The Outsider

by Penelope Williamson

  "You appear none the worse for wear, Mr. Cain," she said as he moved to the fence and stood next to her, "after such a long and perilously close brush with salvation."

  "It was a near thing, though. Y'all got me so worked up, I was almost shoutin' hallelujahs."

  She looked away. She had astonished herself, making a joke out of such a serious thing as a soul's salvation. She wanted the words back, but of course it was too late. That was the dangerous thing about words—once said they couldn't be unsaid.

  She would have to remember that he had a way of making her say things, do things, that were not herself.

  He noticed the cocoon in her hand and leaned over to see it, leaned so close his breath bathed her cheek. He touched the wriggling cocoon with the tip of his finger. "We don't have enough bum lambs at home to feed that you got to be taking in bum butterflies now, too?"

  At home. She knew he hadn't really meant to say such a thing, but it did make her smile. "By evening this little one will be flying free on the wind."

  They stood together in silence a moment, then he said, "I've never heard hymns sung like that before. They sounded like the bells that're played sometimes during a funeral. Slow and sad and lonely."

  She wondered if that meant he'd liked their singing. She wanted to ask him if he'd been given even a glimpse of God in the silence, in the waiting, in the hymns that had sounded to him like funeral bells. "There's someone here I want you to know," she said instead. "And I want her to come to know you."

  "Your mother?"

  She shook her head. Her mother—if she brought Johnny Cain to her mother and said, "I want you to look at this man, Mem, and see not an outsider but a man I have come to..." She shook her head again. She couldn't finish that thought, not even to herself.

  She said nothing more to him, but pushed away from the fence and started across the yard, leaving him to come with her, or not.

  The Plain People had gathered together again in groups of friends and family in the yard. The men talked about what kind of lambing season they were having, and how the open winter meant a poor hay crop this summer. The women talked about their next quilting frolic and a new recipe for sour cream cake. But a hush fell over everyone as they turned to watch Rachel and the outsider walk side by side toward Bishop Miller's big house.

  They skirted a huge iron kettle hanging from a tripod over a fire. Steam thick with the smell of bean soup billowed around them. "Are you hungry?" she asked him.

  He glanced back at the bubbling kettle. "Well, I was." He tilted his head to study her. "But with the way you're looking so solemn-mouthed all of a sudden, you got me feeling like a horse thief on his way to meet the judge."

  "I'm taking you to meet Mutter Anna Mary. She's what we call a Braucher, which means she can heal the sick with her touch alone. It's a wondrous gift of God and comes from a faith that runs deeper than the core of the earth. She is very old and very wise, and you mustn't mock her."

  He made a show of patting his pockets. "Well, shucks, lady, I think I got me some manners in here somewheres." He smiled at her, but when she didn't smile back, he said, "I'll be good."

  "She's actually my father's grandmother, but all of us from the youngest babe to old Joseph Zook call her Mutter, for mother, for she's connected to so many of us here, either by marriage or blood. She is our roots."

  She sat in a willow rocker on the gallery of her Daudy Haus. She'd never been a big woman, even in her youth, but the years had worn her down until she was little more than parched skin and frail bones. As Rachel climbed the porch steps, the old woman lifted her head. Her skull was bald beneath her prayer cap, her marbled skin pulled taut over the bones. Her eyes were like two smooth milky white pebbles. She had been stone blind for over fifty years.

  "Rachel, my wild child," she said, although Rachel had yet to make a sound but for the tap of her heels on the floorboards and the rustle of her skirts. "What have you done?"

  Rachel knelt and put the leaf with its fragile cocoon into the old woman's hand. "I've brought you a butterfly. It will be a spring azure, I think, when it hatches." The silk shell shivered and trembled, and the old woman's sunken mouth curved into a smile. "And I've brought Johnny Cain."

  Rachel stood up. The outsider settled down on his haunches in her place before Mutter Anna Mary. The old woman still held the butterfly cocoon cupped in her parchment brown palm, but she reached out with her other hand, and he took it. She stared at him with her milky blind eyes, and he stared back.

  "You have slain your brother."

  She'd said the words flat out, brutally. He didn't answer her accusation. But neither did he pull his hand from hers.

  The old woman's chest rose and fell with her breath. "And will you give to your God only silence when He says to you: 'What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground'? Are you so full of pride, Johnny Cain?"

  "Yes."

  The word had come out of him almost like a gasp, but he said, "I make no excuses for what I've done, and I'm not looking to change what I am."

  The old woman turned her face toward the tenuous warmth of the spring sun. "The farther you run, the longer the road back becomes. I would have thought you tough enough for anything, Johnny Cain. Even repentance."

  "Well, ma'am, the way I see it: repenting ain't so hard. It's giving up the sinning that can get to be a challenge."

  "Do you think that because your words are the truth that they are any the less hurtful to God?"

  She pulled her hand from his and let it fall in her lap. She was silent for a time, and the outsider remained where he was, staring up into blind eyes that no longer looked at him and yet saw everything.

  "That hand of yours, it has done more than its share of living," Mutter Anna Mary said.

  "And hurting," he acknowledged. "But then your hands have done more than their share of healing, or so I've been told. Might be it's just nature's way of evening things out. You heal, and I kill."

  Rachel jerked, bumping into the back of her great-grandmother's chair, making it rock with a soft creak. "The men have started setting up the trestle tables and benches for the fellowship meal," she said. "Perhaps you ought to go help them, Mr. Cain."

  The outsider pushed the flat of his good hand against his thigh, stretching slowly to his feet. "It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, ma'am," he said. His eyes met Rachel's for one enigmatic moment, and then he turned away. His boot heels rapped a slow beat as he walked the length of the gallery and down the steps.

  "You sent him away," Mutter Anna Mary said.

  Rachel knelt beside the willow rocking chair. She laid her cheek on her great-grandmother's knee. After a moment she felt the old woman's fingers stroking the crisp black cotton of her bonnet.

  "What did you see?" Rachel said. Neither thought it an odd question to ask of a woman who was stone blind.

  "He is broken," Mutter Anna Mary said.

  His joy is in killing. He was more than broken; he had been shattered, and Rachel knew there was no mending him. It wasn't even right that she should try to mend him.

  The old fingers, gentle, sure, moved beneath the brim of her bonnet to stroke her cheek.

  "You brought him to me because you hoped I would see a goodness buried deep inside him, a soul worth nurturing. And then you became frightened that I would see too much and you sent him away. He has a soul, Rachel. Even that most wicked of Cains, who slew his brother Abel, had a soul. But for what he did God made him a fugitive and a vagabond and banished him from the face of the earth."

  Rachel raised her head. She hadn't known she was crying until she felt the air cool the wetness on her cheeks. "But, Mutter, why can't God forgive him? If you could have seen his eyes on the day he came to me."

  Mutter Anna Mary neither moved nor made a sound. She still held the cocoon cupped in the palm of her hand. Rachel could see the butterfly's blue wings now, through the opaque skin of the chrysalis.

  The cocoon trembled aga
in, and the thin brown hand curled around it for a moment, as if she would protect it. "'And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear.' And perhaps it was, but it was no greater than he deserved. Whom do you want to save this outsider for, my wild child—God or yourself?"

  Rachel could feel the truth searing her face, her cheeks burned and flushed as if she'd been bending too close to a hot stove. But it was easier, in a way, for someone else to name her sin. Easier, then, to admit to it at last—if only to herself.

  "I want to come to know him. I want to understand how he can be as he is," she said.

  "But what you know and understand, you might come to love."

  Rachel was quiet. Out in the yard the children were playing a hand-clapping game, their laughter bright as sleigh bells.

  The old woman's chest shuddered with her deep sigh but she, too, said nothing more. For Rachel to love an outsider was a thing so wrong, so impossible, it was beyond words.

  The cocoon wriggled suddenly, almost jumping. Mutter Anna Mary breathed a soft laugh. "Look, Rachel. It's hatching."

  Rachel leaned closer. The chrysalis was splitting open at one end. "Soon it will fly."

  "If the weather keeps up like this, it's going to be hot as this soup come shearing time," Samuel Miller said as Rachel set a clay bowl filled to the brim with bubbling bean soup in front of him. He wasn't speaking to her, though, but rather to the other men sitting with him at the trestle tables.

  The fellowship meal was the only time the Plain didn't eat in silence. The women always ate separately from the men, though, and they always served the men first. Rarely did they join in the men's talk.

  "Aw, our Sam's only worried about his sweat fouling the wool," Abram said. He tore off a crusty chunk of bread, dunked it in his soup, and stuffed it in his mouth. He grinned and winked at his brother, while the others all laughed at his joke.

  Bishop Isaiah Miller stroked his beard as if he was about to pontificate, but his eyes were smiling. "These hot days of spring do serve as God's warning that summer is coming. So I'm thinking we had better clip my Samuel's sheep first, wouldn't you all say so, my brothers in Christ? Before he has a chance to build up a good head of steam."

  The men laughed again, and Rachel smiled. She tried to catch the outsider's eye, but he and her son, who were sitting side by side, seemed to be sharing a joke of their own as a platter of pickled cucumbers and beets passed beneath their noses. Benjo pinched his face up into a knot of exaggerated disgust.

  Deacon Noah Weaver, on the other side of Benjo, saw what they were doing and frowned.

  The men had made a place for the outsider at the table and then ignored him. They spoke in Deitsch and let their eyes slide over him as if he were a ghost they couldn't see. His separateness from them was understood and accepted by all, including himself.

  But then perhaps he is used to being the outsider, Rachel thought. Even among his own kind.

  She heard a step behind her and she started, aware that she'd been caught staring at the man. She whirled, nearly knocking a bowl of soup out of Fannie Weaver's hands.

  "Oh... Fannie. Is that my Vater's soup?" Fannie's face was bunched tight, like the knuckles of a closed fist. Rachel tried on a smile. "Give it here and I'll take it on down to him."

  Her hands closed around the bowl, but the other woman held fast, so that they wound up tugging it back and forth between them. Boiling hot bean soup slopped over the rim, scalding Rachel's fingers.

  Fannie's too, probably, for she suddenly let go, and turned on her heel and stalked off. Rachel sucked on her burning fingers.

  She used her apron to wipe the soup off the side of the bowl before she carried it down to the end of the table, where her father sat waiting. As bishop he should have been served first, but in a display of proper Plain humility he had insisted on going last.

  The men had fallen into a serious discussion about the coming summer's work, about the hay that would need cutting next month, and the wool crop that would need reaping as well. Come July the sheep would have to be driven from their home pastures up onto the mountain, where they could grow fat on the lush buffalo grass.

  Rachel waited for a lull in the talk before she set the soup in front of her father. "If you men are going to speak of such things as haying and shearing schedules and the plans for the summer pasturing," she said, "then you best do it in Englisch. For I've hired him on to work my farm through the breeding time."

  The silence that fell over the table had the impact of a thunderclap from out of a clear sky. The men's heads all swiveled to look first at her, then at Bishop Miller.

  But Rachel's father said nothing for the moment. He brought a spoonful of the steaming soup up to his mouth and blew on it. In the tense quiet the huff of his breath sounded as loud as a gust of wind.

  Her brothers exchanged long worried looks. Noah Weaver's head jerked around to the outsider, then back to her. Harsh color blotched the skin above bis beard.

  Rachel's belly felt queasy, but she held her head high and stiff. It wasn't against tradition for an outsider to be hired on to work a Plain farm. Many a man sitting at these tables had paid Basque herders to watch over their sheep in the summer. And back in Ohio, even her father had often taken on outsider help during the harvest.

  But she knew her father would say those hired hands had been boys, too young yet to grow beards, and thus not so lost to the world.

  "I thought it would answer," she said, "to hire on Mr. Cain. He can be taking Ben's turns with the haying and with the summer herding."

  Noah forced a laugh that seemed to come ripping out of his throat. "And will he be taking Ben's turn at the shearing, too?"

  "A man needs two good arms to properly clip a sheep, and one of his is broken."

  "He isn't even wearing a sling anymore, and he'll have that plaster off long before shearing time." Noah swung his head back around, pointing at the outsider with his beard. "Such a worldly man as that one, with all his guns and his flashy dress and his knowledge of things, why, I expect he probably figures that to shear a hundred-pound woolly monster has got to be as easy as spitting out a straw. For such a flashy, worldly man as he is."

  Since they were speaking in Englisch now, the outsider had no trouble understanding the Plain man's words. Or the insult behind them.

  But the smile he gave Noah might have been dipped in honey. Only Rachel, who was coming to know him, saw the danger at the edge of that smile. "Well," he said, drawling the word out to its fullest potential, "the sad truth is that up till now sheep shearing hasn't much figured in my line of work." His eyes hardened. "I've had me plenty of practice, though, at recognizing a challenge when I'm given one."

  Samuel barked a sharp laugh and cocked a thumb at the outsider. "You're trying to wring shame from the unshamable with that one, Brother Noah."

  Abram hooted, "Ja, you'll have as much luck getting shame from that one, Brother Noah, as that one will have separating a ewe from its wool. The rest of us will be clipping our tenth woolly before he's done with his first."

  "You can't have a shearing contest with a man who's never done it before," Rachel protested. "It wouldn't be fair."

  "Who said anything about a contest?" Noah said. Benjo was anxiously trying to hand him a pitcher of cider that had been making its way around the table, but he ignored the boy. He cast a contemptuous look at the outsider, and stretched his mouth into a hard smile. "I'm saying he'll not last out the first hour of shearing, let alone the day."

  "And if I don't?"

  Noah showed more of his teeth. "I'm already saying you won't. Outsider."

  "And I reckon y'all humble Plain folk will sure have shown me up properly then, huh? Your God gives out a prize, does he, to the man among you who shears the most sheep?"

  Noah's eyes winced shut, his head bowed, and Rachel knew he felt shame to have been caught out in a vanity. Especially by an Englischer.

  But her hotheaded brother Samuel leaned across the table to point
the handle of his spoon in the outsider's face. "Might be we'll allow you to take a crack at summer herding the woolly monsters, then. Might be all those guns of yours will come in handy when the coyotes come to pay you and the woollies a call."

  Johnny Cain's gaze swept down the table and stopped at Rachel's father. Isaiah was carefully wiping the bottom of bis soup bowl with a piece of bread.

  "I reckon," the outsider said, "that your bishop would say 'the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.'"

  Slowly, Isaiah raised his head. He nodded, his long thick beard brushing the yoke of his shirt. "Ja. It was the Lord Jesus Christ who said as much."

  There was a moment of stunned silence, then Samuel flourished his arm in a dramatic arc. "How fortunate we are then to have this brave outsider among us, my brothers in Christ," he scoffed, "to take on the coyotes."

  Abram snickered. "The big, bad coyotes."

  Noah had folded his hands on the table, pressing them together so hard they trembled, his head bent as if in prayer. But then he lifted his face and Rachel saw that it was flushed, although whether with shame or a new anger she couldn't tell.

  Benjo, who sat between the two men, had turned a pasty white. He still held the cider jug which he clutched tightly to his chest.

  "You ever watch a coyote kill a lamb, outsider?" Noah said. "He goes for the throat, so he does, and the last thing that poor lamb sees is his life's blood spilling down the front of him as he dies."

  Noah laughed.

  And Benjo upturned the jug of cider into his lap.

  Noah's laugh turned into a bellow. He reared to his feet, his belly and thighs knocking into the table so hard it rocked. He pulled back his hand. Benjo squawked and flung his arms over his head.

  "Noah!" Rachel cried.

  The outsider's arm shot up and caught Noah's wrist before the flat of his big palm could slam into the side of Benjo's head. The two men stared at each other, breathing heavily. Noah tried to wrench free, but the outsider held him fast. Benjo cringed between them, his shoulders jerking as he choked over his words.