Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

She made a bitter sound through her nose, and the memory of the horse thief with the pearl buttons shot by Deerling slid into his mind. He lay back down, one arm thrown over his eyes to blot her out of his sight.

“Tom knew all the stars in the night sky,” she murmured. “He used to point out the comets to me and say, ‘There’s another angel falling.’”

“Your husband told me there was a child,” he said, and she suddenly quieted. “What happened to the baby?”

“She’s safe.”

“You mean you abandoned her somewhere.”

She turned from her back onto her side, facing him. “I know better than anyone about abandonment, Mr. Cannon. Have you ever been in a lunatic asylum?” She paused as though waiting for him to answer. “My father committed me to several. You can’t imagine what they do to young girls…” She stared at him until he looked away. “I made the decision before the baby was born to leave and never come back. I gave birth to a beautiful girl and left her in the care of those who would love her. And there’s not been a day that I’ve regretted my choice.”

“Dr. Tom’s family…?”

“She’s safe, that’s all you need to know.” She turned away from him, curling her knees up to her chest, and he thought she had drifted off to sleep. But she finally asked him, “Where is your home, Mr. Cannon?”

“Oklahoma,” he muttered.

He heard a sharp intake of air, as though his answer had surprised her, but he pressed his arm tighter across his face, willing himself to sleep, to ease his way out of the night and out of her company. The thought of Dr. Tom regarding the night sky with his wife beside him, telling her of comets, made sense, but try as he might, he couldn’t fit the image of Lucinda into that picture. She lay not ten feet away, speaking to him of orphaned horses and falling angels, daughter to a famed Texas ranger, wife to another, and yet all he could summon of her former life was an image of her in a bloodstained shift huddled next to a stiffening body.

“Did you know about McGill?” he asked her finally. “Did you know?” But he got no answer, and when he finally lowered his arm to look at her, she was motionless, wrapped cocooned in her blanket.

In the morning, he woke her and saw that she had held the big bite in her hand through the night. He tried to take it back, but she looked so stricken, holding on to the casing tightly with a kind of desperation, as though it were a precious relic of comfort rather than an object of death, and he relented, watched her tear the stitches in her skirt hem open to hide it.

It took another seven days to travel the distance to Austin, but she had no more sickness and they made good time over the well-packed road, the land changing from flat and featureless grasslands to bunched and rolling hills close set with post oak, blackjack, and hickory.

He signed her over to the city jail in Austin to await trial, which, he was told, could take months, as the city was busily processing for trial dozens of man-killers, rapists, and cattle thieves. If she was judged guilty, she would be sent to the women’s wing at Huntsville prison, just north of Houston.

Nate arranged for food to be brought to the jail, as well as a clean dress and a Bible, delivered by a lady from the Disciples of Christ church.

In the jail cell, he sat next to Lucinda on the lone bunk for a while, gazing at the floor. He wanted to find a way round to thanking her for saving his life, but the sentiment was hostage to his need to ask her why she had remained so long with a murderer. He had a growing need to hear from her lips that she was, in fact, unaware of McGill’s true nature, duped by his affability and cunning. But he’d known the moment he looked into her face that her impulsive shooting of McGill had nothing to do with the protection of his own life, nor was it an outraged response to the discovery of his monstrousness.

And when he finally asked her why she shot her lover, she looked at Nate with her wide-awake eyes and told him simply, “Because he was going to leave me.”

He spent another two months finishing his term with a small company of other young state policemen, never firing his Dance pistol again, although he discharged his rifle in the chasing down and arrest of ten horse thieves in the hill country. He apprehended a man who had shot his brother in a drunken brawl, talking him out of a barn where he had threatened self-immolation; he arrested a German immigrant who had killed his wife and four children with a cording ax and then slipped their bodies methodically down his well, like pennies into a clay bank.

He returned to the court for the trial of Lucinda Goddard, expecting to testify, giving lies to the truth about the where and the how of her arrest. But she pled guilty to the charge of accessory to murder, impressing the crowds that had come to see her at the trial when she stated to the court, “I have done wrong and expect to pay heavily for my wrongdoing.”

She received from the judge the lenient sentence of ten years at Huntsville.

On the day of her transfer to the prison, she asked to see him and he appeared, hat in hand, amazed to find her clear-eyed and expectant. She had grown full-cheeked, her body no longer gaunt, her hair lustrous and neatly pinned in a bun at the back of her head.

She smiled and took his hand as though they were old friends and said, teasingly, “Prison seems to agree with me.”

They stood together awkwardly in silence for a moment and then she said, “I’ve begun teaching some of the other women in the jail to read. And I’m allowed as many books on mathematics as I want, which is more than I had dared hope for. All compliments of the church lady who brought me my reformation dress.” She plucked at the heavy folds of her dark skirt and smiled regretfully, as some women did when caught wearing an unfashionable style.

She and Nate were allowed time together in the small, bricked, and airless exercise courtyard, a matron following close behind them, like an attending duenna, as they circled the walkway.

Once Lucinda pointed to the hem of her dress and whispered, “I have kept the shotgun cartridge. It makes me feel rebellious.”

They sat on a bench, the matron wandering some distance away, and Nate realized that she was giving them some privacy, as though he were a suitor.

“How is your wife?” Lucinda asked.

“She’s fine,” he said. “I’m going back to Oklahoma soon for spring planting.”

She asked him a few more questions, listened politely to his answers. But he felt a growing tension in her, and when the matron signaled to them that their time together was at an end, Lucinda asked the matron to hand Nate a small, folded piece of paper.

Lucinda said, “Inside is written the name of the missionary church where I left my baby, as well as the date of her birth.” She placed her hand over his. “The mission is in Oklahoma.”

He looked at her with surprise; he had assumed the orphanage was in Texas.

“I have no right to ask anything of you,” she said. “But I know you are a decent family man. I only want to know that she is well.”

He tucked the paper into the pocket of his jacket. “I can’t make any promises.”

“Of course,” she said, but she smiled at him hopefully, as though he had already agreed to her request.

He stood then and walked briskly towards the guard station. At the gate he turned once, but she had already disappeared inside the jail, along with the matron.

He was discharged from the force in good standing and encouraged to rejoin after his crops were in, and he said he’d think on it, although he knew he’d never return to service.

On the day he rode north from Austin, he stopped at Hillyer’s Photographic Studio to retrieve the print taken of himself and the two rangers. He had waited all that time to look on the image, knowing that it would pain him.