The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  Georgia reappeared in full-skirted blue cotton. The dress looked familiar, for it was the only decent one she had, but Rachel had to admit, with a twinge, that she looked all right. Georgia had a lot of mouse-blond hair, which she had tied back with a blue ribbon. Wrong color blue, Rachel hoped, without looking too closely. But she envied Georgia’s strap slippers, new since they had seen her. Finally got shoes on you, I see. Had to rope and throw you, of course. And stockings, too—will wonders never cease. Now, if next you hear of underwear…

  What Georgia thought of Rachel was not known. Most of the time she seemed unaware of her.

  Soon, though, the men began coming in, and no awkwardness of any kind could long survive the excitement of a house full of people. The two Rawlins boys, though lacking in flash, at least were young men who were not Rachel’s brothers. Charlie was the youngest Rawlins, and the one nearest Rachel’s age. He had sad, slow-moving eyes in a shy, quiet face—an empty face, Rachel thought it. The Rawlins heavyset strength had missed Charlie. Only unusual thing about him, and it was kind of ridiculous, was his great tangle of dusty-looking hair, which stood straight up. He kept plastering it down with water, but it no sooner stopped dripping than it began to spring up again, a tuft at a time—Ping!—like wire busting loose in a freeze. Rachel knew that Charlie’s eyes followed her moonishly, whenever he thought she wasn’t noticing. She found this pleasantly exciting, even though she didn’t care anything about him.

  Charlie’s brother Jude, of an age somewhere between Ben and Cassius, was a likely sample of what his father must have been, before salt pork and inactivity crept up on him—bull-necked, hammered down in the legs, and heavy of bone and muscle. Andy stood in awe of him, admiring his strength.

  “Why, he’s got leaders in his wrists thick as the haft of a brand iron,” Andy said once. “Thicker even.”

  “And Ben can throw him over his head,” Rachel tacked onto it.

  Jude stayed close to his father and Ben Zachary, listening doggedly, in hopes of learning something.

  Cassius was the one who outshone everybody, when he finally came in. Ben, in his old, worn clothes, still looked like the boss; even while he was talking with a courteous deference to Zeb Rawlins, Ben still looked like the man in charge. But Cash was all dressed up, astonishing Rachel, who had not noticed what he was wearing at breakfast, in the sleepiness before dawn. Black leather shirt, wrapped high in the throat, like a stock; black trousers, after he took his brush leggings off. Black, silver-conchoed leather cuffs and belt. Rachel thought he looked wonderful. Ben’s eyes, though, may have been belittling when they rested on his brother, as if he thought Cassius a fool.

  After supper Ben and Zeb Rawlins got their heads together over the bookkeeping that was to Ben the meanest chore in all the cattle business.

  Rachel saw that Zeb Rawlins kept slowly shaking his head, while Ben might be having a hard time hiding his opinion that Zeb had the outlook of a one-horse sod-buster. Zeb would reap half the benefit of Ben’s winter trades, but he had not okayed any buying. Hard feeling always developed when two outfits started even, on the same range, and one came out way ahead of the other; so Ben wanted to give Zeb half the profits on purchased stock, while guaranteeing him against loss. But Zeb thought Ben highhanded, and a plunger as well. He was stubbornly sitting back in the breeching.

  They didn’t get far, and it was just as well.

  Georgia, harder to squelch than a prairie fire, got Cash to his feet, then Charlie and Jude; and of course Rachel. They pushed things back and started up a singing game—a kind of a scamper, first, in which one stood in the middle, and a boy chased a girl around him until he caught her. Then others like that, with clapping and stamping for music, the Rawlinses as tickled as kids with the noisy wooden floor. Couldn’t have been more childish, actually. “Stole old Blue! And I know who! Here I come, and I see you!” Pretty silly, but plenty loud. Ben and Zeb had to give up.

  “If only Effie was here,” Hagar kept saying. She was very much here in their minds, a part of the great day acoming, that had been such a long, long time on the way. With Effie, they had in this one room all who were to have a part in the bust-up of the Dancing Bird range. Or rather, all save one, who was in nobody’s mind; unless, perhaps, the shadow of a wretched and doomed old man sometimes crossed Ben’s thought or Matthilda’s, like a ghost of the living, unasked and unwanted.

  The room became hot; when the girls blew their hair out of their eyes, little damp tendrils were left stuck to their foreheads. “Now swing the other! That’s the wrong one! Go right back where you started from….” One rompy, let-yourself-go night like this had to last them all for a long time. Rachel wanted to hold onto it, as if it were the last night in the world.

  It was the last, for these people as a group. They were never again all together under the same roof.

  Chapter Nine

  It began to rain; not in the good old soaker they really needed, but in bursts that doused the prairie hard and briefly, with spells of sunshine and rain-bows between showers. Ben walked out bareheaded in the first rain that fell. He spread his arms to it, and turned his face up to be rained on, getting whopped all over with drops as big as dollars. The Dancing Bird rose, and the grass started. Wintergaunted cows and horses gorged themselves into bloats and colics, but all would be well with them now, for the time being.

  In the house the women eyed muddy stains spreading upon the whitewashed roof boards, and swore the sod roof must be shingled over this year for sure. But the house would get no attention now. All day long Jude’s hammer rang at the forge, as he repaired the wagons and shrunk new iron to the wheels. Every few minutes came a yell, the angry squeal of a horse, and a splatter of hoofs, as somebody fought to get the hump out of a range-wild pony.

  Every year they had the same argument about whether Rachel was to be allowed out around the hands. When she was little Matthilda had feared she would get her head kicked off, and later that she would hear too much rowdy language. Now that she was a young lady, the objection was obvious. About every third girl in Texas ran off with some young cowhand, who might amount to something later, but showed no signs of it at the time. Rachel always lost the battle, yet won the war. Gradually she would begin sifting out, on useful errands that somehow became more frequent by the hours; till even her mother got used to it, and accepted that nothing was actually happening to her.

  This year Ben felt that the whole thing had better be handled a different way. He didn’t say anything, but come afternoon the day after the Rawlinses’ visit, he rode to the house, and hollered for an extra slicker. When Rachel brought it to the stoop, he sung out, “Rachel’s with me, Mama!” And he had her up behind his saddle, and through the Dancing Bird, before objection could be raised.

  Only thing, he explained to Rachel, he wanted to see something before he turned her loose on her wild lone, so she would have to stay put where he told her. “Right—square—here,” he said, letting her off on the fence of the round busting corral.

  She sat on the top rail, hugging her luck, for here was put on the best show they had. Half a dozen of the best rough-string riders got a few dollars extra for working the round corral. The corrida Ben had hired was full of youngsters who had ridden before they could walk, and most of the time since. They would fight anything that wanted to fight, so long as they weren’t crippled up. But the round-corral busters were expected to turn a mustang into a saddle horse without any wasted roughing, and this took a kind of horse-savvy that had to be born in a man.

  Into the round corral, half a dozen at a time, were hazed the horses that had never before felt rope—called “colts,” whatever their ages might be. All were geldings, age-hardened at full growth; the Zacharys rode no mares, no fillies, and no colts under four. Like the longhorns, the Texas mustangs came of Spanish stock, abandoned upon a strange continent long ago. After running wild for three centuries, beset by wolves, drouths, and bitter winters, they had a runty look, but an almost incredible toughness
and en-durance.

  With the range-wild colts came the meanest badactors from the rough strings, the ratchet-heads that never knew when they were licked, but had to be fought out all over again every spring. These knew what they were up against, and were not afraid of it; they fought wickedly and cunningly, bucking as they had never bucked when they were fear-crazed colts. You didn’t have to be thrown to get hurt riding horses like that. Rough-string riders were smashed up and through before they were thirty.

  Not every year, but once in every few hundred horses, a killer might turn up. Usually there was nothing about him to warn you. Any colt was likely to strike, or lash out, or try for you with a snap of the teeth fit to take off your arm, as you worked around him. Or he might groan, deep in his chest like an angering bull, as you snubbed him short for saddling. None of this meant anything. A killer almost never charged a man on foot, as a stallion might do; he might even stand quiet, as if earlier handling had cured his fear of men. But when his rider was thrown he turned like a lion, and trampled with whirling, stiff-legged jumps, sometimes savaging with his teeth.

  The rare killers hardly explained why nearly all the young riders wore pistols; and neither did the un-likely chance of a dragging account for it. If a thrown rider’s boot caught in a stirrup, almost any horse would kick him to death in a hurry. But this happened so seldom that few had ever seen it, and it could be made impossible by using tapaderas, such as the brush-country riders always wore on their stirrups. In any case, neither a man slammed hard on the ground nor one stirrup-dragged by a runaway was likely to draw and fire soon enough to do himself any good. Even the bystanders, invariably taken by surprise, generally failed to take effective action in time.

  But the only boy you saw unarmed was one who hadn’t been able to get hold of a gun. They wore them belted snug and high if they were going to ride, with a slitted thong on the hammer to keep the gun in the holster; or slung them low, tied down to the thigh, if they expected to be afoot. They wore guns to break horses or to brand calves, or when they weren’t working at all. Most of them took their guns to bed. A seven-pound gun could develop an almighty heavy drag, in fourteen or sixteen hours of riding, but only a thunderstorm could cause it to be laid away. For gun wearing was a fashion; maybe it was a fashion set by men in trouble with the law—but a fashion just the same.

  So, when a rough-string boy who called himself Johnny Portugal came sidling along the fence to where Rachel was perched, he was armed with a huge hog-leg of a percussion revolver, like most of the rest. He leaned an elbow on the top rail close to Rachel, and crossed his feet in a pose of ease. His mouth seemed uncommonly full of large teeth, and the grin he flashed as he looked up at her showed them all.

  “You been living around here long?” Johnny asked pleasantly; and that was as far as he got.

  Perfect, for Ben’s purpose, because nothing even remotely off-color in Johnny’s remark confused the issue. Ben had not set out to teach these saddle tramps their manners; he didn’t give a hoot whether they had any or not. What he wanted was to warn them against messing around Rachel at all.

  Ben spun Johnny Portugal by the shoulder with his left hand, and with his right hand swung what could be called a slap. His hand was open, and the blow rang like a slap. But the heel of the hand carried Ben’s full weight from the heels. Johnny’s feet seemed to fly up, his hat sailed off, and his head cracked a five-inch pole as he hit the fence. He ended sitting in the mud against the bottom pole, and in this position grabbed for his gun. His thumb failed to flick the thong from the hammer on the first try, and he had to start the draw again. Ben stood waiting with an appearance of patience while Johnny Portugal fumbled. The gun came out at last; and Ben instantly kicked it over the fence.

  Cassius had come over the fence, and was standing beside his brother, looking happy and interested, as Johnny Portugal looked up. Rachel remembered afterward that Cash had been fooling around nearby, accomplishing nothing, all the time she had been sitting there. One brother on each side of the fence, watching the bait Ben had put out.

  “He gets it from our old man,” Cassius told the seated man. “Old Zack broke a Comanche’s neck with a slap like that, right in the middle of a Kiowa camp. Indians always called him Stone Hand.” Well—that was the way it was told in Texas, though the story had been fixed up a little, by later narrators. Actually, the Comanche had only been knocked out—which the Kiowas had taken as a good joke on the Comanche.

  “I got time coming,” Johnny mumbled, rubbing his head, and then his jaw.

  “We pay off in Wichita,” Cash said.

  “I ain’t fired?”

  “What for? You’re the party done all the sufferin’, so far.”

  “You’re lucky it wasn’t my brother,” Ben told Johnny.

  “Tell me he hits any harder,” Johnny said, “and I walk back to town!”

  “He doesn’t hit at all,” Ben said; and they walked away.

  Matthilda could have found no cause for complaint, after that, in the averted eyes, the ducked hatbrims, or the wary circlings of cowhands who had to pass Rachel. It was as if she had learned to rattle.

  Chapter Ten

  While it lasted, the lively horse-handling made every day a fiesta, but it was over in less than a week. The colts would have to learn their work as it went along. The cook wagon and the bed wagon began to roll. From here on the corrida would get home only every third or fourth night, coming in long after dark and pulling out before the first light. A couple of hands were left at the home layout, cleaning out the well, or mending saddles, or burning lime; there were always plenty of odd jobs to keep them busy while they served as a garrison. And one of the brothers always came in overnight when the corrida was out. This seemed all the precaution that was needed, for the moon was at deep wane; and even when it waxed again, the Kiowas would remain pinned for one moon more, while their ponies regained weight.

  Almost every day Rachel rode out to the wagons with whichever brother had slept home. The range hands were rounding up, cutting out the beeves that would make up the first drive, and chousing them into bunches that would finally be thrown into one great herd. The Zachary boys worked cattle in the hell-for-leather way Old Zack had learned in the brush country, where you rode full stretch or lost your cow. Often Zeb Rawlins watched the parting of the cattle from his buggy, and Rachel knew he was sometimes angered by what seemed to him a brutal roughing of the stock. But she wasn’t going to worry about old Zeb’s opinions or anything else, while these treasured days of the green-up lasted, to her the most precious of the year.

  Part of it was the good smells, of cows and horses, and leather, and beans boiling, and salt pork frying, sometimes the spice of trampled sage; while every-where, and above all, the fragrance of young grass responding to the rains made a magic like nothing else ever known. It rose upon a new warmth, gentle, moist, and living, from the unlocked vitality of the earth itself—the smell of hope, of promise, of a world reborn. Under the ground and upon it and in the air, every winter-deadened thing awoke, turned young and eager; and human hearts rose singing in answer.

  And partly it was the sounds. From the increasing herds came a continuous bawling that is like no other music on earth, to cow-folks’ ears. Underneath it ran a perpetual soft, deep tone that was the voice of the sod itself under the beating of innumerable hoofs.

  Before long she was sleeping out with the wagons half the time. Matthilda had never been so easygoing with her before. The truth was that Matthilda had been unable to shake off the forebodings she had been made to feel by Kelsey’s appearance on the Dancing Bird. Often when she looked at Rachel she seemed to see a shadow hanging over her, menacing the child’s place in the world, and her will to live—perhaps threatening her life itself; and she was moved to a loving pity, in which she wanted nothing in the world so much as for Rachel to enjoy a free and happy time, in her innocence, while yet she could.

  Out in the overnight camps, Rachel was the only one ever allowed to slee
p in a wagon, sheltered by its bowed canvas. Even Ben and Cash, even the cook, slept on the ground, and would if it were under water. At night the herd was quieter, though never entirely still. When a critter lay down it made a big, contented-sounding “whoof,” as it settled, knees first, into the trampled grass. If there were thunderstorms they would shuffle themselves all night, tense and ready to run, and all hands might have to stay in the saddle. Even on quiet nights the cattle might get restless, for no apparent reason, snuffy and always listening. What did they listen for, spooks? Wolves? They could get themselves strung up until the crash of a falling cigarette ash was enough to explode them, and they would jump and go, all at once. One night when they broke they like to ran down the wagon, rocking it as they blundered past, until it almost turned turtle.

  Singing to the cows seemed to quiet them, and help to keep them from going snuffy, nobody knew just why. Maybe it covered up small sounds that the cattle might think were suspicious, and gave them something meaningless to listen to. Or maybe it kept them assured that the two or three men who rode spur-jingling and saddle-creaking round them all night weren’t up to anything. So all night long some of the hands would be singing out there, while they slowly circled the bedded herd.

  The long rides between the wagons and the house, yellow-slickered in the bursts of rain, were almost the best. It was only when she was alone in the vast-ness of the night that the prairie ever made Rachel afraid. They were getting a lot of rainbows; once she counted eleven in a day. Between showers, all over the prairie, the meadow larks were singing. When she was learning to talk, way back in the first year she could remember, she had known the meadow larks were saying “Happy—new year—to you!” And they were saying it yet.

  But the day came when Rachel realized, with a hard shock of disappointment, that the spring work was almost over. She could not understand how so big a herd as they were going to drive could have been made up so soon. But now the long-winged chutes went up, for a quick road-branding of the herd; and that was always the last thing they did. As the hands began bunching the cattle for the push through the squeezers, Rachel knew the lovely green-up time was done.