The Outcasts (26 page)

“Predators,” she repeated. “You mean men.”

He paused, remembering the steamer passenger who had wanted him to shoot the horse just because he could. “Maybe,” he answered.

“My father once told me that horses can die without companionship.”

It took Nate a moment to comprehend that the father she was speaking of was Deerling. He looked up at the night sky, the black soup, as Dr. Tom called it, fighting to keep his anger towards her present, like a shield against her vulnerability. “You can’t be worrying about that goddamn horse.” He sat up, throwing the blanket from him. “You just lost your father and your husband and you’re pining after a horse?”

He could see her eyes glittering in the sullen light of the campfire. “My father was a man of violence.” She brushed a length of hair from her face and looked up at the sky. “But he was unfailingly kind to animals.”

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.

He was surprised at how young Dr. Tom looked, wearing his new shirt—the old one sacrificed to the snake in the bucket—his dark hair still wet and slicked back from his forehead.

One night on the journey to the Austin jail, Lucinda had mused that she didn’t even know why Tom Goddard, an intelligent man who had attended medical school, had moved to Texas and joined the rangers. “His lungs were weak,” she had said. “I always supposed he came for the air.”

Nate had shaken his head, dismayed that she would not know this elemental thing about her husband, and he told her what his partner had told him. Dr. Tom had said that Texas was the only place he had ever found that, when it killed you, it didn’t forget about you.

When he studied Deerling’s image on the photograph, he could clearly see the resemblance to Lucinda, but he noticed what he hadn’t been mindful of at the time of the sitting. Along with placing his hand on Nate’s shoulder, Deerling had smiled. Not the engaging smile of contentment or even easy, familiar camaraderie, but rather one with a ghosting of pride.

He posted a letter to his wife, telling her of his return.

Nate had already crossed the Red River at Colbert’s Crossing into Oklahoma before he pulled the paper that Lucinda had given him from his jacket and read by the half-light of a gray and banded sunset what was written there.

L
ucinda sat with the letter from General Alvord in her lap, her face half turned to the small cell window behind her. She had put her back to the window in order to capture more light on the page, but she moved her cheek towards the warmth and closed her eyes in pleasure.

With the letter, he had also enclosed his treatise on non-Euclidean geometry, “The Tangencies of Circles and Spheres,” along with diary notes from his time collecting botanical samples in the Rocky Mountains. The notes she put aside; she would read them, or not, depending on how personal or speculative they were, Lucinda being interested in only his purer observations of the heretical theorems of the European radicals Beltrami and Lobachevsky.

The tone of the general’s letter had been polite and formal but not courtly or presumptive. He was an older man, already fifty by the time he served in the war, and was fascinated by the lady geometrist who had written him, thoughtfully, intelligently, from the Huntsville women’s prison.

They began a regular correspondence, one of several she conducted. In the year that Lucinda had been incarcerated, she had become a person of note, a pilgrimage stop for the curious, the alarmists, the outraged. Sometimes the visitors would simply watch her through the cracks in the wall as she made her daily turns about the yard. The bolder ones would throw notes, of declared love or condemnation, over the walls. These she never read but rather walked over them like scattered petals of spring flowers, leaving them for the matrons to gather up and possibly read themselves for their own titillation or amusement.

As well, she had had a few of the women inmates professing their love to her, one woman even hanging herself in her cell in desperation over Lucinda’s cold and impersonal rejections.

 She had taken to wearing only black—the cloth donated to her by a church group—and it made her look remorseful and pious to the believers who prayed over her. But it was an aesthetic choice more than anything else, a way to further negate the world and its troubling distractions. Her sickness had retreated along with the pressures of the corporeal world. Her life was cloistered, orderly, and, in the pursuit of the life of the mind, even comfortable. The women’s prison was new; the food healthful; the matrons, if not kind, were not cruel.

Of course, she was aware that she had been written about in newspapers as far away as Boston and New York, excoriated as the Black Widow of Texas or lauded as the Fallen Dove of Austin, but she heard about these whimsies only in fractured, incomplete pieces from the gossiping lips of the other inmates.

Over the past twelve months, she had toiled to reduce everything and everyone in her circumscribed world—from the regular, right-angled stones and bricks of her cell to the inmates, even herself—to numerical values, just as she had strived to do as a child in the asylum.

She looked up at the buffalo-rifle cartridge, perched upright on its base on the windowsill, one of two possessions from her previous life. Curiously, she had been given permission to keep the cartridge by the warden, who thought it an admonishing object from her father, being ignorant of the fact that it contained a lethal dose of cyanide.

She stared at it thoughtfully. If the equation a + b = c is offered, and if
a
(the cartridge) is assigned the value of
1
, and
c
(death, the final answer) is assigned the value of 0, then what is her value if she is
b
? Could a person be a negative number and still walk the earth? She thought that this could certainly be so.

The second object propped on the sill was a portrait photograph, exquisitely hand-tinted, of a girl. Lucinda ran her fingers lightly over the rich pastel colors, textured finely by the brush that had given the portrait depth and brought the girl’s face and dress to life.

Lucinda had been in Huntsville for six months when the matron had appeared at her cell door saying that inmate Goddard had a family visitor just arrived. Puzzled, she had run her hands in a smoothing motion over her hair, a hopeful thought taking shape. She had heard not one word from Nate since he had left her in Austin, but she had known it might take time to track down her daughter.

She nodded to the matron; the door was unlocked and opened, and a woman swept into the cell. She was portly and expensively dressed, but gaudily so; her hair, which showed beneath her bonnet, was the color of burned hay. Lucinda had struggled at first to put an identity to the woman, and then the woman raised her upper lip, and she knew the visitor to be Mrs. Landry, the madam from Fort Worth.

She stayed only briefly, long enough to take in the cramped, spartan cell and Lucinda’s unadorned black dress and to hand over the photograph. The subject had been posed modestly, dressed in voluminous cornflower blue, mirroring the color of eyes that were incessantly clear and triumphant, a girl beautiful beyond a simple description of lovely attributes in the singular, of teeth or lips or cheek or brow, so that even the matron, craning her neck over the madam’s shoulder, gasped.

Mrs. Landry had watched Lucinda’s face closely, looking for some strong emotion of grief or guilt, and was disappointed when Lucinda remained unresponsive.

The madam gestured to the photograph. “She asked me to come here. She wanted you to have the portrait to remember her by. And this.” She pulled out of her bag the lavender scarf that Lucinda had given May and laid it on the cot. “She died four months back. Yellow fever. We had a lovely funeral. Closed casket, of course. Ruined the face. Pity—May was my best earner.”

She paused for a moment and then, as though unable to contain herself, said, “I don’t know why she bothered. That was a dirty trick you played on her.”

Lucinda had raised her eyes to Mrs. Landry and said, “Yes. But, you see, she loved me.”

Mrs. Landry had left immediately after without a backward look or parting comment, and Lucinda sat on her bed and held the portrait, thinking of May’s soft-limbed vitality, and of her loveliness, and she wept. She then set the portrait in the window, where she could see it at all times.

Next to the portrait, Lucinda often placed objects, which she changed frequently, like offerings: a small colored stone, a tiny flower, a bit of shiny moss. It had become a shrine where the girl’s displayed beauty could serve as a constant reminder of Lucinda’s fatal complicity, and she attended the shrine daily in dutiful penance, standing for hours in front of the portrait until her legs throbbed, willing herself to recall May’s every gesture, every smile.

Now she pulled the lavender scarf over her shoulders and knocked at the cell door for the matron to release her to her classes. She had been tutoring some of the women of the prison and found that a few had a true talent for mathematics. The teaching gave her a modest satisfaction and the sense that she was serving her term willingly, gracefully, filling her time productively—making herself worthy—until she could receive word about her child.

The classroom hours shored up the solitary times when clouded recollections of a man’s voice calling her name or of tangled, blood-filled sheets threatened to send her into a black pit of horror and remorse. She could push away the waking nightmares by seeking out the lines, angles, and elliptical spaces that gave proof to her world, proofs that calmed and comforted her, that helped erase the memories.

But most important, when looking into the faces of the younger inmates, some as young as twelve, she could imagine her own daughter looking to her in gratitude, in understanding, in forgiveness. She had time, and in time, all things were possible.