The Outsider (36 page)

“I’d be honored to shake your hand, Benjo Yoder.”

Surprise held the boy still a moment, then he reached up, and the outsider’s hand closed around his in a man’s firm grip. “You got a quick eye with that sling of yours. A man can be mighty grateful to have himself a partner with a quick eye.”

Benjo’s chest swelled and his face came alight with the outsider’s praise, and Rachel’s eyes stung with fresh tears. She blinked and reached up to brush the hair out of her boy’s face. “You did a . . . remarkable thing, and I am so very proud of you,” she said. “But it is only for the three of us to know, to share. You mustn’t speak of it to the others.”

Benjo nodded, his mouth set serious now. He wasn’t too young to understand that what he had done was not strictly in the Plain way.

“A brave deed don’t need words anyway. It speaks for itself,” Cain said, and the boy’s whole face broke into such a beaming smile that Rachel had to look away.

She stood up, facing the outsider. She searched for words, spirit-lifting words like those he had given as a gift to her son. Words that she could give to him in turn, to thank him for what he had done.

He was the one who spoke. “Let me kill him for you, Rachel.”

“Lieber Gott,”
she cried. That he could speak such hateful words, when but a moment ago he had used loving words as a gift for her son. “Do you still understand so little about us, about me, that you could say such a thing?”

Her own words echoed hollow with her lie. She had wanted Woodrow Wharton dead, if only for a moment. She shuddered as if a cold wind had blown through her soul.

“That man, he hanged my Ben,” she said, willing the lie back into truth again. “Who are you to speak of hate and revenge in front of Ben’s son? He would have killed our son, that man, our son who is all of life to me, and if in the face of his persecution and his cruelty I can still hold fast to the tenets of my faith, then who are you to do otherwise in my name?”

“Maybe I’m mistaken, but I seem to remember staring down the business end of a buffalo gun for a while there.”

“If you fear for your own life, Mr. Cain, then all you need do is leave us.”

His mouth tightened, and a muscle jumped in his cheek. “I don’t know as how I’ve ever been called a coward in quite such a righteous way before.” He touched the brim of his hat. “If y’all will excuse me, I believe I’ll go see about washing off some of this mud.”

But she stopped him from leaving by laying her hand on his arm. The wool of his coat sleeve was rough and warm from the sun; it had been ripped by the slashing cut of a steer’s hoof. “We are separate from each other, you and I,
outsider and Plain. But you saved my son’s life, and there are no words, no words to tell you what is in my heart.”

He reached up to straighten her bonnet, and he let his fingers slide softly down her neck. His touch made her tremble and that frightened her, but his words frightened her even more.

“We’re not so separate, you and I.”

“We are, always we are,” she said, and she backed away, out of his reach.

“Rachel. Rachel, my child.”

The sound of her father’s voice, full of comfort and love, was nearly her undoing. She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. And when she opened them again it was to look into her father’s dear face. The bones of his cheeks were white above the black fleece of his beard. His eyes, like hers surely, glittered too brightly. For a moment she thought he would throw his arms around her and pull her close, but it was not the Plain way.

“I’m all right, Da.” When she tried to smile, the skin around her mouth felt stiff. “We’re both all right.” She draped her arms over Benjo’s shoulders, linking her hands together over his heart. She kept having to touch him, to reassure herself that he still lived.

“Rachel. The Lord has indeed been merciful.”

This time it was Noah who spoke, and she tried to smile at him as well, and at her brother Samuel who stood with him. And then her gaze widened to include them all, all her brothers and Mem and her family and friends, all so very precious and dear to her. Her eyes met Fannie Weaver’s, and this time she did manage a smile for the other woman.

Isaiah Miller turned to the outsider. He took off his hat, but he did not lower his head or his eyes. He would humble
himself, but not so far as he would humble himself before the Lord.

“Outsiders sought to take my grandson from me,” he said in his careful
Englisch,
“but you, an outsider, gave him back to me.”

Cain’s gaze flickered over to Rachel, and his eyes didn’t smile with his mouth. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be countin’ on me for next time. Y’all ought to do what the man said: sell out and move on.”

“Ja.”
Isaiah nodded slowly. “It’s all in the Bible, how Isaac, when the warring Philistines stopped up the wells for his cattle, he moved to new lands and dug other wells. So now you, an outsider and an unbeliever, a man who kills men, you tell us we should leave. I say, what if God is only testing our resolution? ‘They that trust in the Lord shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed.’ ”

“Hunter and his hired guns sure enough seem resolved to remove you folk. And if they can’t remove you, it’s not too big a stretch before they resolve to bury you.”

Noah made a hacking sound of disgust deep in his throat and turned away. But Samuel stepped up to thrust his finger in the outsider’s face. “You speak of death and you smile your devil’s smile and think you’re somebody. But you’d be stone dead now if God hadn’t caused that horse to spook when it did.”

Benjo jumped and paled, and his left hand slid up to cover the sling that was tucked into the waist of his broadfalls.

The outsider gently pushed Samuel’s finger aside. He flashed the most devilish of his devil smiles. “Well, sure enough it must’ve been a miracle.”

THAT EVENING THE HYMNS
did sound sad and lonely, like funeral bells.

Rachel listened from the porch of her father’s house. It was tradition for the young people to gather at the end of a worship Sunday to have a sing. It was a time of courtship, with the girls sitting on one side of the long trestle table and the boys on the other, with the day slowing down to greet the coming night—and with eyes going where they shouldn’t and hearts occupied with thoughts other than the Lord.

In the air was the sickly sweet stench of burning sheep carcasses. It was the only way to get rid of them fast and clean, and spare the farm an invasion of vultures and wolves. The woolly monsters burned easily because of the lanolin in their fleeces. They went up, so the saying was among sheep farmers, like pitch torches.

The young people ended their singing with a crisp, sharp note that echoed in the dusk. Rachel glanced down to the other end of the porch, where
Mutter
Anna Mary was healing the outsider. She could see the old woman’s lips move, chanting Biblical phrases as she stitched the cut below his eye with sheep gut.

“You’re to come in now.”

Rachel turned. It was her brother Sol, and it was too dark to see his face. He reached out, though, with his big, clumsy fingers and pushed a loose strand of her hair back under her cap.

Their father sat at the long oilclothed table in the kitchen, with the rest of her brothers and Noah on their feet behind him. Mem was at the slop stone with her back to the room and her head tucked low, peeling a basket of potatoes, making herself disappear, even down to her shadow.

Although Rachel had never lived in this house, had never spent a night in it, she still knew this place as her home. This
table where her father sat, she would always have a place at it. They were bound, she and her brothers, Mem and Da, with ties toughened by life and love, too tough to break. Surely, surely, they were too tough to be broken by anything.

They all waited for Isaiah to be the first to speak. Yet he sat in silence, with the big family Bible open before him, combing his thick beard with his fingers while he gathered the words he would need from his heart and his head and the book he lived by.

“We have been thinking,” her brother Samuel said, though it was not his place to do so, “that you don’t need to hire some outsider to work your farm. Your brothers and your good neighbor Noah will give you the help you need.”

She knew what they wanted, especially Noah, and so she would shut her ears to their opinions. But if you were Plain, you never outgrew the commandment to obey your parents. What her father said, she would do.

She knelt beside her father at his chair, settled back on her heels, folded her hands in her lap, and bowed her head. “Is this what you think, Da?”

Isaiah pressed his hands flat on the table as if he could draw strength from what it symbolized, the unity of their familial spirit. “I will tell you what I know. I know that he’s not one of us. That he can never be one of us.”

“He’s not like other outsiders,” Rachel said.

A scoffing snort burst from Samuel’s nose, so loud the rafters echoed with it. Beside him, his shadow Abram snickered.

“He doesn’t drink the Devil’s brew,” Rachel said, “or smoke the Devil’s weed.” Since he said he’d won that harmonica gambling, she was careful not to mention games of chance. “He’s careful not to blaspheme, except for those times when he was out of his head with fever. He—”

Samuel’s hand slashed the empty air. “He kills, is what he does!”

“He’s trying to stop. He has come to us for sanctuary, and so that he might stop.” Johnny Cain was staying for a reason. She believed, she had to believe, that in his heart he wanted an end to the death and killing.

“He brought a gun with him to the preaching,” Noah said, and the words came out of him flat and hard.

“A gun that saved our Benjo’s life.”

“If it had been God’s will for the boy to die—”

“Don’t say that!”

Sol stepped between them, as if they’d been about to come to blows. “He didn’t mean that as it sounded,” he said. He turned to Noah. “It would be uncharitable to deny the good the outsider has done for us all on this day.”

An angry flush streaked Noah’s cheek like a slap mark.

Rachel felt her father’s hand settle on her head. “But still,” he said, “for all the good the outsider has done for us, for all the good he might want to do for himself, there is but one faith that counts with God. He is not one of us. He can never be one of us.”

Rachel felt the heaviness of her father’s hand on her head, and the starchy stiffness of her prayer cap, and these things reminded her of what she was. “You should forbid it if what I am doing is against the Plain way. I only sought to hire a man to help with the farm until I marry again.”

“That’s easily solved,” Samuel said. “Marry tomorrow.”

Rachel raised her head. She looked not at her brother, nor at Noah, but at her father so that he might know the truth of what she said. “Ben is still in my heart.”

Samuel spat out a short laugh with something sharp in it. “Are you sure it’s not the outsider who’s come and put down stakes there?”

“You think deviant thoughts sometimes, Samuel Miller. He sleeps in the sheepherder’s wagon.”

He flung his arms out from his sides. “So you say. But four sons our father’s raised, and none has been as much trouble, as much pain to his heart as his one daughter.”

Rachel surged to her feet. “
Five
sons he raised, not four. What stone do you carry inside of you for a heart that you can deny our brother like that? To speak as if he never existed? He might be dead, but you can’t deny he ever lived. He was our brother—” She felt as if she were choking on her own breath. “Our Rome.”

It echoed in the suddenly quiet room, that name. The name that had not been spoken for over five years.

Their mem was gripping the edge of the slop stone with both hands as if she needed it to hold her up. “How can you deny him?” she said to her mother’s back, though she had to swallow hard when she did it. “You carried his body and soul in your womb, you nourished him from your breast. He was your son. Rome was your son.”

Sadie whirled and fled from the room, and the slam of the bedroom door reverberated like Rome’s name.

Their father rose slowly to his feet. He stood before Rachel and she saw on his face a terrible fear that she was being lost to the world as her brother had been lost.

She reached for him. She gripped his sack coat with her two hands and clung to him, pressing her face into his chest. But he took her by the arms and set her away.

Samuel shoved their father aside to thrust a stiff finger in her face. “I say that if the
Englischer
stays through the summer, then, mind you, come mating season he’ll be gone and you like the sheep will be ready to marry.”

At any other time she would have laughed, for it was such a preposterous thing. To tell her, a grown woman and with a
child of her own, whom she must marry and when. But she couldn’t laugh, not looking into her brother Samuel’s face, flushed as it was with anger and even revulsion.

Her gaze went to Noah. He stared back at her through eyes dark with anguish. He had never been able to hide the love he felt for her. She didn’t want to believe that such a love could be a burden as well as a gift. That it could hurt.