"You don't know him."
"And what do you know of him?"
Rachel had nothing she could say to that. What little she did know of the outsider—the callus on his trigger finger, the shackle scars, the whip marks on his back, the bullet hole in his side—was all wickedness. It spoke of the hurt he had done unto others, as much as the hurt that had been done upon him.
Noah stared at her, his face settling into deep lines, and Rachel stared back, her head held high, erect. A silence drew out between them, underscored by the drumroll of the sleet hitting the tin roof above their heads.
She turned away from him and went to the stove. She forked a slab of the cold fried mush onto a plate and poured sorghum syrup over it, then brought it and a tin mug to the table. She stopped there, her hand that held the plate suspended in air. She felt a bittersweet ache in her chest at what she was thinking, what she was about to do. Yet she did it anyway: she deliberately set the plate down in Ben's place at the head of the table.
She felt Noah move and she looked up to catch his gaze on her, questioning. She quickly averted her face and went to the stove for the coffeepot.
When she came back to him, he was seated, his head bent in silent prayer. She thought of the many times she had stood like this beside the table, looking down at Ben's black head. Noah had shoulders broad and blocky as anvils, straining the seams of his hickory shirt and filling her kitchen. His hair wasn't dark, though, but rather the rusty brown color of baked apples.
They had all been the best of friends when they were children, she and Ben and Noah. It seemed strange only now, looking back on it, that a couple of rowdy boys would welcome a shy, skinny girl three years younger into their games. Maybe she had been as sinew is to bone and muscle, holding them together. For even as boys they'd been very different—Noah slow and steady, and maybe just a little stiff in his ways, Ben so quick to laugh and quick to anger, reckless and a little wild.
She poured coffee into Noah's cup from a battered blue speckled pot. He ate in silence, as was the Plain way, his gaze on the painted clay plates that lined the shelf along the far wall. They were like having a rainbow in the room, those plates. Rachel had painted them herself, copying the wildflowers that burst upon the valley in the spring. She had meant to do a dozen, but she'd stopped at five, when Noah showed her how she was taking too much sinful pride and worldly pleasure in what she was creating. Painted clay wasn't nearly as useful as tin, he had said. To have painted plates was not to follow the straight and narrow way.
Yet Ben had been so angry with him that day, for shaming her into quitting her painting. "And did even God not make some things just for pretty?" he'd shouted at Noah, so loud the plates had rattled.
Noah's fork made a soft clink in the quiet as he laid it on the plate that wasn't painted clay but made of tin. "The boy said you had that doctor out here to care for the outsider."
"He did have a bullet in him that needed getting out."
Noah picked up his coffee, then set it down again. "Having that doctor out here, though, and not a year hardly passed since that... that other happened—"
"Ben's dying."
"Ja, that. Next thing you know you'll have him caught up in your lives, in yours and the boy's, and that can't be good."
"Well, he's not likely to start paying us social calls." She sighed, impatient suddenly with Noah's stiff ways. "Lucas Henry's not a bad man. Not really. He pretends to laugh at sacred things, but only because it hurts him to think of them."
"'Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils.'"
Rachel swallowed another sigh. For Deacon Weaver to be quoting Scripture at her, he truly must have reached the end of his tether.
He pointed his finger at her now, as if she were a child that needed scolding. "You'll go too far one of these days, Rachel. And you'll suffer then, for your proud and willful ways."
She lowered her head. She understood the warning he was giving her. He'd soon have her on her knees confessing her sins before the entire congregation if she didn't mend her ways. And perhaps deep in her heart she wasn't sure she could bring herself to do such a thing, not even for the sake of her immortal soul.
"Ben was always doing that," Noah went on, "always going toe to toe with the rules. Seeing how far he could push things. For the sake of his own soul that was bad enough, but he shouldn't have encouraged you to—"
Her head snapped up. "Ben was a God-loving and a God-fearing man."
For a moment Noah said nothing, and his mouth kept that tight, stem look. Then he sighed, pulling at his beard. "Aw, I was only saying about that doctor, that he can never be a true friend to you."
"He isn't. He's only what he is. I couldn't heal a gunshot wound, and so he came for that reason and no other. He's not my friend."
Yet as soon as the words were out of her mouth she felt guilty for uttering them. Though not a lie, they were certainly a denial of the truth. "That doctor" had cut down Ben's hanging body and brought him home to her. He had filled the empty room with his comforting words. He had taken her in his arms, and she had pressed her face into the expensive watered silk of his flashy waistcoat and she had stained it with her tears. She and Doctor Lucas Henry... perhaps they weren't friends, but they were something to each other.
She heard Noah pull in a deep breath. His gaze was now focused hard on the lard pot and salt bowl that sat in the middle of the table. He leaned both elbows beside his empty plate.
"Rachel." He lifted the plate, cradling it in his two big hands. He turned his head and captured her gaze, held it as surely as if it too were caught fast in his hands. "You set this food that was meant for me at Ben's place. I got to believe that—"
"I did it without thought," she said quickly, before he could go on, for words once spoken couldn't be taken back. And her own words just spoken were an outright lie, may God forgive her. By inviting him to take her husband's place at her table, she'd all but told Noah Weaver she was willing to make a place for him in her heart and bed as well. Oh, yes, she had thought of it, and then she had acted on that thought, and now she wanted it all undone.
Noah set the plate down and reached for her hand. "I know what you're thinking, but it's no disloyalty to him, what you did. He's nearly a whole year gone now. And the boy needs the firmness of a father's hand to guide him."
And the church frowned on a woman who went her own way, without a husband to guide her, for the Bible said: "The head of the woman is the man." Those were all good reasons why she should become Noah Weaver's wife.
It had seemed when they were young, she and Noah and Ben, that the three of them would always be together and with all of life to share. It was because of the changeless way time passed in the Plain life, she supposed. Without seam or nub or end. But then there had come that day, the day Noah Weaver had first kissed her, and Rachel had realized they wouldn't always be able to share everything.
On that day Noah had been up in the mow of his papa's barn, forking hay into a wagon bed. She'd tried to sneak up on him and give him a shove from behind, only he'd caught her at the last instant. Caught at her apron strings too so that she'd gone flying with him down into the bed of hay. One moment she'd been lying in the hay, laughing, her arms and legs spread wide like a snow angel, straw tickling her nose and the sun dazzling her eyes. And then his head was blocking out the sky and his lips were pressing down hard on hers.
She could still remember the way that kiss had made her feel, all trembly inside, scared and excited, and filled with strange wantings to have him kiss her again. And a wanting for Ben to do it to her as well, so that she could see if it would feel the same.
So she'd gone looking for Ben later and she'd found him at their fishing hole, stealing a nap when he should have been at his chores. He lay flat on his belly on the grassy bank, his head cradled in his arms. It was a hot day and his sweat-damp shirt clung to his back. She could see the bulge of m
uscle in his shoulders, and the way the curve of his ribs met his spine, the way the small of his back flared up like the smooth inside of a bowl into the taut hard roundness of his bottom. He had the legs of his broadfalls rolled up to his knees, and she saw that his calves were hard and curved like the yoke of a plow and covered with fine dark hair. She couldn't remember ever noticing these things about him before.
She sat down next to him and looked at him for the longest time. Slowly she reached out and touched his black hair where it curled over his collar.
He opened his eyes and smiled at her.
"Noah kissed me on the mouth," she blurted.
His smile deepened, putting a crease in his cheek. He sat up in one quick, graceful movement that was the way of him. He studied her, his head cocked slightly. "I'll allow that," he finally said. "I suppose. As long as you go no further with it, and as long as you don't forget I'm the one you're going to marry."
She made a face at him. "Hunh. Don't you think I might have something to say to that, Benjamin Yoder?"
He leaned into her until it seemed their faces were but a breath apart. That if she did so much as breathe their lips would be touching.
She felt the heat of his own breath as he spoke, "Ja, Meedel, I reckon you will be having something to say to that. On the grand day I do my asking, you'll be saying, 'Yes.'"
Somehow his hands were on her arms and he was pulling her even closer. Her lips seemed to pucker of their own accord. She heard a strange moaning, like the sound the wind made blowing through the rafters of a barn, and then she realized it was coming from her.
He let her go so abruptly she fell back in a sprawl on her elbows. He'd let her go without kissing her at all. She watched him gather up his pole and wicker creel and saunter away while she lay there, with her mouth burning and feeling naked, thinking that maybe she hated him and knowing already that he was the one she loved best.
And Noah, dear Noah, had always known it too. She looked at Noah Weaver now, so many years and memories later, and his dark brown eyes stared back at her, searching her face, trying to see into her heart.
She had seen those eyes looking back at her so often over the years. Seen them bleak with hopeless yearning on the day she had stood up before God and taken another man as her husband. Seen them hollow with anguish the night his own wife had died in childbirth. Seen them dark with despair that summer most of his sheep had eaten the camas plant and died. Seen them countless times shining with the rapture of prayer.
And now because of this simple, foolish thing that she had done she saw those eyes glowing bright as Christmas candles with hope.
Oh, she could imagine herself making a life with him, imagine him sitting at her table like this of an evening while they talked over the day and planned the morrow. She could imagine kneeling with him in the straw, laughing together, as they watched the miracle of a lamb being bom into the world. She could imagine catching his eye during the preaching and sharing a smile—well, maybe not that, for as deacon it wouldn't do to have his attention go wandering during the worship service.
But when she tried to imagine going into the bedroom with him and undressing for him and feeling his weight settle on her and hearing his groans as he...
She had to take a deep breath to ease the pressure growing in her chest. She pulled her hand from his and reached for his empty plate, but he caught at her wrist.
"Rachel—"
"Noah, don't say anything more, please. I'm just not ready to listen to anything more."
He let her go, stretching to his feet. His face was flat and empty as he put on his hat and coat. But he paused at the door, his hand on the latch, and when he turned she could see he was all set to play the part of the deacon and lecture her again and she didn't want to hear it. She turned her back on him, taking the plate and cup to the slop stone.
"Ach, vell, our Rachel," he said. She said nothing. "I know," he went on, "how you'll say that if the Englischer showed up here as he did, gunshot and bleeding, then it could never have been God's will for you to leave him to die. And you're right in that.... There, you see," he added, a teasing in his voice now because her shoulders had jerked at his words, "I'm even allowing as how you can be right on occasion."
She heard him take a step toward her. She stiffened, keeping her back to him. "But it's not for nothing that we Plain People have kept ourselves separate from those things that can corrupt the soul. I know it was Ben's belief that we shouldn't always be blind to change, that we shouldn't always turn our back on the world and those who dwell in it, but he was wrong in that, and now he's got you thinking you can—"
She tossed the tin plate into the slop stone with a loud clatter and swung around on him so fast her cap strings flared. "You stop blaming me on Ben!"
She surprised him so, his face flushed red above his beard. He looked at her now as if he'd never seen her before, as if she wasn't the Rachel he had known all his life.
She reached up and felt that a swatch of hair had indeed slid loose from beneath her prayer cap. She thrust it impatiently back up under the stiffly starched white cambric. The gesture, one she had made a thousand times over the years, brought a reluctant smile to Noah's mouth.
"Aw, Rachel." He sighed a ragged laugh, shaking his head and studying the toe that poked through his stocking.
"You never change. Not even Ben could really change you, for good or for ill."
He half turned to the door, then swung back. "I saw when I drove up that you're getting low on wood. I'll send my boy on over in a day or two with his ax."
The smile she gave him came a little shakily. "That would be kind. That is, if Mose won't mind the extra work."
"That boy'll do what I tell him," Noah said, suddenly all stern and stiff again.
He waited, but there was nothing more she had to say to him, or at least she hadn't within her the words he wanted to hear. The silence fell heavy between them, thick and cold, and after a moment too long of it, he turned and left.
As soon as the door shut behind his broad shoulders, she went to the window. The sleet lay on the slushy yard like a cloak of ice; the wind blew wild. She watched him lead his horse and wagon from the barn and climb aboard, but he didn't drive off right away. He sat there, his shoulders hunched against the weather, one hand clutching at his hat.
She wanted to go to him and take the hurt away, to go to him and say: "I will marry you, my Noah. Then you can have what you've always wanted, and I can have... if I can't have Ben, I can at least have a husband who is dear to me, a friend."
She wanted to run out into the yard and say all those things to him. But though she watched until his wagon disappeared over the rise, still she stayed where she was. The house was silent, except for the sleet raking at the window and the moaning sound the walls made as they trembled beneath the onslaught of the wind.
Sleet still pecked at the window and pattered on the tin roof, and the wind whined in the stovepipe late that night as Rachel took off her brown shawl and apron, storing their pins in the wide apron belt. She removed the top pin from her bodice as well, and untied the stiff strings of her prayer cap. She twisted her head from side to side, stretching the ache of a long day out of her neck.
She took off her cap and put it in its place on the shelf beneath the window. When she looked up she caught her reflection in the night-blackened glass. The woman who stared back at her was not herself at all, but a stranger with a wild tangle of hair falling over her shoulders.
She sat in her spindle-backed rocker, its rush seat squeaking softly as it took her weight. The outsider lay in her bed, a silent collection of lumps and hollows beneath the quilt. The pattern of the quilt was an enormous white star with diamond rays spread out across a field of midnight blue. In the murky light of the coal oil lamp, the star looked jagged and broken as if it had fallen from the sky and shattered.
The oil in the lamp gurgled softly, a homey, comforting sound. In a moment she would join Benjo, although she'd probably
have to shoo off that bed-hog of a dog to make room for herself. Her head itched as it often did after a day of wearing the starchy cap. She thrust her fingers through her hair, rubbing her scalp, indulging herself with a frenzy of scratching. She would go. In a moment. The breath eased out of her in a soft sigh. Her head fell back....
And she let the music come.
The drumbeat of the rain on the tin roof joined in syncopation with the beat of her heart. The wind whistled like a pipe, blowing shrill. The log walls moaned, resonating her bones with their deep bass sound.
The music became wilder. Jagged clarions of trumpets joined with bright cymbals crashing through her blood. She shook with the force of the thundering chords, shocked at their violence. Streaking ribbons of light flashed behind her closed eyes, pulsing and throbbing in cadence with the pounding notes. Never had the music been so awesome, so wild. So forbidden.
No music was allowed in the Plain life, save for the chanting of the hymnsongs on worship Sunday. Yet it seemed that all her life the music had been with her, as elemental as breathing.
She had no notion of why it came, only from where. It came from nature's songs—from the violin scrape of a cricket's wing, the clap of a thundercloud, the pop of the cottonwoods freezing, a cat's raspy purr. She'd heard the outsiders playing on their worldly instruments, of course. Walking down the main street of Miawa City, she couldn't help but hear the tinny honky-tonk tunes coming out of the saloons. But those were nothing like the delicate, joyful melodies and the symphonic furies that could sometimes flood over her, through her, whenever she shut her eyes and opened her heart to the earthsong.
No one knew about her music; not even Ben had known. If the church ever came to hear of it, she was sure they'd make her give it up. She would have to confess it as a sin, bowed on her knees before the congregation, and promise never to allow it to happen again.
Yet the music was her way of praying. Words were difficult for her. They seemed such hollow things, all noise and air. She couldn't use mere words to speak of what was truly in her soul. But the music—it did more than speak. It rejoiced and pleaded, it praised, and wailed sometimes, and shrieked in anger too. It worshipped. When the music came, the Lord was somehow there as well. She could feel Him then in the same way she felt the music, and she knew He heard and understood the thoughts the music spoke. Many were the nights she had sat in this rocker, alone with the Lord and her thoughts and the wild chords and gentle melodies. And time passing at its slowest and sweetest.
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