Williamson, Penelope

by The Outsider

  Only he hadn't done it yet. Every time he thought about doing it, he got a cold queasiness in his belly. He couldn't forget that coyotes were sheep killers.

  Benjo loved every ewe and lamb on the farm. People mostly thought sheep were all alike, but that wasn't so. They had their own ways and peculiarities. One would al- ways run away whenever you got near, while another would come right up and eat hay out of your hand. One would be so lazy, you'd have to always be prodding her up or she'd get stomach bloat. Another would be so flighty, she would forget to feed her lamb. Even their baas were different from one another, and if you listened close enough you could learn to tell them apart.

  It was hard sometimes, though, loving the lambs, because so many of them were always dying. They slid into the creek and drowned; they rolled onto their backs, bloated up and suffocated; they fell over cliffs and into bog holes; they poisoned themselves by eating death camas and lupine.

  And sometimes the coyotes got them.

  He thought again of what had happened today, how the man who'd hanged his father had come to die and how Johnny Cain had come to be the instrument of his death. How he, Benjo Yoder, had in a way been a part of it all just by nodding his head to that offer of a sarsaparilla. And he had laughed about it afterward.

  You did one thing that led to another, and that led to another thing, until suddenly you found yourself at a place where there was no going back, and no escaping.

  He should have gotten his da's rifle out of the barn and shot the coyote cleanly the day he'd found her. Instead he'd fed her and brought her water, and then her pups had been born, and now those pups were getting big and getting hungry, and Benjo Yoder was at that place where he was going to have to either let them go free or kill them, after all.

  Up in the buttes a coyote bayed a mournful song to the moon. But down in the valleys, at the big house, a piano waltz floated sweet and lilting out the parlor's open windows.

  Quinten Hunter stood outside in the shadows of the gallery and watched his father's wife. Her back swayed gently as her hands stroked the black and ivory keys. In the candlelight her hair gleamed like polished obsidian.

  Every once in a great while Ailsa Hunter would play her piano, and when she did she would let him watch and listen. But only from the gallery. It was her way of reminding him, he supposed, that he would forever be on the outside looking in, would forever be a breed and his father's bastard.

  The music, the sight of her at the piano, always made him ache. Yet he always came to watch and listen. There were times in his boyhood when he had come out on the gallery during raging blizzards just to hear her music. Because she would play for him so rarely, and only if he was on the outside looking in.

  At least this night it was warm, and the waltz she played was one of his favorites. He was starting to tap his boot in time with the music when the front door to the house opened, and the floorboards creaked and sagged beneath heavy feet. A match hissed and flared in the night, lighting the sharp bones of his father's face.

  "That you out here in the dark, Quin?" the Baron said. "I thought you were hellcatting it in town with the rest of the boys."

  The waltz stopped abruptly on a jarring chord, and for a moment all Quinten heard was the pulse of his own blood in his ears. Then the darkness filled with nightsounds, the saw of crickets, the low of cattle, the rustle of wind. Quinten tightened his jaw against a rush of disappointment and turned away from the window, for there would be no more music tonight. It would be just like her to close the fall-board over her piano keys and never touch them again.

  "Woody's being buried in the morning," he said to his father. The Baron was only a bigger, blacker shadow among many, marked by the glowing tip of his cigar. "I didn't go the Red House with the others because I don't believe in going to funerals with a boozed-up head. It's disrespectful."

  The Baron blew out a snort along with a puff of cigar smoke. "Who made up that rule of etiquette? Besides, Woodrow Wharton was a bloody-minded fool to let things get personal between himself and a shootist of Johnny Cain's rep, then try to best the man in a quick-draw contest."

  "You're the one who hired the bloody-minded fool in the first place. You saying now he would've done better to bushwhack Cain and shoot him in the back?"

  Quinten could feel his father's aggravation come floating down the gallery, thick and acrid as the cigar smoke. He looked back through the window at his father's wife. She still sat before her piano, her hands quiet in her lap. Her head was slightly bent, as if in thought. The nape of her neck shone white in the lamplight.

  The Baron pushed a sigh up from deep inside his chest. "What I'm saying, what I'm thinking, is we ought to be able to chouse those mutton punchers on out of here without having to come up against Johnny Cain's gun. What's it to him if those Bible-bangers decide to sell out?"

  "He's living with them, for one thing," Quinten said. "Maybe he figures that gives him a stake in the issue."

  "So he should be getting a real education, then, on how perilous is the life of a sheep farmer. What with droughts and coyotes and the death camas. And these hot dry days like we've been having." The Baron drew deeply on his cigar, then waved it in an elaborate arc through the air, trailing tiny pinwheels of fire. "You can never tell, for instance, when a stray spark is going to come flying along on the wind and set those woolly farms to blazing like pitch torches."

  Quinten leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "Pa, don't..."

  "Don't what?"

  He turned his head, trying to see the Baron's face in the night. He wanted desperately to understand, to know, this man who was his father. He supposed, at the heart of it, he wanted to know if Fergus Hunter really loved and accepted his half-breed son.

  But that knowledge was as elusive as the strains of a waltz coming through an open window, and he was always on the outside looking in.

  "Why are you that hell-bent on pushing things so far with those Plain folk?" he said, though he had no hope of getting an answer. He had never been allowed a say in the running of the ranch. Except for sleeping in the big house instead of the bunkhouse and addressing the boss as "Pa" on occasion, he was no different from any other of the Circle H's hands.

  But then his father spoke, surprising him—and frightening him, for the words seemed to come ripping out of the man's big chest with a dark desperation.

  "I'm in deep as a tar baby to the stockyard banks, Quin. Deep and stuck fast. The beef market is still sucking on a dry hind tit, which means I got to run more cows this year to make even half of what I made last year—"

  "More cows. But we're already overstocked and overgrazed as it is."

  "You're making my point for me, boy. Those cows, they got to eat. Throw in this bloody killing drought to play billy-hell with the equation, and the simple fact is I need what those Plain folk got. I need their grass."

  "But they don't want to sell out to us. To you, I mean," he amended, flushing. "You can't just make them give it up—"

  His father laughed and turned, pointing at him with the red end of his cigar. "Aye, that I can, lad o' mine. Ride on up to the reservation and take a good look at what's left of your ma's people, at what's left of the pride of the great Blackfoot Nation, then tell me if the world's not divided into those that take and those that are made to give it up."

  Quinten swallowed hard and looked away, toward unseen buttes that rose out of rolling grassland that went on for mile after mile, and would never be enough.

  He sensed a movement on the other side of the window. When he looked around, he saw that Ailsa was standing next to the piano with the candelabra in her hand. Their gazes met, the woman and the boy's, and although the light shone full on her face, it gave him nothing. She turned, leaving the room and the piano that was shrouded now in darkness and silence.

  CHAPTER 17

  Rachel loaded a water butt onto a small dumpcart and dragged it out to where the men were making hay.

  Windrows of the freshly mowed timothy gra
ss ribbed the meadow. The hot wind blew thick with the smell of it, sweet and rich. Two days ago the hay had been mowed and raked and left to dry, today they were stacking it. Benjo drove the wagon, while Mose Weaver and the outsider did the forking. Noah did the layering and rolling, because that required the most skill. It surprised her, but the outsider seemed to like making hay. He called it "sweet and sweaty work."

  Rachel had always loved watching the hay rise into stacks; they reminded her of fresh baked bread loaves, light and fluffy. Every year Noah and Ben had helped with the haymaking on each other's farms. It was the Plain way for neighbor to help neighbor, and Rachel was pleased that Noah had chosen to carry on the tradition this year, even though he sure enough resented Johnny Cain's participation in the task. But then Noah thought that no outsider could ever work as hard as a Plain man, or could know as much about farming.

  "That outsider, he doesn't know beans about hay," he'd grumped to her after the first day, making her smile. "And he swings a pitchfork like his elbow joints are screwed on backward."

  The men finished off the windrow they were loading before they came for the water. The hay crackled as it was forked and stacked. Prickling dust swirled into the hot air, coating their faces and hair so white their heads looked dipped in cornstarch. Rachel knew from personal experience that on sweaty hot days, hay dust itched like the very dickens.

  Benjo and the outsider were the first ones to the water butt. She gave them each a dipperful and they slurped it down. She watched the water spill out the corners of Johnny Cain's mouth, watched as a single wet rivulet ran down the pulsing vein in his neck, over his collarbone, to be soaked up by his shirt. His shirt, already drenched with sweat, clung to his chest.

  When he lowered his head, he caught her staring, but she didn't look away. The first time she'd seen him, it had been in this very hay meadow. She was about to ask him if he remembered, when Noah and Mose joined them.

  Rachel waited until the men had drunk their fill before she scooped out a dipperful of water for herself. She drank as the men did, with her head tilted back and the water running out the sides of her mouth and down her neck. When she was done, she flicked out her tongue and tasted water and salty sweat on her upper Up. The air was steamy and thick, but through it she could feel the heat of Johnny Cain's gaze on her now, on her mouth. It was so still she could hear water dripping into the hay stubble at her feet.

  "Is it hot enough for you, Mr. Cain?"

  "Heck, no," he said, drawling out the words teasing and lazy. "Back where I come from we call this middlin' weather. We don't say it's hot enough till the water in the creek gets to boilin'."

  "Wuh—we don't say it's hot enough," Benjo chimed in, "till the r-rocks start to melt."

  Laughing, Rachel looked from the man to the boy and back to the man again. They looked like big-lipped clowns, their mouths and chins washed clean while the rest of their faces were still chalky white with hay dust.

  "If you two aren't a pair of a kind," she said.

  Cain's eyes crinkled at the corners as he cocked a thumb at the boy.

  "He's the young one. I'm the one who's wind-broke as an old trail horse."

  Noah Weaver tossed the dipper back into the water butt with a splash. His jaw had taken on a tense bulge. "Hard work is good for a man's soul," he said.

  Mose rolled his eyes up to the sun-bleached sky. "Da!" he exclaimed with such force that he blew off the sweat dripping from the end of his nose. "It's a haymaking we're at here, not a preaching."

  "A preaching or a haymaking," Cain said with an easy smile, "to my way of thinking they're both plumb hard on the back."

  Mose started to grin back at him, then tamped it down at the look on his father's face.

  "Noah has always built the best haystacks in the valley, haven't you, Noah?" Rachel said. "High and tall and straight."

  Noah stared at her. She saw a tightness around his eyes and a hollowness to his face, a sort of bewildered agony. "The righteous man doesn't swell up with pride in his work, he just works." He turned on his heel and started off, saying over his shoulder. "There's still plenty hay that needs stacking sometime before next winter." And the tone in his voice made the boys jump and trot after him.

  The outsider lingered behind, though, his gaze following the Plain man's stiff back.

  "I'm sorry," Rachel said. "He doesn't mean to always be scolding. He's just... being Deacon Noah."

  Cain rolled his shoulders in a half shrug. "Aw, he can't rile me so long as I don't let him. I've been ridden with sharper spurs."

  The hot wind plucked at her loose cap strings, making them dance. She tossed them out of the way, over her shoulders, then peeled a strand of loose hair off her sticky cheek. She sucked her chapped lower lip into her mouth to wet it; she was thirsty again. And she could feel his eyes on her again, hotter than the summer wind.

  "We're having rivels and puddins for dinner," she said. "It's a haymaking tradition. And there's peppermint tea cooling in the creek."

  "I ain't asking what rivels and puddins are, in case I don't want to know."

  She spun around, laughing at him, with him, just laughing. "Hunh. Once you're done building me a haystack to the moon, Mr. Cain, I expect you'll be hungry enough to eat anything."

  She took off for the house at a run, her skirts tossing gaily. But as she crossed the yard and climbed the porch steps, her feet slowed and her smile faded.

  Through the open door she could see Fannie rubbing the soft dough of the rivels between her palms and dropping them into a pot of boiling broth. In a fry pan next to her, the fatty pork puddins were crisping and popping in hot lard. A snitz pie that Rachel had baked that morning was cooling on the windowsill, filling the air with the smell of apples and cinnamon spice.

  Most times she would have enjoyed the company of another woman in her kitchen, but today Fannie was pushing her nose into the air and pulling her skirts aside every time Rachel came near her.

  The broth hissed as Fannie dropped in another batch of rivels, but Rachel lingered on the porch. The furnace-hot sun leached the sky of its blue and gave the mountains a gray sheen, making them appear forged of steel. The hot wind laid a skein of hay dust over the men at their work. From here she could make out nothing but the lean and graceful shape of the outsider, and the flash of dark hair sliding across his shoulders from beneath the slouching brim of his hat. Yet he could have been pressed up hard against her, belly to belly, breast to breast, heart to heart, so close did she feel to him in that moment.

  She felt a movement beside her and turned to look into Fannie Weaver's face. And Rachel knew that all she was thinking, all she was feeling, showed on her own.

  Fannie folded her arms over her chest, gripping herself hard. The harsh lines at the corners of her mouth pulled deeper. She'd always been a thin woman, but now she looked gaunt and shriveled, like a thing left too long in the sun.

  "I know you, Sister Rachel. I've always known you."

  Rachel turned away from her, saying nothing.

  "You're doing it to him again, to our Noah. You think I don't remember how you already shamed and hurt him once, letting him think things he shouldn't, want things he shouldn't? And you all the while with your eyes and your thoughts dwelling on another man."

  "That other man was Ben. My husband. And I could never help what your brother thought and wanted."

  "Ha, so you say. But I saw what you did with our Noah the night Gertie died, how you led him into sin."

  "I held him, is all," Rachel said, and her soul shivered faintly as if a ghost had touched her. She'd often wondered how her husband had come to hear of that private moment with Noah. Well, now she knew. Fannie Weaver and her spying eyes.

  I held him, is all.

  Sometimes the heart remembered things better than the head, holding both the hurt and the joy, as if it all had happened only yesterday.

  She had come home late that night to find Ben sitting at the table, his hands wrapped around a cold cup of co
ffee. He faced a day of plowing on the morrow and he should have been in bed and asleep hours before.

  His dark eyes had looked up at her, glittering with hurt. But his mouth, his mouth that could kiss her so tenderly, was pulled taut and hard with anger, and his thick black beard bristled with it. So did his words, when he finally spoke.

  "And where have you been all this long night, my Rachel?"

  "You know I've been with Noah. He's so sore with grief, I—"

  "Sore, is he? And did you soothe his soreness then, my Rachel? Soothe him with you sweet body, with your soft mouth." His big and callused farmer's hand slapped down hard on the table. "Did you lie with him?"

  "How could you even think it?" she'd shouted back at him. Shouted to hide a surge of guilt that had no logic and no basis, but came anyway to bum her cheeks with a hot flush. "And of him? How could you think it of him?"

  He shook his head slowly, heavily, as if the weight of his thoughts was almost more than he could bear. "I know what he's always wanted, ja. It's you I've never been sure of."

  And she had said, "I held him, is all."

  Ben had scraped back from the table then and gone into the bedroom, undressed, crawled between the sheets, and all without another word to her. In the dark silence she had joined him. But she couldn't bear the anger that had crawled into the bed with them, anger and the mistrust.

  She moved over to fill the emptiness in the middle of the bed, curving her body around his, laying her head on his chest. He held himself rigid, but she could hear his heart beating, and she thought what a sweet, comforting sound that was to a woman: the beat of her husband's heart.

  "Ben, I love you. Only you."

  She'd never said the words before, because it was not the Plain way. A man and wife, they would speak aloud of loving God, never of loving each other. But they did love each other, she and Ben.

  She felt his flesh grow warm and melt beneath her, as if she were the flame and he the candle. His arm came around her back and he held her tight. "Promise me that it will always be so," he'd said. And she had promised.