The Outsider (43 page)

And then he remembered that he’d lied about the bicycle anyway, and the things he wanted most.

Cain reached up and ripped the wanted poster off the wall. He crumpled it up in his fist, but he didn’t throw it away. He gave it to Benjo.

“Let’s go see about that horse,” he said.

The livery was the only building in town to wear any paint, and the paint it sported was the bright red of a spit-polished apple. Even on hot days, passing through those sliding double doors was like dipping your toe into a pool of spring water. Dark cool moist air enveloped them, redolent of hay and manure. Today the livery’s back doors were open, and from the yard there came the tang of burning charcoal and the
pang-ping-pang
of hammer on steel.

They found Trueblue Stone, the hostler, at the smithy out back, fastening a new handle onto a battered black-bottomed boiling pot. Trueblue wore only a pair of tattered trousers and a big leather apron that fell all the way to the domed toes of his hobnailed boots. The bare skin of his arms and back was shiny and black. He had the biggest muscles Benjo had ever seen on a man, thick and knotty as cottonwood logs, and he spoke to his horses with words no one else understood. He’d once told Benjo the words came from a place called Africa.

While the men fell into a conversation about horses,
Benjo rummaged through the pile of horseshoes that stood nearly as tall and wide as a haystack in the middle of the yard. Trueblue liked to tell a story that he’d once fashioned a horseshoe out of a piece of falling star and then accidentally went and tossed it onto the pile. Benjo didn’t believe the tale, but he always looked for the lucky horseshoe anyway, whenever he came to the livery.

Except for this time. This time he dug a hole deep into the pile, stuffed the wadded-up wanted poster in there, and covered it with dozens and dozens of bent and rusted horseshoes.

When Trueblue was finished with the pot, they went to the corral to look at the horses. There were five of them for sale, four geldings and a young mare.

“Which one do you fancy?” Cain asked.

It took Benjo a moment to realize the question had been directed at him, and his chest stretched with surprise and pleasure. But with Trueblue standing there—a man who could speak to horses with words from Africa—Benjo knew he had no hope of getting any of his own ordinary words out from around his twisted-up tongue, so he pointed to the mare, a chestnut with a blaze on her face and white stockings.

“She is the prime one of the lot, all right: nice fat sleek coat, bright eyes, a long arch to her neck, thick cannons, and a clear-footed gait. You’ve a good eye, partner,” Cain said, making the boy’s chest swell even more. “Trueblue allows as how she can be a bit of a bangtail when the mood takes her, though. I’m looking for a real sugar-eater of a horse. One that’s been gentled, not broke.”

Benjo watched, fascinated, as he checked all the horses over carefully, peering in their mouths and up their nostrils, running his hands over their legs. He even squatted down
in the dirt of the corral and studied their droppings. He narrowed the horses down to two candidates, the mare and a big gray gelding, riding them both bareback with only a hackamore bit. To Benjo’s proud delight, he settled on the mare, even though Trueblue had said she could be a bit of a bangtail when the mood took her.

He dickered with Trueblue for a long time over the price—what the hostler wanted for the mare was an ocean apart from what the outsider appeared willing to spend—and then they dickered some more over a saddle and bridle. And not for a minute during it all was Benjo bored. He loved watching Johnny Cain, and he loved listening to him talk. He even pretended to be him sometimes, tilting his hat low over one eye and moving in that easy, loose-jointed way Cain had. But even when Benjo was alone, with no one but himself to hear, he couldn’t talk in that cool, slow way of Cain’s.

Afterward, out again on the hot and dusty street, Cain wiped the sweat off the back of his neck and said, “You know, Benjo, I sure have got me a touch of dry throat, what with all the argufying I had to do with Trueblue Stone over the cost of that mare you talked me into. How about if I was to buy us a couple of sarsaparillas?”

Grinning, Benjo nodded. Then, remembering his manners, he said, “Puh—puh—puh . . .”
Please.

They walked side by side down the boardwalk, and although Benjo felt the stares, he didn’t care. In truth, he relished the looks and the whispers they were attracting. It was a sinful thing, he knew, a worldly thing, this thinking you were somebody. But walking alongside of Johnny Cain, he
felt
like somebody.

And when they stopped in front of the Gilded Cage saloon, he thought he would explode from nervous excitement,
although the moment lost some of its shine when Cain said, “Maybe you better wait out here, else your ma’ll have both our hides.”

Benjo waited until the saloon’s summer doors had stopped swinging behind the outsider’s back before he stood on tiptoe to peer inside. But he couldn’t see much beyond an old moose head hanging on the far wall and a coal oil lamp with a red paper shade.

He dropped down on his knees and peered beneath the batwing doors. He saw a tobacco-stained puncheon floor sprinkled with sawdust. He craned his head, looking up. A whiskified man sat slumped over a table, snoring. A long string of flypaper coiled down from the ceiling above the man’s head, but it didn’t seem to be doing much good, for half a dozen flies buzzed around his oiled hair. Two more men stood at a brown felt-covered table, knocking ivory balls around with long skinny sticks.

He didn’t see any dancing ladies with naked bosoms.

He saw the big gold-framed mirror that Mose Weaver had talked about, though, and the barkeep with the purple lips and the jowly cheeks. “Soon as I serve Gramps here,” the barkeep said to the outsider, who must have just put in his request for the sarsaparillas.

The barkeep jerked on a big silver handle and a dark stream purled out of the tap and into a glass. He set the foaming glass in front of the only other man standing at the counter, an old-time prospector, to judge by his sourdough coat and slouch hat.

The prospector slapped a coin on the slick wood, making it ring. He said, “Here’s how,” and drained most of the Devil’s brew in one swallow.

Benjo heard the ring of jingle-bobs and the scrape of spurs on the boardwalk behind him. He backed up on his
hands and knees, out of the way of the saloon’s door. His gaze went up winged, silver-studded black leather chaps to a fringed and greasy white buckskin shirt and a cowhide vest, settling finally on a face with a billy-goat beard and a bulging cheek, and pale wet eyes.

A strange light appeared in those eyes when they fell on Benjo.

“You sure do keep turning up where you don’t belong, don’t you, boy?” Woodrow Wharton said.

Benjo’s head jerked as the words began to pile up in his throat. His left hand went to the sling at his waist.

But Wharton was already turning away. “I don’t mean to wound your feelings any, but your daddy should’ve thought about using a French letter.”

His lips peeled back from his pointed teeth, and he sent a stream of tobacco juice whizzing so close to Benjo’s face he felt the spray. Laughing, Woodrow Wharton slammed the flat of his hand on the swinging door and disappeared into the murky shadows of the Gilded Cage saloon.

MIAWA CITY WAS A
dangerous place. Most especially, thought Rachel Yoder, it was a dangerous place for a Plain woman who sometimes forgot to keep to the straight and narrow way.

First there had been that girl crying in the privy alley, sobbing as if her heart had shattered. Rachel knew she shouldn’t have gone to her. The church’s teachings were clear on that: outsiders, with all their corrupting ways, were better left to their own hurts and worries. And such a girl as that one, who lived in the house with the red locomotive lantern, ought to be doubly shunned for the wickedness she had fallen into.

The girl had been coarse, with her harlot’s paint running in streaks down her face and her Jezebel dress that showed all of her bosom. And she had been lewd, brazenly admitting to being with child after lying in sin with a man. Yet Rachel had felt a disturbing empathy for her, as if her tears could have been the tears of any woman, of all women. And she’d felt an even more disturbing curiosity to know of the forbidden things that this girl could tell her of: feather beds and silk sheets and mahogany pianos. And all the ways in which a woman’s body could please a man.

More than from that girl, with her harlot’s paint and her sinning ways, Rachel had fled from herself. The church’s teachings were clear; it was only when she forgot them that Rachel ran into trouble.

And it was when she’d fled from the alley that she’d heard the music. It came bellowing suddenly through the slatted wooden doors of one of the saloons, along with shrieks and whoops and a burst of pungent profanity. It was bold music, with walloping bawls of sound. Never had she heard its like before. Deep and rich and echoing, it made the hot air rumble like summer thunder.

“Oh, what is it?” she cried aloud, startled into pure wonderment.

“Why, ’tain’t nothing but a concertina. The fellow sure can make them bellows wail, though.”

She turned to meet the round and shining face of Mr. Beaker, the barber. His long waxed mustaches lifted with his big smile.

“Kind of gets a body’s feet to agitating, don’t it? No matter the heat.”

Rachel’s gaze fell to the sun-bleached boardwalk. She turned and walked quickly away, leaving Mr. Beaker to mumble to himself about “them uppity Plain folk who
think themselves too good to pass the time of day.” But the music followed after her, made her want to cross the street and look through the doors of the saloon so she could see what sort of worldly instrument this was that made such swelling, wailing, warbling sounds. The music—oh, it was a terrible danger indeed.

Like the danger there, in the mercantile’s bay window. It was always an adventure, coming into town, to see what was displayed in Mr. Tulle’s window. Last time it was a safety bicycle, and how Benjo’s eyes had shone to see it. And once, while Ben was still alive, there’d been a four-in-hand road harness made of polished black leather and fitted with etched silver buckles and copper rings. Afterward, on the drive home, Ben had joked that with a harness like that—with so much sparkle—a man needed to wear sun goggles to look at it or he’d be blinded. But Rachel had always wondered if deep in some secret corner of his heart, he hadn’t coveted that fancy harness.

This time there was a dress in the window, a dress so beautiful it took Rachel’s breath away. It was of soft velvet, the blue of forget-me-nots, with an overskirt that was caught up in the back to make a foaming waterfall of ecru lace. A hand-lettered sign identified the dress as a “watering place costume” imported from Paris at a cost of five hundred dollars. Rachel’s mouth fell open in shock. She tried to imagine that much money accumulated all at once and in one place, but she couldn’t.

She wondered if Blackie’s Pond qualified as a watering place, and if even the most extravagant outsider would be foolish enough to wear such a costly and delicate gown among all those thickets and rocks and brambles.

Yet the image of the beautiful dress stayed with Rachel as she entered the mercantile. Mr. Tulle had sprinkled the floor
with water to lay the dust, so the place smelled strongly of wet wood. And of oilskins, which were piled on a deacon’s bench just inside the door. She thought it optimistic of Mr. Tulle to have so many oilskins for sale in the middle of such a hot dry spring.

Whenever her father preached of the Plain being strangers in a strange land, it put Rachel in mind of Tulle’s Mercantile. Today, with shafts of bright sunlight streaming through the bay window to haze the air with dancing dust motes, it especially seemed a mythical place, full as it was of so many tempting things.

Most of the foods for sale there she easily provided for herself, like pickles, and chokecherry preserves. She was certainly capable of potting her own chickens and deviling her own ham. And she wondered what woman would pay such a ruinous price for a tin of butter when she could so easily churn some. Still, she supposed, there was something about store-bought things that made them seem special.

Of course there were some foods she had no earthly way of providing for herself, even if she should want to, like the cans of sugarplums and white grapes.

Faced with the many marvels on display in Tulle’s Mercantile, it was easy to become forgetful of the great goodness of God and all that he provided them from nature, easy to hunger for vain, store-bought things. Like those wispy lisle stockings and those tortoiseshell combs, like that chased gold watch and those dainty button shoes, rainbow-colored ribbons and frilly lace collars. . . .

Like that bolt of yellow sateened muslin, so shimmery it looked shot with sunbeams. She reached out a tentative hand to stroke the soft, shimmery cloth. What did one make out of such a bright material? She wished she could
think of a purpose for it that wasn’t worldly. A Plain woman wasn’t supposed to covet such a thing, but she did.