The Outsider (17 page)

She was leaning back against the porch railing, her arms straight out behind her, her palms braced on the roughly peeled pine pole. Her skirts slatted in the wind, her cap strings danced. She was talking with the outsider. Laughing with him.

The outsider sat on one of her kitchen chairs with his back to the wall, but Noah barely spared a glance for the man. His gaze went straight to Rachel, and stayed there.

So many times over the years he had watched her like this, from afar. Coming to the Yoders’ for a word with Ben about the shearing or the haying or the lambing, when it was really Rachel he’d come to see. Standing in the yard talking with Ben, one eye on the door, hoping, praying she’d come out, waiting to be invited in for coffee and maybe a slab of pie. Sitting at her table, drinking the coffee, eating the pie, talking with Ben. And watching her.

Watching the way her lower lip would puff out when she
blew a sigh up her face if she was tired. The way her skirts would sway around her hips as she moved from the cookstove to the slop stone. The way her back would bow, supple as a willow tree, when she bent to pour more coffee into his cup, and he would look up and smile his thanks to her and she would smile back, and he could fool himself into thinking just for that one moment that she was his.

That was all he’d ever had of her, those times which had always felt stolen to him and somehow empty, lacking. Just those quick, passing moments in her kitchen, and when he saw her every other Sunday during the preaching.

Oh, it truly was God he went to worship on those Sundays, but a small corner of his heart always beat harder and faster at the knowledge that he would see her. No matter what barn the preaching was held in that day, no matter where on the rows of benches she sat, his gaze would find her in an instant. In a sea of brown-shawled backs, and black and white Sunday prayer caps, he would know her. He knew her voice in the hymnsongs and prayers. And afterward, when the women passed out the bowls of bean soup and platters of steaming bread, he’d know which hands were hers, without even looking up, he’d know. Although he always would look up, anyway, just to catch her smile, and he’d be close to pure joy in that moment. Close to God, and close to Rachel.

He approached her slowly now, not to sneak up on her, but only to prolong the moment when it would seem that she was his and his alone. The outsider must have seen him, made some telltale movement, for she suddenly jerked upright and whirled.

“Noah!” she exclaimed. Her face was bright, as if with happiness. But as her gaze settled fully on him, her eyebrows drew together in a slight frown. “What’s the matter?”

Although she hadn’t laughed again since he’d come around the back of the barn, he kept hearing the echo of it. He
felt
the echo of it in the pit of his belly. It made him uneasy, like the hot chinook wind.

The weather-rotted steps groaned beneath his weight as he came up to her. He allowed himself to drink in the sight of her. She stood now with her slender back straight, her shoulders flat and square. He always felt so hulking and clumsy around her, too big for his skin.

“Wie gehts?”
he said to her. She’d been baking, for her sleeves were rolled up and there was a dusting of flour on her arms. Her skin was so pale he could see the blue veins on the inside of her wrists.

It was rude of him, Noah knew, to be speaking
Deitsch
in front of the outsider. The man was a guest in her home. Her gray eyes showed her disappointment in him, the way they darkened. Rachel’s eyes had always been like a weather vane for her feelings.

“How nice of you to come calling, Noah,” she said, enunciating the
Englische
words carefully, as if he’d suddenly turned into a big
dopplich
of a kid that needed teaching. “Mr. Cain, this is my good neighbor, and my particular friend, Noah Weaver.”

Noah waited, though he wasn’t sure what for. Maybe for her to say: This is the man I’ll be marrying soon. Except she wasn’t going to be saying that now. He’d asked her and asked her to marry him, but she hadn’t said yes, and it was only a small comfort to know that she hadn’t said no yet either.

He turned slowly, allowing his gaze to settle at last on the outsider. The man sat there looking all dandified and puffed up in his worldly clothes. His face was as bare and smooth as a baby’s bottom. Noah felt the tight knot ease some in
his chest. Rachel would find nothing pleasing in this flashy, beardless boy.

The outsider looked up at Noah through half-closed eyes that were a pale, cold blue. His face was as flat and empty as the prairie in winter, yet Noah felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. Then the outsider lifted his hand and laid it on his thigh, and Noah realized that he’d had that hand resting on the handle of the Devil’s tool he wore strapped around his waist. Had probably had it there from the moment Noah walked out from behind the barn.

“Good afternoon to you, sir,” the outsider said. “And how d’ you do?” He had a slight drawl, from Texas maybe, Noah thought. Or some other place way down south.

He’d spoken politely enough, but Noah still had no trouble allowing his contempt for such a man—a man who always needed to be touching a gun to feel safe—to show on his own face. “Myself, I’m doing fine, Mr. Outsider. As for yourself, I’d say you were fortunate in where you chose to get yourself shot.”

The outsider’s wide mouth curled into an easy smile. “Ah, but fortune is a two-faced wench, don’t you know?” He cast a look over at Rachel and his smile changed, although Noah couldn’t decide in exactly what way. “All because Mrs. Yoder went and saved my life, now I gotta be polite and let her take a crack at my black soul.”

And in that moment Noah sensed something flash between the two of them, between the outsider and his Rachel. It made him think of the way Saint Elmo’s fire arced and shot off blue sparks between the tips of cattle horns during a heat-lightning storm. Yet the impression was so startling to him, so impossible, that he told himself he must have imagined it.

“Whereas if it’d been your farm I’d’ve stumbled across
when I was dying, why, I suspect you’d have just let me go straight on to hell in my own merry way.”

Noah knew the outsider was speaking to him. He could hear the edge in the man’s drawling voice, and he could feel the impact of that insolent blue stare. But he couldn’t take his eyes off of Rachel. He noticed suddenly that she had a smudge of flour at the corner of her mouth. He’d always had trouble looking at Rachel’s mouth. With its bottom lip thicker than the top one, she looked like she was pouting even when she wasn’t. When he looked at Rachel’s mouth, Noah forgot it was the purity of her soul that he loved.

He tried to clear the gritty feeling out of his throat. “None of us knows if he is saved till he gets over yonder, so we don’t worry ourselves about the salvation of others, Mr. Outsider. We leave that to God. And we don’t accept converts into our church.”

Rachel made a funny little jerking movement. “Oh, honestly, Noah—as if he should even want to. Mr. Cain is only joking.”

Was that what they were laughing over when he came up, he wondered—over God and salvation and the immortal soul? He didn’t like this conversation. He felt left out of it, horrified by it. His gaze roamed over the yard, the barn, the hay fields, as he struggled for something to say.

“Your ewes will be dropping soon.”

Rachel looked over to the paddock where her sheep munched on scattered hay. “No, not for a while yet I should think,” she said.

Noah felt a flash of irritation with her, even though he knew she was right about the ewes not being ready. A woman shouldn’t contradict her man in front of another.

Rachel had turned back to the outsider, and her face had taken on an excited look. She tucked in her chin to hide a
smile in that way she had when she was teasing. “But if they do start dropping while you’re still here, Mr. Cain, we’ll see if we can’t make a lamb licker out of you.”

“Lady, I sure do hope that ain’t what it sounds like.”

“Oh, it’s much worse than what it sounds like. Much worse.” And to Noah’s utter shock, she laughed again.

He wondered where she’d come from, this Rachel he didn’t know. How often had he himself testified at the preaching, about how a boisterous laugh and a quick retort betrayed a cocky spirit, the kind that God despised? He wondered now if Rachel had ever really listened to his words. She’d always needed a strong husband to guide her. Ben, he thought sourly, should have made a better job of it.

He cast a glowering look at the outsider. “Now that he’s up and about, I reckon he’ll be moving on directly.”

“Mr. Cain is hardly cured enough to straddle a horse yet.”

“He can walk. That’s how he came; that’s how he can go.”

Stormy eyes flashed at him. “Noah!”

Noah grunted.

That same easy smile pulled at the outsider’s mouth. “I fear, ma’am, that your good neighbor and particular friend don’t have much use for a disreputable rogue like me.”

Rachel almost laughed again. Noah saw the laughter rise up in her face and flood her eyes, making them sparkle, and she only stopped it from coming by sucking on her lower lip.

He looked from Rachel back to the outsider, looked down into that devil’s face and those cold, cold eyes, and hatred roiled like a storm in his belly. He was astonished by the piercing purity of the hate that he felt. Astonished, and ashamed.

He closed his eyes and groped for a thought, a prayer, that would lead him back to God and away from the sin of
his hate.
He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now.

Noah backed up, shaking his head. “I’ve a buckboard wheel at home that needs hooping,” he said, thinking he probably wasn’t making much sense and not caring. He groped for the porch rail, his big feet stumbling on the muddy steps so that he almost went sliding onto his rump again.

“Noah?” she called after him, but he pretended not to hear.

Once, a long time ago, Ben had said to him: “If she’d chosen you over me, it would have hurt. Hurt bad. But I could’ve come to accept it, through knowing she was happy. Look at her, Noah, really
look
at her, and not with eyes that only want to see what might have been. Rachel is happy.”

Noah had looked at her that day. When could he not have looked at her? On that day she’d been out with the sheep, introducing the new lambs to Benjo. The boy was just learning to walk, and she was laughing at the way he kept grabbing onto the woolly backs of the lambs as he fought to keep his balance, and both lamb and boy would go tumbling down together into the soft spring grass.

“She would have been happy with me,” Noah had said.

And Ben had sighed, his gaze settling gently, lovingly, on his wife. “Maybe so, but maybe not. She’s like the water in that creek, is our Rachel, always flowing fast and clear. You can see through her plain enough, to the bedrock that is her spirit. But you can’t hold all of her in your hands like you’re always wanting to do. Like I try to do sometimes, even when I know better.”

Now, when he got within the shadow of the barn, Noah looked back. She stood next to the outsider. He must have been saying something to her, for she stood as if listening, with her head slightly cocked, one hand on her hip and the
other trying to capture her wind-tossed cap strings. Suddenly she leaned over and gave the brim of the outsider’s hat a sharp tug, and she laughed.

Noah tried to breathe but his chest felt swollen shut, as though stuffed with cotton batting. He tried to remember if he’d seen her happy in the time since Ben had gone, if he’d ever once heard her laugh. Now this
Englischer
had come with his gun, with his easy smiles and his cold eyes.

Now this outsider comes and he makes my Rachel laugh.

MOSES WEAVER STOOD NAKED
on a shelf of rock. He looked down, six feet down, into the still water. Wind rattled through the branches of the willow brakes and wild plum trees and stirred the dead marsh grass that limned Blackie’s Pond. The wind was warm on his bare skin, but he knew the water would be freezing and he shivered at the thought.

He took a deep breath and dove.

The cold seemed to suck the air right out of his lungs, and the water closed over him, gripped him like a fist and pulled him down. He thrust his legs hard and shot back to the surface.

Judas, it was cold. He forced himself to swim two turns around the pond and then pulled himself out.

Shivering, he lay down on a bed of marsh grass, stretching flat out on his belly. He sighed as the warm wind and sun dried his goose-pimply skin. The water might be cold this time of year, he thought, but at least it was clear. Come summer, the pond would be cloudy and filled with skitter bugs and snaky reeds. If a body could stand the shock of it, winter was a good time to come swimming out here. Especially when the chinook blew.

Mose stretched, digging his fingers into the tangled roots
of the marsh grass, breathing in the loamy smell of damp earth. It was a luscious feeling just to lie there and do nothing, although he knew he’d pay for it later, once his father got a look at how that busted paddock gate he was supposed to have been fixing this afternoon was still busted. But when that gate got mended there’d still be another chore waiting, and another after that. Old Deacon Noah was always saying the Lord loathed idleness, and so he did his own level best to keep the Lord happy by loading his son down with work. Mose figured the draft horses at their place knew more moments of loathsome idleness than he ever did.