The Outsider (67 page)

I must do this, I must. For my son and family. For Ben, who is waiting for me to join him in the hereafter. I must do this, or there will be no place for me at the table.

Once, many years ago, she had made a vow. To renounce the world and the Devil. To live separate and walk with Christ and his church along the straight and narrow way, to remain faithful to God through her life until death.

Once, she had made and lived such a vow with joy in her heart. Soon she would make it again. Only now, she would be grieving for the rest of her life, for a love that had been lost to her forever. But neither could she make a promise twice and break it twice, and expect God to understand.

I must do this. For my soul’s sake, I must.

She looked at him, but he kept his eyes on the road.

I can’t become separate like you, Johnny. I can’t live on the outside with you.
She had always been joined, like a limb to a tree, to the church and to her family and to God. If she broke off she would die.

She thought this moment must have always been there, waiting in her future, like a prophecy. Beginning with that day he had come staggering across her wild hay meadow, and ending with this—when she must choose between her family and God, and her love for Johnny Cain.

I must do this. I must.

THIS SUNDAY THE PREACHING
was in Noah Weaver’s barn. To Rachel, his farm was so familiar to her, so much like her own, that she had a startling, frightening feeling
of having ridden forever only to find herself back at home again.

But there were the rows of wagons and buckboards parked in Noah’s pasture, and the rows of black bonnets hanging from the fence rail. The barn doors yawned open, and everyone was inside already, waiting for her.

There was a narrow track worn bald by wagon wheels that led from the road to Noah’s farmyard. The outsider pulled the buckboard to a stop, rather than turn down that track. He was looking not at her but at his hands that loosely held the reins.

“When you hear the hymnsong,” Rachel said. She was feeling feverish inside, all shaky and sweat-sticky and cold. And she kept forgetting to breathe.
I must do this, I must.
“When you hear the hymnsong, then you’ll know it’s been done. Then you will go.”

She watched his fist clench around the reins, watched the beautiful, graceful sinews of his hand and wrist turn rigid. He raised his head, and she saw his heart in his eyes, all of his life in his eyes, a heart beating with hurt and hope, and a terrible, desperate need.

“Rachel, I . . . Damn this, and damn you for it. If this is what your God demands of you, then I don’t ever want to come to know Him.”

She breathed, and it was like swallowing fire. “Oh, no, no. You mustn’t say that, you mustn’t think it. Don’t turn away from God because of me. Please.”

He wrapped the reins around the brake handle and swung out of the buckboard. She started to climb down, but he was suddenly there to steady her, with his hands grasping both her arms, an excuse to touch. An excuse to touch one last time.

“Rachel.”

This time, it was not he who spoke her name but her father. And at the sound of it, she turned and walked away from the outsider, and back into her Plain life.

Bishop Isaiah Miller stood before her in his freshly brushed Sunday coat. He wore the pain she had given him in his eyes.

Although she didn’t look at him again, she was aware of the outsider standing in utter stillness by the buckboard. To her father, the outsider wasn’t even there, was as invisible as glass, not worth seeing, not worth caring about anymore. For once his daughter confessed and repented and was taken back into the church again, once that was done and they all walked out of the preaching together, then Johnny Cain would be gone. Isaiah Miller’s eyes were all for his daughter.

“You will make yourself right with the church,
ja,
our Rachel? You will make it right.”

Her chest felt too full, her throat too tight to speak. She managed a nod, and it seemed to satisfy him, although the smile he gave back to her trembled at the edges.

They started to walk together toward the barn, but her legs wouldn’t work right. She kept stumbling. She wanted to turn around, to look back at Johnny Cain, but she was afraid that if she did, then she wouldn’t be able to take one more step toward a life without him.

You can never become lost if you walk the straight and narrow path.

“Da,” she said, “this is so hard. It’s too hard, I don’t think I can bear it.”

He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, bumping hips with her, clumsy and yet tender. “You’ll feel better once you can walk again in righteousness. See if you don’t.”

He stood there for a moment, holding her, and it was
like the morning of her wedding when she had wanted it to last forever.

BISHOP ISAIAH MILLER STOOD
with tears running over his cheekbones and into his beard. He read in a quavering voice from the Bible, about the prodigal son and about the faithful shepherd and his lost sheep.

Rachel Yoder knelt on the straw-strewn floor, facing the church, facing her family, her friends, her Plain life. She tried to make herself listen to the holy words, to endure this as she must, with humility, with a yielding joy and hope in her heart. But her mind kept wandering, and her heart echoed with hollowness.

She tried to make herself see individual faces beneath the rows of black and white prayer caps and black hats. Benjo—no, she couldn’t bear to look at Benjo. But there was Mem, weeping quietly, with Velma and Alta propped on either side of her like matching bookends. Samuel and Abram with their mouths set stern. Levi with his bandaged leg resting on a pile of pillows and creases of worry across his forehead. Sol studying his clasped hands, hands that were gripped so tightly the knuckles had bled white. And Noah, his soft brown eyes staring back at her, bright with a desperate hope.

At no time in her life had she ever loved them more.

“ ‘The Lord chastises me indeed but he hath not given me over unto death. . . . ’ ”

The words were gentle, hopeful, but they hurt. Her Plain life spread before her. Beyond were the barn doors, wide open to the hot and dazzling sunshine. And beyond the doors an outsider stood waiting to hear the first hymnsong.

“Rachel Yoder, if you believe you can face the All-Highest
God with a penitent heart, then confess to your sins now in the name of God, and you shall be forgiven them.”

The straw prickled her knees. The silence was heavy and solemn. And then a barn swallow fluttered through the open doors to disappear into its nest in the rafters, and it seemed for a moment like just another preaching.

This won’t be so hard after all, she thought. I know the words, all I have to do is say them.

“I confess that I failed to keep myself separate. That I took the outsider Johnny Cain into my house and made him as part of my family, allowing myself and my son to be touched by his worldly ways and corrupting influences.”

He’d been a hard worker around the farm, and so good with Benjo. And he wasn’t as tough as he liked to pretend. He talked sweet to the sheep when he sheared them, and he did the milking for her cheerfully, even though it was woman’s work. When Ezekiel the ram fell into lust with him, he had laughed.

“I confess to falling into the sin of fornication with the outsider Johnny Cain.”

His mouth had always looked so hard. It had been such a sweet surprise when she kissed him, to feel how his lips were soft and warm.

“I confess to the sin of pride, of thinking I could bring salvation to the soul of the outsider Johnny Cain, when only God can grant to any of us the gift of eternal life.”

He had killed in the coldest blood, with joy on his face. Then he had stood in a dark barn with torment in his eyes and said, “I am filthy.” If she went back to her Plain life, he would go back to his old life. And eventually he would die bleeding into the sawdust on a saloon floor.

“I confess . . . I confess . . .”

The sunlight pouring through the open doors was blinding.
Her vision blurred and whitened at the edges. She heard weeping, and a rustling of feet, and then all she heard was her own heartbeat.

I must do this.

“I confess,” she said, her voice rising, firming, the words coming from her heart like a prayer, “I confess to having fallen into love with the outsider Johnny Cain. You say he is separate and so I cannot love him, but tell that to my heart. The love I bear for him, it’s like the music, it just comes over me and over me, only unlike the music it doesn’t stop, it goes on and on and on.”

Her mind was wandering again. She blinked, swaying dizzily. Her prayer cap suddenly felt like a boulder crushing her head, and its strings were cutting into her neck. It had gotten so hot in the barn. She could feel patches of sweat on her forehead and cheeks. But, strangely, her hands were cold. She wrapped them in her apron.

“I think,” she said, fumbling for the words a moment longer. Then she found them. “I think of time passing, of the sweet comfort of the seasons always being there in our lives, the lambing and the haying and the shearing. I think of how time passes and the days flow into one another, and I don’t understand how I’m supposed to live without him.”

She tried to draw in a breath, but it caught in her throat. “He is separate, you say. He is an outsider. But I think to myself: If God loves all of His creatures, even the unbelievers, why then would He demand of me that I deny the love I bear for this one man?”

At some time she had risen to her feet. Behind her, her father said something, a hard, desperate whisper. Sol had his head buried in his hands. Noah had his fist pressed hard to his mouth. Tears washed over her mem’s face.

“I know what I must do,” she said, lifting her gaze to that
dazzling, dizzying, frightening square of white sunlight beyond the doors. “I looked for the sorrow in my heart, for the shame I must feel for what I’ve done, but it isn’t there. I’m sorry, so sorry . . . Mem, Da, my . . . my brothers and sisters in Christ, I am so sorry. But my heart is too full of my love for him.”

The first step was the hardest, then she was running.

SHE DIDN’T SEE HIM
at first, and the fear that he might already have left her was so strong her knees buckled with it. She sat in the dirt of the yard, hugging herself, rocking, buffeted by gusts of unbearable longing.

A lone box elder tree grew at the top of the lane. It was an old tree with a broad leafy canopy, a pale green parasol of shade on this blazing summer day. He sat beneath it, with his back pressed against its furrowed trunk, his arm resting on one drawn-up knee. He hadn’t seen her yet, and then he did. He stood up slowly.

She cried out, a shout of joy, then she was on her feet and running again. And then she was in his arms.

His hands took hold of her face gently, made her eyes look up into his. “Come be my wife,” he said.

From the open doors of the barn, low and slow, came the funeral-bell toll of the first hymnsong.

“Mem!”

Benjo burst into the sunlight, running hard, his hand holding down his hat, the legs of his broadfalls flapping. “Mem! Wuh . . . wait!”