The Unforgiven by Alan LeMay

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.

Chapter Sixteen
    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