The Outsider (59 page)

Fergus Hunter’s mouth thinned into a tight smile. “Now that is peculiar, it is. Because I was given to understand that you folk’ve been having a run of bad luck lately. Stampedes and hay fires and such.”

Noah sat in his wagon, immovable and silent as a boulder.

The cattleman heaved an elaborate sigh. “And what with the way trouble always seems to run in bunches,” he said, shaking his head and taking a cigar out of his vest pocket. “Well, I have to admit to you, sir . . .” He bit off the end of the cigar and spat the tobacco into the dirt at his feet. “I do have to admit that I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about the business of sheep. Cattle being more in my line, you understand.”

He put the cigar in his mouth and struck a long stove match on the wheel rim of Noah’s wagon. “But a man picks up stray bits of facts here and there,” he went on, speaking around the cigar now clamped in his teeth, and holding the burning match up to the end of it. “Like I been told, for instance . . .” He sucked hard on the cigar until its tip glowed red, then blew out smoke from between pursed lips. “. . . that there’s nothing catches alight quicker than a bunch of oily fleeces.”

Fergus Hunter held the burning match up in the air. Caught by the wind, the flame wavered and then brightened, and Mose’s heart jolted with a new rush of fear. That single match tossed into a wagon bed full of woolbags, and they could all turn into one enormous pillar of fire.

The cattleman’s son jerked a hand up as if he would snatch the match away, but then he let it fall back to his side. And the match went on burning, fanned by the wind.

“We will not sell to you, outsider,” Noah said. “And you
can never defeat us. The Lord said to Abram: ‘I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.’ ”

For an eternity of a moment longer they all watched the flame eat away at the thin stick of wood. Then the cattleman shook his hand and the flame went out. He turned hard around on his heel and strode off, back toward the stockyards from where he had come.

“He wouldn’t have done it,” Fergus Hunter’s son said. “He was only . . . He wouldn’t have done it.”

Noah said nothing to the boy, nor did he look at him. He gathered the reins, sitting up taller, although to Mose’s eyes his father’s broad back and shoulders already seemed to fill the world.

“Hie!” Noah shouted to his mules, and his wagon lurched into motion.

“Hie!” Mose shouted, his voice cracking.

He felt such a fierce pride in his father that his heart sang with it.

THE YELLOW LIGHT OF
a full moon illuminated the farmhouse better than half a dozen lanterns. Mose had no trouble finding the window he wanted. He scooped up a handful of pebbles and flung them at the panes, rattling the glass.

“Gracie!” he croaked, trying to holler and whisper at the same time.
“Wo bist du?”

The sash slid up with a loud screech. “You go away, Mose Weaver. I told you I never wanted to see your face again.”

“It’s night out, and you can shut your eyes. You don’t need to look at my face, only let me—”

From deeper in the house came a man’s sleepy, grumbling voice.
“Vas geht?”

The window slammed shut with a screech and a bang.

Mose leaned back against the cottonwood logs of the house, feeling hard used.
What ever happened to mercy, Gracie Zook? What about love covering up all sins, and not being angry forever, and forgiving men their trespasses, huh?

He bent over and searched through the bunchgrass for a rock, found a good-sized one, hefted it in his hand.

He swung around and threw the rock at the window just as the sash was flung up again. The rock sailed through black space and into the house. There was a thump, a clatter, and a loud moan.

“Gracie!” He scrambled over the windowsill, ripping his trousers on a loose nail and banging his forehead on the jamb. “Oh, God in heaven, Gracie. Did I kill you?”

Her white face framed by a white muslin night cap came at him from out of the dark. “You are a crazy person!”

“Let me come in. Please.”

“You’re already in.”

She didn’t tell him to get himself back out, so he took that as an invitation to stay. He stood where he was, letting his eyes get used to the dark. He heard the rustle of sheets as Gracie got back into bed.

He took off his coat and shirt, his boots and trousers. Still wearing his short-legged cotton union suit, he climbed into bed beside her. On a hot night like this the flannel sheets felt as scratchy as wet hay.

They lay in the dark, quiet but for their breathing. Nowhere did their bodies touch, nor would they ever touch until after they had spoken their wedding vows. Yet cloaked by the night, it was easy to talk, to share dreams and hopes and expectations. During a year of bed courtship, you grew to know well the heart and mind of the person you would share a marriage bed with for the rest of your life. You learned if you could take the terrible and the tender together.

The
Englische
thought it sinful, their tradition of bed courtship. Funny, but Mose had never seen how it could be sinful before now. Yet here he was imagining his hand sliding across the sheet and touching Gracie’s arm, his palm covering Gracie’s breast, his mouth kissing Gracie’s mouth, his—

Judas, he was depraved! And heading straight for hell, with maybe a stop off at the nuthouse on the way.

He stretched out his legs to their fullest and linked his hands behind his head. “Gracie?”

She was silent for so long that he thought she was asleep, or pretending to be. Then she pushed herself up on her elbow. Moonlight limned her forehead and the soft curve of her cheek. “I don’t think you fear God anymore, Mose—to do what you’ve done this spring and summer.”

“I fear Him.” He did fear God, and the pain of hellfire, but maybe he feared other things more. He feared losing her, and never being able to make things right again with his father. He feared the moment when he would finally have to choose between what he was and what he wanted to become.

He felt a stinging heat in his chest and eyes. No woman but her was ever going to help him to be his best self.

His hand trembled with the need to touch her.

“Gracie? Let’s go for a walk.”

He didn’t wait for her answer but swung right out of the bed, fast. He stumbled around looking for his trousers and got dressed again, all but for his coat, which he slung over his shoulder.

He climbed first out the window, then turned to help her. As she swung her legs over the sill, she leaned into him and he saw that there were little yellow daisies embroidered on the yoke of her nightrail.

The grass rustled beneath their feet. The wind, still warm from the day’s baking, lifted his hair and tugged at the loose
strings of her night cap. They could see the wild roses that grew along the creek, the fat old moon was so bright.

They walked side by side, and she was the one to slip her hand into his.

“You’re dressed
Englische
again,” she said.

And you, my little secret rebel, have yellow daisies growing all over your nightrail.
He didn’t say it, though. Even he wasn’t that big a fool. “I’m trying to figure it all out inside myself, Gracie, and I’m making progress on it. You got to believe that.”

He wished he could talk to her about what had happened in Deer Lodge, about the way his father had faced down those outsiders in his own brave and quiet and Plain way. He didn’t know the words to explain to her that he wanted to own the courage of his father’s faith, but still wasn’t ready to pay the price. To take to the Plain and narrow path and never stray from it again.

Someday he would talk to her about it all, but not just yet.

“I think you will always be something of a wild one,” she was saying, “in your heart and in your head.”

He tugged on her hand, turning her so that they were face to face. “Can you live with that?”

She gave him a decisive nod that was so much like her. His Gracie, whose thoughts plowed furrows that were straight and deep.

He swung his coat off his shoulder, feeling with his fingers for the breast pocket. “I almost forgot. I brought you something.” He took out a photograph of himself that had been mounted on pasteboard. While in Deer Lodge he had crossed paths with an itinerant photographer and on a whim he’d decided to get his likeness taken. Moses Weaver in his worldly mail-order clothes. The photograph still smelled some of the chemicals that had permeated the man’s wagon.

He held the photograph out to her and she took it, then
gave a funny little sucked-in breath when she saw what it was. “You are giving me this forbidden thing?”

“I was thinking that once I’ve taken my vows and am Plain forever, I might want a reminder of my wild and younger self, the crazy Mose who had to go and break all the rules.” He huffed a little laugh, shrugging. “You can do with it whatever you like. Burn it if you want.”

She curled her hands around the pasteboard and brought it up to her chest. “Maybe I’ll keep it. I can always wave it in your face later, when you’re acting the big know-it-all man around the house.”

Her words warmed his heart. She’d spoken of later, of a time when they would be married and he would be the big know-it-all man around the house. He hadn’t lost her, he wasn’t going to lose her because she’d decided that she cared for him enough to wait until he was ready.

“Gracie?”

She leaned into him to brush her lips across his cheek. “What?”

“I think maybe tomorrow I will begin to grow a beard.”

I
T BEGAN WITH THE
drumbeat of a redheaded woodpecker. There followed a glissando, the crystal chiming of the creek running along its stony bed. The rocking of the wagon wheels over the rough ground was a cradlesong.
And over, through, around it all was the whistle of the hot wind.

The music was with her—soft and sweet-flowing at first. The music quickened, became a runaway, roundelay tune. The music brightened to ebullient, joyful caroling, and Rachel’s soul was stirring, Rachel’s soul was flying.

The music left her.

It left her smiling as the spring wagon lurched over the track, although to call it a track was being kind. It was a sheep path cut through the humped, pine-studded mountains and leathered slopes of grassland where the Plain People summered their woollies.

The Yoder, Miller, and Weaver farms had always done their summer pasturing together. Each June they combined their sheep into a common herd, earmarking and docking the animals to tell them apart, then drove them up onto the mountain ranges. Then the men from each of the farms took turns at the sheepherding.

Ben had never liked the lonesome life of summer sheepherding. He couldn’t stand living in his head so much, he’d said. But Rachel had always thought she would love it. Time moving slow and sweet through the long, pure days. Living in her head with the music.

She couldn’t be a summer shepherd. It wasn’t woman’s work. But when it came the Yoder turn for the herding, Rachel did the camp tending. In her wagon bed now were white sacks of salt for the sheep and rawhide-covered boxes packed with coffee and beans and bacon for the shepherd. And on this day, when sunlight splashed through the pine boughs and ground larks flitted from under her horse’s feet, she was bringing these supplies to Johnny Cain.

It was good that the outsider had gone up into the hills with the sheep, away from the farm now, away from
her. Good for their immortal souls, and for her virtue.

It had only been a matter of days since she had danced in his arms on a new-mown hayfield, since she had kissed his man’s mouth. Days she could count on fingers and toes, busy days of shearing and getting the sheep ready for summer pasturing. Yet for her, he alone had filled every moment of that time.

Even when they had all gathered for the sheep drive—when she was giving her brother Sol a letter-from-home to eat on the trail, and teasing Samuel, who hated to ride, about getting saddle sores, and laughing when the wind snatched away Levi’s hat and a hungry ewe tried to eat it—even when she was safe within the loving family of her Plain life, always, always, she had been aware of Johnny Cain, and it was all she could do not to touch him, there before the eyes of Noah and her brothers.