The Outsider (53 page)

His raw buttocks burned and throbbed, and fresh tears of humiliation stung his eyes. He would never be able to speak to this man about the whipping, but there was Marilee, and she deserved vengeance. “Also, well, maybe you don’t care, but he raped a woman. Miss Marilee from the Red House, who’s a friend of mine. They said they were going to teach her a lesson for being with a Plain boy, and then they raped her. So bad she bled and lost her baby.”

“Look at her, the gluttonous fool,” Cain said. He was staring at one of the ewes they’d just punctured. “She’s back to eating again as if nothing happened.”

Mose had to swallow around the choking lump in his
throat. “Sheep have short memories,” he said. Not like men. Mose didn’t think he’d ever forget what had been done to him on this day.

But he was beginning to feel foolish, like a child trying to capture the attention of an adult who doesn’t even know he’s there. He had expected the outsider to be outraged, horrified, when he heard the story of what had happened, but he wasn’t. In the Plain community, what was done to one was done to them all. But he’d forgotten that Johnny Cain was indeed an outsider, who would care only about himself.

“Of course, you probably just want to go ahead and kill the shit-eating bastard for yourself,” Mose said. “For calling you a dead man.”

Mose waited, but the outsider said nothing, and so he had to go on. “But since I want him dead as well, I’m willing to pay you.”

The outsider brought his cold stare back to Mose. “You can’t afford me.”

Mose nodded, swallowed. He had figured such would be the case. It didn’t matter. Once the gates of hell gaped open, there was no shutting them. “Will you teach me how to quick draw, then?”

Cain gave a bitter laugh. “I’m beginning to feel like the only whore in town and there’s a line forming outside my door.”

Mose wasn’t sure what he meant by that, and he didn’t care. He was suddenly tired, so tired, and he felt raw all over, not only the places where he’d been whipped. He could feel the rage, and with it his resolution, slipping away. He shut his eyes and made himself think of Marilee, of how she’d looked with her face white as death and all that red, red blood.

“He raped my friend and, with or without your help, I’m going to kill him for it.”

The outsider moved so fast, Mose didn’t see him coming until the man’s hand was already gripping his neck, pushing his head up, and Mose was staring into eyes that were as lifeless and hard as blue glass.

“First,” Johnny Cain said, “you are talking too stupid to live, boy. Second, I don’t give a tinker’s damn about you or your whore and her trouble. But Mrs. Yoder seems fond of you, and so for her sake I’m gonna give you one lesson with my Colt. One lesson, and what you choose to learn from it will be your own business.”

Cain let him go, stepping back. “Are you ready?”

Mose nodded, stretching out his neck. He tried to hide his trembling. His legs suddenly felt so weak, he wondered how they were holding him up.

The outsider slipped his revolver from the holster and held it out to Mose butt first. Mose reached to take the gun, when it seemed suddenly to come alive. It spun around in the outsider’s hand, a flash and blur of black metal. Mose heard a loud click, and he was suddenly looking at the black bore of the Colt’s muzzle.

Slowly, slowly, the muzzle came up, until it was pointed between Mose’s eyes. And Johnny Cain was smiling that smile, the smile of a man-killer. “What are your favorite flowers, boy?”

To Mose’s bitter shame, he felt his whole body begin to shake. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited, waited. Then the sense of the man’s words finally penetrated his fear, and he understood that Cain wasn’t going to kill him, had never had any intention of killing him.

He jumped anyway, though, when Cain released the
hammer. He opened his eyes in time to watch the revolver slide back into its holster. Cain had already turned his back on him and was walking away.

“Wait!” Mose lurched forward, grabbing the outsider by the arm.

Cain wrenched out of his grasp and whipped around, his hand falling to the butt of his Colt in a movement that was as instinctive to him as breathing.

Mose raised his hands in the air and backed up a step, but he wasn’t going to give up. “I’m not stupid, Mr. Cain. I know what you were trying to teach me with that lesson, and it doesn’t matter. I want Jarvis Kennedy dead.”

“No, you don’t.” Cain’s eyes were wide and dark now, and he was breathing so hard he was almost panting. “You’d only be sorry for it afterwards, or dead yourself.”

Mose shook his head. “I won’t be sorry. I want that son of a bitch to pay for what he’s done. You’re making the same mistake everybody does, you think that because I’m Plain, I’m also ignorant. I want Jarvis Kennedy dead, and I know what it’s going to take to make that happen.”

The outsider lowered his head. When he raised it a moment later, his face looked gentle, almost sad. “It ain’t about ignorance, Mose. It ain’t even about innocence. There’s plenty more lessons I could teach you. Like how to move quick and aim straight. And if you didn’t prove out in the quick-draw department, I could teach you how to do it ruthless and dirty. How to get the drop on a man so’s to shoot him in the back before he even knows you’re there. I could teach you all that and everything else I know about killing, and you still wouldn’t have what it takes to go up against a man like Jarvis Kennedy.”

Mose’s face felt wet, and he knew it was from tears. He
thought he’d been crying for a good while now. “What does it take, then, damn you?” The hot tears filled his eyes and splattered onto his cheeks. “Just tell me what it takes.”

The outsider’s gaze was focused on the distant mountains, stark and sun-haloed against the sky. Mose didn’t expect an answer, but he got one.

“Nothing. It takes feeling nothing inside except it’s either him or you. When you can empty your gun into a man’s belly with the same amount of feeling it takes to step on a cockroach, then you’ll have what it takes to survive.”

He swung his eyes back to Mose, and they were empty, and so was his face.

“But something happens to you,” said Johnny Cain. “Something happens and even surviving stops mattering so much anymore, and all you feel most of the time is nothing.”

Johnny Cain walked away from him then, and Mose let him go. But after a few steps he stopped, stood still a moment, then slowly turned back around.

“I guess I am sorry a little bit about your friend,” he said. He sounded surprised.

MARILEE OPENED HER EYES
onto a paper trellis of ribbons and roses. There was many a day she had opened her eyes to such a sight, but she knew—even before she felt the aching, hollow emptiness in her belly—that this day was different.

She turned her head. Luc Henry was standing over her, frowning down at her and looking worried. This pleased her, for it meant he must care for her at least a little. But then he was a doctor, and there was that sensitive part of him that cared about the whole world.

He eased down onto the bed beside her, the tick rustling
and sagging beneath his weight. He picked up her hand.

“Marilee . . .”

Her throat hurt, and she had to swallow. “The baby’s gone, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry.”

She pressed her head back into the pillow, squeezing her eyes shut. A sob exploded out of her and then another and another. “Oh, God,” she cried, trying to push herself up. She wanted to be held, she wanted it so desperately, and his arms did come around her, holding her, and she clung to him, burying her face in his shoulder as the tears and sobs ripped out of her in shuddering heaves.

After a while she subsided into shudders and little hiccuping breaths. “It hurts, Luc. It hurts so bad.”

“I know, I know.” He held her tighter for a moment longer, then eased her back down onto the bed. “I’ll give you one of my herbal infusions, in a moment.” He summoned up one of his sweet, crooked smiles. “And maybe some patent medicine, too, just to be safe.”

Her hand fluttered weakly up to her head. “They cut off all my pretty hair.”

He wrapped his finger around a single curl that fell over her ear, giving it a gentle tug. “It’ll grow.”

She bit her lip as a fresh bout of tears, hot and salty, flooded her eyes. “He wasn’t content just to put his cock up inside me, Luc. He had to go shovin’ his six-shooter up in there as well. He ripped me up pretty bad, didn’t he?”

“You’ll be some time in healing, Marilee,” Doc Henry said, but he averted his face, and she knew it was to hide his thoughts.

And so it was a long time before she was able to find the courage to ask him if she would ever be able to have another
baby. And it was a longer time still before he spoke, and before he did, she saw the answer come first into his eyes, and that was when she began to cry again.

I
T WAS HOT.

Blistering, sweat-cooking, drought-making hot. Hot winds shriveled the grass and licked at the water holes, drying them up. Clouds of dry alkali dust washed the blue out of the sky and turned the sluggish Miawa Creek the color of dirty soapsuds. Not a drop of rain fell to pock the ground. And it was still only the second week of June.

It was hot, and it was shearing time.

NOAH WEAVER WATCHED THE
sheep come waddling, one by one, out of the bathing pool, water-laden and staggering with it. He thought if he heard someone say that it was hot as a cookstove one more time, his head might just explode.

It had been hard work this year, damming up the low-running creek and scooping out a puddle big enough to make a woolly bath. But a clean crop fetched higher prices, and at least in this hot weather the sheep would be dry enough to shear in no time.

Samuel Miller, who had the enviable job of standing
knee-deep in the pool and watching to make sure none of the sheep rolled over and drowned, tossed a smile at his brothers. He pretended to wring the sweat out of his beard. “Judas. It’s hot enough to make the Devil feel t’home,
ja
?”

Abram laughed, but then his face sobered quick enough. “It’s a drought we’re in the making of. You tell me if we’re not.”

Sol nodded, his mouth so tight it all but disappeared into his beard. “It’s as hot as a cookstove, it is.”

Noah clamped his own lips together and forced himself to take a deep breath through his nose. He tugged on his hat, half afraid his head really would explode. He reminded himself to think of these days as a trial sent by the Lord to be endured with meekness and humility. God was testing him, saddling him with scorching days, a drought, and Johnny Cain, all in one summer.

He had been looking forward to this day, though. The day they sheared Rachel’s sheep. He had made the outsider a promise—
ach vell,
you could call it a challenge, wicked though that might be—that the man wouldn’t be able to last through a day of sheep shearing. Noah knew the outsider fancied himself tough, that he took pride in his toughness. Sure enough, the Bible was right when it said that pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Noah looked across the pool to where the outsider was trying to nudge a reluctant yearling into the water, and he smiled.
You’ll not last the day, outsider. Might be you’ll not even last an hour. And then we’ll see. We’ll see what my Rachel has to say to that.