Outlawed

by Anna North

“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.”

It was only that I found the lessons of baby Jesus insufficient to explain the world.

“Knowledge can be very valuable,” she said, “but only if people want it. If they don’t, it can be worse than useless.”

I had never longed to hold a revolver, never argued about Colts and Eagletons like the boys in school, or made my fingers into a gun to shoot noises at my friends. But now, the gun smooth and heavy in my grip, I felt like Justice herself, the blindfolded woman who stood cast in bronze outside the courthouse in Fairchild. I would not sentence barren women to die like Judge Hammond, whose mind was addled by drink and age and who did whatever the mayor and the sheriff told him to do. My gun would protect the innocent. I would be dangerous only to the wicked.

“We may be barren in body, dear Doctor, but we shall be fathers of many nations, fathers and mothers both. You see, when we found this land, I knew it was promised not just for us, but for the descendants of our minds and hearts, all those cast out of their homes and banished by their families, all those slandered and maligned, imprisoned and abused, for no crime but that God saw fit not to plant children in their wombs. I knew that we would build a nation of the dispossessed, where we would be not barren women, but kings.”

How can I not hate what I am, if this is what it’s brought me?”

I wished I could think of my own failed body with that kind of care. Instead I was full of shame and fear.

“Everybody cheers the hanging of a witch,” I said. Agnes Rose looked at her dainty watch. “Everybody but us,”

If you die without shame, the shame is all theirs.”

“It’s such a hard world,” the sheriff said. “People need some way of making sense of it.