Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

For a thousand years, the northern, windward side of the island lay fallow. The sand tracked its way inland along with the bellowing gusts from the ocean and the serpents too that crawled towards shelter in intricate breaststrokes. Bald cypress and pine grew on ancient creek beds, and Spanish moss hung from live oaks, trailing heavily in sweet-water streams. Leeward, along treacherous shallow reefs, a ship followed a northwesterly course, its sails at full rigging, the bow pointed towards the mainland. Twelve miles to the south, on the island’s port city, a red house burned.

The Pride would make no return to the island; its captain, Jean Lafitte, had been proclaimed a brigand. The great red house had been his—the entire Galveston settlement had been his—and he had torched it rather than give it over to the hard-following agents and hounding merchant marines of the new Americas.

The ship he sailed was over one hundred feet long and fast beyond belief. Shallow-drafted for mobility and stealth, it had been stripped of every bulkhead to make room for additional men and powder, and outfitted with sixteen cannons for killing. It maintained its northerly course through Galveston Bay, slackening its sails only when April Fool Point had been passed.

At the mouth of Clear Creek, the anchor was dropped, and over the side of the ship a longboat was lowered into the water. Onto the longboat climbed Lafitte, followed by two men holding two chests filled with gold coins. They would row beyond Clear Creek into the heart of Middle Bayou.

At sunset, Lafitte returned to the ship without the men, and without the chests. By midnight, the Pride was well on its way to the Tropic of Cancer and the Yucatán that lay beyond it like a pale virgin sleeping, reflecting the light of countless stars.

Ahard fall had come upon Lucinda, throwing her to the floor of her bedroom, chafing an elbow and bruising the skin on one cheek. It had happened on a Monday, so that when the dizzying waves came over her again on the following Wednesday, she stood with her back pressed flat against a door for balance and her hands balled at her sides. A crescent of sweat beaded her lip, and she could taste the salt as it ran into the corners of her mouth. She closed her eyes and waited for the rigors to pass.

There had been a forewarning of this within the first hour of waking. The scent, strange and not altogether pleasant, had seemingly rolled out along with the folds of the gray bombazine travel dress that she unpacked from a box hidden under her bed. She thought for an instant that the dress had perhaps been secretly taken out and worn by one of the other girls, the fabric still carrying the remnants of a too-old perfume. She frowned in irritation and pulled the dark jacket closer to her nose. Then she remembered that the odor was a part of the malady, a sign that was of her and not apart from her. She had seen the beginnings of fracturing lamplight, the hazy yellow globes floating and pulsing at odd intervals, and she had known the aura for what it was. She had gone weeks without such a fit, until the Monday past. It was the stress of the impending travel, she thought, that had brought back her intractable weakness.

She had managed to finish dressing that morning by herself, willing her arms and legs through the complicated layers of laces and hooks of undergarments and overdress, and she was fine until the moment she stepped out of her room. She latched the door soundlessly behind her before her limbs began their jerking, trembling rigidity, her mind sliding towards blankness.

She was damp through her clothes, her forehead slick and prickling, but to move away from the door, even to dab at her neck, could pitch her facedown onto the thin carpet, waking the occupants in the nearest bedroom. She dared to let her chin fall, her eyes downcast and half closed, her lips twitching as though in conversation with her shoes.

The shoes. She saw right away how ridiculous was the turn of mind that had prompted her to put on the high-laced boots of yellow kidskin. They were thin soled with raised heels, and the color flashed from the hem of her skirt like a lighthouse beacon through a storm. They were insubstantial and ill-advised for traveling, but in a moment of stubborn vanity, she had put them on, rather than the sturdy black walking boots that she had packed into her traveling bag.

Next to her feet, where she had dropped it, lay the tapestry bag containing a light cotton dress, a heavier woolen dress, a paisley shawl, her teaching primers, a lady’s gun, and a bottle of laudanum. The laudanum had proven useless against the fits, as had bromine, tincture of mercury, and every other apothecary offering. She had once even tried an evil-smelling concoction of herbs and what looked like turtle shells bought off a Chinaman. Boiling the dark fragments into a tea had filled the house with foul odors, driving Mrs. Landry, the house’s owner, into one of her own fits. Lucinda never tested its merit, as her landlady had thrown it all into the yard to be pecked over by the hens.

But the laudanum would bring comfort on the nights she couldn’t sleep. The Remington offered reassurance of a different kind.

There was an easing of the spasms in her legs and neck, and she felt the edges of her vision expand again to the ends of the hallway on either side of her. The wave of sickness she had felt moments before resolved itself into simple morning hunger. Although the paralysis had been brief, precious time had been lost. It could be only a half hour more, if that, until the woman arrived to clean the downstairs parlor.

The only sounds came from the room next to hers: a gentle snoring and a squeaking of a bed frame as the sleeper shifted.

Still she rested against the door, breathing slowly the stale air coming off the worn carpet. She wondered how many feet had trudged up and down the hallways, day upon day, hour upon hour. Mrs. Landry was not a young woman; she was already well in her forties, although her fondness for wearing false bangs and low-cut, tight-fitting gowns had not diminished over the decade she had run her busy and very profitable house.

How many women and girls had trodden these stairs, each thinking to stay for a short while, to make some quick riches selling the only asset left to her, the garden between her legs, only to find that quick and plentiful were two different things entirely. It was astonishing really how many of them believed they could be frugal enough, or smart enough, or sly enough in their dealings with Mrs. Landry to save the money required to set up their own shops somewhere else.

She’d seen girls as young as twelve taken in, girls who had already spent months with the camps, following men on cattle drives. Hollow-eyed and detached, even after a stiff scrubbing, they looked in their wet nakedness like wiry boys, their backsides flat as china plates.

And also older women, well beyond their years of first budding, who, because of widowhood, or misuse, or just plain boredom, came and stayed for a bit to change their luck, then disappeared again. What was the same for everyone in Madame Landry’s house was the importance of accepting a simple mathematical truth: the law of diminishing returns. The longer you stayed, the deeper in debt you became, through the acquiring of either gowns, doctor’s bills, liquor, or laudanum.