The Outsider (8 page)

“Who’s that?” said the man in the bed, the man with a gun in his hand.

Rachel thought she might be sick. “M-my son. Don’t . . .” The words faded as her throat constricted. “Don’t hurt him.”

Out by the wild plum thickets Benjo released one of the sling’s rawhide cords, and the rabbit dropped like a stone.

The man turned his eyes back to her and stared with a concentration that was frightening and tangible. Unexpectedly,
he smiled. “Looks like you’ll be having rabbit stew for supper.”

His words and his smile disconcerted her. His eyes remained terrifying.

Her gaze dropped to the floor, where the vinegar water had made a dark wet stain, almost like blood.
Lieber Gott, lieber Gott.
If it had been Benjo to come through the door instead of her . . .

“What kind of crazy person are you?” she shouted, advancing on the bed. “
Englischer, litterlich und schrecklich!
Waving that wicked thing around like a crazed fool, pointing it at innocent folk. I’ve already one bullet hole in my wall and I’ll not have another. Not in my wall, not in my son, nor my own person, for that matter. Why, I’ve a good mind to . . .” She trailed off as she heard the echo of her own shrieking voice.

The brackets around his mouth deepened ever so slightly, and his eyes tightened at the corners. “You’re gonna do what, lady—take a switch to my sorry ass?”

Flustered, she jerked her gaze away from his. “Hunh. I ought to.”

She saw that she still held the basin hanging empty in her hand and she slammed it down on the floor with a clank. She had dropped the roll of bandages back by the door. She went and got it and slapped it on the nightstand next to her black calfskin Bible and the bottles of carbolic acid and alum Doc Henry had left with her. She jerked the bedclothes down to his waist and tugged up Ben’s nightshirt.

“What the hell . . .” He reached for the sheet, but she batted his hand away.

“Whatever you’ve got, mister—I’ve already seen plenty of it.”

Blood had seeped in a starburst pattern through the
white linen bandage. She leaned over him, reaching for the knot where the bandage ends wrapped and fastened around his middle. Her arm pressed against the hard sinewy muscle that encased his ribcage. He was still feverish, his skin sweaty and hot to the touch.

His chest heaved beneath her arm as he drew a ragged breath. She glanced up, her fingers abandoning their battle with the knot. He was studying her, his gaze moving slowly over her prayer cap, her brown Plain clothing, then back up to her starched white cap again.

“What are you?” he said. “Some sort of nun?”

“What a notion. I’m a daughter of the Plain People.”

His eyes were certainly blue, cold and sharp like broken shards of river ice reflecting a winter sky. And he was staring at her as if he were trying to crawl inside her skin.

“I don’t know as I’ve ever heard of such a thing,” he said. He flashed a bright smile that showed off his even white teeth. “You sure don’t look plain to me. A bit starchy maybe, and undoubtedly a holy-howler. But definitely not plain.”

It occurred to her that he was trying to be friendly. As if he could wave a six-shooter in her face one minute and expect to make it up with a smile in the next. His was a charming rascal’s smile, and she trusted it for about as long as it took to blink.

He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I guess I should know by the scowl I’m getting that you are definitely a holy-howler of the serious sort.”

“I don’t know what you mean by holy-howler. There’s nothing special about us, except that we raise sheep, so I suppose if you’re a cowman you might call that an aggravation. We follow the straight and narrow way, working and praying together and trusting in the mercy of the good Lord to take care of us.”

“And does He? Does your good Lord take care of you?”

It was a question only an outsider would ask. A Plain man was born knowing the answer. She felt no need to reply.

A ragged silence fell between them, and his gaze went back to the window. She busied herself with unfolding the clean bandages, though she hadn’t finished removing the soiled one. “You aren’t from these parts, are you?” she said.

“No.”

“Were you just passing through, then?”

He made a sound that could have meant anything.

“I only ask because if you got folk expecting you somewhere they’ve likely worried themselves sick by now, and I could send them word if I knew . . .” She let the end of her thought dangle open for him to finish off. He didn’t even bother to grunt a response. Rachel was beginning to have some sympathy with the outsiders, who became so frustrated with the Plain People when their questions were met with silence and single syllables.

She slid another glance at him. He was looking her bedroom over now; he seemed to be analyzing and cataloguing it the way he’d done with her.

Her house was like most every other Plain farm in the valley, a simple structure made of cottonwood logs and a tin roof. Three simply furnished rooms: a
Küch
, or kitchen, and two bedrooms opening off the back of it. No curtains on the windows, no rugs on the floors, no pictures on the walls. Just a Plain house. But then he wouldn’t know that, so doubtless it seemed some strange to him.

She had been looking around the room as he was, but now her gaze came back to him. His face revealed nothing of what he was truly made of, whether good or evil.

As they stared at each other, the air seemed to acquire a
thickness and a weight. She had no idea how to be with him. She knew she could never manage a smile, but she thought she could try a bit of friendliness herself. He was after all a guest in her house, and they didn’t even know each other’s names.

She wiped her hand on her apron and held it out to him, as was the Plain way. “It seems a bit late for a proper meeting, being as how you’ve already cursed me, like to have shot me, and bled buckets all over my best muslin sheets. But I’m Rachel Yoder. Mrs. Yoder.”

He lay there looking up at her with his eyes so cold they burned. Yet the hand still wrapped around the gun held it gently now, his thumb caressing the butt, slowly, slowly. The silence dragged out and her own hand hung in the air between them until it trembled and started to fall.

And then he let go of his gun and took her hand in his. “You have my gratitude, ma’am. And my apology.”

They remained that way for only the briefest moment, touching palm to palm; she was the one to pull away. “Your gratitude and apology are both accepted,” she said. “While you’re at it, do you have a name you’d care to give me? If only so’s Benjo and I can have a handle to put on you when we speculate about you behind your back.”

She had thought to show her willingness to be friendly by doing a bit of teasing, and then making a little joke at her own expense. But that was a Plain way of going about it; obviously it made no impression on him. He let her wait so long for an answer, she didn’t think she was going to get one.

“You can call me Cain,” he said finally.

She nearly gasped aloud.
And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. . . .

Surely no one could be born with such a name. He must have taken it on as some sort of cruel and bitter joke. She thought of the callus on his trigger finger. Cain. The name he killed under.

She knew her thoughts showed on her face. His mouth twisted. “If you don’t like it,” he said, “pick something else. I’ll answer to most anything that ain’t an insult. Is this Benjo your husband?”

“My—” Her voice cracked and she had to start over. “My son.”

He stared at her in that intense way of his, and she could feel the color building in her cheeks.

“So, you’re a widow, are you?”

She opened her mouth to lie; but a lifetime of believing it a sin stopped her. “Yes. My husband died last year.”

He didn’t say he was sorry for her loss, as most outsiders would have done. He said nothing at all. His gaze had wandered to the window again; he seemed to have forgotten her. Beyond the weathered gray fence of the feeding paddock, beyond the black cottonwoods that lined the creek, beyond the snow-clotted meadows and rocky buttes and weed-choked coulees, the mountains beckoned. Surging up against the harsh blue of a wind-tossed sky, they looked splendid, and lonely.

A stillness had come over him. The silence in the room took on a prickly tension, like a strand of barbed wire pulled tight between two fence posts.

“You still haven’t told me where you call home,” she said. She felt a need to put him in some familiar place. Not that she could imagine him walking behind a plow or tossing hay to a band of ewes. She couldn’t even imagine him roping a cow or clinging to the pitching back of a wild mustang.

He pulled his attention from the great outdoors and looked at her. “I don’t call anywhere home.”

He seemed about to say more, but he was interrupted by the rattle of wagon wheels over the log bridge. He swung his gun up and pointed it at the door in a movement so quick she didn’t even realize it had happened until it was over.

His jumping like that set her own heart to clamoring again, and it was pounding still as she stepped up to the window to see more of the road. The Weaver spring wagon rolled into the yard with Noah’s son at the reins.

She turned back to the outsider. He could barely hold up his six-shooter, it was trembling so hard in his outstretched hand. His chest jerked with his rough breathing, fever-sweat sheened his face, his eyes glowed wild. Strangely, he reminded her of an etching in the
Martyrs Mirror
of a true believer being burned at the stake, his clasped hands raised to heaven in rapturous prayer as the bright and terrible flames consumed him.

She walked to him and put her hand against his chest, pressing him down into the bed. Ben’s muslin nightshirt was slick beneath her palm; he’d sweated through it. She could feel him shuddering. “It’s only Mose,” she said. “My neighbor’s boy, come to chop up some wood for me.”

His harsh breathing made his words come out as a gasp. “This neighbor and his boy, do they know about me?”

“The whole valley can’t help but know about you by now, the way rumor flies and grows with each telling. If a body coughs on Sunday, he’ll hear about his own funeral come Tuesday.”

“What are they saying?”

Through the window she watched Mose set the brake, tie the reins around its handle, and jump to the ground. He slapped the hat off his head, wiped his coat sleeve across his
mouth, then smoothed back his light brown hair. He rolled his broadening shoulders like a horse with an itch. At seventeen he showed the sure promise of someday being as big and sturdy as his father.

“If they’re Plain, they’re saying you’re a fool
Englischer
who went and got himself shot almost dead, and it’s only by God’s bountiful grace that you’re not—dead, that is—although it would probably be no more than you deserve for your wicked ways. Nevertheless we all pray you will eventually arrive at the Truth and the Light. As for what the outsiders are saying—you could probably imagine that better than I could. Now, if you think you can be still for longer than a tick at a time, I’ll tend to your hurt. The day’s waning and I’ve got chores forming up a line for me to do.”

He looked up at her, his eyes bright and slightly unfocused with the fever. “You are an oddity,” he said. His gaze went slowly around the room again. “This whole place is an oddity.”

“I’m Plain, and this is a Plain house. Our ways are the true ways, and they’re not an oddity to God. Lie quiet now.”

She used a pair of scissors to cut through his soiled bandage, since the knots were hopeless. She’d lied to him that first night, she thought. Lied without meaning to. He wasn’t safe here. There was no place safe for a man like him this side of heaven, and he’d likely never be going
there
this side of eternity.

The flesh around the wound was raw and black and puckered at the edges; fresh blood seeped from all the jerking and jumping he’d been doing. Flesh. It could be sliced with a knife, smashed and torn by a bullet, whipped and burned, chained and degraded—how easily could the flesh be hurt. How frightening that flesh was so vulnerable when it was the vessel of life, the temple of the soul. It was solely
by God’s grace, surely, that this man still lived. He lived because God had sent him staggering across her wild hay meadow.

And then it occurred to her, with a sudden horror that almost made her heart stop, that if he wasn’t safe, then neither were she and Benjo. That on taking him in, his enemies had become their enemies.

Slowly she looked up. He had a way of making all the life go out of his face, of making his eyes go flat and empty so that it was as if she looked through two holes into a husk of a man.

“The one who did this to you,” she said, “is he going to be coming after you here?”

Nothing stirred behind his eyes. Nothing.

And then she realized the truth. He’d killed him. He had killed the man who had shot him; she had no doubt of it.

A terrible feeling came over her, a feeling she struggled to disown, for it was not the Plain way to seek redress against one’s enemies, but rather to yield absolutely to God’s will and trust in His ultimate mercy.
Not my will but thine be done.
But the feeling was there, nonetheless. She felt
relief.
Relief that she and Benjo would be safe because this man had killed.

She ripped off a piece of clean bandage and dabbed at the seeping blood. “You don’t need to be pointing that gun of yours at every little noise or visitor. No outsider will be having a reason to come here.” She dabbed at the wound, and dabbed and dabbed. “As for us, we Plain People bring suffering to no one, least of all the helpless and the sick.”

“You’re bringing suffering to me now, lady, the way you’re prodding at me like I was a cow in a bog hole.”

He’d put on his charming rascal’s smile again, but this time it didn’t quite work. This time his mouth betrayed
the wildness in him, revealing the potential for meanness.