The Outsider (4 page)

“You’ve already had enough nips to settle your nerves into a stupor.”

He stared at her with bleary eyes a moment longer, then
pulled his wrist from her grasp. But he slid the flask back in his pocket. “I believe I liked you better, Rachel my dear, when you were the tongueless wonder.” He sighed deeply, looking down at the wounded man. “Pity I haven’t chloroform along with me to settle
him
into a stupor. But then he’s already so far under, just the shock of cutting into him is liable to kill him anyway.”

The doctor’s hand shook only a little as he picked up a scalpel from the bedside table and pressed the blade of it against the stranger’s pale skin. Blood welled and the flesh gaped, and it was Rachel who had to look away.

She heard the soft clinks of metal on wood as the doctor laid down the knife and picked up another of his gruesome instruments. She could hear his breathing and her own, and the clock ticking and the wind blowing.

The stranger groaned, and to Rachel’s shock the doctor actually huffed a soft laugh. “Feel that, do you, dear heart?” he crooned. “That’s good, that’s good—as long as you’re suffering, you’re still living.” The gunshot man groaned again and jerked violently. “Dammit, don’t stand there like a fence post, woman. Hold him down.”

Rachel leaned over the bed and gripped the stranger’s shoulders. His flesh was cold and hard and slick beneath her hands. The doctor probed and dug at the bloody wound. Rachel drew in a deep breath and swallowed. A bead of sweat trickled down from beneath her prayer cap and ran along her neck.

The doctor pushed out a grunt between his pursed lips. He straightened and held the bullet, pinched between a pair of long silver tweezers, up to the light. “A forty-four-forty,” he said. “Probably fired from a Winchester. See where it’s slightly flattened at one end—that’s where it struck the rib.”

He dropped the bullet into the basin of bloody water. “You’re looking kind of peckish there, Plain Rachel. I expect you could be using some of the Devil’s brew now yourself, huh? Well, to serve you right I’m not giving you any. And don’t you go fainting on me just yet either. We’ve work still to do.”

He had her help him sew up the hole in the man’s flesh, made by a bullet and enlarged by his doctor’s knife. “Suturing” he called it, which he did with a curved silver needle that wasn’t unlike the carpet needle
Mutter
Anna Mary used. Once, Rachel had helped her great-grandmother stitch up her brother Levi after he’d sliced open his calf with a sickle during the haying. She hadn’t been at all queasy then, but now the sweat clung cold to the roots of her hair beneath her prayer cap. Her stomach felt like a knotted fist.

Doc Henry dressed the wound and then took a look at the man’s broken arm. The doctor’s hands no longer trembled. Maybe he was feeling surer of himself, she thought, and no longer needing the whiskey.

He made a clucking noise with his tongue and shook his head. “An oblique compound fracture of the radius, and it looks as if the blamed fool tried to set it himself. Your bum lamb sure does fancy himself a tough one.”

Rachel thought that surely it would take a lot of courage to set your own broken arm. She wondered if it had happened before or after he’d been shot, and who had shot him, and why, and what had been behind that wild terror she’d seen in his eyes. But then, she had so many wonderings about him, this outsider who had come staggering across her hay meadow and leaving his bloody footprints in the snow.

ALL THE WAY THROUGH
the clay-chinked cottonwood logs of her house Rachel could hear the terrible gagging, choking sounds that came from the yard. Doctor Lucas Henry throwing up the whiskey that had soured in his belly, and trying to throw off the fear that made his hands shake and his smile a little mean at times.

She sat in her spindle-backed rocker, her own hands folded in her lap and her gaze on the young man in her white iron bed. They had bound up his broken arm in a sheet of surgeon’s plaster, cleaned the blood off him, and dressed him in one of Ben’s old nightshirts. She thought his eyes no longer looked so sunken into the bones of his face. A tiny blush of color touched his lips.

She heard the squeal of the yard pump handle and then the gushing splash of water. Doc Henry cleaning himself up now.

The man on the bed lay in utter stillness, but she thought she could see the throb of the pulse in his throat. She thought that if she listened hard enough she would be able to hear the rush and suck of his heart.

A sound at the door made her look up. Doc Henry leaned against the jamb, his worldly elegance decayed, his clothes stained and water dripping from the ends of his mussed hair. A cigarette drooped from one corner of his mouth. The cigarette and his mustache lifted together with his lopsided smile. “Well, and aren’t you just a-sitting there looking as pleased with yourself as a pig in pokeweed.”

She was so pleased she beamed a smile back at him. “He’s going to live,” she said.

The doctor raised one shoulder in a careless shrug. “For today.” He drew deeply on the cigarette, squinting at her through a haze of smoke. “Wild boys like him don’t make old bones. That last bullet gets them all in the end.”

He didn’t sound as if he cared much that a “last bullet” would get his patient in the end. He was a strange man, was Doctor Lucas Henry. She supposed she knew him better than she’d ever known an outsider, and yet of course she really knew him not at all. One afternoon last spring she had sat in this very chair, beside this bed, holding the hand of her dead husband, and Doc Henry had stayed with her for a time, talking to her. He had stayed because he’d sensed somehow that she—she who had always so loved silence and being alone—could no longer bear either.

Most of what he’d said that day had been merely words to fill the empty corners of the room, but some of it she’d heard and remembered. He’d been born the same year and month and very day as she, to her a wondrous happenstance that made her feel strangely linked with him, as if two souls who’d begun the journey of life together ought to have a special care for one another along the way. And which made him thirty-four. Everyone in Montana had left a home behind somewhere, and his had been in Virginia. She could often hear the echoes of that place in his speech. For a time he’d done his doctoring in the U.S. Cavalry.

Those things he had told her about himself, and one other thing she’d only felt. He was a man apart from the world, but not out of choice as she was. Rather it was as if the world had locked him out, or shunned him, or he believed that it had. His was a bleak and lonely soul.

She watched him now as he pulled the silver flask from his pocket and drank deeply. “Strictly for medicinal purposes,” he said, mocking himself this time. “Merely replacing some of the vital fluids I just lost.” He gestured at the bed with the flask. “The very thing that must be done with our desperado here. The nursing bottle was a fine idea—see if you can get him to take it again, along with as much
beef broth as you can force down him. And after a couple of days, when he’s stronger, give him some of that god-awful sweet rhubarb wine you Plain People make.”

She nodded, and then the full sense of what he’d said struck her. “But I thought you would be taking him back into town with you?”

“Not unless you want to undo all our good work.”

She crossed her arms, gripping her elbows. “But . . .”

“Change the dressing often—I’ll leave you plenty of alum. And for mercy’s sake, don’t clean the wound with turpentine again. He doesn’t need blistering on top of everything else. I’ll give you some carbolic acid instead. And make him stay quiet. He can’t afford to start bleeding again.”

The doctor pushed himself off the doorjamb. He held all of himself gingerly, but especially his head, as if he feared it might fall off if he moved too abruptly. He went to the bed and picked up the stranger’s wrist to feel his pulse. The stranger’s hand, Rachel saw, was long and fine-boned, with fingers so slender they looked almost as delicate as a girl’s.

But then the doctor’s own long fingers slid down to grip the man’s hand, and he turned it over almost roughly. “Have a good look at that, Plain Rachel. All pretty and smooth on the outside and a pure mess on the inside. Somebody’s worked this boy brutally hard for a time in his life. And look at this finger. It takes hours of shooting practice to put a callus like that on your trigger finger.”

He laid the scarred and callused hand on the bed, gentle now, brushing the back of it with his fingers. “He’s got shackle scars on his ankles, and someone’s taken a whip to his back—those are the sort of marks a spell in prison leaves on a man. He probably killed his first man about the time he was weaned and he’s been riding the owl-hoot trail ever since.”

His touch again oddly gentle, he smoothed the dark hair off the stranger’s pale forehead. “So will he thank you for saving him, I wonder? And I wonder why you even bothered, for he’s already caught fast in the Devil’s clutches. Isn’t that what you believe?” His gaze lifted to hers. His face was stark with something, some inner torment she couldn’t begin to fathom. “You people who are so sure that only you are saved, for you alone are the chosen of God?”

She shook her head at him. Strangely, she wanted to brush the dripping wet hair back out of his eyes, to touch him with that same soothing gentleness with which he’d touched the wounded man. “No one can be sure of salvation. We can only yield to God’s eternal will and hope things turn out for the best.”

He stared at her hard with a frown between his eyes, as if she were a puzzle he was trying to piece together. She had always thought that he was one of the few outsiders who looked at the Plain People and saw beyond their long beards and prayer caps and clothes that belonged to the last century. What he saw was the peace in their hearts, she supposed, and it both frightened and drew him.

He made a sudden jerking motion now with his shoulders, as if throwing off the weight of his thoughts, and he laughed. “Knowing how rarely things ever turn out for the best, I reckon hell’s got to be a mighty jumping place, then.”

He moved abruptly away from the bed and began to pack up his instruments. Except to tell her that he would be back in a day or two to check on his patient, he said nothing more. Rachel too was silent. She no longer looked at the outsider sleeping in her bed, the man who had a callus on his trigger finger and whip marks on his back.

She went with Doctor Henry out into the yard. The wind, raw and cold, twisted her skirts around her legs and
snapped at the long tails of his greatcoat. She was surprised to see Benjo still on the hay sled, feeding the ewes, for it seemed that hours surely must have passed.

At his buggy Doctor Henry turned and looked back to the house. Lampshine spilled from her bedroom window in a soft yellow pool on the mud-splattered snow.

“That boy in there . . .” he said. “He might be handsome as a July morning, but he’s also probably mean enough to whip his weight in wildcats when he’s not half dead.” He brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek, touching her gently in the way that he had touched the stranger. “Have a care, Plain Rachel. The powers of darkness really
do
sometimes prevail.”

T
HERE WAS NOTHING QUITE
so eye-watering as the sour stink of sheep. Even with the wind blowing hard enough to take the bark off the trees, Rachel Yoder could still smell the woolly monsters. They crowded around the sled, bleating and bumping their bony faces against the slats, while she stood on the deck and heaved pitchforkfuls of hay out beyond their wriggling backs.

She braced her legs apart as Benjo drove the sled lurching over the frozen ruts in the pasture. The muscles in her shoulders and arms ached as she bent to lift the damp hay, but it was a pleasant ache. She’d always loved working in the
open air, much more than she did the cooking and washing and keeping up of the house, the woman’s work. The drudge work, she thought, and then almost as a matter of habit she sent up an apology to the Lord for her willful ways.

Benjo hauled up on the reins and the sled squeaked to a stop. Rachel thrust the pitchfork into a loose bale and jumped to the ground. She pulled off a glove and swiped the prickly hay dust off her forehead with the back of her hand.