Outlawed(72)

“That’s horrible,” I said.

The Kid held up a hand a third time.

“The doctor said that the best treatment for me would be pregnancy. He said I should continue to bear children as many times as I was able, but they should be taken from me, until such time as I could show myself cured.”

This time I did not speak, but tried to look the Kid in the eye. The Kid looked away.

“I made it three months,” the Kid said. “Every day I curse myself that I couldn’t make it one week longer, to see my daughter a final time. But it was pure torture, lying with my husband, knowing I’d lose whatever child I had. One night in the spring I climbed out our window and hitched a ride to Holy Child, where I’d heard they took in barren women. But the memory of my daughter wouldn’t let me rest.

“Years I wandered, cowboying, rustling. I lived as a man and as a woman; no life suited me. Then I met Cassie. As long as I could protect her, I told myself, I would be worth something.”

The Kid turned to face the wall again.

“Now I can’t even do that.”





CHAPTER 11




On the morning we’d chosen for the purchase of the bank and the beginning of our careers as landlords, I lay awake in my bunk. The stars were still out, and it was hours before we’d start for Fiddleback, but I couldn’t sleep. Cassie had cleared away the blankets that had been Lark’s bed, but a clean space remained on the bunkhouse floor where he had slept, the red dust not yet settled over it. His death made me miss my family freshly, the new injury opening up the old wound.

It was Bee’s birthday in August—she would be turning ten. I still remembered the smell of her scalp as a baby, the way her tiny fingers wrapped around a hank of my hair. The way her head would grow heavier and heavier against my chest as she drifted into sleep.

As our plan drew closer to fruition I found myself increasingly restless. I visited the Kid every day. Some days were better and some days were worse, but every day I left feeling exhausted, as though the strength had been drained from me.

When Mama attended a birth she often developed a closeness with the mother. When she was sick, many of these women dropped by to help, bringing food or baby clothes. After she got better, she explained it to me. Even if before the birth she’d thought of the mother as silly or small-minded or mean, afterward they had something in common: they’d faced death together, and they’d survived. But the Kid was still facing whatever had to be faced, was not yet on the other side. And so I crawled out of my bed and went to sit by the firepit in the dark.

Night had reached its low point, that time just before dawn when the memory of sunshine is dimmest. The rocks around the firepit were cold, the birds and insects silent. I sat staring at the ashes and found I had an urge to pray. But I had forgotten all the prayers I’d learned at the convent, as though after I left, my mind had expelled them in a kind of protest. Instead I sang to myself, softly, under my breath, my arms wrapped around my knees, rocking myself the way a mother rocks a weeping child.

In a cavern, in a canyon,



Excavating for a mine—



A small animal or bird rustled in the alders to the south of the firepit, where the road was. A jackrabbit, perhaps, that had evaded Elzy’s snares.

Dwelt a rich old copper miner,



And his daughter Clementine—



The rustling grew louder. I got to my feet. The wolves who howled from the mountains at night sometimes came down into the valley to hunt, but Texas had assured me they were cautious and would never approach humans. Bears, on the other hand, were a danger—especially in spring or summer. A mother bear might come down to the flats with her cub, and there was no predicting what she might do if you got between them. The best thing, Texas had said, was to make a lot of noise, to let her know where you were and give her plenty of time to avoid you.

“She went shopping at the market,” I sang, walking back toward the bunkhouse,

Every morning just at nine,



Met a man with Flu and fever—



The gunshot was so close that I felt the wind of it on my cheek. I wheeled around to see, standing among our alder trees, the sheriff of Fiddleback, the barrel of his pistol picking up the first rays of the rising sun.

My mind blanked out and my body took over. My arms pushed open the bunkhouse door, my throat and lungs bellowed out a cry to rouse my friends.

Cassie opened her eyes first. I saw a flash of terror in her face. This was the thing she’d been most afraid of, all her years in the valley—our hideout breached, strange men invading our home. I saw fear turn for a moment to anguish and grief, as though someone she loved had died. Then she swallowed it down. Her eyes hardened. When she spoke, her voice was a command:

“We have to get to the Wall.”

Panicked and shooting we ran to the barn. The sheriff was not alone—shots came at us from the pasture, from the grove of trees where, so long ago, I had seen Cassie and Elzy pressed together in an embrace. If I had sat at the firepit a moment longer, we would have been surrounded.

Where we had been caught by surprise, the horses—their ears keen, their muscles tuned to vibrations in the earth—had been ready. Amity was out the door as fast as I could throw a saddle over her back and myself into the saddle, and then tearing along the path to the wall as though the two of us were of one mind. Gunshots rang around us as we rode, and the calls of birds who had lived their whole lives in peacetime, now frightened out of their sleep by the sounds of war. As we crested a hill I heard a cry behind me, a high, helpless noise like an infant in pain, and I turned my head to see Faith dropping to her knees, blood pouring down her flank. I felt pity for the horse, whose tail I had sometimes brushed after I brushed Amity’s, who had loved to eat cubes of barley sugar out of my palm. But what sent a spike of icy fear through my mind and heart was what I saw behind Faith, behind Temperance and Elzy, Prudence and Cassie, Charity and News.