The Outsider (46 page)

“Is it hot enough for you, Mr. Cain?”

“Heck, no,” he said, drawling out the words teasing and lazy. “Back where I come from we call this middlin’ weather.
We don’t say it’s hot enough till the water in the creek gets to boilin’.”

“Wuh—we don’t say it’s hot enough,” Benjo chimed in, “till the r-rocks start to melt.”

Laughing, Rachel looked from the man to the boy and back to the man again. They looked like big-lipped clowns, their mouths and chins washed clean while the rest of their faces were still chalky white with hay dust.

“If you two aren’t a pair of a kind,” she said.

Cain’s eyes crinkled at the corners as he cocked a thumb at the boy. “He’s the young one. I’m the one who’s wind-broke as an old trail horse.”

Noah Weaver tossed the dipper back into the water butt with a splash. His jaw had taken on a tense bulge. “Hard work is good for a man’s soul,” he said.

Mose rolled his eyes up to the sun-bleached sky. “Da!” he exclaimed with such force that he blew off the sweat dripping from the end of his nose. “It’s a haymaking we’re at here, not a preaching.”

“A preaching or a haymaking,” Cain said with an easy smile, “to my way of thinking they’re both plumb hard on the back.”

Mose started to grin back at him, then tamped it down at the look on his father’s face.

“Noah has always built the best haystacks in the valley, haven’t you, Noah?” Rachel said. “High and tall and straight.”

Noah stared at her. She saw a tightness around his eyes and a hollowness to his face, a sort of bewildered agony. “The righteous man doesn’t swell up with pride in his work, he just works.” He turned on his heel and started off, saying over his shoulder, “There’s still plenty hay that needs stacking
sometime before next winter.” And the tone in his voice made the boys jump and trot after him.

The outsider lingered behind, though, his gaze following the Plain man’s stiff back.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “He doesn’t mean to always be scolding. He’s just . . . being Deacon Noah.”

Cain rolled his shoulders in a half shrug. “Aw, he can’t rile me so long as I don’t let him. I’ve been ridden with sharper spurs.”

The hot wind plucked at her loose cap strings, making them dance. She tossed them out of the way, over her shoulders, then peeled a strand of loose hair off her sticky cheek. She sucked her chapped lower lip into her mouth to wet it; she was thirsty again. And she could feel his eyes on her again, hotter than the summer wind.

“We’re having rivels and puddins for dinner,” she said. “It’s a haymaking tradition. And there’s peppermint tea cooling in the creek.”

“I ain’t asking what rivels and puddins are, in case I don’t want to know.”

She spun around, laughing at him, with him, just laughing. “Hunh. Once you’re done building me a haystack to the moon, Mr. Cain, I expect you’ll be hungry enough to eat anything.”

She took off for the house at a run, her skirts tossing gaily. But as she crossed the yard and climbed the porch steps, her feet slowed and her smile faded.

Through the open door she could see Fannie rubbing the soft dough of the rivels between her palms and dropping them into a pot of boiling broth. In a fry pan next to her, the fatty pork puddins were crisping and popping in hot lard. A snitz pie that Rachel had baked that morning
was cooling on the windowsill, filling the air with the smell of apples and cinnamon spice.

Most times she would have enjoyed the company of another woman in her kitchen, but today Fannie was pushing her nose into the air and pulling her skirts aside every time Rachel came near her.

The broth hissed as Fannie dropped in another batch of rivels, but Rachel lingered on the porch. The furnace-hot sun leached the sky of its blue and gave the mountains a gray sheen, making them appear forged of steel. The hot wind laid a skein of hay dust over the men at their work. From here she could make out nothing but the lean and graceful shape of the outsider, and the flash of dark hair sliding across his shoulders from beneath the slouching brim of his hat. Yet he could have been pressed up hard against her, belly to belly, breast to breast, heart to heart, so close did she feel to him in that moment.

She felt a movement beside her and turned to look into Fannie Weaver’s face. And Rachel knew that all she was thinking, all she was feeling, showed on her own.

Fannie folded her arms over her chest, gripping herself hard. The harsh lines at the corners of her mouth pulled deeper. She’d always been a thin woman, but now she looked gaunt and shriveled, like a thing left too long in the sun.

“I know you, Sister Rachel. I’ve always known you.”

Rachel turned away from her, saying nothing.

“You’re doing it to him again, to our Noah. You think I don’t remember how you already shamed and hurt him once, letting him think things he shouldn’t, want things he shouldn’t? And you all the while with your eyes and your thoughts dwelling on another man.”

“That other man was Ben. My husband. And I could never help what your brother thought and wanted.”

“Ha, so you say. But I saw what you did with our Noah the night Gertie died, how you led him into sin.”

“I held him, is all,” Rachel said, and her soul shivered faintly as if a ghost had touched her. She’d often wondered how her husband had come to hear of that private moment with Noah. Well, now she knew. Fannie Weaver and her spying eyes.

I held him, is all.

Sometimes the heart remembered things better than the head, holding both the hurt and the joy, as if it all had happened only yesterday.

She had come home late that night to find Ben sitting at the table, his hands wrapped around a cold cup of coffee. He faced a day of plowing on the morrow and he should have been in bed and asleep hours before.

His dark eyes had looked up at her, glittering with hurt. But his mouth, his mouth that could kiss her so tenderly, was pulled taut and hard with anger, and his thick black beard bristled with it. So did his words, when he finally spoke.

“And where have you been all this long night, my Rachel?”

“You know I’ve been with Noah. He’s so sore with grief, I—”

“Sore, is he? And did you soothe his soreness then, my Rachel? Soothe him with your sweet body, with your soft mouth.” His big and callused farmer’s hand slapped down hard on the table. “Did you lie with him?”

“How could you even think it?” she’d shouted back at him. Shouted to hide a surge of guilt that had no logic and no basis, but came anyway to burn her cheeks with a hot flush. “And of him? How could you think it of him?”

He shook his head slowly, heavily, as if the weight of his thoughts was almost more than he could bear. “I know what he’s always wanted,
ja.
It’s you I’ve never been sure of.”

And she had said, “I held him, is all.”

Ben had scraped back from the table then and gone into the bedroom, undressed, crawled between the sheets, and all without another word to her. In the dark silence she had joined him. But she couldn’t bear the anger that had crawled into the bed with them, the anger and the mistrust.

She moved over to fill the emptiness in the middle of the bed, curving her body around his, laying her head on his chest. He held himself rigid, but she could hear his heart beating, and she thought what a sweet, comforting sound that was to a woman: the beat of her husband’s heart.

“Ben, I love you. Only you.”

She’d never said the words before, because it was not the Plain way. A man and wife, they would speak aloud of loving God, never of loving each other. But they did love each other, she and Ben.

She felt his flesh grow warm and melt beneath her, as if she were the flame and he the candle. His arm came around her back and he held her tight. “Promise me that it will always be so,” he’d said.

And she had promised.

TO RACHEL THE CLANG
of the lead-wether’s bell was a joyous song marking the end to a good day.

She drove the herd of ewes and their lambs onto the rough stubble of the newly shorn hay meadow. MacDuff padded slowly back and forth along the rear edges of the flock. He knew his business; a smart herding collie never nagged or drove his sheep, but gently guided. Rachel liked it
that nobody, and no dog, could rush sheep. They got where they were going in their own sweet time.

She and MacDuff saw the woollies settled and munching happily. But although she had dishes to wash and a kitchen to scrub down, she stayed in the pasture. She stood with her feet planted firmly in the hay stubble, her hands hanging loosely at her sides, and she let the hot wind blow wild through her.

Slowly, she tipped her head back and let herself be drawn up, up, up into the deep blue of the evening sky, the endless and empty sky.

“A body could get lost up there if she isn’t careful.”

He stood leaning against the trunk of a jack pine, one booted foot crossed over the other, his hat dangling from his fingers. She stared at him, at his reckless face with its flaring cheekbones, his fierce mouth, his eyes. . . . Those eyes weren’t cold, not cold at all.

She looked from his eyes up to the heavens, then back to his eyes again, as if judging which were bluer. “How do you feel when you look at the sky?”

He hooked his hat on a pine branch and walked toward her through the grazing woollies until they were only a handspan apart. He’d just washed up, for the ends of his hair dripped water and he smelled of soap, with a lingering whiff of green hay. His shoulders lined out level and wide, blocking her view of the horizon. His eyes were definitely bluer than the sky.

“Lonesome,” he said. “The kind of lonesome that can make you feel good and sad and wild, all at the same time. Almost crazy like, so that you want to howl with the coyotes or climb up on a horse and ride till you get to the edge of the world.”

He leaned toward her, although he was being careful
not to touch her. But the words pulsed out of him, soft and deep. He touched her with his words.

“The kind of lonesome that’s like a sweet hurting inside you, so that you aren’t sure if you should laugh with it, or cry. Because you know it comes from a wanting, a reaching for something you ain’t ever gonna have.”

She stared up into his face, a face that had somehow become beloved to her, and a wild yearning swelled and cracked open inside her. It was more than love she felt for him. Love she could live with from afar, but not this. She needed him, needed him in her life, and it was a need so elemental, so consuming, it was like needing air to breathe, like—

“Cain! Cain! I w-washed up real good just like you s-said. Oh . . . hey, Mem.”

She stepped back and turned to smile at her son as he came running up all breathless with a big grin on his face. A face that shone red with sunburn and a good scrubbing. She wondered what threat or bribe or miracle Johnny Cain had worked to get her son to bathe.

She reached down and pushed her fingers through her son’s wet hair. Even the backs of his ears were clean. “You men baled a fine batch of hay this day.”

“Benjo’s the best hay stacker I’ve ever had the pleasure to work ’longside of,” the outsider said, looking serious.

The boy preened like a jaybird, and Rachel’s heart swelled again. “I hear Annabell lowing like she’s fit to die,” she said. “Don’t you think you ought to go milk her and ease her misery?”

Benjo heaved an enormous sigh and said, “Aw, Mem.”

He obeyed her, though, and she was alone again with Johnny Cain. But the closeness of before had been lost.

She let her voice go light and teasing, the way she knew
he liked her to be. “So, and just how many hay stackers have you worked with that you’re suddenly such an expert?”

“That boy does you proud, Rachel.”

“It’s you he’s aiming to impress,” she said. But she flushed, pleased for Benjo’s sake, and pleased also that he’d called her by her given name. He was doing it more often now.

Just then one of the lambs took a notion to buck, jumping stiff-legged and sideways, and landing with a loud bleat. He spooked the whole flock into a run, so that they flowed around Rachel and Cain and down the sloping meadow.

They laughed, and their laughter—his mellow and deep, hers light and airy—became a carol of bells. The woollies bleated and
baa
ed, bass and tenor notes. Grasshoppers rasped in the grass along the creek. A killdeer trilled sweetly and a chickadee burbled. The wind roared a song through the tops of the cottonwoods.

“Oh, do you hear it, Johnny! Do you hear the music?”

She whirled to face him in her excitement and caught the look on his face. He stared at her with such fierce intensity that she could almost feel it, like a warm gust of breath on her flesh.

“I hear them, you see, all the sounds the earth makes,” she went on, as if he’d said to her,
What music?
“I hear the wind and the creek and all the noises the animals make, the sheep and birds and frogs, I hear them all in my head and it comes together into music. I don’t know. I can’t explain it, except that I know it’s wicked.”

A muscle ticked in his cheek. He lowered his head slightly, so that his long thick eyelashes shielded his eyes. “What’s wicked about taking the songs of life and making a symphony out of them?”