The Outsider (30 page)

Bishop Isaiah Miller had the biggest and finest sheep farm in all the valley, mostly because of her older brother Sol. A solemn, gentle man and a lifelong bachelor, Sol had filed his claim alongside their father’s, and they had combined the two homesteads. The bishop spent a good part of his days praying, studying the Scriptures, and shepherding his human flock, while his eldest son tended to the sheep.

Rachel wondered if the outsider would believe that Isaiah Miller’s stature within the church really did come from his prayers and spiritual guidance, and not from the size and wealth of his farm.

The outsider came back through the gate alone, without Levi. He flashed one of those sweet-rascal smiles at her. She wondered what sort of look she was wearing on her face that he felt he had to smile at her that way.

They walked together toward the front of the barn where the preaching would take place. They passed along the rows of buggies and wagons, all of them Plain, without backrests or dashboards, whip sockets or booster steps, the seats all simple plank boards. The outsider’s restless gaze lingered a moment on a large gray wagon, which had the look of a hearse.

“That’s our bank wagon,” she said. “We use it to carry the benches for the preaching service. Since we worship in a different barn every time, the family who hosted the service last time brings the benches along for the next preaching in the bank wagon. Our church is a body of believers, not a single place.”

He said nothing. He wasn’t looking at the bank wagon anymore, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She
could never tell what he was thinking. Not during all his teasing talk and lazy smiles that drew her to him, or the hard and brutal silences that made her fear him—she never knew what he was really feeling.

But then she wondered about herself, what her own thoughts and hopes were on this day. She had wanted the outsider to see this because it was so much a part of her, the backbone of her life. And yet she had known that even seeing it, he would never really understand. It could never matter to him anyway.

As they drew closer to the silent crowd in front of the barn, Rachel felt a nervous quiver in her belly, and she unconsciously smoothed her apron again. There would be consequences to face over what she had chosen to do. It was one thing to take in an outsider who’d been found gunshot and bleeding to death in your hay meadow. It was quite another to make him your hired man. And another thing entirely to bring him along with you to the preaching.

Rachel looked for her father. Of all those here today, he would have the most influence over whether the outsider would be allowed to stay among them for a time. But he was already in the barn, meeting with the community’s other two ordained ministers, Noah Weaver and Amos Zook, as he did before every worship service.

Her brothers certainly appeared to have made up their collective Miller minds. They stood in a row, looking like a chain of cutout dolls in their freshly brushed Sunday sack coats and broadfalls and wide-brimmed felt hats, all of them glowering at the outsider as if they wished him in perdition.

Or rather, Abram and Samuel glowered. Levi gawped and blushed. Sol, whose big and gentle heart was incapable of glowering, looked only at her, with concern shadowing
his face. Sol wouldn’t send the outsider away, at least not without a lot of prayer and thought. Not so the others. Samuel was the sort to leap headfirst into a raging river without a care for whether it was deep enough. And where Samuel leaped, Abram followed.

It was Samuel who broke away from the group to stride toward her and the outsider, with the others trailing after him like wind-stirred leaves. He stopped in front of her, hands on his hips, long black beard jutting.

“What the die-hinker do you think you’re doing, bringing
him
here?”

Rachel thrust her own chin into the air. Samuel always had something to be angry about, and Rachel had learned long ago that the only way to handle him was to stand up to him. “Mr. Cain has come to witness the preaching. It’s not a forbidden thing.”

A loud snort punctuated the air. This came from their brother Abram. Some people thought Abram was skewed in the head, mostly because he never had a thought there that hadn’t started out in Samuel’s head first.

“It is not forbidden,” Rachel said again. “And you just now sounded like a sick hog, our Abram.”

“He’ll not understand a word he’s hearing,” Samuel said. “He’ll be bored.”

“He’ll be bored stiff as a corpse,” Abram echoed.

Since they were already speaking
Deitsch,
presumably he couldn’t understand a word he was hearing now. But Rachel thought the man could probably make a pretty good guess at the sentiment behind the words.

“So what’s it to us all if he is bored,” she said, in
Englisch.
“I’ve told him he can leave whenever he wishes and we won’t be offended. You would deny him an opportunity to pray and worship God in fellowship with us?”

“He’s an outsider,” Samuel said, in
Deitsch.

Abram’s lips curled.
“Englischer.”

“He’s a man in the sight of God,” Rachel said, in
Englisch.

“The Devil’s own son, more like,” Samuel said. In
Englisch.

Four pairs of gray Miller eyes looked the outsider up and down, four wide Miller mouths flattened into frowns. Even Sol’s. The Devil’s own son stared back at them with lazy, hooded eyes, and that empty face he could slip on like a mask.

“She’s right,” Sol said. Sol’s words were so soft, they sounded as if they came out of his shirt yoke rather than his mouth. But when Sol spoke, others always listened. “About the preaching, at least,” Sol went on. “It’s not forbidden if he wants to come and witness.”

“Aaugh . . .” Samuel waved his hand as if brushing away a pesky fly. “He’ll grow tired of it all soon enough anyway. Long about the time his back starts to feel like it’s going to crack in two and his butt goes numb.”

Levi snickered. Samuel and Abram exchanged knowing grins.

Just then, as if they’d been given some invisible signal, the Plain women began to file into the barn. The children came running up from the pond, the girls going with the women, the boys joining the groups of men. Benjo seemed to have something in his hat and he was laughing and showing it to Levi, who had gone trotting over for a look. Rachel wouldn’t have put it past that boy of hers to bring a frog into the preaching.

But even a frog would be more welcome than Johnny Cain. She turned to him, feeling this strange need to stay with him, to keep him safe—which was ridiculous, for her brothers would do him no terrible harm, nor even a small harm. There was probably no safer place on this earth for Johnny Cain than here, in this place, at this moment.

“I must go,” she said to him. She wanted to touch him, simply touch him in some small way, but she didn’t dare. She wouldn’t have touched him even if they’d been alone. “We women always sit separate from the men.”

He gave her a probing look, one she couldn’t read. Then his mouth broke into one of those reckless smiles that had a touch of wildness in it. “Don’t you worry none about me, Mrs. Yoder. If I waited till I was invited, I’d never go anywhere. . . . But then I
was
invited, remember? By you.”

“It’s not that the others don’t want you, it’s just . . .”

But they didn’t want him, and it was hardly to be wondered at. Looking at him standing across from her brothers, she realized how separate he was from them all.

Oh, her brothers might look different from each other. Samuel, with his hair and beard black as a starling’s wings, and his big square jaw always thrust forward, plowing through life. Abram, Samuel’s shadow, but a lighter man with his butternut hair and beard. Sol, with no hair at all on his head and a beard as tangled as a crow’s nest. And Levi, still growing up into his features and his self. Yes, different they were to look at, but underneath they were much the same man, in their faith and values and tradition.

Her brothers, with their open, honest faces and their Plain dress, standing shoulder to shoulder, God-fearing men, good men. Whereas he . . .

He was Johnny Cain, man-killer. And an outsider in every way there was.

“I must go,” she said again. And she left him, almost running.

She crossed over to the side of the yard where the women stood in their own tight little knots. Her steps faltered when she saw her mother. Sadie Miller’s mouth and eyes were etched with shame. Her shoulders bowed with the weight of
it. In a world where a woman was judged by the daughters she raised, Rachel was her mother’s singular failure.

Standing close to her mother, on either side of her as if she needed shoring and bolstering, were her daughters-in-law. The two younger women each held a baby resting on a hip. Together, they raised their free hands to pat Sadie on the arm. Together, they lowered their heads as if in silent prayer.

Abram, who followed his brother Samuel everywhere, had followed him into marriage as well, taking the same woman to wife, or as close as he could get without being sinful. Velma and Alta were twins and so alike that no one but their husbands even made an attempt to tell them apart. It was more than a matter of them sharing the same moon-pale hair, dimpled chin, and bow-shaped mouth. They had the same squeaky voice, the same whimsical smiles, the same way of blinking their identical big hazel eyes whenever they were simultaneously confused. They lived, they thought, they even breathed in synchronization.

Next to the three Miller women, and yet somehow apart from them, was Noah’s spinster sister, Fannie. She stood with her shoulders pulled back and her bosom lifted high, as if she’d just sucked in a deep breath and now didn’t want to let go of it. She turned her head to stare at Rachel, with her nose wrinkled and her mouth puckered.

Still, Rachel wanted to go to them so badly her chest ached with it. She thought she could face the twins’ blinking eyes and Fannie Weaver’s puckered mouth, but she couldn’t face her mem’s shame.

So instead she went alone to the snake fence and took off her bonnet, looping it over the top rail with the others. The black bonnets all hung upside down off the fence rail in a row, looking like coal scuttles.

She stood there by herself a moment, feeling lonesome, even shaky. By the time she turned around again, all the older women, the wives and widows, had already passed through the big sliding double doors into the shadowy coolness of the barn. Rachel was left to join the
Meed,
the girls and young unmarried women.

The
Buwe
—the young bachelors—flanked the barn doors to watch as the girls walked through. The girls’ eyes stayed straight ahead, but their lips curled into pleased smiles and blushes pinkened their cheeks. They wore white shawls and white aprons and crisp black prayer caps to mark their virginal state. But those smiles and blushes, Rachel thought, would still have given them away.

She remembered what it was like to be young and watched, to be wanted. But Rachel had never been like the other Plain girls. Always, at the last moment, as she passed by the
Buwe
, she would brazenly turn her head to catch first Noah’s shocked eyes and then Ben’s laughing ones.

And because she was remembering, she was careful not to turn her head on this Sunday. For Ben wouldn’t be leaning there, one shoulder braced against the barn door, his dark eyes peering at her from beneath his hat brim, watching as she walked by. But others were there. On this Sunday, an outsider was there to watch. And perhaps to want.

THE SILENCE LAY HEAVY
and warm over the barn.

It was a time of waiting, of moments that passed slowly, yet were rich with the promise of what was to come. She breathed in the barn smells of horse and cow and hay, the Sunday smells of starch and soap and shoe blacking. Her gaze moved lovingly over the checkerboard of white and black prayer caps in front of her.

This was her life.

It was not as if she felt God more, in this moment, in this place, for God was everywhere and with her always. But in this time of waiting, of silence, with her family and friends close around her, Rachel Yoder felt safe. She felt loved. She sat on the hard, backless bench and lost herself in the silence. For her, just being here was an act of worship.

Rachel’s gaze roamed over the men’s benches. The outsider sat pressed between two of her brothers, Sol and Samuel. Her son also sat with the men, sat properly with his hands resting on his knees and his head respectfully lowered. But just then he shifted around on his bottom, caught the outsider’s eye, and pointed to the back of the man in front of him, Joseph Zook’s back. Benjo wafted his hand through the air and pinched his nose. Rachel had to bite her lip hard to keep from laughing.

She closed her eyes.
Oh, Lord God,
she prayed.
Thank You for blessing me with the gift of my son. Thank You for blessing me with life and love and laughter.

Her prayers drifted, became formless thoughts. The silence spun out and out and out, until the men reached up, as if in one motion, and took off their felt hats, putting them under the benches. They made a soft
husssh
of sound, like a suppressed sigh.