The Unforgiven

the thousandth time, to sight a distant disturbance that would be Ben, at the head of his grand corrida.

Maybe he’s remembered to fetch me some pretty anything-he-could-get. To make just one nice dress…. She knew perfectly well he had remembered; he always remembered, though often he might be prevented. The shakier question was what it would look like. Men didn’t know anything about yard goods. With the best intentions in the world, he might bring her something perfectly awful. In which case she would make it up and wear it anyway—for years, likely—rather than see him chagrined, after he had tried.

He wasn’t coming of course. Men never did come while their women watched for them. Only when least expected. But they always watched, nevertheless, so now Rachel went to their north lookout, to see if Cassius and Andy were riding in. The lookout was no more than a tiny-paned tunnel through the sod wall. It was set high, and though Cash could stand flat-footed to fire through it, and Ben might even have to stoop a little, Rachel had to stand on a box to see out. This brought her eyes only a few inches above the ground at the back. Yet this worm’s- eye view commanded a surprising reach of prairie, for the land fell away behind the soddy, to rise again in swells and gentle ridges rolling northward to the end of sight.

Most of the time the prairie was worth looking at, for it changed constantly, like the sea, to which so many have compared it. People thought of the deep-grass as brown, but usually it looked almost anything else—purple, or gold, or red, or any kind of blue; for a little while each year, as spring came on, it even looked green. Often, when cloud shadows crossed the long swells, the whole prairie stirred, and seemed to mold and flow, as if it breathed. But nothing like that was to be seen out there now. The land lay winter-defeated, lightless and without color. Out of those dead spaces her brothers would presently come jogging. But she could not see them yet.

Behind Rachel the shadows were growing in the corners, crawling toward the banked embers on the hearth. They brought a faint, penetrating chill, felt more in the heart than in the fingers of the skin, as if the earth itself were dying, instead of just this one bleak day between the winter and spring. And now for once, Rachel became strangely aware of the awful emptiness of this far lost prairie where they lived; and a loneliness took hold of her, with a hollow sinking of the heart. Afterward she came to believe that she had recognized this at once for a premonition of something unknown and dreadful already beginning to happen to them as this daylight failed. But it wasn’t true, for no clear thought of any kind came to her, then.

Just as she turned away from the lookout, something out there changed, and she looked again without knowing what she had seen. The first ridge was scarcely a furlong off, and they kept its crest burned off, to deprive horse-thieving enemies of cover commanding the house. On this burn had appeared a dark, narrow object, about three feet high. It looked a little like a scorched rock; only, it had never been there before. She tried to see it better by looking beside it, instead of straight at it; she looked away and glanced back; she moved her head in circles, as an owl does, when it is trying to give shape to something unknown. “What is that?” she whispered; and her whisper was lost in the sound of the wind.

Now the object moved, and the mystery cleared, but without reassurance. She had been looking at the upper half of a man, whose horse was hidden by the swell of ground. The oddly behaving visitor now pushed onto the crest of the burn, and stopped again. Even at an eighth of a mile, Rachel could judge that there stood about the sorriest horse she had ever seen in her life; and somehow she knew that the rider was old too, and in all ways as poorly as his horse. She supposed he would ride on in when he had looked them over enough to suit him, and usually she would have welcomed any such diversion. But this time she felt an unaccountable dread, almost a horror, of his coming nearer.

He came no nearer, then. She watched him as long as he was there, yet somehow she never saw him leave. He was there, and then he was gone. Rachel whipped on a coat, meaning to saddle a pony and ride that ridge. She saw it as her bounden duty to keep an eye on the fellow, and see what he was up to, for his actions had no reason unless he meant them harm. At the door she took the Sharp & Hankins carbine from its pegs, and clashed open its sliding barrel, to load. Then she stopped, knowing that she was not going out there, could not go out there. A nameless fear held her powerless to leave the house.

She heard her mother moving about in their bedroom. Soundlessly she eased the sliding barrel back into its seat, and returned the Sharp & Hankins to its pegs. She was building up the fire by the time Matthilda Zachary appeared, misty-eyed and yawny from her nap. “Did I hear a sound?” she inquired vaguely.

Rachel hesitated. Often Matthilda was so absentminded she missed half you said, but she was capable of sharp flashes of observation, too, all unexpected. She came up with one now. “Thought I heard you breech the Sharp & Hankins,” she said.

They spoke with the trailing double vowels of the cotton lowlands, from which most of the early Texans had come. Matthilda was strict with her children about those lapses she regarded as “po’ white”; but her own soft speech made the carbine a “Shahup ‘n’ Hay-’nkins.”

Rachel was silent a moment more, then blurted it out. “There’s something spooky going on out there! Back of the north ridge.” She saw she had her mother’s startled attention. “Some awful old longhair—he’s been watching us. Sitting the dread-fulest old horse, out on the burn…” She put a lot more to it, about how she came to look, and all, but actually she hadn’t seen much more.

“Poor old man,” Mama said.

“What?” She had not conveyed one speck, evidently, of her lonely dread.

“Some old hunter, doubtless; been alone so long he was likely too shy to come in. No matter how much he wanted. What a shame! We’d have fed him, so gladly, if only he’d known.”

“Yes, and filled the house with smells,” Rachel said sharply. “And fleas, too! I bet he’s been with every fat old squaw that never heard of soap between here and—”

“Rachel! I won’t have you speaking so unkindly!”

Rachel said, “Well, I think he’s harmful to us,” and was disturbed to hear a tremor in her own voice.

“Touch of cabin fever,” her mother said, gently deprecating. Cabin fever was their name for the sensitive, weepy mood that sometimes came on prairie women in the weeks while spring held off. It came from being shut in, hearing too few voices repeating the same dull things for too long. The tiniest things became magnified into horrid slights and dangers, until you were downright unlivable. And the last thing you wanted to hear was that your troubles were imaginary—especially if you knew it to be true.

Mama said with unwelcome sympathy, “I think this waiting time, between the false spring and the green-up, is just the very meanest time of the whole year.” She dipped a pan of cold water from the barrel at the door, freshened her face at the wash shelf, and emptied the pan into the slop pail that served as plumbing. She polished the pan to a tinny shine with a clean flour sack before hanging it up. At the fireplace she pulled the teakettle forward on the hob, so that the boys would have warm water when they came in.

Rachel bided her time in a sulk, confident of getting more of a hooraw out of her brothers. They jogged in pretty late, and took a while shoveling nubbin corn to a dozen winter horses that had come in to be fed. The women never knew when to have supper hot, having no way of telling how long the boys would fool around on chores like that. Matthilda set out candles, and as she lighted them with a fat-wood splinter, her hair caught their yellow glow in its silver mist. Matthilda’s hair had been white since she was thirty, nearly twenty years ago. Nobody remembered when her hair was any other color, except after she washed it, when it was blue. But they remembered when she had been light and bouncy of step, with quick ungnarled hands, and they still saw her that way, for the changes in these things had come slowly, unseen.

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?”