The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (12 page)

Inez pulled herself up onto the wagon’s side step, and once on the buckboard, she gave her mother a hand up. Little Luther climbed up behind her, and from the high buckboard he jumped flat-footed into the bed of the wagon, rocking it. His trick made Liz and Alise giggle. Mrs. Fills the Pipe whirled around and said something to him. He sat down.

Mrs. Fills the Pipe whistled again. Inez put on her duster. Minutes passed before Franklin and Mary came running from the wash, Emma bouncing in Franklin’s arms. He shifted her to Mary and when he did, I saw how his hand stayed on Mary’s arm while he said something to her. Then he jumped up onto the wagon. He cracked the reins and the wagon jerked forward. The girls ran beside it, waving and calling good-bye.

Mrs. Fills the Pipe and Inez did not wave back. Neither did they look up at me. All at once furious, I was on my feet, hollering, “And don’t you ever come around here again!” The wind blew my words back at me. They couldn’t hear, and that gave me courage. “You’re nothing but Indians! Agency Indians!” Suddenly spent, I sank back into the rocker.

“Mama!” Liz and Alise had turned back from the wagon and were running up the rise, their dresses tangling around their knees, yelling about all the fun they’d had. I closed my eyes, cursing myself for inviting squaws to tea, cursing myself for giving them water and food. And Isaac. I didn’t want to think what he was going to say about all this.

The girls jumped up onto the porch steps, shaking the floor, jarring my nerves, and making my head hurt. “Hush up,” I snapped. “I hear you just fine.” They were too worked up to pay me any mind.

“Luther was funny,” Liz said. “He was doing somersaults in the wash. You should’ve seen him. Grit was sticking all over his shirt. His hair too! He shook himself off like Rounder does after rolling.”

On the porch, Alise crouched low and tucked her head between her knees, eager to try a somersault. Liz gave her push and Alise flopped on her side, giggling. I loosened my sun-hat ribbons, hoping that would ease the headache that had come up from nowhere. Just like the memory that flashed through my mind.

Fourteen summers ago, I suddenly recalled, a squaw and her half-breed boy had showed up at our homestead. She had come looking for something. I tried to remember what it was, but as the memory began to take shape in my mind, I saw Mary coming up the rise. I leaned forward some. There was something new about her. She was all light and airy even though she carried Emma, squirming, on her hip.

“Mary?” I said, when she came up onto the porch.

She didn’t answer. She smiled in a loose kind of way like she had come across a secret that pleased her. Or like she had just been walking with a boy.

“Mary.”

“Ma’am?” There was a faraway look in her dark eyes.

“What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing.” She kissed Emma on the forehead and giggled as she swung her to the ground.

“What’d you and that boy talk about?”

“Franklin? Oh, nothing much. Just about school, mainly. He’ll be going back in ten days. He goes to the same boarding school as Inez. Or where she used to go. Inez just graduated; smartest girl in her class. She’s so pretty, don’t you think, Mama?” Mary didn’t wait for my answer. “Franklin sleeps in a dormitory there with forty-nine other boys. In bunk beds. So does Luther. I think that would be so much fun, but he says it’s not, not really.”

“How old is he?”

“Fifteen. Just turned in July.”

Isaac would have a fit.

Just then the memory of the squaw and her half-breed boy came back to me. The boy’s face had chilled me. The squaw was swelled up with a baby. Isaac had run them off but they hadn’t gone far. They showed up the next day.

“Mama, I’m hungry,” Alise said.

“Me too, me too,” Liz said, Emma joining in with her, their high-pitched voices making me wince from the pain in my head.

“Enough,” I snapped. The girls stopped, pressing their lips to swallow their whines. I rubbed my forehead. I never wanted to see Mrs. Fills the Pipe again. She had insulted me in my own home; she had brought up ugly memories.

“Mary,” I said. “Go corral the horses.”

She smiled, her eyes still far off.
Her mind was on that boy,
I thought,
that Indian boy.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Enough of that,” I said, startling Mary, bringing her back to herself.

At least empty bellies were a familiar worry.

I
t was the next afternoon when another wagon—coming from the west—stirred up a dust cloud. This time it wasn’t Indians; it was Isaac and John.

It should have been a homecoming to lift my heart. They were bringing water and supplies. But my nerves were in a knot. Mrs. Fills the Pipe and her ugly words about buffalo soldiers kept circling in my mind. So did the squaw what showed up at the homestead years back with her half-breed boy. But most of all, I thought about Isaac. He wasn’t going to like it when he heard about Indians sitting on our porch, and he wasn’t going to like it when he found out that I’d done the inviting.

The girls and Rounder went to the barn to meet Isaac and John, and I followed, not moving near as fast. There, Isaac brought the wagon to a stop and he and John jumped down. “What’d you bring, Daddy?” Alise said. “Candy?” and that started the excitement and the clamor that was always part of a homecoming. Mary and Alise got to guessing about what was in the supply boxes, and I was glad for all the noise. Maybe nobody’d think to mention Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s visit.

Liz clutched my leg. Her eyes were wide and stared at nothing. “Isaac,” I said, my hand going to the top of Liz’s head. John was standing near him. “Did you get water?”

“Buckets of it,” Isaac said, directing his words to Liz. “More than enough to wet your whistle.”

John grumbled something under his breath. I frowned at him. He frowned back. “Mind yourself,” I said, my voice low. John’s eyes darted to Isaac, and Isaac gave him a hard, steadying look. John ducked his head but he was angry. His fists were knotted up. A chill walked up my backbone.

“How was town?” I said, not knowing what to make of any of this.

“Like usual,” Isaac said. “For the most part.” He and John locked eyes for a moment before John turned away and went over by the hitched horses. Isaac said, “Folks aren’t themselves right now. This drought’s bringing out the worst in some.”

Behind Isaac, Mary lifted Alise to the top of one of the wagon wheels. “Careful now,” I called out. Alise’s feet slipped. Mary caught her and pushed her up and over and into the wagon bed. At my side, Emma had a fistful of Liz’s skirt balled up in her hand as she tottered on the rocky ground.

I turned back to Isaac. “What do you mean? Was it John? Did he misbehave?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I told you. People aren’t themselves,” he said, his voice as low as mine.

“Something happened. I can tell.”

“Nothing did.” Then he said, “Mrs. Svenson.”

“You had business at the post office?”

“No.”

Mrs. Svenson was the postmistress, and her husband was the ticket agent for the railroad. He wasn’t so bad, but Mrs. Svenson didn’t like us, and because we had never given her cause, I always figured it was because we were Negroes. When I used to go to Scenic with Isaac and needed postage to send a letter home, Mrs. Svenson sold it to me without speaking. Instead she stared at me, her blue eyes narrowed as if she expected me to try to steal the stamp. She had a way of curling her lips that showed her yellow teeth. I’d never seen her clean. The front of her dress was always soiled with spots of food. Mrs. DuPree, Isaac’s mother, would have called her poor white trash. My mother would have gone along with that.

“What’d she do?” I said to Isaac.

“Doesn’t matter. We got the water.”

I glanced at John. He had his left hand up on Bucky’s withers, but his eyes were fixed on Mary and Alise what were in the wagon bed. He made like he was listening to all their chatter about the food supplies but I knew different. John was listening to me and Isaac.

I lowered my voice even more. “Did she say something to John?”

“No.” The muscles around his mouth were tight. “It was me, if you have to know. She and I had a few words. At the depot. That’s where they’re keeping the water brought by the train. It’s being rationed. You buy it from Anderson at his store, pick it up at the depot.”

I waited.

“She claimed all the water was spoken for.”

My eyes flickered to the wagon’s bed. “But—”

John said, “She called Daddy ‘boy.’”

“Lord,” I said, putting my hand out toward Isaac.

“Forget it,” he said. “I got the water.”

I pictured the train depot, seeing in my mind a handful of townsmen and a few ranchers too, all there to get water. I imagined Isaac and John standing with them near the water tower, the tracks to their backs. The men talked about the drought, shaking their heads over all the families what had been driven out by the hard times. Isaac was a man with twenty-five hundred acres, and so far he had managed to hang on to every bit of it. In the Badlands—even in the best of times—that earned respect. I imagined how his easy manner with the other men riled Mrs. Svenson.

“Trash,” I said. “She’s nothing but trash.”

“I said forget it. I have.” Isaac turned around to the wagon. His back stiffened. Mary and Alise stood in the bed, quiet, their eyes wide, staring at us. They had heard, and I saw that they were puzzled, they didn’t understand. Isaac was a grown man, not a boy.

“Move,” Isaac said to Mary and Alise. The harshness in his voice made them jump away and they stumbled as the wagon rocked. He reached over the side of the wagon and pulled a box to him. All at once, John looked ready to cry. He rubbed at his mouth, tugging at the corners. I wanted to spit out more ugly words about Mrs. Svenson but before I could, Isaac whistled out some air. He let go of the box that he’d pulled to him. He stepped away from the wagon, facing us. He forced a grin that came out lopsided, and then he cleared his throat. “John and I had ourselves quite an adventure on the road. Just a mile or so from here.”

Nobody said anything. They all—even Liz—looked to be still turning over in their minds what had happened in town. “You did?” I finally said.

“Yes, ma’am. We had ourselves an adventure.”

“What happened?” Mary said.

Isaac gave Mary a quick look of appreciation. “We were just minding our own business, heading home. John had the reins.” A sparkle worked its way into Isaac’s eyes. “I believe we were talking about how well he handled the horses when all of a sudden he said, ‘Look over there—it’s a tornado!’” Isaac had the children’s attention now; even Liz was listening. He let his voice turn serious. “It was a surprise, I’ll tell you. The sun’s shining and here comes a tornado. Right for us. Spinning faster and faster. ‘Take cover,’ John yelled, and you never saw two men move as fast as we did getting under the wagon. We covered our heads—we were ready. But girls, that tornado stopped right in front of our very eyes and turned into a—” He paused. “John, you tell them.”

John frowned, shaking his head.

“What was it?” Alise said.

Isaac looked to the left, then he looked to the right. Alise hunched down in the flatbed. Liz tightened her hold on my leg. Isaac cleared his throat, shaking his head. “No, can’t tell you. It’s too scary. But I’ll say this. It had a tail that stretched from here to the house.”

The girls’ eyes widened.

Bucky blew and sputtered, shaking flies from his eyes, startling the girls. “What was it?” Liz whispered. Isaac looked over his shoulder and then back at Liz and Alise.

“A dragon!” Isaac said, his voice booming. The girls all jumped, screaming. Mary laughed and then Alise and Liz did too. Not John, though. His head was down, hurt, I knew, by what had happened in town. Hurt too, maybe, that Isaac looked to be making light of it. But Isaac had to. A man was a man in the West, that was what he believed. It didn’t matter if that man was black or white. Work hard, pull your fair share, and people couldn’t help but respect you. Isaac, I knew, couldn’t bear it any other way.

By then, Isaac was reaching for one of the supply boxes. It scraped like sandpaper as he pulled it along the bottom of the wagon’s bed. Groaning some, he hoisted the box to his shoulder. Nothing more, I knew, would be said about Mrs. Svenson. I could ask Isaac from now until midnight about the particulars of what had happened, but he’d only shake me off saying how it amounted to nothing. Mrs. Svenson, Isaac might say, didn’t get along with anybody, not even her husband.

Maybe. All the same, it happened to Isaac. I said, “Let’s get these groceries in.”

 

 

 

It wasn’t until the two wooden boxes were unpacked that I realized there were just enough supplies for four weeks. I counted the tin cans again and refigured the two sacks of cornmeal and flour. I tried to make it come out different, but I was right the first time. Four weeks.

A year ago we’d had a tall stack of dollar bills in our savings account at the Interior Ranchers and Merchants Bank. Now, after buying Mabel Walker’s land, there must be nothing, not even a copper penny. It gave me a hollowed-out, sick feeling.

Isaac came up behind me, startling me. “I’ve got good news. Heard it’s raining in the Black Hills and it’s blowing this way.”

“That’s real good,” I said, but I was checking those supplies again. And even if I hadn’t been, I wasn’t about to let myself get all stirred up with hope. The Black Hills were some seventy miles west, and rain clouds were prone to drying up between there and the house. I couldn’t count the number of times this summer when Isaac had felt rain in the wind, seen it in the clouds, and smelled it in the air.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

“What on earth?”

“Just close them.”