Williamson, Penelope

by The Outsider

  Perhaps that had not been quite the thing to say. But the bleakness had left his face; he seemed amused with her again.

  "Do you never sin, Mrs. Yoder?"

  "Of course not." She felt herself flush a little. "Well, I don't go out of my way to do it."

  "I do."

  "You do?" she asked, astonished.

  "Uh huh. I go far, far out of my way to sin. So far I can practically smell the hellfires burning."

  He was teasing, surely. She had discovered that he enjoyed teasing. He was like Ben in that. He—

  Thin wisps of black smoke trailed like mourning ribbons through the air.

  "Judas Iscariot! My pie!" she shouted, pushing so hard to her feet that the back of the rocker smacked against the wall.

  As she ran from the room she heard him laughing.

  CHAPTER 5

  The outsider stood on Rachel Yoder's porch with one leg bent, the sole of his boot propped on the wall, and one thumb hooked in the leather cartridge belt that hung heavily from his hips. His hat cast his face in shadow, and his whole body looked relaxed and lazy. Yet there was a crackling anticipation to the air around him, like on a hot summer's afternoon just before a lightning storm.

  At the sight of him on her porch, Rachel's steps faltered. She was already out of breath from chasing the ewes from the feeding paddock back into the pasture. Now, suddenly seeing him standing there, dressed and wearing his gun, she felt her heartbeat give a hitch.

  She crossed the yard toward him, passing through the deep shadow cast by the barn. The morning frost crackled beneath her shoes. At the bottom of the steps she stopped and looked up at him. His hat brim hid his eyes, and his mouth was set hard. She mounted the first step, but couldn't manage the next.

  "Lady, them sheep 'pear to have got you running every which way out there," he said, and he smiled.

  She blew out a startled breath. She wasn't sure what she'd expected—that because he'd suddenly willed himself well enough to get out of bed, he'd be coming after her now with his six-shooter blazing? And after all the work he'd done to charm her, too. Why, if the man knew it, he'd probably be disappointed in himself.

  She climbed the rest of the way onto the porch. "Sometimes I think it would be easier to get that creek to go where I want it than those confounded woolly monsters. I should've brought along a tin dog."

  He thumbed his hat back. "A tin dog? What's wrong with the dog you got? Beyond his propensity for rabbit chasing, that is."

  She lifted a strip of baling wire, which was hung with a half dozen empty milk cans, from where it dangled over the porch rail. "A tin dog," she said, and she gave the noise-maker a vigorous shake. The sheep, which were bunched up against the pasture gate, whirled and took off as fast as they could for the safety of the cottonwoods.

  The outsider laughed, a sound rich and thick.

  For a moment Rachel stared at him in wonder. There he stood, a bullet wound in his side, his arm all bound up in a sling and a Colt revolver hanging deadly off his hips, a hard-jawed man, laughing at a bunch of witless sheep. He made Rachel feel a dizziness in the pit of her belly just to look at him, the kind of feeling she'd get as a little girl when she'd hang upside down by her knees from a tree limb.

  "You shouldn't be out of bed, Mr. Cain," she said.

  "Another day spent lyin' on my back countin' the knotholes in the rafters and I'll end up crazier than the bedbugs."

  "There are no bugs in my bed!"

  He scraped a hand over his beard-roughened jaw. The way his eyes crinkled at the corners, she suspected he was hiding a grin. "Show me who's been sayin' there is, and I'll call him a pernicious liar. No, ma'am, that bed in there is sure enough clean, and it's soft, too. But it's lonesome, real lonesome."

  She had to tangle her hands up in her apron to keep from pressing them to her hot cheeks. Lonesome. It was indecent, what he'd said, and wicked.

  But then she wondered if maybe the wickedness wasn't all in her own head, if maybe she'd added a meaning to his words that wasn't there. She rarely sensed anything heartfelt behind what he said or did, only a detached calculation. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her, wondered what he thought of her. And surely it was wicked to have such thoughts. Rachel Yoder thinking she was somebody.

  He pushed himself upright, his boot hitting the floor with a soft thud. He stepped further out onto the porch, until he was standing almost on top of her. He was taller than she'd thought him to be. Taller and with a look of elegance about him, with his fine gabardine trousers tucked into glossy black leather boots, his black Stetson hat and bottle green vest and... Ben's shirt. He was wearing Ben's shirt.

  He noticed what she was looking at. "I found everything but my shirt, so I helped myself to one of your husband's. If it hurts you to see me in it..."

  She came to herself with a start and shook her head hard. "No, no. As if such a thing would matter. It was stained and torn beyond salvation—your own shirt, I mean." Torn by a bullet, stained by his blood. His shirt had little tucks and pearled buttons set in the bosom, and a choker collar. The shirt he had on now was collarless and buttonless and tuck-less. "I'm afraid you'll have to dress partly Plain for the time being, Mr. Cain."

  "Well now, I'm not sure as how my reputation can stand that," he said, drawling the words. "I'm pretty much known far and wide as a man with a certain tawdry appeal."

  She felt a smile pull at her mouth and fought it back.

  He turned, a bit unsteady, so that he had to fling out his good arm for balance. "Would it inconvenience you if I brought a chair out here? I thought to take a little sun, but I don't reckon after all that I can do it on my feet."

  Earlier this morning, when she'd changed the dressing, his wound had still looked angry and sore. And after all, he'd been two weeks in bed, consumed with fever a good part of the time. She wasn't surprised he was feeling unsteady.

  "You shouldn't be up at all," she said. "What Doc Henry will think, I can't begin to imagine." Yet even as she was protesting, she was passing through the open door into her kitchen, fetching one of her spindle chairs for him. She thought if he was going to be inflicting his disturbing presence on the world, she'd rather have him doing it out here than in her house.

  As she came back out onto the porch, he took the chair from her hands and put it flush up against the wall. He lurched again when he went to sit in it, so that she had to help him, and for a moment they were side by side, her arm around his waist. But then he was in the chair and she had taken a step back from him.

  He leaned his shoulders against the unpeeled cottonwood logs of the house and lifted his face up to the sun. The wind caught at her skirt, dark and heavy with frost, slapping it against his shiny black boot. He looked so worldly sitting there, so different from what she was used to. It was too bad he'd ruined his shirt. Ben's shirt stood out on him the way a wild thistle would stick out in a tulip bed.

  She wondered if his soul had also been torn and stained beyond salvation.

  Rachel's skirts swayed as she whipped the lather brush around and around the shaving mug, working up a thick foam. From his position in the chair on her porch, the outsider was casting a concerned look up at the whirling white bristles. "Are you riled at me, Mrs. Yoder?"

  Rachel whipped the lather brush even harder. "Ought I to be, Mr. Cain?"

  "Heck, I don't know. A man never knows. And now that I've had a chance to think some more on your kind offer to give me a shave..." He stretched out his neck and rubbed his hand over the scruffy beard under his chin. "Well, the regrettable fact is, ma'am, that in my experience it ain't wise to allow a riled woman to get paired up with anything pointed or sharp." He gave her his teasing smile. "You know what they say about the snakebit man being scared of a rope."

  "Myself, I haven't had all that much experience with snakes, Mr. Cain." Rachel wrung out a huck towel she'd had soaking in a basin of steaming water. "But the more regrettable fact—regrettable to you, of course—is that riled or not I am already pa
ired..." She unrolled the towel with a snap of her wrists. "... up with a warranted Perfection razor that is sharp enough to split the hair on a frog."

  With that she slapped the hot cloth down over his face, smothering his startled yelp.

  Truth be told, she was more than a little nervous to be doing this, even though she'd had some practice. Although Plain men grew thick, flowing beards on their chins, they still had to shave their cheekbones, upper lips, and necks. One winter, Ben had been felled by a grippe that left him too weak to do the chore himself, so Rachel had done his shaving for him, to keep him pure in the sight of God.

  This morning, as the outsider was taking the sun on her porch, she'd noticed how he kept scratching at the sprouting hair on his face. The next thing she knew she'd been offering to scrape it off for him. She'd figured that even if she loaned him her husband's shaving things, with his right arm bound up the way it was, he'd never manage them on his own.

  His gaze was riveted to her every move as she spread open Ben's warranted Perfection razor and stropped the blade, moving it back and forth over the smooth leather. She tested its sharpness with the pad of her thumb, deliberately giving herself a little nick. She pulled a face and sucked on the wound. He swallowed hard.

  She removed the towel and began to brush the lather over his thick dark beard. She knew the badger bristles were as soft as a baby's hair. The soap smelled sweetly of spring laurel, and steam floated through the air, warm and moist. She waited until his eyes had drifted closed before she said it:

  "I reckon when I see the blood start to spurt a geyser, I'll know I've scraped off too much."

  His eyes flew open wide, and Rachel laughed. Once started she couldn't stop. She laughed so hard, she buckled at the waist, and it felt good, so good. She hadn't laughed like this since Ben died.

  When her laughter quieted she looked at him. He was trying to act insulted, but his mouth gave him away.

  "You done making a fool of me?" he said.

  She nodded solemnly.

  "Let me see you hold that razor then. I want to know if your hand shakes."

  She picked up the razor, deliberately jiggling her hand so that the blade flashed in the sun. It made her laugh again, and him as well. But the quiet that followed brought an odd uneasiness with it, as if they both were wary of the intimacy their shared laughter had stirred.

  The razor made a soft snicking sound as it cut through his beard. She enjoyed watching the lean ridges and smooth skin of his face become bared by the blade. She had forgotten how young she'd first thought him. There were hard edges to him, a toughness, that made him seem older, as if he'd been through more of life than his face could ever show. She had asked him once how old he was. He said he didn't know. As if you wouldn't know something like that about yourself.

  She leaned closer to him, to get at the whiskers along the far line of his jaw, and her belly pressed against his shoulder. She jerked back, her startled gaze sweeping over his face. But his eyes were focused not on her but on something beyond. Or perhaps something deep within.

  She had just shaved off the last of the beard beneath his chin and was wiping the razor clean when she felt him stir.

  She looked down and saw that he had her pincushion again, and again he was squeezing it over and over.

  Yesterday, when she'd sat down in her rocker for a minute to darn a sock of Benjo's, he'd noticed the pincushion. Made of red velvet, it was the size and shape of a small crabapple—a bit of frivolity she probably shouldn't have allowed in her Plain life. He'd asked her if she would loan him the use of it for a time. She couldn't imagine what he wanted with it. Not even when he took out all her pins and needles and began squeezing the cushion with his right hand, the hand of his broken arm, did she understand. He just kept squeezing, again and again, although she could see from the taut set of his mouth that it was paining him.

  "Why?" she'd asked.

  He hadn't answered her. When it came to answering questions about himself, he was like the sheep, who might spook and run off at the slightest movement toward them. But she'd seen his gaze go to the bullet that still sat on her nightstand next to her Bible. What he had called "the last bullet, almost." He'd looked at that bullet and all the while his hand had been squeezing and squeezing her crabapple pincushion.

  Squeezing and squeezing, like he was doing now. Her gaze was drawn by the way his fingers gripped the red velvet so tightly his knuckles went white, and the fine bones of bis wrist and hand pressed out against the skin and receded, pressed and receded. The mystery of him fascinated her, the complexity of him. There were so many things she wondered about him, the loneliness and the restlessness she saw in him, and the sin.

  She washed off his face with a clean hot towel. "There you are now, Mr. Cain," she said. "No, wait." She leaned over him, using a corner of the towel to wipe one last bit of foamy soap off his earlobe.

  He reached up and curled one of her prayer cap strings around his finger and gave it a little tug. "What do you wear this thing all the time for?"

  "We've always done so. It's part of the Attnung, the rules of living. The prayer cap is a symbol, a reminder that we must always submit ourselves to God, and to men. The Bible says, 'For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn.' So we wear our prayer caps during the day, and we've other caps for night as well."

  She had not, however, always worn her night cap, not when Ben was alive. He had so loved the feel of her hair, the way it wrapped around them when they came together in the dark. Sometimes he would leave the lamp lit, just so he could see it. Polished mahogany. She had thought it only a small breaking of the rules, not to wear her cap in bed with Ben.

  But the way the outsider was staring at her now made her wonder suddenly if he didn't know somehow about all those times she had not worn her night cap, and why.

  "You ever seen a prairie fire?" he said. "The way the flames light up the bellies of the clouds from underneath, turning them all scarlet and wine-red? I opened my eyes that first night I was here, lying in your bed, and I thought I was looking at a fire-lit cloud. I thought it was a dream, but it was you. Only your hair was down. Why should God or any man breathing want to hide something so pretty?"

  She felt a little flutter of pleasure in her chest from what he'd said; he'd called her hair pretty.

  But it was sinful to have such feelings, vain as well as foolish. Rachel Yoder thinking she was somebody again. She began to gather up Ben's shaving things. "Listen to you talk," she said. "I suspect the Devil used similar such blather on Eve to persuade her to taste of the forbidden fruit."

  His mouth curved into an unholy smile. "Yeah, I 'spect he did." Capturing her gaze, he transferred her pincushion over to his good hand and held it up, as though offering the apple to her.

  "But I also reckon she liked the taste of that apple so much, the ol' Devil didn't have to do any persuading at all to get her to take a second bite."

  Rachel sat on the porch steps, her arms wrapped around her bent legs, her head tilted back. The sun was a pulsing red ball behind her closed eyelids. The wind had the barest thread of warmth to it. It smelled of the thawing earth, of spring.

  She opened her eyes, and was sucked up, up, up into the sky. A sky that was a vast and empty blue.

  She stretched her legs out flat, leaned back on her elbows, and turned to look at the outsider. The man sat with the chair braced up against the wall of her house and his long legs sprawled over the warped boards of her porch. He sat so still she thought about getting up and going over to him to see if he was breathing.

  She ought to get up in any case. She had bread to bake, clothes to wash, and a million and one other things that needed to be done. She knew it was slothful just to be sitting there; she didn't have the excuse of a bullet hole in her side.

  Benjo would be done with school soon, too, and she wasn't sure she wanted the outsider on the porch when her son came home. Ever since he'd been scared off with a "bang," Benjo had stayed clear of the man. Rach
el felt easier inside herself because of it, although she wasn't quite sure why anymore. She wanted to believe the outsider's promise that he would bring them no harm.

  They hadn't spoken in a long while, she reflected. It shouldn't bother her. She was used to spirits that were silent and at peace, because the Plain believed that needless words were a displeasure to God. Only she didn't think the silence in the outsider's spirit came from peace, but rather a hard and brutal emptiness.

  In the pasture, a couple of ewes suddenly jumped up and started butting heads and doing a lot of blatting. The outsider's hat brim lifted slightly as he watched them.

  "We've hardly lost any of the woollies this winter," she said. It was strange, but she, who had never minded silences, kept feeling this need to talk to him. To fill up his emptiness, perhaps. "That big snow a few weeks back was the only real bad one we had. Not like other winters when the skins can pile up to the rafters in the barn. It's the blizzards, mostly, that kill sheep. They huddle up so close together, they smother to death."

  He didn't say anything, but she sensed that he was listening.

  "Except for the blizzards," she went on, "sheep really like winter. They're all snug in their wool coats, they've no flies to pester them, and some two-legged creature comes out twice a day no matter what the weather and feeds them forkfuls of hay." She drew her knees back up and cupped them with her hands. She rounded her shoulders, pressing her mouth to her knuckles, smiling to herself at her thought before she voiced it aloud. "Winter is a good time to be a sheep." As she spoke she turned her head to look at him.

  The creases around his mouth deepened for a moment. She was coming to believe that when his smile was real, when it came from his heart, it was nothing more than a quick tightening of his mouth and a crinkling of the sun-creases around the eyes. "They do seem to be having themselves a time," he said.