The Outsider (61 page)

It was cleaner inside than she had expected, although there was a kettle of mulligan stew sitting on an iron spike that had sure seen better days. She took the coffeepot off the stove and gave it a shake. She popped the lid and wrinkled her nose at the tarry sludge stirring in the bottom. But she didn’t set about brewing up a fresh pot right away. Instead, she unpacked the last of the provision boxes that she and
Benjo had carted up from the farm. At the bottom of the box, wrapped in butcher paper to protect it, was a gift she had made for Johnny Cain.

The yellow sateened muslin caught the light, shimmering, as she slid it from the brown paper.

She had done a wicked thing, buying the sateened muslin that terrible day in Miawa City. Then once she had it in her possession, she had done another wicked thing. Oh, not a terribly wicked thing, more a worldly thing. She had sewn up a set of ruffled curtains.

The sheepwagon had a single window on the side where the table was, framed by wood set into the thick canvas. It had oiled parchment in place of glass, but it was a fair size, big enough to let in the light, and the mountains and pines and acres of grass and the big Montana sky. Big enough for curtains made of yellow sateened muslin.

She would never have been able to make such a gift for a Plain man. But she didn’t see what harm there would be in giving the outsider a little something just for pretty to brighten up the solitary, lonesome days of summer herding.

Kneeling on the table, she strung the curtains across the window with a piece of rope. She’d just folded the table back up when she heard the scrape of boots on the steps. She spun around, putting space between herself and the window, trying to look busy with the coffeepot. She was floating with sweet anticipation.

She wiped her hands on her apron, tucked a loose bit of hair beneath her prayer cap. “So,” she said to him as he came through the door, “did you two catch any fish?”

“A whole mess of sockeye.” His gaze was drifting around the wagon, alighting everywhere but on her. “I thought you and Benjo could take the bunk tonight,” he
said. He rocked a little on his heels and gave his hat brim a tug. “I’ve been bedding down outside most nights, anyway,” he went on. “It’s cooler. And I want to keep a watch out for them coyotes.”

“I’ve a surprise,” she blurted, smiling, floating, lighter than air. Loving him, loving him so much. “Actually, I’ve two surprises. One was a shoofly pie, only that boy of mine, he went and ate most of it on the way up here. But these I made up special just for you.” She swung around, showing him the curtains, floating, smiling, loving him. “A little something just for pretty.”

She was looking at the curtains, smiling still, and so she didn’t notice the silence. She turned back to him, smiling, and she was still smiling even as she began to see that all the color had left his face and his eyes had gone stark and hard.

He turned on his heel and left the wagon, left her, without a word.

SHE MADE A CAMPFIRE
out in the meadow and cooked the salmon he and Benjo had caught for supper, but he never came to eat it. Later that evening, lying snug up against her son in the narrow bunk, saying her prayers in silence, as was the Plain way, her gaze went to the window.

The curtains were gone.

THE WAIL OF A
cougar woke her.

She sat up, fumbling for the tin matchbox holder in its place beneath the bunk. Benjo stirred in his sleep, but dreamt on. She used a struck match to find her half boots and her shawl to pull around her nightrail, but she waited
until she was through the door of the sheepwagon before she lit the wick in the coal oil lantern.

MacDuff stood at the bottom of the steps, legs braced and growling. The hair on his neck had risen in a thick ruff. Some of the sheep were bleating and milling in alarm. The cry of a cougar was a terrible thing to hear deep in the night. It sounded like a woman’s scream.

She listened, ears straining, but all she heard now was the wind making the treetops shake. MacDuff gave a muffled whine and lay back down.

Her lantern threw a pale glow against the pines, casting long shadows over the grass. She walked among the sheep, murmuring, soothing them. She prayed the cougar had passed them by.

When Ben did the summer herding, he would bring his old Sharps rifle along with him to take care of such things as coyotes and bears and cougars. But the Sharps rifle was in the barn back at the farm. And Johnny Cain, her shield and comfort, appeared to have deserted her.

If the outsider was still gone by morning, she would have to send Benjo back down into the valley to fetch Noah, for their sheep couldn’t be left without a shepherd. She would have to look into Noah’s eyes and admit to the mistake she had made.

The woollies settled down again, went back to their dreams of green meadow grass. But Rachel didn’t go back to the bunk in the herder’s wagon and her own troubled dreams. She extinguished the lantern and let herself be swallowed up by the deep blue night.

The moon, shining white and hard, balanced on the peak of the highest mountain. She tilted her head back, and it seemed she was falling into a big black bowl of a sky milky with stars.

But then she sensed a movement out the corner of her
eyes, over by the rock cairn that stood at the far edge of the clearing.

It had been built by the summer herders over the years, that cone-shaped heap. One by one, each rock had been added by the resident shepherd, one for each week spent up here alone. A tradition that had no meaning, except that the result of it had become a monument to loneliness.

HE WAS WEARING HIS
black duster, so she could barely tell where he left off and the darkness of the night began. They stared at each other, and the air around them ached and trembled like the pause between lightning and thunder.

He came toward her suddenly, his duster flaring darkly, throwing shadows over her. He held a ripped and wadded-up ball of the yellow muslin in his hands.

She took a step back, and he stopped. He drew in a deep breath and then another. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I know, Johnny,” she said, sparing him with a lie. For he could hurt her in so many ways.

The yellow muslin cloth fell from his fists, fluttering to the ground. “Don’t leave me, then,” he said.

She took a step toward him, and then another. She reached out her hand to him, and he met it halfway with his own, entwining their fingers.

They stayed that way awhile, touching in silence. Then he gave a little tug, pulling her closer, and she came. He sat at the base of the rock cairn, bringing her down with him, settling her between his thighs. She leaned her back against his chest and wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs. They stayed that way a long time, silent, her sitting deep within the circle made by his body.

He rubbed his palm over her bent knee. His breath
stirred warm against her neck. “I always thought of sheep as being white, but they’re gray,” he said, bringing her into the middle of his thoughts. “They’re the color of the gravy we had every Sunday for supper over soda biscuits. Gravy so watery it was the color of sheep.”

“Your folks, they were poor, then?”

He fell silent again, but she didn’t care. She would give him the silence and this night as a gift, for like the sheep and the seasons, he couldn’t be rushed.

She heard a rustle, then a barking cry, and looked up to see the winged shadow of an owl flit across the moon.

His chest moved against her back as he eased out a held breath. “I’m no good at this, Rachel. It’s like allowing a man to get the drop on you in a gunfight.”

“Then let it go and just hold me instead,” she said, for she had come to know that she could never understand the source of all the darkness that lived inside him. There could be no understanding of him, only acceptance.

His arms, which had been wrapped loosely around her, tightened a little. “There’s this orphanage in east Texas, only they call it something more fanciful, the Blessed Are the Merciful Foundling Home for Boys. It has this big wrought iron fence and a gate in front of it. They told me that was where they found me, tied to the gate with a rope like an abandoned dog.”

She picked up his hand, his scarred and beautiful and deadly hand, and wrapped her own hands around it as if she cradled a wounded bird. He tried to pull free, but she tightened her grip. She had to touch him, to comfort him, and he made it so hard.

“Every spring they’d have this day in church where they’d put us up for adoption, as they called it.” His laugh caught on a tearing sound. “Aw, Rachel, we were so pathetic.
The way we’d scrub our faces and slick back our hair and put on begging little smiles, each of us hoping he’d be the one to be picked out from the others. Believing that if we minded our manners and worked real hard, then we wouldn’t be brought back to the Home come winter.

“But we were always brought back, because there was never meant to be any ‘adoption.’ The Home was only renting us out to the local farmers for their planting and the harvest. Still, even after I got wise to that game, every damn spring I’d stand up in the front of the church and hope some family would pick me out for their son.”

Rachel bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. She thought of the chair always there for her at her father’s table. She’d never had to hope to be chosen because she had always belonged, cherished within the loving arms of her family and her Plain life.

“The summer I was ten I was rented out to a Mr. Silas Cowper, who was a hog farmer. He claimed to have owned slaves before the war, and I think he must not’ve put much stock in the Emancipation Proclamation, because he sure enough thought he owned my sorry ass, and I don’t know if there was any slave ever worked as hard as he tried to work me.

“I ran away first chance I got, but he caught me easy enough. With dogs that he bred for bull fighting. He dragged me back to his place and he put shackles on my legs and arms and chained me to a post in the barn next to this big carcass hook.”

He was talking in a raw, hoarse voice now, as if he were being strangled. She could feel a hard trembling going on deep inside him.

“Cowper took this hog and he hooked it through the neck and hoisted it up with pulling blocks, only the hog
wasn’t dead, and it hung up there for two days, squealing and bleeding and dying, with me chained underneath it.”

She held herself still. She wanted to turn within the circle of his arms and press herself hard against him and tell him that she hadn’t known, hadn’t known. But she held herself still.

“Then when that hog
was
finally good and dead, Cowper gutted it and dropped it into a barrel of boiling hot water to make it easy, he said, to scrape the hair off its hide. He was talking to me, see, all the while he was doing it, telling me how he owned me and that if I ever ran off again he’d do to me exactly what he’d done to that hog. And I believed him.”

He breathed, his chest pushing against her back, and she could feel his heart beating frantically like a trapped bird. “From then on he kept me chained to that post in the barn, when he wasn’t working me, except for the nights when he hung me from that carcass hook and laid my back open with a shot-loaded hog whip. It took me nearly a whole year to weaken a link in that chain enough to bust it.”