Outlawed(60)

As soon as the priest left, the guard returned.

“Ready for your wedding night?” he asked, not entirely unkindly.

In the lamplight, Lark and I locked eyes, getting ready for what we were about to do. The guard cuffed us both and chained us together, then motioned with his gun for us to walk ahead of him down the corridor. Lark acted quickly. As he passed in front of the guard he wheeled around and, with both cuffed wrists, knocked the lamp out of the guard’s hand.

For a moment all was shattered glass and shouting. The oil blazed on the cell floor; the woman jumped onto a bench to avoid it. Lark ran; I ran with him, dragged by the chain between us. He looked back at me and on his face I saw what I felt—that improbable, unlooked-for exhilaration. Then I heard the shots.

A strange thing about pain is how slowly it travels. Here are all the things that happened after the guard’s bullet hit me and before I crumpled to the ground: Lark and I ran two more paces down the corridor, toward the door to the outside world, which stood ajar slightly, as though the guard was so sure of his power that he needed no backup measures, not even the precaution of an additional lock; my heart lifted like a bird to see the open air in such close reach; in the sunlight streaming in through the door, Lark saw the blood streaming down my leg; I ran three paces, outstripping Lark; I had a memory, clearer and more vivid than the jail itself, of the day I broke my arm falling out of a tree just a few months after Mama got better and began caring for us again, how she scooped me up and held me to her chest, and how she fed me broth and barley candy and made much of me for weeks while I healed, and never reproached me even though I was clearly too big for the tree branch I’d been standing on, and old enough to know better; I wondered what had brought that memory to mind; I felt a wave of nausea; I called Lark’s name.

By the time the pain overtook me, a terrible cold grinding, a feeling of great wrongness deep in the core of me, the guard was already dragging me and Lark down the corridor and back into the room where we’d been married.

When the haze of pain cleared enough for me to reason and perceive again, I heard Lark’s voice in my ear.

“It’s all right,” Lark was saying. “Try to breathe. Breathe in and out as slowly as you can.”

I breathed, and the pain did not lessen, but the breathing made some space inside my mind which I found was enough to allow for speech.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“Only a little,” Lark said. “I’m fine, but you’re not. I need you to tell me how to help you.”

I touched my right pantleg and felt the blood soaking through the fabric. For a moment my mind went white with panic.

“Ada,” Lark said. “You need to focus. You’re the doctor. Tell me what to do.”

With great effort I imagined myself out of my own body, tending to that body at a remove. A badly bleeding leg wound in a place with no water, no iodine, no needles and no thread—all a doctor could do in such a situation was bind the leg tightly and hope for the best.

“Tear me off a piece of your shirt,” I said.

I heard the fabric rip.

“Now wrap it around my leg as tight as you can.”

I saw white again.

“You’re screaming.”

“Good. That means it’s tight enough. Now keep pressure on it.”

A whiteness, and then a return to the intense, specific pain, broadened and deepened slightly by the weight of Lark’s hands.

“Now what?” he asked.

“That’s it,” I said.

“You’re still bleeding, I can feel it.”

“There’s nothing else to do,” I said. “With any luck, the blood will start to clot before I lose too much.”

“Luck?” Lark asked. “That’s all we have to go on?”

I felt the warmth of his hands pressing into me, as though they could hold my body together.

“Agnes Rose says I’m lucky,” I said.

“Who?” he asked, but I was drifting, floating somewhere beyond pain and hope, where future, present, and past melted together and I was forever opening my eyes on a Colorado morning, breathing Lark’s breath into my mouth, gazing down at baby Bee as she smiled her first smile.





CHAPTER 9




My mama’s house in Fairchild stood on a dirt road, on either side of which someone had planted flowering dogwood trees. Whenever I came back anxious or ill at ease—after a hard birth, or a difficult day at school, or a dance where no boys noticed me—the sight and smell of the dogwoods calmed me. As soon as I turned onto that road, I felt like I was home.

I had the same feeling on the Sunday after Easter, when Amity reached the top of the pass above Hole in the Wall and I saw the entire valley spread out below. The feeling was so strong and so wholly unexpected that I nearly wept.

“Thank you,” I said to News, who rode behind me and held Amity’s reins.

“Stop thanking me,” News said. “What you did was stupid, and you deserved to suffer for it. But I wasn’t going to let you hang, and neither was the Kid.”

“Anyway,” said Agnes Rose, “that guard was an easy mark. I never get tired of sweet-talking stupid men.”

By now, I reasoned, the day guard had probably arrived to find the night guard sharing the jail cell with the catatonic man, and the rest of us long gone. The woman had bolted out the cell door with a speed that made me wonder again if she was much younger than she looked.