by The Outsider
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.
He shook his head hard, trying to dislodge the pictures he had put there. Judas, he was truly depraved, to deliberately let such thoughts steal into his head, especially on a Sunday.
He slid a glance at Grade, half afraid and half hoping the evening breeze had managed to rip off all her clothes. But no, she was still all pinned up from heel to head in apron, shawl, and prayer cap. He sighed. She was being unusually quiet, and her lips were puckered as if she'd somehow been given a glimpse of his nasty thoughts.
"That mouth you got on you looks weaned from a pickle," he said.
She pulled her hand from his and turned to face him, folding her arms across her chest. "Why are you behaving so crazy and wild?"
"I haven't done anything," he protested, his voice breaking on the last word so that he sounded as guilty as he felt. He spread his hands out from sides. "Look, I even dressed Plain today."
"You know I'm not talking about today."
It was getting dark, too dark now to see her face, and he was glad for it. He knew there was a hurting going on behind those deep brown eyes.
He felt all tangled up inside like a snarl of yarn, but he kept hoping that if he just found a loose end, he could unravel the mess and everything would be all right again. She was so strong, his Gracie, the strongest person he knew. Maybe if he could just get her to understand what was wrong with him, then she could show him how to make it right.
"Haven't you ever wanted to go to a minstrel show, Gracie? Or how about a circus, one with elephants and tigers?"
"A cougar came out of the hills last week and slaughtered three of our lambs. They have this terrible scream, cougars do. I heard it and went running outside and there he was, ripping out the belly of a newborn lamb." She shook her head at him. "And you think I should want to see a tiger?"
"Forget about that, then," he snapped, impatient with her, impatient with himself. "Do you know that there's a city, New York City, that has three million people living in it, some of them from countries we've never even heard of? And they've all sorts of new inventions there, like telephones and electric lights."
She stared at him. He knew she was trying to understand him, and she wasn't even coming close.
He himself couldn't grasp what it was inside of him, where it came from, this terrible urge that drove him to try wicked things like the taste of whiskey and the feel of flashy clothes against his skin. He wanted to see if he could touch and taste and smell the moon.
And there she stood, his Gracie, with her shoulders back and her steady eyes gauging him, and he knew he could lose her if he wasn't careful. If he didn't stop wanting things he shouldn't want
"These inventions you talk about those things are evil," she said. "What good is knowing about evil things that we shouldn't have?"
"Maybe it helps to know the truth about evil in order to understand what is truly good."
She gave him a little flex of her lips that didn't quite make up a smile. "But we've always known what is truly good, Mose. It's this." She swept her arm in a broad arc and then folded it up against her chest, as if she'd just gathered to her heart all that their eyes could see. "Our families and the church. The life we will make together, the children we'll have."
And what could he say to that—that those things weren't good? He knew they were; he wanted them as much as she did. Or once he had.
She'd gone quiet beside him. Above their heads, the Cottonwood leaves stirred. A loud whoop came from the pond in back of the lambing sheds. The younger boys were down there throwing rocks at the bullfrogs and trapping fireflies. Mose almost wished he could be down there with them. He could get Benjo Yoder to teach him how to bean a frog with that sling of his.
Benjo Yoder. When those cattle had come roaring down the road, they'd all run like skeeters out of a smokehouse, except for poor Benjo. And the outsider.
"That was something, what Johnny Cain did," he said aloud, expecting Gracie to jump right into the middle of his thoughts. "That's how I want to be, like him. To know enough things, to have done enough things that I can feel strong and brave inside. Brave enough to walk out into the world and face down the Devil himself."
She tilted her head, thinking, then she said, "The outsider doesn't face down the Devil, he sits down to sup with him. He isn't strong and brave, he's lost. You should be pitying him for his lostness."
"But what if we're the ones who are lost? If it wasn't for the outsider, Benjo Yoder could have died today, and all we'd have done about it was to pray. We're like those poor dumb lambs who got trampled, and we don't even know it. We're always patting ourselves on the back and telling ourselves that we're smarter than the world. But what if they're the smart ones? What if we're wrong in what we believe?"
He seized her by the arms, desperate to make her see, to understand. "Aw, Gracie, Gracie. Do you honestly believe you would be a sinner if you woke up one day and decided to wear four pleats in your cap instead of three? Is an extra pleat going to damn you to hell?"
She pulled away from him, rubbing her arms where he'd grabbed her. "You make it sound too simple. And stupid. But you know it's not."
He tried to laugh, but it felt like he had a tough scrap of jerky lodged in his throat. At the moment everything he'd ever been taught to believe sounded too simple and stupid, their church, their whole way of life that allowed for no doubts, no bending. No mercy.
That was the hardest to accept of all, that for those who strayed, for those who doubted, there could be no mercy. It was get down on your knees and swallow the whole Kitenkabutal or be damned to you, Moses Weaver.
And there she stood, his Gracie, looking at him with her forthright eyes, waiting for him to be something he wasn't.
He thrust his face close to hers, making her flinch. "I know what it is you really want; you want what every girl always does. You want me to settle down and join the church so we can get married. You got those quilts piling up in your hope chest and you're starting to wonder if you'll ever have a bed to put mem on."
He wrenched away from her with such force he almost stumbled. "Well, you can just go on wanting and quilting, Grace Zook," he shouted at her over his shoulder, "because I'm not ready to be tied to a woman's cap strings yet."
He got almost all the way back to the big house before he looked back. He could barely make her out, still standing there among the sentinel trees.
The slop bucket sat there beside the door waiting to be taken outside and emptied into the pig trough. A simple enough chore, but every time her glance strayed that way, Fannie Weaver screamed inside.
Outside the night waited, and the sky, the black and empty Montana sky. The night brought the sky closer. Even within the stout log walls of the house she could feel the sky looming over her, big and black and brutal, pressing down on her. Crushing her.
The slop bucket sat there, a silent and smelly reproach. If she left it until morning it would stink even worse, and Noah would scold. She could see her brother through the half-open door of his room. He sat on the edge of his bed, etched by the lantern light. His Bible was clasped lovingly in his han
ds, his lips moving silently as he memorized the day's verses.
"Noah?"
He looked up, looked through her, and then his gaze fell back to the open book in his lap.
Fannie wiped her sweating hands on her apron. If Mose had been here she would've told him to do it. But he was out somewhere, lost to the night, running wild.
She wiped her hands again. It was a small kitchen with little in it, for it was Plain, as it should be, with a bare pine floor, a square oak table with four ladder-back chairs, a black potbellied stove, and a trundle bed tucked into one corner where Mose slept. Yet by the time she crossed that bare pine floor to the door, her ragged breathing was louder than the hated Montana wind. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears.
Her hand fumbled with the latch. Slowly she cracked the door open, just as a bat flew out from beneath the eaves with a frantic flapping of black wings.
She shrieked and slammed the door so hard the whole house shook.
"Vas geht?" Noah called out. But she was already past him. The house shook again with the slamming of her own bedroom door.
She fell back against the wall, sucking in great gasps of air, breathing, breathing, breathing frantically, as if she dared not stop even for an instant.
"Fannie?"
Her breath caught.
He knocked. "Fannie? Wie gehts?"
Her whole body was so rigid it shook. A high-pitched whine hummed in her constricted throat. She heard his booted feet thump back across the floor and the click of his own door latching closed.
She sagged, sliding down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her legs drawn up tight against her chest. "Leave me alone," she said, too loud, too loud with only her to hear it. She smothered her mouth with her knee, but now she was shouting it, screaming it, inside herself, Leave me alone, leave me alone, don't leave me, don't leave me, don't leave me alone....
She threw her head back and squeezed her eyes shut against the burn of tears, but they came anyway. They poured like hot, silent rain over her face, into her nose and mouth and ears to drown her, poured back down her throat to flood her heart. Poured and poured, until she was empty and full, both at once, of tears.
And she was left staring wide-eyed up at the open rafters, feeling foolish. No, not foolish—betrayed. Surely, she thought, so many tears should have earned her more than just burning eyes and a sore throat. She fumbled for the handkerchief she always carried in her sleeve and blew her nose. She creaked slowly to her feet, leaning against the wall. She was only thirty-five, but she felt so old, and so alone.
Although a coal oil lamp already burned bright in the room, she lit the fresh candle that sat in a stick by her bedside. Later, when she was calmer, she might extinguish the lamp. But she would leave the candle to burn until dawn.
Noah was always telling her she'd burn the house down around their ears one night. So now she was careful to set the stick in a saucer of water. He told her she was being wasteful, so she bought the cheapest candles, made of buffalo tallow. Noah said they stank. "It's my nose to suffer," she'd answered back, standing up to him for the first time in her life. But it was worth it to her putting up with the smell to have the light.
She said her evening prayers in private silence, as was the Plain way, while she undressed. She put on her nightrail and night cap and climbed into bed. The sheets were cool and rough against the bare skin of her legs and smelled of the lye soap she'd washed them in. The bed was large, big enough for two. She spread her legs wide from corner to corner, feeling its emptiness.
There were no windows in the room, so she couldn't see the night and the sky. But she knew they were there.
She prayed some more until she heard Mose come in. At least, she thought, he wasn't bundling with that Gracie Zook tonight. Fannie hated Gracie, even though she knew she wasn't supposed to hate, that it was a sin. It was just that Gracie managed to remind her of Rachel, the way she was always acting lofty, always thinking she was somebody. And now Gracie was trying to take her Mose away from her. Just like Rachel had taken Ben.
"Ben."
She turned her head into the pillow to stifle the sound of his name in her empty bedroom. She wrapped her arms around the pillow and pulled it to her belly, pressed the pillow to the hollow ache that ate at her belly, and she curled her body around it.
CHAPTER 15
It got hot early that spring of '86, the spring the outsider was hired on to work Rachel Yoder's sheep farm.
A haze built up in the mountains and hung there like tobacco smoke in a saloon. But overhead the sky blazed so blue it hurt to look at it, and stayed empty but for a few feathers of cloud. The mud dried to a cracked crust that was scuffed into dust by hooves and boots and wagon wheels.
Folk said a drought was in the making and everyone, even those with only a nodding acquaintance with the Lord, prayed for rain. But no rain came. Not even enough dew collected overnight on the tall grass to wet the ewes' udders. And on the morning the outsider paid his first visit to town, the sun came up smoking and the wind died early, so that by midday the whole valley lay sweltering beneath a blanket of gummy, heavy air.
"Isn't this a fine summer's day we're having in spring?" Rachel said to the outsider as he was loading the wagon with crocks of her clotted cheese. "The grasshoppers started singing even before the sun came up."
Cain swiped at the drop of sweat that clung to the end of his nose and growled something about how now they wouldn't shut up. She laughed back at him, not caring that the heat made him grumpy. It was hot, true, but there was a canopy of deep and endless blue sky overhead, and the smell of sun-ripe grass and sage spiced the air. A patch of fireweed in front of the barn had exploded overnight into bright pink blossoms, so pretty that Rachel smiled every time it caught her eye.
The wagon made a song as it creaked and clattered and rumbled its way to town over the washboard ruts in the road. The harness chains jingled and jangled, and the old mare's plodding hooves beat a sleepy tattoo on the baked dirt. Rachel had often dreaded going into town before, the outsiders all stared so and could be so mean. But today a feeling of excitement gripped her, as if they were off on some grand adventure.
She knew a part of her happiness came from him, because he was here with her, sitting in her spring wagon with Benjo between them. He almost looked as if he belonged with her now. His flashy clothes, all but the black duster, had been mined in the cattle stampede, so Ben's broadfalls, sack coat, and felt hat had been added to the Plain shirt. Except it was too hot for the sack coat today, and he couldn't seem to put on the big floppy broad-brimmed hat without tilting it at a rakish angle. He still wore his own fancy stitched boots and black suspenders. And, always, his gun.
Like the road they traveled on, the Miawa Valley itself had the undulating shape of ripples on a washboard, with Miawa City tucked into the lowest dip of the rolling buttes and hills. The first thing a body saw when topping the rise before town was a meandering creek lined with diamond willows and aspens, whose silver leaves always quivered even in the stillest air. Surely the creek was the only pretty thing about the town, which otherwise was a sparse collection of ramshackle buildings roofed with rusty tin and made of logs weathered to the color of old buffalo bones.
Only one road led in and out, but a fingerboard had been planted at the top of the hill pointing the way for those who'd perhaps harbored a faint hope of avoiding the place. Cain pulled the wagon up, looked from the fingerboard to what awaited them down the road, and said, "If you asked me, to call itself a city is to give itself airs. Fact is, if you was to ask me further, I'd say it's got to stretch itself a bit even to be a burp in the road."
Rachel squinted against the sunstruck piles of tin cans and bottles that had been dumped along the creek. "It does have a church," she said, "although the circuit preacher only comes through twice a year. And it's got a school-house, with a flagpole. Except a man got drunk one afternoon and shot at it, at the flag I mean, so now it's got a couple extra stars on its field
of blue."
Benjo bounced up and down on the seat, sputtering. "Tuh—tuh—tell him how the Miawa g-got its name, Mem."
She glanced at Cain. He was watching her in that intense, heavy-lidded way of his that made her feel as if he measured the depth and length of her every breath.
"Once, a long time ago," she said, trying to copy his drawling way of telling a tale, "before the white man came to this valley, there was a Blackfoot warrior name of Mia-Wa, who was afflicted with the worst case of hard luck of any Indian ever born. One night he went to light a campfire and wound up setting the whole prairie ablaze. One day he rode off to kill a buffalo and instead caused a stampede that trampled all his tribe's tipis flat as flapjacks. Another time he took his bow and arrow and went hunting for supper. He saw a plumb willow grouse and he took aim, but he missed the bird and shot his chief in the foot instead—"
"Th-that's not the way Da used to tuh... tell it," Benjo interrupted. "He suh—said ol' Mia-Wa's arrow got his ch-chief smack in the ass."
Rachel gave her son a look. "Anyway, the other Indians eventually got so tired of the walking disaster that was poor Mia-Wa, they banished him from the valley forever. So don't ask me why they then decided to go and name the whole place after him."
"Might be," the outsider said, "that they were so glad to see the back of him, they decided to commemorate the event."
Rachel laughed. Their gazes met and lingered, and parted. He gathered up the reins and started them on their way again.
Alongside the creek some tame Blackfeet lived in tipis made of antelope hides. As they drove by, Rachel saw smoke puffing from one of the tipis, and her smile faded. She thought of that Indian, poor Mia-Wa, who'd failed at everything he'd tried to do. To be banished from your home and family, to be ripped up by the roots from the very earth of your life, was a fate too horrible to be borne.
They passed the cemetery next, where a pair of boots dangled from a freshly hewn cross. Then came a two-story gray clapboard house that was encircled by a double gallery, and had a red locomotive lantern hanging from a hook next to the front door. Three women in silk wrappers and hair papers sat perched on the upper balcony rail like a flock of bright-colored finches.
