The Outsider (32 page)

“You appear none the worse for wear, Mr. Cain,” she said as he moved to the fence and stood next to her, “after such a long and perilously close brush with salvation.”

“It was a near thing, though. Y’all got me so worked up, I was almost shoutin’ hallelujahs.”

She looked away. She had astonished herself, making a joke out of such a serious thing as a soul’s salvation. She wanted the words back, but of course it was too late. That was the dangerous thing about words—once said they couldn’t be unsaid.

She would have to remember that he had a way of making her say things, do things, that were not herself.

He noticed the cocoon in her hand and leaned over to see it, leaned so close his breath bathed her cheek. He touched the wriggling cocoon with the tip of his finger. “We don’t have enough bum lambs at home to feed that you got to be taking in bum butterflies now, too?”

At home.
She knew he hadn’t really meant to say such a thing, but it did make her smile. “By evening this little one will be flying free on the wind.”

They stood together in silence a moment, then he said, “I’ve never heard hymns sung like that before. They sounded like the bells that’re played sometimes during a funeral. Slow and sad and lonely.”

She wondered if that meant he’d liked their singing. She wanted to ask him if he’d been given even a glimpse of God in the silence, in the waiting, in the hymns that had sounded
to him like funeral bells. “There’s someone here I want you to know,” she said instead. “And I want her to come to know you.”

“Your mother?”

She shook her head. Her mother—if she brought Johnny Cain to her mother and said, “I want you to look at this man, Mem, and see not an outsider but a man I have come to . . .” She shook her head again. She couldn’t finish that thought, not even to herself.

She said nothing more to him, but pushed away from the fence and started across the yard, leaving him to come with her, or not.

The Plain People had gathered together again in groups of friends and family in the yard. The men talked about what kind of lambing season they were having, and how the open winter meant a poor hay crop this summer. The women talked about their next quilting frolic and a new recipe for sour cream cake. But a hush fell over everyone as they turned to watch Rachel and the outsider walk side by side toward Bishop Miller’s big house.

They skirted a huge iron kettle hanging from a tripod over a fire. Steam thick with the smell of bean soup billowed around them. “Are you hungry?” she asked him.

He glanced back at the bubbling kettle. “Well, I was.” He tilted his head to study her. “But with the way you’re looking so solemn-mouthed all of a sudden, you got me feeling like a horse thief on his way to meet the judge.”

“I’m taking you to meet
Mutter
Anna Mary. She’s what we call a
Braucher,
which means she can heal the sick with her touch alone. It’s a wondrous gift of God and comes from a faith that runs deeper than the core of the earth. She is very old and very wise, and you mustn’t mock her.”

He made a show of patting his pockets. “Well, shucks, lady, I think I got me some manners in here somewheres.” He smiled at her, but when she didn’t smile back, he said, “I’ll be good.”

“She’s actually my father’s grandmother, but all of us from the youngest babe to old Joseph Zook call her
Mutter
, mother, for she’s connected to so many of us here, either by marriage or blood. She is our roots.”

SHE SAT IN A
willow rocker on the gallery of her
Daudy Haus.
She’d never been a big woman, even in her youth, but the years had worn her down until she was little more than parched skin and frail bones. As Rachel climbed the porch steps, the old woman lifted her head. Her skull was bald beneath her prayer cap, her marbled skin pulled taut over the bones. Her eyes were like two smooth milky white pebbles. She had been stone blind for over fifty years.

“Rachel, my wild child,” she said, although Rachel had yet to make a sound but for the tap of her heels on the floorboards and the rustle of her skirts. “What have you done?”

Rachel knelt and put the leaf with its fragile cocoon into the old woman’s hand. “I’ve brought you a butterfly. It will be a spring azure, I think, when it hatches.” The silk shell shivered and trembled, and the old woman’s sunken mouth curved into a smile. “And I’ve brought Johnny Cain.”

Rachel stood up. The outsider settled down on his haunches in her place before
Mutter
Anna Mary. The old woman still held the butterfly cocoon cupped in her parchment brown palm, but she reached out with her other hand, and he took it. She stared at him with her milky blind eyes, and he stared back.

“You have slain your brother.”

She’d said the words flat out, brutally. He didn’t answer her accusation. But neither did he pull his hand from hers.

The old woman’s chest rose and fell with her breath. “And will you give to your God only silence when He says to you: ‘What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground’? Are you so full of pride, Johnny Cain?”

“Yes.”

The word had come out of him almost like a gasp, but he said, “I make no excuses for what I’ve done, and I’m not looking to change what I am.”

The old woman turned her face toward the tenuous warmth of the spring sun. “The farther you run, the longer the road back becomes. I would have thought you tough enough for anything, Johnny Cain. Even repentance.”

“Well, ma’am, the way I see it: repenting ain’t so hard. It’s giving up the sinning that can get to be a challenge.”

“Do you think that because your words are the truth that they are any the less hurtful to God?”

She pulled her hand from his and let it fall in her lap. She was silent for a time, and the outsider remained where he was, staring up into blind eyes that no longer looked at him and yet saw everything.

“That hand of yours, it has done more than its share of living,”
Mutter
Anna Mary said.

“And hurting,” he acknowledged. “But then your hands have done more than their share of healing, or so I’ve been told. Might be it’s just nature’s way of evening things out. You heal, and I kill.”

Rachel jerked, bumping into the back of her great-grandmother’s chair, making it rock with a soft creak. “The men have started setting up the trestle tables and
benches for the fellowship meal,” she said. “Perhaps you ought to go help them, Mr. Cain.”

The outsider pushed the flat of his good hand against his thigh, stretching slowly to his feet. “It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” he said. His eyes met Rachel’s for one enigmatic moment, and then he turned away. His boot heels rapped a slow beat as he walked the length of the gallery and down the steps.

“You sent him away,”
Mutter
Anna Mary said.

Rachel knelt beside the willow rocking chair. She laid her cheek on her great-grandmother’s knee. After a moment she felt the old woman’s fingers stroking the crisp black cotton of her bonnet.

“What did you see?” Rachel said. Neither thought it an odd question to ask of a woman who was stone blind.

“He is broken,”
Mutter
Anna Mary said.

His joy is in killing.
He was more than broken; he had been shattered, and Rachel knew there was no mending him. It wasn’t even right that she should try to mend him.

The old fingers, gentle, sure, moved beneath the brim of her bonnet to stroke her cheek.

“You brought him to me because you hoped I would see a goodness buried deep inside him, a soul worth nurturing. And then you became frightened that I would see too much and you sent him away. He has a soul, Rachel. Even that most wicked of Cains, who slew his brother Abel, had a soul. But for what he did God made him a fugitive and a vagabond and banished him from the face of the earth.”

Rachel raised her head. She hadn’t known she was crying until she felt the air cool the wetness on her cheeks. “But,
Mutter,
why can’t God forgive him? If you could have seen his eyes on the day he came to me.”

Mutter
Anna Mary neither moved nor made a sound.
She still held the cocoon cupped in the palm of her hand. Rachel could see the butterfly’s blue wings now, through the opaque skin of the chrysalis.

The cocoon trembled again, and the thin brown hand curled around it for a moment, as if she would protect it. “ ‘And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear.’ And perhaps it was, but it was no greater than he deserved. Whom do you want to save this outsider for, my wild child—God or yourself?”

Rachel could feel the truth searing her face, her cheeks burned and flushed as if she’d been bending too close to a hot stove. But it was easier, in a way, for someone else to name her sin. Easier, then, to admit to it at last—if only to herself.

“I want to come to know him. I want to understand how he can be as he is,” she said.

“But what you know and understand, you might come to love.”

Rachel was quiet. Out in the yard the children were playing a hand-clapping game, their laughter bright as sleigh bells.

The old woman’s chest shuddered with her deep sigh but she, too, said nothing more. For Rachel to love an outsider was a thing so wrong, so impossible, it was beyond words.

The cocoon wriggled suddenly, almost jumping.
Mutter
Anna Mary breathed a soft laugh. “Look, Rachel. It’s hatching.”

Rachel leaned closer. The chrysalis was splitting open at one end. “Soon it will fly.”

“IF THE WEATHER KEEPS UP
like this, it’s going to be hot as this soup come shearing time,” Samuel Miller said as Rachel set a clay bowl filled to the brim with bubbling bean soup in
front of him. He wasn’t speaking to her, though, but rather to the other men sitting with him at the trestle tables.

The fellowship meal was the only time the Plain didn’t eat in silence. The women always ate separately from the men, though, and they always served the men first. Rarely did they join in the men’s talk.

“Aw, our Sam’s only worried about his sweat fouling the wool,” Abram said. He tore off a crusty chunk of bread, dunked it in his soup, and stuffed it in his mouth. He grinned and winked at his brother, while the others all laughed at his joke.

Bishop Isaiah Miller stroked his beard as if he was about to pontificate, but his eyes were smiling. “These hot days of spring do serve as God’s warning that summer is coming. So I’m thinking we had better clip my Samuel’s sheep first, wouldn’t you all say so, my brothers in Christ? Before he has a chance to build up a good head of steam.”

The men laughed again, and Rachel smiled. She tried to catch the outsider’s eye, but he and her son, who were sitting side by side, seemed to be sharing a joke of their own as a platter of pickled cucumbers and beets passed beneath their noses. Benjo pinched his face up into a knot of exaggerated disgust.

Deacon Noah Weaver, on the other side of Benjo, saw what they were doing and frowned.

The men had made a place for the outsider at the table and then ignored him. They spoke in
Deitsch
and let their eyes slide over him as if he were a ghost they couldn’t see. His separateness from them was understood and accepted by all, including himself.

But then perhaps he is used to being the outsider, Rachel thought. Even among his own kind.

She heard a step behind her and she started, aware that
she’d been caught staring at the man. She whirled, nearly knocking a bowl of soup out of Fannie Weaver’s hands.

“Oh . . . Fannie. Is that my
Vater
’s soup?” Fannie’s face was bunched tight, like the knuckles of a closed fist. Rachel tried on a smile. “Give it here and I’ll take it on down to him.”

Her hands closed around the bowl, but the other woman held fast, so that they wound up tugging it back and forth between them. Boiling hot bean soup slopped over the rim, scalding Rachel’s fingers.

Fannie’s, too, probably, for she suddenly let go, and turned on her heel and stalked off. Rachel sucked on her burning fingers.