Outlawed(37)

For a moment we all sat frozen to our seats. Then Agnes Rose threw one of the whiskey bottles against the side of the gully, where it shattered into hundreds of pieces that reflected the firelight. The horses whinnied. The bats scattered. News looked up at the stars, then back at me.

“I don’t know, Doc,” she said. “Maybe you’re a curse.”





CHAPTER 6




Winter hit us hard at Hole in the Wall. One day the afternoon wind was warm in the orchard, and the next the firepit was hidden under a foot-thick carpet of snow. We were out of money; the Kid and Cassie had been counting on the contents of Bixby’s satchel, and had spent much of what we’d stolen in the wagon raid on new shoes and saddles for the horses. So Cassie had to start us on strict rations—a ladleful of corn grits for breakfast, beans for dinner, and bacon fat only on Sundays. I thought about food constantly. When I couldn’t sleep, I lay in my cot picturing butter melting into bread.

Worst of all, Elzy couldn’t shoot. I saw her in the frozen-over orchard one morning, firing at snowballs with her left hand and missing half the time. After that I watched her carefully—she ate and drank and brushed her horse with her left hand, and though she still gestured with her right when she talked, I saw how clumsily it gripped the leather when she pulled on her boots. I couldn’t bring myself to ask to examine her, but I could tell what had happened. I remembered one of the books I’d read in Sister Tom’s library, the diagrams of the nerves running through the body like threads. I knew the bullet had ripped through those fragile fibers, and now Elzy couldn’t feel her hand.

Elzy wasn’t just our best sharpshooter; she was also our best hunter. Cassie and Texas and the Kid went out to try to supplement our rations, but none of them could bring down the valley’s skittish pronghorn like Elzy could—all they managed to shoot were a couple of turkeys, already scrawny from winter starving. Their stringy flesh barely flavored that night’s watery stew. When we ate it, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me.

At first I tried to come up with plans.

“The horse market in Sweetwater,” I said to News one below-freezing morning, when we all huddled around the woodstove in the kitchen cabin, the cold only sharpening our hunger. “There must be a lot of money changing hands there. We could find someone flush from a sale and rob him on his way out of town.”

Texas and Lo and Cassie rolled their eyes. News sighed. It was the third idea I’d floated that morning.

“Go saddle up Amity,” News said. “I need to show you something.”

I pulled a fur hat down low over my forehead and a wool scarf over my face; outside in the white day, the slice of skin between them burned. The snow was so cold it squeaked under our boots. The horses snuffled in the freezing air but were willing, their coats long and dense for the winter. The sun shone weak and yellow behind a flat layer of cloud, like it was going out.

We rode south in silence, up the path out of the valley. The horses’ hooves left a crisp trail in the fresh snow. We’d been riding only a few minutes when I saw what News wanted to show me: ahead of us, the road was not just snowed over, it was gone. Where once we had been able to ride between two hills, now a single, smooth snowfield stretched unbroken from hilltop to hilltop, many times higher than the roof of the bunkhouse.

“Can we ride over it?” I asked.

“Sure,” said News, “if you want Amity to get stuck in the snow and die.”

I reached down to rub Amity’s neck with my gloved hand, chastened.

“It’ll be like this through March at least, maybe April,” News said. “No raids till then.”

In the dead of winter only the Kid was happy. While the others slept or drank fennel tea to keep their hunger pangs at bay—my only contribution to the winter so far, made with crushed fennel seeds from Cassie’s pantry—the Kid sat in a corner of the bunkhouse surrounded by maps and papers, getting up only to pace around the great room and stare out at the snow. One morning we woke at dawn to the Kid banging on a saucepan with a spoon, shouting, “Wake up, my beauties, my heroes, wake up!”

As we sat all together in the great room, wrapped in parkas and bedclothes and dishtowels and rags, I saw how much we’d lost since winter began, the hollows in our cheeks and the stains around our eyes. I knew the course of malnutrition—soon our teeth would loosen from our spongy gums, and the beds of our fingernails begin to bleed.

“Before I explain why I’ve gathered us all here this morning,” the Kid began, “I want to give thanks to each of you, for all that you have given of yourselves. Elzy, of course, you have given the strength of your right hand. We are all humbled by your sacrifice.”

Elzy looked out the window, grim-faced.

“News and Agnes, you went out among strangers for weeks upon weeks without the rest of us to help you. I know how living under a false name depletes the storehouse of the heart; I know what you gave for us and I am grateful.”

Agnes smiled; News didn’t, but she looked at the Kid with a devotion I’d never seen before.

“And Doc—I know some of you are still angry with her. But remember Matthew: ‘If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ ”

“The Father will just have to stay mad at me,” Cassie said.