The Outsider

by Penelope Williamson

  He cast a glowering look at the outsider. "Now that he's up and about, I reckon he'll be moving on directly."

  "Mr. Cain is hardly cured enough to straddle a horse yet."

  "He can walk. That's how he came; that's how he can go."

  Stormy eyes flashed at him. "Noah!" Noah grunted.

  That same easy smile pulled at the outsider's mouth. "I fear, ma'am, that your good neighbor and particular friend don't have much use for a disreputable rogue like me."

  Rachel almost laughed again. Noah saw the laughter rise up in her face and flood her eyes, making them sparkle, and she only stopped it from coming by sucking on her lower lip.

  He looked from Rachel back to the outsider, looked down into that devil's face and those cold, cold eyes, and hatred roiled like a storm in his belly. He was astonished by the piercing purity of the hate that he felt. Astonished, and ashamed.

  He closed his eyes and groped for a thought, a prayer, that would lead him back to God and away from the sin of his hate. He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now.

  Noah backed up, shaking his head. "I've a buckboard wheel at home that needs hooping," he said, thinking he probably wasn't making much sense and not caring. He groped for the porch rail, his big feet stumbling on the muddy steps so that he almost went sliding onto his rump again.

  "Noah?" she called after him, but he pretended not to hear.

  Once, a long time ago, Ben had said to him: "If she'd chosen you over me, it would have hurt. Hurt bad. But I could've come to accept it, through knowing she was happy. Look at her, Noah, really look at her, and not with eyes that only want to see what might have been. Rachel is happy."

  Noah had looked at her that day. When could he not have looked at her? On that day she'd been out with the sheep, introducing the new lambs to Benjo. The boy was just learning to walk, and she was laughing at the way he kept grabbing onto the woolly backs of the lambs as he fought to keep his balance, and both lamb and boy would go tumbling down together into the soft spring grass.

  "She would have been happy with me," Noah had said.

  And Ben had sighed, his gaze settling gently, lovingly, on his wife. "Maybe so, but maybe not. She's like the water in that creek, is our Rachel, always flowing fast and clear. You can see through her plain enough, to the bedrock that is her spirit. But you can't hold all of her in your hands like you're always wanting to do. Like I try to do sometimes, even when I know better."

  Now, when he got within the shadow of the barn, Noah looked back. She stood next to the outsider. He must have been saying something to her, for she stood as if listening, with her head slightly cocked, one hand on her hip and the other trying to capture her wind-tossed cap strings. Suddenly she leaned over and gave the brim of the outsider's hat a sharp tug, and she laughed.

  Noah tried to breathe but his chest felt swollen shut, as though stuffed with cotton batting. He tried to remember if he'd seen her happy in the time since Ben had gone, if he'd ever once heard her laugh. Now this Englischer had come with his gun, with his easy smiles and his cold eyes.

  Now this outsider comes and he makes my Rachel laugh.

  Moses Weaver stood naked on a shelf of rock. He looked down, six feet down, into the still water. Wind rattled through the branches of the willow brakes and wild plum trees and stirred the dead marsh grass that limned Blackie's Pond. The wind was warm on his bare skin, but he knew the water would be freezing and he shivered at the thought. He took a deep breath and dove.

  The cold seemed to suck the air right out of his lungs, and the water closed over him, gripped him like a fist and pulled him down. He thrust his legs hard and shot back to the surface.

  Judas, it was cold. He forced himself to swim two turns around the pond and then pulled himself out.

  Shivering, he lay down on a bed of marsh grass, stretching flat out on his belly. He sighed as the warm wind and sun dried his goose-pimply skin. The water might be cold this time of year, he thought, but at least it was clear. Come summer, the pond would be cloudy and filled with skitter bugs and snaky reeds. If a body could stand the shock of it, winter was a good time to come swimming out here. Especially when the chinook blew.

  Mose stretched, digging his fingers into the tangled roots of the marsh grass, breathing in the loamy smell of damp earth. It was a luscious feeling just to he there and do nothing, although he knew he'd pay for it later, once his father got a look at how that busted paddock gate he was supposed to have been fixing this afternoon was still busted. But when that gate got mended there'd still be another chore waiting, and another after that. Old Deacon Noah was always saying the Lord loathed idleness, and so he did his own level best to keep the Lord happy by loading his son down with work. Mose figured the draft horses at their place knew more moments of loathsome idleness than he ever did.

  Mose sighed and stretched again. He closed his eyes and felt himself drift along on the hot wind, just drift along....

  The willow brakes crackled behind him. A pebble slid into the water with a soft plop. Mose looked up, and his heart did a flip-flop in his chest.

  A girl stood among the rocks and willows and wild plum trees. She was dressed all in frothy white, and wore a big plaited straw hat with a white satin ribbon tied in a bow beneath her chin. Over one shoulder she carried a white lace parasol that seemed to be twirling like a carriage wheel in the wind.

  Mose leaped to his feet, then remembered he was naked.

  He bent over, scrambling frantically for his clothes. He found his shirt and held it in a crumpled ball in front of his privates.

  The girl was laughing at him. He couldn't actually hear her because his heart was pounding so hard, but he could see her parted lips and the white flash of her teeth. He felt a searing heat of mortification rise all the way from his bare toes to the tips of his ears.

  "You want I should turn my back?" she said.

  "Huh?"

  "I'll turn my back so's you can put your trousers on. Then maybe you'll quit flushin' all the colors of berries in summer."

  She did as promised, swinging around with a rustle of silky skirts. He stared at her, mesmerized. Her dress wasn't all white, after all—it had tiny stripes going through it, the color of the cinnamon stick candy sold out of jars at Tulle's Mercantile. The silky material was ruffled and gathered in a pouf that rested on her bottom and cascaded over her hips like a lacy waterfall. And she had the tiniest waist he'd ever seen. He could have spanned it with his hands and still been able to link his fingers.

  "I've never known anyone to get dressed so quiet. Did you fall asleep, or somethin'?"

  Mose came to himself with a start. He didn't bother with his long-handles but went right for his trousers. He tried to put both feet through the same pant leg and had to hop about to get himself untangled. While he was pulling his shirt on, the yoke caught on his ear and he nearly poked out his eye getting it loose. His suspenders had gotten twisted, so he left them to dangle at his hips. He snatched up his coat and stabbed his arms into it.

  The parasol dipped, and a straw hat brim peeked around the lacy scallops. "You decent now?"

  Mose swallowed hard, making a funny clicking noise. "Uh, ja. Yes, miss. Sorry, miss."

  She turned with another rustle of silk and walked right up to him, then past him. She gathered the ruffled hem of her skirt, revealing the lacy trim of a scarlet petticoat, and sat on her heels at the edge of the pond. She collapsed her parasol to lay it among the rocks. She peeled lacy gloves off her hands and dipped her cupped palm into the water and raised it, dripping, to her mouth.

  She drank noisily, as if she enjoyed the taste of the water and didn't mind showing it. When she was done she wiped her lips with her fingers.

  She looked up at him, flashing a bright smile. "I wouldn't mind restin' here a spell with you," she said, "but I don't want to get stains on my dress. Do you think I could trouble you, sir, for the use of your coat?"

  He almost ripped his coat in h
is haste to get it off. He spread his precious new four-button cutaway, with its fancy satin-piped lapels, out on the wet grass for her to sit on. He felt awkward in his movements and yet rather gallant at the same time.

  She settled onto his coat with a sigh, a waft of honeysuckle toilet water, and another flash of scarlet lace. She tossed a thick ringlet of hair back over her shoulder. It was pale yellow, her hair, the color of wheat just starting to ripen.

  "This is a nice spot, this pond," she said. "I come here in the summer sometimes for picnics. But mostly I just come to be alone when I'm feelin' blue. Sometimes I go for walks out over the prairie, too. The other girls, they don't hardly stick their noses out the door, but I enjoy my prairie walks." She tilted her head back to look up at him and she smiled again. She had a crooked eye-tooth that caught at her upper lip when she smiled. "Do you ever go for prairie walks?"

  "Yes, miss." He supposed herding a bunch of woolly monsters from one pasture to another might constitute a prairie walk.

  Her bosom rose and fell with another sigh. "I like this country out here. It's so wide open, not at all like where I grew up in the Florida swamps, where it's hot and close and suffocatin'." She slanted another look up at him, and the sun seemed to catch at something in her eyes, making them sparkle. "It sure is warm as summer out here today, though, ain't it?"

  "Yes, miss."

  Mose felt foolish standing there bobbing his head like a windup toy and doing nothing. Yet he thought maybe good manners dictated that he should wait until she invited him to sit down alongside her. He rocked from one foot to the other, torn between standing and sitting. As he squatted down next to her, his knee joints popped like firecrackers.

  "Yup, it's warm as warm can be today," he said, and men flushed.

  She smiled at him again, a nice smile, not a mocking one. "So, what do they call you, boy?"

  "Uh, Mose. Mose Weaver."

  She wrinkled her nose. "Mose. What kinda name is that?"

  "Well, it's Moses."

  She held her hand out to him, her fingers pointing toward the ground in a delicate little arc. "I'm Marilee. That's my real name, too. I'm not like them other girls puttin' on airs with their made-up names."

  He wiped his sweating hand on his pant leg and took her fingers. "Pleased to be making your acquaintance, Miss Marilee."

  He thought she was the prettiest thing he'd ever seen. She had high wide cheekbones and a dainty, pointed chin that gave her face a sweet heart shape. Her lips were very red, as if she'd been eating berries. He wondered if she painted them—fast girls, he'd heard, always painted their lips. Her skin was like freshly-skimmed cream. He could see a lot of her skin.

  "D-do you work at the, uh, Gilded Cage?" he asked. Criminy, he was stammering worse than poor Benjo.

  "Lord, I should hope to never sink so low!" she exclaimed. She lifted her chin and gave a proud little toss of her head. "I'm an upstairs boarder at the Red House."

  She leaned into him and touched the front of his shirt. He jumped a little, and then he realized he'd missed a button in his haste to get dressed, and she was only doing him up again properly. For just a moment her fingers brushed the bare skin of his chest. He felt heat pulse deep in his belly, and a stirring in places he shouldn't even be thinking about.

  "I don't know as how I've ever seen you there," she said.

  Mose knew about the Red House. It sat on the very edge of Miawa City, between the creek and the cemetery. The house wasn't really red, of course. It might have been white once, but it had long ago weathered to a sooty gray. It was only called the Red House because of the red locomotive lantern that hung outside the front door most nights.

  Mose had engaged in a lot of speculation with the other Plain boys about what went on behind that door. Last summer old Ira Chupp, whose wife had passed over five years ago, had gotten down on his knees during the worship service and confessed to the congregation that he'd been consorting sinfully with Jezebels. Although it had never been mentioned by name, everyone knew that the sinful consorting had been done at the Red House.

  "I can't say for sure that I've ever been to your house," Mose said, trying to make it sound as if he visited so many houses of sinful consorting, and on such a regular basis, that he couldn't be expected to keep them all straight. "But now that I know you, now that we've been introduced, I mean, maybe I can come..."

  A little laugh bubbled up her throat. "Land, comin' is what a bawdy house is all about, ain't it? So long as you got the proper tool and the price of admission." She leaned back and gave him a careful look-over, pouching her lower lip out in concentration. Her wet and very red lower lip. "You're a Plain boy, aren't you? Your hair's been barbered and you got on real clothes, but you're one of them Plain boys sure enough."

  Mose could feel another flush burning on his cheeks, and a tightness in his chest. He felt shame for being Plain, and an awful guilt over feeling that shame.

  His gaze fell to the hands he had clasped between his spread knees. "I've not joined the Church yet," he mumbled to his hands. "Maybe I'll choose not to."

  The girl lifted her shoulders in a little shrug that caused the big sausage curls of her hair to slide over her shoulder. "At least you got a choice. Most of us don't ever get many choices."

  She had a small beaded bag that dangled from a gold chain around her wrist. She snapped open the clasp now and took out a pocketmatch safe and a cheroot. She struck a match on a nearby rock and put the flame to one end of the cheroot, protecting it with her cupped hand against the wind.

  Mose watched while she sucked on the other end of the cheroot until her cheeks went hollow and the tobacco glowed red. She tilted back her head and blew a thin stream of smoke into the air, then held the cheroot out to him. "You want a drag?"

  "Uh, well, I..." He wanted her to believe he was the sort of flashy gentleman who could smoke a cheroot with aplomb. But his back twitched in anticipation of the licks it would be feeling later on this evening. Once old Deacon Noah got a look at that still-busted gate and then sniffed out the stink of the Devil's weed on him, he'd give him a hiding for certain.

  She smiled as she slipped the cheroot between his fingers. The end of it, he saw, was wet from being in her mouth. He thought about that as he put it between his own lips, about it being wet like that and why.

  He sucked in hard like she had done, and swallowed fire. The smoke seared his lungs and scorched his throat going down, and came back up again with a racking cough that tore at his guts.

  She smacked him on the back. "Land, boy. You've turned green as a frog." Laughing, she pointed at the pond. "If you're gonna puke, aim it over thataway."

  This must be what it was like to try breathing in hell, Mose thought. His eyes streamed tears. The world around him blurred dizzily, and his stomach rolled and flopped like a stranded fish.

  He blinked hard, squinting at her through a haze of smoke. She'd taken the cheroot back from him and was sucking on it again. Her image wavered and cleared. Mose's gaze fastened onto her bosom. In she sucked, and her breasts rose and swelled, pushing against the ivory lace that trimmed her bodice. Out she blew, and her breasts settled slowly, gently, like a cloud floating to earth. A big, soft, fluffy cloud.

  Lord God, please forgive me, Mose prayed. He ought to be plucking out his eyes, rather than look at what he was looking at. He ought to be cutting off his head rather than think what he was thinking. He was totally depraved, he was sinful, he was damned.

  He was wishing she would put the devil's weed to her lips and suck on it again. Harder.

  She tossed the cheroot into the pond. Pulling on her gloves, she stood and shook out her skirts. "Lordy, it's get-tin' late," she said. "I'd better be makin' tracks for home." She bent over and retrieved her parasol, unfurling it with a snap of lace and fringe.

  Mose stumbled to his feet as she turned to him with another of those smiles that caught at her upper lip. "Thank you, Mr. Moses Weaver, for the use of your coat." She gave him a quick pat on the cheek.
"You're a sweet one."

  Her skirts rustled and whispered as she picked her way back through the rocks and willow brakes, back where she had come from. The pouf of silky material that rested on her backside bounced and twitched with every step.

  "Hey, wait!" Mose cried out. He snatched up his coat and followed after her.

  He caught up with her at the road, which was really nothing more than wagon ruts cut through the prairie grass. She'd driven a smart little black shay out to the pond. It had green wheels and fringed cushions, and was hitched up to a saucy-looking bay.

  She had paused to look down the unfolding ribbon of wheel tracks toward the west, where the flat pancake clouds always built up during a chinook. "The wind's dyin'," she said. "It'll be turning cool again before I make it back. Would you help me to put the bonnet up?"

  "Sure thing!" he exclaimed, then winced at the loudness of his own voice.

  As he unfolded and fastened down the bonnet, he tried out what he wanted to say to her in his head, but everything he came up with sounded stupid. His mouth had suddenly gone dry, and his stomach felt as if he'd just swallowed a sackful of grasshoppers.

  "Might I come pay a call on you, Miss Marilee?" he finally blurted.

  He'd turned as he spoke, not realizing she was right on top of him, and they bumped into each other. He grasped her shoulders to steady her. She was looking up at him, her face serious. Time seemed to slow into a breathless stillness, and Mose would have sworn he could hear his own heart beat. That he could feel the heat and silkiness of her skin beneath her cinnamon-striped dress.

  "You got nice eyes," she said. "Did anyone ever tell you that? They're such a dark, deep brown. Like coffee beans. But coffee can be bitter and your eyes aren't bitter at all. They're nice. Nice and sweet-looking."

  "You got pretty eyes, too." He tried to think of a way to describe them. Blue as the sky, blue as a bluebell, blue as...

  But she was already slipping out of his hands, moving away from him and climbing into the shay. Too late, he realized he should have stepped up and helped her.