The Outsider (11 page)

She had held only one naked man in her arms before this, and that was her husband. She’d always been intrigued by how different Ben’s body was from hers. The weight and size of him that could seem so overwhelming and yet so comforting. The pelt of hair on his chest and legs that gave him a warm fuzziness to snuggle up to. The way a man’s back felt beneath a woman’s hands, taut and smooth and powerful beneath her touch. It was wondrous to think how a man’s skin could feel so soft, and yet underneath there was all muscle and sinew, hardness and strength.

The memory of Ben, of holding Ben like this, tore at her, sharp and raw and nearly unbearable.

A man such as this one killed my husband, she thought, hanged him with a rope and laughed while he was doing it. My Ben, to have died in such a way, and all because of outsiders like this man. This man who calls himself Cain.

No, no, those were the Devil’s whisperings, coming as they often did at night when the will was weak and tired. This outsider had done no evil to her and he shouldn’t have to suffer for the evil that had been done unto her by others. She couldn’t blame him for what happened to Ben, or she would become like him. The rage and hate that lived in him would become a part of her.

Later, during the gray hour that harbingered the dawn, while she held his chill-racked body tight to her breast and her face lay close to his, his bruised and weighted eyelids lifted a little.

“Don’t leave me,” he rasped. And all the world’s sorrow, all the world’s loss, was in those blue eyes.

HE DIDN’T DIE THAT NIGHT,
or the night after that. During the second day Doc Henry came out to the farm. He listened to the outsider’s chest with an instrument he called a trumpet stethoscope. He frowned, shook his head, and said, “Whoever claimed only the good die young never lived in Montana.”

And then, before he left, the doctor gave her laudanum to “help ease your bum lamb’s passing, because once he gets where he’s going he’s sure to know suffering enough.”

Sometime during the third night Rachel fell asleep on her knees beside the bed where she had been praying. When she awoke just after dawn, she was lying half across the bed, and she was holding his hand. Groggy, disoriented, she knew only that something was different, and then she
realized what it was. The room was quiet. The outsider’s choking, stertorous gasps had subsided to the slow, even breathing of a deep sleep.

White winter sunwash flooded through the window, limning the hard planes and angles of his body like the silver edging on a cloud. It made him seem not a real man at all but a thing made of stone. A statue, perhaps, that a pagan might worship.

A pagan statue, indeed. The thought made her smile, for he was lying on a very ordinary old sheet that was gray and thin from many boilings and washings, and stained now with his own fever sweat. She supposed if she was looking at him and smiling then she must have lost some of her fear of him. Some, not all.

She pushed herself to her feet, aching, feeling battered. She looked down at his face, quiet now in his deep sleep. It seemed strange that a face could be so familiar to her eyes, and yet not be dear to her heart.

His fever had broken, and he slept. She thought she ought to see to her hungry sheep and get Benjo off to school, yet she felt reluctant to leave him. She took a jar of glycerin from the nightstand and rubbed it over his fever-cracked lips. Strangely, the intimacy of what she was doing struck her in a way that holding his naked body had not.

She felt an odd affinity for him. Not one of friendship and caring, for he was an outsider. Not even one of liking, for she didn’t know him. Yet she wondered . . . no, it was more than a wondering, it was almost a conviction: that he had been sent to her for a purpose.

But that was vanity, surely. She had saved his life twice and now she was thinking she had some claim on him, when he belonged only to God. Or, more likely, to the Devil. For he was a man who lived surrounded by the
weapons of death, and he carried the damning sin of hate in his heart. In truth, although she didn’t know them, she thought his sins must be too numerous and too terrible even to be named.

And yet, and yet, if God was the Creator of all things, then surely He wouldn’t create a soul that was completely unredeemable.

RACHEL ANCHORED HER CHIN
into the teetering pile of kindling in her arms and nudged the door open with her hip. She was almost safely to the woodbox with her precarious load when she heard a deep, death-rattling moan.

The wood fell from her arms to the kitchen floor with a clatter. She ran into the bedroom with a prayer on her lips. She couldn’t nurse him through another bout of fever, Judas, she just couldn’t.

He wasn’t dying again. If anything looked close to expiring it was MacDuff, who lay sprawled alongside the outsider on the bed, getting his belly scratched by that long, dangerous hand. And getting muddy paw prints and dog drool all over her best quilt.

Rachel headed right at him, her arms waving, her temper flying, and her tongue letting loose in
Deitsch. “Geh naus! Geh veck!”

MacDuff leaped into the air, scrambling off the bed. He came slinking to meet her with his tail tucked deep between his legs. She felt mean for having yelled at him, and bent to push her fingers through the collie’s thick pelt.

The outsider was regarding her with inquiring eyes, his head slightly tilted. The man seemed to have all his senses back for the first time since the fever had felled him again three nights ago. Shooing the dog out of the room, she raised
her gaze from the sun-speckled floorboards to the man’s face. “
Guten Morgen
. . . . Good morning.”

He stared at her for what seemed like forever. Then came one of those unexpected and dazzling smiles. “Mornin’.”

“I’m sorry MacDuff woke you like that.” At his slightly puzzled look she added, “MacDuff’s that pest of a dog.”

His mouth deepened at the corners. It wasn’t quite a smile this time, yet he seemed amused. “Who would think to stick a poor dog with a name like MacDuff?”

“That was what he was called when we got him off a Scottish sheep farmer in the next valley. Later, Doc Henry told us the name came from a play about a king who was foully slain. A terrible thing. But it was too late by then, because MacDuff already thought of himself as MacDuff.”

He laughed, a soft laugh that turned into a cough. And then he looked surprised, as if he didn’t really laugh all that often. It surprised her, as well, to hear him laugh, so that she blushed.

He made her uncomfortable, she decided, because she had no idea how to be with him. She had little acquaintance with outsiders, with their peculiar ways and outlandish thoughts. Yet there was that strange affinity she felt for this particular outsider, because of what they’d been through, she supposed. You couldn’t hold a man close to your heart while he was naked and dying and come away from the experience without feeling you knew him, even when you really knew him not at all.

She struggled to find words to fill the silence and break the uneasiness that lay between them. He was lying propped up slightly on the pillows, as if he’d tried to push himself upright earlier and found he hadn’t the strength.

“How are you feeling, Mr. . . . Cain?” she said. Judas, it was hard to call the man by such a name. But then perhaps,
like MacDuff the dog, it was all what you became used to.

His mouth had tightened in that strange almost-smile. “I feel weak and sore enough to figure out that I should be offering you my gratitude again. How long was I sick for this time?”

“Two days and three nights. And you should be offering your thanks to God, for truly it is by His miracle that you still live.”

“I guess a holy-howler like you ought to know. For a while there that first morning you looked like you were trying to decide between heaving that basin at my head and damning me to hell, or falling on your knees and praying for deliverance.”

He nearly surprised a smile out of her, the way he talked. Judas, she didn’t know what to make of one such as he. And she was having a hard time meeting his eyes, the way he stared at her. But then she knew he found her a curiosity, with her prayer cap and all.

“So, how are you now, truly?” she said. “I mean, can I be getting you anything?”

“Well,” he answered, drawing out the word long and slow. “I woke up with such a dry throat, it would’ve taken me three days just to work up a whistle. But then I found a pitcher of water miraculously sitting right handy next to the bed. Thank you . . . God.” He cast a droll glance heavenward. “And now,” he went on, and this time his smile had a rascal’s tilt, “I’m feeling so hungry I could eat a grizzly but for the claws. Do you think the good Lord might be cooking up another miracle in the kitchen?”

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.