The Unforgiven (5 page)

Five of the Rawlinses arrived next day, to visit overnight while Zeb Rawlins and Ben straightened out their affairs.

“Let’s not mention Abe Kelsey to them,” Matthilda asked of Rachel. She made it oddly confidential, and urgent.

“Why?”

“It just isn’t needful. I can’t see it’s needful at all!” Tears came easily to Matthilda’s eyes, but Rachel was surprised, and a little shaken, to see them appear now. “Promise me. Please promise!”

It was the last thing she said to Rachel before their visitors came.

Zeb Rawlins and his wife, Hagar, appeared first, with a team and rig. All hands but Rachel and Matthilda were out horse hunting; they used ten horses to the man, so driving in a hundred and fifty head more was the first task of the spring work. The Rawlinses’ two grown boys were out with the hands, and Georgia Rawlins, nineteen, had tagged along, as Rachel would have done had she been allowed. Zeb and Hagar Rawlins made a peculiar couple, unlike in most ways, yet held uncommonly close together by the circumstance that each had a handicapping “infirmity,” of which they never spoke, and to which neither yielded an unnecessary inch. “Two old crocks,” one of them might say with curious tenderness, when realizing that the other was concealing pain; but never a word more.

The nature of Zeb’s infirmity had been unclear. Zeb was tall sitting down, and short standing up; his thick arms and shoulders had the great strength that sometimes goes with this build. But he moved with a slow, ponderous step, and always traveled by team, unable to mount a horse or sit a saddle. The Zacharys, inventing an explanation, had once believed that Zeb carried a bullet in his heart. Later the boys had learned what Zeb had was a “rupture”—a hernia of the type for which out-country folk knew no remedy but the truss.

Impeded in movement, but a heavy eater still, Zeb had become vast of heft and paunch; but he handled a team with great skill, once he made it to the seat. He now wheeled his rig close to the house, to let his wife dismount directly upon the stoop; then doffed his hat with a broad gallantry, bellowed at Matthilda that he hoped she was well, M’am, and was off like a runaway to look for the horse hunt.

Hagar Rawlins was taller than her husband, gaunt, grim-jawed, with hollowed cheeks and deep-set eyes. Rachel was afraid of her, for she had often caught Hagar eyeing her strangely, as if with antipathy, or perhaps with some nameless suspicion. As soon as Hagar was afoot, her own physical handicap was plainly visible, though puzzling as to origin. She was not the sort of person you asked about such things. Something was wrong with her ankles, as if the ten-dons had been cut; she painfully shuffled and flapped, dragging or slinging her helpless feet in misshapen moccasins.

Matthilda and Hagar embraced, as was customary, though it had always seemed to Rachel that Matthilda brought all the affection there might be in it. Hagar was from eastern Tennessee, “so fur back in the hills,” she liked to put it, “the sun don’t
never
shine.” She could ridicule her own background, but she was “easy throwed” by Matthilda, who was likely to con-fide that her father had been schooled for the ministry, partly, and had read Latin and Greek. Around Matthilda, Hagar would have sieges of speaking carefully, in mincing forms she imagined elegant. Then she would backslide, and catch herself again; so that her language kept kind of running out and in, like a sliphorn.

But today Hagar brought news, and they could see at once that it had changed her past all imagining. The Rawlinses had an older daughter called Effie, who had been gone from the Dancing Bird country for a year and a half. She had taken down with lung fever, and gone into a decline; as a last resort she had been sent to Fort Worth for a prolonged doctoring. No matter how many children you have, the one in danger becomes precious out of all reason; and no light of faith had sustained Hagar. “They never come back,” was what she said the day she watched Effie out of sight.

Yet Effie had rallied; Hagar now had word that her daughter’s recovery was complete, and she was coming home. To Hagar it was a miracle and a resurrection. There was warmth, now, even serenity, in the deep-hollowed eyes that had so often chilled Rachel; and a great weight seemed lifted from them all. Perhaps none of them had realized the degree to which this dour, strong-willed, and embittered woman had dominated their prairie.

And more. While convalescent in Fort Worth, Effie had made good her time by catching herself a young man, of pretty good family at that, by all reports. She was bringing him home with her; they were to be married—out here, in her father’s house. The Zachary women spent little time regretting the monotony of their lives; perhaps they did not even know how barren of reward their lives actually were. Yet they treasured every least diversion, and made the most of it. Now, suddenly they had a wedding to look forward to.

Rachel had never known Effie very well. She remembered her, perhaps unkindly, as watery-eyed and washed-out, with a bluish, translucent look. Thinking of Effie as a romantic figure was none too easy, but Rachel took this hurdle in her stride. Immediately, she began to imagine what the wedding would be like. Since she had never seen one, her mental picture of it flowered most wonderfully, unrestrained by facts. She couldn’t seem to help seeing the whole doings spaciously mansioned, with great numbers of handsome people coming to it. All were beautifully dressed, especially the women, whose many-hued gowns were reflected in a floor as brightly polished as wet ice. None of this would ever be. The few families who might possibly get there had never seen the kind of clothes Rachel was imagining, and never would in their lives. And the wedding would have to contain itself in the log house of the Rawlinses, which was hardly bigger than the Zachary soddy. As for polished floors—the Zacharys at least had a wooden floor, long since scrubbed white as bone, and it had never reflected anything yet. The Rawlins floor was of dirt….

In her present mood Hagar talked readily and un-abashed, in the language of her own hills. The hampers she had brought, as was usual, carried a huge baking of crackling bread, and much more. When Matthilda made the conventional protest—“Why, Hagar, you shouldn’t have!”—Hagar said, “ ‘Tain’t nawthin’, Mattie.” Probably nobody else had ever addressed Matthilda as “Mattie” in her life.

Along toward sundown they heard the first day’s horse-gather coming in. The deep-dug back wall often brought the sound of hoofs into the house, through the earth, from a long way off. Today they listened for half an hour to a faint humming in the ground, increasing slowly to a tremor, then to the drumming of hundreds of hoofs, before at last they heard the whooping of the hands. The riders were hazing and frolicking, showing off because Georgia Rawlins was with them; they poured the herd in at the gallop, running like a storm. The uproar sent a dust cloud sky high as they choused the winter-wild stock into the long night corrals across the Dancing Bird.

Georgia Rawlins came on in. She was a big girl a couple of years older than Rachel, tall as her mother, and strongly made; handsome, rather than pretty, but bright-eyed and full of bounce, from hours in the prairie wind. She came in briskly, with a loud but shy, “Oh, hi, everybody!” Her great shapeless riding skirt was held up in front of her, avoiding both stumbles and embraces, for it embarrassed her to be hugged by women. She bolted for the bedroom, to change into other clothes she had carried in a roll behind her saddle.

This was the girl who would normally have been Rachel’s best friend; there was no choice of others. But both families tacitly understood that Georgia was Cash’s girl. Supposedly they would marry at some undetermined time, when Cash got around to building a place to live. This threat stirred up a certain amount of possessiveness in Rachel, so that she very easily found faults aplenty in Georgia, and not much else. Probably no girl would have seemed worthy to Rachel, where her brothers were concerned. She took to noticing that Georgia moved like a tomboy, always ready to climb a corral, or the like, in ways that showed her legs; and could cuss like a man, though she wouldn’t try it in front of Hagar.
More like a man in girl’s clothes
, Rachel told herself, but without much conviction. If there was anything unfeminine about Georgia, the boys didn’t seem to know it.

Georgia reappeared in full-skirted blue cotton. The dress looked familiar, for it was the only decent one she had, but Rachel had to admit, with a twinge, that she looked all right. Georgia had a lot of mouse-blond hair, which she had tied back with a blue ribbon.
Wrong color blue
, Rachel hoped, without looking too closely. But she envied Georgia’s strap slippers, new since they had seen her.
Finally got shoes on you, I see. Had to rope and throw you, of course. And stockings, too—will wonders never cease. Now, if next you hear of underwear…

What Georgia thought of Rachel was not known. Most of the time she seemed unaware of her.

Soon, though, the men began coming in, and no awkwardness of any kind could long survive the excitement of a house full of people. The two Rawlins boys, though lacking in flash, at least were young men who were not Rachel’s brothers. Charlie was the youngest Rawlins, and the one nearest Rachel’s age. He had sad, slow-moving eyes in a shy, quiet face—an empty face, Rachel thought it. The Rawlins heavyset strength had missed Charlie. Only unusual thing about him, and it was kind of ridiculous, was his great tangle of dusty-looking hair, which stood straight up. He kept plastering it down with water, but it no sooner stopped dripping than it began to spring up again, a tuft at a time—Ping!—like wire busting loose in a freeze. Rachel knew that Charlie’s eyes followed her moonishly, whenever he thought she wasn’t noticing. She found this pleasantly exciting, even though she didn’t care anything about him.

Charlie’s brother Jude, of an age somewhere between Ben and Cassius, was a likely sample of what his father must have been, before salt pork and inactivity crept up on him—bull-necked, hammered down in the legs, and heavy of bone and muscle. Andy stood in awe of him, admiring his strength.

“Why, he’s got leaders in his wrists thick as the haft of a brand iron,” Andy said once. “Thicker even.”

“And Ben can throw him over his head,” Rachel tacked onto it.

Jude stayed close to his father and Ben Zachary, listening doggedly, in hopes of learning something.

Cassius was the one who outshone everybody, when he finally came in. Ben, in his old, worn clothes, still looked like the boss; even while he was talking with a courteous deference to Zeb Rawlins, Ben still looked like the man in charge. But Cash was all dressed up, astonishing Rachel, who had not noticed what he was wearing at breakfast, in the sleepiness before dawn. Black leather shirt, wrapped high in the throat, like a stock; black trousers, after he took his brush leggings off. Black, silver-conchoed leather cuffs and belt. Rachel thought he looked wonderful. Ben’s eyes, though, may have been belittling when they rested on his brother, as if he thought Cassius a fool.

After supper Ben and Zeb Rawlins got their heads together over the bookkeeping that was to Ben the meanest chore in all the cattle business.

Rachel saw that Zeb Rawlins kept slowly shaking his head, while Ben might be having a hard time hiding his opinion that Zeb had the outlook of a one-horse sod-buster. Zeb would reap half the benefit of Ben’s winter trades, but he had not okayed any buying. Hard feeling always developed when two outfits started even, on the same range, and one came out way ahead of the other; so Ben wanted to give Zeb half the profits on purchased stock, while guaranteeing him against loss. But Zeb thought Ben highhanded, and a plunger as well. He was stubbornly sitting back in the breeching.

They didn’t get far, and it was just as well.

Georgia, harder to squelch than a prairie fire, got Cash to his feet, then Charlie and Jude; and of course Rachel. They pushed things back and started up a singing game—a kind of a scamper, first, in which one stood in the middle, and a boy chased a girl around him until he caught her. Then others like that, with clapping and stamping for music, the Rawlinses as tickled as kids with the noisy wooden floor. Couldn’t have been more childish, actually. “Stole old Blue! And I know who! Here I come, and I see you!” Pretty silly, but plenty loud. Ben and Zeb had to give up.

“If only Effie was here,” Hagar kept saying. She was very much here in their minds, a part of the great day acoming, that had been such a long, long time on the way. With Effie, they had in this one room all who were to have a part in the bust-up of the Dancing Bird range. Or rather, all save one, who was in nobody’s mind; unless, perhaps, the shadow of a wretched and doomed old man sometimes crossed Ben’s thought or Matthilda’s, like a ghost of the living, unasked and unwanted.

The room became hot; when the girls blew their hair out of their eyes, little damp tendrils were left stuck to their foreheads. “Now swing the other! That’s the wrong one! Go right back where you started from….” One rompy, let-yourself-go night like this had to last them all for a long time. Rachel wanted to hold onto it, as if it were the last night in the world.

It was the last, for these people as a group. They were never again all together under the same roof.

It began to rain; not in the good old soaker they really needed, but in bursts that doused the prairie hard and briefly, with spells of sunshine and rain-bows between showers. Ben walked out bareheaded in the first rain that fell. He spread his arms to it, and turned his face up to be rained on, getting whopped all over with drops as big as dollars. The Dancing Bird rose, and the grass started. Wintergaunted cows and horses gorged themselves into bloats and colics, but all would be well with them now, for the time being.

In the house the women eyed muddy stains spreading upon the whitewashed roof boards, and swore the sod roof must be shingled over this year for sure. But the house would get no attention now. All day long Jude’s hammer rang at the forge, as he repaired the wagons and shrunk new iron to the wheels. Every few minutes came a yell, the angry squeal of a horse, and a splatter of hoofs, as somebody fought to get the hump out of a range-wild pony.

Every year they had the same argument about whether Rachel was to be allowed out around the hands. When she was little Matthilda had feared she would get her head kicked off, and later that she would hear too much rowdy language. Now that she was a young lady, the objection was obvious. About every third girl in Texas ran off with some young cowhand, who might amount to something later, but showed no signs of it at the time. Rachel always lost the battle, yet won the war. Gradually she would begin sifting out, on useful errands that somehow became more frequent by the hours; till even her mother got used to it, and accepted that nothing was actually happening to her.

This year Ben felt that the whole thing had better be handled a different way. He didn’t say anything, but come afternoon the day after the Rawlinses’ visit, he rode to the house, and hollered for an extra slicker. When Rachel brought it to the stoop, he sung out, “Rachel’s with me, Mama!” And he had her up behind his saddle, and through the Dancing Bird, before objection could be raised.

Only thing, he explained to Rachel, he wanted to see something before he turned her loose on her wild lone, so she would have to stay put where he told her. “Right—square—here,” he said, letting her off on the fence of the round busting corral.

She sat on the top rail, hugging her luck, for here was put on the best show they had. Half a dozen of the best rough-string riders got a few dollars extra for working the round corral. The corrida Ben had hired was full of youngsters who had ridden before they could walk, and most of the time since. They would fight anything that wanted to fight, so long as they weren’t crippled up. But the round-corral busters were expected to turn a mustang into a saddle horse without any wasted roughing, and this took a kind of horse-savvy that had to be born in a man.

Into the round corral, half a dozen at a time, were hazed the horses that had never before felt rope—called “colts,” whatever their ages might be. All were geldings, age-hardened at full growth; the Zacharys rode no mares, no fillies, and no colts under four. Like the longhorns, the Texas mustangs came of Spanish stock, abandoned upon a strange continent long ago. After running wild for three centuries, beset by wolves, drouths, and bitter winters, they had a runty look, but an almost incredible toughness and en-durance.

With the range-wild colts came the meanest badactors from the rough strings, the ratchet-heads that never knew when they were licked, but had to be fought out all over again every spring. These knew what they were up against, and were not afraid of it; they fought wickedly and cunningly, bucking as they had never bucked when they were fear-crazed colts. You didn’t have to be thrown to get hurt riding horses like that. Rough-string riders were smashed up and through before they were thirty.

Not every year, but once in every few hundred horses, a killer might turn up. Usually there was nothing about him to warn you. Any colt was likely to strike, or lash out, or try for you with a snap of the teeth fit to take off your arm, as you worked around him. Or he might groan, deep in his chest like an angering bull, as you snubbed him short for saddling. None of this meant anything. A killer almost never charged a man on foot, as a stallion might do; he might even stand quiet, as if earlier handling had cured his fear of men. But when his rider was thrown he turned like a lion, and trampled with whirling, stiff-legged jumps, sometimes savaging with his teeth.

The rare killers hardly explained why nearly all the young riders wore pistols; and neither did the un-likely chance of a dragging account for it. If a thrown rider’s boot caught in a stirrup, almost any horse would kick him to death in a hurry. But this happened so seldom that few had ever seen it, and it could be made impossible by using tapaderas, such as the brush-country riders always wore on their stirrups. In any case, neither a man slammed hard on the ground nor one stirrup-dragged by a runaway was likely to draw and fire soon enough to do himself any good. Even the bystanders, invariably taken by surprise, generally failed to take effective action in time.

But the only boy you saw unarmed was one who hadn’t been able to get hold of a gun. They wore them belted snug and high if they were going to ride, with a slitted thong on the hammer to keep the gun in the holster; or slung them low, tied down to the thigh, if they expected to be afoot. They wore guns to break horses or to brand calves, or when they weren’t working at all. Most of them took their guns to bed. A seven-pound gun could develop an almighty heavy drag, in fourteen or sixteen hours of riding, but only a thunderstorm could cause it to be laid away. For gun wearing was a fashion; maybe it was a fashion set by men in trouble with the law—but a fashion just the same.

So, when a rough-string boy who called himself Johnny Portugal came sidling along the fence to where Rachel was perched, he was armed with a huge hog-leg of a percussion revolver, like most of the rest. He leaned an elbow on the top rail close to Rachel, and crossed his feet in a pose of ease. His mouth seemed uncommonly full of large teeth, and the grin he flashed as he looked up at her showed them all.

“You been living around here long?” Johnny asked pleasantly; and that was as far as he got.

Perfect, for Ben’s purpose, because nothing even remotely off-color in Johnny’s remark confused the issue. Ben had not set out to teach these saddle tramps their manners; he didn’t give a hoot whether they had any or not. What he wanted was to warn them against messing around Rachel at all.

Ben spun Johnny Portugal by the shoulder with his left hand, and with his right hand swung what could be called a slap. His hand was open, and the blow rang like a slap. But the heel of the hand carried Ben’s full weight from the heels. Johnny’s feet seemed to fly up, his hat sailed off, and his head cracked a five-inch pole as he hit the fence. He ended sitting in the mud against the bottom pole, and in this position grabbed for his gun. His thumb failed to flick the thong from the hammer on the first try, and he had to start the draw again. Ben stood waiting with an appearance of patience while Johnny Portugal fumbled. The gun came out at last; and Ben instantly kicked it over the fence.

Cassius had come over the fence, and was standing beside his brother, looking happy and interested, as Johnny Portugal looked up. Rachel remembered afterward that Cash had been fooling around nearby, accomplishing nothing, all the time she had been sitting there. One brother on each side of the fence, watching the bait Ben had put out.

“He gets it from our old man,” Cassius told the seated man. “Old Zack broke a Comanche’s neck with a slap like that, right in the middle of a Kiowa camp. Indians always called him Stone Hand.” Well—that was the way it was told in Texas, though the story had been fixed up a little, by later narrators. Actually, the Comanche had only been knocked out—which the Kiowas had taken as a good joke on the Comanche.

“I got time coming,” Johnny mumbled, rubbing his head, and then his jaw.

“We pay off in Wichita,” Cash said.

“I ain’t fired?”

“What for? You’re the party done all the sufferin’, so far.”

“You’re lucky it wasn’t my brother,” Ben told Johnny.

“Tell me he hits any harder,” Johnny said, “and I walk back to town!”

“He doesn’t hit at all,” Ben said; and they walked away.

Matthilda could have found no cause for complaint, after that, in the averted eyes, the ducked hatbrims, or the wary circlings of cowhands who had to pass Rachel. It was as if she had learned to rattle.