The Outsider (7 page)

She sat in her spindle-backed rocker, its rush seat squeaking softly as it took her weight. The outsider lay in her bed, a silent collection of lumps and hollows beneath the quilt. The pattern of the quilt was an enormous white star with diamond rays spread out across a field of midnight blue. In the murky light of the coal oil lamp, the star looked jagged and broken as if it had fallen from the sky and shattered.

The oil in the lamp gurgled softly, a homey, comforting sound. In a moment she would join Benjo, although she’d probably have to shoo off that bed-hog of a dog to make room for herself. Her head itched as it often did after a day of wearing the starchy cap. She thrust her fingers through her hair, rubbing her scalp, indulging herself with a frenzy of scratching. She would go. In a moment. The breath eased out of her in a soft sigh. Her head fell back. . . .

And she let the music come.

The drumbeat of the rain on the tin roof joined in syncopation with the beat of her heart. The wind whistled like a pipe, blowing shrill. The log walls moaned, resonating her bones with their deep bass sound.

The music became wilder. Jagged clarions of trumpets joined with bright cymbals crashing through her blood. She shook with the force of the thundering chords, shocked at their violence. Streaking ribbons of light flashed behind her closed eyes, pulsing and throbbing in cadence with the pounding notes. Never had the music been so awesome, so wild. So forbidden.

No music was allowed in the Plain life, save for the chanting of the hymnsongs on worship Sunday. Yet it seemed that all her life the music had been with her, as elemental as breathing.

She had no notion of why it came, only from where. It came from nature’s songs—from the violin scrape of a cricket’s wing, the clap of a thundercloud, the pop of the cottonwoods freezing, a cat’s raspy purr. She’d heard the outsiders playing on their worldly instruments, of course. Walking down the main street of Miawa City, she couldn’t help but hear the tinny honky-tonk tunes coming out of the saloons. But those were nothing like the delicate, joyful melodies and the symphonic furies that could sometimes
flood over her, through her, whenever she shut her eyes and opened her heart to the earthsong.

No one knew about her music; not even Ben had known. If the church ever came to hear of it, she was sure they’d make her give it up. She would have to confess it as a sin, bowed on her knees before the congregation, and promise never to allow it to happen again.

Yet the music was her way of praying. Words were difficult for her. They seemed such hollow things, all noise and air. She couldn’t use mere words to speak of what was truly in her soul. But the music—it did more than speak. It rejoiced and pleaded, it praised, and wailed sometimes, and shrieked in anger, too. It worshiped. When the music came, the Lord was somehow there as well. She could
feel
Him then in the same way she felt the music, and she knew He heard and understood the thoughts the music spoke. Many were the nights she had sat in this rocker, alone with the Lord and her thoughts and the wild chords and gentle melodies. And time passing at its slowest and sweetest.

In those first months after Ben’s death, she had lost the music. There had been only emptiness then, as hard as a cold stone inside her, and silent, so silent. She’d moved through the days staggered with grief and crushing loneliness, able to summon only a pale shadow of the faith that had always steadied and comforted her. For how could a loving God allow a boy’s father, a woman’s husband, to be so unjustly hanged at the end of a rope?

Yet the music found a way to be heard, just as God always found a way. It came back to her at first in sweet bits and snatches, like the whispered perfume of apple blossoms on a windy spring day. Then one night she had shut her eyes and opened her heart to the wind howling and
moaning through the cottonwoods. And the wind became a chariot of wondrous, booming chords, carrying her higher and higher, home to God. The music brought Rachel Yoder back to her faith again.

And so when the music came to her on this night, Rachel opened her heart. It wasn’t sweet or gentle, not on this night. It was all violence and fury, fiery bursts of notes that exploded in a black sky, sudden and shattering as the sound of a bullet slamming into a wall.

As always the music ended abruptly, falling into a hollow, echoing silence. Slowly, she opened her eyes.

The room wavered before her, hazy from the lamp smoke. The outsider still lay in utter quiet on her bed. A gleam of sweat ran down his cheek and jaw and settled into the hollow of his collarbone. Lampshine reflected off the sheen of his eyes.

He was awake.

Her breath caught, first in surprise and then in fear. The way he was just lying there, staring at her with that taut silence . . . No, she was being foolish. He was only bewildered, and perhaps frightened himself, to come awake in a strange place.

She rose and went to him. She thought she’d gotten used to him, somewhat. Hours, after all, had passed since he’d come staggering across her hay meadow. She had held him and fed him with a pap bottle, she had bathed his naked body. But she had never understood until that moment, until she looked down into his face, why the eyes were called windows into the soul. In the gloomy light his eyes glittered up at her, fierce and wild, and haunted with old and terrible fears.

She didn’t realize she’d taken a step back until his hand grabbed her arm. His fingers dug painfully into her flesh,
surprisingly strong. His ragged breathing sawed across her own gasp.

“Where’s my gun?”

She opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come until she had sucked in a deep hitching breath. “We put it up. In the wardrobe.”

“Get it.” His fingers, so long and slender, whitened with the force of his grip. His strength seemed unnatural, unholy.

“You’ll shoot me.”

“I’ll shoot you if you don’t get it.” His eyes, glowing wild, locked with hers. “Get me the goddamned gun.”

She believed him, and it didn’t matter that he was lying there gunshot and with a broken arm. Looking into those eyes, she believed him capable of anything. “I will, then. As soon as you let go of me.”

She pulled against him but he didn’t let go. And then he did, so that she lost her balance and stumbled.

The door to the wardrobe groaned as she opened it. She knelt and retrieved the leather cartridge belt from the back corner where Doctor Henry had put it. Even though she’d watched the doctor empty the gun of its bullets, she was still afraid of it. It slipped easily and quickly out of the oiled holster, surprising her anew with its weight. Its wooden grip had the smooth worn feel of an old ax handle.

She thought the stranger had fallen back into sleep, for he lay utterly still again, eyes closed. Yet as she held the revolver out to him, his fingers wrapped around it with that unnatural strength. She felt the breath leave him then, on a sigh of relief.

She stared mesmerized at the hand that held the gun. She hadn’t cleaned that part of him very well. Dried blood stained the creases of his fingers, and lay crusted beneath his nails.

She prayed he was too far out of his head to notice the missing cartridges.

His fingers tightened on the gun’s grip. Her gaze jerked up to his face. He was staring at her, his eyes wide open, unblinking.

She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until he relaxed his hold on her by looking away. His gaze roamed over the bare walls, decorated only with knotholes, to the curtainless window that showed only an infinity of black sky. In his eyes was the same wealth of fear she’d seen in the meadow when she had first touched him.

“Where am I?”

“You’re safe,” she said softly. She leaned over him as if she would lay her hand on his forehead, the way she did with Benjo when he awakened from a bad dream and needed comforting. But in the end she did not. “You can go back to sleep now. You’re safe.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were flat, empty but for her own reflection. His mouth pulled up at one corner, but it wasn’t a smile. His gaze went back to the black, empty window. “There’s no such place.”

She did touch him then, on the cheek with the tips of her fingers. “Hush now, and sleep,” she said. “There’s nothing out there but the night and the dark.”

As she bent down to lower the wick in the lamp, her loose hair brushed over his chest and face. She felt a tug on her hair and she saw that he had tangled his fingers in a thick hank of it. In his eyes was a look of surprised bewilderment, but then his heavy eyelids closed as if against his will. He slid into sleep again, but not before letting go of her hair and wrapping his hand once more around the grip of his gun.

She turned off the lamp. The expiring flame leaped and
fell, and darkness swallowed up the room. She paused in the doorway to look back at him. But the bed was only a black shadow now, joined with the phantoms of the night.

She turned away, leaving him to the dark and the night. His eyes, she now knew, were blue.

I
T WAS BARELY NOON
and Rachel was already a day’s worth behind in her chores. She had cream souring in a bucket that needed churning, an apple duff that needed boiling, the bed linens yet to soak. And the floor had been begging for a good scrubbing ever since that last sleet storm had muddied things up so.

But first the outsider’s wound needed tending.

Rachel stuffed a wad of fresh bandages under her arm. She filled an enameled basin with vinegar water and headed for her bedroom. The water slopped over the edges, leaving splatters in her wake and filling the air with its pungent smell.

Doctor Henry had ordered him seen to three times a day. She was to cleanse the bullet hole with carbolic acid and sponge him down all over with the vinegar water. He’d been in a terrible feverish state since that first night. He didn’t toss about and rave, though, as one might expect. Most of the time he just lay there and sweated. Except for twice, when he’d been startled awake, all wild-eyed and pointing his six-shooter at some unseen menace.

Since she’d put it in his hand, he hadn’t once let go of his precious gun. But Doc Henry said that because the wicked thing appeared to bring him comfort, she wasn’t to take it away. Do this, don’t do that, and all easy for that doctor to say when he’d been out here himself only once since the first day. That doctor, she thought with a harried grumble, could be as free with his commands as a new bishop.

Skirts swishing, Rachel entered her bedroom just as, out in the yard, MacDuff let go with an ear-busting
woof.
The man in the bed exploded into a blur of motion. Rachel staggered to a stop, her wide-open eyes staring down the black muzzle of his Colt.

She screamed and flung the basin up in front of her face, dousing herself with the vinegar water. She squeezed her eyes shut and hunched her shoulders as if she could make all of her small enough to fit behind her puny shield. The air grew thick and still, except for the
drip-drip
of the water.

She lowered the basin slowly, peering over its chipped rim.

He still held the six-shooter trained right on the bridge of her nose. She tried to assure herself that with her own eyes she’d seen Doc Henry take out the bullets, but she didn’t completely trust any outsider, let alone their violent and unpredictable weapons.

MacDuff barked again, and the outsider’s whole body drew taut. The gun barrel didn’t waver, but she could have sworn his finger tightened around the trigger, a trigger that had been doctored to go off at the slightest touch. She stared into eyes that were wild and savage.

“
Lieber Gott.
Don’t shoot me. Please.”

“That dog—” His voice was savage like his eyes, and shaking. “What’s it barking at?”

She was holding her head so stiffly it seemed to creak as
she turned to look out the window. MacDuff was loping in and out of the willow brakes and cottonwoods that lined the creek. A dirty gray fluff of tail flashed ahead of him, disappearing into a burrow pit.

“It’s only our herding collie, chasing a jackrabbit.” She creaked her head back around to the man in the bed. She tried to make her voice sound matter-of-fact, as if she conversed daily with strangers who held guns pointed between her eyes. “MacDuff’s got a running feud going with every rabbit in God’s creation.”

The barrel of the gun jerked upward. His thumb flashed and there was a loud metallic click, and Rachel nearly jumped out of her skin again. He sagged down into the pillows. Sweat gleamed on his face. His hand that held the gun trembled briefly, then stilled.

She stared at him. Her heart was pounding like an Indian war drum and he was the cause of it, he and his six-shooter.

His gaze suddenly snapped back to the window, focusing on the running figure of her son outside. MacDuff’s barking must have drawn Benjo away from his chores in the barn. The foolish rabbit, out of its burrow again, was now making a dash for the wild plum thickets that grew between the creek and the lambing sheds. The boy was going after the rabbit with his sling, whirling the rawhide cords over his head like a lasso.