The Outsider (2 page)

Just then Benjo stopped flapping his arms at the sheep and stood still. His head was up and slightly tilted, his gaze focused on the distance, and something about him in that moment pierced Rachel’s heart. Poised still and alert beneath the cottonwoods, he suddenly seemed his father in every way.

She stepped up to the window, the pan of sizzling mush forgotten in her hand. Her breath fogged the glass and she had to wipe it clear. That was when she saw him, too, the stranger walking across their wild hay meadow. An outsider, wearing a long black duster and a black hat. Headed toward them.

There wasn’t anything particularly threatening about him, yet her fingers gripped tight the handle of the fry pan. A gust of wind rattled the windowpanes, and she shivered.

HE WALKED IN A
lolling, floppy kind of way, like a whiskified man whose legs were no longer on speaking terms with his head. No one ever walked in these parts. It was too empty a place for a body to go anywhere without a buggy or a horse. And a man on foot, so most of the outsiders believed, was no man at all.

Rachel left the warmth of the house and met Benjo in the yard. They both watched the stranger come, making his slow, staggering way right at them. “Maybe he’s a drummer whose wagon has broken down,” she said. MacDuff, still guarding the sheep beneath the cottonwoods, stood stiff-legged, a growl rumbling deep in his throat. “Or maybe he’s a cowhand whose pony’s pulled up lame.”

The snow in the meadow had been blown into waves by the winter wind and frozen over and over by winter days and nights. Although the wind was blowing shrill now, she could hear the crunch of his boots as they broke through the ice crust.

He stumbled onto one knee. The wind caught his black duster, making it billow so that he looked like a crow, wings spread for flight, silhouetted against a pewter sky. He
lurched to his feet again, and left a streak of bright wet red on the waxy yellow of the old snow.

“He’s huh—huh—huh—!” Benjo cried, but Rachel had already lifted her skirts and was running.

The stranger’s foot caught in a crest of ice and he went sprawling, and this time he didn’t get back up. Rachel fell to her knees beside him so abruptly that Benjo, following at her heels, almost ran into her. Blood seeped into the snow in a spreading circle around them.

She laid a hand on the stranger’s shoulder. The man recoiled at her touch, rearing onto his knees and flinging up his head. She saw utter terror well in his eyes before they fluttered closed and he slid again to the ground in a heap of black cloth and red blood.

The pool of blood had grown larger. The whole lower half of his black linen duster was wet and shiny with it. Bright red footprints led from the meadow back into the stand of pines from where he had come.

“Benjo,” she said, her voice croaking. The boy jerked and took a step back. “Benjo, you must ride into town and fetch Doctor Henry.”

“Nuh—nuh—nuh—!”

She turned on her knees and reached up to grasp the boy by the shoulders. “Benjo . . .”

His eyes were wild, and he swung his head back and forth, hard. “Cuh—cuh—cuh—”

She gave him a little shake. “Yes, you can. He knows you, so you won’t need to talk. You can write it down for him.”

Benjo’s wide gray eyes stared back at her, his face skewed up with fear. It was always an ordeal for a boy with his Plain dress and his Plain ways to go into town, to go among the outsiders. Most often they merely stared and whispered
behind their hands, but sometimes they were cruel. To a skinny Plain boy who choked on his words, they were almost always cruel.

She gripped him by the neck, nearly knocking off his hat. “Benjo, you
must.
The man is dying.” She spun him around and pushed him toward the yard. “Go on, now. Go!”

The man
was
dying. She couldn’t imagine why he wasn’t already dead, with the blood he had lost, was still losing. She needed to get him into the house. Out of the cold wind and off the icy ground where he would die surely, and soon.

She tried to lift him and couldn’t. She grasped him by the arms and dragged him, then saw the river of fresh red blood pour out from beneath him, and stopped.

She heard the suck and plop of hooves in mud and looked over her shoulder. Benjo had just come out of the barn, riding their old draft horse bareback. He stared at her a moment, then nudged the mare’s rounded sides with his heels and slapped her on the rump with his hat. The horse snorted and broke into a trot, clattering over the corduroy bridge that spanned the creek and heading up the road to town, following the wagon wheel tracks left in the snow.

Rachel scooped up a handful of snow and rubbed it in the stranger’s still, white face. He groaned and stirred. She slapped him on the cheek hard, then slapped him again harder. “Wake up, you. Wake up!”

He woke up, partly. Enough to push himself half onto his knees again. She saw that his right arm was broken, and bound up roughly in a sling made from a man’s black silk neckcloth.

She laid his other arm over her shoulder and grasped him around the waist, and somehow got him onto his feet. “We’re going to walk to the house now,” she said, though
she doubted he heard her. The wind blew hard, buffeting them. His breath came in ragged gasps.

They crunched through the crusty snow, wrapped up arm in arm, so close his beard-roughened cheek scraped hers and his hair whipped at her eyes. The butt of the rifle he carried in a saddle scabbard over his shoulder kept banging her on the head. The revolver holstered at his hip gouged her in the side. Her nostrils were choked with the smell of him, the smell of his blood.

SHE MANAGED TO JERK
the quilt off her bed before they fell into it, still locked together in their strange embrace. She stiffened, rigid beneath his weight, terrified that he had just died on her, that she was lying beneath a dead man. She bucked and heaved against his chest, and flung him onto his back. A bright red stain had already begun to spread on her muslin sheets.

If he was still bleeding so, he wasn’t dead yet. His face was a gravestone white, though, his eyes closed and sunk deep in their sockets. Livid welts marked his cheek where she had slapped him.

He lay awkwardly on the rifle scabbard, and she had to struggle against his weight to pull it out from beneath him. She spread open his blood-wet duster. His worldly clothes, once dandy fine, were now so blood-soaked she had to spend precious seconds trying to discover where he was hurt. She ripped open his bloody vest and shirt.

He had a bullet hole in his left side.

The hole was small and black and pulsed blood with his breathing. She made a thick pad out of a huck towel and pressed it to the wound, leaning against it hard with the heels of her hands. She did this until her arms began to
tremble with exhaustion. But when she lifted the pad she saw that, while the bleeding might have slowed some, it hadn’t stopped.

She ran from the room, banged out the door and into the yard. The wind whipped her skirts and slapped the strings of her prayer cap against her neck. She frightened the chickens that scratched in the straw by the barn, scattering them in a squawking cloud of flapping wings and molting feathers. She pulled open the barn door and was struck in the face with the pungent smells of cow and chicken and sheep, sheep, sheep. Smells that were so much a part of her life that she seldom noticed them. But this time nausea rose in her throat and she coughed, retching.

It was the blood. He’d been covered with so much blood. She squeezed her eyes shut and all she saw was blood.

She gathered up all the cobwebs she could find, thinking that if Ben were alive there wouldn’t have been so many. She wanted Ben alive, to take care of the man who was dying in their bed.

She brought the sticky cobwebs back to the house cradled in her apron where the wind couldn’t snatch them away. She was almost afraid to go into the bedroom, sure that he’d have died while she was gone. But he hadn’t. He lay in a dreadful stillness, though, and his blood now dripped onto the bare pine floor.

She poured turpentine into the bullet hole. He jerked at the sting of it, the skin of his belly shuddering, but he didn’t waken. She laid the webs over the wound and packed it with a clean compress, then backed away from the bed, and kept backing away until her legs nudged the seat of her rocking chair. She sat down slowly, her blood-stained hands lying palms-up in her lap. She shut her eyes, saw blood, and wrenched them open.

She lifted her head and for the first time really looked at the face of the outsider who lay on her bed.

He was young, no older than twenty-five, surely. His hair was the brown-black of fresh plowed earth, his skin milk pale, although that could have been from the loss of so much blood. He had arresting looks: high sculptured cheekbones, long narrow nose, wide-spaced eyes with thick, long lashes. She couldn’t remember the color of those eyes, only the pure and utter terror that had flooded them when she first touched him.

It was
Mutter
Anna Mary who had the healing touch. From her father’s grandmother Rachel had learned the healing lore, but the touch—that was a gift from God and so far He had not seen fit to give it to her. Her great-grandmother said the healing touch came simply of faith. Of opening one’s soul to the power of faith the way a sunflower unfurls its petals to the warmth and the light.

Rachel stood slowly and went back to the bed. She laid her hands on him the way she’d so often seen her great-grandmother do. She closed her eyes and imagined her soul opening like a flower, petals unfolding one by one, reaching, reaching, reaching for the sun.

His chest moved beneath her hands, a ragged rise and fall. She thought she could hear the rush and suck of his heart beating. Beating and beating, louder and louder, and she tried to imagine the life passing from her fingers, like a river pouring into the ocean, until she became part of the rush and suck of his heart.

But when she opened her eyes and looked down at his face, she saw the blue lips and pinched skin of coming death.

“COME ALONG THERE, YOU.
Open up.”

Rachel pushed the rubber nipple between the outsider’s lips and tilted the kidney-shaped nursing bottle so that the milk would flow more easily down the feeding tube and into his mouth. “That’s it, that’s it,” she crooned. “Suckle now, suckle it all down like a good little
Bobbli
—”

She looked over her shoulder as if she’d just been caught doing something foolish. Judas, what was she thinking of, to speak such outlandish words, and to an outsider, no less? And she couldn’t imagine what had prompted her to do such a thing anyway, to try to feed him from a pap bottle as if he were a bum lamb.

Only it seemed she would have to do something to replace all the blood he’d lost or he would surely die. And she’d saved many an orphaned lamb in just this way, by feeding it a mixture of milk, water, and molasses from a nursing bottle.

She was having as little success getting the outsider to cooperate, though, as she sometimes did with the bum lambs. Most of the milk leaked out the corners of his mouth and dribbled down his chin.