The Outsider (5 page)

“Muh—Mem?”

She turned slowly, careful to keep her face calm, for even with the gusting wind she’d caught the thread of fear in her son’s voice.

Benjo stood at the head of the draft horse, one hand wrapped around a hame on the harness collar as if he needed its weight to anchor him to the ground. Next to the mare’s shaggy bulk, he looked so frail. His bony wrists, chapped red from the cold, stuck out from the ends of his coat sleeves.

“Mem, thuh—thuh—that outsider . . . is he an outlaw?”

She came up to him, her gaze moving gently over his pale face. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps.”

“Will he shuh—shuh—shuh . . . ?” His tongue pushed so hard against his teeth that his head jerked, and the muscles of his throat clenched around the word that wouldn’t come.

She put her hands on his shoulders, stilling him. “Sssh, now, and listen to me.” She spread her fingers up over his collar into the ragged strands of his hair. She could feel a fine trembling going on inside him. “The outsider has no reason to shoot us. We mean him no harm.”

He tilted his head back to stare up at her, his eyes as leaden as the clouds overhead. She saw the question in those eyes and the unspoken truth. The outsiders had been
given no reason to hang his father, but Benjamin Yoder had died that way nonetheless, choking at the end of a rope.

It was hard, so hard sometimes to accept God’s will.

The boy’s mouth tightened and spasmed once, and then the words burst out of him fierce and whole. “I won’t let him hurt you, Mem!”

Rachel dug her fingers into his shoulders as she pulled him against her. She knew she ought to tell him that he mustn’t resist whatever happened, for it would be the will of God. But this time it was her own throat that closed up tight around the words and kept them from coming.

THE EWE BUTTED HER
black face against Rachel’s thigh, making a
buuuuhh
sound deep in her throat. “It’s the hay you’re supposed to be eating, you silly old thing, not me,” Rachel said, laughing as she thrust her fingers through the sheep’s rich oily fleece.

This ewe was an old one, and her mouth was so broken she could barely chew even the softest grass. She should have been culled from the band last mating season, but she’d always been such a sweet, gentle mother, producing strong and healthy babies year after year. Rachel just hadn’t the heart to ship her off for slaughter where she’d wind up as someone’s mutton stew.

The ewe stretched out her neck now, lifting her head, and looked calmly up at Rachel through big round dark eyes. Rachel had always imagined she could see wisdom in their gentle depths, as if they possessed not only all the world’s secrets, but heaven’s as well. She’d said as much to Ben once and he’d laughed at her, for in truth sheep were probably among the stupidest of God’s creatures.

“But there’s something you know that you’re not telling
us, isn’t there, dear old thing?” Rachel said, rubbing her knuckles along the length of the ewe’s bony face.

While the sheep fed off the scattered hay and Benjo led the draft horse and sled back to the barn, Rachel and MacDuff walked among the herd, checking on all the ewes whose woolly bellies were round and heavy with lambs. But it would be another month at least before they started dropping.

Rachel sure hoped it would warm up a bit before then. She let her head fall back to stare up into the shifting, boiling sky. From the looks of those clouds they were in for more bad weather.

The wind gusted through the cottonwoods and flapped her skirts like sheets on a line. She felt so strange inside herself. Sad and lonely and missing Ben so much. And yet all trembly and shaky, too, as if she’d been sipping on Doc Henry’s whiskey. She stood in the feeding paddock among the sheep, buffeted by the wind, her face lifted toward the drooping clouds, and it was as if a part of her had been blown loose and up into that sky and was flying around up there, wild and lonesome and scared.

A horse’s whinny floated to her on the wind, followed by the rattle of wheels over the log bridge.

To the outsiders, all the Plain People looked alike, with their austere conveyances and their drab old-fashioned clothes. But as soon as the light spring wagon with its faded brown canvas top turned into the yard, Rachel knew who it was. Although her neighbors and family would all have been worried when they didn’t see her at the preaching this morning, she had known Noah Weaver would be the one to come.

Yet something held her back, so that it was Benjo who came flying out of the barn to meet him. She could tell
from the way her son was waving his arms and pointing to the house that Noah was now getting an earful about the trouble that had come a-calling in the form of an outsider dressed all in black and with a bullet hole in his side.

It had started to sleet. The boy led Noah’s horse, still hitched to the wagon, into the big barn. Rachel snapped her fingers at MacDuff and they left the paddock together. MacDuff took off after the boy in a mud-splattering gallop, barking joyfully. Rachel sometimes thought that dog was better at herding Benjo than he was the sheep.

She walked through the slushy snow and mud in the yard with her back straight, her head lowered against the stinging ice pellets. Noah Weaver waited for her with his hands hooked on his hips, the wind tugging at his long beard. She stopped before him, and their gazes met and held. Their breath entwined like white ribbons in the cold air.

He looked down at her with brown eyes that were warm and concerned. His craggy face, with its bumpy nose and thick ginger beard that lay on his chest like a forkful of hay, was so dearly familiar to her that she wanted to laugh and throw her arms around him in a big welcoming hug.

Instead she stood before him with her hands linked behind her back, and she was smiling, but only inside herself.

White air puffed from his mouth. “
Vell,
our Rachel?”

“I’ve some fried mush left over from breakfast, should you want it.”

He smiled at her, openly, and so she let her own smile come out in a quick curve of her lips and a little downward tuck of her chin.

They turned together toward the house and the wind drove the sleet right at them, stinging their faces. The lampshine from the kitchen window was a beacon, Rachel thought, pointing the way home. Standing out there in the
paddock, beneath the big sky and the wild wind, she had felt lost and alone. But she was herself again now, and this was Noah walking beside her, and the hearth that beckoned was hers.

The wind slammed against them. Noah’s hand flashed to his head, barely snatching his hat before it went sailing. “It’s warming up some,” he said, and Rachel laughed. Only Noah Weaver could find the good in Montana weather.

He heard her laugh and another smile wreathed his face. “What I meant to say was, it could be worse. It could be snowing.”

“It could be blowing up a blizzard, too. And likely will be again before spring gets here.”

“Now, don’t you go hexing the weather like that—hold on a moment.” He stopped to lean against the porch rail and bent over, tugging at the laces of his thick-soled cowhide brogans. “I’ve the barn all over my shoes.”

He must have hurried right over after the preaching, then, as soon as he’d finished his evening chores. At least as much as he was capable of hurrying. Noah Weaver was a slow moving man, slow in thought, word, and deed. He took his own good time arriving at a place within himself, but once he got there not even a barrel of gunpowder could budge him loose.

He padded into her kitchen, cumbersome and big-footed as a bear. He looked so
right
standing there, in his Plain clothes of brown sack coat and broadfall trousers and big-brimmed felt hat, with his face framed by his long shaggy hair and full, manly beard. His big toe was poking through a hole in his stocking, and it gave her a pang to see it. He needed a wife to care for him.

His gaze roamed slowly from the slop stone to the cookstove to the bathing screen, looking for the outsider, she
supposed. As if he expected the man to be sitting at her table eating Sunday supper. “So, where is he then—this
Englischer?
” he said, his lip curling around the word as if it tasted foul.

They were speaking
Deitsch
, the old peasant German of their roots, for the Plain didn’t use the
Englische
talk except around outsiders. And only then when they chose to be friendly. Still, Rachel had to stop herself from putting her finger to her lips, as if the outsider could hear and understand Noah’s strong words.

She led the way in silence to the bedroom. The outsider slept in utter stillness, that long fine-boned hand with its scarred palm and callused finger lying lax on the sheet. As it did every time her gaze fell on him, her breath caught at the arresting quality of his face. It wasn’t the Plain way to attach importance to physical beauty, but she couldn’t help noticing his.

She felt Noah stiffen beside her and knew that he, at least, saw only an outsider who had come unwelcomed and unwanted into their Plain and separate lives. He said nothing, though, until they were back in the kitchen, facing each other as they had out in the yard. Only this time neither of them was smiling.

His head jerked up and around as if he was pointing with his beard. “In your bed, Rachel?”

“He was gunshot and bleeding to death. What else was I to do with him? Dump him in the corner like a bundle of old gunnysacks?”

“Did I say such a thing?”

The gentle reproach in his eyes stung. “I’m sorry, Noah. I guess I’m just . . .”

Weary and lonely and scared. She felt as if she were back out in the paddock again, being buffeted by the wind and getting lost up in the sky.

Noah shrugged out of his sack coat and hooked it on the wall spike. He took off his hat and reached to hang it there as well, but he paused, facing the wall, with his hand resting on the crown of the hat, as if he had to collect his thoughts and carefully choose his words. When he turned back to her, he was very much the church deacon, with his eyes all solemn, his mouth stern. As Deacon Weaver, it was his duty to be sure everyone followed the straight and narrow way and conformed to the understanding of what it was to be Plain.

“That
Englischer
in there . . .” Again he pointed with his chin, as if the man didn’t warrant more than the crudest of gestures. “He’s tainted. What he’s seen, done . . . He reeks of the world and the evil that’s in it.”

“You don’t know him.”

“And what do you know of him?”

Rachel had nothing she could say to that. What little she did know of the outsider—the callus on his trigger finger, the shackle scars, the whip marks on his back, the bullet hole in his side—was all wickedness. It spoke of the hurt he had done unto others, as much as the hurt that had been done upon him.

Noah stared at her, his face settling into deep lines, and Rachel stared back, her head held high, erect. A silence drew out between them, underscored by the drumroll of the sleet hitting the tin roof above their heads.

She turned away from him and went to the stove. She forked a slab of the cold fried mush onto a plate and poured sorghum syrup over it, then brought it and a tin mug to the table. She stopped there, her hand that held the plate suspended in air. She felt a bittersweet ache in her chest at what she was thinking, what she was about to do. Yet she did it anyway: she deliberately set the plate down in Ben’s place at the head of the table.

She felt Noah move and she looked up to catch his gaze on her, questioning. She quickly averted her face and went to the stove for the coffeepot.

When she came back to him, he was seated, his head bent in silent prayer. She thought of the many times she had stood like this beside the table, looking down at Ben’s black head. Noah had shoulders broad and blocky as anvils, straining the seams of his hickory shirt and filling her kitchen. His hair wasn’t dark, though, but rather the rusty brown color of baked apples.

They had all been the best of friends when they were children, she and Ben and Noah. It seemed strange only now, looking back on it, that a couple of rowdy boys would welcome a shy, skinny girl three years younger into their games. Maybe she had been as sinew is to bone and muscle, holding them together. For even as boys they’d been very different—Noah slow and steady, and maybe just a little stiff in his ways, Ben so quick to laugh and quick to anger, reckless and a little wild.

She poured coffee into Noah’s cup from a battered blue speckled pot. He ate in silence, as was the Plain way, his gaze on the painted clay plates that lined the shelf along the far wall. They were like having a rainbow in the room, those plates. Rachel had painted them herself, copying the wildflowers that burst upon the valley in the spring. She had meant to do a dozen, but she’d stopped at five, when Noah showed her how she was taking too much sinful pride and worldly pleasure in what she was creating. Painted clay wasn’t nearly as useful as tin, he had said. To have painted plates was not to follow the straight and narrow way.

Yet Ben had been so angry with him that day, for shaming her into quitting her painting. “And did even God not
make some things just for pretty?” he’d shouted at Noah, so loud the plates had rattled.