The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  Like, some young buck might get a Kiowa warlock to find out from the spirits if, by any chance, the crazy old man had hold of something true. He could hire one of the Owl Prophets, like Sky Walker, or Striking Horse, for a sample, to consult an owl. With a couple of gift horses in the offing for the prophet, it was wonderful how the owl would come up with whichever answer was wanted, about nine times out of ten. And if a single young war leader concluded that his people had a claim on the girl he could very easily find great lashings of fight-loving young bucks eager to take him at his word, and follow him all out in a holy crusade. Then you’d see Kiowas come against walls, and with all they had.

  “There’s another thing,” he began patiently, again. “This is going to be an awful bad Indian year. Maybe the worst Texas has ever seen. You realize more than a dozen people have been killed since the turn of the year, right in the neighborhood of Fort Sill? They even stole a herd of mules out of the fort’s stone corral. And there’s a hundred other warning signs, as well.”

  Matthilda shrugged. Not that she underrated the Indian danger; on the contrary, she feared the Kiowas unreasoningly. This year, as Ben described it, sounded about like any other year, to her. “I’ve never known the time,” she said, “but what an Indian could lie right out there on that ridge, and shoot down any one of us he picked.”

  Actually, a Kiowa out on the ridge was bound to be a scout, alone, or with only two or three others. He wasn’t going to start trouble in decent shooting light unless he caught somebody far from support. Or, if he was from a nearby war party, he wasn’t going to give that show away, either, by poking into the best-forted hornet’s nest on the frontier. Not without even a chance at a scalp. Matthilda would never know things like that. To her the Wild Tribes seemed weird, unearthly, past hope of comprehension; and their cruelties so repelled her that she was forever denied a closer look. Ben was stumped. Nothing he could say seemed to help his case. His mother already held the Kiowas in the greatest fear she was capable of knowing, yet was unswayed by it.

  He now attacked the key point of decision with a reluctance amounting to dread, yet head on, having found no other way to come at it. “Mama,” he asked, “would you be willing—-just for this one year—to take Rachel off to some safe place, like maybe Fort Richardson, or maybe Fort Worth—”

  Matthilda was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

  “Or Austin?” he tried again. “Even Corpus Christi—”

  “Have you gone mad?” his mother demanded.

  He knew what he was up against, then. He felt a moment of chill, almost of panic; he had been hogtied before now by this gentle, lovingly inflexible will. He was hunting for a persuasion that would move Matthilda; without that, he was helpless to care for them or defend them. He could not very well take his mother and Rachel to Fort Richardson in irons, with a demand that they be held secure. It came to him that the fight of his life was not going to be made in the saddle, or in the smoke of black powder, but here, now, in this room. And it must be made with no weapons he knew how to use. Words never did come to him the way a gun or a reata came effortlessly into his hands.

  “We’ve pushed the work hard,” he said, groping. “Cash and me both. We’ve had a right to hope we’d be so far in the clear, before trouble broke, it wouldn’t matter. One good year—maybe this year—and you can school Rachel in Switzerland, or—or—wherever—”

  He saw how sadly his mother was looking at him. For a moment he glimpsed a pity as deep as a sorrow, as deep as her love, so that he was nonplused, and stopped. Matthilda no longer believed this hopeful story of a fortune just ahead; she had heard it too many times, since Old Zack’s first disastrous drive to Sedalia.

  Matthilda Zachary would have hated and feared the prairie if no Indian had ever ridden it. The galling month-long winds; the dust that sifted forever from the walls and roof of the hole in the ground where they lived; the spreading stains of mud that leaked through with every rain; the few poor things they had to do with, so that endless toil showed no return; the cruelly harsh, home-boiled soap, which made cracked, hurting hands the price of just keeping clean—all this Matthilda could have forgiven. But she could not forgive what seemed to her the prairie’s vast malignance, as boundless as its emptiness, and as mighty as its storms.

  A grass fire, a blizzard, or a parching drouth was always dotting the earth with carcasses, so that the deep-grass everywhere hid uncounted bones. For all its birdsongs, its flowers, and its wind-turned grass, the prairie kept changing into a horrid maw, that could swallow the labors of whole lifetimes in one savage night. It had taken her husband, and had even withheld his lifeless body, to be thrown away. The bright will-o’-the-wisp he had followed, and which now led on his sons, was part of a monstrous and cruel lie. I know that, now, she told herself. But men have the hearts of little boys. They love to make up big golden dreams, to treasure as if they were true….

  “Well talk about it when the good year comes,” she answered Ben.

  “Mama, I tell you—will you believe me just this once? You’ve got to get her out of here now, before the first Kiowa Moon—or it’s going to be too late!”

  “What little money we have wouldn’t carry us a step out of Texas. And I’ll never take her to a Texas town again—never. I’ll not see her heart broken, and her life ruined, before my very eyes. Have you forgotten Round Rock? And the San Saba? The whisperings, the snubs, the turned backs—while the poor little thing turns bewildered, and so cruelly hurt—How long can that go on before somebody says it to her face?”

  “Says what to her face?” Cash asked sharply.

  “Do I have to say it? I will then! Red nigger. Red nigger!”

  It was strange to hear Matthilda speak the rough words, forbidden in her house. She might pronounce “Negro” as “Niggra,” but to her nothing on earth could have been a nigger. The disused words had effective force, even shock, as they heard her say them.

  “Tell me,” Matthilda said, “you could bear to hear your own little sister called that?” Sometimes they could not tell whether Mama forgot that Rachel was not her own, or whether she was just playing her chosen role.

  “I’ll hear no man say it twice,” Cash promised.

  “It won’t be said by a man, or to you. It’s Rachel will hear it said.” Matthilda had left an infant daughter under the swept sand of a Round Rock churchyard. From the very first, Rachel had fulfilled for Matthilda a deep maternal need. Perhaps it was the same need that makes a mare break loose, and travel a hundred miles to haunt a cactus patch, where once she dropped a stillborn foal. Her face twisted now, and she sounded as though she were crying, while her eyes remained strangely dry. “Have you any faintest idea of what that would do to her?”

  They supposed they knew how she’d feel; but maybe they didn’t. Perhaps men who live mainly in the saddle can never entirely put themselves in the place of a young girl when the world turns its back upon her, and draws off.

  “She’s so dear, so precious,” Matthilda said. “How can you even think of letting that happen to her?”

  “I’d choose it before I’d risk her death,” Ben said stubbornly.

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe she’d stay on a minute, once she thought she was drawing harm? She wouldn’t care where she went, or if she lived or died. We’d never see her again.” She was pleading with them to understand, and at the same time despairing that they ever could. “I don’t believe you know her at all!”

  “I sure don’t see how it serves any useful purpose to hold her here, trapped, in the one most dangerous place she can be!”

  “I can protect her here,” Matthilda said.

  There it was, the softly indomitable purpose that came before everything else in Matthilda’s world. Because of it she had made Old Zack bring her here, which he never would have done of his own accord, knowing how she felt about the prairie. And because of it she stayed, in spite of every a
ppeal Ben could make. “I can protect her here.” It was the end of argument, standing stronger than hope or fear. Stronger than common sense, too, of which it was the very opposite, Ben thought. He supposed that what he faced here was a female way of thinking. To a male, plain physical danger was the first consideration; it had better be, if he was responsible for a family on the prairie frontier. Matthilda’s conclusions would always be in some part incomprehensible to him.

  “What when the Kiowas come?” he asked her.

  “Well, then, we’ll fight, I suppose.”

  She knew no more about fighting than she knew about Indians, and would be no help whatever if they were forced to a defense of the soddy. Probably she could not have said a thing like that in so maddeningly casual a way if she had known what she was talking about. Yet she had touched the weakest point in his whole position. This place could be defended, for the brothers, and Old Zack before them, had made sure of that. Even overwhelmingly out-numbered, they stood a pretty fair chance of giving attacking Kiowas a licking.

  “Nothing more I can say,” Ben mumbled, baffled and defeated.

  But there was something he could say to Cassius, when their mother had gone to bed. “You saw the hands I hired,” he said.

  “They look all right to me. I told you that.”

  “Could you take about twenty of ’em, and get four thousand head to Wichita?”

  Cassius flared up, roweled on the same old gall. “What the hell you want to ask a thing like that for? You know it damn hootin’ well!”

  “All right,” Ben said. “It’s your herd, Cash.”

  “It’s what?”

  “I’m staying back.”

  Chapter Eight

  Five of the Rawlinses arrived next day, to visit overnight while Zeb Rawlins and Ben straightened out their affairs.

  “Let’s not mention Abe Kelsey to them,” Matthilda asked of Rachel. She made it oddly confidential, and urgent.

  “Why?”

  “It just isn’t needful. I can’t see it’s needful at all!” Tears came easily to Matthilda’s eyes, but Rachel was surprised, and a little shaken, to see them appear now. “Promise me. Please promise!”

  It was the last thing she said to Rachel before their visitors came.

  Zeb Rawlins and his wife, Hagar, appeared first, with a team and rig. All hands but Rachel and Matthilda were out horse hunting; they used ten horses to the man, so driving in a hundred and fifty head more was the first task of the spring work. The Rawlinses’ two grown boys were out with the hands, and Georgia Rawlins, nineteen, had tagged along, as Rachel would have done had she been allowed. Zeb and Hagar Rawlins made a peculiar couple, unlike in most ways, yet held uncommonly close together by the circumstance that each had a handicapping “infirmity,” of which they never spoke, and to which neither yielded an unnecessary inch. “Two old crocks,” one of them might say with curious tenderness, when realizing that the other was concealing pain; but never a word more.

  The nature of Zeb’s infirmity had been unclear. Zeb was tall sitting down, and short standing up; his thick arms and shoulders had the great strength that sometimes goes with this build. But he moved with a slow, ponderous step, and always traveled by team, unable to mount a horse or sit a saddle. The Zacharys, inventing an explanation, had once believed that Zeb carried a bullet in his heart. Later the boys had learned what Zeb had was a “rupture”—a hernia of the type for which out-country folk knew no remedy but the truss.

  Impeded in movement, but a heavy eater still, Zeb had become vast of heft and paunch; but he handled a team with great skill, once he made it to the seat. He now wheeled his rig close to the house, to let his wife dismount directly upon the stoop; then doffed his hat with a broad gallantry, bellowed at Matthilda that he hoped she was well, M’am, and was off like a runaway to look for the horse hunt.

  Hagar Rawlins was taller than her husband, gaunt, grim-jawed, with hollowed cheeks and deep-set eyes. Rachel was afraid of her, for she had often caught Hagar eyeing her strangely, as if with antipathy, or perhaps with some nameless suspicion. As soon as Hagar was afoot, her own physical handicap was plainly visible, though puzzling as to origin. She was not the sort of person you asked about such things. Something was wrong with her ankles, as if the ten-dons had been cut; she painfully shuffled and flapped, dragging or slinging her helpless feet in misshapen moccasins.

  Matthilda and Hagar embraced, as was customary, though it had always seemed to Rachel that Matthilda brought all the affection there might be in it. Hagar was from eastern Tennessee, “so fur back in the hills,” she liked to put it, “the sun don’t never shine.” She could ridicule her own background, but she was “easy throwed” by Matthilda, who was likely to con-fide that her father had been schooled for the ministry, partly, and had read Latin and Greek. Around Matthilda, Hagar would have sieges of speaking carefully, in mincing forms she imagined elegant. Then she would backslide, and catch herself again; so that her language kept kind of running out and in, like a sliphorn.

  But today Hagar brought news, and they could see at once that it had changed her past all imagining. The Rawlinses had an older daughter called Effie, who had been gone from the Dancing Bird country for a year and a half. She had taken down with lung fever, and gone into a decline; as a last resort she had been sent to Fort Worth for a prolonged doctoring. No matter how many children you have, the one in danger becomes precious out of all reason; and no light of faith had sustained Hagar. “They never come back,” was what she said the day she watched Effie out of sight.

  Yet Effie had rallied; Hagar now had word that her daughter’s recovery was complete, and she was coming home. To Hagar it was a miracle and a resurrection. There was warmth, now, even serenity, in the deep-hollowed eyes that had so often chilled Rachel; and a great weight seemed lifted from them all. Perhaps none of them had realized the degree to which this dour, strong-willed, and embittered woman had dominated their prairie.

  And more. While convalescent in Fort Worth, Effie had made good her time by catching herself a young man, of pretty good family at that, by all reports. She was bringing him home with her; they were to be married—out here, in her father’s house. The Zachary women spent little time regretting the monotony of their lives; perhaps they did not even know how barren of reward their lives actually were. Yet they treasured every least diversion, and made the most of it. Now, suddenly they had a wedding to look forward to.

  Rachel had never known Effie very well. She remembered her, perhaps unkindly, as watery-eyed and washed-out, with a bluish, translucent look. Thinking of Effie as a romantic figure was none too easy, but Rachel took this hurdle in her stride. Immediately, she began to imagine what the wedding would be like. Since she had never seen one, her mental picture of it flowered most wonderfully, unrestrained by facts. She couldn’t seem to help seeing the whole doings spaciously mansioned, with great numbers of handsome people coming to it. All were beautifully dressed, especially the women, whose many-hued gowns were reflected in a floor as brightly polished as wet ice. None of this would ever be. The few families who might possibly get there had never seen the kind of clothes Rachel was imagining, and never would in their lives. And the wedding would have to contain itself in the log house of the Rawlinses, which was hardly bigger than the Zachary soddy. As for polished floors—the Zacharys at least had a wooden floor, long since scrubbed white as bone, and it had never reflected anything yet. The Rawlins floor was of dirt….

  In her present mood Hagar talked readily and un-abashed, in the language of her own hills. The hampers she had brought, as was usual, carried a huge baking of crackling bread, and much more. When Matthilda made the conventional protest—“Why, Hagar, you shouldn’t have!”—Hagar said, “ ‘Tain’t nawthin’, Mattie.” Probably nobody else had ever addressed Matthilda as “Mattie” in her life.

  Along toward sundown they heard the first day’s horse-gather coming in. The deep-dug back wall often brought the sound of hoofs into the house, through the ea
rth, from a long way off. Today they listened for half an hour to a faint humming in the ground, increasing slowly to a tremor, then to the drumming of hundreds of hoofs, before at last they heard the whooping of the hands. The riders were hazing and frolicking, showing off because Georgia Rawlins was with them; they poured the herd in at the gallop, running like a storm. The uproar sent a dust cloud sky high as they choused the winter-wild stock into the long night corrals across the Dancing Bird.

  Georgia Rawlins came on in. She was a big girl a couple of years older than Rachel, tall as her mother, and strongly made; handsome, rather than pretty, but bright-eyed and full of bounce, from hours in the prairie wind. She came in briskly, with a loud but shy, “Oh, hi, everybody!” Her great shapeless riding skirt was held up in front of her, avoiding both stumbles and embraces, for it embarrassed her to be hugged by women. She bolted for the bedroom, to change into other clothes she had carried in a roll behind her saddle.

  This was the girl who would normally have been Rachel’s best friend; there was no choice of others. But both families tacitly understood that Georgia was Cash’s girl. Supposedly they would marry at some undetermined time, when Cash got around to building a place to live. This threat stirred up a certain amount of possessiveness in Rachel, so that she very easily found faults aplenty in Georgia, and not much else. Probably no girl would have seemed worthy to Rachel, where her brothers were concerned. She took to noticing that Georgia moved like a tomboy, always ready to climb a corral, or the like, in ways that showed her legs; and could cuss like a man, though she wouldn’t try it in front of Hagar. More like a man in girl’s clothes, Rachel told herself, but without much conviction. If there was anything unfeminine about Georgia, the boys didn’t seem to know it.