The Outsider

by Penelope Williamson

  It was Mutter Anna Mary who had the healing touch. From her father's grandmother Rachel had learned the healing lore, but the touch—that was a gift from God and so far He had not seen fit to give it to her. Her great-grandmother said the healing touch came simply of faith. Of opening one's soul to the power of faith the way a sunflower unfurls its petals to the warmth and the light.

  Rachel stood slowly and went back to the bed. She laid her hands on him the way she'd so often seen her great-grandmother do. She closed her eyes and imagined her soul opening like a flower, petals unfolding one by one, reaching, reaching, reaching for the sun.

  His chest moved beneath her hands, a ragged rise and fall. She thought she could hear the rush and suck of his heart beating. Beating and beating, louder and louder, and she tried to imagine the life passing from her fingers, like a river pouring into the ocean, until she became part of the rush and suck of his heart.

  But when she opened her eyes and looked down at his face, she saw the blue lips and pinched skin of coming death.

  "Come along there, you. Open up."

  Rachel pushed the rubber nipple between the outsider's lips and tilted the kidney-shaped nursing bottle so that the milk would flow more easily down the feeding tube and into his mouth. "That's it, that's it," she crooned. "Suckle now, suckle it all down like a good little Bobbli—"

  She looked over her shoulder as if she'd just been caught doing something foolish. Judas, what was she thinking of, to speak such outlandish words, and to an outsider, no less? And she couldn't imagine what had prompted her to do such a thing anyway, to try to feed him from a pap bottle as if he were a bum lamb.

  Only it seemed she would have to do something to replace all the blood he'd lost or he would surely die. And she'd saved many an orphaned lamb in just this way, by feeding it a mixture of milk, water, and molasses from a nursing bottle.

  She was having as little success getting the outsider to cooperate, though, as she sometimes did with the bum lambs. Most of the milk leaked out the corners of his mouth and dribbled down his chin.

  She was sitting beside him on her big white iron bed. She swung her legs up and leaned against the acorn-spooled rails of the headboard. Struggling against the dead weight of him, she rolled and lifted him up against her, then cradled his head to her chest. She felt him stir a little beneath her hands. And when she rubbed his throat like she did to the lambs, to get them to suckle, she felt him groan. When she put the rubber nipple to his mouth, he drank from it hungrily.

  She laid her hand against his cheek, pressing him even closer to her, and lowered her head, resting her own cheek against the softness of his hair.

  She was out in the yard, waiting, when Benjo came back with the doctor.

  The phaeton lurched over the frozen ruts in the road, swaying on its high wheels. It pulled abreast of her, and she caught her image mirrored in the shiny black lacquer. She was startled to see her prayer cap askew and straggles of loose hair flying about in the wind. A streak of dried blood slashed across her cheek like Indian war paint.

  "Whoa, now!" Doctor Lucas Henry called out, pulling on the reins. He gripped the crown of his beaver bowler, and his tawny mustache curled around a lopsided smile. As usual, the whiskey shine was bright on his face.

  "How there, Mrs. Yoder." He slurred the words, but then she'd always thought he enjoyed for pure mischief's sake putting on a show of wicked drunkenness, especially before someone who was Plain. "It sure is blowing something fierce this morning," he said. "A body needs two hands and a pot of glue to hold down the hair on his head."

  Benjo rode up alongside the buggy. She searched his face. He was pale and a faint line creased his forehead, but his eyes shone more with excitement now than with fear. It was at him that she smiled, so he would know how pleased with him she was, though she said only: "Those poor woollies still haven't been fed yet."

  The boy's wide-eyed gaze jerked to the house, then back to her. When she said nothing more, he pulled the mare's head around and headed for the barn.

  The doctor swept his hat off his head and bent over at the waist in an exaggerated bow. "And a pleasure it is to exchange a howdy with you too, Mrs. Yoder."

  His words and actions flustered her. It wasn't the Plain way to speak empty phrases on coming and going, and she never knew quite what to do when an outsider chose to practice such manners on her. She settled for nodding her head at him.

  The doctor sat in the buggy, looking like a gaudy bird in his green and blue plaid woolen greatcoat, his lean face ruddy from the wind, his eyes laughing at her. "You keep on chattering like a demented magpie," he said, "and you're liable to wear out my ears."

  He stared down at her a moment longer, then heaved a deep sigh. He wrapped the reins around the brake handle, picked up his black bag, and swung out of the buggy. With one foot still on the booster and one on the ground, he wobbled and almost fell.

  Beneath the drooping curve of his mustache, the doctor's mouth pulled into another crooked smile, this one with a touch of meanness in it. "Well, hellfire and brimstone. There's no call to go looking down that disapproving nose at me." He tapped her nose with his finger. "Because while I'm hardly what you would call church-sober, neither am I gutter-drunk. What you could say I am is somewhat pleasantly skunked. Or rather you would say it, if you ever found the proper use for that tongue your Lord gave you. Well, my dear Plain Rachel? What do you think God gave you a tongue for if it wasn't to use it?"

  She wasn't sure quite what he meant by most of the blasphemous nonsense he was always spewing. Like his smile it wasn't a kindness, though, she was sure of that much. And she met his outsider's animosity in the way the Plain People always did: by turning silently away from it. She started for the house, leaving him to follow.

  "Your boy," he said, falling into step beside her, his stride long-legged and only a little wavery now, "managed to communicate to me in his unique way that you've had trouble come a-calling in the form of a devil, a demon, a prince of darkness... an incubus, perhaps?" He tried to wiggle his brows at her. "Dressed all in black and leaving bloody footprints in the snow."

  "He's not a devil, he's one of you outsiders, and he's been gunshot—"

  "Hallelujah, she speaks!" he exclaimed, flinging out his arms with such exuberance that he staggered. He smiled at her, but she didn't smile back. He shrugged. "So, how bad off is he?"

  "He'll die of it, I should think. I bathed the wound with turpentine and packed it with cobwebs. And I fed him from a pap bottle, the same as I do my bum lambs, to make up for all the blood he's lost."

  She held the door open for the doctor. He paused next to her on the threshold, tall and slender, and so close she could have counted the fine lines that cracked the glazed skin of his face. The smell of whiskey oozed from him, sour as old sweat.

  His eyes were golden-brown and full of mockery. "What a wonder you are, Plain Rachel. The very soul of ingenuity and efficiency and so much charity you have, too, for a dying sinner. Indeed, it's a wonder you didn't manage to resurrect the poor bastard all by your lonesome."

  She spoke the truth that was in her heart, because that was the only way she knew how to be. "I did try to heal him," she said. "I laid my hands on him and I reached out to the Lord. But the Lord didn't answer because my faith wasn't strong enough."

  His gaze fell away from hers, and his mustache pulled down at one corner. His voice was serious for once. "No? But then whose faith ever is?"

  As they stepped into the kitchen, the hot air from the cookstove and the smells of fried mush and blood hit them in the face. She waited while the doctor shrugged out of his greatcoat and then his frock coat and hung them both on the spike by the cookstove, along with his hat. She was relieved to see that his movements had sharpened. Perhaps he wasn't as inebriated with the Devil's brew as he had seemed.

  He unfastened the pearl and gold links from his cuffs, slipped them into the pocket of his maroon brocade vest, and began to roll up his shirtsleeves. His dress was al
ways flashy as a strutting gamecock, but today his high stiff wing collar was yellowed at the edges with dried sweat, and his gray silk tie hung loose about his neck. His fair hair, which he usually wore parted in the middle and slicked down with pomade, looked as if he'd been thrusting his fingers through it again and again.

  He washed his hands at the slop stone and then went without asking into her bedroom. He knew where to go because he had been there once before, on the day he had brought home Ben's lifeless body.

  There hadn't been anything he could do on that day, though, for a man the outsiders had hanged.

  "I don't know how he still lives," Rachel said.

  The doctor had removed the compress and was studying the wound. The hole in the stranger's side continued to seep blood. Lampshine glinted off the blood and off the pale hair on the doctor's bare forearms.

  "During the Sioux wars I saw men punctured with more holes than a pie safe," he said. He'd taken an instrument from his black bag and was probing the wound. "Yet they clung to life. One wonders why, in defiance of sense and science and damn good manners, they bothered.... The bullet's bounced off a rib and lodged in his spleen. I'll need hot water and more light."

  She hurried to fetch the water from the cookstove reservoir. She came back to find Doc Henry standing at the dying man's bedside with his head thrown back, a silver flask to his lips, his gullet rippling with his hearty swallows.

  He lowered the flask, wiped his mouth with his wrist, and saw her. He flushed just like Benjo did when she caught him with his fingers in the sugar tin.

  She set the water pail and an enamel basin on the floor with a loud clatter and a splash, then left. This time when she came back with the peg lamp, he was making a production out of laying his surgical instruments on the bedside table. But his eyes, when they looked up at her, were too bright and his hands trembled.

  She stuck the peg lamp in a candle socket above the headboard. She adjusted the screw and turned back to the bed just as Doc Henry dropped the stranger's leather cartridge belt and holster into her arms. His words came at her on a gust of whiskey breath: "You'd better put this up where—"

  The weight of the belt surprised her. She juggled it in her hands, and the revolver slid out of its greasy holster and hit the floor. Something smacked into the wall, spitting splinters. The air itself seemed to explode with smoke and flame, and Rachel screamed.

  She looked down at the floor as if hell itself had opened up beneath her feet. In truth, she could smell the sulfur smoke of hell, and the roar of its terrible fires smothered her ears.

  Cursing under his breath, Doc Henry stooped over and picked up the pistol. She watched, stiff with fear, her ears still ringing, while he emptied it of its remaining cartridges.

  He held the gun out to her, and he was actually laughing. "I was going to tell you to put the damn thing up where we won't trip over it and shoot ourselves stone dead."

  She stared down at the revolver. So black and cold it was, like some terrible dead thing. She couldn't bring herself to touch it. He huffed an impatient grunt and took the gunbelt back from her. He looked around the room, his gaze falling on the wardrobe of rough unpainted knotty pine. Ben had built it for her with his own hands the first year they were married—even though it was breaking the rules for a man's wife to have such a thing when it was the Plain way to hang your clothes on wall hooks instead.

  "An oiled holster and a doctored trigger," the doctor was saying, as he turned the revolver over and over in his hands. Rachel stepped back, afraid it would somehow fire again, even without bullets. "What a dangerous hombre you've brought into your saintly home, Mrs. Yoder." He gestured at the wardrobe as if to say: "May I?" She nodded.

  Her finger shook as she pointed to the corner behind her spindle-backed rocker, where she had set the stranger's rifle scabbard. "There's another," she said.

  He put both firearms into the wardrobe. But when he went back to the bed, she saw that there was still another, a small one tucked into a shoulder holster that hung beneath the stranger's left armpit. The doctor seemed pleased to tell her it was a belly gun. Further exploration showed the man had tucked into a sheath in his boot a bowie knife, which Doc Henry called an Arkansas toothpick.

  "Yup, this bum lamb of yours is sure enough a real desperado," he drawled, putting these weapons with the others. The latch to the wardrobe door made a startlingly loud click in the quiet room as he shut it. "He's packing enough hardware to outfit Custer's army." He glanced sideways at her, mocking laughter in his eyes. She wasn't sure if the laughter was meant for her or the dangerous desperado.

  They undressed him then together, she and Doctor Henry. They undressed him down to the skin. He was built lean and strong, with long shanks and a deep muscled chest, a taut flat belly, and the maleness of him lying heavy against the dark hair between his legs.

  She glanced up to catch the doctor's eyes watching her, laughing at her again. And though it wasn't like her at all, she blushed.

  One of the doctor's pale eyebrows lifted and his mouth curled slightly. "There's nothing wrong in admiring God's handiwork, Plain Rachel."

  He was still wearing that faint smile as he took a pair of spectacles from his vest pocket. He polished the lenses with a white handkerchief, over and over, then hooked the temples one at a time behind his ears. He seemed to be moving so slowly suddenly, like a man swimming under water. In the tense quiet Rachel could hear the moan of the wind, the tick of the tin-cased clock in the kitchen. The ragged breathing of the man in the bed.

  Doc Henry's long fingers slipped into the pocket of his striped pants and curled around the neck of the silver flask. She caught his wrist before he could lift the flask to his mouth.

  The sinews and flesh beneath her fingers tightened. "Getting that bullet out is going to be trickier than braiding a mule's tail," he said. "I'll need just a little nip or two to settle my nerves—"

  "You've already had enough nips to settle your nerves into a stupor."

  He stared at her with bleary eyes a moment longer, then pulled his wrist from her grasp. But he slid the flask back in his pocket. "I believe I liked you better, Rachel my dear, when you were the tongueless wonder." He sighed deeply, looking down at the wounded man. "Pity I haven't chloroform along with me to settle him into a stupor. But then he's already so far under, just the shock of cutting into him is liable to kill him anyway."

  The doctor's hand shook only a little as he picked up a scalpel from the bedside table and pressed the blade of it against the stranger's pale skin. Blood welled and the flesh gaped, and it was Rachel who had to look away.

  She heard the soft clinks of metal on wood as the doctor laid down the knife and picked up another of his gruesome instruments. She could hear his breathing and her own, and the clock ticking and the wind blowing.

  The stranger groaned, and to Rachel's shock the doctor actually huffed a soft laugh. "Feel that, do you, dear heart?" he crooned. "That's good, that's good—as long as you're suffering, you're still living." The gunshot man groaned again and jerked violently. "Dammit, don't stand there like a fence post, woman. Hold him down."

  Rachel leaned over the bed and gripped the stranger's shoulders. His flesh was cold and hard and slick beneath her hands. The doctor probed and dug at the bloody wound. Rachel drew in a deep breath and swallowed. A bead of sweat trickled down from beneath her prayer cap and ran along her neck.

  The doctor pushed out a grunt between his pursed lips. He straightened and held the bullet, pinched between a pair of long silver tweezers, up to the light. "A forty-four-forty," he said. "Probably fired from a Winchester. See where it's slightly flattened at one end—that's where it struck the rib."

  He dropped the bullet into the basin of bloody water. "You're looking kind of peckish there, Plain Rachel. I expect you could be using some of the Devil's brew now yourself, huh? Well, to serve you right I'm not giving you any. And don't you go fainting on me just yet, either. We've work still to do."

  He had her h
elp him sew up the hole in the man's flesh, made by a bullet and enlarged by his doctor's knife. "Suturing" he called it, which he did with a curved silver needle that wasn't unlike the carpet needle Mutter Anna Mary used. Once, Rachel had helped her great-grandmother stitch up her brother Levi after he'd sliced open his calf with a sickle during the haying. She hadn't been at all queasy then, but now the sweat clung cold to the roots of her hair beneath her prayer cap. Her stomach felt like a knotted fist.

  Doc Henry dressed the wound and then took a look at the man's broken arm. The doctor's hands no longer trembled. Maybe he was feeling surer of himself, she thought, and no longer needing the whiskey.

  He made a clucking noise with his tongue and shook his head. "An oblique compound fracture of the radius, and it looks as if the blamed fool tried to set it himself. Your bum lamb sure does fancy himself a tough one."

  Rachel thought that surely it would take a lot of courage to set your own broken arm. She wondered if it had happened before or after he'd been shot, and who had shot him, and why, and what had been behind that wild terror she'd seen in his eyes. But then, she had so many wonderings about him, this outsider who had come staggering across her hay meadow and leaving his bloody footprints in the snow.

  All the way through the clay-chinked cottonwood logs of her house Rachel could hear the terrible gagging, choking sounds that came from the yard. Doctor Lucas Henry throwing up the whiskey that had soured in his belly, and trying to throw off the fear that made his hands shake and his smile a little mean at times.

  She sat in her spindle-backed rocker, her own hands folded in her lap and her gaze on the young man in her white iron bed. They had bound up his broken arm in a sheet of surgeon's plaster, cleaned the blood off him, and dressed him in one of Ben's old nightshirts. She thought his eyes no longer looked so sunken into the bones of his face. A tiny blush of color touched his lips.