Outlawed(51)

“We’ll sleep in our clothes tonight,” she said. “Henry’s camped with me before—he won’t say anything. If Lark does, you get cold easy. Let him rib you a little bit if he wants to. If you’re easygoing about it he’ll forget it soon enough.”

Lark and Henry looked like they had settled on a place. Henry removed mallet, pegs, and thick canvas from his horse’s saddlebags.

“If you need to piss,” News went on, “go to the outhouse by the big tent. Don’t go down by the river or into the trees—someone might see you. It’s not your period, is it?”

I shook my head.

“Good. It’s mine. If yours starts, I have some clean rags.”

Later that night I waited for one of the outhouses. The others in the long line kept looking at me with curiosity, even suspicion. Whenever I’d been among people in my men’s clothes before, I’d always been afraid of being found out. Now that I was clearly taken for someone I wasn’t, I felt a wave of something uncanny pass through me, almost but not quite dizziness. I thought of a feeling Ulla used to talk about, a shivering strangeness that would come on her without warning, the sense that she was outside her body looking in. “Somebody walking over your grave,” she used to say.

I took News’s advice and tried to seem calm and loose, holding my head high, absently kicking an eggshell with my boot. The feeling ebbed but didn’t pass, hanging on in the corner of my mind, a low but insistent buzz.

Up ahead the outhouse door swung open. I felt the attention of the waiting women turn away from me, and I followed the line of their gaze. Lark met my eyes when I looked at him, and, for a moment before he nodded curtly and walked on back to the tents, I saw in his face what I knew he saw in mine: the recognition that both of us must have something to hide.

By the time we got to the big tent around three o’clock the next afternoon, the day was already wild. A short woman wearing a man’s shirt unbuttoned to show the tops of her round breasts pulled me in to dance with her. News grinned and gave me a thumbs-up; I rolled my eyes. We’d all agreed we’d spend an hour at the dance to blend in with the crowd and so we were convincingly sweaty and boozy and flushed when it came time to drive a wagon out. News had succeeded in making me look ridiculous in my yellow dress, the greasepaint giving my lips and cheeks a cartoonish brightness.

And yet she managed to look dashing in the green frock she threw over her dungarees, her hat adorned with feathers and cloth flowers. In the crowd I saw the young woman from the costume stall, now dressed as a handsome boy in a slim dark suit, with a mustache drawn in kohl above her lips. News approached her quickly, as though merely walking past, then paused and tipped her hat again, slowly this time. As she raised the brim I saw her smile below it. Then she turned and walked out of the tent. I saw the woman in the dark suit wait a moment, then follow.

I had never danced a man’s part before but it didn’t seem to matter—the tent was too crowded and the people too drunk to do much beyond the clumsiest reel. My dance partner pressed her breasts against my stomach and looked up at me, inviting—when I took a step away from her she shrugged, released my hands, and moved on to the man next to me, who had a bonnet and a black beard and a dotted Swiss apron straining over his belly.

A young woman wearing a gray mustache and eyeglasses without lenses carried a tray full of sloshing golden beers—I bought one and drank deep. On the stage where Dr. Lively had been preaching the day before, now two fiddlers and a short man with a tall bass guitar were playing at furious speed.

Looking around at the other dancers, I saw Lark—almost elegant in his purple-checked housedress—dancing close with a redheaded woman who threw back her head and laughed at something he said. My jealousy was no weaker for being pointless. The night before we’d slept next to each other as two men. He’d said nothing when I crawled into my bedroll fully dressed. He, meanwhile, had unbuttoned his shirt while I tried not to look. Only when he turned his long back away from me to sleep did I let myself glance, and then the image stayed with me as I shut my eyes. I was no closer to knowing what he had to conceal, but I knew it was not what I was hiding.

Another woman—this one older, an expert dancer—took my free hand in hers. With her I found my feet and began to lead, or at least collaborate. The beer entered my blood and my hips and shoulders relaxed. I knew that none of these people were my friends—I was going to steal from them, and if they knew what I was, some would have me hanged for a witch, while others would have my family expelled from town, or worse, in order to keep the poison of me from spreading to other bloodlines. And yet the woman who danced with me smelled like apples and wine. The fiddlers were laughing to each other as they played. Someone refilled my beer glass without asking for money. The woman and I parted and another took her place, and then the music changed and we joined a circle with other dancers, all of us holding hands, all of us moving in toward the center and back out again, singing and shouting.

I dropped the hand of the man next to me—chest hair, the low-necked red gown of a barmaid—to clap along with the music, and when I tried to take it again I felt a squeeze, a familiar firmness. I turned to see Lark, his cheeks flushed, his eyes shining. I squeezed back, then regretted it—a single squeeze could be a friendly greeting, but surely a second was too much, surely I’d given myself away. I dropped his hand and turned away from him.