The Outsider

by Penelope Williamson

  She covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes widening with a shock of near laughter. She shook her head, backing up a step, then fled the room.

  And it was like running out of a dream, only to awaken in a place she'd never seen before. She stood in the middle of her kitchen, in a house she'd lived in for years, and looked around her as if in a daze. She brought her shaking hand up to her forehead. I'm tired, she thought. And still scared of him.

  She'd never thought of herself as timid around outsiders before. Careful, yes. Or resigned and accepting of God's will when they could be mean. But she'd never really been fearful, the way she was with him. And it had nothing to do with what had happened to Ben. She had already decided to forgive this outsider for being like the men of violence who had hanged her husband. No, this fear went deeper. As if he threatened her very essence.

  Impatiently she shrugged away such strange thoughts. The man had said he was hungry, and for that, at least, she knew what to do.

  She made up a bowl of stewed crackers and took it in to him. He had pushed himself further upright against the pillows while she was gone, and the effort had cost him. He was breathing heavily and sweating, his face was pale, the skin around his mouth taut.

  She said nothing as she pulled the rocking chair up to the bed. She untied her stiff cap strings and tossed them over her shoulders. But then she waited a moment, the bowl of stewed crackers cradled in her hands in case he prayed silently before eating, as the Plain did.

  He didn't pray. He looked down at the saltines soaked in hot milk and made such a face he reminded her of Benjo. She could feel a smile trying to come, teasing at her mouth. She tightened her lips.

  "My mouth," he said, "kinda had its heart set on something it had to chew."

  "I doubt your stomach could handle anything your mouth had to chew."

  "Lady, my stomach is so starved that my bellybutton is shaking hands with my backbone."

  She almost laughed again, and she didn't like herself for it, for responding to his calculated charm. He obviously had a whole repertoire of smiles and his own reasons for these friendly, teasing ways of his. Still, she supposed she ought to be thanking the good Lord he was aiming smiles and jokes at her now, instead of that six-shooter of his.

  She dug the spoon into the bowl and brought it, dripping milk, up to his mouth.

  He curled his fingers around hers, which were in turn curled around the spoon's handle. "I can manage," he said. A trace of color rose under his fair skin. "I can manage, if you'll hold the bowl. Please."

  She slid her fingers from beneath his, allowing him his pride.

  She held the bowl for him and watched him eat. She watched his hand, the subtle flex of bone and tendon, and she thought of how that hand had felt wrapped around her throat, the cruel strength of it. She watched his mouth, his lips as they closed over the bowl of the spoon, and she thought how the very set of that mouth betrayed the wildness in him. She watched his slightly lowered face and thought how his eyelashes were so long and thick they cast shadows on his cheekbones, and she thought how surely she'd never seen such eyelashes on anyone, man or woman.

  And she thought of the Scripture Noah had quoted, of how you couldn't drink both of the Lord's cup and of the Devil's.

  She was out on the sled feeding the sheep, a bare hour later, when she heard Benjo's scream.

  Her son banged out the door of the house, with MacDuff at his heels. The boy was running so hard he lost his hat, and his brogans kicked up big splatters of mud. Rachel stabbed the pitchfork into a hay bale, jumped off the sled, and took off running herself.

  They were nearly to the creek before she caught up with him. She snagged his arm and swung him around. He looked frightened, but he also looked guilty.

  "Benjo—" She had to stop and take a deep breath after the scare he'd given her and then running like that. "Benjo, what happened?"

  "Nuh... nuh... thing!"

  He tried to pull away, but she gripped his shoulders. Her gaze darted over him, searching. "Was it the outsider? Did he hurt you? If he's touched you in any way—"

  "Nuh!" Benjo shook his head hard. "He d-didn't!"

  He twisted out of her grasp and ran off, MacDuff barking at his heels, thinking it a game of chase. This time Rachel let her boy go. He'd been frightened apparently, but not hurt, and she wasn't likely to get anything more out of him. Benjo had never been one for confiding his troubles.

  She crossed the yard and entered the house. She didn't even take the time to wipe her boots on the burlap bag she kept on the porch to save tracking mud onto her kitchen floor.

  It seemed she crossed that kitchen floor in three strides, such was her anger with him. When she entered the bedroom, though, she was stopped by the bemused expression on the outsider's face. During the long hours of nursing him, she had hung one of her soiled prayer caps on a bedpost, to be tossed into the washtub later, and then forgotten about it. He had it now in his hand, holding it up to the light. He seemed to be looking at his own fingers through the sheerness of the cap, and his skin was nearly as pale as the white cambric.

  "What did you do to my son?" she demanded.

  His gaze flashed from the prayer cap to her face. "How come he acts like he's got a frog stuck in his craw?"

  She brought herself right up to the bed so that she could stand over him. "What did you do to frighten my son?"

  He laid the prayer cap in his lap, trailing his fingers along one of the ribbons. But his eyes stayed on her face. "If anyone ought to be frightened, it's me. I woke up and there he was staring down at me, nose to nose, hacking and spouting like a geyser at me. All I did was point my finger at him...." His mouth curled up slow at the edges. "Well, I might've said, 'Bang.'"

  Rachel gripped her elbows, hugging herself to stifle a sudden chill. That had been mean, what he'd done.

  His gaze held her quiet and still and frightened. The way he could go from that lazy smile of a moment ago to the way he was now, his eyes all flat and cold, his face hard.

  But then he looked away from her, down to the prayer cap in his lap. He ran his finger along the edge of the stiff middle pleat. "I don't like surprises, Mrs. Yoder. I thought your boy should know that."

  The strange note of weariness in his voice touched her heart with pity. How terrible, she thought, to have always to be living life on the wary edge. To never be able to let yourself feel safe anywhere, with anybody.

  "The trouble is, Mr. Cain, that you seem to be dealing frights out to us here quicker than we can duck."

  "I want your boy to be careful of me," he said slowly. He lifted his gaze back to her face. "But not scared. And I don't want you scared either."

  She watched, mesmerized, as his hand let go of her prayer cap and came up, and she thought for a moment he was going to touch her, but what he did was even more shocking. He laid his palm on her Bible, which she kept on the table by her bed.

  "I swear to you, Mrs. Yoder, on this book you set such store by, that—"

  "No, you mustn't do that!" She reacted without thought, covering his mouth with her fingers to stop his words. She got a spark from touching him, like you could get sometimes pressing your fingertips to the window pane during a summer lightning storm. "You mustn't swear to me on the Bible like that. Oaths are serious things. To be made only to God and they are binding for life."

  She had taken her fingers off his lips the instant she had touched him, but the spark had given her a strange feeling inside, like a tickle. She curled her hand into a fist and wrapped it up in her apron.

  He stared at her a moment in that intense way of his, with his hand still on her Bible. Then he brought his hand back to his lap, his fingers lightly, lightly brushing over her prayer cap. "How about a simple promise, then?" he said. "If I tell you I'll not harm you or your boy, will you take my word on it?"

  "Why shouldn't I take your word?" she said, surprised by the question.

  "What if I was a gambler, a thief, a shootist of some repute, and a lia
r of considerable practice?"

  "I think you've probably been all those things at one time in your life."

  He laughed, shaking his head. "Lady, you have sure got me pegged."

  She stared at him, trying to understand him. He seemed unable to imagine anyone trusting in him, because he trusted in no one himself.

  "If you believe you won't harm us, Mr. Cain," she said, "then we believe you."

  She went back out to the sled and took up the pitchfork and began to feed the hungry woollies again, her head full of strange thoughts and feelings that flickered and were gone like moths darting at a lamp.

  Later, when she was on her knees scrubbing up the mud she'd tracked onto her kitchen floor, she thought about what the outsider had done to Benjo, pointing his finger and saying "bang" like that, scaring him so.

  She worried about him, her Benjo. She knew his heart was sore and lonely, but she couldn't find a way to ease it, not when she couldn't even get him to talk to her. Much of his unhappiness was a grieving for his father, she knew. But she didn't know how she was going to get him to understand, to accept, the will of God when her own heart and mind balked at understanding.

  And there were other things troubling the boy, she thought, things that had to do with his edging up to being a man. He'd taken to disobeying her lately, doing things he'd never have dared to try to get away with around his father. Like he should have been at school today.... Ach, vell, the Plain didn't set much store by book learning, and so she'd tended since Ben was gone to let the Englische school slide.

  But now this outsider had come into their lives to add to her boy's troubles, and she didn't know how to say to him that he should not be afraid. Not when her own mind and heart knew such fear.

  She wished she could share with Ben the story about their boy getting scared with a "bang." Knowing Ben, though, he probably would have laughed to hear it. He was such a man for that, for appreciating how life had a funny way of twisting itself all inside out and backward. Bang! It made her smile to think of how Ben would have laughed.

  Her hands stilled in their scrubbing, and she shut her eyes. A single tear fell onto the wet pine board, followed by another and another, and then she had to press her hands hard to her face to stifle the sounds of her weeping.

  Rachel supposed, with such a day as she was having, it was inevitable that she would get a visit from Jakob Fischer.

  She'd had a goodly number of visitors over the last three days, neighbors who had come calling with pots of mulligan stew or offers to do chores for her—like young Mose, who'd chopped up enough wood to see her through another six months of winter. And all of them, of course, harboring a hope of glimpsing her notorious houseguest.

  But Jakob Fischer was the worst snoop among their people. Indeed, he'd been sticking his meddlesome and inquisitive nose into others' affairs for so long that the Plain had started calling him Big Nose Jakob to his face. He didn't seem to mind, but then he did have a big nose, red and ripe as a late summer tomato, and Rachel wondered sometimes if he just didn't get the joke.

  She was putting a snitz pie in the oven when the door cracked open and Jakob Fischer's nose came right on in, along with the rest of him. "I'm here to see this outsider you've got for yourself," he said, as if it were a new prize ram she'd just acquired. And without waiting to be announced he headed straight for her bedroom.

  No sooner did he poke his nose around the jamb than he let out a thunderbuster bellow that shook the air. He flew out of the house, his nose leading the way. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, something about the Devil having fangs on him that were as big and shiny as carving knives.

  It had all happened so fast that Rachel was still standing by the stove. She sighed, wiped her hands on her apron, and went in to see what the outsider had done now.

  The man called Cain lay propped against the pillows, holding a long, flat metal tube up to his mouth. She could see where Big Nose Jakob might think he was seeing a devil with fangs, especially with the setting sun pouring fiery red light in through the window and making the room glow like a cauldron in hell.

  The whole thing suddenly struck Rachel as funny. She covered her mouth with her hand, but the laughter came out of her anyway, in startled, bright little gasps.

  The outsider took the metal tube out of his mouth. He gave her one of those wide-eyed, butter-wouldn't-melt looks her son got whenever she caught him smack in the middle of some mischief. "What did I do?" he said.

  She looked away from him so that she would quit laughing. "That Jakob Fischer," she said, when she finally caught her breath. "I expect he came here thinking to see horns and cloven hooves on you, and he saw fangs instead. He thinks he's somebody, does Jakob Fischer."

  "He isn't somebody?"

  That nearly set her off laughing again. She took a deep breath to stop it and almost snorted instead. "A person who's proud, who shows off and is pushy, we Plain say that he 'thinks he's somebody.'"

  They said it, too, about someone who broke the rules, but she didn't tell him that, for she doubted he would understand. A man like him, who probably lived by no rules at all.

  He was studying her as if he didn't quite know what to make of her, but he seemed to be looking at her in a friendly way this time.

  "Where did that come from?" she asked, indicating the metal tube.

  "My duster pocket."

  His duster. She'd hung it from a hook on the opposite wall, and he could never have reached it from the bed. His strength of will was a frightening thing.

  "You shouldn't have gotten up like that," she said. Her gaze went to his gun—his loaded gun, she had no doubt— which lay now on the table by the bed. "Again. I don't much fancy having to nurse you through another bout of wound fever."

  He smiled at her scolding, turning the metal tube over in his hand.

  "What is it, anyway?" she asked, curious in spite of herself.

  He held it up for her inspection. "You've never seen a harmonica before? I won it in a monte game a while back."

  She had no idea what a harmonica was. Or a monte game, for that matter, although that she could at least guess at.

  "I thought one wagered money at games of chance," she said. She hoped this harmonica-thing wasn't another instrument of death and wickedness, like his knife and guns.

  "The fellow I was playing with ran out of money. This was all he had left."

  "It was that poor man's last possession and you took it?"

  "It would've been an insult to him not to."

  She was trying to puzzle out this quirk of outsider logic, when he put the tube thing in his mouth and blew on it. Out of it came a wonderful wailing noise, like an elk bugling for a mate. It raised the hair on her arms and made her tremble.

  "Oh! It makes music!"

  He lifted his shoulders in a little shrug. "Well, it's supposed to. I only know the one tune, 'Oh Susanna!,' and I ain't much good at that one."

  "Will you play it for me?" She was so excited, she forgot herself and smiled at him. "I should like to hear it just the once, if you wouldn't mind."

  She sat down in her rocking chair, with her shoulders rolled forward and her hands tucked between her knees, full of anticipation like a child. He watched her through half-open eyes.

  "This is liable to hurt your ears some, but here goes...." And he brought the metal tube back up to his mouth and blew on it, and that wonderful wailing filled the room.

  Rachel closed her eyes and let the sound fill her. It was like the music the wind made. It yowled and roared. It shrieked to the heavens with joy. And when it ended, it trailed off with an eerie veil of sad moaning.

  She breathed out a long, slow sigh. "Oh, that was such a wonderment."

  She opened her eyes to find him staring at her. "I only know that one tune," he said, the words strangled and rough, as if he'd blown out all of his air through the harmonica. "But I could teach you to play it if you'd like."

  She straightened up with a start. "No, you mustn't. Mus
ic played on worldly instruments such as your harmonica-thing—it isn't allowed in the Plain and narrow life. It was very wicked of me to ask you to play it in the first place, and now I must ask you never to do so again. Not in my house. It's against the rules."

  "What rules?"

  "The rules we live by."

  He considered her words a moment, then he smiled his naughty-boy smile. "And I don't suppose you'd want that fellow who goes around thinking he's somebody to catch you breaking the rules."

  She shook her head, although she had to straggle hard to keep her face set serious.

  She scooted forward in the rocker, with her fingers curled around the edge of the rush seat, beside her thighs. But she didn't stand up. He was looking down at the harmonica in his hand. His hair was mussed from the pillows and there was the lingering flush of fever on his cheeks. He looked roguish and rowdy, and a little lonely.

  Slowly he lifted his head. He seemed to be searching for something to say to her, as if he was the one this time who felt the need to break the silence that kept falling between them.

  "What's that delicious baking smell?" he finally asked.

  "A snitz pie. Do you like it?"

  "I might if I knew what it was."

  "It's a pie made of dried apples and spices. I'm baking it for my Benjo, to make up to him for the way you scared him this morning. He ran off like he does sometimes, when he's troubled, but he'll come back when he's good and hungry, and then I'll have a snitz pie fresh out of the oven for him."

  "It's a wonder to me where you found the time to bake a pie. Just lying in here and listening to you work through this day has got me plumb exhausted. I've never known a woman for going from one chore to another like you do."

  "Hunh. Obviously you've never been married, Mr. Cain. Otherwise you'd know that every woman's day is pretty much as busy as mine."