Mama had always told me never to drink anything offered to me by a stranger, but I was thirsty and exhausted and confused and I took the glass and drank. I’d had champagne only once before, on my wedding day, and this was different—sweeter, spicier, with a strong poisonous scent like paint thinner. I drained the glass and Agnes Rose cheered. She took the bottle from Cassie and refilled my glass. The others seemed, if not to accept, then at least to ignore my presence. The fiddler began to play again, slower this time, and the dancer with the bells began to sing in a rich contralto, very beautiful, with humor and sorrow in it.
O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further pretty sweeting.
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
That’s the last thing I remember clearly from that night: the dancer’s mournful, beguiling voice, the bells on that jacket glinting in the firelight.
When I woke, the sun was already high in the sky. I was lying on top of a bandanna quilt below a sloped ceiling of knotty pine; reaching up, I could brush it at its lowest point with my fingers. As I gathered my wits, I saw I was on a kind of lofted sleeping porch, so narrow that if I rolled to one side I would plunge down into the great room below. Wooden beds lined the porch, some made up and some disheveled; below in the great room were more beds and a cast-iron stove and a long couch over which was draped the Kid’s flower cape, its colors beginning to fade. Heavy-shuttered windows on the ground floor let in the late-morning light. Both porch and great room were deserted.
I was barefoot, I discovered, and the sturdy clogs I’d been wearing were nowhere to be seen. I had no choice but to walk shoeless down the creaking staircase and out to the firepit, where the company had gathered as on the night before, but altogether more subdued.
No one was wearing flowers anymore. The acrobat with the braids had on a simple dress of brown muslin picked out with white dots; Agnes Rose wore a high-necked frock of sky-blue cotton. The lovers, the fiddler, and the dancer with the beautiful voice were dressed in men’s dungarees and work shirts, and the Kid had traded tails for a wool suit in a slim cut, its jet black clouded only slightly at the hem of the pants with red dust. All sat around a fire much reduced from its stature the night before, a small, tame blaze for heat, not light.
“Sit,” said the Kid. “Cassie, give Sister Ada some breakfast.”
Cassie stood reluctantly, went into a smaller cabin next to the bunkhouse I’d just exited, and came back out with a cracked blue china bowl of porridge. It was salty and savory, flavored with bacon fat, and I ate it hungrily, until I noticed that everyone around me was staring. I looked around the circle. It was clear to me now that the dancer with the beautiful voice was a woman: she was tall as a man, with broad shoulders, but I saw the curve of breasts beneath her cotton shirt, and she had a fluid, graceful way of moving that reminded me of some of the older girls back home, the ones who had already had one or two children and seemed more at home in their bodies than I would ever be. Looking at some of the others, I was not as sure. Whispering something to Agnes Rose, the fiddler looked one moment like a roguish young man, the next like a gossiping girl. And I saw now that the person I’d taken for Cassie’s beau wore a diamond earring in each ear.
“Thank you again—” I began, hoping to give an accounting of myself, but the Kid cut me off.
“Can you shoot?”
“I can clean and load and unload a rifle,” I said.
“So no. Can you ride?”
“I used to ride my neighbor’s pony sometimes.”
“No again. What can you do, little Sister?”
I began to grow nervous.
“I can milk a cow,” I said. “I can make soft cheese and I’m learning to make hard cheese.”
“We don’t have cows here,” Cassie said.
Until now, I had not thought of the possibility that the gang might turn me away. If they did, I knew I’d never find the bookseller again. Sheriff Branch was looking for me. And even if I hadn’t had a price on my head, a woman traveling alone makes everyone suspicious. I couldn’t pass near a town without attracting the attention of the sheriff or, worse, a gang of young men out looking for trouble. Once Lucas Saint Joseph and the two younger Petersen boys had come upon a woman on the Buffalo Gap Road, and even though she told them she was running from her husband who beat her, even though she showed them the bruises on the sides of her neck, the boys raped her one by one to break her of her witchcraft. They would have gone free, too—the mayor was on their side—except she had people in Fairchild who vouched she was a mother of three back in Buffalo Gap, and pledged to take her in and find her a better husband. I was many days’ ride from home now, with no one to vouch for me. I had to think of what would make me worth feeding and protecting.
“My mama is a midwife,” I said.
“What luck,” said Cassie. “We’ll be sure to call you when we want to deliver a baby.”
In the convent they had tried to teach me humility. Sister Dolores told us worldly knowledge and accomplishments are nothing to baby Jesus; they are like a cloth that falls away, leaving us naked as infants before him. But she also said baby Jesus would use us to do good in the world, and I didn’t understand how He could use us if our knowledge didn’t matter to Him, if we were nothing more than defenseless babies in His eyes. And so when the sisters asked us to pray for humility, to ask forgiveness for our pride and self-love, I said my own prayers to remind myself who I was and where I came from, so I would remember even if I pretended to forget, even if I took the vows and habit and lived my life under another name.
“I can set a bone,” I said to the Kid. “I can bind a wound. If you get a chill, I know the herbs to warm you, and if you get a fever, I know the herbs to cool you down. I can stitch a cut, I can drain a boil, I can dress a burn so the skin heals clean. I can grind a medicine to put a man to sleep, and if I grind enough, I can make him sleep forever.”
The strangers were quiet. The Kid looked at me for a minute, like measuring, then smiled.
“Texas, find the good doctor a horse she can handle.”
And that’s how I joined the Hole in the Wall Gang, in 1894 when I was eighteen years old.
At first it seemed like I might make a decent outlaw. Texas made me clean the stables and wash and brush all the horses before she would teach me to ride, and even then she was surly and expected me to be terrible, but we were both surprised at how good I was with the horses. They weren’t so different from children, I realized, and I’d spent years convincing children to trust me enough that I could take their temperature or remove their splinters or lead them away from the room where their mother lay laboring.
Soon I learned the horses’ names and their idiosyncrasies, the way they liked to be brushed and talked to and fed. Prudence, a black mare with a white blaze across her forehead and snout, was strong-willed and stubborn. Temperance, a bay, was sweet but flighty, afraid of loud noises and sudden moves. Charity, a sorrel, was sociable but could be jealous, grumbling in her stall when we tended to the others instead of her. Faith, the horse Texas rode most often, was small and brown-haired like her, but boisterous where Texas was quiet. Every morning Faith greeted Texas with a great whinnying and shaking of her mane, at which Texas only nodded and patted her flank. But when the two went out on a ride, Texas’s whole face seemed to open up, her joints to loosen, and I saw in her the same joy I’d seen when she danced with Lo at the firepit, a joy at all other times obscured by her furrowed forehead and her clipped and parsimonious speech.