The Outsider (63 page)

They burst into the house, breathless, grasping each other to keep from falling.

He swung her up into his arms and carried her into the bedroom. The sun filtering through the cottonwoods outside the window cast a tea-green light over her plain white iron bed and star-patterned quilt.

He set her back onto her feet, letting her slide slowly down the length of him. She pulled out of his arms and stepped back, putting space between them. She took off her prayer cap. Carefully, she laid the cap in its place on the shelf beneath the window, and then she let down her hair.

He watched her—and then she watched him as he brought his hand to the gunbelt that rode low around his hips, and his fingers unbuckled the bullet-studded leather, and the gun gave up its embrace of him, falling, swinging through the air, hooking around the thin iron bedpost.

She came to him. She peeled off his suspenders, one at a time. She ran her hand over his chest, and his muscles clenched and seized under her touch. She took his hand
and brought it up to her breast, to the place where her shawl ends crossed in their modest, Plain way.

“Feel my heart,” she said. “Feel it beating.”

They fell onto the bed, onto a quilt of blue and white stars, pulling at each other’s clothes. He rubbed his face in her hair, sucked on her nipples, stroked her belly and between her thighs, and she smiled and took him in her hand and put him inside her.

FANNIE WEAVER WALKED QUICKLY
along the path that led through the woods separating their farm from the Yoder place. The yellow pines and tamaracks spread their thick-needled branches overhead, blocking out the sun. There had never been woods like these back in Ohio. She hated the woods. They were too much like the sky at night, dark and hulking. Smothering.

She hated it all, she hated the woods and everything else about this wild and barbarous country. Hated it, hated it, hated it. She didn’t believe it a sin against God, her hate. For only the Devil could have created country like Montana.

A cloud passed over the sun, darkening the path ahead of her. Fannie gripped her shawl closer to her breast and shuddered. She told herself there were hours left in the day. Hours. But she couldn’t stop the fear that was pinching her chest. She had a terrible dread of being caught out of her house after the night fell.

She lengthened her stride. Her whole body felt as if it were puffing with each heartbeat. Her breathing rushed like the wind in her ears. She tripped over an exposed root and staggered, nearly spilling the bucket of blackberries she carried swinging from one hand.

It had been Noah’s idea that she bring the berries to Rachel.
They grew in wild abandon on their side of the creek, way more than they could ever eat or preserve. It was only right, Noah had said, that they share God’s abundance with others.

Hunh. Easy for him to say. Easy for him to promise blackberries to his precious Rachel, and then leave it up to his sister Fannie to be the actual bearer of his charity.

She emerged from the woods in back of the Yoder barn and immediately felt better out in the hot, bright sunshine. She felt disheveled, though, after rushing along the path like that, and so she paused at the bottom of the porch steps to put all of herself back in order. Rachel—now, she was the one to let herself go flying about without a thought for the hair escaping from her prayer cap.

The door creaked a little beneath Fannie’s hand as she opened it. The Plain never knocked on each other’s doors during the daylight hours, for no one ever did anything that was better left unwitnessed. Friends and neighbors were welcome at any time. The Plain always left their latchstrings out.

At the moment, though, the kitchen was empty, and Fannie was pleased to find it so. If Rachel were here she would have invited her to stay for some coffee
klatsch,
and Fannie did always love a good gossip. So she would have been tempted to linger and tarry and the next thing she knew she’d have been running home through the shadowy woods after the sun had already begun to sink behind the black hulking mountains.

This way, with Rachel off doing farm chores somewhere, she would be able to put the bucket of blackberries on the table and leave.

She did pause long enough on the threshold of the kitchen to glance around and inspect Rachel’s housekeeping.
All was in order, except for a bathing tub that leaned against the wall, tipped onto its end to dry out. And a damp towel was hanging from one of the wall hooks. Fannie wondered what had prompted Rachel to bathe on a day that wasn’t Saturday.
Ach vell,
she thought, shrugging, Rachel had always been the one for breaking the rules.

She took a step toward the table, and the house moaned.

She thought it was the wind, until she heard it again. Deeper this time, more like a growl, like an animal in pain. Another moan, and a rough, harsh panting, coming from the bedroom.

With quiet steps she crossed the kitchen and walked right up to the door, for it was partway open.

Rachel lay sprawled naked on the bed, her legs flung wide, her hands gripping the white iron rails above her head. Her neck was stretched in a painful arc, her eyes flaring wide on the rafters, those terrible moans coming from her taut throat. And the outsider was kneeling between Rachel’s spread thighs. He was naked all over and slick with sweat, and his eyes glowed wild and savage. And as Fannie watched, he gripped Rachel’s bottom with his hands, lifting her, and he pushed his face into her woman’s hair, and he—

Fannie choked and whirled, staggering with such force she banged against the wall. The bucket fell from her hand, clattering, spilling berries that she crushed beneath her half boots as she ran from the house.

She got as far as the barn before she collapsed onto her knees in the dirt and vomited up the pone and blackberries that she’d eaten before leaving home. Long after her stomach was empty, she retched and heaved, until she feared she would be spewing out her guts next.

Finally the heaves subsided to a few wrenching shudders. She pressed her fist into her open mouth, squeezing her eyes shut, but it did no good, for the horror of it was seared on her memory forever. The horror of what the outsider, that monster, had been doing to their poor Rachel.

He had been . . . Dear God in heaven, he had been
feeding
on her.

R
ACHEL WAS MAKING A
slipped custard pie.

It was a foolish thing to be doing so late at night, and it was a tricky thing, too, which was why she was doing it. She needed something to occupy her head and hands, because when her hands were idle they started to shake, and she was too full of feelings to think. The mashed blackberries had left blue stains, like ink splashes, on her pine floor. Every time her eyes fell on those stains, her belly clenched with a sick dread.

She ran a spatula around the edge of the custard, separating it from the plate.
Da will be the one to come. No—it is the deacon’s place to confront a Plain one who has been caught out in a sin. Noah I can face. It will be hard, hard, but I would sooner face Noah than Da.
She shook the plate gently, loosening the custard.
I’ll have to face them all eventually, though, Da and my brothers, Mem, oh, poor Mem to be condemned
even more for the daughter she has raised.
The custard wasn’t loosening very well. She shook the plate harder. Judas, she was ruining it.
I’ll have to kneel before them all and confess my shame and say I’m sorry. But what if I’m not, not sorry, no, I love him. I would do it again, I will do it again. . . . Rachel, Rachel, what are you saying? You are damning your soul, you have damned your soul, and I don’t care, I don’t care. Yes, I do care. I don’t want to care, but I do.

She held the plate of custard above the flaky pie crust shell. Slowly, slowly she tilted the plate and the custard began to slip. Her Benjo and Johnny Cain were out in the barn, getting a late start with the evening milking, getting a real late start when here it was barely an hour left before midnight.

So when she heard the barn door bang, her hand only jerked the littlest bit. The custard began slipping too fast, though. She tried to stop its slide by leveling the plate, and that was when she heard a stuttering shout that was unmistakably Benjo in a panic. The custard slid slickly off the plate to land on the floor with a soggy plop.

Rachel hurried to the window. Shielding the lamp glare on the glass with her hand, she looked out into the night-blackened yard. Lantern light spilled out the open barn doors, though, and she could see twisting, whirling shadows.

Shadows of men fighting.

She flung herself out the door so fast she bumped her hipbone on the jamb, and she cried out in pain. The wind had come up hard, whipping her skirts and cap strings as she ran. The barn doors swung wildly now with each gust, banging. The night was full of terrible noises: a horse’s frightened neighing, men’s harsh grunts and panting breaths, Benjo’s inarticulate sputterings, the smack of fists against flesh.

They were all there, those Plain men who claimed to
love her—Noah Weaver and three of her brothers, Sol and Samuel and Abram—men with clenched fists and rage in their hearts, there to hurt the outsider she loved more than any other man in this world.

She had come hurtling through the door in time to see Sol, her big and gentle brother Sol, throw his full weight into a violent punch that snapped Johnny Cain’s head back and sent him slamming into a stall door.

Rachel gasped to see her lover’s face. That wasn’t the first blow he had taken. Blood oozed from his mouth and from a cut on his cheekbone. One eye was swollen nearly shut. His shirt hung in ripped tatters, and bits of straw and hay dust clung to his hair. Yet he wasn’t fighting back. Even with Samuel and Abram now taking turns to pummel him, he just stood there with his arms hanging loose at his sides while they beat him to a blood pudding.

“You stop it!” Rachel shouted in
Deitsch,
choking over her own breaths. “You stop it this instant!”

Sol didn’t stop. He smashed his fist into Cain’s face again, then followed with a savage blow to his belly. Cain grunted, doubled over, staggered, tripped on a sawhorse, and fell to his knees. Noah Weaver pulled back his brogan and kicked him in the kidneys.

The anger that flooded through Rachel turned the world red as hot, hot fire. She seized a hay rake off a wall hook and ran at them with it, shrieking, “You stop, stop it, stop it!”

But it was the outsider who stopped it, by shouting her name.

The quiet that followed was immediate and complete. The coal oil lamp guttered, casting grotesque shadows on the barn walls. The air was sickly sweet with the smell of spilled milk.

Benjo had his back pressed against a stall door. His face
looked leached of blood, his eyes were staring wild. His jaw and throat were clenching so, he looked to be strangling over his words. The sight of her son shuddering and choking with fear fired Rachel’s rage again. That he should have had to witness this.

“Get off my farm.” She waved the hay rake at them, jabbing the air with it. “Get away from me and mine.”

Cain had pushed himself up as far as his knees. He brushed his forearm across his nose, staining his sleeve with slick red blood. Rachel’s whole body leaned toward him, such was her yearning to go to him, to comfort him and ease his hurt. She couldn’t bear it that he should suffer any more hurt.

The lantern flared as Noah took a step, holding out a clumsy hand toward her, his voice shaking. “Rachel, please—”

“Don’t say my name! Don’t you dare to say my name!”

Samuel walked right up to her, ignoring the stabbing hay rake. His breathing was strident, his beard bristling. He pointed a stiff finger at Cain, who still knelt in the milk-wet straw. “There’s nothing left to your name, now that
he’s
had you for his whore.”

“You take back your filthy words, Samuel Miller—”

“No! I’ll not!” He thrust his face into hers, so close she felt the hot breath propelling his words. “You’ve let him drag you through mud so deep even hogs wouldn’t lie in your bedding.” His lips twisted hard with his revulsion. He scrubbed at his mouth with his coat sleeve, then spat in the dirt. “And I’ve had me a hog’s bellyful of him and you both.”