The Outsider (16 page)

T
HE IRON HISSED AS
it glided over the dampened cambric cap, leaving behind a knife-sharp pleat and the smell of hot starch.

Rachel returned the iron to the hob on the cookstove, releasing the handle a little too soon so that it settled with a loud clatter. She carefully lifted the freshly pressed cap off the ironing board and carried it to the kitchen table, where three others exactly like it sat in a row, like roosting white hens.

She glanced through the open door. The morning breeze had turned into a chinook, a wind hot and dry as summer grass. The sun shone weak in a pale sky, but the old wax-yellow snow glistened as it melted beneath the breath of the wind.

The wind brought the mulchy smell of wet earth into the kitchen to mix with the smells of starch and steam and hot metal. From where she stood Rachel could just see one of the outsider’s glossy black boots. He’d been sitting out on the porch all day.

He kept his back to the wall, so no one could come up on him unawares. She knew that beneath his hat those restless eyes watched the road, as though waiting for someone fool enough to ride down it so he could shoot the poor fellow dead.

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 light-hearted.
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.