Time moving slow and sweet through the long, pure days. Living in her head with the music.
She couldn't be a summer shepherd. It wasn't woman's work. But when it came the Yoder turn for the herding, Rachel did the camp tending. In her wagon bed now were white sacks of salt for the sheep and rawhide-covered boxes packed with coffee and beans and bacon for the shepherd. And on this day, when sunlight splashed through the pine boughs and ground larks flitted from under her horse's feet, she was bringing these supplies to Johnny Cain.
It was good that the outsider had gone up into the hills with the sheep, away from the farm now, away from her. Good for their immortal souls, and for her virtue.
It had only been a matter of days since she had danced in his arms on a new-mown hayfield, since she had kissed his man's mouth. Days she could count on fingers and toes, busy days of shearing and getting the sheep ready for summer pasturing. Yet for her, he alone had filled every moment of that time.
Even when they had all gathered for the sheep drive— when she was giving her brother Sol a letter-from-home to eat on the trail, and teasing Samuel, who hated to ride, about getting saddle sores, and laughing when the wind snatched away Levi's hat and a hungry ewe tried to eat it— even when she was safe within the loving family of her Plain life, always, always, she had been aware of Johnny Cain, and it was all she could do not to touch him, there before the eyes of Noah and her brothers.
Once, when they had a moment alone, he looked at her with one of those quiet smiles that touched only his eyes and he said, "You think that soon as me and the woollies are out of sight over yonder ridge, then you'll have whipped temptation. But aren't you forgetting how when your Jesus went out into the desert, Satan followed along after?"
"What I am thinking, what I am knowing, Mr. Cain, is that a month spent up on yonder mountain with our sheep should teach your soul much about the virtues of solitude and abstinence."
And he had laughed. "Lady, I don't need to go up on any mountain to be getting a lesson in abstinence."
It was then, in the midst of a thousand bawling, bleating woollies, that she had come the closest to telling him she loved him. Perhaps she had needed him to know, perhaps she had needed to tell him this: If it had been only her body that wanted him, then it would have been so much easier to let him go.
But his laughter had drawn looks from her brothers, and so she had turned away from him.
He sought her out, though, one last time before they left, and he said, "Come up with the supplies when the time comes. Don't send somebody else."
And she had said, "But you must understand that nothing will have changed. We will still be who we are."
"Promise me, Rachel, that you'll be the one to come."
"I promise."
The spring wagon lurched over a boulder, and the provision boxes banged and rattled. "Are you keeping a good hold on back there?" she called to Benjo, who was perched, legs swinging, on the open tailboard, with a fresh-baked shoofly pie under his tender loving care.
She got a muffled umph in response.
"You get your sticky fingers out of that pie," she said. She hadn't needed to turn around; she knew her boy.
They plunged out of the mellowed and muted shadows of the tree-shaded path and into the harsh sunlight of a clearing.
The dented tin stovepipe of the sheepwagon flashed a welcome from across the meadow. A few sheep were scattered over the sunlit grass but most were shaded down among the trees. MacDuff was there, ears pricked, tongue lolling, tail thumping. She didn't see the outsider.
They unharnessed and watered the horse, and tethered her loosely so she could graze. They unloaded the provisions, then took a walk among the herd. The sheep were much prettier now that their wool was coming in again. The new growth had a soft knotty feel to Rachel when she rubbed a ewe's head.
"What have you done with your shepherd?" she asked the ewe, who looked back at her with eyes that were sweet, but empty.
She heard a sputtering, choking sound and saw that Benjo's forehead was puckered with worry, his eyes too wide and bright. His throat locked and clenched around the words he couldn't get out.
"Huh... huh... huh..."
"No, he hasn't," she said. She rubbed Benjo's head like she'd just done to the ewe. "He wouldn't abandon our sheep to the mercy of the coyotes and the bears."
But she understood her son's fear, for she shared it One day they would look up and Johnny Cain would be gone, before it was his time to leave them.
"Perhaps he's off hunting a grouse or a rabbit for supper," she said.
Benjo headed deeper into the pines, his eyes searching. Rachel came along with him. They heard a panicked baa! first, followed by loud sucking noises, and a man's low, melodious cursing.
"You perfidious daughter of a promiscuous bitch. Any damned woolly as mutton-headed as you deserves to drown."
"Don't listen," she said to Benjo, her own ears burning. But she had to suck on her cheeks to keep from laughing at the sight that greeted her eyes.
A fat bawling ewe stood mired shank deep in a bog that appeared to be caused by an underground spring. Either too mud-logged or too stupid to climb out, she stood shivering and complaining to the outsider, who was pushing on her rump, trying to shove her out.
Rachel didn't think he knew they were there, but then he said, "You going to stand there and cling to your high ground, Mrs. Yoder? Or get down here and wallow in the mud with the rest of us sinners."
"I believe I will cling, Mr. Cain."
Benjo, with a boy's love for anything wet and dirty, happily slogged into the mire to help. Benjo took the right loin, Cain took the left, and together they heaved. The ewe exploded out of the bog with a loud sucking pop, like a cork out of a bottle. She turned around and around in a circle huffing and bleating and shaking her head, and then trotted off to join the rest of the flock as if nothing had happened.
The man and the boy slogged out after her, bringing a good part of the bog with them.
Cain swiped the grit out of his mouth with his shirt cuff. "This has got to be the only mudhole left in all the Miawa," he said, "and that lady had to go and find it."
Rachel came to him. Using the hem of her apron she wiped the mud splatters off his face, and all the while she was doing it, she was looking into his eyes and smiling.
They walked back to the clearing together, the three of them, like a family. Rachel could feel a humming in her chest, as if her heart were warming up to sing. She thought how there was a certain purity to moments like this, moments all bright and shimmery, like the morning after a hard rain, when the whole world looked washed clean.
She slanted a glance up at him, wondering if he too felt the purity of the moment. He was looking so fine. The days spent beneath the summer sun had tanned his pale skin to the golden color of apple cider. His eyes had a bright, silvered look to them. She thought she could probably walk along beside him like this, looking at him, forever.
Their gazes met.
"So, Mr. Cain," she said, "are you glad to see... us?" Me. She'd almost said me and he knew it.
"I'm glad to see someone who can make a decent cup of coffee. You could float a horseshoe in the sludge I make."
"And besides the mud bath and your wretched coffee," she said, "how have you survived your first days of summer herding?"
"Well," he answered, drawling the word molasses-slow, "I started talkin' to the woollies last Tuesday, and by Friday they were answerin' back, but I didn't really start to worry till this morning." His eyes squinted at her, and his mouth deepened at the corners. "When what they said started makin' sense."
Laughing, she put a little skip into her step. She would have slipped her arm through his and leaned into him, drawn herself closer to him while they walked—if he were her man. But he wasn't her man.
The flash of a red hide among the pines caught her eye. She thought it was a deer at first, but it was too big for a deer. Then she realized there were more of them, perhaps fi
fteen head, feeding on the few shriveled tufts of bunch-grass that grew up around the sparsely scattered trees.
"Huh—Hunter cattle!" Benjo shouted, pointing.
"A couple of days ago those cows decided to join our woolly frolic uninvited," Cain said from beside her. "I keep chousing them outta here, and they keep coming back."
"It's such a hot dry summer, this year. The whole world seems to be running out of grass." The poor cattle looked ragged and hungry, all bones and mangy hide. Rachel didn't mind sharing the hills with them, but she doubted Fergus Hunter wanted to do any sharing with her.
The thought was like a fleeting cloud crossing the sun of her day. As if pulled there by a magnetic force, her gaze went to the gunbelt that hung heavy and deadly around the outsider's hips.
I'll kill them for you, if you want.
This time I'm killing them for you.
All of her life, she had never been afraid, for God had been with her always. All of her life, the Lord had been her shield, the Plain faith her comfort. But then Ben had been taken from her in an act of cruel and senseless violence, and a herd of stampeded cattle had nearly taken her son, and men had come out of the night with fiery brands to burn her hay. Fear had come into her life, corroding her faith, casting shadows over her soul. And sometime during this long hot summer, the lost part of her had slowly begun to embrace a new faith, the belief that Johnny Cain could be her shield and her comfort—Johnny Cain and his gun.
They passed through the flock grazing the parched bunchgrass, and all three of them, out of habit, began looking over the ewes and their babies. At any moment there were a million and one catastrophes that could befall a sheep. They required constant tending.
"We lost two lambs to coyotes last night," Cain said to her, as he lifted the tail of a yearling wether to check for maggots. "It looked to be the work of a single bitch with pups she's teaching to hunt. She's dragging a burn leg."
Benjo, who had stooped over to rub noses with a black-faced lamb, suddenly straightened up. His eyes fastened onto the outsider, wide and frightened and pleading.
"Nuh... nuh... nuh!" He ground the heel of his brogan into the grass as his jaw muscles bunched and clenched, chewing up the words before they could get out of his mouth. His lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. "Nuuuugh!" he shouted in one last agonized gasp, then lurched around and ran off in the direction of the creek.
"I don't know what's the matter with him," Rachel said. "He never used to be afraid of them before, but lately any mention of coyotes sets him off."
Cain was staring after the boy, his eyes narrowed slightly in the way of a man studying a mildly perturbing question. "Maybe he's witnessed a kill recently."
"Oh, I do hope not." She shuddered at her own memory of bellies ripped open, ribs thrusting through mangled wool, entrails spilled on the blood-soaked grass, and bones picked clean. "Benjo has such a soft spot in his heart when it comes to any animal, and it's such a gruesome thing, what the coyotes can do to a lamb."
"It's a part of life," Cain said, and the callousness of his words matched the look that came over his face.
She looked up into that face, into those eyes that were so ruthless, so ruthless. She didn't want Benjo's eyes ever to look like his. Cain was a man hardened and tempered by life. By life in a world where sweet little lambs had their guts ripped out, where the sky forgot to rain and the grass dried up, where men came in the night with burning brands, and a woman's husband was hanged for no reason from the limb of a cottonwood tree.
Then even as she was watching him, she saw his face soften. And she saw the intent in his eyes before he raised his hand to touch her. He only brushed along her jaw, lightly, lightly, with the tips of his fingers, but it almost made her cry.
"Don't you and the boy be afraid of the coyotes," he said, in the gentlest voice she'd ever heard from any man.
The outsider went looking for Benjo so they could fish the creek for their supper.
Rachel was pleased to think of them doing this manly thing together. She hoped her son would open up to Cain about his fears. But he had such trouble getting his words out, and when the words were attached to strong feelings, it became nearly impossible. As for the outsider, who wouldn't crack open himself under a sledgehammer, he certainly wasn't going to probe and poke at Benjo's troubles. It wasn't his way, and it wasn't the way of people out here. For that matter, the Plain folk didn't do a lot of probing and poking either.
Rachel sighed. Probably all they would do was fish.
She decided that in the meantime she would do a bit of housekeeping in the sheepwagon. In her experience, a man living alone in a confined space tended to forget all about cleanliness being next to godliness.
The top half of the Dutch door was open to let in air.
Rachel climbed the narrow steps and pushed in the latch to the bottom half, wincing at the squeal of unoiled hinges.
It always amazed her what an efficient thing was a sheepwagon. A narrow bunk was wedged across the back end, and a small square cookstove tucked into the front end. Along one side was a hinged table that could be folded up when you weren't using it. Along the other were storage bins that doubled as a place to sit. It should have felt cramped, but resting high on its narrow spoked wheels and with its round canvas top, the wagon held a feeling of spaciousness.
It was cleaner inside than she had expected, although there was a kettle of mulligan stew sitting on an iron spike that had sure seen better days. She took the coffeepot off the stove and gave it a shake. She popped the lid and wrinkled her nose at the tarry sludge stirring in the bottom. But she didn't set about brewing up a fresh pot right away. Instead, she unpacked the last of the provision boxes that she and Benjo had carted up from the farm. At the bottom of the box, wrapped in butcher paper to protect it, was a gift she had made for Johnny Cain.
The yellow sateened muslin caught the light, shimmering, as she slid it from the brown paper.
She had done a wicked thing, buying the sateened muslin that terrible day in Miawa City. Then once she had it in her possession, she had done another wicked thing. Oh, not a terribly wicked thing, more a worldly thing. She had sewn up a set of ruffled curtains.
The sheepwagon had a single window on the side where the table was, framed by wood set into the thick canvas. It had oiled parchment in place of glass, but it was a fair size, big enough to let in the light, and the mountains and pines and acres of grass and the big Montana sky. Big enough for curtains made of yellow sateened muslin.
She would never have been able to make such a gift for a Plain man. But she didn't see what harm there would be in giving the outsider a little something just for pretty to brighten up the solitary, lonesome days of summer herding.
Kneeling on the table, she strung the curtains across the window with a piece of rope. She'd just folded the table back up when she heard the scrape of boots on the steps. She spun around, putting space between herself and the window, trying to look busy with the coffeepot. She was floating with sweet anticipation.
She wiped her hands on her apron, tucked a loose bit of hair beneath her prayer cap. "So," she said to him as he came through the door, "did you two catch any fish?"
"A whole mess of sockeye." His gaze was drifting around the wagon, alighting everywhere but on her. "I thought you and Benjo could take the bunk tonight," he said. He rocked a little on his heels and gave his hatbrim a tug. "I've been bedding down outside most nights, anyway," he went on. "It's cooler. And I want to keep a watch out for them coyotes."
"I've a surprise," she blurted, smiling, floating, lighter than air. Loving him, loving him so much. "Actually, I've two surprises. One was a shoofly pie, only that boy of mine, he went and ate most of it on the way up here. But these I made up special just for you." She swung around, showing him the curtains, floating, smiling, loving him "A little something just for pretty."
She was looking at the curtains, smiling still, and so she didn't notice the silence. She turned back to him
, smiling, and she was still smiling even as she began to see that all the color had left his face and his eyes had gone stark and hard.
He turned on his heel and left the wagon, left her, without a word.
She made a campfire out in the meadow and cooked the salmon he and Benjo had caught for supper, but he never came to eat it. Later that evening, lying snug up against her son in the narrow bunk, saying her prayers in silence, as was the Plain way, her gaze went to the window. The curtains were gone.
The wail of a cougar woke her.
She sat up, fumbling for the tin matchbox holder in its place beneath the bunk. Benjo stirred in his sleep, but dreamt on. She used a struck match to find her half boots and her shawl to pull around her nightrail, but she waited until she was through the door of the sheepwagon before she lit the wick in the coal oil lantern.
MacDuff stood at the bottom of the steps, legs braced and growling. The hair on his neck had risen in a thick ruff. Some of the sheep were bleating and milling in alarm. The cry of a cougar was a terrible thing to hear deep in the night. It sounded like a woman's scream.
She listened, ears straining, but all she heard now was the wind making the treetops shake. MacDuff gave a muffled whine and lay back down.
Her lantern threw a pale glow against the pines, casting long shadows over the grass. She walked among the sheep, murmuring, soothing them. She prayed the cougar had passed them by.
When Ben did the summer herding, he would bring his old Sharp's rifle along with him to take care of such things as coyotes and bears and cougars. But the Sharp's rifle was in the barn back at the farm. And Johnny Cain, her shield and comfort, appeared to have deserted her.
If the outsider was still gone by morning, she would have to send Benjo back down into the valley to fetch Noah, for their sheep couldn't be left without a shepherd. She would have to look into Noah's eyes and admit to the mistake she had made.
The woollies settled down again, went back to their dreams of green meadow grass. But Rachel didn't go back to the bunk in the herder's wagon and her own troubled dreams. She extinguished the lantern and let herself be swallowed up by the deep blue night.
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