I'll kill them for you, if you want.
All her life she'd been surrounded by simple things: simple pleasures, simple people, even simple temptations. Then he had come staggering across her wild hay meadow and now her thoughts were going down twisted, dangerous paths.
The Bible said, "The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The outsider dwelled in darkness; he was the night. What she hadn't understood until now was that the night had its own compelling and seductive beauty.
I'll kill them for you, if you want.
She glanced out the open door again as she went back to the cookstove. She clamped a handle around the hot iron, then let it fall back on the hob with a loud clank.
When you wanted to chase away the darkness of night, she thought, you lit a lantern. Jesus had instructed Paul "to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God."
She would show the outsider the light.
She smoothed down her apron, tucked the stray hairs beneath her prayer cap, and went out onto the porch. She stood in front of him. The hot wind slapped her skirts against the backs of her legs.
"What we spoke of earlier today, Mr. Cain..."
He pushed his hat back and looked up at her. "I remember having the conversation, Mrs. Yoder. Though I suspect you're now hell-bent on making me live to regret it."
"But it's about living and being hell-bent that I wish to speak more. Living, and then dying in God's own time, and being held to account for our sins. What Mr. Hunter did he must answer for, but he will do his answering only to God. As will you, as will we all when we are called."
"Yeah, well, I don't figure it's Him who's going to be doing the calling and settling up the accounts when my time comes around."
"But there's where you are all wrong in your thinking." She eased onto her haunches before him, so that she could face him eye to eye and he could recognize and come to know the truth as she spoke it.
"There is peace and joy to be found in God. And there is forgiveness and eternal life. It's never too late to make your soul whole by uniting with Him."
He leaned forward, bringing his face close to hers. Too close, so that she wanted to pull back from him, although she didn't. He wasn't smiling, but then she didn't trust his smiles. She did detect a softness, though, in the way he was looking at her. The wind blew between them in a gush of warmth.
"And there's where you're all wrong in your thinking, Mrs. Yoder," he said, and there was such a sweetness in his voice that she became lost in the sound of it and almost missed the sense of his words. "Because I like being damned. I positively wallow in my damnation like a fat pig in warm mud."
Rachel rustled through the straw in the hen roost, searching for eggs. She found one and added it to the two she already cradled in her apron. It was slim pickings today. The farm was home to half a dozen red bantams, but one or two were always wandering off to hatch a clutch of chicks.
She hurried back across the yard, one hand cradling the eggs in her apron, the other swinging out for balance. The wind filled her skirts like sails, pushing her along. She had to take big skipping steps as she picked her way through the rivulets of water that ran from the melting snow. The outsider sat on her porch, still and silent, watching her.
I like being damned. She couldn't imagine how anyone could say such a thing, even in jest. For the first time she understood how truly separate he was from her. She wasn't going to quit on him, though. She'd never quit on anything in her life.
She stopped alongside his chair. He'd gone back to passing the time by squeezing her pincushion. "That thing isn't going to be of much use to me," she said, "after you're done squeezing the stuffing out of it."
His clenching hand paused for just a fraction of a moment. "The world's full of pincushions. I'll get you another."
"Hunh." She put her free hand on her hip and turned to look back out over the yard. The warm wind kissed her face and fluttered the strings of her prayer cap. "I reckon it sure is a shame you can't just walk into Tulle's Mercantile and buy yourself another immortal soul as easily. Or pick a nice new unsullied one from out of a mail-order wishbook. But then it's only by living a Christian life that a soul can be cleansed and saved. And part of living a Christian life is understanding that we must love those that hate us, and not take revenge on our enemies."
The outsider had settled deep in his chair, and gone back to hiding his eyes beneath the soft brim of his hat. He sighed. Loudly. "Are we back to trotting down that road again, Mrs. Yoder?"
"Indeed we are, Mr. Cain."
"Very well, then. In the first instance, the enemy we're speaking of here ain't my enemy, he's yours; I got no feelings one way or t'other about him. And in the second instance, I told you I'd be the one doing the taking."
"You would take the life of a man you don't even know?"
"I do it all the time."
His words shocked her so, her hand slipped its hold on her apron and one of the eggs slid out. She lurched to catch it and the other two went rolling after. One by one the eggs smacked and cracked open on the weathered pine boards, yolks and whites all running together.
She stared down at the broken eggs, then looked up at him. "You're not to do it to Mr. Hunter. You're not."
He lifted his shoulders in a careless shrug. "I offered and you said no-thank-you. So long as the man don't take a notion to come after me, I'm easy."
Her gaze fell back to the mess of burst yolks and shattered shells. She felt bewildered, disoriented. "What am I going to do...?"
"I'll take mine scrambled," he drawled. "Like I said, I'm easy."
She turned her back on him and went into the kitchen for a bucket and rag to clean up the eggs. She stood in the middle of the room a moment, then strode back outside empty-handed. "I'll have you know that we Plain People have all offered up many prayers for the soul of Fergus Hunter," she said to the man who sat on her porch.
"Uh huh. And no doubt he's suitably grateful for 'em, too."
"As of this moment, Mr. Cain, I am praying very, very hard for you."
Rachel slammed the rolling pin down onto the ball of dough. She pushed hard and the dough flattened. She pulled and pushed the heavy wooden pin, pulled and pushed, rolling out the dough with such vigor that flour floated in a white cloud around her.
She stopped pushing and stood in stillness a moment, bent over the table, her hands gripping the rolling pin.
She straightened, dusted her hands off on her apron, and marched out onto the porch. "The Bible teaches us, Mr. Cain, that 'whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.'"
The face he turned up to her wore a polite expression, but his eyes were hooded. "In all my life the only times I ever turned the other cheek I wound up getting it slapped. I heard them Scriptures you keep throwing up at me read plenty when I was a boy. Seems like I remember Jesus Christ himself doing a lot of talking about loving your enemies. But on a day when his enemies were feeling particularly mean, he wound up getting whipped and crowned with thorns and hung up to die a bad death on a cross. That, lady, is what comes of turning the goddamned other cheek."
She flinched at his profane blasphemy. "Jesus died so that we might be saved."
"Yeah? So what did your man die for?"
She spun around, but his hand shot out, grabbing her arm. "Don't run off again. I'll quit doing it. I promise."
"I'm not running off, I've biscuits baking—quit doing what?"
"What I been doing to you. Like using a spur on a bronco, trying to make it buck so's you can break it."
"You've been... and here I thought I was..." Laughter burst out of her, surprising her before she could stop it, and surprising him, so that he dropped her arm. They'd been hurling words back and forth at each other, she thought, like children throwing balls in a game of Anti-I-Over. But they were too wide apart in their beliefs to ever really hit each other. They were so separate, he of the world and she of
the Plain way, that no amount of words would ever put them on the same side.
And there was no need for it. She saw now that it wasn't the outsider she'd been trying to lead out of the darkness, it was herself. Because that burning emptiness inside her had allowed a terrible thought to take root, the Devil's weed of vengeance. But she had sought the light, and she had found the light, and the weed had shriveled and died before its awesome power.
She laughed again, feeling light-headed of a sudden. Feeling lighthearted. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
"You will never be able to break my faith, Mr. Cain," she said. "Certainly not with something as insignificant as a pair of spurs."
Noah Weaver heard her laughing.
He was slogging through the cluster of yellow pines and tamaracks that separated his farm from hers. He walked slowly, deliberately, his heavy brogans leaving deep furrows in the soggy pine straw and melting snow. His farmer's thoughts were on the weather. These chinooks always made him uneasy—hot as the Devil's breath, they were, and unnatural. A summer wind in winter.
The sound of her laughter startled him so that he jerked to a stop. The heel of one brogan slid on the wet mulch, and his legs went flying out from underneath him, landing him on his rump with a jar that knocked off his hat and rattled his teeth.
He got slowly to his feet, feeling suddenly old and aching in all the joints of his bones. He dusted off the seat of his broadfalls and anchored his hat back on his head. He looked around. No one had seen him, yet he felt foolish, and then ashamed of himself for his vanity.
He heard her laugh again as he came around the back of her barn. He slowed, more careful this time of where he was planting his big feet.
She was leaning back against the porch railing, her arms straight out behind her, her palms braced on the roughly peeled pine pole. Her skirts slatted in the wind, her cap strings danced. She was talking with the outsider. Laughing with him.
The outsider sat on one of her kitchen chairs with his back to the wall, but Noah barely spared a glance for the man. His gaze went straight to Rachel, and stayed there.
So many times over the years he had watched her like this, from afar. Coming to the Yoders' for a word with Ben about the shearing or the haying or the lambing, when it was really Rachel he'd come to see. Standing in the yard talking with Ben, one eye on the door, hoping, praying she'd come out, waiting to be invited in for coffee and maybe a slab of pie. Sitting at her table, drinking the coffee, eating the pie, talking with Ben. And watching her.
Watching the way her lower lip would puff out when she blew a sigh up her face if she was tired. The way her skirts would sway around her hips as she moved from the cookstove to the slop stone. The way her back would bow, supple as a willow tree, when she bent to pour more coffee into his cup, and he would look up and smile his thanks to her and she would smile back, and he could fool himself into thinking just for that one moment that she was his.
That was all he'd ever had of her, those times which had always felt stolen to him and somehow empty, lacking. Just those quick, passing moments in her kitchen, and when he saw her every other Sunday during the preaching.
Oh, it truly was God he went to worship on those Sundays, but a small corner of his heart always beat harder and faster at the knowledge that he would see her. No matter what barn the preaching was held in that day, no matter where on the rows of benches she sat, his gaze would find her in an instant. In a sea of brown-shawled backs, and black and white Sunday prayer caps, he would know her. He knew her voice in the hymnsongs and prayers. And afterward, when the women passed out the bowls of bean soup and platters of steaming bread, he'd know which hands were hers, without even looking up, he'd know. Although he always would look up, anyway, just to catch her smile, and he'd be close to pure joy in that moment. Close to God, and close to Rachel.
He approached her slowly now, not to sneak up on her, but only to prolong the moment when it would seem that she was his and his alone. The outsider must have seen him, made some telltale movement, for she suddenly jerked upright and whirled.
"Noah!" she exclaimed. Her face was bright, as if with happiness. But as her gaze settled fully on him, her eyebrows drew together in a slight frown. "What's the matter?"
Although she hadn't laughed again since he'd come around the back of the barn, he kept hearing the echo of it. He felt the echo of it in the pit of his belly. It made him uneasy, like the hot chinook wind.
The weather-rotted steps groaned beneath his weight as he came up to her. He allowed himself to drink in the sight of her. She stood now with her slender back straight, her shoulders flat and square. He always felt so hulking and clumsy around her, too big for his skin.
"Wie gehts?" he said to her. She'd been baking, for her sleeves were rolled up and there was a dusting of flour on her arms. Her skin was so pale he could see the blue veins on the inside of her wrists.
It was rude of him, Noah knew, to be speaking Deitsch in front of the outsider. The man was a guest in her home. Her gray eyes showed her disappointment in him, the way they darkened. Rachel's eyes had always been like a weather vane for her feelings.
"How nice of you to come calling, Noah," she said, enunciating the Englische words carefully, as if he'd suddenly turned into a big dopplich of a kid that needed teaching. "Mr. Cain, this is my good neighbor, and my particular friend, Noah Weaver."
Noah waited, though he wasn't sure what for. Maybe for her to say: This is the man I'll be marrying soon. Except she wasn't going to be saying that now. He'd asked her and asked her to marry him, but she hadn't said yes, and it was only a small comfort to know that she hadn't said no yet either.
He turned slowly, allowing his gaze to settle at last on the outsider. The man sat there looking all dandified and puffed up in his worldly clothes. His face was as bare and smooth as a baby's bottom. Noah felt the tight knot ease some in his chest. Rachel would find nothing pleasing in this flashy, beardless boy.
The outsider looked up at Noah through half-closed eyes that were a pale, cold blue. His face was as flat and empty as the prairie in winter, yet Noah felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. Then the outsider lifted his hand and laid it on his thigh, and Noah realized that he'd had that hand resting on the handle of the Devil's tool he wore strapped around his waist Had probably had it there from the moment Noah walked out from behind the barn.
"Good afternoon to you, sir," the outsider said. "And how d' you do?" He had a slight drawl, from Texas maybe, Noah thought. Or some other place way down south.
He'd spoken politely enough, but Noah still had no trouble allowing his contempt for such a man—a man who always needed to be touching a gun to feel safe—to show on his own face. "Myself, I'm doing fine, Mr. Outsider. As for yourself, I'd say you were fortunate in where you chose to get yourself shot."
The outsider's wide mouth curled into an easy smile. "Ah, but fortune is a two-faced wench, don't you know?" He cast a look over at Rachel and his smile changed, although Noah couldn't decide in exactly what way. "All because Mrs. Yoder went and saved my life, now I gotta be polite and let her take a crack at my black soul."
And in that moment Noah sensed something flash between the two of them, between the outsider and his Rachel. It made him think of the way Saint Elmo's fire arced and shot off blue sparks between the tips of cattle horns during a heat-lightning storm. Yet the impression was so startling to him, so impossible, that he told himself he must have imagined it.
"Whereas if it'd been your farm I'd've stumbled across when I was dying, why, I suspect you'd have just let me go straight on to hell in my own merry way."
Noah knew the outsider was speaking to him. He could hear the edge in the man's drawling voice, and he could feel the impact of that insolent blue stare. But he couldn't take his eyes off of Rachel. He noticed suddenly that she had a smudge of flour at the corner of her mouth. He'd always had trouble looking at Rachel's mouth. With its bottom lip thicker than the top one, she
looked like she was pouting even when she wasn't. When he looked at Rachel's mouth, Noah forgot it was the purity of her soul that he loved.
He tried to clear the gritty feeling out of his throat. "None of us knows if he is saved till he gets over yonder, so we don't worry ourselves about the salvation of others, Mr. Outsider. We leave that to God. And we don't accept converts into our church."
Rachel made a funny little jerking movement. "Oh, honestly, Noah—as if he should even want to. Mr. Cain is only joking."
Was that what they were laughing over when he came up, he wondered—over God and salvation and the immortal soul? He didn't like this conversation. He felt left out of it, horrified by it. His gaze roamed over the yard, the barn, the hay fields, as he struggled for something to say.
"Your ewes will be dropping soon."
Rachel looked over to the paddock where her sheep munched on scattered hay. "No, not for a while yet I should think," she said.
Noah felt a flash of irritation with her, even though he knew she was right about the ewes not being ready. A woman shouldn't contradict her man in front of another.
Rachel had turned back to the outsider, and her face had taken on an excited look. She tucked in her chin to hide a smile in that way she had when she was teasing. "But if they do start dropping while you're still here, Mr. Cain, we'll see if we can't make a lamb licker out of you."
"Lady, I sure do hope that ain't what it sound like."
"Oh, it's much worse than what it sounds like. Much worse." And to Noah's utter shock, she laughed again.
He wondered where she'd come from, this Rachel he didn't know. How often had he himself testified at the preaching, about how a boisterous laugh and a quick retort betrayed a cocky spirit, the kind that God despised? He wondered now if Rachel had ever really listened to his words. She'd always needed a strong husband to guide her. Ben, he thought sourly, should have made a better job of it.
The Outsider Page 11