The Outsider (52 page)

His hand snaked out, gripping Mose by the hair, and he began to drag him deeper into the cottonwoods. Mose fought back, but there were three of them and they beat him into submission with their fists until they had him tied over a downed log, like he’d been promised, with his trousers and drawers pulled down to his knees.

He lay staring at the sun-scorched grass. Fear pulsed sour in his belly, and sweat poured off him in rivulets, dripping into the parched earth. It was a rank stench, his own fear.

He heard the first blow coming before he felt it, a
whoosh
through the air, and he nearly screamed aloud at the fiery slash of pain. The chaps were heavy leather and studded with metal rivets. The leather blistered and welted his bare flesh, and the metal rivets bruised and tore at it. The whipping went on and on and on. He tried to hold himself still, to stop himself from writhing beneath the blows, but that was impossible. He bit through his lip to keep from hollering out loud, and still the pain went on and on and on, until he thought that maybe it wouldn’t stop until after he was dead.

Long before that, though, the pain became a constant screaming agony and the blows blended one into the other. He didn’t realize the whipping was over until he stopped hearing the noise of it.

He lay there, tied down over the log, gulping in hot air, his lacerated flesh shuddering and quivering, on fire. The pain still kept coming at him in waves, but through it he heard the hired gun say, “Spread her out over there on that quilt.”

Marilee screamed. Mose jerked against the ropes that bound him, and nearly screamed himself as a fierce new wave of pain crested over him. “Leave her alone!” he cried, the last of it ending on a smothered sob.

The hired gun laughed.

Mose couldn’t see what they were doing, but he could hear the scuffling, the ripping of her clothes, her small gasping cries—then silence, except for her frightened, panting breathing.

The Hunter boy spoke for the first time, his voice tight. “Why do you have to do this? If you want to poke her, she’s there at the Red House every night.”

The hired gun’s legs came around into Mose’s view. He slid a knife from his boot sheath, whetting it against his pant leg. Mose craned his head, looking up. The man was still smiling. “This is going to be more than a poke,” he said. “It’s gonna be a
lesson.
”

The cowboy snickered. “You heard your pa say how she had to be taught a lesson for selling her twat to a Plain boy.”

The hired gun caught Mose’s agonized expression, and his grin widened. He walked around the log, tossing the knife from hand to hand.

Marilee screamed once, a desperate wail, and then she began to cry and plead. “Oh God, don’t do that to me, please, please. I’ll be good. Oh God, please, don’t.”

Mose yelled, pulling against the ropes. Tears filled his eyes, only he thought it might be blood.

Marilee’s sobs slowly faded into mewling sounds. Mose
heard a rip, like silk tearing, and the panting grunts of a man rutting. Then a sharp, breathless silence, followed by the same trumpeting bull-moose bellow he’d heard the other night at the Red House.

There was a rustle of clothing and a weak groan, and the hired gun laughed again. “Either of you boys want to take a turn? . . . No? Then there’s one final lesson I’m going to teach this cunt.”

Marilee screamed and went on screaming, and Mose was screaming as well, begging them to stop whatever it was they were doing to her, which he couldn’t see, only hear, but he knew it had to be terrible from the horror locked in her screams.

After a long time, the hired gun came back around the log. Mose stared up at him through blurred eyes. Marilee wasn’t screaming anymore.

The hired gun squatted down before Mose’s face. He had his revolver in his hand and there was blood on the barrel. He pushed it under Mose’s chin, forcing his head up. “I understand,” he said, “that there’s a man who lives with you Plain People, name of Johnny Cain.”

He paused as if expecting an answer. Mose wanted to spit in the man’s face, but he hadn’t the guts. He nodded, swallowing, and tried to keep from sobbing out loud.

The man’s hard smile grew even harder. “You tell him Jarvis Kennedy works for the Circle H now, and that Johnny Cain is a dead man. All he’s got to do is pick his moment.”

He pulled the gun barrel out from under Mose’s chin with enough force to rip the flesh. “Come on, boys. Let’s light out.”

He walked off in a jangle of spurs, and Mose heard the squeak of leather as they mounted up and then the thud of hooves, fading, fading, fading into a stillness that hurt.

He called to Marilee. He could hear her whimpering now, but she wouldn’t answer him. It took a long while to work his hands loose of the ropes. He could feel blood running down his legs. His buttocks were fiery raw, as if his skin had been peeled back with a scaling knife.

He crawled to her on his hands and knees. She was curled into a tight ball in the middle of the quilt, among scattered pieces of fried chicken and cornbread. And something that looked like sheaves of wheat, something he didn’t quite understand until she uncurled enough to look up at him with anguished eyes so large and dark they looked bruised.

“My hair, Mose. They cut off all my hair.”

Her hair, her pretty hair, looked like the stubble left in the field after the hay was cut. It had been sheared off so close to her scalp that in places she’d been nicked enough to bleed.

His hand hovered over her mutilated head, but he pulled it back when she flinched. “Aw, Marilee. I’m so sorry.”

She whimpered and straightened her legs. There was a lot of blood on her skirt.

Suddenly her whole body jackknifed, and she clutched at her belly. Blood gushed out from between her legs, thick gouts of bright red blood, and Marilee screamed again, over and over again.

WHAT WAS LEFT OF
the haystacks they’d built such a short while ago stood baking and tanning in the heat. Mose walked slowly toward them, his boots shuffling through the grass like an old man’s. Each step was an effort and an agony. He kept shivering even though he was sweating.

A briny taste soured his mouth, the taste that came from tears of rage and pain and shame. He thought he’d taken
some bad beatings from his father, but none had ever been like that. Still, the pain and humiliation of being whipped bare-assed with a pair of chaps was nothing to what they’d done to Marilee.

Lieber Gott,
had she screamed! And bled. So much blood, on the quilt, on her dress, on the ground, on the cushioned seat of the shay—they had all become soaked with her blood. He had driven the shay wildly across the prairie back to town, with fear and rage punching his heart, punching, punching, punching, making it flat and hard.

He’d gone running with her in his arms, still bleeding and screaming, into Doc Henry’s house. That was when the doc had told him she was losing her baby, a baby Mose hadn’t even known she was going to
have.

The hired gun had promised Mose he would be too raw and sore to ride a horse, but the rage in Mose’s heart had made it possible for him to get on his mount and ride back across the valley to the Weaver farm and beyond. The rage made it possible now for him to be walking across the Yoder south pastures in search of Johnny Cain.

SHEEPHERDERS HAD A SAYING
that trouble never traveled lonesome. And sure enough, Mose saw, trouble had come calling on the Yoder farm today as well.

Their ewes had managed to find a big thick patch of sweet clover and the silly animals were now proceeding to eat themselves into an epidemic of stomach bloat. Already a good dozen were on the ground foaming at the mouth, their bellies distended and swollen. Four others were on their backs, legs stiff in the air, stone dead.

Mose walked up to Johnny Cain, who was kneeling before
one of the bloated ewes. “You got to lance ’em when they swell up,” Mose said. “Let out all that bad air.”

The outsider slanted an aggrieved look up at him. “I was fixing to do that,” he said. And as the man leaned over the prostrate sheep, Mose saw that he did in fact have a bloating lance in his hand.

He stabbed the lance into the ewe’s left flank. She let out a pathetic bleat and expired on the spot.

“Oh, shit. I’ve gone and killed her,” the outsider said.

Mose squatted next to the dead sheep, setting his teeth on a moan as the movement pulled at all the cuts and welts and bruises on his backside. He took the bloating lance from the outsider’s hands. “Here. Let me do the next one.”

He walked on his knees over to another bloated ewe. He felt along the sheep’s flank, searching for the proper point. “It’s a bit tricky. An inch or two to the right or left, and suddenly all you’ve got is a wool pelt and mutton stew.”

The bloating lance was actually a small tube with a blade passing through the hollow middle. He punctured the ewe’s hide and rumen with the lance, pushing in the tube, then withdrawing the lance and leaving the tube in place. Hot, smelly air whooshed out of the tube with enough force to fan the hair off Mose’s brow. And the ewe got a look on her face of sublime relief.

Such was the difference between life and death, Mose thought. The difference of an inch or two. He crawled over to the next sheep.

“Mrs. Yoder, she’s the best at poking holes in bloated sheep of anyone I’ve seen. But young Benjo also knows what he’s about.”

“Yeah?” the outsider said. “Well, they all went off and left me alone with the goddamn woollies. The boy’s taken
MacDuff over to his grandpa’s to help with the shearing, and she’s gone to help the twins pick over the beans for tomorrow’s preaching service soup. So you got to figure with no one but me around something disastrous like this was bound to happen.”

“That’s sheep for you, all right. Even the Devil couldn’t think up all the trouble a woolly can find to get into.”

Mose looked at the quick-draw rig the man always wore on his hip, even here in such a place of peace as a pasture full of sheep. But it wasn’t easy getting it out—his own trouble and what he meant to do about it, and the help that he would need from Johnny Cain. So he put the moment off until he’d punctured the last of the ballooning ewes, and they’d herded the band over to a field with less of the tempting clover.

They stood side by side among the grazing sheep, he and Cain, and still it wasn’t easy getting it out. It was strange how he had been able to lance the sheep and talk to the outsider about it as if he, Moses Weaver, were his same old self, when all the while rage and fear and hate were gripping him so he felt brittle inside. It was as if he were two Moses Weavers. One a Plain boy and a sheep farmer, and the other this Mose who was far, far different, a stranger even to himself.

He cleared his throat. It felt as if he had ground glass in there. “Before now, before you came to be with us, did you do stuff for money? I mean, how much did someone have to pay you?”

Cain took off his hat and ran a finger around the inside leather, wiping off the sweat. “Pay me to do what?”

“Kill a man. Kill some shit-eating bastard.”

The words had startled Mose coming out of his mouth. Not the words so much as the fresh rage that scorched them. The outsider turned his head slowly and gave Mose
a long, steady stare. He couldn’t have helped seeing all the blood before this, but now he looked at it deliberately—not with wild curiosity, more with a mild interest—and waited for Mose to go on.

“It’s not my blood,” Mose said. “Mostly not,” he amended.

The outsider turned away as if even his mild interest had been used up. A silence fell over the pasture, a silence that blended with the buzz of the flies around the sheep dung, the caw of a magpie, the raucous breath of the wind.

“Who is he?”

Mose jumped as if he’d just been prodded. “What?”

“The shit-eating bastard you want killed.”

“He said his name’s Jarvis Kennedy.” Mose paused, but the outsider’s face showed no reaction. “He’s the new Hunter stock inspector and he said to tell you Johnny Cain is a dead man, and that all you have to do is choose your moment.”

This seemed to amuse the outsider, for his mouth pulled into a smile. But it was a hard, tight smile so reminiscent of the Hunter hired gun’s that to see it again set Mose’s belly to churning.