Outlawed(42)

News began to clap, and the others joined in. I felt a surprising warmth in my chest; it had been so long since I had been surrounded by people who cared for me. Only Cassie did not clap. Instead she looked down at her bandaged feet.

“When we were few, we rarely disagreed,” the Kid went on. News and Agnes Rose exchanged an amused glance.

“But as we become many, we will encounter more differences of opinion. And so I propose this course of action for the consideration of my plan regarding the Farmers’ and Merchants’ Bank of Fiddleback, and all such matters in future, should they prove controversial:

“Take three days. Speak among yourselves. I promise not to try to sway you any more than I’ve already done. If at the end of that time the better part of you disapprove of my proposal, I’ll accept your decision and I won’t seek to change it. But if a majority supports the proposition, then we’ll start the preparations right away. And I’ll endeavor to make sure you never regret putting your trust in me.”

The next day we ran out of beans, so News and I butchered a pair of leather riding pants. I laid them out flat on a clean sheet, and News cut along the seams until the legs came apart, then sliced each one into thin strips.

“I’m not cooking that,” Cassie said, so we carried the pile of leather to the kitchen cabin ourselves and set a pot to boiling.

Hunger made us crazed and giddy.

“Should we add turpentine?” News asked. “Or look, here are some roofing nails.”

“If we wait long enough,” I said, “we might catch some mice to put in.”

“You think you’re joking,” said News, stirring the strips into the water. “We ate mice in eighty-nine. Lo didn’t want to, she said they spread diseases. So the Kid ate one first. Nothing happened, so we all ate them, and we survived that winter.”

A smell of sweat came wafting up from the pot. It was disgusting, but it still made me hungry.

“What do you think of the Kid’s plan?” I asked.

News laughed. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. She rummaged through the packets and jars on Cassie’s spice shelf, found some oregano, and dumped it in the boiling water.

“Then again, if it works, think of it. A whole town. The Kid could be the mayor. Maybe I’d be the sheriff. We could live out in the open, no more hiding, no more running away.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My town wasn’t so kind to me. I’m not sure I’m eager to go back to one.”

“I wish I could go back to Elmyra,” News said. “I miss it every day.”

“Even though they ran you out?” I asked.

News examined a cloudy jar of dried mushrooms. “Who says they ran me out?” she asked. “Our sheriff used to come over for dinner every second Sunday. He knew I was barren, everybody did. Nobody cared. I helped take care of my sister-in-law’s children. We were happy.”

I took the jar from News, sniffed the contents, and put it back on the shelf. “Don’t use that,” I said. “So what happened?”

Her voice took on a hard edge.

“Dr. Lively happened.”

I remembered the book I’d seen in the convent library, about the mixing of bloodlines.

“He came to your town?” I asked.

“He didn’t have to. The mayor became a devotee. Black and white people lived together in Elmyra, they had for generations. Abolitionists founded our town, before the Flu—those were our ancestors. Then Mayor Miller got it into his head that racial mixing caused barrenness. Next thing we knew he had annulled a dozen marriages. The sheriff showed up at my parents’ house at night and made my mama move out. And of course, as a barren woman and the child of a mixed marriage, I was the mayor’s new favorite science experiment. He wanted to bring me with him to different towns to help him convince other mayors to adopt Lively’s ideas.”

News added a liberal shaking of pepper to the pot.

“For a long time after I left I thought, maybe when Mayor Miller dies I can go home. Then I heard his son took over, so I gave that up. But now—” She tasted the leather soup, made a face, and added more oregano. “I know it’s crazy,” she said. “We’ll be killed for sure. But on the off chance that we survive, I keep thinking, maybe it could be like home.”

“Do you remember what you told me up at Hole in the Wall?” I asked Elzy.

She was sitting cross-legged on her cot on the bunkhouse’s upper level, cleaning and oiling all the hunting rifles. I saw she had developed a system, gripping the barrel with her right hand and operating the brush and cloth with her left. Unless you knew what to look for—the way she turned to watch her right hand every time she moved it, the way she occasionally used her left hand to readjust the fingers—you would not have known she had ever been injured.

“Remind me,” Elzy said. “I’ve had a lot on my mind since then.”

“You told me the Kid didn’t mean it literally, all that about the promised land. You said it was a way of holding us together.”

Elzy didn’t look up from her work. “That sounds like me,” she said.

I knelt by the gun parts laid out on clean cotton. “What do you say now?”

Elzy put the barrel down on the cloth. She moved to run her good hand through her hair, noticed the oil on it, and wrapped both arms around her knees. Sitting like that, she looked sweet and scrawny, like a boy in ninth or tenth form, before manhood has fully descended upon him.