The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  You weren’t coming to the house at all. You tried to get back, without I saw you. Rode here to be with him—but didn’t want us to know! I knew it was you made Ben hang my saddle up.

  Georgia exchanged a word or two with Ben. Then both waved at Rachel, and came on at a walk. Rachel saw she wasn’t going to have any chance to talk to her brother at all, not even here in their own house, what with this interloper butting in.

  Sure. Come right on in. May as well, now. Make yourself right at home, just as cool as a hung hog. I’ve had about enough of you! It never occurred to her that Ben could be blamed.

  She was getting ready to fix Ben something to eat, and wondering if she could bring herself to set a plate for Georgia, when Georgia dismounted at the stoop, letting Ben take her pony to the corral.

  “Ben lost his reata,” Georgia said as she walked in. “That’s a man for you. Doesn’t even know where or how, seemingly. Had to come in to get a rope.”

  Rachel must have known that it was jealousy had hold of her, a very different jealousy than she had ever felt when Georgia was fooling around with Cassius. For just a moment she wondered whether she had better start a war she could not finish, or risk an open bust-up with any member of that other family with whom they were already having difficulty enough.

  “Been seeing a good deal of Ben lately, haven’t you?”

  “I help keep the tallies. It frees a man for the work. Anyway, we have to keep a cross-tally. For Pa.”

  “Who’s cross-tallying for Cash? Oh, I forgot. Cash is way far up the Wichita Trail. Out of sight, out of mind. I guess that’s plenty easy, for some.”

  Georgia answered shortly, but reasonably. She had not come looking for this fight, and felt no need of it. “Get this through your head. I’m not bespoke. Not to Cash or anybody else. When I am, I’ll tell you.”

  She moved away, toward the wash bench; and Rachel, turning to the table, picked up the long Bowie knife with which they carved, and cut a paper-thin slice from the pot roast. The run of the honed blade through the meat felt good to her in her present mood. She knew she had said enough. She had a chance to drop it now—the last chance she would have in her life; but she couldn’t let it alone.

  With her back to Georgia she said, “Ben isn’t fixing to settle down. He likes to ride free on the trails.”

  Georgia stood looking at her sideways. She hadn’t angered yet. Her riding had taken the winter softness off of her, and now she was thoughtfully rubbing the palm of one hand on a hip bone. “Neither am I fixing to settle down,” she said. “Not for a while, anyway.”

  “Then why do you keep tolling them on—each behind the other’s back? We have a name for that, where I come from!”

  Georgia’s eyes seemed to go higher in her head, signaling that if Rachel wanted fight she could have it. “Oh, hell, Rachel! Why don’t you quit acting like a brat?”

  “I won’t have you coming between Cash and Ben—you hear me?”

  “I hear you very well,” Georgia said slowly. “You sound like a spying little sneak, to me.”

  Rachel’s head came up. “I am Rachel Zachary,” she said. “Everywhere in—”

  “You’re what?” Georgia got in.

  “Everywhere in Texas, they know who the Zacharys are. And do you know how many people there are in Texas can give a Zachary slack? Not one!”

  “That’s right,” Georgia answered. “It’s a big pity you ain’t one.”

  Rachel stared, no more than puzzled then.

  “You’re no Zachary,” Georgia made it plain for her. “You’re no tittle of relation to a Zachary.”

  “You out of your mind?”

  “Why, I knowed it first time I seen you. Look at yourself! Where’s the Zachary bone? You got bones like a snuff stick. Look at your hide! The sun ain’t hardly touched you, and already you’re the color of a red hog in a mudhole. You couldn’t pass for a Zachary in a thousand years!”

  With shock, with bewilderment, Rachel saw that Georgia believed what she was saying. She stammered out, “How do you think I got here—if—”

  “You’re nothing but a catch-colt, a foundling—picked up bare-nekkid in the road, at that! You don’t know who you be, or what—and you never will! And everybody knows it.”

  Rachel’s lips turned white, and curved in a little smile, while her eyes went wide and fixed. The knife in her hand poised in front of her, edge upward, and she moved toward Georgia, light and quick on the balls of her feet.

  From the bedroom door Matthilda screamed—“Rachel!”

  She stopped short, and the knife clattered from her hand. Before her eyes the room careened and darkened, so that she almost fell.

  Georgia had retreated from her, stumbling over her awkward riding skirt. She was not a girl who scared easily, but this time there was horror in her eyes; for she knew she had never been nearer death in her life. Before Rachel’s vision had cleared she was gone.

  Matthilda held Rachel in her arms, conforting her, crooning to her. “There, now, there…dear girl…dear, dear little girl….Everything’s all right.”

  “What did she mean? Mama—what could she mean?” Rachel was shaking weakly, but her mind was working again.

  “Don’t think about it. Put it all out of your mind—please, Rachel—please!”

  “She believes it. I’d have known if she was making it up. Mama—is it true?”

  Long ago, Matthilda had known this moment might come. In her mind she had rehearsed what she would say, forming two opposite answers, hoping to know when the time came which one to use. One was a straight-out denial, relying upon vehemence and a pretended astonishment. “Why! Shockin’! Fiddlesticks!” The other was meant to be a natural and easy acceptance as of something unimportant. “Why, yes, dear. Of course. Didn’t I ever tell you? Never thought about it, I guess….” An uneasy feeling had remained that neither answer could save the tranquillity she desired for Rachel above all things. Some third way seemed to be hovering just beyond her reach; she never found it.

  But the years had come between, dimming the danger and the need. She had almost been able to forget that Rachel was not her own, because she so wanted to forget. Now as she reached for the answers she had devised she could not remember what they had been.

  She faltered, “Why—why, Rachel—why, I—” And in that moment of groping it became too late.

  “So it’s true, then,” Rachel said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  For almost a week Rachel tried to find herself, while it seemed to her that not a single familiar compass point remained. Her whole identity had been struck away. These familiar people among whom she lived were in reality strangers; they fed and sheltered her by tolerance and charity, not in accordance with her rights, for she had no rights. Sometimes she recalled moments of rebellion, and times she had asserted herself, and she was shamed. There was self-pity in it, and a chill of fear, as if she had been sleepwalking all her life upon the edge of an abyss. It must be people like me who become fancy girls, she thought, without ever having seen one in her life. Mama had sometimes spoken with horror of the dreadful women who preyed upon the cowboys, in the wild towns at the end of the trails, thanking God that her sons would never go near women like that. But a girl who belonged nowhere and to no one couldn’t be expected to care where she was or what she did, Rachel thought now. She wanted to get away, and lose herself where nobody knew her, and who she was couldn’t matter. Yet she did not know how to turn her back on these people who had done everything for her that had ever been done in her life.

  She tried to find out how the Zacharys had come by her in the first place. Matthilda was tempted to invent an elaborate story, giving Rachel an inspiring family history and a romantic orphaning. She would have done it, too, had she not known perfectly well that she would be tripped up by it, soon or late. She compromised by telling part of the truth. Rachel’s natural parents were unknown, she admitted, and this was true. But here she began changing the facts a little bit. Lots of wagon
s were on their way to California, she said, and Rachel had accidentally got left behind by one of them. At a rest-over camp, called Possum Stop. It wasn’t there any more. Nobody knew which wagon, or why the family never came back to look for their baby. Maybe they’d been fooled on where they lost her—looked a long time in some wrong place. Or…it was possible something happened to them…. It came out a whole lot more lie than truth, before she wiggled out of it, perhaps because so little truth was known.

  Matthilda tried to comfort Rachel every way she could think of, for she was as miserable as the girl. She tried reasoning. “Every family has its bad people, and its useless people, and its good people, and its great ones. You are you. You can be what you want to be. What else matters?” She tried religion, in her own conception of it, which was vague, but of high integrity: “God is love. We are his children. We are bound together and sheltered by our love for each other, and His love for us. For love is what God is.” Rachel wasn’t listening.

  She had often told Rachel that men hated to see women cry, and that she must teach herself never to weep before anyone. But when everything else failed, Matthilda herself fell back on tears. Now she let her lip quiver, and her eyes brimmed. “I wanted a baby girl so much. I was so happy making your little clothes. All of us loved you so, and wanted you so—didn’t you want us?”

  Rachel did love Matthilda very dearly; which was not hard, for no gentler spirit could be imagined. Matthilda could be shocked, or hurt, but no one ever saw her angered; and she lived for her children to an all but fatuous degree.

  But now Rachel was cloyed and repelled. She hated herself for it, and she pitied Matthilda, but that was the way she felt. Wanting to be left alone, she pretended she was satisfied, and that everything was all right.

  She asked, “How much do the boys know?”

  “Andy doesn’t know. He wasn’t born, then. And Cassius—well—I don’t believe he ever thinks about such things. Ben knows, of course; he was seven, then. But we promised each other it would be our secret. We wanted you to be just our own.” Then, pleadingly, while those ready tears threatened again: “We don’t need to say anthing to them. Or to anybody. Ever.” She wanted everything put back just as it had been before. But Rachel did not feel that this could ever be.

  All my life I’ll wonder who I am.

  She stayed out of the house all she could. She doubted if either Ben or Andy noticed that anything had happened to her, but she stayed away from them, too, what few times they came in. She was watching the tadpoles in a still slough of the Dancing Bird, without seeing them at all, when a strange new idea came to her.

  Why, then, Ben isn’t my brother. He isn’t even my cousin. He isn’t any relation at all….

  Of course the same thing was true of Cash and Andy, but with them it seemed to make small difference; her affection for them could stay the same, whether they were brothers or just childhood friends. But with Ben it was somehow a peculiarly disturbing, even frightening thought, hard to get near to, after thinking of him as a brother for so long. She circled it skittishly, as a puppy scouts a fascinating new thing that may bite.

  Ben had always been much in her thoughts, a good deal more than the others had ever been. She had never realized before how often she wondered where he was and what he was doing, whenever he was out of sight, which was most of the time. But now she reached into the past, and most of the things she remembered best were mixed up with Ben. They were the only ones in the family who kept playing jokes on each other. Like the time Ben sneaked the little green frog into the water pitcher. Rachel had not let on, but after she refilled his water glass the frog was in that. Ben pretended not to see it—seemed about to drink it down, when Mama squealed. Then they both had laughed so hard, over nothing worth it, seemingly, for the others just stared at them, seeing nothing funny.

  Farther back. There were the talking animals—the dwarf owl, only as big as your thumb; the spotted coyote, the mud hen, and the red mare. For a couple of years, when Rachel was seven-eight years old, Ben had kept bringing home accounts of conversation with such-like critters. They told him all kinds of stories, mostly without much sense to them, and never with any moral, unless it was useless. (“Never stick your head in a clam,” the mud hen had advised him.) Whatever became of them all? They just kind of died out. Perhaps Ben knew when she outgrew them.

  Still farther back, when she was four, five, and six. Moments of mixed terror and delight while Ben was introducing her to horses. She had first been on a horse in his arms, but later had stood barefoot behind his saddle, arms around his neck, while he chased a dodging brush rabbit, and almost roped it. Later, through over-confidence in an old roping horse, he had got her a fall that knocked her senseless; but she hadn’t blamed him. Those were the same years when she had been most afraid of the dark, and sometimes when she had been sent to bed alone he had come and sung to her while she went to sleep. His songs were the same woebegone, bloody, yet somehow soothing ballads the cowhands sang to the cattle: “Pore young dying cowboy, Never more he’ll roam, Shot right through the chest five times, He ain’t never coming home….” Could it be that Ben had been only eleven years old when she was four? She couldn’t remember when he hadn’t seemed as big and safe as a fort.

  Even before that. When she was three, and had nightmares, she remembered running in her nightie, over floors icy to her bare feet, to jump into Ben’s bunk; for he was the one who never sent her away.

  In a few days she was thinking: All I want is to wait on him, and take care of him. Even if he married somebody else, I’d be happy if I could just work for him all my life. But later she knew it wasn’t so. No—I couldn’t stand for anybody else to have him. I’d rather die.

  She began to light up again; and Matthilda was so relieved to see it that she never dared to ask her what had come over her.

  Rachel sent a note out to Georgia, next time Andy stopped home. “I take pen in hand to say I’m right sorry,” she wrote. “I had no call to act up so. You taken me by surprise, first off. But I see now you told me something I bad needed to know, and I’m right thankful.”

  Georgia’s prompt answer was scrawled on a leaf from a tally book, and appeared to have been written in the saddle. During a fit of pitching, Rachel criticized, but was glad to get it. “Freind Rachel,” it began, and went on to express relief. She hadn’t told anybody what their Donnybrook was about, and hoped Rachel hadn’t. All Ben knew was that she “got run the Hell out with a bucher Nife.” Laughed fit to die every time he throwed it up to her. What she needed was her mouth sewed up, Georgia finished.

  Whatever it was the Rawlins family had gone so sour about seemed either to have been withheld from Georgia, or had not affected her. So they fixed it up, as they thought, and just about in time. For now the moon was coming full again; and this time the Kiowa war ponies would be tough and full of run.

  Chapter Seventeen

  During grass season they were under the Kiowa Moon only a few days more than half the time; but the fort-up periods were such a nuisance that they seemed to come directly on top of each other, and to last forever.

  While the moon was full you must never leave the house unarmed, and even in broad daylight you must never go alone beyond gunshot of support. You must fort up every night, battle shutters barred and weapons ready, as if certain of attack while you slept. After dark you could strike no light, and even the ashes on the hearth must be drenched, lest a coal should wake and show a gleam. You must remember where the plaster-covered loopholes were in the walls, and be ready to knock them open with a blow. When a Kiowa scout came feeling out your defenses, you had better whistle a shot or two over his head without hitting him, as a persuasion to look farther. The water barrel must be kept filled from the well by the creek, the homemade ammunition kept in supply, the gunlocks taken down over and over. There was a lot more. The very success of all these precautions made them the more difficult to maintain; for it was pretty hard to keep up to scratch when nothing ever act
ually happened.

  Ben had been saving the work near home for the Kiowa Moon. Of the six hired hands held back from the drive, he had meant to give half to Zeb, for the Rawlins defense, but Zeb, perhaps in a spasm of thrift, had accepted only two. Ben could only hope that the Rawlinses were getting a little something done, now and then, over at their end of the range; for though the Rawlinses were maintaining a taciturn truce, they could not now join forces in a single range crew every day. Of his remaining four men, Ben picked the best shots, a couple of boys named Tip and Joey, for a permanent home guard; while with Andy and the other two he got on with the calf branding, bringing all hands in every night.

  Rachel and Matthilda, who were cooking for them all, made breakfast in the dark, over a little Indian-sized fire that they masked as best they could. But Ben waited for daylight before he saddled now, and spent a while cutting for sign—sometimes a couple of hours, before leading off for the work. Even so, the boys came in dog-tired at the edge of night. They ate enormously and in silence, and were asleep with their clothes on before the women could wash up and get out of the room. Yet loneliness was banished from the Dancing Bird while so many people were around, even if they were sound asleep.

  Rachel watched her chance to catch Ben alone. For a couple of days it seemed as though there was no way this could be done. He had turned short of speech, and was showing strain, as if he did not like what his houndlike casting told him was happening around there, during these moonlit nights. Sometimes she thought he had guessed what she was up to, and was wary of being pinned. But on the third day of the Kiowa Moon he broke a stirrup leather, and had to stop in the saddle shed to rig another. And there she cornered him.