The Outsider (31 page)

And Ezra Fischer shuffled slowly to his feet.

Ezra Fischer did have small, squinty eyes; they were like two dimples tucked into the smooth roundness of his cheeks and forehead. His coat was worn bald at the elbows and frayed at the cuffs, and even his patches had patches. Everyone knew Ezra wouldn’t gift himself with a new coat until this one had fallen off him. But he was a good man otherwise, Rachel thought, although she couldn’t imagine being married to him.

He opened his mouth, and for a moment it seemed he would be smothered by the thick, enveloping silence. But then his voice took flight. A trilling tenor so pure and sharp, it pierced the soul.

His head thrown back, his eyes on his Lord, Ezra Fischer drew out the first note of the hymn as if it were so precious he couldn’t bear to let it go. Then the rest of the men joined with him.

The men’s voices, deep and dark and rich, rolled in slow waves up to the rafters. The women’s voices, high and sweet, melded into the low, tolling tones of the men to become one pure song rising up, up, beyond the rafters now, beyond the sky, to reach the ears of God.

It was an old hymn they sang, mournful and yet beautiful, about exiles wandering through the land. Each word stretched out long and slow, into a chanting cadence, until the hymn itself became its own world of waiting.

They sang not with many voices but with one, and the glorious sound of it was an embodiment of their unity. For three hundred years the Plain People had sung this hymn in just this way, and so it would always be. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.” Forever. The whole of our lives are lived as we sing our hymns, Rachel thought. Slow and unchanging, always together. One flesh, one mind, one spirit.

And for her, for them all, she supposed, there was such sweet comfort in that. You could never become lost, if you always walked the straight and narrow path.

Rachel’s head fell back as the hymn thrummed through her blood and seized her heart, creating a tempest of joy and wonder within her. The slow chanting washed over her, purifying her and making her feel one with God. On and on and on they sang, as if they’d been caught up in eternity.

And then they stopped, abruptly, cutting off the last word, the last note, as if the hand of God Himself had covered their mouths. Silence descended once more, silence and the sweet sense of waiting.

Rachel sat on the hard, backless bench, with her face lifted toward God and her mouth parted, her eyes closed, and not until she felt a sharp pain in her chest did she realize she’d stopped breathing. She drew in a draught of air, and slowly she opened her eyes to a world that tilted and blurred dizzily. She was so filled with joy and the glory of the Lord, she could have burst with it.

Once, Ben had told her that when she sang the worship hymns she looked to be in ecstasy. Dazed still, and breathless, she looked over to the men’s side of the barn, almost expecting to see him there, her Ben. Her gaze locked with the outsider’s instead.

He was staring at her hard, his face fierce and intent. She jerked her head away. And time, which had seemed suspended, as if floating in the rays of sunlight that poured through the cracks in the rafters, rippled suddenly . . . and broke.

NOAH WEAVER STOOD BEFORE
the congregation.

His gaze moved slowly, carefully, over each man, woman, and child, seeing if all were according to the
Attnung,
if all followed the straight and narrow way. He counted the pleats in prayer caps; he looked for buttons, for suspenders, for other forbidden things. When he saw that all were dressed Plain and as they should be, he nodded his approval. As deacon it was his duty to do this, and he was known as a man who took his duties seriously.

Before resuming his seat, he once more surveyed the silent and bent heads. If he was surprised to find the outsider
among them, he gave no sign of it. But then his eyes met Rachel’s, and a look of stark pain crossed his face. Rachel’s hands curled into a tight ball in her lap. He could find no fault with her dress, she knew, but what if he could see beneath her carefully crossed and pinned Plain shawl to the confused yearnings, to the doubts stirring in her heart?

Noah sat slowly and heavily in his place on the front bench, moving as if he carried a log on his big shoulders to round them and weigh them down. Rachel stared at the back of his head, her throat tight. His hat had left a mark, like a ring, in his hair. It made him look oddly vulnerable, she thought, that indentation in his hair. It made him look less a deacon and more a man, with all of a man’s weaknesses and frailties. She wanted to go up to him and smooth his hair, to make that mark go away.

For more long and silent moments, they all sat and waited. And then Bishop Isaiah Miller rose to his feet, which meant that he was the one who’d first gotten the call to preach on this day. There would be two sermons preached, testimony given, prayers and Scripture read, more hymns sung—and the whole of it would last for over three hours.

He stood strong and tall in the middle of the floor, Rachel’s father. His beard was black and fleecy, but his hair had a white streak going down the very center of it, like the stripe on a skunk’s back. He had awakened with that stripe the morning after he’d had the vision-dream that had led them to leave their homes in Ohio and settle in this wild and empty land. It had been taken by all as a sign of divine benediction, that white streak appearing suddenly in Bishop Miller’s hair.

He raised his head now and began to speak.

He talked of days long ago, of a time in the old country when the Plain People suffered terrible torments for their
faith: burnings and stonings, crucifixions and whippings, the severing of tongues and hands and feet. He preached the way they sang their hymns, in a slow singsong rhythm. Yet in the dusk of the barn his gray eyes flashed with the passion of his words.

Sometimes Rachel listened to these old, familiar stories. Sometimes she just let the words flow through her while she drifted on her thoughts. She could smell the bean soup simmering in the big iron kettle out in the yard. She listened to the chickens clucking and scratching in the barn straw, to the
baa
s and bleats of her father’s sheep out in the pasture. The air grew heavy and thick, as before a storm. Her father’s voice flattened into a deep hum. . . .

She came back to the world. Much time must have passed. Her father was preaching now of how the righteous, persecuted and driven from their homes, had brought the one true faith with them across the perilous ocean waters. Yet even here there were hardships to suffer, even here in this land of freedom and plenty there was pain, there was loss.

My Ben, she thought. Oh, my Ben, my Ben, choking to death at the end of a rope. If we are truly God’s chosen people, then why does He make us suffer so?

She pushed the thought away. She listened to her father, the bishop. He spoke of the will of God, of how salvation always came through submission, through acceptance. The familiar words rose and fell against her ears, like gusts of wind, and she imagined God offering those words to her with His cupped hands—words of truth and light and comfort—while that voice, the voice of her father, rose and fell, rose and fell, gentle, soothing. She remembered all the mornings of her childhood, kneeling in the kitchen and listening to that dear voice read the morning prayers.
The memory was as deeply etched on her heart as were the words of God in the big black family Bible.

Those mornings kneeling in the kitchen . . . Rachel searched the rows of prayer caps, needing suddenly to see her mother’s face. Sadie Miller’s eyes were closed, her mouth slack; she was sleeping. Wisps of gray hair curled out from the edge of her cap. Her face looked worn, etched by time, and empty.

Those mornings, kneeling in the kitchen . . . bright sunshine streaming through the bare windowpanes, hands clasped, heads bent, Rachel and her brothers casting their shadows on the worn oak floor. And their
Vater
, with his faith that was so deep and so severe and yet so gentle, throwing his large and loving shadow over them all. Only Mem’s shadow was ever missing in her memories. Had the sunlight never reached where Sadie Miller knelt in silence?

But then, Rachel thought, none of them had ever looked on Mem as a being of substance, something separate from them all. They’d never thought to wonder if Sadie Miller had feelings, dreams, desires of her own.

Whenever Rachel looked back on all the moments of her life, both small and wondrous, even the shadow of her mother was always missing. That morning of her marriage to Ben, when she’d knelt in the kitchen of her childhood for the last time, that morning her father had ended the prayer by putting his arm around her and holding her close as if he couldn’t bear to let her go. Her brothers had grinned at her and made teasing jokes about poor Ben not knowing what he was letting himself in for, and Rachel had wanted to hold that moment of laughter and love tight to her breast as she was holding her father. To make it last forever. And yet where was Mem in that memory? Had her mother not been there, or had Rachel never turned around to see her?

A dipper of water was being passed down the rows of benches. Velma handed it to her mother-in-law, not realizing that she was asleep. Water slopped into Sadie’s lap. Her head jerked, her eyes snapped open. She looked surprised at first, to have been caught napping during the preaching. And then a deep flush spread up her neck and over her cheeks. Rachel felt a painful tightening in her chest and breathed to ease it. She wished Mem would look her way so that she could smile at her, but Sadie Miller’s gaze remained fixed on the spreading wet stain in her lap.

Bishop Miller was approaching the climax of his sermon. His head was bobbing, and the singsong cadence of his words came faster and sharper now.

Several worshipers shifted their bottoms on the hard benches in anticipation of the end. Benjo swung his feet through the straw, making a loud rustling noise and getting a rap on his knee from his uncle Samuel’s knuckle.

Isaiah Miller was explaining how, through all their sufferings, the Plain People followed the example set by Jesus Christ, who had yielded so completely to His Father’s will that He suffered and died on the cross. Rachel listened to her own father’s words and tried to stow them away in her heart for later, when the doubts would stir.

“They spat upon Him and they scourged Him with reeds. And then they led Him away and crucified Him. They passed by Him, hanging up there on His cross, and they wagged their heads at Him and mocked Him, saying, ‘If you are truly the son of God then why don’t you save yourself, why don’t you come down from that cross and save yourself?’ They said to Him, ‘If you trusted so much in God, then let Him deliver you now, you who say you are the Son of God. . . . ’ ”

Rachel’s eyes had drifted closed. She saw a mountain
and three crosses silhouetted against a black, tormented sky. She saw a man, bleeding, tortured, dying. Saw him throw back his head and scream in his despair.

And she knew suddenly what had been behind the terror in Johnny Cain’s eyes.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

R
ACHEL WALKED OUT OF
the dark coolness of the barn and blinked against the sudden wash of sunlight, almost stumbling. After all the stillness and silence and waiting of the worship service, she felt the world rushing past her now in a whirl of sound and motion.

She fetched her bonnet and leaned against the snake fence, bracing her forearms on the whitewashed rail. Clouds were building up over the mountains. But here in the valley it was spring, periwinkle skies and a warm whisper of breeze.

She spotted a cocoon hanging from a pokeweed leaf. The tiny silk case trembled once and then went still. She broke off the leaf at its stem, cradling the cocoon in her cupped hand.

She heard footsteps behind her, moving through the grass. As she turned she saw the outsider coming toward her, his stride so fluid and elegant. He should have been stiff, she thought, after three hours of sitting on a hard,
backless bench, listening to preaching and prayers that to him must surely have seemed like only so much babble. During the long worship service Johnny Cain had sat as quiet and unmoving as the rest of them. But through it all, Rachel had felt his awareness of her, like a warmth that just barely touched her on the air.