Free The Outsider by Penelope Williamson Page B

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 andbrought 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