Outlawed(46)

The bookseller climbed out of the wagon with the book in his hands.

“You won’t need to buy much,” he said. “From what I remember, the main ingredient is horseshit.”

The bookseller was right. Frederick Blunt, the secretary of the St. Louis Militia in the year 1857, when the field manual was published, recommended five pounds of horse manure, a half pound of saltpeter, and a long fuse.

“These materials, if properly assembled, will make a bomb sufficient to destroy a small wagon or outbuilding,” Blunt wrote. “Two bombs will flatten a full-size wooden house. With four bombs, the militia was able to destroy a fort occupied by the Vinegar Boys, thus strengthening our position at the junction of the Illinois and Missouri Rivers, where we hope to establish a seat of government.”

I started with a single bomb—what I hoped was five pounds of shit from the barn, mixed in a feed bag with saltpeter and lit with a bootlace. I tested it far from the bunkhouse, near a snowmelt stream in case it started a fire. Marsh marigolds were just beginning to open their white blooms, and the place smelled earthy and vegetal. I thought of Mama’s garden; her calendulas and coneflowers would be blooming soon.

The bookseller was right that in his way, Sheriff Branch was kind and intelligent. I kept telling myself that he would never harm my family, that he would be satisfied with searching for me. Perhaps it would protect them, I thought, that they truly did not know where I was. No one did—no one who had known me in Fairchild knew that I was an outlaw now, that I was kneeling before a makeshift bomb with a lit match, hoping to rob a bank and buy a town. It was a lonely but exhilarating feeling.

The bomb was a disappointment. The flame ran obediently up the bootlace and caught the feed bag, which crackled merrily on the damp earth, but produced nothing you could call an explosion. We waited a minute, two minutes, five.

“Does the manual say how long it takes?” Agnes asked.

“No,” I said, “but it’s not much good if it’s this slow. Somebody’s going to notice if there’s a bunch of burning shit in the bank vault.”

The next time I spread the manure out first to dry all day in the sun. When it was baked hard and had attracted a black crust of flies, I scooped it into a new feed bag and tried again. This time Lo joined News and Agnes to watch the experiment. This time, again, the experiment failed.

“If we can’t get the bombs to work,” Lo said, trying to sound casual, “we’ll have to abandon the plan.”

“They’ll work,” I said, though I did not know how.

I tried more saltpeter and less saltpeter, more manure and less. I tried longer fuses and shorter fuses, leaving the bag open to the air and tying it tight. Once I got desperate and lit the mouth of the bag without even tying a fuse on. Luckily that attempt failed like all the others.

I stopped telling people when I was testing bombs, but they found out anyway, and by the time of my fuseless test everyone but Cassie and the Kid was coming out to watch. The rivalry between the ones who wanted the tests to succeed and the ones who wanted them to fail was obvious, lighthearted on its surface but serious at its core. After I stamped out the bomb and the crowd dispersed, Elzy approached me.

“How much longer are you going to do this?” she asked.

“Until it works,” I said, though I had no ideas left.

“It doesn’t look like you’re getting any closer,” she said. “Why not tell the Kid it can’t be done?”

“Because it can,” I said.

Elzy sighed and wiped sweat from her brow with her good hand. It was nearly May and warm in the sun, though the shade still held the memory of winter.

“I’m sure you have your reasons for wanting to try the Kid’s plan,” she said. “I’m sure you think they’re good ones. But you and I both know how dangerous it is. Maybe this is a chance for you to reconsider your vote. If you tell the Kid the explosives don’t work, the Kid will have to call everything off.”

“Think about it,” she said, this time running her bad hand through her hair, a gesture whose clumsiness seemed intentional. “You could still save all of our lives.”

For a moment I said nothing. Since the vote I had begun to feel like part of the gang in ways I had not expected. In the mornings, I had started helping Texas feed and water the horses, and though we spoke little I felt a calm with her that I hadn’t felt since I walked to school with Susie, before we picked up Ulla and the day filled up with her jokes and gossip. In the evenings, Lo was continuing my fighting lessons, and in return I was teaching her about medicines and poisons, what we had to buy from traders and what we could gather around the bunkhouse, which herbs we could dry and suspend in tea or oil to cure coughs and fevers and clean infected skin.

I saw how the valley, now blooming into beauty after the long winter, could feel like home. What I had planned instead was so amorphous and uncertain. Mrs. Alice Schaeffer might want nothing to do with me. She might have closed her surgery. She might have died.

But if I stayed in the valley, I would learn no more about myself or people like me than I had known when I left the convent. I would die without knowing what made me the way I was.

“The Kid won’t give up that easily,” I told Elzy. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll find something that does.”

That night, while the rest of the gang bickered and played dominoes and drifted off to bed, the Kid sat brooding over maps and papers, eyes unfocused and bloodshot. I stayed up as the others went to sleep, and once Cassie began to breathe rhythmically in her cot, the Kid motioned me outside.