The Outsider (55 page)

And a new sound this year. Johnny Cain crooning softly to his sheep as he sheared them. The outsider seemed to have a genuine and gentle fondness for the woollies, which both astonished and bothered Noah. He found himself liking the outsider a little bit for it, and he didn’t want to.

Noah finished with a ewe and looked up to see that Benjo was standing on top of a full woolbag. “Time to rest a spell,” he called out to the others. Time to catch their breaths and stretch the kinks out of their backs, time to sharpen their shears.

Noah couldn’t keep the grin off his face as he watched the outsider straighten up slow and stiff, like an old, old man. Cain rubbed one hand in the small of what was surely an aching back. His other hand, stiff as a claw, still gripped the shears. That hand had to be raw with bloody blisters by now. Even Noah’s own palm, toughened and seasoned as it was, burned where he’d been gripping and working the haft of the shears for the last three hours.

Noah went to the water butt, stumbling a little; he was that tired himself. He brought a dipperful of water over to the outsider, and the two men stood staring at each other, rocking slightly on their feet, chests pumping with their sucking breaths, sweat pouring in streams down their drawn faces.

Noah said to the other man, softly so that only he could hear, “So, outsider? There would be no shame now, if you said you had enough.”

A devil’s smile flashed beneath winter hard eyes. “When hell freezes, Deacon.”

As the two men continued to stare at each other, a hush fell over the shearing shed. It grew so quiet they could hear the fleeces, still live and warm, stirring in the woolbag—a faint sound, like soft breathing.

“What is this I see? You lazy men are taking a rest already, and here the morning not yet half gone.” Rachel sailed through the woolbag curtains with her hands on her hips and a teasing light in her eyes. “Pee-uw!” She pretended to reel back in horror. Or perhaps it wasn’t such a pretense, for the shed was steamy with sweat. “You men smell worse than any sheep ever did.”

“It’s a good smell,” Noah said stiffly, as he turned to face her. “A smell that would please the Lord.”

He flushed, wondering why everything he said to her lately didn’t seem to come out right. They were good thoughts, yet when he put them into words they sounded vain and boastful. This time she smiled at him, but then her gaze went right to Johnny Cain, and they shared another one of those special smiles that came only into their eyes.

Noah watched her with helpless yearning as she went to the water butt. When she finished drinking, she headed toward him, and he felt a flutter of sweet anticipation. But she walked on past to Benjo, instead, and helped him finish sewing shut the woolbag. And then she went to
him.
To the outsider.

They stood close together but not too close, and they spoke not in whispers but plain, so anyone could hear. But Rachel’s eyes shone like morning dew. And her mouth smiled quick and sweet. And her whole body seemed to be leaning, straining to span the distance between them,
as if all of her was saying to the outsider
touch me, touch me, touch me.

D
UST DEVILS DANCED AHEAD
of Lucas Henry’s phaeton as he turned into the yard of the Yoder farm. The corrals were filled with bleating sheep, some still dressed in their coats of wool, others already shorn, their naked hides pale and quivering like an old man’s paunch.

Lucas reined up and watched Rachel Yoder walk toward him through shimmering heat ripples. When she came abreast of the buggy he smiled and tipped his hat to her.

“Good day to you, Plain Rachel.”

He didn’t get a return greeting, but he was used to Plain ways and hadn’t expected one. “I was just over at the Triple Bar,” he said, “delivering a baby. Then on my way back to town I felt a wheel coming loose.”

Rachel looked his wheels over. “It’s your right front one, sure enough,” she said. “I suppose Noah or Mr. Cain might help you repair it, but we’re in the middle of shearing at the moment.” She looked up at him and actually smiled. “You’re also welcome to stay a spell and watch our poor woollies get scalped.”

She turned and walked off, leaving him to decide on his own. He climbed out the phaeton and approached the low
sheds next to the barn. A knot of Plain men stood, jabbering in their guttural tongue, long beards jerking, big felt hats flapping in the hot wind. They fell silent and turned in unison to give him a hard stare, and he immediately felt about as welcome as a whore in Sunday school.

Johnny Cain came out of the sheds just then, and Rachel went up to him and said something, lightly touching his arm. She seemed different to Lucas in that moment: more vivid, vital, more of a woman. It was as if he’d been seeing her in two dimensions, like a photograph, all light and gray shadows, and now suddenly she had come to full and breathing life.

He was seeing a woman in love, he thought, and he knew he should be pitying her for all the sorrows that were sure now to come her way. But instead it was himself he felt sorry for, because although love was often a misery, so could it be an ecstasy, distilled to its purest form and headier than any booze. Only it wasn’t happening to him, and it never would again.

Rachel turned, pointing, and Cain came out into the middle of the yard to meet him. The man’s Plain shirt was open at the neck, showing a throat slick with sweat and browned by days working in the fields beneath a hot sun. Bits of sheared wool clung to his hair and to his worn and patched broadfall trousers. But his Colt still hung from a bullet-studded belt on his hips, close by his right hand.

“Hey, Doc,” he said. “Rachel figures you’ve a wheel about to come off.”

Lucas pursed his lips in a silent whistle and made his eyes go round, as he looked the notorious desperado up and down. “The older I get, the more I see the importance of keeping one’s sense of wonder. But what, I’m asking myself, are all your awed admirers and fearsome enemies
supposed to think when they hear you’ve turned into a full-fledged mutton puncher?”

“The good Deacon Noah says such hard and humbling work is a fine thing for a man’s soul.”

“The good Deacon Noah wants to marry Rachel Yoder.”

Cain’s gaze went back to the lambing sheds. Rachel had an apronful of apples and she was tossing them one at a time to the men as she walked by, making a game of it. She lobbed one overhand like a baseball at Noah’s head, and she laughed.

Cain smiled, though his eyes remained cold. “God doesn’t always fix it so’s the good man gets what he wants, though,” he said. “Sometimes he lets the Devil have his day.”

No, Lucas thought. If there is a God, He will have a care for a woman like Rachel Yoder. He will save her from the powers of darkness and a man like you. If there is a God . . . Ah, but if there were a God, He would have saved Lucas Henry’s wife from Lucas Henry, wouldn’t He?

The thought was so painful it was like a sliver of glass in the eye. The sun beat down fiercely, and he could feel the sweat running off him. He smelled himself, smelled the whiskey that had been flowing through his veins for almost thirty years, and almost choked on his own disgust. Yet still, he wanted a drink.

“So, isn’t it too Christly hot a day to be clipping woollies?” he said.

Cain’s gaze swept over the pastures and the sheep. “I’m beginning to think we are all out of our minds.” He sounded almost happy, and he had said “we.” He had counted himself as one of them. Lucas wondered if he knew he’d done it.

“How’s the arm holding up?” Lucas said.

Cain stretched out his right arm, his hand curling into a loose fist. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow.
The exertion of shearing had made his veins stand out like slender ropes and sheened his muscular flesh with sweat.

“You did a fine job of setting the bone, Doc. It feels no different than the other one. They’re both about as weak as newborn lambs.”

“Uh huh.” Lucas took hold of Cain’s wrist, turning it over. “And your hand’s nothing but one big broken and bleeding blister. All in all you’re in prime condition to perform your next killing.”

Cain’s smile was easy, but a painful light flared behind his eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to have some witch hazel ointment in that doctor’s bag of yours?”

Lucas went to his phaeton, not so much for the sake of Cain’s blistered hand as for the opportunity to nip at the flask of Rose Bud he always carried in his medical bag. But as he lifted the flask to his mouth, his own words echoed in his head:
All in all you’re in prime condition to perform your next killing.

He’d heard the tale told so often, he might as well have been there. How Johnny Cain had got the drop on the Hunters’ stock inspector, that day in the Gilded Cage saloon, through the judicious use of a sarsaparilla bottle. And how Cain had then been distracted by the Plain woman and almost let that hired gun get the drop on him.

Almost. Woodrow Wharton’s body had lain on view in his coffin in the bay window of Tulle’s Mercantile with a sign that said he was the twenty-ninth man shot and killed by the pistoleer Johnny Cain. Lucas had prepared the body. The man had been clutching tenaciously to his cocked revolver even in death—in the medical textbooks it was called a cadaveric spasm—and Lucas had left the gun there in the man’s hand. He thought it was a nice touch of irony, not that anyone in town was likely to appreciate irony.

Woodrow Wharton had lain in state in the bay window of Tulle’s Mercantile for only an hour or two, though. After a while the flies and the stink got to be too much, even by Montana standards.

And now they said Fergus Hunter had already hired himself a new “stock inspector.”

As Lucas started back with his medical bag, he saw that Cain had moved into the narrow shade cast by the barn and taken off his hat to wipe the sweat from his face. The wind blew his hair into his eyes. It was as long and ragged as any Plain man’s.

Lucas set his bag on an upturned nail keg, found the witch hazel cream, and rubbed it into Cain’s blistered palm. As he gripped the man’s wrist, he could feel that the pulse was fast, too fast.

Lucas looked up to find that Cain’s eyes were riveted on Rachel. She and a handful of other Plain women were passing out sandwiches to the men, filling up tin coffee mugs from a big blue speckled pot. The wind lifted a stray lock of her dark red hair and laid it across her cheek. Absently she coiled it and tucked it back beneath her prayer cap.

As if he sensed that he was being watched, Cain replaced his hat, tilting it low. But his words startled Lucas, for they ran so close to his own thoughts. “I don’t suppose you believe a man can find his God and himself through a woman?”

“Plenty have tried, but it’s probably about as likely as finding God and yourself in the bottom of a bottle of Rose Bud,” Lucas said. He looked up at the heat-hazed sky. “I was married once myself, for a time. She was like a butterfly, my wife. Flitting from flower to flower, drinking of life. Wild and fragile, and so beautiful. I thought . . .”

He had thought he would do anything, give everything
for his wife. But in the end he hadn’t been able to do the one thing that would have saved her, saved them both. He hadn’t been able to change what he was.

“I thought I loved her so much that she could be my heaven on earth. But then one day my beautiful little butterfly of a wife . . .” He stopped.

“She flew away?” Cain said.

Lucas’s mouth twisted into a hard and painful smile. “Oh no, she loved me far too much to leave me. So I killed her instead.”

If he had been either drunker or more sober, he would have laughed at the absurd high drama of it all. What was Cain supposed to do in the face of that little disclosure? Ask for all the lurid details? Offer condolences along the lines of:
I’m so sorry to hear about your wife, and to think you were the one to do her in.

What he did do was look carefully away from Lucas’s face and after a moment say, “I’ll help you change that wheel now, if you like.”

Lucas heard, as if from a long way away, the rattle of wheels over the log bridge that spanned the creek. He turned and saw a little black shay with green trim and fringed cushions approaching. A voice, trilling as a meadowlark, sang out over the wind. “Luc, oh Luc! Gwendolene’s baby is a-comin’, and she’s fit to bust a gut!”

Lucas did laugh then, although even he could hear what a terrible sound it was. “Spare your poor blistered hand, Mr. Cain,” he said. “I see
my
salvation coming in the form of a sweet little tart named Marilee.”