The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (7 page)

He didn’t know the half of it. Eleven days ago Isaac DuPree had walked into the boardinghouse, and without giving it a thought, he’d made every one of us want something big. The boarders wanted land of their own, Isaac’s mother wanted to keep him here with her, and me—I dreamed of making a home with him in South Dakota.

Mr. Jackson had his wagon in the backyard now. Trudy hurried through the kitchen to meet him, but not before throwing me a knowing glance when she saw Isaac at the kitchen back door. He stepped aside for her to pass, and that put him an arm’s length away from me.

My breathing turned ragged. I held out the sack lunch of biscuits and boiled eggs that I’d packed.

“What’s this?” Isaac said.

“A little something to tide you over.”

“Obliged.”

His eyes flickered over me as he took the sack lunch. I drew in my breath. He liked what he saw. Because I believed this—wanted to believe that his eyes shined for me—I said, “I’m proud to know you.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow.

“A man with land. That’s a proud thing.”

“So it is.”

“There’s talk.”

Isaac cocked his head.

“Talk that you’re getting married.”

“Gossip,” he said.

“To Lydia Prather.”

“Lydia Prather wouldn’t last a day in the Badlands.”

I bit my lip to keep from smiling. In the side yard, Trudy said something about Mr. Jackson making a mess the last time he was there. “That’s the nature of coal,” he said back. Then they both fell to squabbling, each saying the other needed to learn how to mind his own business. It came to me that a year from now, five years, ten, I’d be still in Mrs. DuPree’s kitchen, still looking out the same window, still listening to the same bickering. Mr. Jackson started up with his shovel. It made a raw scraping sound as it scooped up coal. I pulled myself up. Coal clunked down the chute that ran along the side of the kitchen.

“Likely not,” I said to Isaac about Lydia Prather. “But you’ll want a woman out there. In South Dakota.”

Isaac stared at me.

I looked him right in the eye. “One to cook for you, do up your laundry.” I smiled. “One to help in the fields.”

“No,” he said. “Not me. I’m doing this alone. I don’t need Lydia Prather. I don’t need anybody.”

“I—”

“You’re as bad as my mother.”

I’d made him angry; his muscles pulled at his mouth. Before I could make it right, he was gone, leaving nothing but his footsteps on the wood floors as he went through the dining room and then the parlor. The front door opened and closed. My ears rang and my heart flopped around in a strange way high in my chest. I hoped it meant to kill me quick.

I stumbled into a corner, knocking over the kitchen stool. Holding my apron to my face, I tried to cry. I wanted to cry from the shame and the disgrace and the misery of having thrown myself at a man what didn’t want me. I tried, I gave a little wail, but I couldn’t cry. The hurt was too big.

Somebody coughed. I spun around. Isaac. Heat flooded my cheeks. He’d come back to humiliate me even more. “Please,” I said, putting my apron up to my face again. “Go away.”

He cleared his throat.

“Go away.”

“Now this is why women are such a mystery.”

I didn’t say anything.

“God made women just to keep us a little off balance.”

I looked at him over my apron.

He was leaning against the pie safe, a little smile pulling at the corners of his mouth, but there was a hardness in his eyes. He said, “You might have something. The right kind of woman could come in handy. Another pair of hands. You do know your way around a kitchen, and like you said before, you grew up on a farm.” Isaac paused. “You were talking about yourself, weren’t you?”

My heart skipped.

He said, “A single woman can stake a claim.”

My mind stumbled over the words.

“That’d give me three hundred and twenty acres.”

I put a hand on the counter.

“I’ll have you write out a statement saying you intend to homestead. That way I’ll get the claim now. Land’s going fast. The agent’ll expect a little extra; you’re supposed to be there in person. But there’s ways around that.”

His face blurred.

“It’ll be hard work. You’ll have to pull your share. It’ll wear you thin. There’ll be days you’ll curse me, you’ll curse yourself for leaving Chicago.”

“No,” I said.

“You say that now, but it’s not Chicago. There’s no electric lights out there, or running water, not where I’m going.”

Everything was suddenly very clear.

“Three hundred and twenty acres,” he was saying. “I can raise a fair number of cattle on that, wheat too. It’ll get me off to a quicker start.”

I said, “I expect to be married.”

Surprise flashed across his face. “You can’t be. A woman has to be single to stake a claim.”

“Then stake it now,” I said. “Like you said. In my name. Then come back and marry me. If you want that land.”

His lips disappeared into a thin line. He hadn’t expected this, not from me, the kitchen help. I hadn’t expected it either; I didn’t know where the words came from. But now that I had said them, I made myself stand square to Isaac.

He said, “What’s in it for you?”

A chance to be in your arms. A chance to have something that counted. I said, “My own home.”

“That so?”

“Yes.”

He turned away and looked out the back door, and I guessed that he wasn’t seeing Mr. Jackson driving his coal wagon out of the yard. He wasn’t seeing the alley and he wasn’t seeing the back sides of the next row of houses. Isaac was seeing, I believed, three hundred and twenty acres of land filled up with cattle and wheat.

“I wasn’t looking to get married,” he said, still looking out the door.

“Three hundred and twenty acres,” I said.

“Hell.” Then he squared his shoulders. “All right,” he said, turning to face me. “But there’s one condition. We’ll give it six months. That’s enough time to get me started, get me through planting season. Then we’ll end it. You’ll come back home. There’ll be talk, but gossip never bothered me. We both get what we want. You’ll have been married, and I’ll have the land.”

I wanted Isaac to say that I meant something to him, that he’d be proud to take me as his wife. Instead, I felt cheap. This wasn’t how I wanted it to be. I had sold myself for a hundred and sixty acres of land. But it didn’t have to stay that way. I’d work hard. I’d prove myself. Isaac wouldn’t be able to do without me. He might come to like being married. I said, “A year. I want a year.”

His eyebrows rose.

I said, “A year. Four seasons.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Most women don’t last that long homesteading, but all right. A year. I’ll come for you mid-June. Have your things ready.”

“I want a preacher.”

“I figured that.”

He opened his gold pocket watch. “I’ve got just enough time to tell Mother.” He snapped the watch closed and put it back in his pants pocket. “But first your statement for the claim.”

“That’s right,” I said. “My claim.” A chill ran through me. “And your mother.”

 

 

 

I waited in the kitchen while Isaac was upstairs telling his mother about our plans. Waiting turned my nerves bad. I went out back to get some air. Mr. Jackson, the coal man, had driven his wagon into the alley and was calling to his horses to keep moving. Trudy stood on the back stoop watching him, her hands on her hips.

“Trudy,” I said. “He’s marrying me.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Isaac DuPree. He’s coming for me mid-June.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What’d you do to get him?”

“Nothing. He just came out and asked me. Mid-June, that’s when.”

“Lordy. You must have done something.”

“Can’t you be glad for me?” I turned away and went back into the kitchen. She followed me. “Rachel,” she said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

I started to say that she did mean it, but then I put my hand up. Isaac was coming down the stairs; he was coming to tell me what his mother said. His footsteps echoed through the parlor. I held my breath. The front door opened, then closed. The house was quiet.

Trudy looked at me. “There goes your groom.”

 

 

 

“Tramp,” Mrs. DuPree said to me. “Get out.” She stood in the kitchen in her nightdress and bed jacket, her face heavy with rage. Isaac hadn’t been gone over ten minutes.

Stunned, I shook out my wet hands and left the frying pan I’d been scrubbing in the washbasin. “Tramp,” Mrs. DuPree said louder, as if I hadn’t heard her the first time. I fumbled with the knot in my apron strings, my hands still wet. “That’s how you got him,” she said. Trudy came in from the dining room holding her broom.

I hung up my apron and got my cloth bag.

“Give it to me,” Mrs. DuPree said, pointing at my bag. “Some of my silver’s missing.” I gave it to her; I was used to obeying her. She emptied it onto the floor.

“Lordie, Lordie,” Trudy said.

Mrs. DuPree shot her a warning look. With the toe of her shoe she pushed at my things—my tapestry coin purse, my pocket mirror and comb, my handkerchief, some pieces of hard candy in silver foil. My cheeks burned.

“Mrs. DuPree,” Trudy said. “You know Rachel. She wouldn’t steal.”

She glared at Trudy, shushing her. She pointed at me. “Get out, right now. Get out of my house.” I stuffed my things back into my bag, all thumbs and jittery. I struggled with the door and then I was outside and almost to the alley when she opened the door and yelled at me to get back in the kitchen, the dishes weren’t finished, and there was dinner to cook this afternoon. I didn’t think twice. I turned around and went back. Mrs. DuPree was gone.

“What’s the matter with you?” Trudy said. “You got what you wanted. You got her son, a man with land. Where’s your pride?”

Traveling on a train to Nebraska, I thought. I had to come back. Isaac didn’t know where I lived. If I wasn’t at the boardinghouse when he came for me, he might not try all that hard to find me. But that wasn’t the kind of thing I was willing to say out loud. I said, “I need the money. I’ll stay as long as she’ll let me in the door.”

Trudy shrugged her shoulders. “It’s your funeral.”

 

 

 

Mrs. DuPree placed a newspaper advertisement for my job. That brought all kinds of women to the back door, but none of them suited Mrs. DuPree. “Too nervous. She’ll break every dish I own,” she told Trudy about one woman. “Hands shake. She probably drinks.” Of another she said, “Shifty. That one will steal me blind.” One woman, still nursing, wanted to bring her baby with her. Once a gray-headed white woman showed up begging for the job. “Poor white trash,” Mrs. DuPree said. “Won’t have her kind in my house.”

Trudy thought Mrs. DuPree turned away all those women just so she could keep on tormenting me.

“You think you’re marrying a rich man,” Mrs. DuPree said on those days when she was so angry I believed I could smell her bitterness. “You better think again, you conniving little cheap tramp. I know your kind, coming up from the South, looking for easy money. Think you’re marrying up, a dark girl like you snagging my son. Well, think again, missy. Marry my son and he’ll never see a penny of my money. You’ll be the ruin of him. You mark my words, you’ll bring him down.”

Other days though, Mrs. DuPree talked to me only through Trudy. “She’s wanting you to stay late again,” Trudy would say. “Wants the oven scoured and polished all over again. Told her you just did it yesterday, but that wasn’t good enough. Said you were sloppy.” Or, “Now she’s got you cooking for her friends, wants you to make chicken and dumplings for Preacher Teller. Mercy, Rachel. I don’t know how you’re standing it, her being so nasty. Why don’t you go on and quit, you don’t need this job.”

But I did. I was buying for my own home now—cooking pots, a frying pan, and dishes and cups for two. One by one I packed each thing in the traveling trunk Mama bought secondhand for me. I was not going empty-handed into this marriage.

Mid-June came and went.

At first I worried that Isaac had been killed, scalped by Indians. But then a letter addressed to Mrs. DuPree came from Nebraska and she turned even meaner.

“He didn’t write you, did he?” Mrs. DuPree said to me.

I tried to smile.

“Of course he didn’t. He’s forgotten all about you. But Lydia Prather, he hasn’t forgotten her. He’s quite taken with her.”

I tried to ignore Mrs. DuPree. I did my best to keep my hopes up. Isaac was an army man; he was a man of his word. But he hadn’t written; he hadn’t tried to explain why mid-June had come and gone. In my heart, I believed the worst. He had my statement for the claim. He didn’t need me.

Days passed. Heartsore, I cooked for the boarders and kept still when Mrs. DuPree talked about Lydia Prather. Each night I went to bed beside my sister Sue, worn out but too hurt to sleep. On the last of June, Mama said it was time to put Isaac DuPree behind me. She patted my hand when she said this. She and Dad didn’t like it that I’d agreed to marry a man they hadn’t met. But Mama liked it even less that Isaac DuPree had hurt me. The next day, the first of July, me and Sue carried the traveling trunk with its pots and pans up to the attic.

Mama thought I should do the same with my plum-colored wedding dress. She thought I’d never forget Isaac DuPree as long as the dress hung from a peg in my room. She was right, but I couldn’t bring myself to put it up in the attic. I wanted the dress near me. I wanted to admire the lace collar and to be able to touch the pearl-shaped buttons that ran down the back. I wanted to think how it would feel for Isaac to take that smooth satin dress off of me.

“No,” I told Mama. “Not yet.”