Williamson, Penelope

by The Outsider

  To Rachel the clang of the lead-wether's bell was a joyous song marking the end to a good day.

  She drove the herd of ewes and their lambs onto the rough stubble of the newly shorn hay meadow. MacDuff padded slowly back and forth along the rear edges of the flock. He knew his business; a smart herding collie never nagged or drove his sheep, but gently guided. Rachel liked it that nobody, and no dog, could rush sheep. They got where they were going in their own sweet time.

  She and MacDuff saw the woollies settled and munching happily. But although she had dishes to wash and a kitchen to scrub down, she stayed in the pasture. She stood with her feet planted firmly in the hay stubble, her hands hanging loosely at her sides, and she let the hot wind blow wild through her.

  Slowly, she tipped her head back and let herself be drawn up, up, up into the deep blue of the evening sky, the endless and empty sky.

  "A body could get lost up there if she isn't careful."

  He stood leaning against the trunk of a jack pine, one booted foot crossed over the other, his hat dangling from his fingers. She stared at him, at his reckless face with its flaring cheekbones, his fierce mouth, his eyes.... Those eyes weren't cold, not cold at all.

  She looked from his eyes up to the heavens, then back to his eyes again, as if judging which were bluer. "How do you feel when you look at the sky?"

  He hooked his hat on a pine branch and walked toward her through the grazing woollies until they were only a handspan apart. He'd just washed up, for the ends of his hair dripped water and he smelled of soap, with a lingering whiff of green hay. His shoulders lined out level and wide, blocking her view of the horizon. His eyes were definitely bluer than the sky.

  "Lonesome," he said. "The kind of lonesome that can make you feel good and sad and wild, all at the same time. Almost crazy like, so that you want to howl with the coyotes or climb up on a horse and ride till you get to the edge of the world."

  He leaned toward her, although he was being careful not to touch her. But the words pulsed out of him, soft and deep. He touched her with his words.

  "The kind of lonesome that's like a sweet hurting inside you, so that you aren't sure if you should laugh with it, or cry. Because you know it comes from a wanting, a reaching for something you ain't ever gonna have."

  She stared up into his face, a face that had somehow become beloved to her, and a wild yearning swelled and cracked open inside her. It was more than love she felt for him. Love she could live with from afar, but not this. She needed him, needed him in her life, and it was a need so elemental, so consuming, it was like needing air to breathe, like—

  "Cain! Cain! I w-washed up real good just like you s-said. Oh... hey, Mem."

  She stepped back and turned to smile at her son as he came running up all breathless with a big grin on his face. A face that shone red with sunburn and a good scrubbing. She wondered what threat or bribe or miracle Johnny Cain had worked to get her son to bathe.

  She reached down and pushed her fingers through her son's wet hair. Even the backs of his ears were clean. "You men baled a fine batch of hay this day."

  "Benjo's the best hay stacker I've ever had the pleasure to work 'longside of," the outsider said, looking serious.

  The boy preened like a jaybird, and Rachel's heart swelled again. "I hear Annabell lowing like she's fit to die," she said. "Don't you think you ought to go milk her and ease her misery?"

  Benjo heaved an enormous sigh and said, "Aw, Mem."

  He obeyed her though, and she was alone again with Johnny Cain. But the closeness of before had been lost.

  She let her voice go light and teasing, the way she knew he liked her to be. "So, and just how many hay stackers have you worked with that you're suddenly such an expert?"

  "That boy does you proud, Rachel."

  "It's you he's aiming to impress," she said. But she flushed, pleased for Benjo's sake, and pleased also that he'd called her by her given name. He was doing it more often now.

  Just then one of the lambs took a notion to buck, jumping stiff-legged and sideways, and landing with a loud bleat. He spooked the whole flock into a run, so that they flowed around Rachel and Cain and down the sloping meadow.

  They laughed, and their laughter—his mellow and deep, hers light and airy—became a carol of bells. The woollies bleated and baaed, bass and tenor notes. Grasshoppers rasped in the grass along the creek. A killdeer trilled sweetly and a chickadee burbled. The wind roared a song through the tops of the cottonwoods.

  "Oh, do you hear it, Johnny! Do you hear the music?"

  She whirled to face him in her excitement and caught the look on his face. He stared at her with such fierce intensity that she could almost feel it, like a warm gust of breath on her flesh.

  "I hear them, you see, all the sounds the earth makes," she went on, as if he'd said to her, What music? "I hear the wind and the creek and all the noises the animals make, the sheep and birds and frogs, I hear them all in my head and it comes together into music. I don't know. I can't explain it, except that I know it's wicked."

  A muscle ticked in his cheek. He lowered his head slightly, so that his long thick eyelashes shielded his eyes. "What's wicked about taking the songs of life and making a symphony out of them?"

  She turned away from him, suddenly shy. She began to walk toward the house, and he fell into step beside her.

  "I know of such a thing as a symphony orchestra," she said. "That is, I've heard it spoken of. Tell me what it sounds like."

  "I've never heard one myself. I did go to an opera once in Leadville, Colorado. It seemed mostly just a lot of fat ladies caterwauling." His mouth crooked slightly, not quite forming a smile. "And once, somewhere down in Texas, I heard this phenomenon called a cowboy band. It was mostly a lot of brassy horns. It was led by a man with a baton in his one hand and a six-shooter in his other, I reckon so's he could kill the first man who blew a sour note."

  They laughed together again. She felt light-headed, and light-footed. She wanted to lift up her skirts and twirl around and around and around, until she became dizzy and collapsed into a heap in the grass, the way she used to do when she was a little girl.

  "Have you ever done any dancing?" she asked him.

  "Now, I have indeed been to more than a few fandangos in my time."

  Somehow they had stopped walking and were facing each other. The wind fluttered her cap strings. He took one in each hand and pulled them down until they were stretched taut, with his fingers barely brushing her breasts, and yet she felt his touch all the way to her toes.

  He surprised her by starting to sing, a lilting song about a girl named Annie Laurie, filling in with la-di-das when he forgot the words, and at some time he had let go of her cap strings to take her hand, and he was now fitting his palm to hers, entwining their fingers, while his other hand had lifted her arm by the wrist and was draping it over his shoulder, and he was sliding his arm around her waist.

  And they were dancing.

  He twirled her around and around in dipping, sweeping circles, and his knee came in and out between her thighs, and her skirt wrapped around his legs. She could feel every inch of her own skin, every prickling hair on her arms. She could hear her own breathing, and his.

  She clung to him as he turned her faster. Her head fell back and she opened her eyes to the wide blue sky spinning crazily above her while the earth tilted and swayed beneath her floating feet. The dance and the wind snatched away the last of his song, and they were laughing, laughing.

  And then suddenly they weren't laughing anymore. Their bodies slowed and drew closer and his mouth came down over hers, pressing her lips, opening them, filling her with his breath, with his heat, with his tongue. She dug her fingers into the hard muscles of his back to hold on, hold on. And they might have been dancing still, for the way the sky spun and the earth tilted.

  It lasted forever and ended too soon. His mouth let go of hers, but slowly, slowly, coming back to touch her lips with his once more, and then again
.

  "I want you, Rachel," he said, his breath washing hot and urgent over her face. "I want to lie with you."

  She put her fingers on his mouth. Her heart was fierce with panic, because she needed him so and loved him so, and she was so very weak. "No, we can never," she said, her voice breaking over the words. "You know we can never. Not only is it a terrible sin, but what you would take from me is so much less than what I would end up giving. And what you would give to me can be nothing."

  His mouth moved beneath her fingers, but she pressed them harder to his lips.

  "There's nothing you can give me," she said, pulling away, letting him go, taking one step backward and then another and another and another, so that they were no longer within touching distance of each other. "Not even if you somehow came to love me, because you are an outsider."

  She turned and walked away from him. She kept her back stiff and her head up because she didn't want him to know how hard this was when she needed him and loved him so much.

  "You ask too much, Rachel," he shouted after her. "You ask too much."

  That night the wind blew hot and smelled sweet, of fresh cut hay and sun-baked earth.

  The men on horseback pulled up on the north bank of the creek, where they were shielded by the thick willow brakes and cottonwoods. The small logwood farmhouse, the sloped-roofed barn, the squat lambing sheds all looked quiet. Nothing stirred but an empty milk bucket which the wind blew tumbling across the yard.

  "You sure you got the grit for this, lad o' mine?"

  "I'm less worried about my grit than about your good sense," Quinten Hunter said. "The whole valley's like a tinder box and you've taken a notion in your head to play with fire."

  His father's laughter came to him from out of the dark, carried on a gust of tobacco-laden breath. "You don't intend to ease up on me, do you?"

  "No, sir."

  "But in the end you'll do what I tell you, where I tell you, and how I tell you. Won't you?"

  "Yes, sir." Quinten's lips pulled back from his teeth in a hard smile, but the branding iron he carried was heavy in his sweating hand. The Circle H mark glowed fire-red in the dark, like a giant eye.

  He made himself think of the grassland they had ridden through to get here, of how it was grazed down to the roots in places, and cut up by hundreds of sharp and pointed hooves. He remembered the first time he'd ridden over this end of the Miawa. He'd been with his father then too, only so small he'd been riding a pony instead of a horse. The grass had grown as high as his stirrups that summer.

  When Quinten thought of the grassland, of how it had been before the Plain folk had brought their sheep into the valley, the burning brand didn't feel so wrong.

  "Let's get it done, then," the Baron said, and sent his horse splashing across the creek and toward the stacks of fresh mown hay.

  Quinten spurred his own horse to catch up with his father. Three other Hunter cowhands crossed the creek on their heels. These others had joined up with Quinten and his father shortly after they had left the small campfire they'd built to heat the iron, and Quinten had paid them little mind. The Baron had made it plain that tonight at least he was putting the Circle H brand and all that it stood for into the hand of his breed son.

  They rode through a flock of sheep, scattering the bleating animals into broken streams of gray wool. Inside the farmhouse a dog barked. One of the cowhands fired two shots from his six-shooter, and a door slammed shut.

  Quinten clamped his legs tighter to his horse, urging the big gelding to go faster. Fear and excitement pulsed through him, and a wild shout surged up his throat, hot and wet, like the thrumming of his blood. He threw back his head and let it loose into the starry, wind-swept sky. The Blackfoot war cry.

  Whooping, Quinten put the burning brand to one of the haystacks. The timothy grass was fresh and green and slow to catch. But then spirals of white smoke curled up from the end of the iron, and the hay melted into tongues of orange and red flame.

  From out of the night, a gun fired. The cowhand next to Quinten slumped over in his saddle with a soft cry.

  "Christ, Ailsa!" the Baron shouted. He pointed his gun toward a sheepherder's wagon which was parked next to the barn, and fired off three quick shots. The two other Circle H men opened fire on the wagon as well.

  His father's words had so shocked Quinten that he dropped the branding iron. He twisted around trying to peer through the veil of smoke and flickering light. The cow- hand, what he had thought was a cowhand, was sitting up in the saddle again, one hand gripping the other arm.

  "Ailsa!" the Baron shouted again.

  "Regrettably you must delay the celebration, Fergus," said that snowdrift voice. "I am not yet dead."

  "Aw, woman, why are you always saying such things? Quin, what in hell are you doing to set that fire, rubbing two sticks together?"

  Quinten bent over his horse's neck, searching for the branding iron. The gun fired again from the sheepherder's wagon, and he heard a bullet kiss the air where a moment before his head had been. He couldn't see the brand, and then he did—a glowing red Circle H in a spilled shaft of hay.

  He stretched out his hand for the iron just as the haystack went up in a sheet of flames, spitting sparks, lighting up the night bright as day. And silhouetting them against the horizon like wooden ducks at a shooting gallery.

  "Let's get the hell out of here," his father bellowed, but Quinten had already dug the heels of his boots hard into his horse's sides.

  They all rode low on their horses' necks back across the creek and through the cottonwoods, firing off random shots. When they were sure they weren't being pursued, they pulled up their mounts and looked back at the sheep farm. They could see figures with buckets running to and fro between the burning haystack and the creek and a yard pump.

  But Quinten could only look at his father's wife. In all the years he had been at the ranch he had never seen her on a horse, and yet she sat the saddle as if born to it. He had never known her to wear anything but silk and taffeta. Now the sleeve of the man's shirt she had on was black and wet with her blood. Her face was alight with a wild and desperate excitement.

  He didn't understand what she was doing here, why his father had allowed her to come. Quinten's throat felt thick with what he realized to his shame were tears of jealousy.

  "I left our branding iron back there, Pa," he said, his eyes still on Ailsa.

  The Baron pulled his horse's head around, toward home. "Don't fret about it."

  The two other cowhands followed him, but Ailsa Hunter lingered, and so did Quinten. She took off the man's hat she was wearing, and her hair fell thick and heavy over her shoulders. He had never seen her hair down before. It shimmered in the starlit night.

  Quinten brought his horse closer and leaned toward her. He was compelled to touch her, although in the end his courage failed him. He pulled his hand back and gripped the pommel of his own saddle instead.

  The word tore out of him, heavy with years of uncertainties and fears, and desperate longings. "Why?"

  She looked at him. A glaze had come over her eyes, like a film of ice. And then, although he hadn't been able to touch her, she touched him. For the first time in all his memory, she touched him.

  She laid the tips of her fingers against his mouth. "What a poor fool of a boy you are," she said. "Shouldn't you be asking that question of yourself?"

  "The Devil should be well pleased with his work on this night."

  Rachel pulled her gaze away from the blackened, smoldering stack of hay that Noah had built so high and tall and straight for her. She looked at him, her good neighbor and friend. He had seen the fire from his farm and ridden over to help put it out. Now his long beard was singed, his face streaked with soot, his eyes red rimmed and watering from the smoke.

  She lifted the Circle H branding iron that she held awkwardly in her hand. "It wasn't the Devil," she said.

  He shook his head, his mouth set stubborn. "This happened because the outsider killed tha
t stock inspector."

  She turned away from him and threw the branding iron into some willow brakes. The outsider, along with her son and Noah's boy, Mose, were soaking blankets and gunny-sacks in the creek and laying them over the smoldering mound of hay to prevent the wind from fanning an ember back into life or stray sparks from setting more fires.

  "Perhaps you're right," she said. Her eyes stung. Her throat was so raw and gritty it hurt to swallow. "Perhaps if Mr. Cain hadn't provoked them, they would've set fire to your haystacks instead."

  Noah's big rough hand grabbed her arm. "Send him away, Rachel. For the sake of your immortal soul, send him away."

  "No."

  He let go of her, although she hadn't tried to pull away. His gaze searched her face, then went slowly over the rest of her. She had run out of the house to fight the fire barefoot, wearing only her nightrail. She had on her night cap, but most of her hair had fallen out from underneath it. She knew she should feel shame to stand before him with her hair uncovered, but all she felt was tired.

  Noah made a strangled sound deep in his throat. "You've said you'll be marrying me come the mating season. But who is the woman I'll be taking as my wife?"

  The outsider had left the boys and was coming toward her. Noah's gaze flickered to him, then back to her.

  "Rachel," he said, but then he turned and strode away.

  The outsider's face was so blackened by the smoke, all she could make out of his features was the white glint of his eyes reflecting the rising sun. He too was barefoot and he wore his Plain man's broadfalls with no shirt. But his gun was strapped around his hips.

  When the men on horseback had come riding out of the night, howling louder than the hot wind, she and Benjo had huddled against the wall, out of the way of the windows, and she had heard the outsider firing back at them from the sheepherder's wagon. It was not the Plain way to fight, to shoot guns at your enemies. But she couldn't help wondering if those Hunter men would have managed to put their burning brand to all of her haystacks instead of just the one, if Johnny Cain hadn't been here to shoot his gun.