The Unforgiven (14 page)

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.

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 stuff—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…”

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.