The Unforgiven (2 page)

As the yellow candlelight came up, the air outside seemed to turn a darker and more icy gray. Rachel closed the heavy shutters, as they must always do when they made a light inside. The north lookout was now a lightless eye, staring in at them. Rachel stepped onto the chest to pull shut its slide, and a shiver crossed her shoulders.
Somebody stepped over my grave
, she thought. It was what they said when they shivered without feeling cold. She had half expected to find a weird ancient face looking in from close outside. “What
are
they doing out there?” she complained, her patience dwindling.

But when her brothers finally came in, their reaction to her story was just as big a letdown as her mother’s had been. She built it up all she could, this time, but Cassius was washing and spluttering, and Andy was noisily trying to straighten a spur, all the way through.

“I don’t know what’s got into this soap,” Cassius said when she slowed up. “Bites like a black-foot weasel.”

“Same soap,” his mother told him. “You’ve chapped your hands again. Those buck gloves fend nothing but rope burns. You should have worn your mittens, like I said.”

“Cash! Did you by any chance,” Rachel demanded, “hear one word I said?”

“Oh, sure. Sounds a little like some old joker stands in need of horse flesh. Andy, remind yourself to go put up the bars. So’s we’ll know where at to start tracking from, come morning.”

Rachel could have killed him. Cassius Zachary, twenty-one, was slim, black-haired, and was starting a mustache, not long enough to twist, yet, but sharply trimmed. He did nearly everything well, and carried himself as if he knew it. Ben often said Cassius had most of the brains in the family, and sometimes this seemed to be true. Like the easy way he picked up languages. Lots of people spoke Spanish, of a sort, and some even a dribble of Comanche; but Cassius could handle the weird Kiowa tongue, which had seventy-four vowels, besides a lot of clicks and nasals, and had to be sung. Of course, Ben spoke it, too, but only because he had labored and sweat over it. Not Cassius! He had heard it, hadn’t he? So he knew it. Naturally. Nothing to it. Matthilda said he had learned to read when he was three. And hadn’t cracked a book since, Ben sometimes added. Cassius liked raising hell and cattle. Didn’t want to know anything else.

And he could come up just a little bit too happy-go-lucky for any use, Rachel was thinking now.

But Andy, by his want of sense, went back on her worst of all. He was not yet sixteen, but already tall, and moved well, so that strangers must have thought him older. As small children he and Rachel had stood together against a world of adults, consoling each other when wronged and left out of things. Rachel had always liked to think she had raised Andy herself, almost single-handed, so that he was virtually her own little child. Only, there wasn’t much left of that illusion any more. He was out-growing her, getting away from her; he could ride horses she could not ride, and go places she could not go, disappearing into the vast unknown world of men. All this made him the more exasperating when he came up with something stupid, and he was an expert at it. So now he looked as owlish as he ever had at eight years old.

“Don’t you know what that was you saw? That—” he made it weighty—“was the Ghost of the Bandit!”

This sober idiocy left Rachel speechless, so Cassius took it up. “Ghost? In all this wind? He’d blow away.”

“What about the Skeleton in Spanish Armor, down on Devil’s River?
He
don’t blow away.”

Cassius pretended uncertainty. “Well—no; but—you take all that ironware he’s got up in—”

“How about that whole platoon of spooks, down on Phantom Hill? Seen time and again, drilling in line!”

“I know, but is it a good
straight
line? Weather regardless?”

“It’s perfect,” said Andy stoutly.

Most of the feel of danger had left since the men came in. But they had spoiled her story, and Rachel was hurt. One of the little sadnesses that women endured out here in the lonelies was that of never having anything to tell their menfolk when they came home. If the first potato had sprouted in the root cellar, or a jumping mouse had eaten out of Rachel’s hand, that was news to be treasured, told to each separately, and discussed at length. Mostly there was nothing at all. Quite a few pronghorns came in sight of the house, of course, and blacktail deer; often they saw a coyote, sometimes a lobo. But the men saw such things all the time. You couldn’t interest them with anything short of a bear. And tonight, when for once Rachel had been full of a story to tell them, they wouldn’t listen.

She drew into herself, and shut up. Next evening, as twilight closed off another dark, windy day, she felt haunted for a little while, and stole a few glances at the north ridge, to see if the sinister figure would reappear. Nothing happened, though, for two days more.

Then, at the end of the third day, the stranger came again.

Matthilda saw him first. This was hardly to be expected, for her eyes were far from the best in the house. One of the things that made Matthilda look younger than she was, lively and interested always, was her bright wide-eyed gaze, which may well have been the result of trying hard to see. On this night, though, she had not far to look. She had taken her sewing basket to a south window, and as her hands worked she kept glancing at the prairie across Dancing Bird River, in hope of seeing Ben coming in. She was very often there. It seemed to Rachel that Ben had hardly got out of sight before Mama had started watching for him.

Rachel was in the root cellar, a sort of pit they had dug as an afterthought into the hill behind. It went down four feet below the level of the floor, and could be got into, awkwardly, through a hole at the base of the wall, behind a wooden slide. Fumbling down there in the dark, Rachel had filled her apron with potatoes, when she heard her mother gasp. Immediately wood clattered on wood as a chair went over; and Rachel bumped her head as she came scrambling out. Matthilda stood at the window, so motionless that she looked rigid, staring at something outside. Rachel cried out, “Mama!” and the potatoes bumped across the floor as she went to her mother.

Just outside, no more than two long steps from the window, sat a strange-looking rider; and Rachel knew at once that this was the man she had seen on the ridge. The startling thing was the concentration with which he leaned from the saddle to peer in. Rachel saw a colorless straggle of beard, some stringy long hair flying loose from under a pulpy wool hat, and an Indian-trade kind of rifle too long for a saddle boot, carried across the withers. And the horse—how could so old a horse be living, let alone worked? Age had turned it a flea-bit white, showing patches of black hide, and scabs of mange. The lip dangled slack below long outthrust teeth, and the unseeing eyes had the staring look of pain peculiar to animals of enormous age. Not a muscle stirred in horse or man, yet the wind made a flicker of movement all over them—a small flying of lank hair and wispy mane, a shimmer of tatters.

The sky was full of mud again, and what little light it had left was behind the horseman, so that he sat in a darkness of his own. A man without a face, except for that wind-wavered suggestion of a beard. And yet, even in that first moment of shock—was there something familiar about him? This frightened instant had a feeling of being relived, as if the same thing had happened someplace else, long ago.

“Pull back,” Rachel whispered. “Mama—come away!”

Matthilda said uncertainly, “Can he—can he see us?”

Perhaps there was some doubt of it, what with the darkness of the room, and a possible sky reflection on the panes between, but Rachel felt him to be looking straight into her face. “Of course he can!
Please
don’t stand there—” She drew her mother out of line.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Matthilda said, bewildered. “I just looked up and—”

Her daughter whisked to the door, and the Sharp & Hankins came off its tree nails into her hands. The sliding barrel clashed twice, clambering a cartridge. Matthilda cried out, “Wait—don’t—”

“Ben said to—” Rachel jumped the heavy bar from its slot, and forgot what she was saying as the door creaked wide.

“Rachel! Don’t go out there!”

But Rachel was only standing on the stoop, looking frightened, and a little silly, as she stared up-creek and down. No one was in sight as Matthilda came to her side.

“He—he’s around the corner of the house,” Matthilda whispered.

“Let me go! I’ll put a ball through his hat!”

“No! You come in here—please, Rachel, please—”

That breathy, frightened note had not come so strongly into her mother’s voice since Rachel could remember. She hesitated, listening for a sound of hoofs, but the great organ-toned wail of the wind through the cottonwoods scoured away all sounds. Strands of hair whipped across her face, stinging her eyes. Suddenly Rachel wanted to be inside, behind the heavy door, within the thick walls. She was looking meek as she obeyed.

Matthilda’s hands were unsteady as she barred the door; she crossed to warm them by the fireplace, so that her back was to the room. This was not like her. The stranger hadn’t actually done anything much. Maybe he had been trying to see if anybody was home, never dreaming that women lived here. At first glimpse of them he had fled like a scalded cat. Yet Matthilda, always first to make allowances, had no word of reassurance. She seemed numbed.

Rachel said, “We know that man, from someplace. I’ve seen him before, a long while back.”

“Fiddle,” said Matthilda absently.

But Rachel was beginning to remember, not the man, but a happening that was the same. Long ago—six or seven years?—when they lived on the San Saba…. She began setting the table in shaky silence.

This time the boys came soon. Rachel saw Andy, first, jogging homeward around the upper bend of the Dancing Bird; and in a few moments more Cassius appeared, looking so sure of himself, so easy in the saddle, that Rachel was comforted in the uncertainty of this dusk. Still, neither of them, nor the two together, could quite take the place of Ben, who could make everything seem all right just by coming into sight.

She held her tongue when they came in, waiting to see what her mother would tell them; for she had a wicked little plan. A name that had been playing tag with her, teasing her by dancing just out of her reach, had now come clear into her mind. She judged it would serve to get Cash’s attention this time. Certainly there had been enough fuss and to-do—yes, and mystery made of it, too—that time on the San Saba, long ago.

“Any word of Ben yet? Any sign at all?” Matthilda always asked that first, nowadays; although, unless she was thinking of smoke signals, it was hard to see how she expected any kind of word to outtravel Ben himself.

“Nope.” Cassius scooped a handful of homemade soft soap and began to wash. “You all have a good day around here?” He always asked that, too.

“Well…” Matthilda wavered, and would not meet Rachel’s eyes. “Just a middling ordinary day, I reckon.”

Quiet again, under the sound of wind, while Cassius bent low to souzle his face and hair. Rachel waited a moment more, watching her mother. Then—“Abe Kelsey was here,” she said.

The effect was explosive. Cassius straightened so sharply his heels lifted off the floor. Rachel was dumbfounded; she had almost scared him through the roof. Well, not scared him, maybe—startled him, more like. His eyes went to his mother, not to Rachel, and held with a hard questioning.
Good lord, I’ve pulled a trigger. What trigger?

She had been stretching it, of course; she had no memory of what anybody named Kelsey looked like, way back yonder. She had meant to admit, in a minute, that she hadn’t really recognized the stranger. She guessed she had better snatch that mysteriously powerful name back, and in a hurry. Confession was on the tip of her tongue. Then suddenly it was too late for that.

“I was going to tell you,” Matthilda said to Cassius, and her voice was coaxing him not to be mad.

Rachel’s heart contracted. Her mother had recognized the stranger and had not let on. When you live so close to people, and they hold things back from you, it makes halfseen things stir in shadows that come all around you. Part of the cabin fever…. Cash still stood there, water from his face running down his limp old buckskin shirt, and puddling on the floor from his dropped hands.

“She doesn’t mean he came in,” Matthilda said. She was faltering now, and near to tears. “He—just sat out there and—looked—”

“How long ago?”

“Well—I guess—it might have been—”

“Twenty minutes,” Rachel said clearly.

Cash shifted as if he would rush outside, but changed his mind without moving a step. “But the light was failing. You couldn’t have told if—Wait. How far out was he?”

“About seven feet,” Rachel said. “He leaned down close, to look in.”

“Seven—” He stared at her blankly a moment and his next question fairly crackled. “How come
she
knew him?” he demanded of his mother. “Did you tell her who—”

Matthilda shook her head, and her eyes were ominously shiny. “Why, the child can’t have seen Abe since—why, she can’t have been more than ten years old. And not even then, unless—and anyway, he’s so changed, Cash, just dreadfully. It’s uncanny she remembers him now.”

More uncanny than you think. This man was faceless, for all I saw.
Aloud Rachel said, “A man of that name had an ambuscade with Papa, back in the earlies.”

“Papa had falling-outs with a lot of people.” Cash reached for a towel, wishing he were shed of the whole thing.

“But Kelsey kept nosing around.”

“The child’s right, Cassius,” Matthilda murmured.

“There was something more to it,” Rachel said. “Something queer, that I was never let to know.”

“All you need to know is I don’t want him around! Let him smell gunpowder—you all hear me?”

It was as if Ben himself had come into the room. No, more as if Papa had come into the room; Ben was quieter. Andy was sitting there gaping, with no more idea of what was happening than Rachel had. Mama went to the table, so that she was behind Andy and Rachel; but Rachel knew at once that Mama put a finger to her lips. “Don’t talk so much in front of the children,” Rachel put it into words for them.

They made no answer to that. “Bring your carbine,” Cassius told his brother, making his tone ordinary. “We’ll put the gate poles up.”

As they let themselves out, the wind whisked at everything in the house, and set the pans to swinging, but perhaps it was less violent than before. The women moved immediately, both at once, to get supper on. The wheels of daily living began to turn again, as they must always turn, no matter what.

“He’s going back where he came from, now,” Matthilda said, and Rachel knew she meant Abe Kelsey. “Hear how the wind’s dying? Going down more and more, as he gets farther and farther away.”

It was the kind of sign some of the Indians believed. The Zacharys took no stock in such heathenisms, but out here you could sometimes get mixed up, and confuse the things you really believed with things that just sort of came with the country. But it was true that the wind was abating. This should have made the night a better one for sleep, but it did not. Their bedding was turning clammy again for want of sun, so that they were chilled and sweated, seemingly both at once. Rachel knew she should have baked their blankets before the fire, but had put it off, hoping for a chance to get the outdoor smell of sunshine into them.

Perhaps it was the very quiet that woke her in the first hour after midnight, so lightly she slept that night. Once she was full awake, she heard her mother crying, two yards away, in the other bed. Matthilda wept so softly, her face pressed so hard into her pillow, Rachel never would have heard her at all if the wind had held.