Outlawed

CHAPTER 1

In the year of our Lord 1894, I became an outlaw. Like a lot of things, it didn’t happen all at once.

First I had to get married. I felt lucky on the day of my wedding dance. At seventeen I wasn’t the first girl in my class to marry, but I was one of them, and my husband was a handsome boy from a good family—he had three siblings, like me, and his mama was one of seven. Did I love him? We used to say we loved our beaus, my girlfriends and I—I remember spending hours talking about his broad shoulders, his awkward but charming dancing, the bashful way he always said my name.

The first few months of my marriage were sweet ones. My husband and I were hungry for each other all the time. In ninth form, when the girls and boys were separated to prepare us for married life, Mrs. Spencer had explained to us that it would be our duty to lie with our husbands regularly so that we could have children for baby Jesus. We already knew about the children part. We had read Burton’s Lessons of the Infant Jesus Christ every year since third form, so we had heard about how God sent the Great Flu to cleanse the world of evil, just like he’d sent the flood so many centuries before. We knew that baby Jesus had appeared to Mary of Texarkana after the sickness had killed nine of every ten men, women, and children from Boston to California, and struck a covenant with her: If those who remained were fruitful and peopled the world in His image, He would spare them further sickness, and they and their descendants forever after would be precious to Him.

But in ninth form, we learned about lying with our husbands, how we should wash beforehand, and put perfume behind our ears, how we should breathe slowly to relax our muscles, and try to look our husbands in the eyes. How we’d bleed.

Don’t worry, Mrs. Spencer said, then, smiling at us. It only hurts in the beginning. After a while you’ll start to like it. There’s nothing more joyful than two people joining together to make a child.

My husband did not know what to do at first, but he took his responsibility seriously, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in ardor. We lived with his parents while he saved for a house; in the mornings his mother made little jokes about how soon I’d be eating for two.

During the day I still attended births with my mama. I was the eldest and the only one who actually wanted to learn about breech births and morning sickness and childbed fever, so I was the one who would take over for Mama when she got too old. When I came on rounds with my new wedding ring, the mothers-to-be winked and teased me.

It’s good you’re learning about all this now, said Alma Bunting, forty years old, pregnant with her sixth child and suffering from hemorrhoids. Then you won’t be surprised when it’s your turn.

I just laughed. I was not like my friend Ulla, who had eight baby names picked out, four boys and four girls. When I was ten and my sister Bee was two months old, my mama had gone to bed and stayed there for a year. So I had already been a mama—I had changed a baby, fed her from a bottle when Mama couldn’t nurse, soothed her at night when I was still young enough to be afraid of the dark. I was not in a rush to do it again. I knew from working with Mama that sometimes it could take months, even for a young girl like me, and I was happy to sleep with my new husband and still sneak off sometimes to drink juneberry wine behind the Petersens’ barn with Ulla and Susie and Mary Alice, and not have to worry about anyone except for me.

But then it was six months since our wedding day, and my husband’s mama was lingering in the kitchen while I put the breakfast dishes away.

You know, she said, after you do it, you can’t just get right up and go about your day. You have to lie still for at least fifteen minutes to give everything time to work.

She had a way of talking to me like we were girls the same age gossiping after school, but this wasn’t gossip and we weren’t friends. I kept my voice light and happy.

Mama says that doesn’t matter so much, I said. She says the most important thing is the time of month.

Your mama’s a very smart woman, she said. She had never liked my mama. But sometimes every little bit helps.

She took the teacups from my hands.

I’ll finish this, she said. You get ready for your work.

I didn’t take my mother-in-law’s advice—I’d never liked lazing around in bed. But I started marking my period carefully on the calendar so I’d know exactly when my fertile time was coming. Still I didn’t worry—Mama had said it took her eight months to get pregnant with me, and my daddy almost left her, but after that Janie and Jessamine and Bee were easy. My husband made fun of his mother when we were alone—he said she meddled so much in his older brother’s marriage that his sister-in-law banned her from their house. Six more months we were happy and then it was a year.

There’s only one thing to do now, my mama said. You’ll have to sleep with someone else.

Half the time, she explained, the man was the one who was barren.

This shocked me. Mrs. Spencer had taught us that the most common reason for failing to conceive a child was not lying with one’s husband often enough, and the second was forgetting one’s prayers. If a woman did her duty by her husband and baby Jesus and still did not become pregnant, then most likely she had been cursed by a witch—usually a woman who, barren herself, wanted to infect others with her malady.

I knew from Mama that there was no such thing as curses and that sometimes the body simply went wrong all on its own, but I had never heard of a man being barren before. When Maisie Carter and her husband couldn’t have a baby, it was Maisie who got kicked out of the house and had to live down by the river with the tinkers and the drunks. When Lucy McGarry didn’t get pregnant her family took her back in, but when two of her neighbors miscarried the same summer, everyone looked to Lucy for the cause. I was eleven when she was hanged for a witch. I had not yet started going on rounds with Mama; I had never seen a person die. It terrified me, not the violence of it but the swiftness, how one moment Lucy was standing on the platform and the next she was dangling limp below it. I tried to imagine it myself: what it would be like to see and think and feel and then suddenly plunge into blackness—more than blackness, into nothingness. It kept me awake that night and for many nights after, the dread of it. But at the gallows I cheered with everyone else; only Mama did not cheer.

I don’t want to sleep with someone else, I said. Can’t we just try a little longer?

Mama shook her head.

People are already starting to gossip, she said. My patients are asking me if you’re pregnant yet.

She would find someone for me, she said. There were men who did this for money, men whose virility was proven and who knew how to keep a secret. When it was the right time of month, I’d meet with one of them during the day for a few days running.

Don’t think of it as being unfaithful to your husband, Mama said. Think of it as keeping yourself safe.

The man was a surprise to me. We met at my mama’s house, where he posed as a repairman (he really did repair Mama’s stove). He said I could call him Sam, and I understood that was not his real name. He was Mama’s age and ugly, with a scraggly mustache the color of mouse fur, a big belly, and skinny legs. But he was kind to me, and put me at ease.

You ever want me to stop, you tell me, he said, taking off his socks.

I did not want him to stop. I wanted him to do what he had to do quickly so I could go back to my husband with a baby in my belly and never be afraid again.

After our fourth meeting, when I was waiting to see if what we had done had worked, I asked Mama what really made women barren. Mama knew many things that Mrs. Spencer and the other people in our town did not know. She knew, for instance, that the Great Flu that had killed all eight of her great-grandparents was not, as everyone else said, a judgment from baby Jesus and Mother Mary. Mama’s teacher Sarah Hawkins, a master midwife, had taught her that the Great Flu had come to America on ships along with spices and sugar, then spread from husband to wife and mother to child and trader to trader by kisses and handshakes, cups of beer shared among friends and strangers, and the coughs and sneezes of men and women who didn’t know how sick they were and went on serving food and selling cloth and trading beaver pelts one day too long. Sarah Hawkins said the Flu was just a fever, a sickness like any other, and the only reason people put a meaning to it was that otherwise their grief would have overwhelmed them. Mama said Sarah Hawkins was the smartest person she had ever known.

But when I asked Mama about barrenness, she just shook her head.

Nobody knows, she said.

Why not? I asked. I’d never before asked Mama a question that didn’t have an answer.

We don’t even know exactly how a baby forms in a mother’s womb, she said. How can we know why sometimes her womb stays empty?

I looked down at my hands and she could tell I was disappointed.

I know one thing, she said. It’s not witchcraft.

How do you know? I asked.

People cry witchcraft whenever they don’t understand something, she said. Remember, the town ladies said a witch had put a curse on Mayor Van Duyn, and when he died the doctor found his lungs all filled up with tumors. The only curse on him was that pipe.

So why don’t you tell people? I asked. Everyone listens to you.

Mama shook her head.

I used to tell my patients, she said. Every woman worries about a curse if she’s not pregnant two months after her wedding. ‘That’s just a silly story,’ I’d say. But they didn’t believe me, and what’s more, some of them got suspicious, like maybe I had cursed them.

Mama delivered all the babies in the Independent Town of Fairchild and cured most of the illnesses besides. She had set more bones than Dr. Carlisle and heard more confessions than Father Simon. Her reputation was so secure that even when she took to her bed after Bee was born, her patients were all but lined up at our door the day she got well. Nobody was suspicious of Mama.

I don’t understand, I said. Why didn’t they believe you?

When someone believes in something, Mama said, you can’t just take it away. You have to give them something to replace it. And since I don’t know what makes women barren, I’ve got nothing to give.

I didn’t get pregnant that month, or the month after. At my husband’s house my mother-in-law watched me all the time, like she might catch me in the act of witchcraft. Once she came into our bedroom while I was washing and began making small talk with me, forcing me to answer politely as I washed my underarms and private parts. I felt ashamed of my body then as I never had before, of my small breasts, stomach flat over an empty womb. She began to make me pray to baby Jesus in the mornings; we knelt together and asked him to send our family a child. My mother-in-law was not a particularly religious woman. She kept a crèche above the hearth and a copy of Burton on the shelf like everyone in Fairchild, but went to church only on holidays or when she was seized with a desire to appear pious. The fact that we were praying now—in stumbling words I imagined she half-remembered from some childhood catechism—showed me how desperate she’d become.

At night my husband would touch me only during my fertile week; he was tracking me himself now, as though he didn’t trust me to do it. When I reached for him late in the month he told me his mama had said it was better to save our energy for when it counted, and I was not surprised that he talked to his mama about such things, but I was still disgusted by it.

My meetings with Sam, strangely, became a refuge. In Mama’s house no one watched us. Afterward he did not pester me to lie still or put my legs up the way my husband did; he put his clothes on and said goodbye and left me alone so that I could lie in my childhood bed and pretend that I had never married.

Sam and I didn’t talk much, but in the third month of our meetings he asked if I wanted him to touch me while we did it.

It might help you relax, he said. Some people say that makes you more likely to conceive.

By that time I trusted Sam. He had never tried to do anything I didn’t want, had always behaved like a friend helping me with something—perhaps a dish on a high shelf I couldn’t quite reach. So I said yes, he could touch me, and that was the beginning of the end.

When it came to married life, we girls had other sources of information besides Mrs. Spencer. We had the older married girls and the web of gossip and advice they wove to keep us safe. From them we knew it was dangerous to sleep with someone too many times before you were married—if you didn’t get pregnant after a few months of fooling around, he’d never marry you. Worse, he might spread the rumor that you were barren. We knew, too, that if you married someone who turned out to be cruel, the best thing to do was to have children as quickly as you could. A woman with three children could divorce her husband and she would probably find another man to marry her—she had never said as much, but I knew that was why Mama had waited until after she had Janie and Jessamine to leave our daddy and bring us to Fairchild, where the old midwife had recently left town. A woman with four children could do as she pleased, marry or not, and I knew that was one reason no one spoke ill of Mama when she chose not to take another husband after Bee’s daddy left.

There was also a book that circulated among the girls and younger women of Fairchild, succinctly titled Fruitful Marriage. The book was more explicit than Mrs. Spencer’s lessons, and it was mildly scandalous to be caught reading it, though not altogether forbidden. When Susie’s mother had found the book while cleaning, she had not reprimanded Susie but had merely replaced the book under her bed in such a way that made it seem likely she had read some of it.

Fruitful Marriage included drawings of men and women naked together, locked in embrace. The author, one Wilhelmina Knutson, also discussed something called climax, which she described, frustratingly, as a moment of indescribable pleasure. The ability to feel this sensation, Mrs. Knutson said, was the sign of a physically and psychologically healthy individual who was ready for motherhood. And Mrs. Knutson was very clear on one point: climax could only occur when a man’s member was deep inside a woman’s body.

I had never experienced climax with my husband, and in recent months, I had come to believe that my inability to do so was yet another sign of my bodily deficiency. But when Sam touched the top of my vagina with his fingers, rhythmically and patiently, for an amount of time that might have been two minutes or two hours, I experienced a sensation so extreme that I thought it must either be climax or something very dangerous, possibly fatal. It was something like what I had felt a few times when, awakening from a sweaty dream of hands and mouths, I touched myself under the covers of my bed. But what I felt with Sam was much more intense, and when he took his leave that day I was still shaking slightly, and absolutely sure that this time, I must be pregnant.

I was still thinking about it when I met Ulla and Susie at the barn a week later. Mary Alice was four months pregnant with her first baby so she wasn’t meeting us anymore; Ulla was two months married, and Susie was engaged to be married in November during the harvest feasts. At first we joked and gossiped about our former classmates and their courting the way we always did, but soon I was too curious to keep quiet.

When it was my turn with the bottle I took a deep drink.

Have you ever had a climax? I asked my friends.

Susie knitted her brows for a moment, considering.

I think so, she said, a small one.

Ulla laughed. She had a gap between her front teeth that always made her look mischievous, like nothing would shock her.

With Ned it’s like this, she said, miming a hammer pounding in a nail. Mostly I just feel sore. But my mama says not to worry, you don’t need a climax to get pregnant.

She took a swig from the bottle.

Why, she asked, have you?

I think so, I said. I should have stopped there, but my confidence buoyed me on. My period was a day late and I knew that what Sam and I had done must have worked at last.

And do you know, I said, I think a man can make you climax with his fingers.

Ulla looked incredulous.

With his fingers, she said.

That’s right, I insisted. He touches you between your legs, above the opening. And then it’s just like Mrs. Knutson says—a little hard to describe, but very powerful. Almost like fainting.

Your husband did this? Ulla asked. Just by touching you?

That’s right, I said, in what I hoped was a convincing tone.

Ulla shook her head.

That’s not possible, she said. Everyone knows a woman can only climax from deep inside. Mrs. Knutson says so.

Well, I said, affecting a tone of pride, maybe my husband knows better than Mrs. Knutson.

She looked skeptical.

Where did he learn it, then? she asked.

It began to dawn on me that I had made a mistake.

What do you mean? I asked, stalling for time.

"I mean I highly doubt Mr. Vogel taught the boys about this form of climaxing, if none of us have ever heard of it before. And he certainly didn’t learn it from Fruitful Marriage. So how did he know how to do it?"

From another book, I said, that only the boys have.

Really? Ulla asked. What book?

"It’s called Fruitful Marriage for Men, I said, cursing myself even as I said it. It’s quite rare. One of my husband’s visiting cousins had a copy."

Ulla took another drink, all the while looking me in the eye.

Well, she said, I’ll have to track it down. Ned could use a copy.

I’ll never know who put two and two together, whether it was Ulla or Susie or both who understood that the experience I was describing was much more likely with an outsider than with one of our town boys, young and inexperienced and raised on all the same folk wisdom as we had been. All I know is that when I came back to my husband’s family’s house after my rounds with Mama one evening, my husband was gone and his mother and father were sitting at the kitchen table.

You know, said my mother-in-law, I stuck up for you.

What’s going on? I asked.

Mama’s old suitcase, the one I’d used to bring my clothes and medical books to my husband’s house, was standing next to the stove.

Malcolm thought you’d be a bad match. He said your mama was unstable. He said if it wasn’t for the charity of your neighbors, your little sister would have died.

My father-in-law looked vaguely pained. He had never spoken more than three words to me. It was hard for me to imagine him saying all this to his wife.

That’s not true, I said. I took care of Bee myself while Mama was sick. She was never in any danger.

That’s what I said, my mother-in-law went on. And I told him your mama still delivers every baby within ten miles of here. That has to count for something, I said.

She waited like she expected me to thank her. I didn’t say anything.

Are you listening? she asked. I’m trying to tell you why it hurt me so much to find out you betrayed us. To find out you chose to be with another man when my son loves you so much, he was willing to wait another year if that was how long it took.

I imagined the conversations they must have had about my failure to conceive, the same ones in which she told him to save himself for my fertile days. I doubted either he or she would have waited a year.

I didn’t want to sleep with him, I said. I just wanted to give you a grandchild.

My mother-in-law rolled her eyes.

Well, did it work? Are you pregnant now?

I shook my head. I’d started to bleed that morning, while I was mixing mallow and beeswax for a baby’s rash.

Of course not, she said.

Was she disappointed? What would have happened if I’d said yes? Would we have raised the child, my husband and I, together? Would I have done it again? Sometimes I still wish for that life, and everything it would mean.

My mother-in-law nodded at her husband and he picked up my suitcase and handed it to me.

Leave your wedding ring on the table, she said.

That night I had dinner with my mama and sisters like nothing was wrong. Janie and Jessamine were excited to see me and told me everything that was happening in seventh form: how Arthur Howe said his daddy had gone to the high country to join the Hole in the Wall Gang, but everybody knew he had just taken up with a woman two towns away, how Agnes Fetterly had started her monthlies already but nobody wanted to court her because she was an only child, how Lila Phelps had tried to fake hers with chicken blood so her mama would let Nils Johansson come to court her, but her mama caught her pouring the blood onto her bedsheets and made her do all the laundry in the house for a month. It hurt, almost, to remember what I’d been like at their age, not so long ago, a woman-child—my body beginning to change, my mind, like theirs, still full of tricks and gossip. The darkness of the grown-up world just starting to seep in.

All the time our sisters were talking, Bee was stealing looks at me. I could tell she already knew something was wrong. Bee was eight years old that spring. Mama said we were like two sides of the same coin. When I was her age I’d been chatty, always asking questions. Bee was quiet—she picked up