The Outsider (62 page)

His throat locked up for a moment, the way Benjo’s sometimes did. The darkness and the silence of the night lapped around them. Rachel’s heart felt bruised and battered, as if it had been wrenched from her body and beaten against the rocks at their backs.

“I figured,” he said, his voice gone flat and cold now, “I figured that if I wasn’t going to wind up like a butchered hog, then I had to make sure Cowper couldn’t come after me. So before I ran away that second time, I took up a pitchfork and went into his house and stabbed him in the gut with it. I did it three times to make sure he was good and dead.”

Rachel brought his hand up to her mouth, pushing her
pursed lips hard on his knuckles against the pain burning in her throat. Just a boy. He’d been just a boy, hardly any older than Benjo, when those terrible things had been done to him. When he had done that terrible thing.

He turned her around to face him.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t cry for me. It shames me to have you crying for me.”

She looked down. More tears fell, splashing, wetting the wash-worn cloth of her nightrail. “I love you.”

She heard his breath catch, and then she heard him let it out, slowly and carefully. She looked back up at his hard and beautiful mouth, up into his old-young eyes.

“Don’t do that either,” he said.

“It’s too late.”

He picked up the ruined yellow muslin from the ground and held it out to her as if offering it as a gift. “I killed a woman once,” he said, and his voice was flat and hard and cold again.

“She was a dance hall girl in a town whose name I don’t even remember. The night before I killed her I gave her a three-dollar token for a five-minute lay and I don’t remember her name either, because I never knew it to begin with.”

She watched as his hand that held the yellow muslin curled into a fist, and her heart was curling and fisting and aching for him, aching for herself. “Don’t tell me any more, Johnny. I don’t want to know any more.”

He went on anyway. “The next morning, when I was coming out of the livery, I heard a man hollering my name. I didn’t know the fellow. He was just another quick gun looking to take on my rep. We started shooting, and splinters from the livery door were flying every which way, and there was all this dust and smoke. And through it I saw her come running out of that saloon where she worked, I saw
her, I know I saw her, but I couldn’t stop firing, because it’s something you learn, you see, not to stop until your gun is empty.

“And she took one of my bullets high in the chest. She was wearing a dress made out of shiny yellow stuff like this, and there was blood all over her pretty yellow dress.”

He opened his fist and let the muslin flutter back to the ground.

“I went over and looked at her, looked down at her, and then I got on my horse and rode away. I kept thinking I ought to be feeling something. Horror or pity or shame, something, anything. I
tried
to feel bad for her, for what I had done, but there was nothing inside of me but this emptiness. And I was tired. I felt real tired, that’s all. . . .”

He put a hand on her jaw, silencing her lips with his thumb, even though she hadn’t yet spoken. “How I got from that pig farmer to shooting down a woman in the street like a stray dog was all my own doing, Rachel. I had some hard luck, but a better man than me would’ve faced up to life differently. Done it all differently.”

Her lips moved against his fingers, the tip of her tongue touching them as she spoke. “If you come to the Lord with true repentance in your heart, then you will be forgiven all your sins. No matter how unforgivable they seem.”

“I’m a man-killer, Rachel. I’ve killed and killed and killed, until now I’m like the coyotes and the wolves, a creature that kills because he must, without thought or feeling, but only because it’s in his nature to kill.” His mouth curved into a terrible smile. “I don’t believe your God has that much forgiveness in Him.”

She cupped his face with her hands, gripping him tightly, almost shaking him. “Then let me be your faith.”

But in his eyes she saw the desolation of a man who believed
there was no way off the dark path he had chosen to follow.

She couldn’t bear it. She pulled his head to her breast, and she smoothed his hair as a mother would. But only for a moment, for then he was rubbing his open mouth against her throat, and she could feel the hunger surge through his body, the hunger a man felt for a woman.

He lifted his head, and she thought he would kiss her, but he said, “Will you do something for me? Will you take down your hair?”

She reached up and took off her night cap, letting it float to the ground, a flutter of white. One by one she took the pins from her hair and it fell over her shoulders in a thick, slinky mantle, fell until the curling tips of it brushed the ground where her cap lay.

He stared at her a long time. With trembling hands he cupped her hair and lifted it to his face as if he would drink of it.

“You’d better leave me now,” he said, and he gently let her hair slip through his fingers.

IN THE MORNING
she made them all a sheepherder’s traditional breakfast of cheese mixed with canned milk and bread.

The sun came up hot again, casting a red patina over the thick bunchgrass and turning the sheep’s woolly backs a rosy pink. The smell of dew-wet pine straw hung on the air, and the curlews sang their raucous song.

Her son seemed to have gotten over his fear of the coyotes and was again sputtering questions faster than she and the outsider could answer—or at least, faster than they cared to. The outsider sat with his hands wrapped around a cup of her coffee, his eyes looking edgy and wild. The air between
them was so filled with feelings that there was hardly room for words.

He spoke to her only once, when the spring wagon was already hitched up for departure and Benjo had gone off for a farewell frolic with MacDuff.

“Send someone up to take over the care of your sheep and then let me go, Rachel. Let me go,” he said.

“I love you,” she said. “Soon I will show you how much I love you.”

SHE DID NOT GO UP
on the mountain again. Young Mose Weaver took over the camp tending chores, and one day in July Mose went up the mountain to stay for his turn at the herding, and Rachel knew the outsider would be coming home to her. Hoped he was coming home to her.

She sent Benjo to her father’s farm, to help Sol whitewash the new fence they had built. She dragged out her galvanized tin tub and heated gallons of bathwater on the cookstove. She washed her hair. By late afternoon, when she expected him, her whole body was humming with sweet anticipation.

That was when Ezekiel, their prime ram, went crazy.

They kept the rams year-round in a fenced meadow, separate from the other sheep. Normally, these great woollies went about the business of eating and sleeping, storing up stamina and seed for their big progeny-producing days in the fall. But on that summer afternoon, for no apparent reason, the ram Ezekiel took it into his head that his day had arrived in the here and now.

He wanted to mount a ewe.

He brought Rachel running out of the house with his ferocious bawling—great bellowing
baa
s that sounded like a
locomotive blowing its horn through a tunnel. He was pacing back and forth along the fence, butting his head against every post he came to.

Rachel was trying to distract him with a brown cracker, his favorite thing, when Johnny Cain appeared at her side. After waiting for him half a day, she hadn’t heard him come.

Her hair was flying every which way out from under her prayer cap. She was panting so hard from all that running that she unconsciously splayed her hand over her chest. She hadn’t quite decided what he would find her doing when he rode into the yard, but chasing a sex-crazed ram up and down a pasture had not been on her list of considerations.

“You came home,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“Is this my home, Rachel?”

“For as long as you want it to be.”

He gave her a soft, slow smile. Her heart thundered against her hand.

Ezekiel bellowed and rammed his head so hard against a fence post that the wood cracked.

Rachel looked into the outsider’s eyes and fell in love all over again.

Ezekiel bawled and plowed the ground with his thick, curved horns.

Cain slowly pulled his gaze from hers and looked at the ram. “Did he get into locoweed, or something?”

“Oh, he’s just got lovemaking on his mind, the silly fool.”

Cain dipped his head so his hat brim would hide his eyes, but she saw his mouth twitch. He muttered something that sounded like, “Who doesn’t?”

At the far end of the pasture, another sheep began bleating and humping his rump into the air.

“The affliction appears to be highly contagious,” Cain said.

“Well, that one can’t actually . . .” A flush stained Rachel’s cheeks, although she also wanted to laugh. “That is, he’s our teaser. He’s been, well, he can’t actually
make
a lamb. We put him in with the ewes when they start their female cycles. The teaser mounts the ewes and that helps them to get in the mood for the rams.”

Cain gave the teaser a horrified look. “That is the meanest, cruelest thing I’ve ever heard of. You ought to be calling him the teas
ee.
At least the ewes wind up getting satisfied eventually.”

Rachel shook her head at Ezekiel, who was still pacing and bellowing and tossing his horns. “All this excitement isn’t supposed to be happening for a couple of months yet.”

Ezekiel’s wildly rolling eyes settled on Cain. He let out another loud bawl and pushed his head through the fence, sniffing, and curling his upper lip.

“Oh, dear,” Rachel said. “Now he thinks you’re a ewe.”

Cain looked from her to the ram, then back to her again. His eyes narrowed slightly. She could read his thoughts as if they were written on his forehead in printer’s ink. He figured she was probably teasing, but on the other hand . . .

Ezekiel turned sideways and lifted his front leg, making his huge testicle sac sway. Deep gargles spewed up from his thick throat. His big black tongue flopped out of his mouth and hung there.

Laughter came gurgling up Rachel’s own throat at the wide-eyed look of alarm on Cain’s face. She wagged her finger at him. “Johnny, Johnny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’ve got that poor ram positively love-struck.”

He took a couple of judicious steps back. But she was laughing, and so he laughed himself, and she loved him so much in that moment she was nearly dizzy with it.

Their eyes caught and held, and held and held, and this
time they both knew that neither one was letting go. She reached out her hand, and he took it. She wove their fingers together.

His eyes focused behind her, going wide. “Rachel, should I be running for my virtue?” he said, just as the ram Ezekiel smashed through the fence with sex on his mind.

SHE RAN WITH HER
hand tucked safe in his, all but flying above the ground, letting the laughter come in a wild rush of joy. On and on they ran, laughing, long after the danger was over—after Ezekiel became sidetracked by a mow of fresh hay and settled down to munch happily, all breeding urges forgotten.