The Outsider (15 page)

“God, no. Never again as long as I draw breath.”

She waited to see if he would say more. She thought he probably hadn’t meant to reveal even that much about himself. She tried to imagine him standing spread-legged on a sled, forking hay over the wriggling backs of a bunch of hungry ewes. But the image that came to her mind was of Ben.

“It was Ben’s, my husband’s, idea to try sheep. But even though the Bible speaks often of shepherding and flocks, and of Adam’s son Abel being a keeper of sheep—still, it took my
Vater,
as bishop and leader of our Church, many days of prayer to come around to the idea of it. We’d always been farmers, you see. To put up the plow and raise sheep instead, it was such a drastic change from what we’d known.
It wasn’t a thing that could be done lightly. It took a lot of contemplating and praying on my da’s part.”

“It don’t sound like he bends much, your old man.”

“It isn’t our way to bend. There is one Plain way of doing things, and no other. Ben, though, he always used to say God wouldn’t have given us a brain if it wasn’t to think with. He had a way of looking at things from the other side, Ben did.” She waved her hand at the wall behind them. “It’s like that window over there, you always look through it from the kitchen out into the yard. But one day you’re out here on the porch and you walk by that window and you look through and you’re surprised to see the kitchen. It’s the same sheet of glass, but you’re looking through it from the other side. Ben was always doing that, looking through windows the wrong way. Our people thought him a bit wild at times—”

A sadness welled up inside her, choking off the words. She shut her eyes and pressed her fingers to her lips. She didn’t want to grieve for Ben in front of this man. Ben was . . . hers.

She swallowed and drew in a deep breath. “Oh, listen to me rattle on. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. A moment ago I was feeling so happy, and now . . .” She thought she wasn’t going to cry after all, and in the next instant scalding tears pushed against her eyes.

“You miss him.” He said the words simply, his voice low and flat.

“I do miss him. So much that at times I . . .” She shrugged, pressing her lips together.

He kept his gaze on the sheep, as if watching them eat were the most fascinating thing in the world. But then he said, in a voice that hurt her with its gentleness, “How did he die?”

She covered her face with her hands, but for just a moment. Then she let them fall to her lap, where they made a
single, gripping fist. She’d never spoken aloud of the hanging, not with her
Vater
or Mem, not with any of her brothers. Not even with Noah. The Lord had taken Ben home, they all acknowledged. No one ever spoke of how.

“Look, forget I asked,” he said. “It ain’t none of my—”

“They hung him is what they did. The outsiders hung my husband for a cattle thief.”

She looked at him, daring him to say he was sorry. Instead he said, “Was he?”

“Ben would sooner cut off his hands than allow them to take up a thing that wasn’t his!”

Her words had come out harsh, but it was an old and festering anger that she felt. “The outsiders in this valley, most of them don’t like us much because our ways are different and we keep ourselves apart. So they’re mean to us at times, in little ways, like tossing firecrackers in our wagons when we drive through town, or hooking their spurs into our skirts when we walk down the boardwalk. They laugh at us and call us names sometimes, but mostly they never do us any real hurt. Except there’s this cattleman, a Scotsman by the name of Fergus Hunter. He owns a big spread on the other side of those hills over yonder.”

She looked hard at the rock- and pine-studded buttes, as if she could see through them to the big white house with its gables and spooled-railed galleries, to the acres of corrals and miles of fences, to the big cedar-shingled stables, to the thousands of cattle that needed so much land to roam in.

“At one time this whole valley was all open range, and Mr. Hunter got used to grazing his herds wherever he pleased. He got to be what the newspapers and such call a cattle baron. And he got so puffed up in his pride he even allowed some folk to call him that, to call him Baron. Like some king had come along and knighted him, or something.”

“I knew a horse, once, named Baron.”

They looked at each other, sharing a mutual thought, that life really does have a way of twisting itself all inside out and backward.

“Mr. Hunter sure wouldn’t like knowing he’d been named for a horse,” she said. “And he sure didn’t like us Plain People coming here to homestead on what he’d come to think of as his land. He liked it even less when we started raising sheep. In those early years, he tried to drive us out by setting fire to our barns and tearing down our fences, poisoning our watering holes and pastures with saltpeter. But when he saw that we weren’t to be driven out, he eased up some on his cruel ways. After a time we thought he’d come to see the light of Our Lord, and had chosen to live with us in peace.”

Her gaze fell to her lap. She put a pleat in her apron with her fingers, then smoothed it out with her palm. “But then a year or so ago, he went and made up this boundary to go down the middle of the valley, like some sort of line you’d draw on a map, that he called a deadline, and he said to us: ‘If you cross it, bring your coffin along.’ ”

The outsider made a small sighing sound, as if he’d heard this story before. “But you didn’t believe him.”

“Oh, no, we believed him. But we were not leaving here, no matter how many lines Mr. Hunter drew. It’s not our way to seek confrontation with outsiders who wish to do us harm. But we can’t always avoid suffering for our faith in a hostile, sinful world. It has always been so with us.”

“ ‘Yea, for Thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.’ ”

“Why, you know the Bible, Mr. Cain!” she exclaimed. She was so pleased to discover this about him that she nearly smiled despite all the memories of Ben that were pressing like a pile of stones on her chest.

The outsider was gazing on the far mountains again, and his face had taken on his flat look. “A man can come to know the smell of a sweetgrass meadow,” he said. “He can know the feel of a prime horse between his legs, and the taste of a beautiful woman. He can come to know them, without ever once understanding them.”

She felt deflated. There was surely no knowing or understanding
him.
She thought that he probably really didn’t care much at all about how a Plain sheep farmer came to die. He was only listening to her out of politeness. Because if he wanted to take the sun on her porch, he figured he had to take her prattling, too. But she wasn’t going to betray Ben by leaving his story unfinished.

“About the time Mr. Hunter marked off those deadlines, he hired on this man he said was a stock inspector. He said his calves were disappearing quicker than he could slap a brand on them, and this inspector, he was to put a stop to it.” She tried for a scornful laugh, but what came out was a strangled sound. “Maybe that inspector should’ve had a talk with those Hunter cows, because they were always wandering uninvited onto our hay meadows. One morning last spring we woke up to find a bunch of them grazing right alongside our woollies. Ben rounded them up to drive them back home.”

It was her last memory of him, sitting astride their old draft horse, yipping and waving a lariat at the milling cattle that were churning up the mud in their yard. She’d teased him, told him he made a dashing cowboy. But he’d barely managed a smile for her. He’d been that aggravated over those Hunter cows.

“He was always quick to anger, was Ben, and just as quick to get over it. I suppose he did leave here that morning with the intention of giving Mr. Hunter a piece of his mind for allowing those strays to wander all over wherever they felt
like. And Ben was always hard to talk with when he had himself a mad on.”

She closed her eyes, but there weren’t any more tears inside her that she had to work to keep down. Only an emptiness that burned.

She was seeing her other memory of him, a remembrance of a Ben she’d never seen but only imagined over and over—a Ben who swung from a cottonwood tree, his big hands hanging limply at his sides, his long legs twisting slowly, the rawhide rope around his neck creaking as it bit into the wooden branch above his head. It had been April then. The branch would have just been sprouting the red buds of new leaves.

She opened her eyes and looked at the ragged pine-studded buttes that shielded the Hunter ranch, and a cottonwood tree she’d never seen except in her memories. “Doc Henry brought him back to me that afternoon. He was dead. They’d hung him for rustling those silly strays.”

“And may God be with him,” the outsider said, so softly she wondered if it was more his thought than his voice she’d heard. Maybe she’d only hoped he would say it.

She nodded and tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Her eyes were now so dry it hurt to blink. The emptiness inside her burned and burned.

She’d been looking at the buttes, but now she swung hard around to face him. “You know what Mr. Hunter said? That he was sorry.
Sorry.
He came with the sheriff out to the farm. First the sheriff explained how the mistake had happened, how a man’s got a right to try and protect his cows if he thinks they’re being rustled. Then Mr. Hunter said it was a terrible tragedy, and how sorry he was for it.”

“You don’t sound like you believe much of his explanation, or his apology.”

“Ben is still gone to me.”

The outsider was looking at his hand, where it rested on his thigh, looking at it hard as if he could see through flesh and skin all the way to the bones. “I reckon you’re right in that,” he said. “Dead is dead.”

No, she thought. Ben had left her, but he’d gone to God. The emptiness was there, but she would fill it. With Sundays full of hymnsongs that echoed off the barn rafters, and the uplifting cadence of the preaching, and the sharing of pots of bean soup with her neighbors and family afterward. With mornings full of tossing hay to the woolly monsters, and wetting down the cowlick in Benjo’s hair. With afternoons full of the smell of bread baking in the oven and the sound of the Montana wind gusting in the cottonwoods. And nights when she’d sit in her rocking chair and the music would come, bringing God to her on a tidal joy of sound. All the days and nights full of work and prayer and music. Full of the love of those left to her, and the slow and steady sureness of time passing.

“Death
is
a hurtful thing,” she said aloud, to the outsider and to herself, “but only to those left behind. The Bible says: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh,’ and in our sorrow it’s so easy to dwell only on the taking part, to forget all about the giving. But He does give us so much. He gives us the sheep who love the winter, and a day like this one that is so pretty and full of the promise of spring that you ache with the joy of it. He gave me the years I had with Ben, and He gave me our son.”

She spoke the words and she knew them to be true, and the thought behind them was true, and yet they didn’t fill the emptiness.

“I’ll kill them for you, if you want.”

“What?” The word came out as a tiny squeak. She turned sharply to look at him.

He sat there in her chair, so sprawled out and lazy he might have been asleep. But his voice was as cold as winter earth. “I’ll kill this Mr. Hunter of yours and his so-called stock inspector who hung your husband.”

He’d said it so easily:
I’ll kill them for you, if you want.
And God help her, but she could feel that burning emptiness, the need to make them pay for what they’d done to Ben.

“Killing is never justified,” she said, her voice shaking. “Vengeance belongs only to the Lord.” More true words that did nothing to fill the emptiness. Not like his words:
I’ll kill them for you, if you want.
In one shattering moment he’d let loose this terrible need inside her, the need to make them all pay. It was like his gun—black and ugly—this need of hers.

He pulled that gun out of its oiled holster, slowly, lovingly. “The Lord taketh, Mrs. Yoder . . . but so does this.” He pointed the revolver’s barrel into the sky, as if he intended to shoot at the jays who were always raiding her vegetable garden. But he was offering that gun to her. His gun and the deadly skill of the hand that held it.

She lurched to her feet, almost falling over the steps, so that she had to grab at the railing. “Don’t you say these terrible things!”

The outsider’s hat brim rose slightly as he peered at her from underneath it. She could see his eyes now, and they were flat and bleak.

“You keep away from me!” She shouted it, as if he’d gotten up from that chair and was stalking her. But he only followed her with his empty blue gaze.

“It was just an offer, because I figure I owe you for taking me in and tending to me like you’ve done. If you change your mind—”

“I won’t.” Just then the wind kicked up hard, slapping her skirts and rattling the tin eaves. The wind was cold again,
with no hint of spring at all. She wrapped her arms around herself, shuddering. “I won’t,” she said again.

She turned and walked away from him, out into the yard. She made herself walk slowly with her head up. She walked into the barn, all the way into the middle of it, and just stood with her arms hanging at her sides. She had no notion of why she had come there. Dust motes danced in the shaft of sunlight that shot through the open doorway. She breathed in the smell of animals and hay.

“I won’t,” she said, the words like a vow.