Outlawed(76)

The sheriff removed his hat and wiped his brow with his sleeve. Bareheaded he looked older, weary, his bald scalp reddening in the sun.

“I know that, Ada,” he said.

“Then why would you do this? Why chase me all this way?”

I felt tears welling in my eyes. More shots rang out behind me. I heard bootsteps and hoofbeats. I heard News shouting but I couldn’t make out the words. There was something strange in her voice—it sounded like joy.

“It’s such a hard world,” the sheriff said. “People need some way of making sense of it. You know that as well as I do. You and your mother, when you said ‘rheumatism’ or ‘hay fever’ or ‘liver trouble,’ half the time the patient got better just from knowing what was wrong.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“When a child dies, or two people in love can’t conceive, or a man loses his wife in childbirth—these things aren’t bearable, Ada, not without help. But if you know why it happened, if you have someone or somebody to blame, then sometimes that’s enough to keep going. Do you understand now?”

“You’d let me rot in jail just so Ulla has someone to blame?”

“Not just Ulla,” the sheriff said. “Everyone in town was lighter in their hearts when I announced you’d been charged with witchcraft. They’ll be lighter still when I bring you back. We all have to make sacrifices, Ada. I’m sorry, but this is yours.”

My tears dried and contempt welled up hot in my throat. At the same time I knew he was telling the truth—he wouldn’t hurt me. He would take me back to the town jail and let me see my mama and my sisters every Sunday. I would see Bee grow up and have children of her own.

But, I realized, I would not see them born. Someone else would attend my sisters’ births and I would be kept far away from pregnant women and babies, even—especially—those who were sick and desperately needed expert care. Women would die when I could save them. And I would sit useless in a cell, my hands aging and curling in on themselves, my knowledge growing outdated, while others, elsewhere, learned what I would never know. I looked over my shoulder at the valley spread out in greens and golds. It was especially beautiful in the late afternoon light, opening up below me like a bowl, like a pair of hands. I could simply step back and drop into it. I would die without shame.

“Please, Ada,” the sheriff shouted. “Let me take you home.”

I shut my eyes. I took half a step back. I heard a gunshot so close I thought I was hit. And when I opened my eyes and looked up, I saw the Kid standing over the sheriff’s body, gazing down at me with a face both alert and at peace.





CHAPTER 12




We fought the posse all night and into the next day, but by the time I saw the Kid, the tide had already turned. The Kid knew all the hiding places in the wall, all the routes and trails, and wherever the men tried to climb, we were there first to shoot them down. The sheriff of Fiddleback was the last one alive. Cassie and the Kid found him at the base of the wall, readying a horse to flee back to his town, and Cassie put a bullet in his chest. Then the Kid staggered and collapsed into her arms.

Weak and skinny, with a mind still weary from illness, the Kid had to be wrapped in blankets back at the camp and fed hearty soups with beetroot and marrow bones. I made a tonic of lemon, dandelion, and nettles boiled to blunt their sting, and I thought of what Sheriff Branch had said. I did not know what ailed the Kid, and I could not promise it would not come again. All I knew was that visiting the Kid’s bedside had seemed to speed healing, and so I made sure someone sat with the Kid every moment, reading or talking or simply looking out the bunkhouse window as the Kid slept.

After five days the Kid was feeling strong enough to sit up and eat pemmican and biscuits, and Cassie asked the question on all of our minds:

“What are we going to do now?”

The Kid smiled.

“I was thinking of taking a walk.”

“That’s good to hear,” Cassie said, “but you know what I mean. We can’t very well buy the bank now. If any of us go to Fiddleback we’ll be shot on sight. And there’ll be a price on all of our heads—I’d be willing to bet someone’s already putting together another posse, bigger and better-armed than the last.”

“I know,” the Kid said. “I’ll think of something.”

But the days went on without a new plan, all of us in a kind of stasis. The nights began to crisp; autumn was coming. We rotated patrol duty up at the pass, waiting for the day when the townsfolk whose sheriffs we’d slaughtered got together a new posse to capture us. It would take time, we reasoned—after the Battle of Hole in the Wall, our gang would be even more feared than before—but it would not take forever.

On the seventh day after the Kid’s return, I was kneeling by the side of the road, digging up coneflower plants to dry for the winter. When I heard footsteps behind me I wheeled around, drawing the pistol I now carried with me every day. Before me was a woman, her feet bleeding through flimsy house shoes, her hands empty except for a sheet of crumpled paper.

“Please,” she said, “I’m looking for Hole in the Wall.”

“Who are you?” I asked. “Who told you to come here?”

She handed the paper to me without a word, and through the red road dust, I saw my own face staring back. Next to mine were the faces of my friends—remarkable likenesses, as we’d appeared the day we robbed the bank. Below the drawings, the poster bore the following words: