The Outsider (21 page)

J
OHNNY CAIN STILL SAT
at her table, his hand on his gun. Its long smooth barrel gleamed black and heavy against the brown oilcloth. By comparison his hand looked pale and ephemeral, almost beautiful. Deadly beautiful, Rachel thought. Yes, that was what his hand was to her—a thing that was horrible in its beauty, because it was an instrument of death.

Johnny Cain was looking down—at his hand, at the gun. But she could read nothing in the look of him. She didn’t
know if he felt the horror of what he saw, or if he felt nothing at all.

Rachel took the coal oil lantern down from its ceiling hook to light it against the coming dark. The scrape of the match sounded unnaturally loud in the still kitchen. She nearly dropped the chimney when she went to put it back on its base, and glass rang against copper, loud as a church bell.

Slowly he lifted his head. His eyes gleamed in the murky light, but there was no warmth there.

He had such a remarkable face, a truly breath-catching face. A face, she thought, that made you long to open its secrets. But maybe there were no secrets. Maybe there was simply Johnny Cain, man-killer.

He smiled, a smile with a hint of ruthlessness in it. “I’ve been telling you I’m the Devil,” he said, “and you’ve been trying to argue me out of the notion. Now you’re looking at me like you expect me to sprout horns and a pair of cloven hooves with my next breath.”

“I know you are not the Devil, Mr. Cain.”

He gave a hard, short laugh. He stood up, slowly this time, and pushed his revolver back into its oiled leather holster. “But you’re still going to ask me to leave. Soon as you can think of a gentle way to do it.”

He brushed past her, making for the door, as if he had it in his mind to leave that very moment. She went after him, although she didn’t really know if she meant to stop him or see him on his way.

She nearly stumbled up the back of his boots when he halted, his hand on the jamb. “But what if there are others out there,” she said, “waiting up in the buttes, waiting for you down the road, in the next town, behind the next rock?”

He kept his back to her. “There ain’t no what-if about it.
They’re out there waiting, all right. And I’ll kill them for it, just like I did the Calder boys.”

“You could put your gun away. Refuse to fight.”

He studied his hand, pressed flat on the rough wood. He stretched his long fingers out wide, so wide the veins and bones of his hand pushed hard against the pale skin. “Turn the other cheek.”

“Yes.”

He spun around abruptly, facing her. “God, Rachel, what do you think’ll happen then? You think some bastard hell-bent on taking on my rep is gonna come up and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me, Johnny Cain, but I happen to notice you’re not wearing your gun today, and I was sort of wondering if maybe you wouldn’t mind strapping it on before I go ahead and shoot you in the back.’ ”

“But it’s all so unfair! You shouldn’t have to . . . have to
live
like that.”
To die like that.

He exhaled a laugh, flat and aching. He leaned back against the door as if he suddenly had no more strength to stand. “There’s only the quick and the dead. You ever heard that said? Well, I reckon now you know what it means.”

He stared at her, his head lifted, his gaze open and unwavering. And she saw the horror that lived deep within the wasteland of his eyes.

His hand came up, and she thought he was going to touch her mouth like he’d done before. But instead he let the hand drop.

“You make it easy for a man to take advantage of you. To hurt you.”

“Would you hurt me, Johnny Cain?”

He said nothing, but he did touch her this time. He ran his fingers lightly, lightly down her throat, and her skin burned as if stung by nettles. He knows he’s going to hurt
me, she thought; he’s sorry for it, but he’s going to do it anyway.

He pushed himself off the door. He grabbed the latch, jerking it open with such force the hinges squealed. “I think I’ll go on down to the paddock and take a look at the sheep.”

She followed him out onto the porch, but no further. The chinook had scoured most of the snow off the ground, and the dead grass showed through. She felt scoured herself, washed clean to the bone.

She watched him walk slowly across her yard and she thought that he moved like what he was, a man sorely hurt.

She hadn’t asked him to leave. He hadn’t said he would stay.

She knew that anyone with a purpose could find him here on a Plain farm, same as anywhere else. And he knew that, too. She understood what the risks were for herself and for her son, and so did he. She thought that she was probably the only one, though, who was trusting in the Lord to take care of them all.

She saw Benjo come shuffling out from behind the lambing sheds, with MacDuff at his heels. The outsider saw them as well, and stopped. He said something that caused Benjo to shrug and plow the toe of his brogan through the mud. The dog trotted up to the man, and he stooped to ruffle its ears. After a moment the boy joined them. The three of them went to the paddock fence. The outsider put his boot on the lower rail and hung his left thumb off his back pocket. Benjo put his brogan on the rail, but he had no back pockets and so he simply rested his hand on his rump, which made him look a little silly and had Rachel smiling through a sudden prickle of tears.

She could tell by the way his head was jerking that her son was spouting his questions again. From time to time the
outsider would look the boy’s way, and she wondered if he was answering.

The moon was coming up full over the sloped roof of the barn, competing with the last glimmer of light from the dying sun, as the day gave way to night. Time passed. But no longer slow or sweet or sure for Rachel Yoder. She felt as if she were rushing headlong over a cliff, believing she could fly when she had no wings.

He’d called her Rachel. He probably hadn’t even heard her name coming out of his mouth. But she had heard.

WHEN THEY CAME BACK INSIDE,
the outsider went right to bed. She was sweeping up the cornmeal crumbs and the beans she’d spilled earlier, and he passed by without even looking at her. He said, “Good night, Mrs. Yoder.”

The next morning she was rattling a fresh stick of wood into the cookstove, punching at the coals with it, when the door to the yard opened and she heard his step behind her.

She straightened and turned, her face flushed from the heat of the fire, to see that he carried a zinc bucket brimming with foamy milk.

“Why, you’ve done the milking,” she said. She was surprised he even knew how to do such a thing as milk a cow. “And you managed it one-handed.”

“Yeah, well, it sure wasn’t easy. That brown bossy kept trying to kick the holy . . . dickens outta me.”

She took the bucket from his hand and set it on the slop stone. He smelled of hay, and of the crisp morning air.

“That brown bossy’s Annabell,” Rachel said. “She has real sensitive teats. You need to use gentle hands on her. Ben used to say you got to squeeze her sweetly and slowly, like a man courting a skittish woman. . . .” She turned quickly back
to the stove, flushing. She used the poker to wrestle the lid back into place, making a loud clatter.

“I’ll have to remember that,” he said, “if I’m going to be doing the milking while I’m here.”

She swung around to look at him. She felt herself smile. She thought it was probably a very wide and foolish smile, and yet she couldn’t seem to help it. “I’ll make you into a lamb licker yet,” she said.

“Now as to that, I’m kind of taking on a wait-and-see attitude. Wait until I figure out for sure what the heck that is, and then see if I can stomach it.”

She laughed as she put a pan on the fire and began to stir up the batter for flapjacks.

He went to look out the window. “I was thinking maybe if you had a soogan,” he said, “or some such thing handy, I could roll it out come nighttime and bed down in the barn.”

“There’s a sheepwagon parked out back of the lambing sheds. A herder’s wagon. You could sleep there. My husband used to drive it up into the hills when it was his turn at the summer pasturing. It’s all fixed up with a bunk, even a cookstove. A sheepwagon’s a sight more comfortable than a barn.”

He made a grunting noise that she took to mean he would be pleased to have the herder’s wagon to sleep in.

She busied herself some more with the flapjack batter, whipping the wooden spoon through it. Beating out all the air, she thought; they’ll likely be heavy as stones now. “Benjo sure will be grateful to hear you’ve done the milking for him. He’d laze away the whole morning in bed if I let him. Especially on a school day.”

This time the outsider didn’t so much as grunt a response.

“There’s coffee fresh brewed,” she said.

He turned from the window, but he didn’t go for the pot. “What we talked about yesterday,” he said, “about that trouble waitin’ on down the road for me. I’ll have a care that you and the boy don’t get involved.”

“Life is to be lived as it comes, Mr. Cain.” She spooned a dollop of flapjack batter onto the hot fry pan. “Bad things happen, like floods and pestilence, and good things like babies being born and the wildflowers coming back to bloom every spring. They are not in our power to control. We can only put ourselves in God’s hands.”

“Lady, when are you ever goin’ to figure it out that your God don’t give a damn about me? He never has.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” She slammed the spoon back into the bowl so hard the batter splattered. She spun around to him. “You sound just like Benjo come Saturday mornings, when I make him take his bath and he whimpers on and on in just that poor-me, little-boy way. On and on about how if I really loved him I wouldn’t be so awful mean to him, feeling sorry for himself, making excuses—”

His head rocked back a little, as if he’d just been slapped.

“Mr. Cain . . .”

“I noticed there was some tack out in your barn needs soaping,” he said. He snatched off his hat, then slammed it back down again. “Reckon I’ll get at it.”

His boots rapped across the bare pine floorboards. He jerked open the door.

“Mr. Cain? Do you like shoofly pie?”

He kept his hand on the latch, though he did turn to look at her. The cold morning air blew in, stirring up the rich smell of fresh warm milk. “I don’t know as how I’ve ever had any,” he said.

“It’s what I make for Benjo come Saturday nights, if he’s been a real good boy about taking his bath.”

A quiet spun out between them. And then she saw the brackets around his mouth deepen just a bit. “You make that poor boy take a bath
every
Saturday? Lord-a-mercy, no wonder he questions your affections.”

BENJO YODER WASN’T THINKING
about baths as he walked later that morning through the jack pines and tamaracks that draped the lower slopes of Tobacco Reef. He was thinking that maybe he was almost as good at reading trail sign as any Indian scout ever was.

He squatted on his haunches to study the black droppings that lay scattered like lumps of coal over the pine straw. A bear had crossed over this deer trail not too long back, he thought. He pushed at one of the turds with his finger, rolling it over. It was still plenty fresh. Yes sirree he thought, a bear had sure enough passed this way, maybe as recently as this morning.

He looked up, squinting against the sunlight that splashed through the pine boughs. The trees were thick here but they thinned out further on up the slope of this butte, and there were plenty of caves in the rocks up there for a bear to snooze away the winter. It was just this time of year that bears first stuck their noses out their winter beds to get a whiff of spring—

The brush crackled behind him.

Benjo whirled, his fingers scrabbling for his sling. Ears straining, he stared hard at the tangled thicket of kinnikinnick bushes.

A breeze came up, stirring the leaves on the bushes and trees, rustling, whispering, crackling . . .

He let out a shaky breath. It was only the wind.

He sure hadn’t wanted to meet up with any bear. He
had no illusions that he could take down a grizzly, or even a black bear, with his sling—no matter what David was supposed to have done to Goliath. Just like he knew he really wasn’t any Indian scout.