The Unforgiven (7 page)

Kelsey did not come to the house this time, though he might have been on his way there. Neither Rachel nor Matthilda saw him. If Rachel’s understanding of her younger brother had been less acute, she would not have known about the ugly thing that happened then, in those days before the Kiowa moon.

One afternoon Andy rode in two hours before he could rightly be expected, in a dusky rain; and Rachel ran down to the corral, a carbine under her slicker, to unsaddle for him, in case he was of a mind to catch up with a few chores. One look at Andy’s face brought her up short. He had a greenish pallor, for one thing, like something under water.

“Andy! You’re fetching down with something!”

“No—oh, no—I’m fine—” He tried to keep his face turned away from her as he stepped down.

“Then you’re hurt. Either a colt stacked you, or—” Another possibility struck her. “Is Ben all right?”

He nodded, and pushed his rein into her hands; and he ran around behind the trough shelter. She could hear him being sick back there, as soon as he was out of sight. She tied the pony, and got a gourd of water from the well by the Dancing Bird.

Andy gulped at it. “Tell me one thing. Was he here? Did you see him?”

Confused, she almost said, “Who, Ben?” Then she understood. “No,” she answered him. “I haven’t seen him. But I think you have. Today.”

“I didn’t say…” He let it die out, and made a vague move toward his pony.

She said, “You weren’t going to tell me that, were you? And there’s more you haven’t told me.
Which of you killed him?
”

“Nobody,” Andy said, and looked as if he wanted to be sick again. He drank the rest of the water. “We had a chance at him. But somehow—something went wrong.”

She got the rest out of him, then. Andy had been with Ben, a long way out from the wagon, when Kelsey showed himself. He came toward them, first, as if he wanted to talk—maybe had been watching for a time when they were apart from the others. But when they pointed their horses at him he lost his nerve, and ran for it. Andy thought he must be trying to lead them into an ambush; he pulled up, yelling at Ben. But Ben went on, so Andy drew carbine and followed. Kelsey rode a pretty fair horse this time, but with no grain to it, of course. Ben closed on him fast, and pulled his pistol. Kelsey took one look back, and the next thing he did was unbelievable. He pitched away his rifle—and went tearing on with his hands up, kicking his horse full stretch. Ben seemed flabbergasted; plainly he didn’t know what to do. He could have gone ahead and shot Kelsey, but he didn’t seem to think of that. He hesitated a few seconds, then stuck away the pistol and shook out his reata. And the rest was a night-mare.

Kelsey was jerked off his horse, but the loop had got an arm and a shoulder, as well as the neck, and he hit the ground alive. Ben didn’t seem to know what to do about that, either. He just spurred on….

“When finally he stopped, and I come up, there wasn’t nothing on that reata but…”

Rachel let him skip that part of it.

“Ben threw away his reata, rather than step down and loose it,” Andy ended.

“You don’t call that killing him?”

He shook his head. “We went back to the wagon, for tools to dig a grave. And it started to rain. Took us two hours, before we got back where we left him. And when we did…he was gone from there.”

“Didn’t you cut for sign?”

“It was raining hard by then. We couldn’t find out anything.” They never did find out how Kelsey left there. “I never knew Ben to foozle so. I suppose I should have shot Kelsey, somewhere in there. I guess,” Andy finished uncertainly.

“Why should you?”

Andy stood opening and closing his mouth. “Ben told us we had to,” he said finally.

They stood out there talking a long time, though Matthilda twice came to the door of the house and banged on the triangle. Andy didn’t know anything more. But talking had got some of the kinks out of him, and he returned to his normal color. They didn’t have to explain anything to Matthilda, which was just as well. The truth was that they didn’t know then just what had happened—whether Kelsey was alive, or dead, or what.

That night Rachel wept a little, silently, into her pillow, thinking sentimentally about her brothers. She was sorry for Andy; in this mood she thought of him as still the little innocent-eyed boy of whom he sometimes reminded them. And she was sorriest for Ben, the one who had always been so steady, so gentle, and so kind, yet had somehow been driven to saddle not only himself but his brothers with a commitment to murder. Perhaps he still did not know whether he had killed the old man or not. But if he had, he had done it in the clumsiest way it could be done, and she could believe he might be haunted all his life by that.

She hoped for a while that Kelsey was indeed dead, so that the whole nightmare was over with. Then she thought how awful it was if the corpse was stiffening somewhere out there under the brush tonight; and she was horrified at herself, and filled with a sense of guilt.

Why does he haunt us so? He has a reason. He had it before, and all along. Or Ben would not have called his death. What evil thing was it we did—or Papa did—long ago, that makes this happen now?

She believed she would be able to make Ben tell her, now.

It did not work out that way. Before she ever spoke to Ben again, another thing happened. This time it happened to Rachel herself, and to nobody other, except as everyone in the family was affected by a disaster to one. And the world as Rachel knew it turned from beneath her, past all possible recovery.

During the night the rain stopped; the skies were clear, the day after Kelsey was dragged. Rachel plotted to get a horse saddled and out of there. She meant to find Ben at once. She knew about where his crew was at work.

Only a year or so back, it had been hard to get Matthilda to go and lie down, or to take any daytime rest at all. But her afternoon had hardly begun when the bedroom door closed upon her. Rachel was out of the house in the same minute. She walked past the corrals, and along the Dancing Bird, pretending to size up the driftwood brought them by the spring rise, in case Matthilda happened to be watching her out of sight.

In another minute, as soon as she had given her mother a chance to doze, she would have turned back to rope a pony.

She never got it done, for Ben appeared unexpectedly, and Georgia was with him, stirrup to stirrup. They came surging up out of an arroyo some distance downstream and Georgia was laughing, having a great time. Then Rachel saw her do an odd thing. Georgia’s laughter stopped abruptly; she checked, and whirled her horse in what looked very much like an attempt to get out of sight. Too late, of course. Georgia recovered herself at once, and stopped where she was. Her horse shied, she explained afterward. It was not important. What mattered was the way Rachel took it. For her resentment of this girl suddenly popped sparks like a sap log.

You weren’t coming to the house at all. You tried to get back, without I saw you. Rode here to be with him—but didn’t want us to know! I knew it was you made Ben hang my saddle up.

Georgia exchanged a word or two with Ben. Then both waved at Rachel, and came on at a walk. Rachel saw she wasn’t going to have any chance to talk to her brother at all, not even here in their own house, what with this interloper butting in.

Sure. Come right on in. May as well, now. Make yourself right at home, just as cool as a hung hog. I’ve had about enough of you!
It never occurred to her that Ben could be blamed.

She was getting ready to fix Ben something to eat, and wondering if she could bring herself to set a plate for Georgia, when Georgia dismounted at the stoop, letting Ben take her pony to the corral.

“Ben lost his reata,” Georgia said as she walked in. “That’s a man for you. Doesn’t even know where or how, seemingly. Had to come in to get a rope.”

Rachel must have known that it was jealousy had hold of her, a very different jealousy than she had ever felt when Georgia was fooling around with Cassius. For just a moment she wondered whether she had better start a war she could not finish, or risk an open bust-up with any member of that other family with whom they were already having difficulty enough.

“Been seeing a good deal of Ben lately, haven’t you?”

“I help keep the tallies. It frees a man for the work. Anyway, we have to keep a cross-tally. For Pa.”

“Who’s cross-tallying for Cash? Oh, I forgot. Cash is way far up the Wichita Trail. Out of sight, out of mind. I guess that’s plenty easy, for some.”

Georgia answered shortly, but reasonably. She had not come looking for this fight, and felt no need of it. “Get this through your head. I’m not bespoke. Not to Cash or anybody else. When I am, I’ll tell you.”

She moved away, toward the wash bench; and Rachel, turning to the table, picked up the long Bowie knife with which they carved, and cut a paper-thin slice from the pot roast. The run of the honed blade through the meat felt good to her in her present mood. She knew she had said enough. She had a chance to drop it now—the last chance she would have in her life; but she couldn’t let it alone.

With her back to Georgia she said, “Ben isn’t fixing to settle down. He likes to ride free on the trails.”

Georgia stood looking at her sideways. She hadn’t angered yet. Her riding had taken the winter softness off of her, and now she was thoughtfully rubbing the palm of one hand on a hip bone. “Neither am I fixing to settle down,” she said. “Not for a while, anyway.”

“Then why do you keep tolling them on—each behind the other’s back? We have a name for that, where I come from!”

Georgia’s eyes seemed to go higher in her head, signaling that if Rachel wanted fight she could have it. “Oh, hell, Rachel! Why don’t you quit acting like a brat?”

“I won’t have you coming between Cash and Ben—you hear me?”

“I hear you very well,” Georgia said slowly. “You sound like a spying little sneak, to me.”

Rachel’s head came up. “I am Rachel Zachary,” she said. “Everywhere in—”

“You’re what?” Georgia got in.

“Everywhere in Texas, they know who the Zacharys are. And do you know how many people there are in Texas can give a Zachary slack? Not one!”

“That’s right,” Georgia answered. “It’s a big pity you ain’t one.”

Rachel stared, no more than puzzled then.

“You’re no Zachary,” Georgia made it plain for her. “You’re no tittle of relation to a Zachary.”

“You out of your mind?”

“Why, I knowed it first time I seen you. Look at yourself! Where’s the Zachary bone? You got bones like a snuff stick. Look at your hide! The sun ain’t hardly touched you, and already you’re the color of a red hog in a mudhole. You couldn’t pass for a Zachary in a thousand years!”

With shock, with bewilderment, Rachel saw that Georgia believed what she was saying. She stammered out, “How do you think I got here—if—”

“You’re nothing but a catch-colt, a foundling—picked up bare-nekkid in the road, at that! You don’t know who you be, or what—and you never will! And everybody knows it.”

Rachel’s lips turned white, and curved in a little smile, while her eyes went wide and fixed. The knife in her hand poised in front of her, edge upward, and she moved toward Georgia, light and quick on the balls of her feet.

From the bedroom door Matthilda screamed—“Rachel!”

She stopped short, and the knife clattered from her hand. Before her eyes the room careened and darkened, so that she almost fell.

Georgia had retreated from her, stumbling over her awkward riding skirt. She was not a girl who scared easily, but this time there was horror in her eyes; for she knew she had never been nearer death in her life. Before Rachel’s vision had cleared she was gone.

Matthilda held Rachel in her arms, conforting her, crooning to her. “There, now, there…dear girl…dear, dear little girl….Everything’s all right.”

“What did she mean? Mama—what could she mean?” Rachel was shaking weakly, but her mind was working again.

“Don’t think about it. Put it all out of your mind—please, Rachel—please!”

“She believes it. I’d have known if she was making it up. Mama—is it true?”

Long ago, Matthilda had known this moment might come. In her mind she had rehearsed what she would say, forming two opposite answers, hoping to know when the time came which one to use. One was a straight-out denial, relying upon vehemence and a pretended astonishment. “Why! Shockin’! Fiddlesticks!” The other was meant to be a natural and easy acceptance as of something unimportant. “Why, yes, dear. Of course. Didn’t I ever tell you? Never thought about it, I guess….” An uneasy feeling had remained that neither answer could save the tranquillity she desired for Rachel above all things. Some third way seemed to be hovering just beyond her reach; she never found it.

But the years had come between, dimming the danger and the need. She had almost been able to forget that Rachel was not her own, because she so wanted to forget. Now as she reached for the answers she had devised she could not remember what they had been.

She faltered, “Why—why, Rachel—why, I—” And in that moment of groping it became too late.

“So it’s true, then,” Rachel said.

For almost a week Rachel tried to find herself, while it seemed to her that not a single familiar compass point remained. Her whole identity had been struck away. These familiar people among whom she lived were in reality strangers; they fed and sheltered her by tolerance and charity, not in accordance with her rights, for she had no rights. Sometimes she recalled moments of rebellion, and times she had asserted herself, and she was shamed. There was self-pity in it, and a chill of fear, as if she had been sleepwalking all her life upon the edge of an abyss.
It must be people like me who become fancy girls
, she thought, without ever having seen one in her life. Mama had sometimes spoken with horror of the dreadful women who preyed upon the cowboys, in the wild towns at the end of the trails, thanking God that her sons would never go near women like that. But a girl who belonged nowhere and to no one couldn’t be expected to care where she was or what she did, Rachel thought now. She wanted to get away, and lose herself where nobody knew her, and who she was couldn’t matter. Yet she did not know how to turn her back on these people who had done everything for her that had ever been done in her life.

She tried to find out how the Zacharys had come by her in the first place. Matthilda was tempted to invent an elaborate story, giving Rachel an inspiring family history and a romantic orphaning. She would have done it, too, had she not known perfectly well that she would be tripped up by it, soon or late. She compromised by telling part of the truth. Rachel’s natural parents were unknown, she admitted, and this was true. But here she began changing the facts a little bit. Lots of wagons were on their way to California, she said, and Rachel had accidentally got left behind by one of them. At a rest-over camp, called Possum Stop. It wasn’t there any more. Nobody knew which wagon, or why the family never came back to look for their baby. Maybe they’d been fooled on where they lost her—looked a long time in some wrong place. Or…it was possible something happened to them…. It came out a whole lot more lie than truth, before she wiggled out of it, perhaps because so little truth was known.

Matthilda tried to comfort Rachel every way she could think of, for she was as miserable as the girl. She tried reasoning. “Every family has its bad people, and its useless people, and its good people, and its great ones. You are you. You can be what you want to be. What else matters?” She tried religion, in her own conception of it, which was vague, but of high integrity: “God is love. We are his children. We are bound together and sheltered by our love for each other, and His love for us. For love is what God is.” Rachel wasn’t listening.

She had often told Rachel that men hated to see women cry, and that she must teach herself never to weep before anyone. But when everything else failed, Matthilda herself fell back on tears. Now she let her lip quiver, and her eyes brimmed. “I wanted a baby girl so much. I was so happy making your little clothes. All of us loved you so, and wanted you so—didn’t you want us?”

Rachel did love Matthilda very dearly; which was not hard, for no gentler spirit could be imagined. Matthilda could be shocked, or hurt, but no one ever saw her angered; and she lived for her children to an all but fatuous degree.

But now Rachel was cloyed and repelled. She hated herself for it, and she pitied Matthilda, but that was the way she felt. Wanting to be left alone, she pretended she was satisfied, and that everything was all right.

She asked, “How much do the boys know?”

“Andy doesn’t know. He wasn’t born, then. And Cassius—well—I don’t believe he ever thinks about such things. Ben knows, of course; he was seven, then. But we promised each other it would be our secret. We wanted you to be just our own.” Then, pleadingly, while those ready tears threatened again: “We don’t need to say anthing to them. Or to anybody. Ever.” She wanted everything put back just as it had been before. But Rachel did not feel that this could ever be.

All my life I’ll wonder who I am.

She stayed out of the house all she could. She doubted if either Ben or Andy noticed that anything had happened to her, but she stayed away from them, too, what few times they came in. She was watching the tadpoles in a still slough of the Dancing Bird, without seeing them at all, when a strange new idea came to her.

Why, then, Ben isn’t my brother. He isn’t even my cousin. He isn’t any relation at all….

Of course the same thing was true of Cash and Andy, but with them it seemed to make small difference; her affection for them could stay the same, whether they were brothers or just childhood friends. But with Ben it was somehow a peculiarly disturbing, even frightening thought, hard to get near to, after thinking of him as a brother for so long. She circled it skittishly, as a puppy scouts a fascinating new thing that may bite.

Ben had always been much in her thoughts, a good deal more than the others had ever been. She had never realized before how often she wondered where he was and what he was doing, whenever he was out of sight, which was most of the time. But now she reached into the past, and most of the things she remembered best were mixed up with Ben. They were the only ones in the family who kept playing jokes on each other. Like the time Ben sneaked the little green frog into the water pitcher. Rachel had not let on, but after she refilled his water glass the frog was in that. Ben pretended not to see it—seemed about to drink it down, when Mama squealed. Then they both had laughed so hard, over nothing worth it, seemingly, for the others just stared at them, seeing nothing funny.

Farther back. There were the talking animals—the dwarf owl, only as big as your thumb; the spotted coyote, the mud hen, and the red mare. For a couple of years, when Rachel was seven-eight years old, Ben had kept bringing home accounts of conversation with such-like critters. They told him all kinds of stories, mostly without much sense to them, and never with any moral, unless it was useless. (“Never stick your head in a clam,” the mud hen had advised him.) Whatever became of them all? They just kind of died out. Perhaps Ben knew when she outgrew them.

Still farther back, when she was four, five, and six. Moments of mixed terror and delight while Ben was introducing her to horses. She had first been on a horse in his arms, but later had stood barefoot behind his saddle, arms around his neck, while he chased a dodging brush rabbit, and almost roped it. Later, through over-confidence in an old roping horse, he had got her a fall that knocked her senseless; but she hadn’t blamed him. Those were the same years when she had been most afraid of the dark, and sometimes when she had been sent to bed alone he had come and sung to her while she went to sleep. His songs were the same woebegone, bloody, yet somehow soothing ballads the cowhands sang to the cattle: “Pore young dying cowboy, Never more he’ll roam, Shot right through the chest five times, He ain’t never coming home….” Could it be that Ben had been only eleven years old when she was four? She couldn’t remember when he hadn’t seemed as big and safe as a fort.

Even before that. When she was three, and had nightmares, she remembered running in her nightie, over floors icy to her bare feet, to jump into Ben’s bunk; for he was the one who never sent her away.

In a few days she was thinking:
All I want is to wait on him, and take care of him. Even if he married somebody else, I’d be happy if I could just work for him all my life.
But later she knew it wasn’t so.
No—I couldn’t stand for anybody else to have him. I’d rather die.

She began to light up again; and Matthilda was so relieved to see it that she never dared to ask her what had come over her.

Rachel sent a note out to Georgia, next time Andy stopped home. “I take pen in hand to say I’m right sorry,” she wrote. “I had no call to act up so. You taken me by surprise, first off. But I see now you told me something I bad needed to know, and I’m right thankful.”

Georgia’s prompt answer was scrawled on a leaf from a tally book, and appeared to have been written in the saddle.
During a fit of pitching
, Rachel criticized, but was glad to get it. “Freind Rachel,” it began, and went on to express relief. She hadn’t told anybody what their Donnybrook was about, and hoped Rachel hadn’t. All Ben knew was that she “got run the Hell out with a bucher Nife.” Laughed fit to die every time he throwed it up to her. What she needed was her mouth sewed up, Georgia finished.

Whatever it was the Rawlins family had gone so sour about seemed either to have been withheld from Georgia, or had not affected her. So they fixed it up, as they thought, and just about in time. For now the moon was coming full again; and this time the Kiowa war ponies would be tough and full of run.