be barren in body, dear Doctor, but we shall be fathers of many nations, fathers and mothers both. You see, when we found this land, I knew it was promised not just for us, but for the descendants of our minds and hearts, all those cast out of their homes and banished by their families, all those slandered and maligned, imprisoned and abused, for no crime but that God saw fit not to plant children in their wombs. I knew that we would build a nation of the dispossessed, where we would be not barren women, but kings.”

The Kid’s words were exciting, and I wanted to feel carried away by them. But I remembered the power I’d felt in my fingers when setting a particularly difficult break, or guiding a baby headfirst into the world. That power had been taken from me, and I didn’t see how it could return.

“I don’t mean to be impertinent,” I said, “but if God really cared about us, why wouldn’t He let us have children so we could stay in our homes, with our families?”

The Kid looked at me for a moment in silence, and I saw Elzy’s shoulders tense. I wondered if I should be afraid.

But then the Kid smiled, and spoke to me with a sweetness and sympathy I hadn’t heard since I left my mother’s house.

“You think God has forsaken you, Ada, is that it?” the Kid asked.

“If there is a God,” I said, “then yes, I do.”

“Poor thing. We all felt this way when we first arrived. Elzy, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t believe in anything when I came here,” Elzy said.

“Even I sometimes succumbed to despair,” the Kid said. “But then I realized: we were told a lie about God and what He wants from us.”

“What does He want from us?” I asked.

The Kid bent close to me then, until our foreheads were touching.

“He will make you father of many nations, Ada,” the Kid said. “Watch and see.”

We came to Sutton’s Gulch a few hours after nightfall and camped at the bottom, watering the horses at the stream that trickled there. I was tired from the climb and the long ride but I slept badly, dreaming and waking, dreaming and waking. Every time I woke I saw that the Kid was awake too, reading the Bible or drinking whiskey or simply walking in a circle round the dead coals of our fire.

Morning came cool and cloudy. Elzy was heating beans with chunks of pemmican on a skillet over the fire.

“Where’s the Kid?” I asked.

“Watching the road,” Elzy said. “If News is right, the wagon should be along around midmorning. But we don’t want to miss it if they’re early.”

She dipped a tin cup into the mixture and handed it to me.

“No forks,” she said. “Let it cool a little and slurp it down.”

Elzy and I sat in silence, blowing into our cups. I remembered the way she’d looked at the Kid the day before, the love and respect in her eyes. I wanted to feel what she felt, or at least to understand it.

“Do you believe baby Jesus promised this land to us?” I asked her.

Elzy shrugged. “I didn’t grow up on baby Jesus, or God, or any of that. My daddy didn’t go in for it. I believe in the Kid.”

“But if you don’t believe what the Kid’s saying, about God and everything, then what’s left?” I asked. “Isn’t it all just words?”

Elzy put down her cup. She looked offended now.

“I didn’t say I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just don’t always take it literally. Like when the Kid talks about building our nation, do I think we’re going to re-create the United States of America? No, of course not. I wouldn’t want to even if we could.”

“Then what does it mean?” I asked.

“It’s a way of holding us up,” Elzy said. “It’s how the Kid reminds us who we are.”

“And who are we?”

We heard hoofbeats in the distance.

The Kid appeared at the lip of the gulch then, nose and mouth already covered by a scarf of purple silk. Elzy smiled at me, then removed a checked bandanna from her pocket.

“Didn’t you hear?” she asked. “We’re kings.”

A few minutes’ ride to the south was an overlook from which we could see several miles of road. At first I saw nothing—then, in the distance, a spot.

As we waited, the spot grew, and when we could see two men seated in a wagon, one with a rifle as long as my arm, we drove our horses fast down the face of the overlook to the roadway. I registered things I would remember later: two pronghorns springing away as we rode past, a sunbeam cutting through the clouds to the northeast, the driver saying something to the guard, the guard laughing.

Then we had them in our sights and the Kid said, “Sir, kindly drop the rifle,” and the robbery began.

The guard was middle-aged, broad and short, curly hair flecked with gray under his hat. He climbed down from the wagon seat and laid his rifle in the dirt, then nodded to the driver, who was younger, a little taller, handsome, with black hair curling into his eyes. The Kid took the guard’s rifle and handed it to me; my job was to go around to the back of the wagon and look for the money. Elzy and the Kid covered the two men.