The Outsider

by Penelope Williamson

  She heard the squeal of the yard pump handle and then the gushing splash of water. Doc Henry cleaning himself up now.

  The man on the bed lay in utter stillness, but she thought she could see the throb of the pulse in his throat. She thought that if she listened hard enough she would be able to hear the rush and suck of his heart.

  A sound at the door made her look up. Doc Henry leaned against the jamb, his worldly elegance decayed, his clothes stained and water dripping from the ends of his mussed hair. A cigarette drooped from one corner of his mouth. The cigarette and his mustache lifted together with his lopsided smile. "Well, and aren't you just a-sitting there looking as pleased with yourself as a pig in poke-weed."

  She was so pleased she beamed a smile back at him. "He's going to live," she said.

  The doctor raised one shoulder in a careless shrug. "For today." He drew deeply on the cigarette, squinting at her through a haze of smoke. "Wild boys like him don't make old bones. That last bullet gets them all in the end."

  He didn't sound as if he cared much that a "last bullet" would get his patient in the end. He was a strange man, was Doctor Lucas Henry. She supposed she knew him better than she'd ever known an outsider, and yet of course she really knew him not at all. One afternoon last spring she had sat in this very chair, beside this bed, holding the hand of her dead husband, and Doc Henry had stayed with her for a time, talking to her. He had stayed because he'd sensed somehow that she—she who had always so loved silence and being alone—could no longer bear either.

  Most of what he'd said that day had been merely words to fill the empty corners of the room, but some of it she'd heard and remembered. He'd been born the same year and month and very day as she, to her a wondrous happenstance that made her feel strangely linked with him, as if two souls who'd begun the journey of life together ought to have a special care for one another along the way. And which made him thirty-four. Everyone in Montana had left a home behind somewhere, and his had been in Virginia. She could often hear the echoes of that place in his speech. For a time he'd done his doctoring in the U.S. Cavalry.

  Those things he had told her about himself, and one other thing she'd only felt. He was a man apart from the world, but not out of choice as she was. Rather it was as if the world had locked him out, or shunned him, or he believed that it had. His was a bleak and lonely soul.

  She watched him now as he pulled the silver flask from his pocket and drank deeply. "Strictly for medicinal purposes," he said, mocking himself this time. "Merely re- placing some of the vital fluids I just lost." He gestured at the bed with the flask. "The very thing that must be done with our desperado here. The nursing bottle was a fine idea—see if you can get him to take it again, along with as much beef broth as you can force down him. And after a couple of days, when he's stronger, give him some of that god-awful sweet rhubarb wine you Plain People make."

  She nodded, and then the full sense of what he'd said struck her. "But I thought you would be taking him back into town with you?"

  "Not unless you want to undo all our good work."

  She crossed her arms, gripping her elbows. "But..."

  "Change the dressing often—I'll leave you plenty of alum. And for mercy's sake, don't clean the wound with turpentine again. He doesn't need blistering on top of everything else. I'll give you some carbolic acid instead. And make him stay quiet. He can't afford to start bleeding again."

  The doctor pushed himself off the doorjamb. He held all of himself gingerly, but especially his head, as if he feared it might fall off if he moved too abruptly. He went to the bed and picked up the stranger's wrist to feel his pulse. The stranger's hand, Rachel saw, was long and fine-boned, with fingers so slender they looked almost as delicate as a girl's.

  But then the doctor's own long fingers slid down to grip the man's hand, and he turned it over almost roughly. "Have a good look at that, Plain Rachel. All pretty and smooth on the outside and a pure mess on the inside. Somebody's worked this boy brutally hard for a time in his life. And look at this finger. It takes hours of shooting practice to put a callus like that on your trigger finger."

  He laid the scarred and callused hand on the bed, gentle now, brushing the back of it with his fingers. "He's got shackle scars on his ankles, and someone's taken a whip to his back—those are the sort of marks a spell in prison leaves on a man. He probably killed his first man about the time he was weaned and he's been riding the owl-hoot trail ever since."

  His touch again oddly gentle, he smoothed the dark hair off the stranger's pale forehead. "So will he thank you for saving him, I wonder? And I wonder why you even bothered, for he's already caught fast in the Devil's clutches. Isn't that what you believe?" His gaze lifted to hers. His face was stark with something, some inner torment she couldn't begin to fathom. "You people who are so sure that only you are saved, for you alone are the chosen of God?"

  She shook her head at him. Strangely, she wanted to brush the dripping wet hair back out of his eyes, to touch him with that same soothing gentleness with which he'd touched the wounded man. "No one can be sure of salvation. We can only yield to God's eternal will and hope things turn out for the best."

  He stared at her hard with a frown between his eyes, as if she were a puzzle he was trying to piece together. She had always thought that he was one of the few outsiders who looked at the Plain People and saw beyond their long beards and prayer caps and clothes that belonged to the last century. What he saw was the peace in their hearts, she supposed, and it both frightened and drew him.

  He made a sudden jerking motion now with his shoulders, as if throwing off the weight of his thoughts, and he laughed. "Knowing how rarely things ever turn out for the best, I reckon hell's got to be a mighty jumping place, then."

  He moved abruptly away from the bed and began to pack up his instruments. Except to tell her that he would be back in a day or two to check on his patient, he said nothing more. Rachel too was silent. She no longer looked at the outsider sleeping in her bed, the man who had a callus on his trigger finger and whip marks on his back.

  She went with Doctor Henry out into the yard. The wind, raw and cold, twisted her skirts around her legs and snapped at the long tails of his greatcoat. She was surprised to see Benjo still on the hay sled, feeding the ewes, for it seemed that hours surely must have passed.

  At his buggy Doctor Henry turned and looked back to the house. Lampshine spilled from her bedroom window in a soft yellow pool on the mud-splattered snow.

  "That boy in there..." he said. "He might be handsome as a July morning, but he's also probably mean enough to whip his weight in wildcats when he's not half dead." He brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek, touching her gently in the way that he had touched the stranger. "Have a care, Plain Rachel. The powers of darkness really do sometimes prevail."

  CHAPTER 2

  There was nothing quite so eye-watering as the sour stink of sheep. Even with the wind blowing hard enough to take the bark off the trees, Rachel Yoder could still smell the woolly monsters. They crowded around the sled, bleating and bumping their bony faces against the slats, while she stood on the deck and heaved pitchforkfuls of hay out beyond their wriggling backs.

  She braced her legs apart as Benjo drove the sled lurching over the frozen ruts in the pasture. The muscles in her shoulders and arms ached as she bent to lift the damp hay, but it was a pleasant ache. She'd always loved working in the open air, much more than she did the cooking and washing and keeping up of the house, the woman's work. The drudge work, she thought, and then almost as a matter of habit she sent up an apology to the Lord for her willful ways.

  Benjo hauled up on the reins and the sled squeaked to a stop. Rachel thrust the pitchfork into a loose bale and jumped to the ground. She pulled off a glove and swiped the prickly hay dust off her forehead with the back of her hand.

  "Muh—Mem?"

  She turned slowly, careful to keep her face calm, for even with the gusting wind she'd caught the thread
of fear in her son's voice.

  Benjo stood at the head of the draft horse, one hand wrapped around a hame on the harness collar as if he needed its weight to anchor him to the ground. Next to the mare's shaggy bulk, he looked so frail. His bony wrists, chapped red from the cold, stuck out from the ends of his coat sleeves.

  "Mem, thuh—thuh—that outsider... is he an outlaw?"

  She came up to him, her gaze moving gently over his pale face. "I don't know," she said. "Perhaps."

  "Will he shuh—shuh—shuh...?" His tongue pushed so hard against his teeth that his head jerked, and the muscles of his throat clenched around the word that wouldn't come.

  She put her hands on his shoulders, stilling him. "Sssh, now, and listen to me." She spread her fingers up over his collar into the ragged strands of his hair. She could feel a fine trembling going on inside him. "The outsider has no reason to shoot us. We mean him no harm."

  He tilted his head back to stare up at her, his eyes as leaden as the clouds overhead. She saw the question in those eyes and the unspoken truth. The outsiders had been given no reason to hang his father, but Benjamin Yoder had died that way nonetheless, choking at the end of a rope.

  It was hard, so hard sometimes to accept God's will.

  The boy's mouth tightened and spasmed once, and then the words burst out of him fierce and whole. "I won't let him hurt you, Mem!"

  Rachel dug her fingers into his shoulders as she pulled him against her. She knew she ought to tell him that he mustn't resist whatever happened, for it would be the will of God. But this time it was her own throat that closed up tight around the words and kept them from coming.

  The ewe butted her black face against Rachel's thigh, making a buuuuhh sound deep in her throat. "It's the hay you're supposed to be eating, you silly old thing, not me,"

  Rachel said, laughing as she thrust her fingers through the sheep's rich oily fleece.

  This ewe was an old one, and her mouth was so broken she could barely chew even the softest grass. She should have been culled from the band last mating season, but she'd always been such a sweet, gentle mother, producing strong and healthy babies year after year. Rachel just hadn't the heart to ship her off for slaughter where she'd wind up as someone's mutton stew.

  The ewe stretched out her neck now, lifting her head, and looked calmly up at Rachel through big round dark eyes. Rachel had always imagined she could see wisdom in their gentle depths, as if they possessed not only all the world's secrets, but heaven's as well. She'd said as much to Ben once and he'd laughed at her, for in truth sheep were probably among the stupidest of God's creatures.

  "But there's something you know that you're not telling us, isn't there, dear old thing?" Rachel said, rubbing her knuckles along the length of the ewe's bony face.

  While the sheep fed off the scattered hay and Benjo led the draft horse and sled back to the barn, Rachel and MacDuff walked among the herd, checking on all the ewes whose woolly bellies were round and heavy with lambs. But it would be another month at least before they started dropping.

  Rachel sure hoped it would warm up a bit before then. She let her head fall back to stare up into the shifting, boiling sky. From the looks of those clouds they were in for more bad weather.

  The wind gusted through the cottonwoods and flapped her skirts like sheets on a line. She felt so strange inside herself. Sad and lonely and missing Ben so much. And yet all trembly and shaky, too, as if she'd been sipping on Doc Henry's whiskey. She stood in the feeding paddock among the sheep, buffeted by the wind, her face lifted toward the drooping clouds, and it was as if a part of her had been blown loose and up into that sky and was flying around up there, wild and lonesome and scared.

  A horse's whinny floated to her on the wind, followed by the rattle of wheels over the log bridge.

  To the outsiders, all the Plain People looked alike, with their austere conveyances and their drab old-fashioned clothes. But as soon as the light spring wagon with its faded brown canvas top turned into the yard, Rachel knew who it was. Although her neighbors and family would all have been worried when they didn't see her at the preaching this morning, she had known Noah Weaver would be the one to come.

  Yet something held her back, so that it was Benjo who came flying out of the barn to meet him. She could tell from the way her son was waving his arms and pointing to the house that Noah was now getting an earful about the trouble that had come a-calling in the form of an outsider dressed all in black and with a bullet hole in his side.

  It had started to sleet. The boy led Noah's horse, still hitched to the wagon, into the big barn. Rachel snapped her fingers at MacDuff and they left the paddock together. MacDuff took off after the boy in a mud-splattering gallop, barking joyfully. Rachel sometimes thought that dog was better at herding Benjo than he was the sheep.

  She walked through the slushy snow and mud in the yard with her back straight, her head lowered against the stinging ice pellets. Noah Weaver waited for her with his hands hooked on his hips, the wind tugging at his long beard. She stopped before him, and their gazes met and held. Their breath entwined like white ribbons in the cold air.

  He looked down at her with brown eyes that were warm and concerned. His craggy face, with its bumpy nose and thick ginger beard that lay on his chest like a forkful of hay, was so dearly familiar to her that she wanted to laugh and throw her arms around him in a big welcoming hug.

  Instead she stood before him with her hands linked behind her back, and she was smiling, but only inside herself.

  White air puffed from his mouth. "Vell, our Rachel?"

  "I've some fried mush left over from breakfast, should you want it."

  He smiled at her, openly, and so she let her own smile come out in a quick curve of her lips and a little downward tuck of her chin.

  They turned together toward the house and the wind drove the sleet right at them, stinging their faces. The lampshine from the kitchen window was a beacon, Rachel thought, pointing the way home. Standing out there in the paddock, beneath the big sky and the wild wind, she had felt lost and alone. But she was herself again now, and this was Noah walking beside her, and the hearth that beckoned was hers.

  The wind slammed against them. Noah's hand flashed to his head, barely snatching his hat before it went sailing. "It's warming up some," he said, and Rachel laughed. Only Noah Weaver could find the good in Montana weather.

  He heard her laugh and another smile wreathed his face. "What I meant to say was, it could be worse. It could be snowing."

  "It could be blowing up a blizzard, too. And likely will be again before spring gets here."

  "Now, don't you go hexing the weather like that—hold on a moment." He stopped to lean against the porch rail and bent over, tugging at the laces of his thick-soled cowhide brogans. "I've the barn all over my shoes."

  He must have hurried right over after the preaching, then, as soon as he'd finished his evening chores. At least as much as he was capable of hurrying. Noah Weaver was a slow moving man, slow in thought, word, and deed. He took his own good time arriving at a place within himself, but once he got there not even a barrel of gunpowder could budge him loose.

  He padded into her kitchen, cumbersome and big-footed as a bear. He looked so right standing there, in his Plain clothes of brown sack coat and broadfall trousers and big-brimmed felt hat, with his face framed by his long shaggy hair and full, manly beard. His big toe was poking through a hole in his stocking, and it gave her a pang to see it. He needed a wife to care for him.

  His gaze roamed slowly from the slop stone to the cookstove to the bathing screen, looking for the outsider, she supposed. As if he expected the man to be sitting at her table eating Sunday supper. "So, where is he then— this Englischer?" he said, his lip curling around the word as if it tasted foul.

  They were speaking Deitsch, the old peasant German of their roots, for the Plain didn't use the Englische talk except around outsiders. And only then when they chose to be friendly. Still, Rachel had to
stop herself from putting her finger to her lips, as if the outsider could hear and understand Noah's strong words.

  She led the way in silence to the bedroom. The outsider slept in utter stillness, that long fine-boned hand with its scarred palm and callused finger lying lax on the sheet. As it did every time her gaze fell on him, her breath caught at the arresting quality of his face. It wasn't the Plain way to attach importance to physical beauty, but she couldn't help noticing his.

  She felt Noah stiffen beside her and knew that he, at least, saw only an outsider who had come unwelcomed and unwanted into their Plain and separate lives. He said nothing, though, until they were back in the kitchen, facing each other as they had out in the yard. Only this time neither of them was smiling.

  His head jerked up and around as if he was pointing with his beard. "In your bed, Rachel?"

  "He was gunshot and bleeding to death. What else was I to do with him? Dump him in the corner like a bundle of old gunnysacks?"

  "Did I say such a thing?"

  The gentle reproach in his eyes stung. "I'm sorry, Noah. I guess I'm just..."

  Weary and lonely and scared. She felt as if she were back out in the paddock again, being buffeted by the wind and getting lost up in the sky.

  Noah shrugged out of his sack coat and hooked it on the wall spike. He took off his hat and reached to hang it there as well, but he paused, facing the wall, with his hand resting on the crown of the hat, as if he had to collect his thoughts and carefully choose his words. When he turned back to her, he was very much the church deacon, with his eyes all solemn, his mouth stem. As Deacon Weaver, it was his duty to be sure everyone followed the straight and narrow way and conformed to the understanding of what it was to be Plain.

  "That Englischer in there..." Again he pointed with his chin, as if the man didn't warrant more than the crudest of gestures. "He's tainted. What he's seen, done... He reeks of the world and the evil that's in it."