The Outsider (25 page)

Wharton let loose a ringing splatter of tobacco juice into the empty cast-iron hearth behind him. “You remember what that sumbitch was jawing about right before we hung him, boss?” His lips pulled back from his long teeth in a smile. “He said we were all gonna be done in by a rider on a pale horse—”

“ ‘I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’ ”

That quiet snowdrift voice seemed to freeze them all in mid-breath.

Quinten looked at his father’s wife. Her violet gaze was on the window that framed a fiery sunset. Streaks of copper and orange flamed across a blood red sky. The eerie light was suddenly reflected in the silver and china and crystal on the table, in the mirror of the mahogany sideboard, until it seemed the whole of heaven and earth had caught fire.

The faintest of smiles touched her pale lips. “His name was Death.”

BENJO YODER CAREFULLY LAID
the rifle across a pair of deer antler brackets mounted high on the barn wall. He wiped his sweating hands on the seat of his broadfalls and blew out a gusty breath. Maybe now that he was safe home again, and the gun was back where it belonged, maybe now he could quit being so scared.

He’d had to stand on a hay bale to reach the deer antlers, and he was about to climb down when the man’s voice came out of the dark shadows behind him.

“I was wondering myself if that old Sharps could still fire.”

Benjo whipped around and his feet shot out from under him. He landed on his rump on the hay bale and went scooting feetfirst to the floor. His heart was pounding so hard it was like a drumbeat in his ears. He looked up into Johnny Cain’s face. But the sun, setting out beyond the barn’s open doors in a blaze of red glory, dazzled his eyes so that all he saw was a black silhouette.

“I guess you been out doing some hunting this evening,” the outsider said.

Benjo shook his head “no,” then he nodded “yes,” then
he realized he didn’t have any dead game to show for a hunting trip, so he shook his head “no” again.

“If you’re going to tell a lie, Benjo, it’s always best to stick with it come hell or high water. Elaborate, but don’t explain. Apologize, but don’t make excuses. . . . Your ma was about to rouse the whole valley to go looking for you, she was that worried.”

The outsider’s hand gripped his shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, but Benjo still found himself being propelled toward the door.

“Huh—Hunter’s m-men. Th-they were g-gonna huh—huh—huh . . . hang me!” he said, the last words shooting out of him with such force he choked on them. “F-for being a cuh—cattle ruh—ruh—ruh . . .”
Rustler.

Then he realized that an almost-hanging wasn’t going to account for a whole missing day, so he elaborated. “I ran off and huh—hid.” And he
had
done that for a while, before he’d fetched the Sharps and a water bucket and gone back to Tobacco Reef and the coyote. “I’m suh—suh—sorry.” Apologize, but don’t make excuses.

What the outsider made of this story, Benjo couldn’t tell. They were out of the barn now and heading toward the house, and although Benjo tried to drag his feet, they weren’t slowing down any.

“I’m thuh—thuh—think . . . ing,” Benjo said, stuttering so hard his head jerked, “m-maybe you m-might want to shuh—shoot them Hunters stone dead.”

They stopped, and the outsider stared down at him from underneath the brim of his hat. The man made a sound that was partway between sighing and laughing. “I might want to. But I as good as promised your mother I wouldn’t.”

Benjo sighed, too, because the door to the house had just then banged open, and his mem had come flying out of
it, and he knew he’d made her scared enough that as soon as she figured out he was all right, she was going to turn madder than a nest full of hornets.

She grabbed him, hugging him so hard she nearly knocked off his hat. She ran her hands all over him, feeling for broken bones, he supposed, and maybe gunshot wounds. Then she grabbed him again and shook him so hard his hat did fall off.

“Joseph Benjamin Yoder, you had me worried half out of my wits! Where have you been?”

Benjo opened his mouth, but the words piled up so thick and fast in his throat they made a dam there, and then nothing was coming out now, not even air. He gasped and choked and his eyes filled with tears, and he hated himself that he couldn’t even
talk
like everyone else.

“He’s only been lying low,” the outsider said. “Your Mr. Hunter, the man whose soul you so enjoy praying for, his men threw a bad scare into him by threatening to hang him.”

Benjo didn’t like the way his mother’s face got. She brought the back of her hand up to her cheek as if she was feeling to see if she had a fever, and above her hand her eyes were wide and dark with old pain and a fresh fear.

She reached for him, gently this time, and she smoothed his hair back off his forehead and touched his cheek the way she’d touched her own. “What were you doing clear over on Hunter land?”

“Truh—tracking bear.”

“Oh, heavens.” She surprised him by laughing, although it was a shaky laugh. “Go on into the house now, Benjo,” she said softly. “Wash up for supper.”

Benjo picked his hat up out of the mud and climbed the porch, but he stopped within the shadows just inside the
kitchen door. His mem and Johnny Cain had their backs to him, both looking toward the buttes that divided the valley between cattle and sheep. The sun was mostly gone now, but it had left a ruby glow in the sky, and everything had a pink tinge: the barn and the sheep, his mem’s prayer cap, the outsider’s white shirt that had once belonged to his da.

It was hard to hear them from the house, but he thought his mother said, “What am I going to do?”

Johnny Cain must not have had an answer for her, because he said nothing.

She turned half around, and although the outsider still said nothing, she spoke to him as if he had. “No, never that way. Your way is wrong.”

“My way is certain. He won’t be able to hurt you from the grave.”

“But what becomes of my soul then? What becomes of
me
?”

They were facing each other now, as far apart as the distance between two fence posts. Benjo thought, from the way the air seemed to crackle around them, that they were angry.

The outsider’s voice had an edge to it. “They won’t quit, Rachel. I know these men.”

“Because you are one of them.”

“Because I am one of them. They are capable of destroying anything, killing anything. Believe me, I
know.
”

She shook her head once, hard. “I don’t believe you’ve ever killed a child. I’ll not believe it.”

“Learn to believe it. There’s only one way of stopping men like that.”

“No!” Her hand came up as if she would touch him, but they were too far apart. “No, no . . . God’s ways are often hard to understand, but He can be merciful. You are the one who must learn how to believe.”

“Death stops us.”

R
ACHEL HELD THE LANTERN
high as she slogged through the icy mud in the yard.

It was after midnight, but she still was dressed properly, in her apron and shawl. She wasn’t wearing either a prayer cap or a night cap, though, and her hair fell thick and heavy over her shoulders and down her back. The wind tugged and stirred the curled ends of her hair.

The moon, round and creamy, had risen above the cottonwoods, the first full moon of spring. It shed a soft light over the hay meadows, and over the sheepherder’s wagon where the outsider now spent his nights. The wagon’s big wheels cast spiky shadows onto the barn, and the battered tin stovepipe, poking out of the humped wooden roof, shone like polished silver.

She climbed the steps of the wagon’s small stoop and knocked.

A moment later the top half of the Dutch door swung open, and she found herself staring at his naked chest. She took a startled step backward. “They are coming, Mr. Cain,” she said.

She could almost feel his gaze moving over her hair, like the touch of the wind, before it shifted to the corral next to the lambing sheds, where the ewes milled and bleated in the cold spring night.

“Let me just finish getting dressed, then,” he said.

She waited for him at the bottom of the stoop, facing away from the door.

When he joined her she saw that getting dressed to him included strapping on his cartridge belt. “What do you intend to do with that gun of yours tonight, Mr. Cain?” she said. “Aim it at some poor ewe’s head and demand that she push harder?”

“No’m. I’m figuring to point it at you, lady, the first time you tell me to go lick something.”

Their feet crunched through the half-frozen mud, the oil sloshed in the lantern she carried. Beyond, in the dark infinity of the prairie, a coyote began singing to the moon. Rachel felt herself smile, and she lowered her head, as the wind tugged and pulled and stirred her hair.

Benjo, with MacDuff at his side, appeared at the door to the sheds in a wash of lantern light. He had one gloved hand wrapped tight around a pole nearly half again his length and with a hook at the end of it. “You can go fetch some water from the creek,” she said to him, “if you please. And by then I should have need of that hook.”

The boy leaned the sheep hook against the sheds and snatched up a couple of empty creamery cans. He ran off, the cans banging against his legs, his dog loping at his heels, and was soon swallowed up by the black shadows of the cottonwoods and willows.

Earlier, in preparation for this moment, Rachel had hung several lanterns on the poles of the corral. She went around lighting them now, and yellow puddles spilled onto the muddy straw and the shifting gray woolly backs.

“Mr. Cain, if you would start separating out the ones who are about to drop . . .”

He stood in the middle of the bleating, milling sheep
and turned in a slow circle. “I’d do that, Mrs. Yoder, truly I would. But one sheep pretty much looks like another to me even in the best of times.”

She ducked her head to hide another smile. “The ones with stiff teats, and those whose udder bags and female parts are pink and swollen—they’re the ones whose time is near. That flighty one is going to be first off the mark.” She pointed to a young ewe that had moved away from the flock and was digging almost frantically in the straw with her forefeet to make a nest. “It’s her first spring as a mother, and she could have trouble.”

Rachel could always spot the ones that were going to lamb in the next hour or so. She could tell right off which ones would need help and which wouldn’t. Ben had said it was because she was a female herself that she was so good at reading the ewes.

Rachel thought it was the music. Come lambing time, she imagined she could hear a sweet trilling, like birdsong, emanating from the ewes who were about to give birth. Or rather, she didn’t so much hear the songs as
feel
them as a stirring in her own blood. And if a ewe was headed for trouble, the birdsong became the jarring and discordant caw of the crow.

The outsider was now walking among the ewes, bending over from time to time to peer at them. “It appears,” he said, “like there’s gonna be a lot of ’em coming all at once.”

“Indeed, Mr. Cain. It’s going to be a busy night. Now, if you could just come over here, please, and give this new little mother your man’s strong and sturdy leg to push against. She finds what’s happening inside her belly very strange, I think, and so she’s scared by it.”

A thin white sac was showing now in the opening under the ewe’s tail. She flung her head back, her neck stretching,
her whole body straining, her eyes bulging. The opening widened, and more of the white membrane appeared. Rachel could see the emerging lamb’s front hooves and between them a tiny black nose. This mother might be a frightened amateur, but at least her baby knew the proper way to make an entrance into the world.

The ewe collapsed suddenly into the nest she’d tried to dig for herself. She was laboring hard, her upper lip peeling back with each push. She was silent, though, except for a grunting deep in her throat and the instinctive slurping of her tongue.