The Outsider (66 page)

Benjo found him sitting by the rock cairn, his rifle cradled in his arms. He didn’t need to ask the man what he was doing. It would be dawn soon.

Benjo’s legs suddenly seemed to turn to cornmeal mush. He sat down next to the outsider, Indian fashion. Now that the moment had come, he’d lost some of the day’s assuredness. His heart felt like it was clubbing his chest, and he kept having to blink back tears.

He thought it was hard, real hard, sometimes to be a man.

The outsider had never said it aloud today, but it had been there between them, the understood and accepted knowledge of how a man was supposed to behave. His da had sure said it all to Benjo plenty often. A man had to be tough enough inside to own up to his mistakes. His da had called it “taking the consequences,” and he’d usually said it right before he’d reached for the razor strop.

Benjo wondered if the outsider’s refusal to raise his fists against Mem’s brothers and Deacon Noah had been his way of taking the consequences. And maybe those Plain men had thought they would own up to their mistake by
using
their fists. The mistake of letting an outsider come among them in the first place.

Sometimes, Benjo thought, it was hard figuring it all out. He wondered if it was still hard when you got to be big, like the outsider and his uncles.

The sky was just becoming marbled with light when she came. Johnny Cain was as fast with his rifle as he was with his Colt. He fired twice, reloaded, and fired twice more. Then it was over, the coyote and her three pups were all dead.

They walked out into the meadow together, Rachel Yoder’s son and the outsider. Blue veins of gunsmoke drifted past them. A magpie flew away with a flash of white-barred wings. The grass trembled beneath the silvery gold light of the rising sun. For a moment the wind ruffled the coyote’s fur, giving her the illusion of life.

Benjo couldn’t stop the tears and he didn’t care if the outsider saw them. “I j-just wish shuh . . . she hadn’t come after our sheep.”

“It was in her nature,” said Johnny Cain.

T
HE SUN WAS SETTING
when Rachel Yoder’s son came swaggering through her door, looking grimy and sweaty and all-around pleased with himself. Came swaggering through her door a full three days after he’d gone running out of it.

Rachel didn’t even waste her breath on a howdy. She seized his arm and hauled him off to his bedroom so fast his feet barely skimmed along the floor. But when she sat on the bed, instead of putting him over her knees, she suddenly had him in her lap and she was crying and hugging him and rocking him like a babe.

“Mem!” he protested, struggling out of her embrace and pushing back onto his feet. He’d always hated her doing what he called “mushy girl stuff.”

She gripped him by the shoulders and gave him a shake. “You are never again to go up to the sheep camp without first getting my permission.”

The look Benjo gave back to her was one of genuine surprise, as if he expected the leaving of a message scrawled in charcoal on a barn stall to be permission enough. A message
she hadn’t even
seen
until she’d spent a whole frantic night searching for him.

She pushed her fingers through his ragged hair. It looked as if he hadn’t combed it in three days. “Joseph Benjamin Yoder, you are filthy.”

“Cain and me, we shuh—shot the c-coyotes,” he said.

Rachel stared at her son. After a summer of jumping like a spooked cat at the very mention of coyotes, here he’d ridden off without hardly a by-your-leave to hunt down and slaughter the beasts as if it were all some grand adventure. He baffled her, this son of hers. She’d often wondered if it would be different with a daughter—at least she would have a hope of understanding a girl. And then she thought of herself and her own mem.

She fussed over him some more. She tucked in his shirttail. She wet a corner of her apron with spit and scrubbed the sticky dirt ring off his mouth. Finally she was able to get the words out. “Did Mr. Cain come back with you?”

“He’s b-bedding down for the night in the b-barn. Are you going to whuh—whip me?”

She hugged him again, so tightly that this time he couldn’t wriggle free. “I should, I should. But I won’t.”

She made Benjo take a bath—it was Saturday, after all. And she tidied her own self up while she was about it, putting on a fresh apron and prayer cap. She took extra care over supper that night, fixing what she had discovered over the summer to be Johnny Cain’s favorite things: squaw corn on the cob and venison steak.

But he never came in to eat it.

SHE WENT TO HIM
the next morning.

He had his saucy little mare’s left rear hoof up on his
thigh and he was scraping caked dirt and dung out of it with a hoof pick. He straightened up, though, as soon as he saw her.

She could say nothing at all, only look at him, and it was so wonderful to look at him. But it hurt as well: to see his hard mouth that once she had kissed into softness, the long dark hair that had brushed across her naked belly, the hands that had touched her in all her woman’s secret and hungry places.

It hurt so much that she was the one to look away.

The barn held a mixture of sweet and pungent smells, summer hay and manure, sour milk and the ripening sunlight pouring through the open doors. She sucked in a deep breath, feeling almost dizzy.

She came around to the mare’s right side and petted the velvet nose. Her throat was hot and tight, full of the things she wanted to say.

Her gaze met his over the horse’s head. At some time he had bought himself new flashy clothes, for he was no longer dressed Plain. He had on a white shirt with a crisp linen collar and a vest the color of rhubarb wine, decorated with shiny jet buttons. His trousers were black with a thin gray stripe running through it. He looked fine, not at all like a sheep farmer.

Even with his horse between them, he was close enough to touch. She wanted to reach out and pull his head down and press her mouth to his.

“I thought you’d left,” she said. “That you’d leave without saying good-bye. Then Benjo said you’d come back with him, but you didn’t come in to supper.”

He had yet to take his eyes off her. He didn’t seem to be breathing. “After the trouble I brought you,” he said, “I thought our good-byes would be better said in the daylight, out in the open.”

The moment stretched between them, a moment fraught with memories made and in the making, thoughts both sweet and bitter, and things better left unsaid. She saw him swallow hard.

“I had to see you one last time, though, Rachel. I couldn’t go through the rest of my life without seeing you one more time.”

Yes, they were words better left unsaid, for all the hurt they would bring later in remembrance. But they were such sweet words to be hearing now, such tender words. He had spoken carnal words to her in bed. But except for asking her to marry him, he hadn’t said many tender words.

He made a hard, jerking movement, as if the memories and thoughts and words were now a rope binding them together, and he had to break it.

She watched him exchange the hoof pick for a dandy brush and begin to run it over the mare’s neck and withers. He hadn’t needed the horse for a quick getaway after all. Then it occurred to Rachel that he was preparing her now for a long journey.

“Where are you going? I mean, do you have any idea what you’ll be doing . . . ?” She’d nearly said
with the rest of your life.

His shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I’ll get by. I’ve always been a fiddle-footed man.”

She watched his hands move over the glossy cinnamon hide.

“Johnny—”

He reached up, the pearl buttons on his cuff catching at the mare’s tawny mane, and he covered her mouth with his fingers. “I thought about us, Rachel, up on that mountain, I thought about whether I should stay and try to fight you for yourself.” His hand fell away. “And I decided it was better
just to end it now. Because someday someone was going to come riding down that road with a burning need to kill me. Someone who’s just a bit quicker, who can shoot just a bit straighter, and if I’d stayed you’d only have had to watch that happen.”

This time she was the one to reach across the horse’s withers, to touch one of the smile lines that edged his mouth, although he wasn’t smiling. “You still haven’t learned, have you, outsider? You could have walked out into the yard and gotten struck by lightning, and I’d have had to watch that happen as well.”

He shook his head, stepping back, moving out of reach of her touch. But now he did smile at her, with his eyes. “As much as I’ve gone out of my way to incur the wrath of the Almighty, He’s yet to go throwing lightning bolts at me.”

A panic gripped her chest so tightly that she thought her heart had stopped beating. “It’s happening this morning at the preaching,” she said, the words coming out of her on a searing shock of breath. “My confession and repentance.”
My promise never to speak with you, never to see you, never to have thoughts of you again.

His gaze fell away from hers, and he went back to currying his horse. “So young Mose told me when he came back to take over the herding.”

“Will you bring me there, to the preaching this morning, and will you promise not to leave until after it’s over?”

He made a raw, gasping sound, as if the breath had backed up in his lungs, hot and thick. “Jesus, Rachel. What do you think I’m made of?”

All that is fine and frightening, all that is sinful and beautiful, she thought. “Whang-leather,” she said. It was what the old-timers out here said about a man or a thing that was tough. Tough as whang-leather.

She tried to smile, but she could feel it coming all wrong like a terrible grimace. “Please, Johnny. I need you with me because I’m not tough at all.”

She backed up a step, and then another. She turned and walked toward the wet smear of gold light that she hoped was the open barn doors.

“Do you think it a sin, Rachel, the love we made?”

She didn’t answer because she didn’t know what the answer was.

THE SUN WAS A
molten copper ball in a hard blue sky. The wind rippled the tawny grass. It luffed the wide black brim of Rachel Yoder’s bonnet.

As she did on the way to every preaching, she turned around after they crossed the bridge and started up the rise, and looked back to the farm. For some reason she thought it would look different to her today, but of course it did not.

It was only herself and the outsider in the buckboard this time. Her brother Sol had come over with his wagon to bring her to the preaching, but she had patted his bearded cheek and sent him on his way with Benjo instead. It had seemed a terrible enough thing to Rachel, that her son would have to witness her shame as she confessed her sins of pride and fornication. She couldn’t bear having him endure with her what would come before: that long walk past the silent rows of benches, through that sea of black and white prayer caps and black hats. Those long, long moments on her knees, of waiting, waiting, of time passing slow. Not sweet this time, but bitter. Bitter and hard.

The old horse shook her harness and plodded along. Johnny Cain’s horse, saddled and groomed to a shine and tied to the back of the buckboard, was following along behind.
Her hooves made a more lively sound. Not a plod-plod, but a clip-clop. Johnny Cain’s getaway horse. The sun-baked road stretched before them, hard, but not long enough. Not nearly long enough.