The Outsider

by Penelope Williamson

  "Nuh—nuh—nuh!"

  "Noah, don't!" Rachel had started around the table toward her son, but her father grabbed her arm, stopping her. "He didn't mean to do it," she said. She was sure he hadn't meant to do it. It was that talk of coyotes and blood spilling down a lamb's front—it must have frightened the boy, for the pitcher had just seemed to slip from his hands. "He didn't mean to do it."

  Benjo scrambled off the bench and took off running. The outsider let go of Noah's wrist. Noah's hand clenched into a fist. His nostrils flared as he sucked in a sharp breath.

  Rachel's father had tightened his grip on her arm to keep her from going after her son. He cast a stem look down the length of the table. "Brother Noah."

  Noah's chest shook as his breath rushed in and out his throat. "The Proverbs admonish us not to spare the rod."

  "My daughter coddles that boy too much, 'tis true. But you ought not to have given way so to the sins of anger and pride."

  Noah's head rocked back. He closed his eyes, and his lips moved in desperate prayer.

  His whole body shuddered hard, as if he were trying to throw off the sins that had gripped him. Then he swung around and pointed a shaking finger at the outsider. "You see! You see what corrupting influence this man has on us all. He is of the evil world, and he has brought the evil world among us!"

  He turned and tried to climb over the bench that had him trapped against the table. His big feet got all tangled up with the table and the bench and each other, and he went sprawling onto his hands and knees in the dirt.

  He picked himself up, brushed off his broadfalls, and walked off, his hands folded together and his head bowed.

  Joseph Zook and Ira Chupp snickered in their beards. The others pretended a sudden fascination with what was left in their soup bowls. Noah's son, Mose, stared after his father and then lowered his head in bewildered shame and contempt.

  Bishop Isaiah reached for the bread and tore off a piece. "The fellowship meal is no place for such as this," he said.

  The tables fell quiet except for the clink of tin against clay. Rachel stood next to her father, rubbing her arm where he had held her. Johnny Cain looked up, and their gazes met, but she could see nothing in his eyes. Throughout all that had just happened, he had shown not a shred of anger, nor even said a word, yet he had stopped Noah from striking her son. He had cared at least that much.

  Still, she thought that when the fellowship was done her father would tell her that the outsider must go.

  The women spread quilts to sit beneath the shade of the cottonwoods that grew along the east side of the big house. Rachel found a place next to her mother and the twins. She wanted so badly to talk with her mem, simply talk. But then, sitting there with her arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs and staring at the blue dahlia pattern of the quilt, she could think of nothing to say.

  Alta's baby started fussing. Rachel watched the other woman as she unpinned her shawl and bodice and put the baby to her breast.

  "Yours suckles so much better than mine," her sister Velma said.

  Smiling, Alta kissed the downy crown of her son's head. "But look at yours. He'll be crawling long before mine."

  Velma's baby had caught sight of a cattail waving in the breeze, just off the quilt, and he was going after it. He hadn't yet learned how to coordinate his knees with his elbows, though, and he pushed his bottom high in the air and fell forward onto his nose.

  "He thinks he's an inchworm," Rachel said.

  "Whereas my Thomas thinks he's nothing but an old slug," Alta said, laughing, for her Thomas had chosen just that moment to let out a loud, satisfied belch.

  Rachel leaned over and picked up Velma's wriggling baby. She stood him on her thighs. He rocked back on his heels and blew bubbles at the sky.

  She turned her head in time to catch her mother staring at her. But when the two women's gazes met, Sadie looked away.

  Rachel rubbed noses with the baby, and he squealed in delight. She hugged him to her, breathing in his baby smell. Oh, how she wished he were hers. The Plain had a saying: A new baby every spring. Velma and Alta both had six children in only ten years of marriage, and all of them still living. No one even thought to tease them anymore, when the twins started increasing at the same time and gave birth to their babies on exactly the same day. Rachel remembered her own marriage bed, remembered lying in Ben's arms and whispering dreams in the dark of all the babies they would make together. But the nights had passed into months and the months into years, eight of them, before Benjo had been born. They had called him their miracle baby.

  And Rachel had stopped mourning the lack of other babies. Benjo had been all that they had needed, to make their world complete. Their wonderful, precious, God-delivered miracle. But her Ben was lost to her now, and her world was complete no longer.

  She almost didn't feel the touch of a hand on her shoulder, so light it was, so tentative. Afraid even to breathe, Rachel turned her head and looked into her mother's face. She couldn't remember the last time her mother had touched her in any way, even accidentally.

  "When you were a little girl," her mother said, "you used to say you were going to have thirteen babies. A baker's dozen."

  Tears blurred Rachel's eyes and filled her throat. She had to swallow twice, before she could speak. "Did I?"

  Her mother nodded, so serious, so solemn. Her mother, Rachel thought, wore her solemnity as naturally as she did her shawl and prayer cap. "Thirteen children and a hundred and sixty-nine grandchildren."

  A startled laugh burst from Rachel's tight chest, and a smile flickered over her mother's lips. A smile so quick and faint, Rachel wondered afterwards if she'd really seen it.

  "Oh, yes. For each of your babies was going to have thirteen babies of its own, you see," her mother went on. "You were only three at the time you made this declaration, but you had your brother Sol work out the mathematics of it." A crease appeared between her eyebrows as she searched Rachel's face. "But we always thought, your father and I, that Deacon Noah would be the one you would choose to marry."

  "You never said so at the time."

  "It was your life to live, Rachel."

  My life to live as long as I kept to the straight and narrow path, she thought. And of course she had. She always would.

  The baby flung his head back and whimpered. Rachel set him belly-down on the quilt, and he immediately started inchworming his way back toward the waving cattail. She picked up a doll, dancing it in front of his eyes to distract him. Plain dolls never had any faces painted on them.

  Rachel glanced again at her mother. They'd never talked this way before and she was afraid of saying the wrong thing, of raining the moment. Sadie's whole attention was now on her grandson. There was a look about her that reminded Rachel of the old gappy-mouthed ewe that had died this spring.

  "Mem, have I changed so much from that little girl you remember?"

  Sadie made a jerking motion with her hand and turned her head away, and Rachel nearly gave up then. A Plain woman was judged by the daughters she raised, and she was surely her mother's failure.

  "In here," Rachel said, pressing her hand to the hollow between her breasts where her shawl ends crossed, "I don't feel as if I've changed at all."

  The silence stretched between them. Rachel started to push to her feet.

  But then Sadie reached up and gripped her sleeve.

  Rachel looked down at the hand that held her and she was startled. This wasn't Mem's hand. This was an old woman's hand, webbed with wrinkles and liver-spotted. She looked up into her mother's face, so beloved and familiar, and it was a face she knew not at all. There were deep lines around Sadie's mouth and eyes, and the hair that showed from beneath her prayer cap was the gray of a winter's day. Yet into Rachel's head came a memory of her father saying: She had the merriest laugh in the whole of Sugarcreek Valley, did your mother. The merriest laugh.

  "It's not too late," her mother said.

  Rachel sucked in a breath and nearly choked
. "What?"

  "It's not too late for you to have more babies." Sadie's hand fell to her lap. She looked down, watching her own fingers make a pleat in her apron. "He's always wanted you, has Noah Weaver. That man has always wanted you worse than a mudhen on a tin roof wants rain."

  Her mother's words shocked Rachel, their frankness cloaked in country wryness. No Plain woman ever spoke aloud of a man's desires, no one even acknowledged the existence of such a thing in the Plain life, let alone made a joke of it.

  Sadie raised her head. A smile flickered in her eyes, and then was gone.

  Yet for Rachel it was enough. She felt herself smile in return and then heard herself laugh. Her smile widened to include the twins, who laughed with her even though they'd been talking between themselves and missed what Sadie had said. Rachel's gaze took in all the women, spread out over their hand-pieced quilts, and then went beyond, to the men at the trestle tables lingering over their empty soup bowls, to the children who had gathered around the pond again to play with the tadpoles.

  A thousand times her eyes and heart must have taken in such a scene. It was all the same, and so was she. She hadn't changed at all, not at all.

  This is what it means to be Plain, she thought, this certainty of changelessness, of always belonging. This is what she'd really brought the outsider here to see. Mem, Da, her brothers and Noah, even Fannie: these people defined not the means to her life, but life itself, and she wouldn't know who she was without them. They were a part of her, as much a part of her as her guts and heart, as her soul. They would always be a part of her in ways she could never be to others. To any outsider, even him.

  She thought that if she lost all this, if she lost any more, she would never be able to bear it.

  Those who died Plain were buried in a cemetery on a hill behind the Miller big house. It was a pretty spot, this hill, shaded by cottonwoods and box elders and carpeted with lush buffalo grass that bowed and danced in the wind. A snake fence had been built around the graves to protect them from the winter snowdrifts. But one grave lay outside the fence, separate from the others. No stone or wooden cross marked this resting place, though everyone knew it was there.

  Rachel's steps faltered as she passed by that grave on her way to the gate, but she didn't look at it. Couldn't bear to look at it.

  Ben's grave was with the others, safe inside the fence. She had picked wildflowers and put them in an empty tomato can. Spring colors and smells—yellow holly grape, white Indian pipe, and pale lilac monkshood. She knelt in the grass and wedged the can of flowers into the sunken earth beneath a rough-hewn granite marker. Into this stone she herself had scratched with a hoof pick his name and the years of his life.

  Usually Benjo came with her when she did this, when she brought Ben things like flowers and holly sprigs and a wreath of fall leaves. She wanted Benjo with her now, but he'd run off to hide somewhere again. Nursing wounded feelings after that incident with Noah and the cider. Maybe Ben would have known where to look for him. Or maybe Ben, like her own father, would have said to leave the boy alone.

  She arranged the flowers in the can so that they made a pleasing picture to the eye. "Here you are, Ben. A little something just for pretty." That's what he'd always said to her. A little something just for pretty. No sooner would the year's first Indian pipe and monkshood be poking their heads through the spring grass than he'd be out picking her a bunch. A little something just for pretty. It was one of the rituals of spring, like feeding the bums in front of the stove and watching the newborns take their first steps—Ben picking her flowers. Now she did it for him.

  "We had us a nice crop of fat lambs this year, including six sets of twins. And the bone pile's been small."

  He'd been killed during the haying time. On this day last year, he'd still been alive. He might have picked her flowers on such a day. A month later she'd been scratching his name into this stone. This afternoon the sun shone warm and bright in the sky, but on the day they buried him it had been raining. Life and death, they were so close, she thought. All that separated them was a solitary breath, a single heartbeat, and the will of God.

  Then it had been raining. The earth had been wet and heavy, and it had made loud plopping noises as it slid from the shovels onto his coffin. He had been dressed not in his brown sack coat and broadfalls but in a suit of the purest white. Der Herr gibt und der Herr nimmt. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh. She had said, weeping, to her father, "Where was God when my Ben died?" And her father had said, "Where was God when His own son died?"

  The rawhide hinges of the gate squeaked as it opened. Rachel scooted around on her knees, squinting against the sunlight that splashed through the trees, hoping to see Benjo. But instead it was Noah.

  She said nothing, only got stiffly to her feet. She didn't want him here.

  But her annoyance faded when Noah Weaver raised his head, and the broad brim of his hat lifted to reveal his face. His eyes looked like two bruises in the paleness of his face, and she knew she had done that to him.

  He stopped in front of her, not looking down at Ben's grave, but searching her face, as she searched his. The silence between them grew heavy.

  She wanted to do something to make it better, to make him better. He wasn't a man often given to smiles, but she wanted to make him smile.

  "I was just telling Ben what a sweet crop of lambs we have this year."

  "And did you tell him how you've been letting an Englischer work his evil wiles on you?"

  Rachel pushed past him, but he grabbed her arm, swinging her back around so hard she fell against him.

  His lips tightened and twisted down at the corners, making him look mean. "That outsider, he sure does think he's somebody, he does. And now he's got you thinking you're somebody, too."

  She tried to pull free of him, but his grip tightened, hurting her. "Let go of me, Noah."

  "Ja, I'll let go of you, Rachel Yoder. I'll let go of you. But not before I've spoken plain." He let go of her, but only to span her bonnet with his big hand, twisting her head back around toward the gate and the solitary grave that lay beyond it. "That's what conies of pride, of thinking you're somebody. Is that how you want to wind up, first shunned in life and then shunned in death, shunned by all, even by God?"

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She wouldn't look, she couldn't even bear to think of it.

  He gave her head a little shake. "Do I need to tell you what to think, Rachel? How to be? 'Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers; for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? What communion hath light with darkness?'"

  She wrenched loose of him with such force she stumbled. She flung out her hand to break her fall and scraped her knuckles on one of the rough gravestones. Lurching upright, she backed away from him.

  "I've done nothing wrong. Do you think I could come up here and face Ben if—"

  "Ben is dead!" He closed the space between them and grabbed her shoulders. "Dead!" He shook her so hard her teeth cracked together, shocking a cry out of her. "Aw, Rachel, Rachel." His hands gentled and moved up her neck to cradle her face. "Ben's dead and you've a life still to live, a straight and narrow life, a Plain life. Home-steading to be done and a boy to raise." He lowered his head, bringing his face close to hers, breathing hot, harsh gusts. "More children to bear for the glory of God and the church."

  His lips came down on hers, desperate, smothering. She tried to pull away but he held her fast, his fingers pressing into her cheeks. She pushed against his chest and twisted her face aside, cutting her lips on his teeth.

  He let her go. He was panting, sucking in great gasps of air like a drowning man. He pressed his hands to his mouth. "Lieber Gott, lieber Gott. Rachel... I'm so sorry, so sorry...."

  Her legs were shaking so hard she had difficulty standing upright. She could feel herself swaying. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and tasted blood.

  "That you could do such a thing, Noah Weaver, and right on top of Ben's grave." A harsh soun
d tore out of her. She had meant it to be a laugh, but it wasn't. "And you accuse me of thinking I'm somebody."

  He dropped his hands and lifted his head. "You don't..." He drew in a deep breath, his chest shuddering. "Listen to me, our Rachel..." He came at her. "No, no, I won't hurt you," he said when she scuttled back a step. He spread his arms out from his sides, pleading. "I'll not touch you. Only you must listen. Send the outsider away. Make him go before it's too late. Light cannot be found in darkness. Or truth among lies."

  She shook her head, not understanding him, not knowing him. Yet he looked so hurt, so frightened and broken, and she couldn't bear it.

  She held out her hand to him, but she was too far away to touch him. "Oh, Noah. Surely you know nothing can seduce the truth from my heart."

  He stared at her with eyes that were wet with anguish. "Once. Once I thought I knew you. But no longer."

  This time she was the one to take a step toward him. She thought at first her legs weren't working right, the way the grass trembled and the ground shuddered beneath her feet. A heavy rumbling was pounding her ears, growing louder and louder, like thunder rolling across the sky.

  She saw Noah's face change, contort with horror as his eyes focused beyond her onto the farmyard below. She spun around.

  A herd of cattle about a hundred strong stampeded down the lane that led to the farmhouse. Eyes wild, rolling and white. Mouths bawling and nostrils snorting, hocks clattering and horns clashing. Hooves drumming, churning up the grass and mud.

  The sheep in the meadow waddled in panicked retreat, their frenzied bleating adding to the din. In the farmyard men shouted, women and children screamed, running, knocking over trestle tables and benches, scattering quilts, running, running for the shelter of the barn and the houses, and still the cattle came, thundering down the lane. The pretty white pasture fences, those poles so lovingly hewn and peeled and whitewashed by her brother Sol, acted as a funnel for the crazed beasts. And standing alone in their path was Benjo.