The Unforgiven

by Alan Lemay

  Jake knew cattle. Neither Cash nor Ben ever had any trouble with him. “Trying to give everything away,” was his only objection to the way they were handling the bust-up. The Rawlinses, for the time being, stayed off the range.

  But afterward, when the parting of the herds was complete? Doubtless Rawlins could comb up a corrida. He could even scrape up a corrida of Yankee outlaws, if that was what he wanted; he could throw fifty killers onto this range. Maybe both outfits would be cool and careful, at the first. Then bickerings would begin, and presently somebody’s temper would break. Once the guns began to smoke, how could they ever be quieted again? They didn’t know. They did the work in hand, judging that they would know how to handle what came next, some way, when they saw what it was.

  Meantime their debts had to be paid, a big job in itself; for all those thousands were owed in dribbles, to hundreds of cowmen, spread out over most of Texas. It was a job Ben felt he had to do himself; wanted to find out what kind of friends he still had in Texas, for one thing. He would be in the saddle many weeks, and he was eager to get at it. As soon as he got Cash and Jake Rountree well started with the cross-branding he would be on his way.

  As Ben bored into the range work, setting a brutal pace for the corrida, Rachel was watching the calendar in a little horse race of her own. Ben’s birthday was coming up; she wanted him to be home for it. She had thought of something she could make for him, something that would have no practical use at all, but which she hoped would look pretty to him, and surprising.

  The calendar had no chance in a race with Ben. Three days on the range, three nights in a deluge of papers at the secretary, and that was it.

  They were at breakfast when he told them that he would ride south in the morning, leading the old bullion mule. No, he wasn’t taking any men with him…. Because he didn’t need any, that was why…. Robbers? What about robbers? Robbers had to take their chances same as anybody else. Come fooling around him, they probably deserved it. Shanghai Pierce had ridden all over Texas with a mule of money, time and again. So had Papa. Ben judged he could handle it.

  He was leaving Cassius with twelve men, including the cook, and Andy. Four or five men, and either Cash or Andy, were going to be at the house all the time. The place would never be unguarded, regard-less of the moon.

  He shouted from the door for somebody to catch the mule up.

  Mama exclaimed, “But I thought you said tomorrow!”

  “Oh, sure; only thing, if I happen to be twelve, fifteen miles in the right direction comes sundown, hardly any sense in riding it two ways. Pretty near amounts to a day. Though it’s hardly likely; I expect to be home, all right, if you want to set a plate—”

  “Now, Ben, you can come home for dinner just this one last night,” Matthilda pleaded. “Please, now, won’t you?”

  “I’ll sure try,” he promised. He was always shy, and embarrassed when it came time for any big build-up of goodbys. They knew he had maybe seized upon this way to get out of saying any at all. But Rachel could only take a chance on it, and bake him a birthday cake ahead of its time, in hopes he would come home, this last night he could.

  When the cake was frosted, she made for Ben the creation she had invented. Summer had turned hot early this year, and as they neared the end of June the swampy sedge pockets along the Dancing Bird were green-scummed and still. This was the kind of summer that made a good firefly year. Some years they saw hardly any, but this time they were all along the creek, all through the trees, by the middle of June. And the ground cherries—the other thing she needed—were ready early, too. These were tiny plants that hid under the deep grass; they bore papery little lanterns the size of a strawberry, each with two small yellow berries inside. Experimenting, Rachel found she could get the twin berries out of the little lanterns and put a firefly in each, instead.

  So she made a firefly tree—and if there had ever been one in the world before, she hadn’t heard of it. She cut a dried-out smoke bush, a skeleton of silvery twigs, about two and a half feet tall, and tied the ground-cherry lanterns all over it, dozens of them—though they looked like hundreds before she was through. After that she had to wait for dusk, when the fireflies came out. Half the time she worried for fear Ben wouldn’t come home, and the rest of the time for fear he would come early, before she was ready. If he came too soon she would have to wake him up to show his cake to him; he always went sound to sleep, as soon as he had eaten.

  As soon as the first fireflies rose into the twilight she began lighting the firefly tree. On and off went the little lanterns, more and more of them lighting as she got fireflies into them, until by full dark the whole firefly tree was alive, working all the time. It showed up well; for, though they were about at the end of the current Kiowa Moon, they lighted no candles, preferring to leave the shutters open for air. Rachel stuck the contraption in the middle of the birthday cake, and waited for Ben to come and see.

  She sat up for a long time, in the dark beside the firefly tree; until finally she put her head on her arms and went to sleep.

  It was close to midnight when Ben got home. The ringing of his spurs waked her. She raised her head as he came clumping in, and heard his fingers slap his holster before he knew who was there, in the dark.

  “I made you a cake,” she said stupidly. “It’s right here.”

  “Seems like some kind of a tumble weed, or something, has grown up out of it,” he said, fumbling in the dark. “My God, am I as late as that?”

  She started to say, “It’s supposed to—” Then she realized that the firefly tree was dark.

  “There’s a lightning bug climbing on it,” Ben said. One little lantern had gleamed weakly, once, and then quit. She shook the tree, but nothing happened; the fireflies wouldn’t light any more. Maybe they were dead.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  She tried to tell him how the firefly tree had been meant to work, and had worked, before she went to sleep. She wanted to make him see how pretty it had been, with the little lanterns lighting up all over it, on and off, on and off. But in a minute she knew it didn’t sound like anything, just told in words. And she began to cry.

  He took her in his arms, tangled his fingers in her hair, and let her cry against his chest. He said, “I believe that was the very nicest thing I ever knew anybody to do.”

  She realized then that she was actually close in his arms, there in the dim dark, and she forgot about the firefly tree; but she still pretended to cry a little, for a while more, so that he would keep on holding her. She thought, He knows I’m not his sister. Shall I tell him now? Shall I tell him I know it, too?

  “Well, anyway,” he finally said, “we can eat the cake.”

  They took it out on the stoop, in the faint light of the waning moon. He sat with his back against the house, and when Rachel had cut the cake she sat close by him, leaning against his shoulder, while they ate. Before they were through, they ate it all.

  They talked about how dry it was. Ben had been up at the source of the Dancing Bird, and it was no more than a seep; though in the spring it was a little waterfall nearly two feet high, and they called it The Falls. Rachel admitted to Ben that whenever she was at the head of the creek she always looked for the bird Papa had seen there that had given the stream its name. Ben laughed a little, but as much at himself as her. He said, “I always do, too.”

  “Papa was chasing Pawnees,” she said, knowing this was wrong. She had found she could always get him to tell her the old stories she liked by pretending she didn’t have the facts right.

  Old Zack had been chasing a Comanche raiding party, in the early days of the War; it was that ever-lasting raiding and chasing that had kept snatching him back every time he set out to enlist. This time the chase had led them a long way through the dry, until finally their loose horses had lit out, thirst-blind and undrivable. And Zack himself had left the trail to recover them. They had smelled the live water, running freshly in the heat, a dozen miles away.

  Downs
tream, the little creek disappeared in the sands; only four miles of it ran all year round. Zack had followed upcurrent to where the water came out from under a limestone ledge. And there on the flat rock just above the water was dancing the strangest bird, some kind of a crane. Zack knew sand-hill cranes, and whooping cranes, and every kind of shidepoke, whether it lived in Texas or just passed through; but this was none of them. It was bigger than a whooper, nearly five feet tall; blue and white, with yellow legs and a red beak. Nobody had ever heard of any such a thing. But there it was, reflected in the water as it bobbed and wheeled and pirouetted with halfspread wings, the way sand-hill cranes like to do, though only around their mates.

  Papa sat neck-deep in the cool water under the ledge and watched the dance, and the bird seemed not to mind him. And as he sat there the notion came to him, he used to say, that this was no natural bird, but a spirit bird, sent to him for a sign. The Indians would have called it that. Papa told that part as if he didn’t mean for you to believe it—and yet as if he did more than half believe it, himself.

  Or maybe he didn’t, Ben thought now, as a possibility occurred to him that had never come to his mind before. Might well be that Papa made all that up, to kind of sugarcoat this last, farthest move, into the very shadow of the Kiowas…. So maybe there never was a bird that danced. Just only a fairy story….

  “I sure miss Papa,” he told Rachel. “He’s four years gone; and yet, this year, I miss him more than I ever did before. We needed him, Sis. We needed him bad.”

  In some ways he sounded weary, and about a hundred years older than he was. But there was something else in the way he spoke that reminded her of a little boy. Now? she wondered. Should I tell him now? “Sis.” He knows I’m not that to him. He pretends it to please Mama. Because he thinks I believe it. Is this the time to tell him?

  She was afraid. She could not remember ever having been so much afraid in her life. Ben was naturally good-natured, when not harassed, or overworked too much. Maybe he hadn’t minded being so nice to her as he had always been, so long as the pretense that they were brother and sister held up. But maybe he wouldn’t like to think of her in any other way; maybe he wouldn’t have any use for her at all. There never seemed to be a right or natural time to tell him. Nothing they talked about ever led into it any way. She couldn’t seem to find a way to tell him without it sounded far-fetched, and crude, and kind of out of a clear sky. Like a rock plunked into the pancake batter, all unexpected out of no place.

  She asked him where Witch River was, where Papa had died, and why nobody outside the family ever seemed to have heard of it. It was a reached-for question, to keep him out here on the stoop a little longer. Any time, now, he might yawn and go to bed.

  He explained—and this was new to her—that Witch River wasn’t the right name of anything. It only ran in the spring, or during hard rains. Just one of the innumerable runoff channels that gullied the prairies everwhere. Few drivers logged it, because they crossed it when it was dry. Those who had trouble with it, during the spring melt, called it the Death Crossing, or Deadman’s Creek, or the Ghost Fork, since Old Zack died there. Only the Zacharys called it Witch River, after a stock joke Papa had used, just before he started his herd into the angry water.

  Old hands were always sending some greenie up to ask the boss what river they had come to.

  “Witch River,” Old Zack would say.

  “Why, this one, right here.”

  “That’s right,” Zack would answer, sending the boy back bewildered. If the jokers in the swing could get the boy to say he guessed it must be the Wright, they were satisfied. From there on the kid couldn’t head his horse into any stream, without somebody asking him if he was sure it was the right river.

  To Ben it seemed fitting that the river in which his father died should be named after this country joke. He believed Old Zack would have chosen to go to his death with any kind of makeshift, rather than with no joke at all.

  Now Ben told her about the day his father had died. The family knew, of course, that Papa had been drowned, while crossing cattle, but Rachel had never known Ben to feel like talking about it in any detail before.

  Zack had reached Witch River late in the day, but he had ordered a crossing anyway, though it would run on into the dusk, and maybe the dark. They put the herd through in bunches of about five hundred, going into the water where the banks were low. The current was running pretty hard, but they had enough riverwise hands to press hard against the leaders, lest they yield and be turned. Three bunches crossed all right. But as they put the fourth into the water the light was failing, and maybe the horses were tiring, for this time the leaders turned, and were swept downstream with the current. The wild Texican cattle would do that, sometimes, in spite of all hell and the best men in Texas.

  The cows were carried downstream into a deeper, narrower channel, under the nigh bank, where the faster water got hold of them. Here the south bank was high and bluff, and even undercut; there was no way to turn back. The riders who fought against the sweep-away found themselves either too far across, or caught in the mix of the turned cattle—a mortally dangerous place to be.

  Ben himself was in the broad shallows on the far side. The lead cattle, with thrashing hundreds behind them, rushed past and got below him in the first moments, swimming with the fast current. Old Zack—Papa, to Ben—was famous for his crossings. No disaster was in his record such as caught him this time, all in a moment. Ben was running his horse at a stumble through the shallows, trying to get down-stream of the leaders. So he was well placed to see what Papa did then.

  Straight off the bluff came Zack’s rocketing horse, winging far out over the channel as it plunged to deep water. How far below was the river? To Ben the bluff looked sky high—crowding fifty feet, maybe. But this sounded like such a stretch that he always afterward called it “worse than thirty.” Not a record jump, but one hell of a piece of cow-handling. Zack sounded the rebel long yell all the way down. An explosion of water went up as the horse hit just ahead of the leaders—and they turned.

  As Papa came up he was trailing free from the saddle horn, on the downstream side of his horse—you can be swept under your animal, into the meat-chopping hoofs, from the upstream side. Papa’s horse sunk its hindquarters, treading for bottom, and found it. Man and horse surged up onto sound footing, and all the hardest part was behind….

  Once Papa had said, “All accidents are freak accidents. All dangers are hidden dangers, by the very meaning of the word. Look out for the Indian sharpshooter where there’s no cover to hide him. Watch out for the badger hole, far from where any badger should be. A man can ready himself for anything on earth, if he knows it’s there.”

  So now the unforeseeable struck from under the fast water. As Zack’s saddle horn came streaming up, some thing sodden whirled to the surface, and shawled itself over the nose of his horse. The horse reared and went over backward, and the current rolled over horse and man. They did not reappear.

  Ben sent the herd on, and stayed to search Witch River. The stream emptied like a bucket in a day or two, and Ben found his father’s horse, along with some drowned cattle, in a mess of drift. And with the horse was a drowned wolf. Now, how many drowned wolves have ever been seen? Ben had never heard tell of one in his life. Those varmints refuse to be drowned; too strong, too tough, too wary. Yet this one had come a long way to surface right there, at the nose of Zack’s horse, in that one split second when Zack’s life could be ended by it.

  Though Ben rode downstream a long way, and later others rode, Zack’s body was never found.

  Zack had been around forty-five when he died, but full of drive, and a don’t-give-a-damn quality, much like Cassius. So long as he lived, Ben would never forget that soaring leap with its ringing rebel yell, the spraddling horse against the sky above him, the incredibly tall sheet of water that went up as horse and rider hit, turning the cattle. He remem-bered it all, as if it had been last night. He had never been able to get
used to the idea that a man so much alive as Zack could just suddenly be out of the world, completely and forever.

  “Now the horses he rode are old,” Ben said slowly, wonderingly, “and his bones are sand in the sea.

  They were silent. The fireflies that had failed Rachel were thick and bright, stirrup-deep, all along the Dancing Bird. Rachel reached for Ben’s hand, and held it hard between both her own.

  “I miss him still,” Ben said. “He was all I ever knew to turn to, when I didn’t know what to do. I need him, so many times…. Rachel, Rachel honey, I never needed him any more than I do this year.”

  Now? Shall I tell him now? Maybe I could become what he needs, instead. But still she didn’t know how to speak.

  “He would have known what to do here,” Ben said. “Papa knew how to face anything down.”

  “No,” Rachel said. “If you’ll think back, you’ll remember things he turned his back on, trying to pretend they weren’t there. You’ll even remember things he never faced, but gave ground to, and drew away.”

  Now how does she know that? He was almost frightened, for a moment. How much does she know, and understand, that we think she’s never suspected? He decided to ignore it.

  “He was a good man,” Ben said, without change of mood. “The best man ever forked a horse, I guess. There’ll never be another like him.”

  Her whisper was intense, rebellious. “That isn’t true!”