by Alan Lemay
“What?”
“You’re a better man than Papa ever thought of being,” she told him.
“Rachel! Me?”
“You’re steadier, and you hold on harder. You stick to your knittin’, where Papa was always getting switched off. Papa could no more stay with what he was doing when the guns and saddles came out than a yearling hound. You’re the one people can tie to, Ben! And count on always.”
“I—but—why, Rachel—” he was dumbfounded. “But, you loved Papa—I know you did. Because—”
“I worshiped him. I would never have known he wasn’t the best man in the world, if I hadn’t known you. But you’re the best man.”
He was silenced; and she didn’t know whether he was touched, or only astonished, and shocked by her heresy.
Presently he leaned over, and gently kissed her hair. He said softly, “I’m right glad you think that, anyway.”
Now? Is this the time?
But he stood up, and with an easy pull of one hand lifted her to her feet. He said, “Now, you take care of everybody, while I’m gone.”
And it was time to get some sleep.
Chapter Thirty
After Ben was gone, the summer ran on; and it was turning into one of the driest they had known since they had been on the Dancing Bird. The grass cured on the stem before it was halfway up, and the range, heavily overstocked the year before, was overgrazed and haunted by dust devils, wherever the livestock used. Trail men who drive late would bust, as most had busted, the last three years in a row.
This year the things that had made Rachel’s childhood happy didn’t seem to interest her any more.
Other years she had trapped pets, often collecting a regular zoo of them. Once she had raised an elf owl, no bigger than a sparrow when it was full-grown. Another time she had spoon-fed a nest of ravens until they flew. For several years one or another of them had come back, from time to time, to squawk for handouts around the stoop, but fewer appeared each year, until no more came home. She had tamed any number of deer mice, and jumping mice. These were magical little creatures, with delicate oversized ears that the sun shone through. If one of them tried to hide in the grass, with no dark place to crawl into, all you could see of it was those sun-shot ears, like two glowing pink flower petals, all alone. Once there had been a kangaroo rat that Ben had caught for her somewhere in the dry, a bouncy, tassel-tailed bit of fluff with no fear of people whatever.
Most exciting, and at the same time most disappointing, had been a coyote pup. Cash had dug it out for her before its eyes were open, and until it was nearly grown it had seemed to be turning into a dog. But it had ended by snapping at her whenever she touched it, and had finally run away. A few times afterward she had seen it sitting on a hummock to watch her from a long way off, but it had never come home again, or answered her call.
But this year what she remembered best was how much work pets make. Only children had much fun, she guessed, and she wasn’t a child any more. Hadn’t been for a long time. She dug up extra tasks for herself, which in other years she had delayed as long as she could. She boiled down antelope blood to a stickum, and made a couple of quarts of percussion caps. She set up the big outside kettles, to begin the annual soap boiling and candle making.
She was trying to forget another task that she knew she must someday undertake. No one had assigned it to her; indeed, she would be prevented if she were found out. Her restless industry was an attempt at escape, for she dreaded this thing, and even saw reason for physical fear. But she could not drive it from the back of her mind. The five hands who were always loafing at home, a different combination every day, were a help in putting off the job she feared. They played poker endlessly, on a blanket laid in the dust by the creek, shifting position with the shade; some of them followed her with their eyes whenever she was in sight. These, with either Cash or Andy always around, gave her an excuse for believing she could not slip away. But her time was running out. July passed, and they were into August; she knew Ben might already be on his way home.
Then the grasshoppers came.
When the first great cloud of them appeared in the north, Rachel didn’t know what they were. They had heard of northern Texas being devastated by them in ’68, but they had not amounted to anything on the San Saba. At first she mistook the strange low darkness on the horizon for a dust storm, and she watched for twisters. The billions of grasshoppers rolled swiftly across the grassland, and only shreds and fibers were left where they touched. The cotton-woods along the Dancing Bird turned to skeletons, with only chewed tags and remnants of leaves left on the branches. The day they were thickest they made it impossible to walk outside. They covered you, and got down your neck, and tangled their spiny legs in your hair. You could not set foot to the ground without crushing them, or lay a hand upon anything without snatching it back from a bristly, kicking handful of them.
It was the grasshoppers that gave Rachel a chance to get away. When they had passed, the cicadas, which everybody called locusts, resumed their metallic shrilling in the bare cottonwoods—what on earth did they find to eat? But the cattle were left standing in helpless bunches upon the stripped land; and the prairie moaned night and day with their bawling. Cash worked as though possessed.
He sent riders in seven directions, hunting for belts and pockets of grass the grasshoppers might have missed. When these were found, the cows had to be moved to them, with Jake Rountree on hand to see that the Rawlins cattle got an even break.
Zeb Rawlins himself was in Fort Worth, seeking a deal with somebody to put together a corrida, with which he wanted Jude to drive a herd of stockers to Wichita with the first cool weather. Jude was the drawback, there; Zeb was not having an easy time finding the men he had to have. But if word went down to him that he was coming out on the short end at home, he might be able to flood the Dancing Bird with gun-toting riders, and take over the whole range.
Cash still came in at night, or sent Andy, with three or four of their crack shots, but only a couple of hands were left home to sleep away the days. They had almost, but perhaps not quite, come into the first days of their next Kiowa Moon.
“One day’s work more,” Cash kept saying, “and we’ll have done what we could.” But at night there would again be just one day’s work more, still ahead.
No excuse was left. Rachel could get away now, and must, if she was ever going to. Early one morning, when the locusts were already grinding away in the heat of sun-up, Rachel saddled a fast pony, and got away unnoticed.
She pointed downstream, and to the east, toward the Rawlinses.
She had told herself she was going there to try to make peace with Hagar. The men were feisty enough, but there was a bare chance that they would draw back from a war if Hagar could be made friendly again. Her chance of getting through to Hagar was obviously not much, but if there was any chance at all she could not forgive herself, ever, if she did not take it.
Or so she had told herself, and told herself again as she rode. Something else in the back of her mind was still unrecognizable in shadows; she would not look at it, or let it out into the light. So well had she suppressed it that she could not have named what it was, even if she had dared to try.
Half a dozen horses shuffled themselves in he Rawlins saddle corral, restless in the morning sun. They watched her approach, and whinnied at her pony, so that she was announced from a long way off. Nothing else stirred around the Rawlins place; the cabin was closed up, tight-shuttered against the morning heat, and the chimney was smokeless. Except for the corralled horses, the place might have been deserted for a long time.
Rachel did not tie. When she had dismounted she led her pony to the door, keeping hold of him, for she was frightened now, more so with every step that she advanced. At the door she raised her knuckles to rap, but still hesitated, all but unable to face the ordeal she had laid out for herself. What, after all, could she possibly say?
She never knocked. The door was suddenly snatched open in front of her,
and Hagar was standing there, glaring at her with a total hostility. The sunlight was pitiless upon the deep lines and rough-nesses of her face, and it was a death’s-head face.
Chapter Thirty-one
Rachel tried to speak, and could not. She was seeing devil-lights come up behind Hagar’s eyes, the same dreadful glow she had seen upon that awful night in this same house when they had heard the story of Hagar’s captivity. She wanted to turn, vault onto her horse, and get away, but not a muscle would move.
“You,” Hagar said. The word was voiceless, a rasping of breath in her throat. She had not seemed to breathe at all, at first, but now she was breathing hard, almost gasping for air. “You,” she repeated. “You dare to come here?”
“I—only—” Rachel could not remember a word that she had ever thought of to say.
“You come here,” Hagar said. “To this house. You come and stand afore me.” She had regained her voice, though it shook, and her words seemed to choke her. “What blasphemy can there be, you would draw back from?”
Looking into the terrible eyes, Rachel was certain Hagar was insane. Yet she still stood there.
“Squaw!” Hagar accused her. “Ki’way squaw! Yet you stand here afore me!” Her voice still shook but rose strongly now. “Red nigger as ever was, yet you dare face up to me? For now we know all. Your own brother put knife to my little girl at No Hope—her dear pretty hair has been seen on his shield! Yes, and he stopped by your place, as he rode to that butchery, didn’t he? Boasted to you of what he would do—and from you rode straight to the massacre! And his knife—your own brother’s knife—it was at work when they cut apart her darling body—past all decent laying out of it—leaving no part with another—”
Overrun by Hagar’s storm of words, Rachel was in bewilderment. Hagar had seemed to accuse Ben, or Andy—perhaps Cash, even, forgetting in her madness that Cash had been far away. But Hagar’s raving still poured on.
“Oh, I know you now! Dear God in heaven, how I know you! For I know the work of red-nigger squaws, when they be nigh a massacre, and get a chance at the bodies. Had you been longside your brother, you would have bloodied your hands like his own. But not again! All Texas knows the truth now, save those too blind to see. You will be struck from the face of this earth. You, and all your kin, and all who give you help or feed you—you’ll be hunted and driven—”
She lost her breath in a hard fit of coughing. Yet through it she managed to force out, “Yet now—you stand afore—me—” Spittle foamed and dribbled at the corners of Hagar’s mouth, and it was flecked with blood. She turned blindly from the door, went to her knees as her crippled feet betrayed her, and clawed herself up again. “Rifle,” she croaked, as if someone were standing there to hand it to her. “M’ rifle—gi’ me m’ rifle—”
The spell broke, and Rachel could leave there. Perhaps she could have moved before, had not some unaccountable inner compulsion held her standing rigid to hear Hagar out. She had a scared moment in which her pony reared and spun away from her, spooked by her billowing skirt as she whirled. The leather burned through her fingers, and she all but lost him. She made cast after cast of the split-rein, while the pony ran backward from her, and she stumbled over her skirt, unable to quiet him. But she got the rein over his neck at last, and a foot in the stirrup; she was no better than lying across the saddle, but with him, as he lit out.
No bullet came. In the Rawlins cabin, Georgia had finally got to her mother, from wherever she had been, and caught Hagar as she stumbled toward the door. Hagar had got down a heavy rifle musket, and was fumbling to seat its coiled Maynard primer.
“Ma! You can’t!” Georgia threw arms around her.
Hagar fought her daughter with an unnatural strength. Georgia’s lip split as an elbow struck her mouth, and a rib cracked as the musket butt drove into her body. Yet she held on; and in a matter of moments Hagar’s cough came back, and the strength went out of her. She lost her grip on the musket, and went to her knees. Georgia picked her up, and carried her to her bed.
Chapter Thirty-two
When Rachel could gain her seat, her knee over the horn, she bent low on the pony’s neck, letting him bolt; and only then looked back. Hagar had not reappeared in the open door. But still she urged the pony flat out and belly to the ground, winging over gullies, sailing high over brush they could more quickly have swerved to pass, wanting only more space behind her.
By the time she pulled up, the pony was shaking as badly as she was, and all the wind was beaten out of both of them by the headlong run. It took her a while to recover herself sufficiently to take a look at what had happened. None of it made much sense at first. The wildness of Hagar’s accusations had the effect of disconnecting all she said from reality, blurring what basic meaning had been in it. Rachel had the impression that Hagar had accused her of taking part in the No Hope massacre.
Going back over it, taking apart what Hagar had said, and looking at each piece of it alone, she found that the meanings became more clear. Hagar had not said Rachel was at No Hope; her reference had been to what could be expected of squaws, if they were present at a slaying. And the accusation of her brother—Hagar had not meant any of the Zacharys. Nor had she meant Seth, who was a savage, but not a red savage. The mad woman had been repeating some part of Abe Kelsey’s babblings. She had called Rachel a Kiowa Squaw, whose brother had ridden with Seth.
Strangely, she felt no real surprise. She could not remember that the possibility had ever come to the surface of her mind; certainly she had never con-ciously considered it. Yet some part of awareness must have been there, someplace. She found herself calm in the face of this answer; it was almost as though she had felt relief, that the long mystery and foreboding were over. I think, now, that I already knew it. I think I must have known it for a long time.
She unsaddled methodically and put away her saddle and bridle. With a corncob she cuffed up the wet back of her pony, so that it would dry without chilling. She walked into the house unexcited and unhurried; yet Matthilda knew what had happened in the first moment that she saw her.
This time Matthilda did not panic. She had known for quite a while that her struggle to stand off the in-evitable was a hopeless one. She said, “You’ve been to the Rawlinses’.”
Rachel nodded. “The bones are out of the tree.” It was an expression they had brought with them from the San Saba, where the Indians had formerly made tree burials; sometimes riders still came upon skeletons in tattered wrappings, high above the ground among the branches.
Neither Cash nor Andy was home that day. More than either Ben or Andy, Cassius followed the crash-on, bust-’em-down, keep-em-hustled tactics their father had brought out of the Big Thicket; and now he was trying to complete the redistribution of the herds in an all-out rush, before the Kiowa Moon came full. The two cow-hands supposed to be garrisoning the home layout were out looking for Rachel—poor trackers, obviously, searching where she had not been.
So Rachel and Matthilda were alone, and now they said what little had to be said about these bones, newly fallen from the tree.
“I should have told you the whole thing straight off, I guess,” Matthilda admitted.
“Is this all of it, this time?”
“Yes; this is all of it.” She told Rachel now how Papa, or Old Zack, as everyone called him, had led a band of volunteers in pursuit of a party of Kiowa raiders, who had cleaned out a whole string of isolated settlers, apparently. This was back before the War, in ’57, but the Kiowas were always bad ones, even then. The raiders had captive children with them, seven or eight, at first; Papa had sworn he would follow them as long as horses made tracks. The Indians never did seem to learn how tenaciously a man like Papa could hold on. He chased them all the way to their village, far up the Salt Fork of the Brazos, and whipped their warriors in a holding action they tried. He was less than an hour behind them, at one point, as the village got away.
That was when he found her. Traveling villages carried all their stuf
f—children, old folks, everything—on drag litters, or travois, which were poles dragged behind a horse, with a buffalo-hide hammock slung between. And there between the travois tracks, sat a white baby, less than one year old—
“How do you know I was?” Rachel asked coolly.
“Why, by your teeth, of course. Seemed you had bounced out of a drag litter, all unnoticed—”
“Indians have teeth. What made you think I was a white girl?”
“It was perfectly obvious. It always has been. It was only long after, when Abe Kelsey got mad at Papa, he started that other outlandish story.”
Matthilda stated it as a simple fact, because that was what it was to her, and always had been; for she had wanted it that way. “Papa carried you more than two hundred miles in his arms,” she said now. “Took him two weeks to get you home. How many wild cows he roped and milked to feed you, we’ll never know. But Papa didn’t mind. He loved you the minute he saw you. And always after. Even more than as if—”
“If I was a captive child, why did nobody ever find out who I was?”
“Maybe we didn’t try too hard—though we did do what we thought we ought to. But you were so dear, and sweet, and we wanted you so—”
“It doesn’t matter any more,” Rachel said.
“Of course not. I don’t know what difference it would make even if that foolish story had been true. There’s lots of Indian blood, in some of the very finest southern families. Sam Houston himself married a Cherokee girl. And General Pickett, who led the brave charge at Gettysburg—he was married to an Oto woman—a north-west kind of Indian. I don’t know how people get so upset.”
Having seen Hagar, Rachel knew how. But she said again, “It doesn’t matter.”
Mama kissed her, and praised her for being so sensible. “You and I aren’t going to be here, anyway, come winter. We have money, now; it’s time to see to your education. We’ll visit a while in New Orleans, first. After that, maybe Charleston; maybe Richmond…”
