The Outsider (58 page)

His father slowly turned to scowl at him. “What in hell are you yapping about?”

Quinten made his eyes go wide and innocent. “I thought I was just voicing aloud what you were thinking.”

“What I’m thinking is that I’m hot and my head hurts.”

“I don’t know, Pa. You ought to be feeling good, what with the deal you just struck buying those mangy cows on the cheap. Why, with all the money you saved, maybe you should go talk to that Plain man on yonder wagon about acquiring some of his sheep. Since we’re having so much trouble beating them head-on, maybe we ought to offer them a little roundabout competition by running some mutton of our own—”

He didn’t see his father’s fist coming until right before it connected with his jaw. The blow knocked his hat off his head and sent him sprawling in the dirt. But he scrambled back fast onto his feet, with his own hands clenched and raised.

The Baron lifted his head and jutted his jaw forward. “Well, lad o’ mine, you with the smart mouth and cutting tongue? Let’s see if you’re as handy dealing out the hurt with your fists, eh?”

Quinten let his hands fall. “Naw. I don’t fight with old men,” he said. He bent over and picked up his hat, knocking the dust off against his thigh. The whole left side of his face felt like it had just had a set-to with a sledgehammer. “But I’ll be damned if I apologize either.”

His father gave him a hard smile. “I’m not so bloody old as you seem to think, and you can go choke on your bloody apologies.”

He swung around and walked off, and it took Quinten a moment to realize that he was heading straight for the Plain folk and their wagons.

As Quinten started after him, his vision blurred beneath a wash of unexpected tears and his chest was suddenly choked with feelings—feelings of love and anger and dismay, and a growing disgust with himself. He couldn’t change his father and he couldn’t change what was going to happen. But neither could he walk away from it.

“Aw, Jesus, Pa,” he said, and broke into a run to catch up. “What are you going to do now?”

IN THE PLAIN LIFE
all was done according to tradition.

There were the old traditions, like the prayer cap and the hymnsongs, that went back so far no one could remember their origins. And then there were the new things, such as the sheep shearing and the summer pasturing. But even the new things were soon done in the same fashion year after year. It was the Plain way, this, to take the changes the world thrust upon them and make those changes into traditions
that were woven into the pattern of their life. Into the straight and narrow way.

One of the new traditions was the selling of the season’s wool crop.

Just as the Miller, Yoder, and Weaver farms all shared in the labor of their shearing, so too did they share in the selling of their fleeces. In good years the woolbags would be many and stuffed full, and it would take two big hay wagons, each pulled by a six-mule team, to carry them to market.

As the deacon, and thus less susceptible to temptation, Noah Weaver was always given the task of going out into the dangerous and corrupting world to find a buyer for their wool. Always before, he had chosen one of the Miller brothers to drive the second wagon, but on a morning three days ago he had looked up from his breakfast of fried mush and said to his son:

“You’re a man grown enough, I should think, to come along with me to Deer Lodge this season and deal with the wool broker. To learn how it’s done.”

Mose had just taken a big drink from his coffee cup and he sputtered over the swallowing of it. “Are you saying you want me to drive one of the wool wagons to market with you?”

“I’m saying that,
ja.
Maybe you need to go wash out your ears.”

So this season it was a changed Mose who had gone along with his father from farm to farm, loading the woolbags into the wagons. A Mose whose thoughts were dwelling on the traditions of the Plain life and his part in them. The bags, packed full with fleeces, were heavy to lift, but they were all big strapping men and it was good, hard, sweaty work. “The bad thoughts and feelings, they come out with the sweat,” his father liked to say and Mose could see how this was so.

As he shared the work with the other men, he found himself looking at this life, the Plain life, in ways he hadn’t done before. We are a good people, he thought. Strict and narrow in our ways, but our backs are wide and our hearts are giving.

They went last to the Yoder farm, and there a thing happened that was both hurtful and healing. A small thing it was, really, a small moment, and yet it made some broken part of Moses Weaver begin to feel whole again.

It happened after the last of the woolbags had been thrown high onto the growing piles in the wagons. They were standing in the farmyard, Mose and his father and the outsider, stretching the kinks out of their backs and wiping the sweat out of their eyes, talking about the fine crop they had sheared this season, when Mrs. Yoder came out of the house carrying a tin pan of cornmeal in her hands.

She began tossing the cornmeal to a flock of hens pecking in front of the barn. She flung her arm out wide, and the wind caught the meal and sent it swirling in a yellow cloud. The wind tugged at her cap strings and the loose strands of hair that curled out from beneath her prayer cap, and pressed her skirts to her legs.

Then she turned and looked their way, and her gaze locked with the outsider’s.

Noah must have seen the look, too, for his face grew bleak with a hurt that cut deep. For once Mose saw his father not as the stern deacon full of righteous thoughts but only as a man who wanted desperately a woman who didn’t want him back. And in that moment, Mose knew his father’s pain as if it were his own.

Mrs. Yoder came up to him, dusting her hand off on her apron, smiling, and she said in that teasing way she had, “Well, young Moses, so it’s you we’ll be having to look to, this wool-selling season, to keep our Noah safe from trouble
out in the wild and wicked world. Now, why do I think that’s a bit like putting the coyote in with the chickens?”

Mose tried to smile, but he knew it must look all wrong. Since that terrible afternoon out by Blackie’s Pond, he hadn’t felt much like going out into the wild and wicked world.

“You got to quit thinking about that day, boy. Let it be like a bad dream you forget come morning.”

The outsider’s words nearly stopped Mose’s breath, for the man rarely spoke to any of the Plain unless spoken to first. And it was disconcerting, besides, to have one’s thoughts suddenly plucked out of the air and commented upon like that.

At least no one else had heard. Mrs. Yoder had turned to his father now, and she was laughing and picking tufts of wool out of his beard. Old Deacon Noah was trying to look stern, but Mose could tell he was pleased at the attention she was paying him.

The outsider’s gaze lingered on her a moment and then shifted to the hill in back of the house, where young Benjo and his collie were herding a band of ewes through a gate and into a lower pasture. For just a moment a wistful look came over the man’s face, a moment so quick Mose wondered afterward if he had only imagined it.

“It’s days like this that are worth the remembering,” the outsider said. “A day like this can stay with you, can settle down to live on in your soul forever.”

“Yes, sir,” Mose said, nodding, not sure if the man was really talking to him anymore or only to himself. And then he heard a startling thing. He heard his father laugh. Mrs. Yoder was threatening to cut off his father’s beard to use for a broom, it was getting that long and thick, and his father was laughing.

Mose looked at his father. A big man, he was, with arms so strong they could toss a two-hundred-pound woolbag into
a wagon bed and not even strain with the effort. A man so strong, so certain in his faith that angels probably found it hard to live up to his high expectations, let alone his only son.

Ja,
a strong man was Noah Weaver, and a good man. Mose looked at his father’s laughing face, and he felt the peace of the moment settle into his soul.

BUT THEN THE MORNING
after the woolbags were all loaded, when the mule teams were hitched up and they were ready to set off for Deer Lodge, Mose had come out of the house wearing his flashy mail-order clothes. His father said nothing, only looked at him with the disappointment showing raw in his face. Mose set his jaw at a stubborn tilt, climbed onto the high seat of the hay wagon and picked up the reins.

And then as they were about to set the wagons to rolling out of the yard, Gracie came running down the road toward them, skirts flying, cap strings fluttering, and a cloth-covered basket bouncing on her arm. She ran right past him and stopped, out of breath and flushed, next to his father’s wagon. She held the basket up and laughed.

“Oh, I’m so glad I caught you, Deacon Noah. I’ve brought some good Plain food for you, for your journey, so you won’t have to do so much eating in those terrible
Englische
places.”

“And a good morning to you, too, Gracie Zook,” Mose called out to her, but she didn’t answer him. The last time he had tried to talk to her, she’d told him she never wanted to look on his face again.
Ach vell,
she was a strong-willed girl, was his Gracie, and she surely wasn’t looking at him now. But she had never before brought a food basket to Deacon Noah to take with him on his journey to the wool market.

Maybe it was a new tradition she was starting.

HE WAS THINKING OF GRACIE,
of the way she had looked with her face all flushed so prettily and her bosom rising and falling with her panting breaths. He was thinking of Gracie and smiling, when he saw Fergus Hunter step into the path of his father’s wagon.

They both had to pull up hard on their teams to avoid running over the cattleman. Their heavily laden wagons jolted to a stop, creaking and groaning. Mose’s leader mules shied and bucked in the traces, and he had his hands full for a moment getting them back under control.

When he looked up again he saw that Fergus Hunter’s son had come to stand by the man’s side. Their gazes, Mose’s and the other boy’s, met for a moment and then jerked hard apart. A blush of shame burned hot in Mose’s cheeks as he remembered how that boy had last seen him—bent over a cottonwood log, his bare ass getting whipped with a pair of chaps by the Hunters’ hired gun.

They had pulled up across from the Deer Lodge stockyards. Mose’s gaze searched the corrals and pens, looking for that hired gun now but finding only cows.

The cattleman’s black eyes were studying Noah from beneath the brim of his hat. “I believe,” he said, “that you are one of the preacher gentlemen I talked to last year. About you and your people selling your rangeland to the Circle H.”

The wind came up, bringing with it the smell of cattle and sunbaked dust. And fear. Mose could smell the fear on himself, rank as rotting meat.

But if his father was afraid, he didn’t show it. Noah sat in stillness on the wagon seat, his head up and his eyes on the road ahead, the reins loose in his hands. He sat in silence long enough for the cattleman to think he wouldn’t be getting
a response, and then he said, “
Ja.
You talked, outsider. And our minds, they have not changed.”