The Outsider (69 page)

He dragged the weight of his feet and legs off the porch and toward the barn and the woods that separated her place from his. Unable to help himself, he paused once to look back. Rachel had stepped out onto the porch, the outsider with her. He stood with one wrist draped over her shoulders now, drawing her against his hip. And as Noah watched, the wind lifted her hair, whipping strands of it against Johnny Cain’s face, in his eyes and mouth, and wrapping more of it around his neck, until he was bound by her hair.

F
OR RACHEL, TIME PASSED
both sweet and hard that summer.

It was sweet on the night she came awake to find him watching her. “Rachel,” he would say, just her name, and his mouth would come down on hers, slow and hot, and she would feel his hunger burning through him into her. She knew a heady feeling of power that she could do this to him, make him want her so. And she felt helpless under his weight, the weight of the love she bore for him.

Once, in the middle of lovemaking, he had started singing at the top of his lungs: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. . . .”

She tried to smother his mouth with her hand, thinking of Benjo sleeping in the next room. When that didn’t work, she used her mouth to quiet him. “You are so wicked,” she said into his open mouth, laughing.

It was like nothing she could ever have imagined, her life with him. She would look at him, sitting at the man’s place at her table, eating a slab of fried cornmeal mush of a morning, and her heart would catch anew with awe and a shiver of excitement to think he was hers, her man.

Or she would suddenly be swept up into his arms in the middle of the yard, and he would be humming a tune and whirling her around and around and around in a dance, and
she would think of the Bible words:
For ye have not passed this way heretofore.

Or she would watch him shave, watch the razor scrape away the lather to reveal his arresting face to her eyes one more time, and an image would flash into her mind, sharper than a memory, of his hard body coming against hers. Of her body rising to welcome him, to take his weight and his thrusts and his need.

Often, though, she was reminded of how different he would always be from her. Like that day he came to her when she was carrying buckets of water out to her withering vegetable garden. He said that they ought to build themselves a windmill, and she’d answered, not thinking, with words a Plain woman would have used: “God provides us with water. We shouldn’t ask Him to pump it, too.”

He’d looked at her as if he thought a trip to the nuthouse might be in order. Then he’d laughed and kissed her hard on the mouth, and left her to her bucket watering.

By marrying an outsider she supposed she had gone
Englische
, but she didn’t feel that way. She no longer wore her prayer cap, though. Not because he’d asked it of her but because, to her, the cap was a symbol of what she once was and could never be again.

Otherwise, she dressed as she always had, for much of what she was inside of herself was still Plain. Outside, though, she felt something vital was missing. She was less than herself, as if a leg or an arm had been cut off.

There was a saying in the Plain life.
Oh, das hahmelt mir ahn,
which was about calling to mind older times and pleasures with such vividness that the memories were akin to pain. She caught herself doing that often, remembering sweet moments: Setting a bowl of bean soup before
her father at the fellowship. Hearing Ezra Fischer’s voice push through the waiting silence with that first long and piercing note of the hymnsong. Sitting on a blue dahlia quilt, to
klatsch
with her mother and her sisters-in-law, and hold a fat-legged baby on her thighs. Placing that first cocoon of spring, trembling with new life, into her great-grandmother’s hand. She would remember and know joy, and then the swift thrusting pain when she understood that it had all been lost to her forever.

And then there were those times she would look at Benjo, and the fear would burn hot in her breast, to know the future pain she had brought upon herself and her son. For although she was shunned, Benjo was not. His kin and his church were still there for him to have, and she would be sure he had them. She would raise him Plain and send him to the preaching and fellowship every other Sunday. He would go often to the farms of his grandparents, and all his uncles and aunts and cousins, to help with the haying and the shearing. He would eat at their tables. And then one day he would kneel in a Plain barn and he would say the traditional words: “It is my desire to be at peace with God and the church,” and he would have to shun her then, his mother. She would become dead to him, and he would be lost to her. But if he didn’t choose the Plain church, if he joined her in the world instead, then he would be lost to God.

As she was lost to God.

THAT FIRST WORSHIP SUNDAY
after she was banned, she had decided she would drive Benjo to the preaching in the buckboard, rather than let him take himself there on their old draft horse.

Her
Englische
husband came to her as she was about to climb into the wagon. The look on his face was one she hadn’t seen since their marriage.

“Don’t do this to yourself,” he said.

There wasn’t a way she could make him understand, he who had never before had a home, a family. The spirit of the man that was Johnny Cain, the toughness inside of him, could sustain him alone forever. She wasn’t like that, she needed others, she needed that place at the table. She loved her family so much, she would grieve for them for the rest of her life. Yet God had made their loss the price she had to pay for loving him. And she couldn’t tell him any of this, for he wouldn’t understand. Except for one thing, one thing he might understand.

She pulled his head down so that she could kiss him on the mouth, in broad daylight, on a worship Sunday, in the middle of the yard, and with her son watching. “I love you,” she said.

But it was worse at the preaching than she would ever have thought it could be. She was not, of course, going to be allowed into the barn during the worship service. And she had known no one would speak to her. But she hadn’t understood what it would be like to have people you love, family and friends you’ve known all your life, not even look at your face. To have them know you were there and behave as if you were not there at all—as if even their memory of you had long ago faded to nothing more than a dull ache.

The worst, the very worst, was when
Mutter
Anna Mary, sitting in her willow rocking chair beneath the shade of a weeping willow, “saw” Rachel coming with her blind eyes, and turned her face away.

That night, after it had grown dark, and supper had been cooked and eaten, and the dishes washed, and her
son pried out of the kitchen and sent off to bed, Rachel went by herself out to the paddock fence. She stood there, listening to the saw of the crickets, to the gentle purl of the creek, to the soughing of the summer wind, opening her heart to the music, only the music wouldn’t come. And suddenly she was doubled over the fence rail, burying her face in her arms and sobbing.

She didn’t even know he had come until he’d already gathered her up in his arms and was walking back to the house, with her face buried in his chest and her sobs quieting now into hoarse whispers of breath.

He laid her on the bed, and then he lay down next to her. More than next to her, he lay almost on top of her, with one arm wrapped around her back, and one leg thrown across both of her legs, as if he would pin her there to the bed with his man’s weight.

“Hold me, Johnny,” she said. “Hold me tight.”

He said nothing, but he held her tight.

LATER, HER
ENGLISCHE
HUSBAND
was the one to come awake in the middle of the night, but not to find her watching. She was sitting in her spindle-backed rocker, staring into the darkness, into the nothingness of her soul. He got up and went to her. He knelt at her feet and took up her hands, which she had clenched in her lap, warming them with his own.

“The music is gone,” she said to him.

“It’ll come back.”

A single tear streaked along the bone of her cheek and into her hair, where there was already a damp spot over her ear. He didn’t understand. He hadn’t the faith within him to understand.

She brought their clasped hands up to her mouth and kissed his knuckles. “No, it can’t come back. The music was God.”

SHE LOVED HIM DESPERATELY.
And her love, her need, made her so afraid.

Since he didn’t believe in a better world after death, he lived wholly in this one, wholly in the moment. And up until the day he had come staggering across her wild hay meadow, he had lived the life of a skipping stone. She could imagine him waking up some morning and thinking that he didn’t want to be here, with a fallen Plain woman and a ten-year-old boy, on a sheep farm in the Miawa Country, and so he would just up and leave.

The first time this imagining came to her, it had sent her into such a panic that she knew she wouldn’t be able to take one more breath until she saw with her own eyes that he was still with her. He’d said something about going out to the barn to perform one of those eternal chores men found to do in a barn. But now suddenly she was convinced he’d gone out there to saddle his getaway horse.

She burst through the big open cross-hatched doors, shouting his name.

He spun around fast, his hand hovering above his gun. “What’s happened?”

She was breathing hard, and unconsciously she put the flat of her hand against her chest to still it. “Nothing.”

“What?”

“I thought you’d left me.”

The creases at the corners of his mouth deepened. She thought it was his heartfelt smile, until she heard the edge of his voice when he spoke. “We both of us promised till death do us part.”

And she understood. He was telling her he would hold her to her vows, and so he expected her to do the same with him.

He had been repairing a harness. He had one of the leather traces wrapped around his left hand. She looked at that hand, so long and fine-boned, so graceful in the way he moved it. She took his hand and peeled open his fingers to examine his palm. “Your hands are a farmer’s now,” she said. “You’ve calluses in different places.”