Outlawed(70)

Against the wall, one of the women was praying: “Baby Jesus, deliver us from danger. Care for us as your holy Mother cared for you.” The fastidious clerk began to cry as he loaded cardboard tubes of gold and silver pieces into a cloth bag. The unkempt clerk wasn’t moving.

“I can’t give you this money,” he said. “It isn’t my money to give.”

I had no idea what to say to him. His gray eyes were full of defiance, and also full of fear.

“Empty the till,” I said, “or I’ll shoot you.”

“You see those people over there against the wall?” the clerk asked. “This is their savings. They need it to feed their families. If you take it, what will become of them?”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “we’ll take care of them. But first we need the money.”

“Just give it to her!” the other clerk shouted. He passed the heavy bag through the window into Elzy’s free hand.

“I’m sorry,” said the unkempt clerk. “You’ll have to shoot me.”

I thought of the wagon driver, the way he had crumpled in the dirt, the way his father had keened over his body. I knew I would never shoot this man.

“You don’t want that,” I said. “What about your family? They need you alive.”

I could feel the fear cracking the edges of my voice.

“I don’t have any family,” the man said. “It’s just me. If you’re going to shoot me, do it now.”

He was looking me square in the eye.

“Andrew,” sobbed the fastidious clerk, “please just give them the money.”

“Baby Jesus, deliver us into your arms,” the woman prayed, “as you were delivered into the arms of your holy Mother.”

Cassie appeared in the entrance to the corridor. I took my eyes off the clerk and turned to her. Her face was ashen. Her shirt was covered in blood. The clerk tried to reach for something below the window. Elzy shot him in the chest.

Some people believe that when a person dies, the body is nothing but a shell the soul leaves behind. I have never believed this. The first time I touched a dead body, I was thirteen years old. Irma Love was eighty—had been eighty—the night her heart stopped working and her lungs filled with fluid and she died. The next day, Mama brought me with her to wash and lay out the body.

Mrs. Love had worked in the dry-goods store and taught piano lessons to children. She played very beautifully and was very mean and I and all the other children in Fairchild were afraid of her, but she had a sardonic sense of humor, too, and as I got older I liked to go to the dry-goods store to hear her talk about other adults she thought were stupid or self-satisfied. All of that was still there when Mrs. Love died—the meanness stamped on the corners of her mouth, the laughter in the wrinkles round her eyes, those long fingers still limber after a lifetime of stretching across the keys. Mama taught me to treat a body with respect, like a person, and Mrs. Love was a person to me, her body no less her own just because she was dead.

And so when I saw Lark lying in the corridor in front of the blasted vault, his chest blown open with bullet holes, and when Cassie shouted in a ragged voice to leave him behind, that the sheriff’s posse would surely catch us if we delayed any longer, I ignored her, and I bent low and slipped my arms under his limp arms and half-carried, half-dragged him to the wagon, where Texas was waiting to bear us all away.

In the dark back of the wagon, Cassie put her head in her hands.

“I should have been ready for the clerk to be there,” she said. “The Kid would’ve been ready.”

The third clerk, a square-bodied, apple-cheeked young man who looked full of life even in death, was likely now being prepared for burial in the Fiddleback churchyard, Cassie’s bullet already corroding at his heart. We’d never know what unlucky impulse had made him decide to stay at his post that day instead of drinking with his friends at Veronica’s, where he would have been rewarded for his shirking with his life. We knew only that after Lark and Cassie had placed the bombs all around the door to the vault, just as they were lighting the fuses, he had entered the corridor from the bank’s back office; that, perhaps having heard a commotion, he was already carrying his revolver in his hand; that on seeing him, Lark reached for his own revolver; and that the clerk shot him three times before Cassie was able to draw her weapon and shoot the clerk. As we carried the gold out of the vault—more bags than we could count, each as heavy as a three-year-old child—we had to step over his body.

“It’s terrible what happened,” Elzy said, “but Cassie, we did it. We got the gold. I never thought we’d do it, you know that. And at least all of us made it out alive.”

Cassie raised her head.

“He risked his life for us,” she said, “and I let him die.”

His head in my lap, Lark looked now as he had in life—slightly sorrowful, slightly amused, very beautiful. But when I’d gotten him safely into the wagon, I’d immediately shut his eyes with my fingers—they were wide and staring, and full of fear.

Cassie looked me full in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I extended my hand, she took it, and we held each other there.

We had no coffin, but Agnes Rose made a shroud of fine white muslin from Lo’s steamer trunk. She offered to help me prepare Lark’s body, but I shook my head. I wanted to protect his privacy, even now, and I wanted to be alone with him one more time.