She unsaddled methodically and put away her saddle and bridle. With a corncob she cuffed up the wet back of her pony, so that it would dry without chilling. She walked into the house unexcited and unhurried; yet Matthilda knew what had happened in the first moment that she saw her.
This time Matthilda did not panic. She had known for quite a while that her struggle to stand off the in- evitable was a hopeless one. She said, “You’ve been to the Rawlinses’.”
Rachel nodded. “The bones are out of the tree.” It was an expression they had brought with them from the San Saba, where the Indians had formerly made tree burials; sometimes riders still came upon skeletons in tattered wrappings, high above the ground among the branches.
Neither Cash nor Andy was home that day. More than either Ben or Andy, Cassius followed the crash-on, bust-’em-down, keep-em-hustled tactics their father had brought out of the Big Thicket; and now he was trying to complete the redistribution of the herds in an all-out rush, before the Kiowa Moon came full. The two cow-hands supposed to be garrisoning the home layout were out looking for Rachel—poor trackers, obviously, searching where she had not been.
So Rachel and Matthilda were alone, and now they said what little had to be said about these bones, newly fallen from the tree.
“I should have told you the whole thing straight off, I guess,” Matthilda admitted.
“Is this all of it, this time?”
“Yes; this is all of it.” She told Rachel now how Papa, or Old Zack, as everyone called him, had led a band of volunteers in pursuit of a party of Kiowa raiders, who had cleaned out a whole string of isolated settlers, apparently. This was back before the War, in ’57, but the Kiowas were always bad ones, even then. The raiders had captive children with them, seven or eight, at first; Papa had sworn he would follow them as long as horses made tracks. The Indians never did seem to learn how tenaciously a man like Papa could hold on. He chased them all the way to their village, far up the Salt Fork of the Brazos, and whipped their warriors in a holding action they tried. He was less than an hour behind them, at one point, as the village got away.
That was when he found her. Traveling villages carried all their stuff—children, old folks, everything—on drag litters, or travois, which were poles dragged behind a horse, with a buffalo-hide hammock slung between. And there between the travois tracks, sat a white baby, less than one year old—
“How do you know I was?” Rachel asked coolly.
“Why, by your teeth, of course. Seemed you had bounced out of a drag litter, all unnoticed—”
“Indians have teeth. What made you think I was a white girl?”
“It was perfectly obvious. It always has been. It was only long after, when Abe Kelsey got mad at Papa, he started that other outlandish story.”
Matthilda stated it as a simple fact, because that was what it was to her, and always had been; for she had wanted it that way. “Papa carried you more than two hundred miles in his arms,” she said now. “Took him two weeks to get you home. How many wild cows he roped and milked to feed you, we’ll never know. But Papa didn’t mind. He loved you the minute he saw you. And always after. Even more than as if—”
“If I was a captive child, why did nobody ever find out who I was?”
“Maybe we didn’t try too hard—though we did do what we thought we ought to. But you were so dear, and sweet, and we wanted you so—”
“It doesn’t matter any more,” Rachel said.
“Of course not. I don’t know what difference it would make even if that foolish story had been true. There’s lots of Indian blood, in some of the very finest southern families. Sam Houston himself married a Cherokee girl. And General Pickett, who led the brave charge at Gettysburg—he was married to an Oto woman—a north-west kind of Indian. I don’t know how people get so upset.”
Having seen Hagar, Rachel knew how. But she said again, “It doesn’t matter.”
Mama kissed her, and praised her for being so sensible. “You and I aren’t going to be here, anyway, come winter. We have money, now; it’s time to see to your education. We’ll visit a while in New Orleans, first. After that, maybe Charleston; maybe Richmond…”
For a fraction of a moment, then, the glint of a tear threatened, but Matthilda forced it back. She was ready with this answer, too. She had often con-trolled them by letting them see she was hurt; but she had expressed self-pity so seldom that she could use it now, to confuse the trail.
“We must be crazy people,” she said, “to live in a leaky mud hut, at the utter end of desolation, and put our money down a hole. The boys find their work here; emptiness has some strange pull, for men on horses. But it’s a dreadful thing to be a woman, out on the prairie. A woman on the prairie is an unwanted thing. Nothing but a burden and a tie-down, keeping the ones she loves from doing what they want to do. Until they can’t stand it any more, and run away. Cassius will be gone soon, and Andy too. And poor Ben—he’ll feel he must stay by us, drawing into himself, and growing old too soon….”
Rachel saw now how drawn Matthilda looked, how terribly tired. She made Matthilda lie down, and she sang the herd lullaby, about the pore cowboy, shot five times right through his dang chest, until Matthilda smiled and dozed. Then she slipped away.
Maybe they got too much practice in facing up to the worst, out there. Rachel never doubted for a moment that she was of Kiowa blood. Too many things bore it out besides the conviction Abe Kelsey’s statement had borne for so many. She remembered how Matthilda had always kept at her to wear a sunbonnet and cotton gloves when she went outdoors in the summer heat. How all the lemons they ever got hold of had been wasted trying to make creams to keep her bleached. How she never had been allowed to wear moccasins with beads, or any kind of an Indian-looking thing…
The Kiowas had been stealing Spanish-Mexican women, and Texican women, for somewhere up-wards of half a century, and raising stolen white children as their own. Many Kiowas had the same Spanish kind of olive skin as she had—maybe lighter than her own would be, if she were out in the weather as much. And plenty of them had wavy chestnut hair, far less Indian than her own, which was straight black. Lost Bird had auburn hair; and his eyes—
She felt her stomach try to turn over as she remembered Lost Bird’s eyes. Now she took down the little mirror that hung above the wash bench, and studied her own eyes. They had always looked the color of the mud in the bottom of a tadpole puddle, to her. But this time she took the mirror to the darkest corner, and saw that her eyes were nearly black. Then she stood sideways at a window and watched her eyes turn green. And when finally she faced toward the bright sky she saw her eyes go paler than a peeled grape; doubtless they would flash like pale steel, like the knife in Lost Bird’s eyes, out in the full sun.
She went to the slop bucket, and was sick. But when she had drunk a pint of cold water, and washed her face, she knew what she had to do; at once, tonight, before Ben got home. If only Cash and Andy would stay out one night more…
Nightfall did not bring them home.
She located a sheath knife, and a belt that would carry it, and punched holes in the belt so that she could strap it on. It was all she was going to take with her. She had no destination, and no plan, except to get away; to the west likely, and try for the cap rock breaks. Her brothers were trackers, all of them, but so was she, enough of one to know how to break her trail.
That night as she and Matthilda ate supper alone, she could not help thinking that she was eating in this house for the last time, and a lump hurt in her throat, so that she could hardly swallow her food. But Matthilda was quiet too, so that Rachel did not have to talk; and the failing light helped her not to give herself away. They went to bed, and Rachel lay listening for Matthilda’s breathing to become regular, so that she could creep out of the house.
But that was the night the travails of Matthilda’s life caught up with her. Something closed in, and something bore down, and something gave way.
