The Outsider (70 page)

AN HOUR LATER
he came to her where she was hanging wash on the line and said, “I’m going into town.” He paused, and when she said nothing, he added, “I thought I’d take our Benjo with me.”

She could feel her heart in her smile. “You’d make that boy’s whole week with that offer.”

She watched him walk away from her, feeling so full up inside. Her heart sang with the way he had said
our Benjo,
in the Plain way.

It was just coming on to dusk when he came home. He had with him something big wrapped up in a canvas tarp in the wagon bed, and there was a paper-wrapped parcel in Benjo’s lap, and he and Benjo both were wearing cat-in-the-cream smiles.

He made her go with him into the bedroom, just the two of them, and he had the paper-wrapped parcel with him.

“Open it,” he said, and he had the kind of heated, lazy look in his eyes that made it hard for her to swallow.

She untied the string and laid back the brown paper to reveal a dress of soft velvet, the blue of forget-me-nots, frilled up with foaming waterfalls of ecru lace. “Oh, my.” She had to sit on the bed, her legs were shaking so. Her hand hovered over the beautiful dress, but she did not touch it.

“But this costs a fortune!” she cried. She couldn’t say the amount out loud, her head could barely think it. “I saw that sign in the mercantile window.”

“Tulle was lookin’ to unload it, and I drove a hard bargain.”

She felt queasy inside to think of five hundred dollars. She would have felt queasy to think of one hundred dollars. “How much of a bargain?”

“It ain’t polite to ask the cost of a gift. Weren’t you ever taught that?”

“Oh, Jesus God!” she exclaimed, blaspheming for the first time in her life. She jumped to her feet, flinging out her arms. “What kind of crazy person are you?” She whirled to look again at the dress, hungry for it, frightened of it. “It’s a watering hole dress. Where is there a single watering hole in all of Montana where one could wear such a dress?” She spun back around with her hands on her hips. “What ever in heaven’s name were you thinking of?” Her legs started to shake again, and she had to stop to suck in a deep breath. “Oh, Johnny, bargain or not, we can’t afford it.”

His eyes were laughing at her. “You’re pretty when you go all wrathy.”

She sat back down, clutching the dress to her chest. Then she let go of it as if it had suddenly burst into flames in her hands. Judas, she was wrinkling it! Judas, it was beautiful. How could you marry a man and not know that he would up and go buy you a dress like this?

He was studying her now in that sharp, intent way of his. “I got a fair amount of money in a bank in San Francisco,” he said. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow.”

This shocked her more than the dress had. It shocked her breathless. “How did you come by this money? Did you rob banks?”

His eyes were definitely laughing at her. His mouth was nearly laughing, too. She could see him working to hold the laughter in. “Rachel, Rachel. Would a man who robbed banks for a living trust putting his money into one?”

“I don’t know.”

He bent over and brushed his lips across her forehead. “Now, you wait right here. I’ve another surprise for you.”

Her gaze went back to the beautiful dress. Surely even the Devil at his most fiendish couldn’t come up with such a temptation. She ran her hand over the soft velvet, and scared and excited feelings swelled in her chest. It was the kind of thing a man would do if he wanted to seduce a woman, buy her such a dress. But he already had her heart, body, and soul. She didn’t know what was left to give him.

She heard banging as they came through the door from the yard, panting grunts, and Benjo’s excited, stammered whispering. Her husband and her son came into the bedroom carrying the big tarp-covered thing that had been in the wagon bed. It was still covered with the tarp, although she could see wooden feet poking out from beneath the folds in the canvas.

They set the tarp-covered surprise on its feet in the corner nearest the wardrobe. He said something to Benjo too low for her to hear. Benjo backed out of the room, grinning at her all the way, and then she heard him leave the house, banging the door behind him. Her husband went to their bedroom door and shut it.

Rachel had gotten off the bed when they first came in with the surprise, and now she stood in the middle of the floor feeling suddenly shy with him, and a little anxious.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

She closed her eyes, swallowing hard. She heard the sounds of the tarp being pulled off her surprise and rolled
up. His hands fell on her shoulders, turning her around. “Look,” he said.

She looked and saw herself. Saw a reflection of herself in a cheval glass with a mahogany frame. She didn’t quite know what to make of what she saw. There was a woman, not very tall and rather skinny, in a Plain brown dress and apron and shawl, with auburn hair rolled up in braids on top of her head. There was a pink flush on her face and a sheen of sweat on her neck, for it was a hot day. Her eyes looked a little frightened, or perhaps only surprised. Like a rabbit caught in a sudden wash of lantern light.

He took one of her prayer caps from off the shelf beneath the window, where she kept them still, though she no longer wore them. She watched in the mirror as he came up behind her with the cap in his hands and he put it on her head.

“This is what I see when I look at you, Rachel. From the beginning this is what I saw.”

“You see me Plain?”

“I see you.”

It was a strange way of telling her he loved her, a man’s way, she supposed. But it warmed her heart.

Their gazes met in the mirror, and they loved with their eyes. He leaned closer, his hair brushing her cheek, his breath warm and moist against her ear. Her heartbeat became hard and uneven.

“Are you going to take me to bed?” she said.

“Oh, lady, that I am.”

After they made love, when she was alone in their bedroom, she put on the watering hole dress and looked at herself in the mirror. A cheval glass, she thought. Imagine! She could see why they were forbidden in the Plain life. You would certainly start thinking you were somebody pretty darn quick if you looked at your own self like this all
the time. As for the woman she was looking in the mirror at now, the woman in a blue velvet dress with a cascading bustle of ecru lace—she was a stranger.

Rachel felt a little breathless and shaky as she took off the dress and put it away with loving care in the knotty pine wardrobe. She thought that someday she might wear it for him, but not just yet.

SHE WAS SITTING
on the porch later that afternoon, with the butter churn between her knees, cranking on the handle, when she saw a Plain woman walking down the road.

Rachel’s arm slowed its cranking. And long before the woman crossed the bridge and turned into the yard, Rachel knew it was her mother.

She couldn’t imagine what terrible thing had happened in the lives of her family that would send her mem here. A death, surely—it could be nothing less for Sadie Miller to break the
Bann.
To put her own immortal soul at risk by acknowledging her wayward daughter.

Rachel stood, the churning forgotten, her thumping pulse filling her throat, as she watched her mother come.

Sadie Miller stopped at the bottom of the steps, as if she was afraid, or couldn’t bear to come any further. Her prayer cap, starched and bleached, blazed white under the sun.

“Who is it?” Rachel said, her voice barely a whisper.

Confusion clouded her mother’s face, then she expelled a loud breath. “No, no, we are fine, all of us. Well, your brother Levi, his leg is still paining him some.”

Rachel’s relief was so great, she felt dizzy with it. “Mem, what are you doing here?” She looked back down the road, squinting against the heat haze, as if she could find the answers walking there. “You shouldn’t have come. If anyone’s
seen you, if they find out . . .” Then Sadie Miller also would be shunned by her church. Even by her own husband, she would be shunned. Bishop Isaiah would have to make his wife leave his bed, as well as his table.

Rachel’s mother lifted her head and met her daughter’s eyes. Hers were the only eyes in the Miller family that weren’t some shade of gray. But then she wasn’t really a Miller. “I won’t come again,” she said. “Only just this once. But I had to see with my own eyes how you are.”

Sol had been the one to discover Rome’s body hanging from the barn rafters. But Mem had been the one to bathe and dress her boy child for the last time. Not in a white suit, though, for he had not died Plain.

Rachel’s heart ached, and the feeling was both sad and sweet. Sad for her mem, whose fate it was to suffer the loss of two children to the world. Sweet for herself, because her mother cared enough to come see with her own eyes how she was faring.

“It’s hard for me some days, some moments, but I’m happy,” she said to her mother, and the truth felt good to say, good to acknowledge inside herself. She was happy. But then suddenly a vast longing filled her to have her mother see, have her understand, why their lives had taken the turn they had. Why she had brought such hurt to them all, including herself.

“I love him so very, very much, Mem. He is everything to me.”

She couldn’t tell if her mother understood. It wasn’t the Plain way to flaunt one’s love with open displays of passion, or even affection. Indeed, it was never spoken of. Isaiah and Sadie’s marriage had been a quiet and somber one, but their children all knew the bond went deep.

Then her mother said, “It’s a wonderful and hurtful love
you must have for this outsider. Hurtful because you’ve given up everything to possess him. And wonderful because you believe him to be worth it all.”

He was worth it, of that Rachel had always been sure.

Her mother was looking at her in a way she’d often done when Rachel was a girl, with a mixture of exasperation and confusion and surprise. “I don’t know if God’s always so smart,” she said, “in the way He matches us all up, the one to the other. Sure enough, I wasn’t the right mother for you.”

Something caught at Rachel’s chest. “Oh, Mem—”

“There you see, always you’re the one to be jumping right in, worse even than our Samuel, and you don’t let me finish. I used to look at you growing up,
ja,
and even after you married and had a boy of your own, I used to look at you and I would think to myself: This is my daughter? And I’d feel such a wonderment, how this had happened, that you had come from me, Sadie Miller. For sure, I could never see how that could be. You’ve always been so strong, so complete inside yourself. Like a hymnsong, always sung in the same, sure way, you always knew right where you wanted to go, how you wanted to be.”

“I don’t feel so much that way now,” Rachel said.

“You will make yourself that way again. You are so strong, my daughter.”

My daughter.
Rachel hadn’t known how badly she’d been needing to hear those words, and they were doubly sweet and doubly painful because she knew she would never hear them again after this.

Tears filled her eyes. As she walked down the steps and into her mother’s arms, she moved as if blinded. It was an awkward embrace, for they weren’t used to it, and it left them both feeling a little shy and foolish, so that when they pulled apart, neither could look at the other.

Rachel’s mother dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron. “I never said it to Rome. I never said it to him and I’ve had to swallow back many a bitter regret since. So I’ll not leave here without saying it to you.”

She dropped her apron and stared up into her daughter’s face, as if she were etching it into a memory that she would be able to take out and look at again and again. “You aren’t dead to us, our Rachel. Not to your da or to your brothers or to me, no matter how we must behave to you. You are with us always, in our hearts.”

Rachel watched her mother turn and walk away from her, and she knew Sadie Miller would be strong enough after this to keep to the straight and narrow way, and so they would never speak again.

The afternoon sun blazed hot at their backs. It cast Sadie Miller’s shadow long and dark before her on the road.