The Outsider (9 page)

“The Bible says, Mr. Cain, that a man’s sins do find him out.” And Rachel tipped the bottle of carbolic acid over the raw hole in his side.

He made no sound, but his belly shuddered hard. She knew she’d hurt him and she felt mean now herself for having done it. It was what Noah meant about the taint of worldly corruption, she supposed. Already she was doing and saying things that weren’t Rachel Yoder at all.

She finished putting on the fresh dressing, saying nothing more, not meeting his eyes. She was about to leave him when she saw that his gaze had fallen on the bullet he’d brought with him into her house, buried in his flesh. It sat there on the nightstand, next to her Bible. Small and round and bronze, and flattened a bit at one end where Doc Henry said it had struck a rib bone.

“The doctor dug that out of your spleen,” she said.

He actually let go of his precious gun to pick up the bullet. He held it up to the shaft of sunlight pouring through the window, examining it almost with awe, as if it were a gold nugget. But then his fingers curled around it, making a fist.

She followed his gaze from the bullet in his fist to the wardrobe. The door was half open, although it should not have been. The wardrobe where Doc Henry had put the outsider’s guns—and his cartridge belt with the extra bullets.

Rachel gasped, and her own gaze flew to the gun lying at his side, and then back up to his face.

Blue eyes, dead of all feeling, looked into hers. “The last bullet, almost.”

MOSES WEAVER SCUFFED HIS
feet along the rough boards of the Yoder front porch, scraping the worst of the sheep manure off his tooled leather high-heeled boots. He lifted his derby to slick back his pomaded hair, gave his checked trousers a hitch, and raised his arm to knock.

The door opened before his fist could fall. Mrs. Yoder gave him a slow look-over, pressing her fingers to her lips and making her eyes go round as shoe buttons. “Why, if it isn’t our Mose. And don’t you look flashy in those clothes, like a tin roof on a hot summer’s day?”

His fist fell to his side and his cheeks caught fire. “Uh, I’ve come to chop up that wood for you, ma’am.”

“I figured as much, and it sure is good of you. Especially when I know how your da has got you working over at your place from can’t see to can’t see.” Her eyes squinted up at him, as if with silent laughter. “My, but you do look handsome, though.”

He craned his head to see around her into the kitchen, but she shifted her weight to lean against the jamb. “So, did you get those fancy new clothes of yours out of a mail-order wishbook?”

“Yes, ma’am. I sent off for ’em with last summer’s wool money.” He stretched out his neck to see over her. He got a glimpse of a milk bucket and strainer sitting in the middle of the floor, a flour tin and a string of dried apples waiting on the table. With all the talk he’d been hearing, he almost expected to see the outsider lurking in there, wearing a black duster, armed with a pair of pearl-handled six-shooters, and leaking blood from a bullet hole in his side.

Mrs. Yoder stepped across the threshold onto the porch, pulling the door half shut behind her. The smell of vinegar wafted off her, pinching Mose’s nose. She must be pickling, he thought, though it was the wrong time of year for it.

And he hadn’t gotten so much as a whiff of the stranger. Folk said the man was a desperado, an outlaw whose face looked out of wanted posters that offered a thousand dollars in pure gold for his capture dead or alive. But the only reward, so it was also said, that anyone had collected thus far was hot lead from the end of the desperado’s blazing six-shooters. Mose sure wished he could’ve gotten a look at those six-shooters. It was just the sort of wild tale to give the shivers to his girl, Gracie. Sometimes if he got Gracie worked up enough, she’d let him put his arms around her and hold her close.

Mose suddenly realized that Mrs. Yoder was still standing there smiling at him, and probably wondering why he didn’t get on with it. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and backed up, and stumbled when his boot heel caught on a warped board. “I’ll just be at that wood, then.”

He got halfway to the chopping block before she called after him. “Mose? Why don’t you knock on the door after you’re done and I’ll give you some dried apple duff to take home with you.”

Mose spun around, grinning broadly, and touched the curled brim of his new black derby in a cocky salute. She hadn’t actually invited him inside, but maybe he could get a gander at the desperado after all, might even get a chance to exchange a howdy with the man. Wouldn’t Gracie be impressed when she heard about that, he thought, although his father would likely have a conniption. Old Deacon Noah was of the mind that all a Plain boy had to do was get within hailing distance of the world outside, with all its evil and corrupting influences, and he would be damned. As if the purity of a body’s soul could be corroded by exposure to the world, the way a rake got rusty if it was left out too long in the rain.

Mose looked back at the house, shading his eyes from the dazzle of the sun striking off the tin roof, but Mrs. Yoder had gone inside. He looked flashy, she’d said, flashy as a tin roof in his new clothes. He grinned to himself at the thought of it.

There’d been a lot of talk lately about his father and Mrs. Yoder marrying. It wasn’t any secret the old man had been hankering after her for years. It didn’t appear like she was going to have him, though, not even with Mr. Yoder dead and buried nigh on a year. Mose didn’t really like to think of how beaten down and sad his father had been looking lately.

Mose wished it would happen—them two getting married. He liked Mrs. Yoder a lot. She had a nice way of smiling and touching him in little ways, like patting him on the shoulder and brushing the hair back out of his eyes, and she was always asking him whether his coat was warm enough and giving him food, like the offer of dried apple duff. He’d often imagined that if his own mother had lived she’d be like Mrs. Yoder. But his mother had died having another baby when he was only a year old. His aunt Fannie had moved in after that, to keep house for him and Da, and if she’d ever spared so much as a smile for either one of them, he sure couldn’t remember it.

Even with the sun shining, the wind still had winter’s bite to it, and Mose shivered as he shrugged out of his four-button cutaway. He didn’t want to sweat stains into his new coat before Gracie got a look at it. She probably wouldn’t recognize him in it, she was so used to seeing him in that ugly brown sack coat that all the other Plain boys wore.

He ran his finger over the skin beneath his nose to see if anything had started sprouting there yet, but he didn’t feel so much as the prickle of a single whisker. He’d bought a tonic at the drugstore in Miawa City that guaranteed to
grow hair on a man’s bald head, but it seemed to work squat-all when it came to mustaches. He wanted to grow one of those mustaches that curled up on the ends. He’d really look flashy then.

And old Deacon Noah would have himself another conniption.

As it was, his father’s lips puckered up as if he’d been sucking on a lemon every time Mose stepped out of the house wearing his mail-order clothes with all their forbidden buttons and pockets and fancy stitching. But it wasn’t really against the rules for Mose to dress worldly because he hadn’t been baptized into the church yet. Once he took his vows, once he promised to walk the straight and narrow way—well, then he’d have to dress Plain, to grow a beard but not a mustache, and quit parting his hair for the rest of his life. So the way he saw it, there was no sense to doing all that before time.

Mose carefully hung his new coat on the low branch of a nearby yellow pine. He gave the satin-piped collar a caressing stroke. All his life he’d been taught not to love the world, nor the things of the world, but he loved that coat. Every time he put it on, every time he so much as looked at it, he felt a forbidden exhilaration. Sort of like what he felt when he dove into Blackie’s Pond. There was that first sudden, exciting shock of it when his head would break through the water. Then the excitement would start to edge over into fear as he’d be sucked down into the pond, down, down into the cold black depths. And just when the fear would be about to take hold, he’d touch bottom and shoot back to the surface, back to the warmth and light again.

He thought about that, about the heady and scary temptations of the world, as he laid a thick piece of cedar trunk on the chopping block. He raised the ax above his head and
brought it down. The ax split the wood with a solid
whunk!
and a ring of its steel blade. Chips spun off into the dirt, and the spicy scent of cedar floated on the wind.

His body settled into the rhythm of the swinging ax—arms stretching above his head, shoulders bunching as he brought the ax down, and the hard shudder of the blow through his body as the blade bit the wood. Chopping firewood was hard work, but Mose liked it. It helped to calm some of the wild and edgy feelings that had been churning in his guts all winter. “Work sure will keep a boy from getting the bighead,” old Deacon Noah was fond of saying. “Hard work is the answer. The bad thoughts and feelings—they come out with the sweat.” Except they didn’t all come out, Mose thought, not completely.

The ax blade caught in a knot, and Mose jerked hard on the helve. He winced as the sudden movement pulled at the bruises and welts on his back. He was still some sore from the thrashing his father had given him for what he’d done in Miawa City last Saturday afternoon. He thought he was getting too big to be whipped, but the trouble was he wasn’t so big yet that he could stop his father from doing it.

Ach, vell
, he did know of one way. He could renounce the evil world, marry Gracie, and settle down into the Plain life forever after. If he did all that, he would make things right again between him and his father. But every time he thought of it he got this suffocating, choking feeling in his chest, as if he’d somehow gotten nailed up in a coffin alive.

Mose tossed a piece of the fresh-cut wood onto the stack and was reaching for another when a stone whizzed past his head and smacked into a burl on the trunk of the pine tree that held his coat.

“Hey!” he shouted and whirled, a scowl pulling at his face.

Benjo Yoder trotted up, his herding collie loping at his heels. Both boy and dog must have just come from the creek. The dog gave himself an allover shake, misting the air. The boy’s broadfalls were wet to the knees, his coat matted with last summer’s thistles. A braided rawhide sling dangled from his left hand.

Mose jammed his fists on his hips and pointed to the sling with his chin. “I ’spect you fancy yourself David the giant killer with that thing.”

“I kuh—kuh—killed me a m-muskrat.” Benjo raised his arm to show off what he had in his other hand. He held the animal up by its webbed hind feet. Its long flat tail curled around its glossy brown fur. Its crushed head dripped blood into the dirt.

“Pee-uw!” Mose said, rearing back a step as the muskrat’s powerful stink slapped him in the face. He looked the trophy over, his lips curling into a sneer. “Come see me when you bag yourself a grizzly bear, Benjo Yoder, and then maybe I’ll be impressed.”

Hurt crumbled the boy’s bright-eyed grin, and Mose had to look away. Just because he was feeling aggravated with his own life, Mose thought, that was no reason to take it out on poor Benjo.

“Hey,” he said, punching the boy lightly on the arm. “You gonna serve up that ol’ muskrat for supper?”

Benjo snorted a laugh. He hauled back and flung the wet carcass into the air. They both watched until it landed in a wild plum thicket with a soggy
splat.
MacDuff barked and took off after it, only to get sidetracked by a rabbit that darted out of the thicket and led him on a chase behind the barn.

“So how come you’re out hunting muskrats, instead of being in school?” Mose said.

“It’s an outsider huh—holiday.”

“Hunh. It’s no outsider holiday. But I bet your mem don’t know that.”

Poor Benjo was one of the few Plain kids whose folk actually made him go to the
Englische
school. Most of the Plain didn’t hold with book learning, figuring it a waste of time for a boy who was only going to grow up to be a farmer. Schooling wasn’t forbidden by the church, though. It was one of the few things that weren’t forbidden, Mose thought sourly.

At the mention of school, Benjo had suddenly turned deaf, busying himself with looping up his sling and tucking it into the waistband of his broadfalls. Mose hefted another piece of the cedar onto the chopping block. He wiped the wood dust off his ax blade, spat into his palms, gripped the helve and settled his shoulders for the first upward swing. He looked up in time to catch Benjo casting a worried glance back at the house.

“What’s he like?”

The boy jumped like a cricket, then lifted his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. There’d been no need for Mose to specify who
he
was. The whole valley had been talking about
him
for three days now. “Mem says I’m to stuh—stuh—stay away from him,” Benjo said. “He’s juh—juh . . . jumpy.”