The Outsider (28 page)

He came toward her, padding across the floor in his stocking feet. They’d all had to leave their shoes on the porch, filthy as they were with the muck of the lambing sheds. He squatted on his haunches in front of the cookstove, his face turned away from her.

“Your boy did you proud tonight.”

“I’d be busting my buttons, if I had any,” she said. She tried to smile, but her mouth couldn’t manage it. She was more afraid of Johnny Cain in this moment than she had ever been. If the Devil walked the earth . . .

She watched him as he shook down the ashes in the stove, adding more wood. Watched the way his long fingers curled around a piece of splintery kindling, the way the bones and veins of his hand stood out against the pale skin. His hands fascinated her—perhaps because every time she saw them, she couldn’t help thinking of all the violent, terrible things those hands had done.

He turned gracefully on the balls of his feet to sit Indian fashion across from her, their knees almost touching. She looked away from him, toward the window that now framed a morning sky of dazzling blue. The new wood settled into the fire with a pop and a hiss.

The lamb had slowed in its suckling. Milk dribbled from the abandoned nipple into Rachel’s lap. The lamb’s tummy, round and warm and replete, pressed into her own belly.

There were so many things she could say to the outsider in this moment. She chose what seemed the easiest, the safest.

“He’s different around you, Benjo is. I think he wants to show more of what he is, of what he can be, when he’s with you.” She settled the sleeping lamb into the empty cracker box. “Those aren’t the sort of feelings I’m very good at inspiring, making him feel like a man.”

His unsettling eyes stared at her across the small space that separated them. His voice, when he spoke, was clotted and rough. “You’re good at it.”

And then time slowed and slowed and . . . stopped, as his hand came up. His fingers caressed her neck as they followed the length of her thick, loosely woven braid, down over her shoulder, down where the feathery, wispy ends of it curled around her breast. Dreamily, she realized he was loosening it further. He was loosening and unraveling her hair.

His mouth was so hard, so hard. But his fingers combing
through her hair were gentle. She felt a strange seizing, deep in her heart—as if it, like the whole rest of the world, had ceased beating.

“Rachel,” he said, though it was more of a sigh, an easing of the breaths they’d both been holding.

He had her hair undone now, he had all of her undone. Strands of it caught on his callused fingers, clinging. He brushed his knuckles along her jaw, so lightly it was as if he’d only thought about touching her. “Rachel,” he said again, so soft it was as if he’d only thought her name.

But she heard in his whisper, she saw on his face, echoes of the same longings that cried inside her. She wanted to touch the hard edges of his mouth. She wanted to touch his mouth with her own.

One of the lambs let out a loud, indignant blat. They both started, jerking away from each other.

His hand, that a moment before had so briefly touched her face, fell gently to the cracker box and was now fondling the lamb, the old gappy-mouthed ewe’s baby. She thought of that hand, of what it had done and what it could do. Of what a terrible, terrifying, tender man he was.

The lamb bumped the outsider’s hand with its head, thinking the rough, scarred palm was its mother’s udder bag. “That poor little bum, I guess he woke up hungry,” Rachel said, shocked at how hard it was to get the words out her tight throat.

He picked the lamb up, one-handed, by the scruff of the neck. She’d never seen anyone do that before. “You’d better go on and get some sleep yourself,” he said. He pried the pap bottle from her stiff fingers. “I’ll take care of this one.”

He didn’t sound as if he was having any trouble at all getting his words out. Whatever she’d seen in his face, it might never have existed. He could do it so easily, empty
his face of all thought, all feelings, until it looked made of stone.

“Go on to bed,” he said again, for she hadn’t moved.

She wanted to stay with him, talk with him more, have him touch her again. And she wanted to touch him.

Instead she pushed herself to her feet and walked away from him on legs as unsteady as any newborn lamb’s. At the door to her bedroom, she turned and looked back.

He had the old gappy-mouthed ewe’s baby cradled in his strong left arm, nestled against his chest, and the bum lamb was suckling hard on the pap bottle, its little tail flopping up and down. The man’s eyes, his smile, his touch were all for the lamb.

“Johnny,” she said. But softly, so that only she would hear.

O
H, YOU POOR THING.
Whoever’s tied you up like this?”

Rachel knelt in the damp grass and began to pick at the knots in the wet rawhide rope. MacDuff welcomed her with a whimper and a heavy thump of his tail. He lay with his ears drooping and his nose buried between his paws. One end of the rope was tied around his neck, the other around one of the corral posts.

As Rachel’s fingers worked to loosen the knots, her eyes searched the creek bank and hay meadows for Benjo. She saw sheep, of course, and a beaver sitting next to a chewed
log, combing its fur with its toenails. She saw a pair of red-winged blackbirds trilling in the willows. But no boy.

She couldn’t imagine where Benjo was off to so early on a preaching day, what he was doing that he didn’t want MacDuff along with him. He took that dog with him everywhere, sometimes even to school, and never mind that a herding collie’s main purpose in life was to be following after sheep and not Benjo Yoder.

Rachel stood, wrapping the rope around her bent arm in a cowboy’s coil. MacDuff didn’t seem to care that he was free. He buried his nose deeper between his paws and looked up at her with sad eyes. Rachel thought of what had happened to Benjo the last time he’d strayed too far from home, and she could actually taste the fear in her mouth.

Suddenly MacDuff lurched to his feet with a joyful bark and took off for the woods that separated their farm from the Weaver place. Benjo burst out of the yellow pines and tamaracks, running so hard he was throwing up pine straw in his wake. Rachel’s legs went weak with relief.

The boy saw MacDuff and jerked to a stop. His head whipped around toward the corral. His shoulders sagged when he saw her. She could almost hear the sigh he let out as he turned reluctant feet in her direction. He came slowly, his gaze on the ground. MacDuff pranced along beside him, beating the boy’s coat with his tail.

“What’ve you been doing?” she said as he shuffled up to her, her voice sharp-edged with the residue of fear. He was sweaty and out of breath, as if he’d been running not only hard but for a long way. His broadfalls were soaked to the knees and splattered with mud. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Joseph Benjamin Yoder, I’ve asked you a question, and now I’ll thank you for the answer to it.”

His face paled and then turned pink as a spring strawberry. “Nuh—nuh—nuh . . . thing!”

“And just what sort of ‘nothing’ was it that you didn’t want MacDuff along with you?”

He pursed his lips, shrugging. He dug a trench in the mud with the heel of his brogan—a brogan she’d put fresh blacking on just last night. She was about to scold him for it when she saw the blood beneath the nails and in the creases of his hand.

“You haven’t been killing rabbits with that sling of yours just for the sport of it, have you?”

His face changed hue again, paling. He shook his head, but his eyes looked guilty.

She gave him a little push in the direction of the yard pump. “Go wash up, then. Go on. We don’t want to be late for the preaching, today of all days. . . .”

She let her voice trail off, for by now he and that dog of his were already halfway to the pump, both of them running with the carefree gait of sinners freshly shriven. She stared after them, frowning. Her boy was doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing and he was lying about it as well. She wanted to shake him until the truth rattled out of him. She also wanted to tie him up to a corral post with a rope, keep him home, keep him safe.

“Oh, Benjo.” His name came out of her on a sighing breath.

Squaring her shoulders, she turned back to the corral and lifted her black bonnet from the fence post where she’d set it before freeing MacDuff. She pulled the bonnet on her head over her prayer cap, and tied the wide black ribbon beneath her chin, tilting her head back to stare up into the soft and hazy sky of a Montana spring.

She loved this time of year, when the earth seemed to
be warming up from within, erupting into a rainbow glory of color. The willow trees were swelling with brilliant red buds. Blossoms of phlox pillowed the ground, pink and sweet. And high on the slopes of the buttes, the sage at last was turning from the steel gray stalks of winter to a soft feathery green.

Rachel laughed as, out in the pasture, a lamb awoke with a start and jumped stiff-legged like a grasshopper into the air. When he lit, he butted heads with another young male, spooking the whole flock.

A horse’s loud, nose-clearing snort cut across her laughter, and she turned, smiling wide. The outsider had led their old draft mare from the barn and stood now in the yard, his hand wrapped around the harness reins, looking at her.

Rachel felt a shiver of precognition, as if this moment would someday prove to be more important, sharper, truer than other moments. But perhaps it was only that the sun had just then lifted full above the hazy horizon to brighten the world, and a breeze had come up to blow soft and sweet against her face.

“Isn’t this the most glorious day?” she said as she came up to him. “It’s as if the whole world has gotten caught up in God’s smile.”

He turned away from her and began backing the horse between the shafts of her small buckboard, letting her words and her smile hang suspended in the air, until they both began to fade.

“What’s put you in such a fine mood this morning?” he finally said.

He was having trouble fastening the traces to the swingletree, for although he’d discarded the sling some days ago, Doc Henry hadn’t removed the surgeon’s plaster
from his arm as yet. She leaned over to help him with the harnessing, their shoulders brushing. He smelled good, of laurel soap and coffee.

“I’m that pleased you’re coming to the preaching with us, Mr. Cain.”

“Yeah, well, I’m thinking you ought to hold off on being pleased until we see how it goes.”

It had been two months since he had come into their lives, and nearly a month since that first sweet night of the lambing season. In that time the last traces of winter had run off into the creeks and coulees, the days had grown longer, and the land was greening. During that time, every other Sunday, as was the Plain way, they had all gathered to worship the Lord. But not the outsider. Then last night, while they were feeding the newest bum lambs in front of the stove, she had said to him, “Come with us to the preaching tomorrow.”

And he had said, not surprised, indeed almost smiling, “Why?”

“So that you can come to know us, to see how we are . . . and this Sunday the preaching is at my father’s farm.”

A silence came between them then, as it often did, and then he said, “They won’t want me there.”

She couldn’t deny the truth of that. And what would it serve him, what would it serve her, for him to know the Plain and understand their ways when he could never be one of them?

But then he said, “I’ll come.”

And it was her turn to ask, “Why?”

“Because,” he had said, “you asked.”

NOW, THIS MORNING,
his cheeks shone from a fresh shave and his hair was still damp from washing. He had polished his boots and brushed his coat and put on a clean shirt of Ben’s. Those shirts didn’t look the same on him as they had on Ben. He made them look flashy, even without a collar and neckcloth.

He was coming with them to the preaching, and the day was bursting with spring; Rachel smiled as she watched him reach up to take a kink out of one of the kidney link rings. But then his coat flared open to reveal the leather cartridge belt and holster hanging heavy around his hips.