The Outsider (14 page)

This morning, as the outsider was taking the sun on her porch, she’d noticed how he kept scratching at the sprouting hair on his face. The next thing she knew she’d been offering to scrape it off for him. She’d figured that even if she
loaned him her husband’s shaving things, with his right arm bound up the way it was, he’d never manage them on his own.

His gaze was riveted to her every move as she spread open Ben’s warranted Perfection razor and stropped the blade, moving it back and forth over the smooth leather. She tested its sharpness with the pad of her thumb, deliberately giving herself a little nick. She pulled a face and sucked on the wound. He swallowed hard.

She removed the towel and began to brush the lather over his thick dark beard. She knew the badger bristles were as soft as a baby’s hair. The soap smelled sweetly of spring laurel, and steam floated through the air, warm and moist. She waited until his eyes had drifted closed before she said it:

“I reckon when I see the blood start to spurt a geyser, I’ll know I’ve scraped off too much.”

His eyes flew open wide, and Rachel laughed. Once started she couldn’t stop. She laughed so hard, she buckled at the waist, and it felt good, so good. She hadn’t laughed like this since Ben died.

When her laughter quieted she looked at him. He was trying to act insulted, but his mouth gave him away.

“You done making a fool of me?” he said.

She nodded solemnly.

“Let me see you hold that razor, then. I want to know if your hand shakes.”

She picked up the razor, deliberately jiggling her hand so that the blade flashed in the sun. It made her laugh again, and him as well. But the quiet that followed brought an odd uneasiness with it, as if they both were wary of the intimacy their shared laughter had stirred.

The razor made a soft snicking sound as it cut through
his beard. She enjoyed watching the lean ridges and smooth skin of his face become bared by the blade. She had forgotten how young she’d first thought him. There were hard edges to him, a toughness, that made him seem older, as if he’d been through more of life than his face could ever show. She had asked him once how old he was. He said he didn’t know. As if you wouldn’t know something like that about yourself.

She leaned closer to him, to get at the whiskers along the far line of his jaw, and her belly pressed against his shoulder. She jerked back, her startled gaze sweeping over his face. But his eyes were focused not on her but on something beyond. Or perhaps something deep within.

She had just shaved off the last of the beard beneath his chin and was wiping the razor clean when she felt him stir. She looked down and saw that he had her pincushion again, and again he was squeezing it over and over.

Yesterday, when she’d sat down in her rocker for a minute to darn a sock of Benjo’s, he’d noticed the pincushion. Made of red velvet, it was the size and shape of a small crabapple—a bit of frivolity she probably shouldn’t have allowed in her Plain life. He’d asked her if she would loan him the use of it for a time. She couldn’t imagine what he wanted with it. Not even when he took out all her pins and needles and began squeezing the cushion with his right hand, the hand of his broken arm, did she understand. He just kept squeezing, again and again, although she could see from the taut set of his mouth that it was paining him.

“Why?” she’d asked.

He hadn’t answered her. When it came to answering questions about himself, he was like the sheep, who might spook and run off at the slightest movement toward them. But she’d seen his gaze go to the bullet that still sat on her
nightstand next to her Bible. What he had called “the last bullet, almost.” He’d looked at that bullet and all the while his hand had been squeezing and squeezing her crabapple pincushion.

Squeezing and squeezing, like he was doing now. Her gaze was drawn by the way his fingers gripped the red velvet so tightly his knuckles went white, and the fine bones of his wrist and hand pressed out against the skin and receded, pressed and receded. The mystery of him fascinated her, the complexity of him. There were so many things she wondered about him, the loneliness and the restlessness she saw in him, and the sin.

She washed off his face with a clean hot towel. “There you are now, Mr. Cain,” she said. “No, wait.” She leaned over him, using a corner of the towel to wipe one last bit of foamy soap off his earlobe.

He reached up and curled one of her prayer cap strings around his finger and gave it a little tug. “What do you wear this thing all the time for?”

“We’ve always done so. It’s part of the
Attnung
, the rules of living. The prayer cap is a symbol, a reminder that we must always submit ourselves to God, and to men. The Bible says, ‘For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn.’ So we wear our prayer caps during the day, and we’ve other caps for night as well.”

She had not, however, always worn her night cap, not when Ben was alive. He had so loved the feel of her hair, the way it wrapped around them when they came together in the dark. Sometimes he would leave the lamp lit, just so he could see it.
Polished mahogany.
She had thought it only a small breaking of the rules, not to wear her cap in bed with Ben.

But the way the outsider was staring at her now made
her wonder suddenly if he didn’t know somehow about all those times she had not worn her night cap, and why.

“You ever seen a prairie fire?” he said. “The way the flames light up the bellies of the clouds from underneath, turning them all scarlet and wine-red? I opened my eyes that first night I was here, lying in your bed, and I thought I was looking at a fire-lit cloud. I thought it was a dream, but it was you. Only your hair was down. Why should God or any man breathing want to hide something so pretty?”

She felt a little flutter of pleasure in her chest from what he’d said; he’d called her hair pretty.

But it was sinful to have such feelings, vain as well as foolish. Rachel Yoder thinking she was somebody again. She began to gather up Ben’s shaving things. “Listen to you talk,” she said. “I suspect the Devil used similar such blather on Eve to persuade her to taste of the forbidden fruit.”

His mouth curved into an unholy smile. “Yeah, I ’spect he did.” Capturing her gaze, he transferred her pincushion over to his good hand and held it up, as though offering the apple to her.

“But I also reckon she liked the taste of that apple so much, the ol’ Devil didn’t have to do any persuading at all to get her to take a second bite.”

RACHEL SAT ON THE
porch steps, her arms wrapped around her bent legs, her head tilted back. The sun was a pulsing red ball behind her closed eyelids. The wind had the barest thread of warmth to it. It smelled of the thawing earth, of spring.

She opened her eyes and was sucked up, up, up into the sky. A sky that was a vast and empty blue.

She stretched her legs out flat, leaned back on her elbows,
and turned to look at the outsider. The man sat with the chair braced up against the wall of her house and his long legs sprawled over the warped boards of her porch. He sat so still she thought about getting up and going over to him to see if he was breathing.

She ought to get up in any case. She had bread to bake, clothes to wash, and a million and one other things that needed to be done. She knew it was slothful just to be sitting there; she didn’t have the excuse of a bullet hole in her side.

Benjo would be done with school soon, too, and she wasn’t sure she wanted the outsider on the porch when her son came home. Ever since he’d been scared off with a “bang,” Benjo had stayed clear of the man. Rachel felt easier inside herself because of it, although she wasn’t quite sure why anymore. She wanted to believe the outsider’s promise that he would bring them no harm.

They hadn’t spoken in a long while, she reflected. It shouldn’t bother her. She was used to spirits that were silent and at peace, because the Plain believed that needless words were a displeasure to God. Only she didn’t think the silence in the outsider’s spirit came from peace, but rather a hard and brutal emptiness.

In the pasture, a couple of ewes suddenly jumped up and started butting heads and doing a lot of blatting. The outsider’s hat brim lifted slightly as he watched them.

“We’ve hardly lost any of the woollies this winter,” she said. It was strange, but she, who had never minded silences, kept feeling this need to talk to him. To fill up his emptiness, perhaps. “That big snow a few weeks back was the only real bad one we had. Not like other winters when the skins can pile up to the rafters in the barn. It’s the blizzards, mostly, that kill sheep. They huddle up so close together, they smother to death.”

He didn’t say anything, but she sensed that he was listening.

“Except for the blizzards,” she went on, “sheep really like winter. They’re all snug in their wool coats, they’ve no flies to pester them, and some two-legged creature comes out twice a day no matter what the weather and feeds them forkfuls of hay.” She drew her knees back up and cupped them with her hands. She rounded her shoulders, pressing her mouth to her knuckles, smiling to herself at her thought before she voiced it aloud. “Winter is a good time to be a sheep.” As she spoke she turned her head to look at him.

The creases around his mouth deepened for a moment. She was coming to believe that when his smile was real, when it came from his heart, it was nothing more than a quick tightening of his mouth and a crinkling of the sun-creases around the eyes. “They do seem to be having themselves a time,” he said.

“They do,” she agreed, and then her heart was suddenly too full for words as she let her gaze roam lovingly over the farm: over the haystacks built tall and square, the neat lambing sheds, the lofty barn. It was a good home for sheep, their farm. Plentiful grass. A creek that ran almost the year round. And a wide belt of cottonwoods and willows to give shade in summer and break the wind in winter.

The ewes had quit their fighting and gone back to eating. Rachel had always enjoyed just sitting and watching the sheep. They slowly munched and dozed their way around the pasture, passing the time in the way they loved best, all the while quietly growing their wool and the lambs in their bellies. That old gappy-mouthed ewe did know a secret after all, she thought. She knew the comfort of time passing gentle and sweet.

As she sat there on the steps of her porch, hugging her knees, the barn and the haystacks and the sheep all
shimmered before Rachel’s eyes in a white light, and the light exploded into a soaring, tumultuous melody. For no more than a heartbeat the music seized her. Then it let her go, leaving her with a breath-held feeling of utter joy—a joy so intense it spilled out of her.

“A day like this is so
good,
don’t you find it so, Mr. Cain? It makes you want to praise God, and thank Him for giving you the life to enjoy it.”

Her words fell into an empty silence. She turned her head and saw his eyes lift quickly to the mountains, as if he didn’t want to be caught looking at her. Something cold seemed to shiver across his face. She had the notion that he’d just seen something, or thought something, that hurt him terribly. She wanted to go to him and touch him, just touch him. Just lay her hand against his cheek.

Instead she gripped her knees tighter and held her breath.

“What made y’all settle away out here, anyway?” he said, a strange roughness in his voice.

“The Lord.” She drew out the words with the slow easing of her pent-up breath. “It’s all part of the wondrous and mysterious ways of the Lord, how that came about. We began as a larger community of Plain People that farmed the Sugarcreek Valley in Ohio. But there was a division of thought, I suppose you would call it, among the members. Some of us felt that the others were becoming tainted by the world. Taking up modern things, like lightning rods and whip sockets on their carriages. And doing prideful things, like posing for photographs and wearing buttons and suspenders. Why, some of the men even took to wearing neckcloths!”

He made a snorting sound. “Heaven forfend. I’ve known many a man to be led down the merry path of sin by his neckcloth.”

“You ought not to laugh at things you don’t understand.”

His face sobered, but she sensed he was still laughing inside.

“Well,” she went on, a bit tentatively, “what happened was, my
Vater,
my father, he had a powerful awakening. A revelation from God.”

She paused to see if he was going to laugh again, but he just sat there looking at the sheep.

“Da saw this very valley in a dream and he led us here. Those of us who were determined to keep to tradition, to follow the straight and narrow way. And during our first worship service in this place, when the lottery chose my
Vater
to be our bishop, we knew it was a sign from God that his awakening had guided us true. But then the land turned out to be too dry for farming.”

“This country’s too high to grow much of anything but hay.”

His comment surprised her. She tried to imagine him walking over a furrowed field behind a mule-drawn plow, and she just couldn’t. “Are you a farmer, Mr. Cain?”