The Outsider (19 page)

B
ENJO SWIPED A SMEAR
of apple butter off his mouth with his shirt cuff and stretched his hand across the table in search of another hoecake. But his mother got to the tin first, snatching it back out of his reach.

“You clean your plate of those pickled beets first, Joseph
Benjamin Yoder,” she said, rapping his knuckles with the handle of her fork. “Then you ask, politely, for someone to pass you more hoecakes. And use your napkin, for mercy’s sake, not your sleeve.”

Benjo rubbed his stinging knuckles, and his bottom lip jutted out. “Yes’m,” he mumbled to his plate, which had a little bit of sowbelly beans left on it, and a whole lot of pickled beets.

The kitchen fell back into silence, but for the occasional clink of a tin fork on a tin plate, and the tick of the tin-cased clock.

Another two days had passed since the outsider first tested his constitution by getting out of bed and taking the sun on Rachel’s porch. But this was the first time the three of them had sat down at the table to take a meal together.

Meals were usually times of prayer and quiet contemplation in the Plain life, which seemed to suit the outsider just fine. He hadn’t uttered one word since he’d taken a chair on the side of the table that backed up to the wall. While Rachel and Benjo had said their silent prayers, she noticed that he’d kept his head respectfully lowered. Nor could she fault the man’s table manners. He ate with almost too much care, Rachel thought, as if he’d learned those manners late in life.

Thus far Benjo, too, had kept quiet, although with a considerably lesser show of manners. But he’d been watching the outsider with such wide eyes that Rachel could practically see behind them to the questions working their way from his head to his tongue.

While meals were indeed supposed to be a time of silence and prayerful contemplation, she and Ben had always indulged Benjo’s questions during supper, hoping that any amount of talking at all would help him to get over his stammering. But she wished now they’d been more diligent in
their discipline. Noah had warned her, time after time, that she was spoiling the boy.

Just then Benjo drew in a deep noisy breath, and Rachel held hers. “Huh—how muh—muh—muh . . .” he began and then got stuck, his throat spasming and clenching shut over the rest of it.

Rachel leaned over and gently touched his arm, trying to calm him. “The words might come out easier, our Benjo, if you didn’t try to push them past the food that’s already in your mouth.”

The boy chewed and swallowed hastily. He wasn’t going to quit on those words, Rachel could see, and she held her breath again, for a question from Benjo could know no bounds. Still, she nearly gasped aloud when it finally stuttered out.

“H-how many people have you shuh—shuh—shot s-stone dead, mister?”

The outsider slowly turned his head and looked at the boy as if he wondered where he’d sprung from. He laid his fork down gently on the plate and patted his lips with the napkin he had tucked into the neck of his shirt.

“Enough to make trouble for myself in this life,” he said.

“Is th-that what they luh—locked you up in jail for?” Benjo asked, and Rachel dropped the hoecake she was eating into her lap.

He had stolen only that one look at the outsider all the time the man had been lying in her bed, so she couldn’t imagine how her son could know Mr. Cain bore the marks of prison. Maybe the rumor of it had just gotten carried along through the valley on the Montana wind.

The outsider was staring at Benjo from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. He pulled at his lower lip. “Let’s see, that time I got thrown into the hoosegow. I’m tryin’ to remember, here.
I think maybe it was ’cause I didn’t eat all my pickled beets like my ma told me to.”

Benjo shot a wary look at his mother, then stabbed his fork into a beet. He cast a covert look at the outsider, and saw that the man was watching him in turn. He shoved the beet into his mouth, chewed, swallowed.

“I th-think it was ’cause you kuh—killed a man. Wh-what did he do to m-make you kuh—kill him?”

“I reckon he might’ve asked me one question too many.”

Benjo’s jaw sagged open, and his face flooded red. His gaze dropped to his plate. He stabbed at another beet.

Rachel tucked in her chin to hide a smile. In the fading winter sunlight she couldn’t be sure, but she thought the outsider’s eyes were crinkling at the corners. The man sure did like to tease, and he had a rather wicked way about it. Like Ben, she thought.

Neither shock nor fear could rein in that boy of hers, though. He squirmed in his chair and drew another breath, and Rachel knew the next question was working its way to the surface.

“You done your evening chores yet, Joseph Benjamin?” she said.

“No’m. B-but—”

“But get to it.”

He heaved a loud sigh, then scraped back his chair, grabbed his hat and coat, and banged through the door, shoulders rounded and chin hanging low.

No sooner was he gone than Rachel wanted him back. Maybe, with all his pesky questions, Benjo could have pried some answers out of the outsider. His broken life fascinated her. She had been watching him closely, collecting thoughts and observations like quilt pieces, but she hadn’t been able to make a pattern with them as yet.

These last two days he’d spent a good part of the time out of bed. He’d even taken a few short walks to the paddock to watch the sheep. But it had turned cold again, too cold for him to sit outside. So he’d done his sitting at her kitchen table, and they talked sometimes while she went about her work.

This much she thought she knew about him: His life had left a taint on him, wounds and scars that went beyond the ones on his flesh. Yet there was laughter in him, and unexpected wells of gentleness. He had no home, no family, and this more than anything struck her heart with pity for him. Family, friends, a home—those were what gave life meaning and joy.

Ach,
the way he was sitting there now, with his back to the wall and his eyes flitting every so often to the door, waiting, watchful, careful. His hand lay flat on the table, next to his plate, but from time to time his fingers drew restless circles in the oilcloth. She wondered how he could live with such intensity inside himself. It would, she thought, be like trying to stare into the sun.

Rachel’s chair made a loud grating noise in the quiet room as she pushed away from the table. She picked up her plate and Benjo’s. On the way to the slop stone, she paused opposite the outsider’s place. There were, she saw, a goodly number of pickled beets still left on his own plate.

Another thing she’d discovered about him was that he enjoyed being teased himself; he was like Ben in that as well. “I reckon, Mr. Cain,” she said, “that you’d better finish off those beets of yours. Otherwise I just might have to send for the sheriff.”

He looked down at his plate, then let his gaze slowly rise to meet with hers, his mouth curling into a roguish smile. “But, Mrs. Yoder, ma’am, what I really had my heart set on was some more of your deeelicious hoecakes.”

She set down the plates and snatched up the tin of hoecakes, dancing just out of his reach. “Oh, no you don’t. You can’t sweet-talk me into breaking the rules just for—”

He exploded out of his seat, startling her so that she skidded backward, her feet tripping over each other. She grabbed wildly for a chair, dropping the tin with a loud clatter. The only reason she didn’t scream was that he’d finally managed to scare the breath right out of her.

She pressed her fist to her pounding chest and stared at him wide-eyed. He had his gun in his hand, though for the life of her she couldn’t say how it had gotten there. “What—” she began, and then from the yard she heard a horse’s whinny.

“See who it is.” He said it calmly, but his eyes were feral.

She swallowed, trying to clear her throat of her still wildly thumping heart. “You can’t always be thinking that just any-old-body who comes to pay us a call—”

“See who it is, dammit.”

Rachel quaked as she went to the window, fearing less whoever had ridden into her yard than she did the outsider already in her house.

She stared through the glass. A burly man in a mud-splattered duster and a sweat-stained brown Stetson was swinging out of the saddle and making to tie an apron-faced roan to the paddock gate.

“You know him.”

She hadn’t heard the outsider come up behind her; she jumped at the sound of his voice so close to her ear. And his words were not a question but an accusation.

“It’s Sheriff Getts,” she admitted. She jerked around to face him, suddenly afraid of what he would think. “I didn’t send for him, truly I did not!”

The outsider gave no sign that he cared, or even heard
her. He braced the wrist of the hand that held his gun against the wall and leaned into the window for a better look. A grimace tightened his mouth, and he drew in a quick hitching breath. She thought he must have pulled the stitches on his wound, jumping up so quick like that. The wildness in his eyes had faded, though, replaced by the same flat stare he wore so much of the time.

She realized what a fool she’d been to let herself start liking him, even to think he was something more than what he’d appeared to be, a desperado on the run from the law. It was all because of his charming smiles and teasing manner. And because he’d reminded her in some strange way of Ben.

He shifted his weight, and his thumb cocked the hammer of his gun. The noise seemed obscenely loud in the quiet of her kitchen.

“Don’t kill him,” she said. “Promise me you won’t kill him here, before me and my son.”

This time the smile he gave her was pure mean. “Well now, lady,” he said, drawling the words, “if I have to shoot the son of a bitch, you can be sure I’ll go to the trouble to lure him out beyond your pasture fence first.”

He turned back to the window. The sheriff didn’t seem in any hurry to come in. He was leaning against the paddock gate, his elbows braced on the top rail, looking at the sheep.

“You said once, Mr. Cain, that you figure you owe me. And then you promised you wouldn’t harm us. If you meant that at all, then you’ll not allow your filthy violence to taint us. We haven’t a back door, but maybe if I go out into the yard and distract him you can make a run for the barn. You can have our old draft horse. She isn’t fast, but she’ll give you a head start and—”

He snapped his head around to impale her with his cold, cold eyes. “I don’t run,” he said. And then he touched her
face. He traced the curve of her jaw and brushed his fingertips once, lightly, over her mouth. “I won’t kill him here, and not at all if I can help it.”

She backed away from him. First one careful step and then another. “I’ll go see what he . . . what the sheriff wants, then,” she said. And she ran for the door.

She had a hard time slowing herself down as she crossed the yard. The outsider had said he didn’t run. She wanted to run and keep on running, over the prairie and beyond the jagged mountains, to the very ends of the earth. And even then, she knew, she wouldn’t be safe from what she had already allowed this man to do to her.

She drew a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. She kept feeling the brush of his fingers on her lips. She wanted to rub her mouth with her hand, to make the feeling go away.

The sinking sun seemed to have been snagged out of the sky by the hooked mountain peaks. It had turned the clouds around it a salmon pink and cast a pale yellow light over the fields that were just greening with the first shoots of spring. She searched the shadows by the outbuildings for her son, but she thought he’d probably taken off at the first sight of Sheriff Getts. Benjo held the man in part responsible for the hanging of his father and, in truth, Rachel felt the same. A man sworn to uphold the law, she thought, should have had more to offer than polite explanations for what had been done to Ben.

The sheriff touched the curled brim of his hat, all politeness even now, as she came up alongside him. “Evenin’, ma’am,” he said, then went back to looking at the sheep.

He was a man long past the prime of his life, with tired blue eyes and seamed, weather-glazed skin. His gray mustache hung down over the corners of his mouth, and his
belly hung over the waistband of his black britches. He was pulling a pair of fringed buckskin gauntlets again and again through gnarled, big-knuckled hands.

“Them woollies of yours are gonna be droppin’ pretty soon,” he said in his deep, rough voice.

Rachel’s eyes narrowed in perplexity as she studied the heavy-bellied ewes feeding on the scattered hay in the paddock. She saw no swollen udders, and their teats seemed to be hanging placidly. Not a single one showed the signs of imminent birth, and she wondered what had prompted the sheriff, and Noah before him, to say so. Maybe it was simply a need that men had to hurry time along.

“Did he tell you who he is?”

Rachel tried to calm her face, to make it look innocent, before she turned and met the lawman’s eyes. “He said his name is Cain. Isn’t it?”

He nodded slowly, sucking on one end of his tobacco-stained mustache. “Johnny Cain. It prob’ly ain’t the name he was born with, but it’s the one he’s grown into. Johnny Cain.” He said the name again, almost with relish. “He’s a shootist by occupation, a man-killer. His purpose—some might even say his joy—is in killin’.”