The moon, shining white and hard, balanced on the peak of the highest mountain. She tilted her head back, and it seemed she was falling into a big black bowl of a sky milky with stars.
But then she sensed a movement out of the corner of her eyes, over by the rock cairn that stood at the far edge of the clearing.
It had been built by the summer herders over the years, that cone-shaped heap. One by one, each rock had been added by the resident shepherd, one for each week spent up here alone. A tradition that had no meaning, except that the result of it had become a monument to loneliness.
He was wearing his black duster, so she could barely tell where he left off and the darkness of the night began. They stared at each other, and the air around them ached and trembled like the pause between lightning and thunder.
He came toward her suddenly, his duster flaring darkly, throwing shadows over her. He held a ripped and wadded-up ball of the yellow muslin in his hands.
She took a step back, and he stopped. He drew in a deep breath and then another. "I won't hurt you."
"I know, Johnny," she said, sparing him with a lie. For he could hurt her in so many ways.
The yellow muslin cloth fell from his fists, fluttering to the ground. "Don't leave me, then," he said.
She took a step toward him, and then another. She reached out her hand to him, and he met it halfway with his own, entwining their fingers.
They stayed that way awhile, touching in silence. Then he gave a little tug, pulling her closer, and she came. He sat at the base of the rock cairn, bringing her down with him, settling her between his thighs. She leaned her back against his chest and wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs.
They stayed that way a long time, silent, her sitting deep within the circle made by his body.
He rubbed his palm over her bent knee. His breath stirred warm against her neck. "I always thought of sheep as being white, but they're gray," he said, bringing her into the middle of his thoughts. "They're the color of the gravy we had every Sunday for supper over soda biscuits. Gravy so watery it was the color of sheep."
"Your folks, they were poor, then?"
He fell silent again, but she didn't care. She would give him the silence and this night as a gift, for like the sheep and the seasons, he couldn't be rushed.
She heard a rustle, then a barking cry, and looked up to see the winged shadow of an owl flit across the moon.
His chest moved against her back as he eased out a held breath. "I'm no good at this, Rachel. It's like allowing a man to get the drop on you in a gunfight."
"Then let it go and just hold me instead," she said, for she had come to know that she could never understand the source of all the darkness that lived inside him. There could be no understanding of him, only acceptance.
His arms, which had been wrapped loosely around her, tightened a little. "There's this orphanage in East Texas, only they call it something more fanciful, the Blessed Are the Merciful Foundling Home for Boys. It has this big wrought iron fence and a gate in front of it. They told me that was where they found me, tied to the gate with a rope like an abandoned dog."
She picked up his hand, his scarred and beautiful and deadly hand, and wrapped her own hands around it as if she cradled a wounded bird. He tried to pull free, but she tightened her grip. She had to touch him, to comfort him, and he made it so hard.
"Every spring they'd have this day in church where they'd put us up for adoption, as they called it." His laugh caught on a tearing sound. "Aw, Rachel, we were so pathetic. The way we'd scrub our faces and slick back our hair and put on begging little smiles, each of us hoping he'd be the one to be picked out from the others. Believing that if we minded our manners and worked real hard, then we wouldn't be brought back to the Home come winter.
"But we were always brought back, because there was never meant to be any 'adoption.' The Home was only renting us out to the local farmers for their planting and the harvest. Still, even after I got wise to that game, every damn spring I'd stand up in the front of the church and hope some family would pick me out for their son."
Rachel bit her so so hard she tasted blood. She thought of the chair always there for her at her father's table. She'd never had to hope to be chosen because she had always belonged, cherished within the loving arms of her family and her Plain life.
"The summer I was ten I was rented out to a Mr. Silas Cowper, who was a hog farmer. He claimed to have owned slaves before the war, and I think he must not've put much stock in the Emancipation Proclamation, because he sure enough thought he owned my sorry ass, and I don't know if there was any slave ever worked as hard as he tried to work me.
"I ran away first chance I got, but he caught me easy enough. With dogs that he bred for bull fighting. He dragged me back to his place and he put shackles on my legs and arms and chained me to a post in the barn next to this big carcass hook."
He was talking in a raw, hoarse voice now, as if he were being strangled. She could feel a hard trembling going on deep inside him.
"Cowper took this hog and he hooked it through the neck and hoisted it up with pulling blocks, only the hog wasn't dead, and it hung up there for two days, squealing and bleeding and dying, with me chained underneath it."
She held herself still. She wanted to turn within the circle of his arms and press herself hard against him and tell him that she hadn't known, hadn't known. But she held herself still.
"Then when that hog was finally good and dead, Cowper gutted it and dropped it into a barrel of boiling hot water to make it easy, he said, to scrape the hair off its hide. He was talking to me, see, all the while he was doing it, telling me how he owned me and that if I ever ran off again he'd do to me exactly what he'd done to that hog. And I believed him."
He breathed, his chest pushing against her back, and she could feel his heart beating frantically like a trapped bird. "From then on he kept me chained to that post in the barn, when he wasn't working me, except for the nights when he hung me from that carcass hook and laid my back open with a shot-loaded hog whip. It took me nearly a whole year to weaken a link in that chain enough to bust it."
His throat locked up for a moment, the way Benjo's sometimes did. The darkness and the silence of the night lapped around them. Rachel's heart felt braised and battered, as if it had been wrenched from her body and beaten against the rocks at their backs.
"I figured," he said, his voice gone flat and cold now, "I figured that if I wasn't going to wind up like a butchered hog, then I had to make sure Cowper couldn't come after me. So before I ran away that second time, I took up a pitchfork and went into his house and stabbed him in the gut with it. I did it three times to make sure he was good and dead."
Rachel brought his hand up to her mouth, pushing her pursed lips hard on his knuckles against the pain burning in her throat. Just a boy. He'd been just a boy, hardly any older than Benjo, when those terrible things had been done to him. When he had done that terrible thing.
He turned her around to face him.
"Don't," he said. "Don't cry for me. It shames me to have you crying for me."
She looked down. More tears fell, splashing, wetting the wash-worn cloth of her nightrail. "I love you."
She heard his breath catch, and then she heard him let it out, slowly and carefully. She looked back up at his hard and beautiful mouth, up into his old-young eyes.
"Don't do that either," he said.
"It's too late."
He picked up the ruined yellow muslin from the ground and held it out to her as if offering it as a gift. "I killed a woman once," he said, and his voice was flat and hard and cold again.
"She was a dance hall girl in a town whose name I don't even remember. The night before I killed her I gave her a three-dollar token for a five-minute lay and I don't remember her name either, because I never knew it to begin with."
She watched as his hand that held the yellow muslin curled into a fist, and her heart was curling and fisting and aching for hi
m, aching for herself. "Don't tell me any more, Johnny. I don't want to know any more."
He went on anyway. "The next morning, when I was coming out of the livery, I heard a man hollering my name. I didn't know the fellow. He was just another quick gun looking to take on my rep. We started shooting, and splinters from the livery door were flying every which way, and there was all this dust and smoke. And through it I saw her come running out of that saloon where she worked, I saw her, I know I saw her, but I couldn't stop firing, because it's something you learn, you see, not to stop until your gun is empty.
"And she took one of my bullets high in the chest. She was wearing a dress made out of shiny yellow stuff like this, and there was blood all over her pretty yellow dress."
He opened his fist and let the muslin flutter back to the ground.
"I went over and looked at her, looked down at her, and then I got on my horse and rode away. I kept thinking I ought to be feeling something. Horror or pity or shame, something, anything. I tried to feel bad for her, for what I had done, but there was nothing inside of me but this emptiness. And I was tired. I felt real tired, that's all...."
He put a hand on her jaw, silencing her lips with his thumb, even though she hadn't yet spoken. "How I got from that pig farmer to shooting down a woman in the street like a stray dog was all my own doing, Rachel. I had some hard luck, but a better man than me would've faced up to life differently. Done it all differently."
Her lips moved against his fingers, the tip of her tongue touching them as she spoke. "If you come to the Lord with true repentance in your heart, then you will be forgiven all your sins. No matter how unforgivable they seem."
"I'm a man-killer, Rachel, I've killed and killed and killed, until now I'm like the coyotes and the wolves, a creature that kills because he must, without thought or feeling, but only because it's in his nature to kill." His mouth curved into a terrible smile. "I don't believe your God has that much forgiveness in Him."
She cupped his face with her hands, gripping him tightly, almost shaking him. "Then let me be your faith."
But in his eyes she saw the desolation of a man who believed there was no way off the dark path he had chosen to follow.
She couldn't bear it. She pulled his head to her breast, and she smoothed his hair as a mother would. But only for a moment, for then he was rubbing his open mouth against her throat, and she could feel the hunger surge through his body, the hunger a man felt for a woman.
He lifted his head, and she thought he would kiss her, but he said, "Will you do something for me? Will you take down your hair?"
She reached up and took off her night cap, letting it float to the ground, a flutter of white. One by one she took the pins from her hair and it fell over her shoulders in a thick, slinky mantle, fell until the curling tips of it brushed the ground where her cap lay.
He stared at her a long time. With trembling hands he cupped her hair and lifted it to his face as if he would drink of it.
"You'd better leave me now," he said, and he gently let her hair slip through his fingers.
In the morning she made them all a sheepherder's traditional breakfast of cheese mixed with canned milk and bread.
The sun came up hot again, casting a red patina over the thick bunchgrass and turning the sheep's woolly backs a rosy pink. The smell of dew-wet pine straw hung on the air, and the curlews sang their raucous song.
Her son seemed to have gotten over his fear of the coyotes and was again sputtering questions faster than she and the outsider could answer—or at least, faster than they cared to. The outsider sat with his hands wrapped around a cup of her coffee, his eyes looking edgy and wild. The air between them was so filled with feelings that there was hardly room for words.
He spoke to her only once, when the spring wagon was already hitched up for departure and Benjo had gone off for a farewell frolic with MacDuff.
"Send someone up to take over the care of your sheep and then let me go, Rachel. Let me go," he said.
"I love you," she said. "Soon I will show you how much I love you."
She did not go up on the mountain again. Young Mose Weaver took over the camp tending chores, and one day in July Mose went up the mountain to stay for his turn at the herding, and Rachel knew the outsider would be coming home to her. Hoped he was coming home to her.
She sent Benjo to her father's farm, to help Sol whitewash the new fence they had built. She dragged out her galvanized tin tub and heated gallons of bathwater on the cookstove. She washed her hair. By late afternoon, when she expected him, her whole body was humming with sweet anticipation.
That was when Ezekiel, their prime ram, went crazy.
They kept the rams year-round in a fenced meadow, separate from the other sheep. Normally, these great woollies went about the business of eating and sleeping, storing up stamina and seed for their big progeny-producing days in the fall. But on that summer afternoon, for no apparent reason, the ram Ezekiel took it into his head that his day had arrived in the here and now.
He wanted to mount a ewe.
He brought Rachel running out of the house with his ferocious bawling—great bellowing baas that sounded like a locomotive blowing its horn through a tunnel. He was pacing back and forth along the fence, butting his head against every post he came to.
Rachel was trying to distract him with a brown cracker, his favorite thing, when Johnny Cain appeared at her side. After waiting for him half a day, she hadn't heard him come.
Her hair was flying every which way out from under her prayer cap. She was panting so hard from all that running that she unconsciously splayed her hand over her chest. She hadn't quite decided what he would find her doing when he rode into the yard, but chasing a sex-crazed ram up and down a pasture had not been on her list of considerations.
"You came home," she said. "I wasn't sure you would."
"Is this my home, Rachel?"
"For as long as you want it to be."
He gave her a soft, slow smile. Her heart thundered against her hand.
Ezekiel bellowed and rammed his head so hard against a fence post that the wood cracked.
Rachel looked into the outsider's eyes and fell in love all over again.
Ezekiel bawled and plowed the ground with his thick, curved horns.
Cain slowly pulled his gaze from hers and looked at the ram. "Did he get into locoweed, or something?"
"Oh, he's just got lovemaking on his mind, the silly fool."
Cain dipped his head so his hatbrim would hide his eyes, but she saw his mouth twitch. He muttered something that sounded like, "Who doesn't?"
At the far end of the pasture, another sheep began bleating and humping his rump into the air.
"The affliction appears to be highly contagious," Cain said.
"Well, that one can't actually..." A flush stained Rachel's cheeks, although she also wanted to laugh. "That is, he's our teaser. He's been, well, he can't actually make a lamb. We put him in with the ewes when they start their female cycles. The teaser mounts the ewes and that helps them to get in the mood for the rams."
Cain gave the teaser a horrified look. "That is the meanest, cruelest thing I've ever heard of. You ought to be calling him the teasee. At least the ewes wind up getting satisfied eventually."
Rachel shook her head at Ezekiel, who was still pacing and bellowing and tossing his horns. "All this excitement isn't supposed to be happening for a couple of months yet."
Ezekiel's wildly rolling eyes settled on Cain. He let out another loud bawl and pushed his head through the fence, sniffing, and curling his upper lip.
"Oh, dear," Rachel said. "Now he thinks you're a ewe."
Cain looked from her to the ram, then back to her again. His eyes narrowed slightly. She could read his thoughts as if they were written on his forehead in printer's ink. He figured she was probably teasing, but on the other hand...
Ezekiel turned sideways and lifted his front leg, making his huge testicle sac sway. Deep gargles spewed up
from his thick throat. His big black tongue flopped out of his mouth and hung there.
Laughter came gurgling up Rachel's own throat at the wide-eyed look of alarm on Cain's face. She wagged her finger at him. "Johnny, Johnny, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You've got that poor ram positively love-struck."
He took a couple of judicious steps back. But she was laughing, and so he laughed himself, and she loved him so much in that moment she was nearly dizzy with it.
Their eyes caught and held, and held and held, and this time they both knew that neither one was letting go. She reached out her hand, and he took it. She wove their fingers together.
His eyes focused behind her, going wide. "Rachel, should I be running for my virtue?" he said, just as the ram Ezekiel smashed through the fence with sex on his mind.
She ran with her hand tucked safe in his, all but flying above the ground, letting the laughter come in a wild rush of joy. On and on they ran, laughing, long after the danger was over—after Ezekiel became sidetracked by a mow of fresh hay and settled down to munch happily, all breeding urges forgotten.
They burst into the house, breathless, grasping each other to keep from falling.
He swung her up into his arms and carried her into the bedroom. The sun filtering through the cottonwoods outside the window cast a tea-green light over her plain white iron bed and star-patterned quilt.
He set her back onto her feet, letting her slide slowly down the length of him. She pulled out of his arms and stepped back, putting space between them. She took off her prayer cap. Carefully, she laid the cap in its place on the shelf beneath the window, and then she let down her hair.
He watched her—and then she watched him as he brought his hand to the gunbelt that rode low around his hips, and his fingers unbuckled the bullet-studded leather, and the gun gave up its embrace of him, falling, swinging through the air, hooking around the thin iron bedpost.
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