The Outsider (27 page)

As they waited in silence for the boy to come back, kneeling side by side, watching the ewe labor, Rachel was so very aware of him. Of the way those black suspenders cut his shirt into white diamonds lit by the moon, and the way his sharp cheekbone cast a deep shadow onto his beard-roughened cheek. Of the way his hand, like her own, rubbed and pulled through the wool of the sheep’s shuddering belly.

And her awareness of him made her aware of herself. Of the heaviness of her braid lying on her back. Of the way her breasts pushed up against the cotton of her shift, and her thighs rubbed together when she shifted her weight to bend closer to the ewe.

Benjo came running up so fast he stumbled and sprawled
onto his knees in front of her, nearly dumping the bucket of water in her lap. “M-Mem! Is she g-g-going to d-die?”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said, rolling up her sleeves. “I’ll try to save her and her baby both. But the Lord always knows what’s for the best.” She plunged her arms in the water, scrubbing hard with the soap. “So we must leave it all in His hands and strive for the patience and the courage to surrender to His will.”

The outsider made a small movement, and she thought he was going to say something, but then he didn’t. She thought he’d probably been about to say that the good Lord surely had more pressing business to attend to than the fate of an old gappy-mouthed ewe and her lamb.

“God is all-knowing, and all-loving,” she said, answering him as if he had spoken aloud. “A sparrow doesn’t fall from the sky without Him knowing of it.”
Even you, Johnny Cain.

She pushed her hand up inside the ewe’s hot womb. The lamb’s head was turned backward, and its other hind leg seemed to be bent up around it. The ewe stretched her neck forward and rolled her head as a fierce contraction shook her body. The squeezing muscles bore down hard, crushing Rachel’s hand between the lamb’s skull and the ewe’s pubic bone. The bruising pain was so intense tears started in her eyes.

When the contraction ended, Rachel pulled out her hand, slimy now with the ewe’s blood and the birth mucus. She tried to wipe the wetness off her cheek with her shoulder, but more tears followed, for she knew now that the ewe and her lamb would both surely die.

“The lamb’s head is twisted around all funny, and my hand’s too big. I can’t get it up in there far enough.”

“Let the boy try,” the outsider said.

Benjo reared back. “Nuh—nuh—nuh—!”

Rachel cupped her son’s face so that she could look into
his eyes. They’d gone big and round as cartwheels. “You don’t have to do it. I’ll not make you. But this poor old gappy-mouthed ewe, you are her only hope.”

Benjo pulled his head out of her hands to look at the outsider. The man’s face showed nothing—to Rachel, at least. But her son must have found what he was searching for, because he turned back to her and nodded solemnly.

“All right, then.” Rachel’s breath eased out in a sigh. She had smeared the ewe’s blood on the boy’s cheek and she used a gunnysack now to wipe it clean.

“The trick is going to be to get your fingers around the lamb’s nose and jaw and ease its head around until it’s pointed right.” She tucked a strand of his long shaggy hair behind his ear. “You can use a piece of the baling twine then, to help you, but you’re going to have to stay with it, to stay with the head and pull the baby out. And Benjo . . .”

She gripped his hand, his small boy’s hand that she was asking to do a man’s job. She could feel a fine trembling going on inside him. “Benjo, the ewe’s belly is going to be trying to squeeze out her baby, and when that happens she’s going to squeeze your hand, too.”

“Wuh—will it h-hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Luh—luh—lots?”

“Probably. Yes.”

“He can do it.” The outsider clasped her boy’s shoulder, giving it a rough shake, the kind of touch men gave one another. The kind of touch a man gave his son. And he smiled—the first all-out, genuine smile she’d seen from him. It was as bright and dazzling as hot sunshine.

Her boy tried for a brave smile himself, but his mouth only trembled a little.

Benjo had to lie flat on his belly to push his hand and
arm up inside the ewe. With every one of the ewe’s contractions, he screamed aloud. Tears ran down his cheeks, leaving white streaks through the straw dust and grime, but he never once let go, and Rachel had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep him from hearing her sobs.

Each time the ewe labored, the lamb came down only an inch or two. Then, finally, she gave a mighty heave and the lamb slid, bloody and sticky, out into the straw.

Rachel knelt unmoving, with her hand pressed hard against her mouth. But the outsider was right there to cradle the lamb. His fingers tore away the membrane from the tiny black nose. “Breathe, damn you, breathe, you little bastard.” He was chanting the profane words like a prayer. “Breathe, breathe, breathe.”

The lamb wasn’t breathing.

Rachel grabbed the yellow bag of bones from him by the rear hocks. She stood up and swung it hard in a full and violent circle through the air. Once. Twice.

The lamb let out a loud, indignant
baa!

Laughing, Rachel collapsed back into the straw, cuddling the bawling lamb in her lap.

Through it all, Benjo had been choking over hysterical words, while the outsider had stared at her, wearing a wide-eyed look of pure wonderment. Now as she sat hugging and rocking the bleating lamb, she laughed just to see him like that. Then he let his own laughter go.

“I thought you were going to . . .” he sputtered. “Lordy, I don’t know what I thought—the way you were swinging that poor lamb like a lasso.” His laughter wound down and then came back again. He shook his head. “If you aren’t the damnedest woman I’ve ever seen.”

“No, no,” Rachel said. “That’s how it’s done, truly. It’s supposed to help them start breathing.”

“Helps to scare the breath right
out
of them, I would’ve thought.”

Her boy had been laughing as well. But now he gripped her arm. “M-Mem? Wuh—wuh—wuh . . .”

She touched his tear-streaked face. “He’ll live, our Benjo. He’ll live.” She laid the lamb gently back into the straw, then pushed a burlap sack into the outsider’s hands. “Here, rub him down with this, Mr. Cain. Or you can go on ahead and use your tongue, if you like. Then you can lay full claim to the title of ‘lamb licker.’ ”

That dazzling smile blazed across his face again. “Lady, you sure don’t cut a man any slack, do you? I’ve a mind to . . .”

She was so caught up in his smile that it took her a moment to realize his voice had trailed off. The whole world suddenly seemed to have fallen silent, and in the next instant she saw what he had just noticed: that the ewe was lying too quietly. It was hardly to be expected that she would bounce right up after such a hard delivery, but still . . .

Rachel pressed her hand to the ewe’s brisket. It rose once and then subsided, softly, gently. She looked down into those quiet, all-knowing eyes in time to see the life fade out of them.

The outsider came up onto his haunches, shifting his weight so that the ewe was shielded from Benjo’s sight. His gaze met hers and then, together, they looked at the boy. Benjo had taken up the burlap sack himself and he was absorbed with wiping the lamb clean. His face glowed bright as a lighthouse beam, with joy and pride over what he had done.

“Hey there, partner,” the outsider said, as he gripped the boy by the back of the neck and gave him another of those rough manly shakes. “Come along and help me to carry this youngster of yours into the shed and out of the cold.”

Rachel watched them go. Once, Benjo started to look
back, but the outsider said something, snagging his attention. She knew he would find out soon enough about the ewe’s death, but she couldn’t bear for him to be told of it just yet.

When Benjo was out of sight inside the shed, she turned back to the ewe. That old gappy-mouthed ewe—she should have been culled from the band last fall, but she’d always been such a good mother. Such a sweet, gentle mother.

Tears came again, stinging Rachel’s eyes. She threaded her fingers through the tight curly wool between the ewe’s ears. She leaned over and kissed her bony nose.

“Good-bye, old dear.”

RACHEL STOOD IN THE
middle of the corral. The drop band was quiet now, the only sound coming from the low-burning lanterns that hissed and guttered. Beyond the fence, the night was just beginning to soften into dawn.

She sighed and stretched, feeling loose-jointed with weariness. She had just checked on all the expectant ewes; there would be a respite of several hours before the next flurry of birthings. Her arms ached from carrying so many lambs into the sheds, for tiny as they were, they could still feel heavy when dangling off the end of a long hook.

Her chest ached, too, with the mixture of joy and pain that always came with spring and the lambing time.

She drew in a deep breath of air sweet with the smell of warm ewe’s milk. From inside the sheds she could hear the soft
buuuuh
of ewes crying to their babies, and the tiny lambs answering
maaaaa.
The ewes would be settling down to sleep. The new lambs would stretch out across their mothers’ front legs, and the ewes would rest their chins on their babies’ heads. It was a sight that never failed to pull at Rachel’s heart.

A creaking noise broke her reverie, and Rachel turned.

Benjo emerged from between the shed’s crossbuck doors. He carried a green willow stick, upon which he was adding another notch with a whittling knife. He hadn’t cried when she’d told him of the old gappy-mouthed ewe’s death. He’d cinched his mouth together and tugged his hat low over his eyes, but he hadn’t cried.

“What’s the tally, then?” she said to him now, smiling.

Grinning back at her, the boy made a show of counting the notches he’d made in the stick, slowly and carefully. “Tuh—twelve!” he announced.

“Eleven.”

The outsider stepped out of the sheds. He had his own hat pulled low to shade his eyes against a sun that wouldn’t be up for an hour yet. His mouth was set tight. He carried one of the newborn lambs cradled in his good arm, as gently and tenderly as if it were made of spun glass, but the lamb was dead.

“I went to check—the little fella was so hungry before, and I wanted to make sure that flighty mother of his had gotten the hang of feeding him. She’d gone to sleep. I reckon she didn’t know any better, but she laid right down on her baby and smothered it with her wool.”

The outsider turned away from them and headed for the bone pile. He laid the tiny carcass down next to the other ones, arranging its head and tiny legs so that it seemed only to be sleeping. In the first days of its life, a lamb’s wool felt more like the matted nap of a worn-out old rug. But Johnny Cain stroked that flighty ewe’s dead baby as if he were touching the softest thing on earth.

RACHEL CUDDLED THE BUM LAMB
to her chest as she tipped the pap bottle’s black nipple into the gaping, pouching
mouth. “Drink up, little one, drink up,” she crooned, tickling him under his little yellow tail to stimulate the suckling instinct. Through the kitchen window she could see the sun casting its first long light onto the land, reddening the bluffs and etching the cottonwood branches into a pale sky.

She sat on the floor in front of the cookstove, two cracker boxes filled with straw flanking her. She had two bums to care for after this first night of the lambing season. The lamb she fed was a twin whose mother had only enough milk to nurse one. And snug in one of the cracker boxes slept the old gappy-mouthed ewe’s orphaned baby.

The door to Benjo’s room opened, and she looked up. The outsider stood there obscured in shadow. Then he stepped into the kitchen, shutting the door behind him with a soft click.

“That’s one tired boy you have,” he said. “He and that ol’ dog of his both went out the moment their heads hit the pillow.”

The morning sun, pouring now through the window, caught him full on the face. You looked into that face, Rachel thought, and you longed to possess all its secrets. If the Devil walked the earth, he would have such a face, for what better way to seduce than with sublime mystery.