The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  Always ready to run again, Rachel thought, every time the truth about me catches up. She said, “Could you ever really bring yourself to leave Ben, and Cash, and Andy?”

  For a fraction of a moment, then, the glint of a tear threatened, but Matthilda forced it back. She was ready with this answer, too. She had often con-trolled them by letting them see she was hurt; but she had expressed self-pity so seldom that she could use it now, to confuse the trail.

  “We must be crazy people,” she said, “to live in a leaky mud hut, at the utter end of desolation, and put our money down a hole. The boys find their work here; emptiness has some strange pull, for men on horses. But it’s a dreadful thing to be a woman, out on the prairie. A woman on the prairie is an unwanted thing. Nothing but a burden and a tie-down, keeping the ones she loves from doing what they want to do. Until they can’t stand it any more, and run away. Cassius will be gone soon, and Andy too. And poor Ben—he’ll feel he must stay by us, drawing into himself, and growing old too soon….”

  Rachel saw now how drawn Matthilda looked, how terribly tired. She made Matthilda lie down, and she sang the herd lullaby, about the pore cowboy, shot five times right through his dang chest, until Matthilda smiled and dozed. Then she slipped away.

  Maybe they got too much practice in facing up to the worst, out there. Rachel never doubted for a moment that she was of Kiowa blood. Too many things bore it out besides the conviction Abe Kelsey’s statement had borne for so many. She remembered how Matthilda had always kept at her to wear a sunbonnet and cotton gloves when she went outdoors in the summer heat. How all the lemons they ever got hold of had been wasted trying to make creams to keep her bleached. How she never had been allowed to wear moccasins with beads, or any kind of an Indian-looking thing…

  The Kiowas had been stealing Spanish-Mexican women, and Texican women, for somewhere up-wards of half a century, and raising stolen white children as their own. Many Kiowas had the same Spanish kind of olive skin as she had—maybe lighter than her own would be, if she were out in the weather as much. And plenty of them had wavy chestnut hair, far less Indian than her own, which was straight black. Lost Bird had auburn hair; and his eyes—

  She felt her stomach try to turn over as she remembered Lost Bird’s eyes. Now she took down the little mirror that hung above the wash bench, and studied her own eyes. They had always looked the color of the mud in the bottom of a tadpole puddle, to her. But this time she took the mirror to the darkest corner, and saw that her eyes were nearly black. Then she stood sideways at a window and watched her eyes turn green. And when finally she faced toward the bright sky she saw her eyes go paler than a peeled grape; doubtless they would flash like pale steel, like the knife in Lost Bird’s eyes, out in the full sun. Is that why he looked familiar, when I never saw him before? She could find no other resemblance. But she could hear Hagar saying, “Your brother stopped by, on his way to No Hope….”

  She went to the slop bucket, and was sick. But when she had drunk a pint of cold water, and washed her face, she knew what she had to do; at once, tonight, before Ben got home. If only Cash and Andy would stay out one night more…

  Nightfall did not bring them home.

  She located a sheath knife, and a belt that would carry it, and punched holes in the belt so that she could strap it on. It was all she was going to take with her. She had no destination, and no plan, except to get away; to the west likely, and try for the cap rock breaks. Her brothers were trackers, all of them, but so was she, enough of one to know how to break her trail.

  That night as she and Matthilda ate supper alone, she could not help thinking that she was eating in this house for the last time, and a lump hurt in her throat, so that she could hardly swallow her food. But Matthilda was quiet too, so that Rachel did not have to talk; and the failing light helped her not to give herself away. They went to bed, and Rachel lay listening for Matthilda’s breathing to become regular, so that she could creep out of the house.

  But that was the night the travails of Matthilda’s life caught up with her. Something closed in, and something bore down, and something gave way.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Matthilda slept lightly, nervously. The twilight seemed to hold on forever, and when at last it was gone the moon rose earlier, and shone more brightly through the skeleton cottonwoods, than they had expected of it, so soon. Four times before midnight Rachel stole out of the bedroom, and each time Matthilda came broad awake.

  “Rachel—you up—”

  “Drink of water. It’s hot tonight.”

  Then Matthilda would like some water too, so that she was fully waked up again. And the patient waiting began all over again.

  An hour after midnight Matthilda began to moan. Rachel thought her to be having a nightmare, and tried to get out of the room. But Matthilda’s voice sounded, faint but wide awake, through the warm dark. “I don’t feel very good.” It was almost a whimper. “I have the awfullest pain….”

  The pain seemed to be right in her middle, so they decided it was indigestion. Rachel closed the shutters, and saw to it that the loopholes were all plugged, so that she could build a fire. They had drawn the coals at dusk, so she had to start anew, setting tinder to burning with a flash of powder from the snaphaunce firelighter. She set a kettle on, but lighted no candles, and fumbled by memory for the herbs she supposed she should put together, verifying them close to the fire. Finally she made a brew, believed to be good for indigestion, out of peppergrass, ginger, and some pinches of stuff such as mandrake root.

  This concoction, brought scalding hot, must surely have been the worst thing she could have dished up, for it induced hard vomiting. A little later, before her breath was entirely recovered, Matthilda gave a long, groaning cry of pain, and went unconscious.

  The next three hours went to make up the longest night Rachel had ever lived in her life. Matthilda regained consciousness in half an hour, but moaned continuously until daylight. She tried to lie quiet, but could not; the sounds were wrung out of her against her will. Finally she took to putting words to the moans, in an effort to get control. “Oh, mercy, mercy…Oh, mercy, me…Oh, dear, oh dear me, oh deary, deary me…Oh, mercy, mercy…” On and on forever, without end. Sometimes she asked for water, but if she swallowed a mouthful she could not keep it down.

  When Cash and Andy rode in together, in the first dawn, Rachel knew she had never been so glad to see anybody before. Matthilda tried to smile at them. “Something I ate,” she whispered. They felt her forehead for fever, but she was wet with sweat. A little later she seemed to doze, out of sheer exhaustion; or perhaps she lost consciousness again, for her breathing sounded strange.

  “Seems like a busted blood vessel,” Andy thought. “Somewhere in her chest.”

  “You don’t know what it is any better than I do,” Cash set him back. “All I know, it don’t look like any natural kind of bellyache, to me. I’ve got to get help.”

  Rachel was appalled. “All the way to—where? The Rountrees’? You won’t be back before tomorrow night!”

  “I’ll fetch Georgia Rawlins.”

  “They wouldn’t let her come here if the world was falling down!”

  “She’ll come.”

  Matthilda rested more easily after the sun came up. Her breathing became more natural, and she slept almost peacefully through the middle of the day.

  Cash brought Georgia late in the afternoon. They came in at the gallop on beat-out horses—not wind-broke, but spent to the last notch that they could be without permanent damage. They would not work again in a month. Cash let Georgia down at the stoop, threw her saddle on the ground, and turned loose her horse. “Got to look around a minute!” he shouted, and rode to the corral to get a fresh pony.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Andy asked the outdoors, afraid to speak to Georgia.

  “He’s been fretty the last four miles,” Georgia told them. “Something spooked him. Didn’t say what it was. Let’s see your mother.”

>   Matthilda had gone worse again, seemingly half conscious but unable to recognize Georgia, and breathing with great labor. Georgia asked when it had begun, and looked overpowered. “This is bad. She’s bust a blood vessel.”

  “I told you,” said Andy.

  “Shut up and fetch my saddle bags…. We’ve got to quieten her what we can. Keep her warm. Wish we could get dry sheets around her. But I don’t dast mess with her. I sure hope I’m mighty wrong. She looks a whole lot like a goner.”

  She pounded some dried leaves and pieces of root into a powder, and made a tea of it. They got about a half a cupful into Matthilda; it was the first liquid she had kept down so far. “Make her sleep, some, maybe. Won’t do no other good, though.”

  Rachel tried to find out how Georgia had got away from her mother.

  “Ma? Never asked her. Just lit out.”

  “Don’t she know you’re gone?”

  “Bound to. Saw me ride off with Cash, I reckon.”

  “But what will you tell her when you go back?”

  “Hell, Rachel, how do I know? Maybe I’ll tell her I’m carryin’ by him. Whatever seems needful.”

  “She’ll kill you!”

  “Not me. Oh, she’s game to pull a trigger, all right! But me, I’m all the girl she’s got left.”

  That was the nearest they came to talking about Rachel’s bad time with Hagar. Listening, they became aware that Matthilda’s breathing was already quieter. Rachel was impressed and Georgia explained that it seemed like there had been a power of sick folks around, wherever she was. But she did not look confident; perhaps she was not entirely sure she had not killed Matthilda, with her witch-woman herbs.

  Now Andy roused them up, speaking in a low tone, but urgently. “Stand over by the windows. No—one to each side. Get ready to bar them up. Not yet!”

  They could hear the hoofs of Cash’s horse coming in, walking quietly. Standing by the windows, but out of line, they could not see Cash, but they knew he had given Andy some kind of signal.

  “We got trouble,” Andy told them. “But don’t touch the shutters! We can’t let on we know it. Lest they never let Cash get here.”

  He pulled a loophole plug from the door, and stood behind it, ready to swing it open. The sound of the walking hoofs came on, and on. How could hoofs so near approach for so long, yet never seem to get here? Suddenly Andy swung the door wide, and Cassius, bent low over the horn, jumped his horse across the stoop and intp the room. Andy slammed and barred the door behind him. “Now fort up,” he shouted.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “I figure there’s about a dozen of ’em,” Cash said as he dismounted. His horse seemed enormous, in here, making the house and everything in it look smaller than they had ever seen it before; the wooden floor boomed under the hoofs. “Knock open a loophole in the west wall. Rachel—get one open in Mama’s room. Georgia, pull the slide on the north lookout—better bust out the glass.”

  They posted themselves as he told them, each alone, one to each side. And after that there was silence in the house. Matthilda seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Half an hour passed, and the sun went down. The shuttered interior darkened, but a clear dry light remained outside; it would not dwindle enough to harm marksmanship for the next two hours.

  Cassius was trying to listen. “Georgia, for God’s sake, stop that damned clock!”

  They had not heard the familiar ticking at all until Georgia stopped the pendulum, and the little painted ship on its painted sea rocked no more. When the ticking had stopped it left an emptiness that fairly rang in their ears.

  “See there!” Andy spoke from the west loophole. “One’s riding in the creek bed. I can bead right on his head!”

  “I see him,” Cash said.

  “You want I should—”

  “Let him come on.”

  Up over the cutbank of the Dancing Bird, squarely in front of the house, came a single Indian rider. “Lost Bird,” Cash said, so that they all could hear it.

  He came as he had come before, except that he rode bareback, and with a war bridle, a single cord tied on the lower jaw. He was without war paint, and his shirt was on; a four-inch silver concho shone in his hair. And this time they could see he carried no weapon at all. It was a strange thing for a Kiowa to present himself like that, entirely unarmed. But that was the worst thing about Kiowas; they were always doing something original, unpredictable, so you could never figure what kind of way they were fixing to come at you.

  “That gray he’s riding is a famous racer,” Cash said with a peculiar detachment.

  Lost Bird’s right hand was raised in the peace sign. He did not lower it as he pulled up five yards out, directly in front of the door, and made his pony stand like a rock.

  Cash said something in Kiowa, and Lost Bird began to speak. Andy had returned to his station. Nobody was unglued from his loop to see Rachel creep through the shadows to one of the front shutter loopholes.

  She remembered the smooth, beautifully molded face, the small, pleasant-appearing smile, the dark-reddish glow in the thick braids. But his eyes were only dark slits now. Rachel felt the peculiar revulsion that she had felt before. Lost Bird was speaking slowly in Kiowa, a phrase at a time; and he matched his words with the conventional sign language of the prairies that they all knew. So this time she knew what he said.

  “We many times take your people,” he said, and though the sign language does not translate well in its literal meanings, the thought came through clearly; “You come, you want them, you buy. You pay us. We let you take them back. Many times. All friendly. All good.”

  Cash said something through the door in Kiowa, and Lost Bird acknowledged it with a brief grin. But he went on with the speech he had doubtless carefully prepared. “Long ago,” Lost Bird’s signs said, “you take a child of ours. You take my sister. We look for her very long. Now we find. Now we come. We want her back now. She is ours. We pay. You pay us, now we pay you. All friendly, all good. I give ten horses for my sister. You give me. I take home.”

  Cash spat out an angry Kiowa phrase.

  “Tell what you want more. Price is good. But I give more,” Lost Bird’s hands said. “I do not leave this place without my sister. I have twenty-two men. You have two men, three women—one very old. No good.”

  Cassius raised his carbine to the loophole, aimed steadily, and put a bullet close past Lost Bird’s ear. The blackpowder smell was plain in the room as he reloaded. Outside, the gray war pony quivered, but did not move its feet. Lost Bird was smiling, and the smile expressed more contempt than he could have shown in any other way. He believed he knew whom he was dealing with, and how their minds worked, and what Cassius, particularly, would do and would not do.

  “You shoot well,” his hands said. “You do not shoot to hit. You hit me, nobody in your house will see the sun again. You know that. Now listen. I tell you all this again.” He started over with the same prepared speech as before. “Few times, we take your people….”

  Rachel startled Cash by speaking almost in his ear. He didn’t know how she got there, standing at his elbow. “This is no good,” she said.

  “You get back where I put you!” he ordered her, through his teeth. He was abruptly, bitterly angered, for her intrusion threatened a betrayal of all their long efforts to shield her.

  “There isn’t going to be any fight,” she said. “Let me by. I understood what he said, this time.”

  “Never mind them damned Indian lies! You’re going to—”

  “He’s telling the truth. I’ve known all about it for a long time. I’m going to end all this trouble now!”

  “You’ll not go out there, because I’ll stop you,” he said; but he was less sure of himself, thrown off by her revelation.

  “Maybe you can stop me. But they’ll be in here, while you have your hands full with me. Now let me go.

  He stared at her, bewildered by the flat, dead-sounding tone in which she threatened outlandish, unbelievable things. “Is every
body crazy but me?” he demanded. “By God, I know how to settle this!”

  Out in the clear twilight, Lost Bird was patiently, slowly, going through his smooth, clear signs. His gruff Kiowa phrases came steadily to them, through the door. Cash raised his carbine again, and instantly fired. Lost Bird’s head jerked violently with the impact of the bullet; he was dead as he fell. The whole back of his skull seemed to be gone as he lay face down in the dirt. The gray war pony shied, found itself free, and stampeded.

  Cash had fired to kill, from cover and without warning, at a range from which failure was impossible to him; while Lost Bird had sat horse before him, unarmed, fully exposed under the peace sign. Any justification would have to be found in the necessity Cash had believed governed his decision. He never thereafter spoke one word in his own defense, or gave any sign of regret.

  “Oh, Cash, Cash!” Rachel cried out. “They’ll never draw back now! They’ll fight till we’re dead!”

  “You can bet on it,” Cassius said.

  “They’ll never let up, so long as—”

  He cut in harshly. “Then there’s no use you going out, is there? Now get back to your loop!”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  For a few moments stillness held outside. The zinging of the locusts in the cottonwoods by the creek had been silenced by the gunshots; and this made the quiet unnatural, as if the whole prairie lay stunned.

  Before the locusts could begin again, the “Wa-wa-wa-wah!” of a war cry sounded from the creek, immediately followed by an uncountable chorus. The creek bed seemed to be full of Kiowas, while yet no Indian but the dead Lost Bird could be seen. Two rifles slammed, down there; then a ragged volley. The windowpanes burst outside the battle shutters, and fell tinkling.

  “Close your slide,” Cash called to Georgia, who stood at the back of the room, at the north lookout. “Get down on the floor!”