Outlawed(59)

“ ‘I used to have a dress like that,’ I said, pointing to the gingham frock he was stitching. And when he looked up from his work I saw he was not entirely surprised.

“ ‘You know me as Adam,’ I said, ‘but I was born Ada Magnusson, the eldest of four daughters. I’m an outlaw and a fugitive, and when I left my home I thought I’d left my woman’s heart behind.’

“ ‘But now,’ I said, ‘I find it beats inside me still.’ ”

I looked at Lark, and waited for the guard’s lamp to illuminate us so he could see me looking. He picked up where I had left off.

“I told her that I’d taken her at first for a resolute young man, his speech direct and his aim true, with a fine hand for horses and a proud set to his jaw. And I said that at some moment, I’d become aware that walking in her men’s boots was a young woman, hiding a part of herself and yet showing quite clearly the strength and anger and consuming curiosity that animated her being. And at some other moment, I told her, I’d fallen in love. I couldn’t say when each occurred, I told her, but now that neither of us was hiding from the other, I said my heart was hers if she would have it, and that if she was agreeable we ought to marry as soon as our thievery was completed and the wagon safely sold.”

“And tell me,” Father Daniel asked, “how had you determined to set up your household, had your theft come off as you had planned?”

“We planned to travel to Colorado country,” I answered, “so I could apprentice with a master midwife there. Once I had learned all I could, my husband and I would travel all throughout the mountain and prairie towns. I would deliver babies and treat women with female ailments, and he would offer his services as a veterinarian, a trade for which he trained in his youth. We would leave the outlaw life and live quietly, and yet remain adventurers still, waking every week in a new bed, a new vista outside our windows.”

The door opened and the guard peered in, his lamp making a cone of light with his fist at the apex.

“Get a move on,” he said. “How long can it take to marry two thieves?”

“By all rights it should take longer to marry thieves than honest men and women,” Father Daniel replied, “because the presiding priest must take more time to ensure they are responsible and upstanding enough to marry. But don’t worry. I have just one question left before I determine whether I will perform the ceremony.”

The guard rolled his eyes and shut the door.

“Sometimes I think a priest is only just above a thief himself in terms of the respect of his fellow man,” Father Daniel said. “My last question, in any case, is this: In your adventuring life, how had you planned to bring up children?”

Before this question, my pulse had been quick with excitement. I was not na?ve enough to think that Lark really felt all the things he said about me—I knew we were engaged in a game of make-believe. But I liked the game, despite the circumstances under which I had to play it, and I was reasonably sure Lark did too. In the blackness of the jail it was easy to imagine our flirtation over sewing implements, Lark’s proposal, our life together delivering babies and tending to animals—easy to imagine all this in our future, rather than in an invented past. And yet when Father Daniel mentioned children I remembered that none of what we had spun was possible for us, and that I would probably never see the outside of a jail again, let alone the clear sky of mountain country out my window.

“We assumed we’d manage somehow,” I said, unable to think of anything better.

“What my love means to say,” Lark cut in, “is that we’d train our children in our trades, just as we had been trained by our elders. I would teach them to care for lame horses and sick dogs. And my wife, she would instruct them in the ways of midwifery, so that her knowledge would travel farther than she ever could, and live on long after her death.”

“A quarter of an hour in a jail cell is hardly enough time or space to learn a person’s real motives,” the priest said. “The truth is, you may well be deceiving me as to your intentions toward one another. But I prefer to believe the best of people when I can, and I choose to believe the best of you: that if you were free now, you would indeed marry and lead a godly life together, not travel on separate paths to further thievery. I will perform the ceremony.”

At my first wedding, I wore an eyelet lace gown and wild roses in my hair. At my second wedding, I wore a dress filthy with road dust and the sweat of several frightened days and nights. At my first wedding, everyone I had ever loved sat in pews at our church, smiling up at me as I spoke my vows. At my second wedding, the only guests were a catatonic man and a mysterious old woman, the latter of whom had agreed to act as a witness. At my first wedding, I believed my life was about to begin. At my second wedding, I was reasonably sure it had already ended.

And yet after my second husband kissed me for the first time, when our faces were still close together in the dark, the smell of his sweat and breath firing every nerve in me, I began to laugh—not because our wedding was funny, although the solemnity with which the priest read the vows and we said our “I do’s” and the woman scrawled her mark on a marriage license the priest produced from his satchel were all funny in their way, but because even in that place, facing lifelong imprisonment and possible death, I felt that the two of us had gotten away with something.