The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (22 page)

“Then you’re turning down a hand?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll need the help.”

“All right then.”

I put the empty bottle and the funnel down. I’d think about this white boy when he showed up on our doorstep. Maybe he’d be the shy, quiet kind that wouldn’t be any trouble. Maybe he’d be too young to care about girls.

Isaac began pulling the slippery tube out of Jerseybell. When there was just a few inches of it still in her nose, Isaac stepped to her side. He gave me a warning look. I left the stall and turned my back, my hand to my mouth. I heard Isaac pull the tube out and Jerseybell snorted, blowing snot everywhere.

When my stomach settled, I went back to the stall. Isaac was on his knees rubbing Jerseybell’s underbelly, trying to work the bloat out. I put my hand on the letter in my pocket and looked around the barn, taking in the rafters and then the four horse stalls across from Jerseybell’s. The horses were at the McKees’ place and that made the barn big and lonesome. When Isaac and I built the barn during the summer of 1903, stacking rows of cut sod, we imagined a barn full of horses and milk cows. It ended up bigger than the dugout by a good forty paces.

I said, “My mother needs me.”

On his knees by Jerseybell, Isaac cocked his head and gave me a funny look. Then all at once a knowing look came into his eyes. “Sue’s letter,” he said.

“It’s not Mama. That’s who I thought it would be. But it’s not, it’s Johnny. Sue says he’s dead. Says somebody killed him.”

Isaac stared at me.

“I want to go home,” I told him. “My mother needs me.”

“Somebody killed Johnny?” Isaac said.

“Yes.” I got the letter and magnifying glass from my pocket and put them on top of the railing. I put my shawl back over my head. “I’ve got supper to get on,” I said and left the barn.

After the supper dishes were put away, I didn’t sit in the parlor with Isaac to listen to the rain. Instead, I went to bed. It wasn’t close to dark but Isaac thought it best; he thought I looked peaked. Mary got a spring quilt to keep me from getting a chill and helped me get into bed. I didn’t like that she had to take care of the little girls by herself, and I was sorry that Isaac was left to be the one to tell the children about Johnny. I didn’t know how he’d explain such a thing. I let him, though. I was worn out clear to my bones, sick with sorrow.

I rested on my side, listening to the rain tap on the tin roof. It was a peculiar thing being in bed before full dark. It was even more peculiar to be sad about Johnny while at the same time taking pleasure in being left alone with nobody wanting anything from me.

The house was quiet when Isaac came into the bedroom. “You awake?” he said.

“I’m awake.”

He set the lamp on the high dresser and sat down in my rocker. His shadow stretched to the side of him. It flickered on the wall as he rocked back and forth. Isaac said, “This is a bad thing about your brother. Race riots. God.”

I nodded.

“I told the children.” Isaac paused. “Told them Johnny had an accident. It’s better that way.”

“Yes,” I said. The other way would scare them.

“I know you want to see your mother. Times like this—” Isaac stopped. “But, Rachel, I can’t let you go. Not right now.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s not safe in Chicago. Whites going around killing people. Sue thinks you’re lucky to be here.”

I felt a quick chill of fear for my mother and for Sue and her family. Then I thought about the coming winter. I thought about running out of supplies. I thought about snowdrifts up to my shoulders. “It’s not safe here, either,” I said.

“Folks around here know us.”

I had to think for a moment what Isaac meant by that. I said, “Doesn’t mean everybody likes us. Mrs. Svenson doesn’t.”

“There’s only one of her here. In Chicago there’s hundreds.”

“But what happened to Johnny, that was St. Louis, not Chicago.”

“Chicago could be next. There’s thousands of Negroes there. All crammed into the Black Belt, living in hole-in-the-wall apartments, the air stinking from the slaughterhouses. If whites took after them—” He paused. “And what do those people have, living like that? What about their children? They don’t have anything.”

“Your mother has it good.”

“She has boardinghouses, Rachel. They aren’t the Palmer Hotel. They’re for slaughterhouse men.”

“One of them’s high class.”

“There’s no pride in it,” he said. “Not for my children. Not when it comes to standing up to white people.” Isaac got up from the rocker.

“My mother,” I said.

“It’s not safe.”

I didn’t say anything.

Isaac picked up the lamp and went to the doorway. He turned back. In a voice so low that I almost didn’t hear, he said, “When things are better. When I can send you in style,” and then he was gone.

At first, I didn’t understand him, and then all at once I did. He didn’t want Chicago people—his mother—to see me in my patched-over country clothes and heavy work boots. He didn’t want his mother seeing my chapped lips, my rough hands, and broken nails. He didn’t want her seeing the weariness that I was sure showed in my eyes. Race riots had nothing to do with it. And I was wrong to think Isaac admired me. He was ashamed of me.

I pictured Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s daughter, Inez, in her short linen dress with the pink sash. That dress belonged on Mary. John should have a gray suit and a crisp white shirt. The little girls should have blue dresses with white starched petticoats. They were the children of a Dakota rancher, one of the biggest land-owners in the Badlands. And me? I should be like the Circle of Eight ladies with a cream-colored blouse, a black skirt, and a brooch at my throat.

Last spring there was money to buy Mabel Walker’s place. This coming winter, Isaac was going off to work in the mine. He was doing it to raise money for more cattle, for grazing rights, for that bull of Al McKee’s. Isaac wasn’t doing it to buy linen dresses with sashes and a boy’s suit with a white shirt. He was doing it to buy Al McKee’s land.

Anger welled up inside of me. Land was a measure of a person’s worth. I couldn’t count the number of times Isaac had said that. But there’d never be enough land to satisfy Isaac. There’d always be another patch just right for grazing, or there’d be a corner with a wash that never ran dry, or there’d be a stretch of flatlands made for raising winter wheat. It’d never end.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Fourteen years ago I lived in fear of Isaac sending me back to Chicago. I had worked hard to please him; I had done everything he’d asked of me just to see a shine of admiration in his eyes. Looking back, I understood that I had done it all too good. He couldn’t run the ranch without me. I was never going home.

L
ate the next day I stood in the open doorway looking out. The air was fresh and cool; the rain had quit that morning. It was the day after I’d read Sue’s letter about Johnny. I had just put the little girls to bed and had my sewing basket and mending in my hands. The light wasn’t all that good for mending, I decided. Either that or my eyes weren’t up to it.

“Fall finally got here,” Isaac said to me. His rocker thumped unevenly over a rough patch on the plank porch floor. I sat down in the rocker beside him. “Rode in on the storm,” he said. From all sides of us, toads chirped their quick, high call. I had thought the drought had killed them all, but I was wrong. All along they’d been biding their time, low in the grasses, waiting for the rain so they could do their calling and mating.

Isaac said, “I’ll go to Al’s tomorrow, get the horses and the wagon. It’ll be dry enough. With Mary and John’s help, I’ll have the wheat in the ground in a week’s time. You wait and see, Rachel. Come spring, the fields will be green and the cattle getting fat.”

My brother Johnny had been killed. That morning there’d been more blood in my underclothes, and the baby still wasn’t kicking. There was winter to get through on low supplies and Isaac away at the gold mine. All that to face and he was looking past it.

“Spring,” I said.

“It’ll be here before you know it,” he said.

I held my tongue. Like yesterday, everything was still peculiarly sharp in my mind. There’d been more clouds than sunshine, but even so, the sun had seemed too harsh. The wind was overly crisp and the children’s voices were shrill, all of it setting my teeth on edge. And the mud. The heavy, rotten smell of it made my belly roll.

Earlier that day, right after noon dinner, the prickly sharpness in my mind made me go to the root cellar. I needed to see firsthand how it was going to be this winter. Usually by September sealed jars of tomatoes, corn, and carrots lined the cellar shelves. Usually I’d be busy putting straw on the cellar’s dirt floor so I’d be ready when it came time to store the potatoes and the heads of cabbage. Most times in September, I was counting and sorting vegetable seeds so I’d know what I had for the spring planting.

But this was a different September. The canning jars on the cellar shelves were empty, and there was no need to line the dirt floor.

Sitting on the porch in the twilight, I pulled my shawl closer. I thought about Johnny in some potter’s field far from home. I hoped that someone had prayed over him. I wanted to think there was a cross to show where he rested. I hoped that his fingernails were clean and that someone had thought to fold his hands on his chest. Isaac stood up, jarring my thoughts. He whistled for Mary and John, and the shrillness of it ran clear through me. I tensed, my back arching.

John and Rounder bobbed out of the wash that now had a stream running through it. They loped up the rise, both of them muddy, John’s hands pressed together making a cupped circle.

John spun to a quick stop in front of Isaac and me. “Look,” he said, darting a nervous look at me. The children had been careful around me all day. In their eyes, Johnny’s death made me a stranger. It turned me into a woman what hollered at them for no good reason. I forced a smile.

He opened his dirty hands just enough to show the head of a green-speckled toad he’d captured. “He’s a jumper. Watch.” John fell to his knees on the porch, and I heard something give way in his pants. One more thing to mend, I thought. John put his cupped hands on the ground. “Get back, Rounder,” he said.

With his finger, John poked the toad. Rounder let out a great woof of excitement. Startled, the toad jumped a short length of the porch, its back legs dangling high in the air. It plopped into a sudden landing, folding its spotted legs beneath itself.

John sprang forward, scooped up the toad, and turned to me, waiting for me to say something. “My,” I said. He grinned, and in that instant he looked just like Isaac.

“That’s some toad,” Isaac said. “Must have gone a good foot and a half, maybe even two. And he’s a little fellow. Let’s see for sure. Get your ruler, John. I’ll hold your toad.”

I looked toward the barn. “Call again for Mary, would you?”

Isaac did, but his whistle was not all that shrill or long. His mind was on that far-jumping toad. I got up. “I’ll go get her,” I said. “She must be where she can’t hear.”

“I’ll go,” Isaac said, but he was down on the porch floor with John, measuring the jump with the ruler.

“I feel like walking,” I said. And I did. All of a sudden, I was restless. I felt like doing something hard. I felt the sudden urge to drag all the rag carpets from the house so I could beat the dust out of them. I even had it in me to polish the cookstove, and after that I wouldn’t have minded going out in the pasture and picking up a wheelbarrow load of cow chips.

The baby,
I thought, fear shooting through me. That was what had me all stirred up. I’d be giving birth any time and I didn’t know how it was going to go.

“Jumped twenty-two inches, Daddy. Just look at that,” John was saying as I walked down the rise toward the barn. “Isn’t he some kind of jumper? Didn’t I tell you?”

“You’re right about that, son. Let’s try him again.”

Their voices faded as I made my way to the barn, mud sticking to my boots. At the barn door I stopped, taken aback by the swarms of flies and by a stink that reminded me of meat gone bad on an August day. “Mary, bedtime,” I called. “Daddy’s been whistling for you.”

She didn’t answer. Holding my shawl close, I stepped into the barn and waited for my eyes to get used to the sudden dark. My nose pinched against the stink. I swatted at the flies, sorry that I hadn’t thought to bring my bandanna to keep them from my mouth and nose.

“Mary? You in here?”

“I’m over here with Jerseybell,” Mary said. “She’s bad.”

I went to the stall. Jerseybell was down and on her side. Mary sat beside her, running her hand along the cow’s flank. “I’ve been trying to tell her she’s got to eat,” Mary said. “She’s got to get up, but she won’t do it. It’s like she doesn’t care.”

I found a lantern and took a match and a piece of sandpaper from my apron pocket. I struck the match; the light flared. I lit the lantern and hung it from a bent nail in the dirt wall. In the white circle of light, Jerseybell panted. Her eyes were dull and unseeing. Her ribs poked out and she looked half her size. Yesterday’s castor oil treatment hadn’t helped at all; maybe it had made her worse. Isaac better get over to the McKees’ first thing tomorrow and get that new cow home quick.