Outlawed by Anna North

Author:Anna North
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

For the next few days, no one talked about the plan the Kid had proposed. All of us were occupied with caring for Cassie. Texas took over cooking and spoon-fed her warm grits. Lo combed her hair and wrapped her in blankets. Elzy held her hand, and the Kid kept circling and fretting over her, with an anxiety I’d never seen, asking me repeatedly if she was going to be all right.

“She’ll be fine,” I said.

Cassie was fully conscious and speaking, and while her toes were frostbitten, I did not think she would lose any of them. I made a footbath of warm water and feverfew to ease the stinging as her blood came back into her snow-burnt skin, and then I wrapped her feet loosely in lengths of clean cotton. She didn’t talk to me as I cared for her, only responding yes or no when I asked if something hurt, and even then she refused to meet my eyes. The others, however, especially Texas and the Kid, treated me with a new gravity, asking my opinion on what was best to feed Cassie or whether we should use up more of our limited firewood to give the bunkhouse extra warmth. I tried not to think about what would’ve happened if Cassie had died in Elzy’s arms in the kitchen cabin, if I’d promised to save her and had failed.

On the fourth day of Cassie’s convalescence she could walk a little, and the sun came out over the valley. We shoveled a path from the bunkhouse to the kitchen cabin and the horse barn. I visited Amity and stroked her watchful face, and Texas let me feed her a wizened carrot she’d been saving. A little joy crept in around the edges of that day—Cassie laughed at something the Kid told her, too quiet for anyone else to hear; News got out her fiddle for the first time in weeks and played “My Pretty Jane” and “Shinbone Alley”; while we were shoveling, Texas and Lo threw snowballs at each other and then, as though deciding something, at me.

That night, after a dinner of beans lightly burned by Texas, the Kid stood and faced Cassie.

“Cass, friend of my heart, for many years it was just the two of us at Hole in the Wall. Those were blessed years; everything we reap now was sown then. And even as we began to grow, we grew slowly—News, you came to us, and then Elzy, then Texas, then Lo, then Agnes Rose. And then the good doctor, who I think has earned an apology for the skepticism with which we initially treated her.”

News began to clap, and the others joined in. I felt a surprising warmth in my chest; it had been so long since I had been surrounded by people who cared for me. Only Cassie did not clap. Instead she looked down at her bandaged feet.

“When we were few, we rarely disagreed,” the Kid went on. News and Agnes Rose exchanged an amused glance.

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