The Outsider (33 page)

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 his 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 his 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.

“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 stern 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 afterward 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.