The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (9 page)

I looked at the little girls under the kitchen table as I put the iron back on the stove.
This was their home,
I told myself. Our home. Not Chicago. I was lucky to have so much. I had a house, a wood house. I was the only one in my family able to say that. A person didn’t just walk away from her house, not even when times were bad.

Something inside of me bucked at that. This drought was driving out homesteaders right and left. I used to feel sorry for them, but not anymore. At least the drought was over for them. Their mouths weren’t dried up like they’d been chewing grit. They weren’t watching their cattle die, and they weren’t dropping their children into water wells.

But they had other worries,
I told myself.
Most everybody did. Things were going to get better here. They had to—it couldn’t stay dry forever. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and put your mind to your work.

Later that day, when the sun was burning its hottest and the wind blowing its strongest, me and the girls sat down to a noon dinner of beans and half-filled cups of lukewarm water. The girls all made faces. I had strained the water but it still clouded up with silt. The beans were nothing without fat or salt, but they were filling and we were hungry. Even Liz ate. When we finished, I gave Rounder a spoonful of beans I’d put aside for him.

“Time for the outhouse,” I said to Alise and Emma, expecting Mary to dry-wipe the dishes clean. Liz gave me a questioning look. “You too,” I told her. I picked up Emma, put her on my hip. She stretched a leg across the top of my belly, resting it there, and that made me smile a little.

Alise whined on the way to the outhouse, Rounder following, but I tried not to listen to her complain about her mouth being all dried up. The Palmer Hotel in Chicago had indoor plumbing. All a person had to do to get water was turn a faucet at the kitchen sink. The hotel even had indoor bathrooms. Mama once wrote that she figured someday all the houses in Chicago would have them too, even the ones in the Black Belt.

When Mary was almost two and Isaac Two a new baby, Isaac made the outhouse bigger. He dug a second hole and cut and sanded a new wood seat that had two round openings. One seat was small for Mary and her brother for when he’d be out of diapers. The other was larger for us. The outhouse was good size, but too small to hold me with my swelled-up belly and three children. “Wait outside,” I told Liz. “Don’t you go off anywhere.”

I held Emma steady while she sat on the smaller hole. “Stinks,” Alise said, pointing at her.

“Hush,” I said.

Mama loved to tell stories about the Palmer Hotel. It was ten stories high and had a long view of the lake. Shiny black horse cabs waited out front to take the white gentlemen guests to the downtown skyscrapers. Sometimes it was their wives, wrapped in furs, what rode in the cabs. These women shopped in the department stores and when they wore themselves out doing that, they had afternoon tea in the hotel dining room. Dinners on silver trays were delivered to their rooms at seven, and later the gentlemen and their wives left together, that time wearing evening clothes for the theater.

When we moved to Chicago, it took Mama just one day to find her job at the Palmer. After Sue finished the tenth grade, she went to work with Mama deep in the basement far below the guest rooms. Not me. I had to have windows. My first job was rolling pie crusts in a Michigan Avenue bakery. I was almost fourteen. But before I had to quit school, I liked meeting Mama at the end of the day so we could walk home together. I waited for her beside the department store catty-corner to the hotel. In the winter, I hunched up inside my wool coat and pulled my hands high up into my sleeves. There, I watched the doorman in his red velvet cape sweep guests in and out of the hotel’s yellow-gilded tall front doors.

“Liz,” I called as the three of us left the outhouse. “Your turn.” She was nowhere to be seen. I called again. Still no answer. That rubbed me wrong. Liz knew better than to go off without telling me. The Badlands was a dangerous place for children. They could lose their bearings and get lost, they could fall into a narrow slit in the earth, or they could, like our Isaac Two, slip from a low boulder.

“Where’s Liz?” Alise said. The look she gave me said she hoped Liz would get a spanking. She wouldn’t be disappointed.

I looked around as we walked up to the house. Star and High Stepper had wandered to the cottonwood and stood switching their tails at flies. Jerseybell was gone; Liz must have gone off to help Mary move her to another patch of grass. She was always trailing after Mary. Maybe Liz had called through the outhouse door asking permission, and I hadn’t heard her. Maybe she hadn’t had to use the outhouse after all. No matter. She was still going to hear about it.

Alise and Emma went back to playing with their rag dolls under the table. I stirred what was left of the beans, not wanting any of them to stick to the bottom of the pot. I looked out the window and my heart nearly stopped. Mary was in the near west pasture putting cow chips in the wheelbarrow. I pressed closer to the window. Mary was alone.

I went outside and waved her in.

“Isn’t she with you?” Mary said when I asked about Liz.

My chest seized up. “Look in the barn and the root cellar. I’ll look in the dugout and the outhouse.”

I went back into the house, told Alise and Emma to get their dolls and come with me. “Why?” Alise said.

I said, “Never mind, just do it.” I yanked them up by their arms, hurried them into their room, told them to be good. I was scaring them but I didn’t care. Without another word, I latched them in and rushed off to the dugout the next rise over. Likely that was where Liz was. In good years, during planting and harvest seasons, Isaac hired a few of the boys what rode the train west to find work, and we put them up in the dugout. We kept beds there, and Liz was probably hiding under one of them.

Halfway up the rise, I had to slow down. Winded, I tried to pull in some air, but I couldn’t get much. The baby took up all the space in my belly and chest. My breath came out in short puffs.

“Liz?” I called when I finally got to the dugout. Nothing. I knew she couldn’t be there—the cobwebs in the doorway hadn’t been torn—but I went in anyway. She could have gotten in somehow. I called again as I looked in the kitchen and in the two bedrooms. She wasn’t there.

I hurried out of the dugout. She better not be hiding in the outhouse thinking that’d be the last place I’d look. The little girls knew they weren’t allowed in there alone. The larger hole wasn’t all that big, but if a child got to playing and stood up, she could slip and lose her balance. Liz wasn’t all that much bigger than four-year-old Alise, but she was old enough to know better. If she was hiding there, and something told me she was, she was going to hear from me and my big wooden spoon.

The outhouse door banged in the wind. My mouth went even drier. We always kept it latched.

Holding my belly, feeling like I was carrying a twenty-pound sack of flour, I ran.

The outhouse was empty, but I couldn’t shake the bad feeling. I put my ear to the larger toilet hole. Sharp lime fumes stung my nose and eyes. Wind whistled in the deep, dark tunnel.

Straightening, I thought I heard a cry. I put my ear back to the toilet. “Liz!” I screamed into the hole.

Nothing.

Wild thoughts took ahold of me. In Chicago’s slaughterhouse district, children were forever falling into open sewer holes, grown folks too, if they were tipsy from drink. I gripped one end of the wood plank that made the seat and pulled. When those bodies were pulled out, they were swelled up and gray, not looking anything like human beings. I pulled again. The plank gave a little.

I pulled harder. One of the boards cracked, splintering around the nails. “Liz,” I screamed into the pit. “Hold on, I’m getting a rope.”

I backed out of the outhouse and nearly fell, stumbling over Rounder. He barked at me.

“Liiii-zzzz!” Mary called from somewhere behind the barn.

I ran to the barn for the rope. This was all my doing. I’d been daydreaming, thinking about Mama and the Palmer Hotel with its indoor plumbing, and now something bad had happened to Liz. But some of this was her fault; I couldn’t help thinking that too. She’d run off on purpose; she wanted to make me sorry for putting her in the well.

Inside the barn I slowed down, my eyes adjusting to the gloom as I made my way to the wall where we hung the rope. My breathing was loud and quick. Rounder circled tight, hemming me in, meaning to stop me. “Get away,” I shouted. I found the rope and hurried out but stopped, blinded all at once by the sudden glare of the sun. Squinting, I put a hand up to shade my eyes.

Rounder bumped up against my leg, nervous, and without thinking, I patted his neck to calm him. His tongue darted out and licked my fingers. Panting, Rounder tightened his circles around me, and suddenly I understood his meaning. “Liz!” I said. He barked, put his ears flat, and raced off to the wash, a narrow cut in the earth by the cottonwood.

“Mary!” I called, dropping the rope, running.

She came from the trash heap behind the house. I pointed at Rounder, and Mary went after him.

Rounder went down into the part of the wash that was the depth of a grown man. Mary followed him into it, sliding on her bottom, gray dirt tumbling down behind her, dust swirling. I ran, breathing hard, my fingers spread out under my belly. A cramp shot through my side; I hunched up. Isaac Two had slipped from a low boulder. A pointy-edged rock had pierced through his right temple when he landed, killing him. He’d only been five years old.

My legs wobbled; I caught myself.

“Mama! I found her!”

My knees buckled and my legs gave way one part at a time and before I knew how, I was sitting on the ground, my legs folded up under me.

“She’s all right!”

I didn’t try to get up. I sat there thinking how I was going to give Liz a tongue-lashing that child wouldn’t forget anytime soon. But all at once she was throwing herself on me and I didn’t care that she nearly knocked the air out of me. Her arms were around my neck, and I rocked her, back and forth, both of us crying, and that was when I knew that I hated the Badlands.

The shock of this thought stopped my tears. I hated the Badlands. For years I had hated it; I just didn’t know it until then.

“Mama,” Mary said, her voice low. She knelt beside me. “Mama.” Her face was pinched with worry.

I hated the Badlands, I hated everything about it—the bigness of it, the never-endingness of it, the lonesomeness of it. The weight of my hate bore down on me. I wanted to lie down in the dirt and cry.

“You’re bleeding,” Mary whispered. “Your hands.”

Over Liz’s shoulder, I held them up. One fingernail was partly torn off. There were splinters in other fingertips. There were tears and scratches in my palms. It took me a moment to understand it was from pulling at the outhouse seat. Blood ran down my hands; it was on my sleeves. It was on Liz’s dress, and all I could think about was the long soaking it would take to get the stains out and how there wasn’t any water. The blood was going to set, and me and Liz would have to wear these marked dresses.

Rounder circled the three of us, panting, his tongue too swollen for his mouth. Mine felt the same. I pulled myself together and told myself I didn’t hate the Badlands, I couldn’t. It was the place where me and Isaac made a home, it was the place where I birthed our children. The scare of losing Liz had played fast with my nerves; I couldn’t hate my home.

“Mama?” Mary said, holding out the handkerchief that I kept tucked in my sleeve. She wiped Liz’s eyes, and then she wiped mine.

So easy to lose a child. It could happen anywhere. It could happen to any child, to any mother. But God was watching even if I wasn’t. God and Rounder.

“Why’d you do this, Liz?” I said. “Why’d you hide like that, scaring us this way?”

Liz hid her face in my neck. She didn’t have to say it. She had run away from the well. And from me. I said, “Don’t you ever do this again. You hear me? Don’t you ever.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I thought of Alise and Emma in their room and a flutter of panic rose in my chest. I couldn’t take any more lost children. “Let go of me, honey,” I said to Liz. “Can’t get up if you don’t let go.” Mary unwrapped Liz’s arms from my neck and pulled her up. Somehow, then, Mary got me to my feet.

I stood there a moment looking down into the wash. In good times it had water in it.

I turned my back on it. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see to your sisters.”

A
lise and Emma were crying when we got up to the house—me hurrying them into their room had scared them bad. They weren’t the only ones. My dress was soaked clear through—that was what losing Liz had done to me. After me and Mary got the little girls settled, I wrapped up my torn fingernail, and Mary used a needle to pick the splinters from my hands. I put on my other dress and hung the damp one with its bloody spots on the clothesline to dry. I wanted a bath in the worst way. I imagined sitting in a tub of clear water, the grit floating off of me. I wanted a cool drink of water to take the swelling out of my tongue. The girls were every bit as thirsty; Emma got to crying from it. We settled for a few sips each of lukewarm water, Rounder too.

My ironing was waiting for me. The outhouse seat needed fixing, but like the ironing, it was just going to have to wait. What we needed was a little rest on the porch. Mary gathered up the girls’ rag dolls, and I spread out our red Indian blanket for the girls to play on. Mary and Liz sat on the top porch step, the wind tugging at their bandannas. For something to do, Mary tried to play school. “What’s two plus two?” she asked Liz. “Two plus three? Three plus two?” Liz acted like she didn’t hear Mary; she just looked down at her fingers spread out on her knees. When Mary gave up, I told her and Liz to move Jerseybell to a fresh patch of shade, and after that they needed to pick up more cow chips.