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
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.
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.
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
