Outlawed(62)

Lark paused. I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging look.

“Probably you shouldn’t,” Lark said finally. “But if you don’t, wouldn’t you rather have me here where you can keep an eye on me?”

“The man has a point, Cassie,” the Kid said. “Now that he knows where we are, we either keep him or we kill him. And I’m not inclined to shoot someone who helped our doctor. Not yet, anyway.”

I was lucky—the bullet had missed my shinbone, passing through the flesh and out the other side. Under my direction, Texas disinfected the wound with a rag dipped in a basin full of whiskey and hot water, then stitched and dressed it while I lay on my cot, biting down on a leather bridle to distract myself from the pain.

“Your turn,” said Texas to Lark when it was done. “Let’s get these off you.”

She moved to unbutton Lark’s bloodstained pants, but Lark took hold of his belt and shook his head.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“You’re not all right,” said Texas. “You’re bleeding onto the quilt.”

“I think the bleeding’s stopped.”

Texas turned to me. “Tell your friend here he needs his wound dressed,” she said. “Otherwise he’ll get gangrene, and I’m not spending my days looking after a one-legged man.”

“I’ll do it, Texas,” I said. “Now that mine’s closed I feel better already.”

“You look terrible,” Texas said. “Your face is the color of mashed potatoes.” She turned to Lark. “I wouldn’t want her working on me in this state,” she said.

“I’ll take my chances,” said Lark.

Texas shrugged. “Suit yourself. If she passes out while she’s stitching you, I’m not coming to help.”

“Why not tell them about what happened to you?” I asked Lark when Texas was gone. “It might make them trust you more.”

“It’s not their business,” Lark said.

“You told me,” I said. “Is it my business?”

Lark smiled. “Of course it is. You’re my wife.”

I dropped my eyes.

“Very funny,” I said.

I was not sure where I stood with him. I believed he had meant at least some of what he said in the jail—he had not kissed me like someone merely playing a role. But I knew, too, that he was a thief who made much of his living fooling people. I thought of how Agnes Rose must have spoken to the jailhouse guard, and looked at him up from under her eyelashes—she must have made him believe that she found him interesting and handsome and that she wanted him. If Agnes Rose could do it then surely Lark could do it too.

“Texas is right,” I said. “You need your wound cleaned. Is it okay if I take off your pants?”

“I’ll do it,” Lark said.

The wound was not deep but it had bled copiously, coating his thigh and soaking the right half of his underwear.

“I’m sorry,” I said, pointing awkwardly. “You should probably take those off too.”

He nodded, but instead began unbuttoning his shirt. His chest was long and lean, his skin the color of honey. A trail of black hair led from his navel under the waistband of his undershorts. He locked eyes with me, then removed them.

What I saw was ugly, there is no denying it. Lark’s scrotum was intact, but above it was a tiny stump, puckered like a belly button. I could tell the wound had become badly infected after it was dealt, because it was surrounded by a starburst of scar tissue as big as a man’s hand, still pinkish and shining as though it was fresh. What I saw was not just disfigurement; it was the record of terrible pain. I had the instinct to look away.

But I had been fighting that instinct all my life. I had not looked away when my mama had taken me to my first birth, when a woman groaned from deep down in her belly and a screaming, blood-covered head spurted out between her thighs. I had not looked away when another woman’s flesh ripped from birth canal to anus so her baby could be born. I had not looked away when my neighbors brought us their broken bodies: their weeping sores, their crusted rashes, their breasts rock-hard and bright red with mastitis, their vaginas leaking clumpy yeast. I had not looked away when Mama washed and dressed and tended their most inflamed, infected parts, and I had not looked away when I was older and it became my job to tend them. I had not looked away when it came time to learn where God or Nature had strayed from the normal path to make my body; I was looking still. I dipped a rag in the basin of water. I let my eyes travel the length of his whole body, taking it all in.

“You’re very beautiful,” I told him.

In his face I saw relief.

“So are you,” he said.

That day was the first time I had sex without the thought of conceiving a child. What we did, my first husband and I had never done—young as he was, I don’t think he knew you could put your tongue between a woman’s legs—and what I felt, I had never felt with my first husband. It was not only the feeling in my body that was different—all that wanting stirred up to fury and then released, my stomach dropping as though I was falling from a great height. It was also the feeling of doing something solely for its own sake, each moment not the beginning of the future, but its own, solitary now. Afterward I felt a stillness in my body I had never felt before, as though for a moment I was complete in myself, I was all that was needed.