Outlawed(55)

My binder gone, the shape of my breasts was visible through my clothes. And I had stopped trying to walk and gesture like a man; no point in keeping up the deception now. I looked like what I was: a woman in an ugly dress, sitting in a jail awaiting her fate.

“Where’s your Easter costume?” she asked, looking at Lark in his purple frock, wondering no doubt why I wasn’t in dungarees.

I was wary of telling her anything about myself. Even here, it seemed like a mistake to reveal too much.

“What are you in here for?” I asked instead.

“Why,” she said, “can’t you tell? I’m a witch!”

When the light crossed her again she was sitting up and smiling at me. One of her front teeth was missing, giving her an impish appearance.

“Are you barren?” I asked.

“I have five sons, each one more good-for-nothing than the last,” she said. “But my sisters-in-law, neither of them could have babies after I married their brother. So they pointed the finger and here I sit, twenty years next month.”

I felt a kinship with her, so strong in that dark place that I had to fight the urge to reach out and take her hand.

“My mama is a midwife,” I said. “She says there’s not the slightest truth to what people say about witches making women barren. It’s just a silly story told by silly people.”

“And what, pray tell, does cause barrenness, Miss Daughter-of-a-Midwife?” the woman asked me.

“Nobody really knows,” I said. “But one day, I aim to find out.”

“Well, then you can tell the sheriff and I’m sure he’ll have me released,” the woman said, not unkindly. “Until then, I’m going to get some rest. You should do the same. The judge is off for Easter week, so you have another day in here, maybe two, before you find out what’s to become of you. You should make the most of it.”

The woman curled up on her bench and shut her eyes. The man had not spoken a word; he seemed to be sleeping too. I waited until the woman’s breathing went slow and even with sleep, and then I whispered to Lark.

“How did you know?” I asked.

His voice came closer than I’d thought in the flat dark.

“I didn’t know,” he said, “but I suspected. You’re doing a good job—an ordinary person would never guess. But there’s a lightness in the way you move, especially when you dance. Men are heavier in their bones than women, even when they’re slim, and you can see it if you know how to look.”

“And you know how to look?” I asked.

“I do.”

The guard passed in front of the window and the lamplight gave Lark’s face to me like a present. I searched it for clues—that pretty mouth, yes, but also a day’s growth of beard on his cheeks and chin, a man’s prominent brow. I decided there was no reason anymore not to ask.

“Are you a woman?”

The light left his face before I could see his reaction.

“No,” he said.

“I saw you at the outhouse on the fairgrounds,” I said. “You were the only man there.”

“And?” he asked.

“And there must be something you don’t want people to see.”

For a moment he was quiet in the darkness and I thought maybe I’d offended him. Then the lamp passed by the window and I saw his face was amused, resigned.

“Fair enough,” he said, “we can trade secrets. When we met I told you I left Mobridge because I was in love with a married woman, right? Well it wasn’t a woman, it was a man. And I didn’t leave of my own accord.”

That explained why Lark had been so interested in me in Fiddleback. And presumably he wouldn’t be interested in me now—even in the dark of the jail I found I cared about this. I tasted disappointment like metal in my mouth.

Back home I had known two boys who were rumored to like other boys. Both were married to women by the time I left, with children on the way. Neither had ever had to leave town.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The man I loved, he stopped sleeping with his wife. They only had one child. His wife’s family found out about us and set the sheriff’s posse on me. In Mobridge, the usual penalty for interfering in the conception of children was gelding.”

“Gelding?” I asked. I thought I understood what he was saying, but I hoped I didn’t.

“Sometimes they used a red-hot poker to do the job. I was lucky—on me they used ordinary castrating shears. Oh, and then they threw me in jail. That’s where I got the name Lark.”

The light passed across him, but I looked away; I could not match what I was learning with what I felt for him, the thrum of desire in my belly that persisted even now.

“Why ‘Lark’?” I asked.

“Because eunuchs are supposed to be beautiful singers,” he said, “with high clear voices like meadowlarks.”

“Your voice isn’t high,” I said.

“They didn’t take everything from me,” he said. “A lot, but not everything.”

I wanted to know exactly what they’d taken, and what was left; if he could still feel pleasure when he went to bed with someone; and what it felt like, to go through the world with such a wound. I didn’t know how to ask any of those questions.