The Outsider (37 page)

“If he stays,” she said, holding Noah’s eyes with her own, “then I promise that come mating season I will marry again.”

She waited for her father to speak, but he gave her only silence. She thought she should leave before she started to cry or said too much. She’d already said too much.

Yet she couldn’t bear to leave things this way between her and Samuel. She made sure to pass by him on the way to the door, and she put her hand on his arm, squeezing it a little. It wasn’t until she was back out on the porch that she understood the gift her father had given her with his silence.

The gift and the burden.

NOAH STARED AT THE
door as it shut behind her, and his eyes burned as though there were sand under his eyelids.

“That’s that, then,” Samuel said. “She gave her promise. You heard it.” He looked at Noah, waiting for him to speak. But Noah couldn’t seem to get his tongue to work, even get enough air into his lungs to breathe.

Samuel snatched his hat off the wall hook and stomped from the house, with Abram at his heels.

“I should take a look at what’s left of our sheep,” Sol said after a moment that passed long and heavy. He too lifted his hat from its hook, although he paused with it in his hands, turning it around and around by the brim. Then he pushed
out a sigh that sounded as if it hurt, settled the hat on his head, and left.

“Levi, go milk the cows,” Isaiah said.

Noah thought the boy was so frightened at what was happening to his family that he shook with it. “But I just did already, Da,” he said, his voice breaking.

“Go.”

The door whispered shut behind Levi’s slender back. Only two hats were left on the hooks now. Noah stared at those hats as if he found them fascinating. It seemed impossible to look anywhere else.

Isaiah fell back heavily into his chair, causing it to scrape on the bare wooden floor. He laid his hand on the Bible, his blunt fingers stroking the black leather lovingly.

Noah pushed out the words he knew needed saying, even though they didn’t want to come. “Why are you doing this? Why are you letting an outsider such as that one come among us?”

“If we come across a lamb lost in the wilderness, do we leave him to stay lost, to perish? Or do we lead him back to the flock of the Lord?
Ja,
there is much wisdom in the Scriptures.”

No, Noah thought. That is not the reason, not the only reason. You think that for Rachel’s sake Johnny Cain will be as our sword, cutting down our enemies, while we keep our hands clean of their blood. But though you are our bishop, you are wrong in this, wrong in the path you are choosing for us.

Noah knew he should speak to Isaiah Miller of the wise words in the Bible, words about how you shouldn’t do evil so that good will come of it. But this time his tongue stayed pressed to the roof of his mouth.

Isaiah stood up and laid the Bible in its place on the
crockery shelf above the table. “The outsider will do what he will do. And God will give him his punishment, not us.”

Noah’s gaze fell back down to his feet, and the words he should have spoken stayed locked in his heart. He turned away from his bishop and crossed the kitchen to get his hat. He felt that he was moving like an old, old man.

Out on the porch he filled his lungs with clean Montana air, but it didn’t ease the pain that gripped his chest. Deacon Noah Weaver, puffed up in his wicked pride, keeping quiet about his misgivings, hoarding his thoughts. Knowing in his heart the right thing and choosing to do wrong.

And all because Rachel,
his
Rachel, had looked him in the eye and promised to marry after the breeding time.

T
HE CROAKING OF THE
bullfrogs by the pond rumbled in the blue dusk. Rachel waded through the thick grass looking for wildflowers. An ache pulsed behind her eyes. She felt unstrung down to her soul.

She knew the outsider would find her, wanted him to find her. Yet when he came, she turned her back on him. She ripped through a patch of mountain bluebell, twisting and yanking at their stems so hard she pulled them up by the roots. Dirt rained on her skirt and shoes. She started to sneeze, but the sound that came out was closer to a sob.

“What did they do to you?” he said.

“Nothing.”
She straightened up, but still she wouldn’t look at him. “Did you think they would beat me? Shout at me?” The bluebells in her fist trembled. “Oh, Samuel and I, we shouted aplenty. We exchanged terrible words. We’ve hurt the family, so badly I wonder if . . .” She caught at her lower lip, tears blurring hot again in her eyes.

He thrust his hands in his coat pockets and turned away from her, toward the mountains that were stark flat silhouettes against the ivory light of the fading day. “They want me to leave,” he said.

“I promised Noah I would marry him after the breeding season.”

To that, he said nothing. But then he didn’t understand the cost of her promise, or perhaps he didn’t care.

She cut through the grass with long strides, heading for the hill behind the big house. When he didn’t come along with her she stopped, turning, and waited for him, and after a moment he caught up to her.

At the cemetery, she didn’t go through the gate as she had earlier that day. She knelt beside the grave that lay outside it. “My brother Rome is buried here,” she said. “Do you know why he’s apart from the others?” Do you care? she wanted to ask him.

He studied the neglected grave. “He was an outsider,” he finally said.

“No, not in the way that you’re an outsider.” She took in a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment against the pain and loss. “Rome went to one of those revival meetings one day, just for a lark, and this saddlebag preacher there laid his hands on him, and the next thing Rome is coming home and saying he’d been born again in Jesus, that he’d been saved.”

She brushed her hand across her face, breathed again.
“How this happened, we don’t know. He wouldn’t confess to being wrong, and so he was placed under the
Bann
by the church for having a
fremder Glaube
, a strange belief. He was shunned.”

Her throat clenched. “Shunned by us all, even his own family. Food was made for him, but he had no place at the table. He worked side by side with us, but no one could speak to him, or smile at him, or acknowledge him in any way. He had a bed in the bachelor house with Sol, but his own brother would have nothing to do with him, for if you break the
Bann
, then you are shunned by all in turn.”

“Why didn’t he just leave, then?”

She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “This was his home. How could he leave his home? Only to us it was as if he had died. He moved among us, but he was dead. And then one day he did die.”

She laid the ragged bluebells with their bruised petals and ripped roots on the weed-choked earth. She didn’t realize he had knelt beside her until he took her in his arms. She didn’t realize she was weeping until he said, “Go on, now. Get your cry out.”

She clung to his coat the way she had her father’s. But he did not set her away as her father had done. He held her, stroking her back. And after a while he rested his chin on the stiff pleats of her prayer cap and held her closer.

“I want you to stay,” she said.

“. . . AND THEN THE OLD LADY,
she yelled, ‘So
now
you do tell me!
Mein Gott,
his cock, you say? And no wonder the fish they were biting so good. I thought it was an angleworm and I used it for bait.’ ”

Mose pretended to laugh. He leaned against the rough
boards of the lambing shed, crossed one foot over the other, dangled a piece of timothy hay from his lower lip, and pretended he was one of them, one of the
Buwe.
But he wasn’t.

It was like this at the end of every worship Sunday. The
Buwe
would gather out by the wagons to chew hay and be rowdy, or at least what they thought of as rowdy, which was to swap stories having to do with shitting and farting and screwing, and the more dirty words the better.

None of them had ever really done anything more sinful than to nail his big brother’s brogans to the floor or smear apple butter around the privy hole. They were all nothing but talk. The truth, Mose thought, was that they couldn’t tell their own dicks from an angleworm even with the help of a lantern at high noon.

Someone cut a loud fart, and the
Buwe
let loose with another burst of laughter. Mose’s lips curled in a sneer around the hay stem.

Their laughter had caught the attention of the
Meed.
The girls still sat at the trestle tables where they’d all been having a sing earlier. Their white aprons and shawls glowed in the gray dusk, catching the last pale light of the dying day. They weren’t supposed to be looking over at the
Buwe,
but most of them did. Not Gracie, though; she’d probably never broken a rule in her life.

Even from where he was by the wagons, Mose could pick out Gracie Zook from among the other girls. She had a shoulders-back way of sitting. A way of holding her head just so. Because of that some people accused her of being proud, but she wasn’t proud. She was only being Gracie.

Mose plucked the hay out of his mouth and pushed himself off the shed wall. He headed for the trestle tables, his heavy brogans cutting a swath through the thick buffalo grass.

Gracie was careful not to look at him as he approached. It was tradition to try to keep your courtship a secret from the others, even though everyone knew who was bundling with whom.

One of the other girls touched a match to a lantern wick just then, and light spilled over the tables. Before, all his eyes had been able to make out of her was her white apron and shawl. Now he could see all of her, down to the little wisps of honey brown hair that curled out of her crisp black prayer cap, and the tiny mole, like a cinder, caught between her lip and her uptilted nose.

He’d known her all his life, but sometimes out of nowhere the sight of her could snatch away his breath and make his chest hurt.

He hung a thumb off the waistband of his broadfalls, threw his weight onto one hip, and tried on a cocky smile. “
Har
, Gracie.”

She blushed red as a beetroot, but she answered cool enough. “
Har
to you, too, Moses Weaver.”

“Come take a walk with me?” he said.

“Now? Here?”

“No, I was thinking more like in San Francisco next Fourth of July.”

A tiny smile crimped her mouth. He held out his hand to her, and after a moment she took it.

He helped her to climb over the bench and he kept her hand as they left the pool of lantern light. They walked to the west end of the Miller farm, where a line of cottonwoods stood black against the twilight sky like the posts of a stockade.

Her hand was rough in his, chapped from hard work on her folk’s sheep farm. Not at all like Miss Marilee’s hands. He’d been thinking a lot about the two girls lately, comparing
them. He’d been wondering how they would both look naked.

He thought Marilee’s breasts—he’d already seen a good part of them—would be heavy and full, with rosebud pink nipples. Gracie’s breasts would probably be small, just big enough to fill his hands, and her nipples would be round and brown, like acorns. The hair between Marilee’s legs would be golden and crinkly, while Gracie’s secret hair would be dark blond and sleek.