Outlawed(56)

“How did you get out of jail?” I asked instead.

He laughed in the dark.

“Don’t get excited,” he said. “I don’t have any special knack for escape. My parents got together the money to pay the sheriff to release me, on the condition that I leave town and never come back. Don’t suppose you have any rich relatives around here.”

“No one except News and the others,” I said. “And I’m not sure they’ll come back for me. I wasn’t universally popular before today, and now—”

“Who are the others?” Lark asked. “Nate—News?—gave us the impression he worked solo. Even you were a surprise.”

The guard’s lamp washed over the room, catching the silent man for a moment clearly in its light. I saw now that his eyes were open but pointed blankly at empty space, nothing animating behind them. His mouth hung slack, moving slightly as he breathed. One of his hands trailed on the dirt floor; its nails curled all the way over the fingertips in filthy grayish claws. I understood clearly then that I could die in this jail, that it might in fact be better if I was hanged.

“There are eight of us,” I told Lark. There seemed no sense in keeping secrets now. “All of us are barren. For now we hide out in the mountains, up at Hole in the Wall. But we’re trying to make Fiddleback into a place where people like us can live in safety. The wagon was part of that—is part of that.”

I realized for the first time that the Kid’s plan had become my plan. I wanted it to succeed, not just because it would get me to Pagosa Springs but because I wanted the town the Kid imagined to exist in Powder country. I imagined treating a barren woman at the surgery in Pagosa Springs and telling her I knew of a place she could go and live without fear.

For a moment we sat in silence and darkness. Then Lark asked, “Is that why you left Dakota? Because you’re barren?”

The light came across his face and I saw him watching me so closely I dropped my eyes in embarrassment.

“I was married,” I said. “After a year I didn’t get pregnant, so my husband’s family threw me out. Now the sheriff in Fairchild wants me hanged for witchcraft. I can never go back there.”

“Do you miss it?” Lark asked. “I can’t say I miss Mobridge.”

“I miss my family,” I said. “Don’t you miss yours?”

He paused in the soft dark.

“My mama used to take me with her to forage for morels and fiddleheads to sell at market,” he said finally. “I had six brothers and sisters and I wasn’t my mama’s favorite—that was my sister Tilly. But my mama said I had the best eye for growing things. Every time I spotted a mushroom on the forest floor, her face would light up. She’d say, ‘See, James? You have a gift.’ ”

“James,” I said.

“That’s right. It was my daddy’s daddy’s name. Nobody’s called me that for a long time, though. I’ve gotten to like Lark. I’m not ashamed of what I did, or what happened to me. I used to be, but not anymore.”

I thought about the winter dance the year before I got married, me and Ulla and Susie and the other girls from school running outside in our dresses in the freezing air just for the shock of it, then running back inside gasping and falling all over one another, the boys looking at us in what I knew was jealousy, wishing we loved them as much as we loved each other. I thought about Bee running in from the garden in springtime to tell me that the mourning dove eggs had hatched and the tiny pink babies were reaching up to their mother with open mouths. I thought of the last birth I attended with my mother, a long labor, the baby faceup inside the birth canal, and how I was able to get the mother in position to push the baby out without my mama’s help, and how she cried afterward, her baby on her naked chest, and kept saying “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“I’ll never see my mama or my sisters again,” I said. “My littlest sister, Bee—I was like a second mama to her. Now she’ll think I abandoned her. I don’t even know if she’s safe. How can I not hate what I am, if this is what it’s brought me?”

I had never spoken such a thing aloud, but I felt it now as keenly as I’d felt it for the sheriff and his deputy on the Powder River Road. I hated my uselessness, the way my body had taken my family and my calling from me. I had thought the gang might give me a purpose, but here I was in a jail cell while the others, no doubt, readied themselves for the Fiddleback job without me. I had trained from childhood to heal sick people and bring babies and their mothers safely through birth, and now I would die, more likely than not, in a jail far from my home, and in more than a year I’d delivered no babies and healed just two people, one of them suffering from a wound I’d caused.

The light returned, and this time I looked Lark full in the face. It made me angry, even if we were both about to die, that he had come this far with no contempt for himself and no regret. It made me jealous.

“After I got out of Mobridge,” he said as the dark fell on us again, “I wanted to kill myself. I got a job in a roadhouse and I cut my wrists with a bread knife.”

I heard a rustle of fabric.

“Here,” he said, “feel.”

The scar was wide and slippery on the muscle of his forearm. Underneath it I could feel his pulse.

“Some part of me must not have been serious, because I didn’t cut deep enough. The owner found me ruining his kitchen floor with my blood. He was kind, but I was a liability. When I was healed he sent me away. After that I didn’t try again, but that didn’t mean the desire wasn’t there. For five years I thought about it every day.”