Outlawed(54)

News brought the wagon to a stop and without speaking, I got out to unlatch the gate. It was crude—lengths of barbed wire stretched between two heavy wooden posts, one of which fit through a metal ring at the bottom to form the latch. The wire was pulled so tight that I had trouble sliding the post out of the ring. Lark jumped down from the back of the wagon to help me, and we had just pulled the post free, allowing the wagon to pass through, when three men on fast horses came around the bend with guns drawn.

Lark didn’t hesitate.

“Go!” he shouted to News.

News gave him a single nod, then cracked the reins and set the horses galloping, leaving us behind in a cloud of gravel and garbage and dust.

The sheriff’s deputy searched me. He was a big man with meaty, careless hands, and at first I thought he might miss what I was hiding. He felt my ankles, knees, hips, waist, and found nothing amiss there, but then his hands slid under my arms and found the thick fabric I had used to bind my breasts.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“I was wounded in a barfight,” I said. “I just have a bandage there, that’s all.”

“Show me,” the deputy said.

I unbuttoned the first two buttons of my ridiculous flowered dress to reveal the very top of the binder.

“I have to wear it for a few more weeks,” I said, “until the wound heals.”

We caught the attention of the sheriff then, a skinny man with pockmarked skin and a dark red cowboy hat who had been searching Lark.

“Show us the whole thing,” he said.

My heart was pounding in my ears as I unbuttoned the dress and laid the binder bare.

“That’s not like any bandage I’ve ever seen,” the deputy said.

“It’s no bandage,” the sheriff said, recognition and disgust mingling on his face. “Take it off.”

The evening air was cold on my naked skin. The deputy looked confused.

“What’s a woman doing thieving on the Powder River Road?” he asked the sheriff. “Is this some kind of Easter foolery?”

“She’s no woman,” the sheriff said. “I’ve seen this before, back in Colorado country. I knew a young man down there, very popular with the ladies. But when he seduced the mayor’s wife we arrested him for adultery—and we found one of these ‘bandages’ under his clothes. He, or she, or it, whatever you like, had a woman’s breasts, a woman’s body. Turned out her real name was Caroline and she’d escaped from jail in Salida, where she’d been held on suspicion of witchcraft. She’d been posing as a man ever since, leading unsuspecting women into wickedness.”

“What did you do with her?” the deputy asked, staring openly now at my breasts.

“We put her in the stocks for three days and three nights,” the sheriff said. “After that, we would have released her, but she was already dead.”

“We don’t have stocks here,” the deputy said, still staring.

“The judge will think of something,” the sheriff said. “You know what surprised me? When people came to cast their stones and shoes and whatnot at Caroline, the women were twice as savage as the men. If it weren’t for the women, she might have survived.”

I had not thought of my mother-in-law in months, but I thought of her as I buttoned the dress over my naked chest. The way she looked at me on the kitchen the day she sent me away, the loathing in her eyes, and the satisfaction at being able to punish me—I saw both now in the faces of the sheriff and his deputy.

I had not hated my mother-in-law for kicking me out, my husband for failing to stop her, or Sheriff Branch for treating me like a contagion when he had known me all my life. I had been angry and afraid, but not hateful. Now my hatred reached back from the two men before me all the way to Fairchild, where I imagined my husband’s family sitting down to dinner with their new daughter-in-law. I imagined my hate as a flame racing along the dirt road until it licked at their door.

I did not look at the sheriff or his deputy again as they cuffed our wrists and chained us to the deputy’s horse. My fate was sealed; I did not care what they thought of me or what they said. Instead I watched Lark. He met my eyes with a look that was warm and steady and calm, as though nothing he had seen that day disturbed or even surprised him. The look confused me, but it also sustained me, keeping the worst of my fears from overwhelming me as the men marched us down the road and into town.

The jail was a long, low building arranged around a central corridor down which a twitch-eyed guard paced, carrying a kerosene lantern and stopping periodically to sip something from a copper mug. The first room on the left, the one to which we were brought, held two other prisoners, a man and a woman, lying on long wooden benches above a dirt floor. It was separated from the corridor by a padlocked door with a window—too small for a man to crawl through, but large enough for the guard to keep an eye on the prisoners, and for us to watch him. Night had fallen and the only light in the room came from his lamp, passing across our faces as he paced by, then leaving us in darkness.

“What did you do?” the woman asked when the sheriff and his deputy had left.

Her voice in the darkness sounded young, but when the lamplight tracked across her face I saw her skin was weathered, like a year-old apple gone puckered and wrinkly in the storeroom.

“We stole a wagon,” Lark said, but the woman was looking at me.