Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

Within a quarter hour he returned and beckoned for her to come from the room. After pinning up her still-damp hair and collecting her shawl, she followed him down to the lobby and out onto the street, where a small carriage, brought from the livery, stood. He climbed into the driving seat and took up the reins and waited for her to climb in after. She hesitated briefly, allowing herself to think only that he was taking her to the place where the gold had been stored.

He chucked at the reins and they followed the sea road south, the Gulf to their left, the sun blinding them through a wilting sky to their right. Lucinda had brought no hat or bonnet and placed her hand as a shield over her forehead and cheek, keeping her face turned expectantly towards Bill, waiting for him to break his silence.

After traveling a few miles, he finally spoke to her. “Do you know what a boondoggle is, Lucy?” He turned his head to look at her, and Lucy blinked and nodded hesitantly.

“Yes,” he said, nodding along with her. “A waste of time and money. Middle Bayou was a complete and utter boondoggle.” He drew out the last word, his lips and tongue hard against the consonants. “Bedford Grant fabricated the story of pirate’s treasure to puff up the value of land that he wanted to unload.”

Shocked, she remained motionless, but the hair on her arms rose as with a chill.

“I have lost a man and substantial resources, leaving me with what I’m wearing on my back, and my horse.” He’d taken off his spectacles so that she could see closer into his eyes. “I’ve also lost a significant asset in the person of May Grant. Or rather, I should say, you have lost May for me. You are lowered in my esteem, Lucy, for not following my instructions.” His tone was reasonable: a father reviewing the fractious behavior of a child. But for the first time in her relationship with Bill, she felt afraid, and she fought the temptation to look away, to scan the road for any fellow travelers.

He removed from his pocket a cigar and expertly lit it against the wind. “Have you got any money left?” he asked, and she shook her head. “What about your gun?”

Before she left the hotel room, some formless, self-preserving thought had niggled at her to take the small purse in which she kept the Remington. But she had brushed it aside in her eagerness and expectation, and, when he cut his eyes to her, she met his gaze and again shook her head. Now she did look to the beach for some person to offer assistance, but he clamped one hand over her arm, as though reading her thoughts, and for the first time, it entered her mind that he might kill her.

He dropped the reins to his lap, letting the horse go at his own pace, the hoofbeats sounding a paper-like rattle on the shell-filled road, and lit another match. Handing it to her, he instructed her to keep the flame alive with her cupped hands. Within a moment the wind had blown it out, and he lit and handed her another, instructing her to try it again. The flame stayed visible for only an instant and then went out, leaving a spiral of smoke.

“You see, Lucy,” he said, “no matter how hard we try, the outcome is always the same.”

After that he was quiet. She dropped her hand from her face and stared dully at the banks of clouds obscuring the sun, turning the white road a liverish pink.

When she was a child, confined inside the walls of the asylum, she dreaded most of all this time of day: the disappearing of the sun and the casting of long shadows. It was a time of claustrophobic despair. Of constrained ice-water baths when she was uncommunicative and cod-liver purges when she lagged in sufficient animal energies; a time of enforced eating, supervised sleeping, and communal, vigilant prayer for her return to normalcy.

In her third year of confinement she discovered the comforting axioms of geometry, the science wherein the properties of magnitude are considered: a line having length, but not breadth; a surface having length and breadth, but not thickness, and so on. Fixed, constant, and immutable. She would recite them aloud as a way of distancing her mind from her body, which would otherwise be rebellious during her fits and enraged during her treatments.

She recited to herself, as they drove along a parallel path to the sea, the rule of the magnitude of angles, which depended on the inclination the lines that formed it had to each other, and not on the length of those lines. There had been magnitude between the path of her life and Bill’s, even if the length of that path would be short.

When he stopped the carriage, she calculated that they were close to six miles from town. He handed her down and walked with her away from the road and onto the beach. He let go of her and stood pondering the ocean and the sky, both equally dark now.

She stared at his features for as long as she could, until he told her to turn around.

“Watch the stars,” he directed, pointing upwards.

She identified the constellation of Perseus and the variable star of Medusa’s head. It made her think of the glass negatives of the soldiers in the Wallers’ greenhouse and of the white spaces where their eyes would have been.

Then Bill said, “Lucy, look at me.”

The train from Houston to Galveston was to leave at four o’clock. Nate and Dr. Tom arrived shortly after noon, in time to store in the post office’s safe room all of their weapons, with the exception of a firearm each, Nate’s Winchester and the Whitworth rifle. From the post office, Nate cabled Austin to inform the state police captain there that they would be “off the map” for a week or so but that he would give a full report once they had returned to Houston.

The postman also handed Nate a letter from his wife. The last one he had received from her was during the time of Dr. Tom’s convalescence from pneumonia. Nate placed the letter carefully in the pocket of his coat, planning to read it on the train, and followed Dr. Tom to the local apothecary. As he sat on the stoop, though, he decided he couldn’t wait any longer and opened the envelope raggedly with one thumb, then pulled out the thin sheet of paper.

Dear Nathaniel,

All is well now, but Mattie was laid low for three days with a griping belly. She is recovered and is back to chasing the chickens. The livestock is hearty, the cow giving eight pounds of butter a week. The weather is mild but with heavy rains.

I must tell you I’ve had troubling dreams these past few nights. Because of this, I would ask that you take especial care in making any river crossings or in being close to rough water. You have respected my glimmerings in the past. Please do so now, even if these dark thoughts come from excessive rains and from too much time spent within four walls.

I abide in the belief of your essential goodness, and know with certainty that you will always make the right and dutiful choice.

He worried at his lip with a thumb and forefinger over the last but put the letter quickly away when he felt Dr. Tom’s shadow fall over him. His partner’s face was droop-lidded and relaxed; the man had wasted no time in dosing himself with the newly acquired laudanum.

The most difficulty they had was loading the big bay onto the cattle car. Deerling’s horse, already brutish from the noise and commotion, balked and almost pulled the stock loader’s arm from its socket. Nate tried patience and bribery in equal measures, but after ten minutes of the horse’s rearing and plunging, they had moved only the front half of the horse into the narrow entrance of the darkened car. The lead rope was passed over a pulley, but the stallion continued heaving backwards, threatening to yank it from the mounting.