Outlawed(30)

Agnes Rose did not wear men’s clothing—“It’s not for me,” she said—so we traveled as husband and wife, brass wedding rings greening our fingers. But she didn’t need the pretense with the trader, who seemed to know her well. She greeted him in Arapaho.

“Your accent is improving,” he replied in English.

“I know you’re lying, but thank you for flattering me,” she said. “News sends her regards, she’s sorry she couldn’t make it. But I’d like you to meet Doc, our newest recruit. She’s a trained midwife.”

The trader looked at me with curiosity. He was slight, older than me but younger than Mama, with thick eyeglasses and a sky-blue bead in each ear. On walls and shelves around and behind him were valuables that people had brought to pawn or trade—a gold-plated pocketknife, a revolver, a buckskin war shirt with beads and fringe, a lady’s hat decorated with ostrich feathers, a mahogany grandfather clock with gilt numbers on its face. The head of a mountain lion, frozen in a roar.

“What made you join up with these ne’er-do-wells?” the trader asked me, pointing at Agnes Rose. “I thought the Americans took good care of their midwives.”

“Not barren ones,” I said.

He shook his head and said something in Arapaho. Mrs. Spencer at school had said that the Indians did not value children the way Christian people did. Thinking about it now, far from the schoolhouse, I realized it was likely Mrs. Spencer had never spoken to an Indian person. I myself had done so only a handful of times, when women came from Lakota country for my mother’s services. I did not know what they thought about barren women, or what the trader thought, but I realized now that he might not feel the same way as the Fairchild ladies did, that perhaps barren wives were not hanged for witches everywhere.

“We’re looking to buy some laudanum,” Agnes Rose said. “How much do we need, Doc?”

“A hundred drops should do it,” I said, “if it’s strong.”

The trader raised an eyebrow at Agnes Rose.

“And how are you paying for this, exactly?”

From her handbag, Agnes Rose produced a small sack of what I assumed was gold.

“We’ve had a good summer,” she said. “This should cover it.”

The trader looked inside the sack and hefted it in his hand.

“Agnes,” he asked, “do you know where laudanum comes from?”

She looked at me, but I was no help. I knew laudanum was scarce and expensive—Mama got it from Dr. Carlisle, and only for very special cases, like cutting out a breast tumor or an ovarian cyst. I had no idea where Dr. Carlisle got it.

“It comes from China,” the trader said. “The few merchants who still cross the Pacific sell it to traders in San Francisco or the Dalles, and they sell it on to traders who carry it across hundreds of miles of hard country until finally, weeks or months later, some of it makes its way to me. So while I’m prepared to give you a discount from my usual rate, Agnes—we’ve worked together a long time—I’m going to need about double what’s in here.”

“Come on, Nótkon,” Agnes Rose said. “You and I both know it’s not worth that. I can throw in twenty silver liberties.”

I could hear anxiety in her voice. She hadn’t been prepared for this. Nótkon shook his head.

“I’d be losing money,” he said. “Now if you had some valuables from your last job to sweeten the deal—that necklace you brought last time paid for my son’s wedding.”

“We might be able to throw in some hatpins,” Agnes Rose said, but I could tell she was stalling, and Nótkon was unimpressed. I looked around at his wares, the glint of the ruby in the hat, the sheen on a pair of snakeskin boots. A leather-bound Bible from before the Flu with gilt-edged pages and a scarlet ribbon to mark your place. I had an idea.

“I have something you might like,” I said. “It’s a medical manual.”

Nótkon looked amused.

“No offense,” he said, “but I don’t have much use for American medicine. I seem to remember something about a Flu.”

“This is new medicine,” I said. “Mrs. Alice Schaeffer has a surgery down in Rocky Mountain country where she sees hundreds of women a year. She can cure things that killed women and babies in my town. She knows how to cut a baby from its mother’s womb and sew the mother back up so both survive.”

Nótkon tried not to show it, but I could tell he was intrigued. I took the book out of my satchel and laid it on the counter before him, open to the diagram of the woman sliced open to reveal the baby inside. He recoiled, then leaned closer. He began flipping pages. The minute hand of the grandfather clock ticked once, then twice.

Agnes Rose took the book away.

“Can’t let you read all the secrets until you pay for it,” she said.

Nótkon looked at me, then at Agnes Rose, then back at me again.

All the way back to Hole in the Wall, the tiny bottle of laudanum light in my satchel where the book had been, I repeated Mrs. Schaeffer’s treatments to myself so I wouldn’t forget them.

Fiddleback Ranch was the biggest cattle operation between Casper and the Bighorns. It was so big that a town had grown up around it, where all the cowboys and ranch hands lived in bungalows and rooming houses and bought coffee and sugar at the general store and drank in the evenings at the saloon and roadhouse, Veronica’s. The owner of the ranch was a man named Roger McBride, the youngest son of a poor farmer from out east in corn country. McBride had come to the Powder River Valley with nothing but a horse and a knack for business, and now he owned not just the ranch but the mayor of the Independent Town of Fiddleback (who was widely rumored to be on his payroll), the sheriff (same rumors), half the houses in town (his agent collected rent on the first Saturday of the month, and was harsh in evicting those who couldn’t pay), and a roving crew of bounty hunters who chased down cattle rustlers and generally protected his interests in Powder country and beyond (their numbers were said to be in the dozens).