The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (14 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“You should be. Our children are doing without and you’re feeding Indians.” He stepped down from the porch and walked off into the dark.

Sweat broke out on my forehead. Rounder whimpered, nosed my leg. A coyote—not all that far off—started up yipping and yowling. The baby kicked. I jerked and gripped the armrests. One by one, more coyotes joined in, their yammering echoing off the buttes, making it sound like there were hundreds of them.

I swore under my breath. I hated the Badlands. The words hissed through my mind. I hated it all—Indians, the ranch, the drought, what we’d done to Liz. I hated it. I wanted out.

The thought shocked me.
Don’t think that way,
I told myself. It wasn’t true. I didn’t mean it, and then I thought I heard a cry from inside the house. I hurried in, Rounder with me, afraid that the children had heard me and Isaac. I stood listening in the girls’ doorway and then in John’s. Their breathing was slow and easy. They were asleep; they hadn’t heard.

It is the drought,
I told myself. It was wearing me down, Isaac too. He was forty-five years old; he wasn’t a young man anymore. Five children and one more coming. The worry of caring for us was playing on his nerves. Mine too. No one could be in their right mind with so many worries.

I went to the parlor and lit a lamp, meaning to leave it there for Isaac. Doing that showed that I wanted things to be all right between us. I turned up the light. It caught on the glass doors of the narrow bookcase. I stopped. Inside the bookcase was Isaac’s gold army insignia. A wash of sadness came over me. I put the lamp on top of the case.

We had been married a little over a week when Isaac unpinned the insignia from his army hat. It was July, but there was a nip in the air so we had a fair-sized fire going. We had just eaten supper and even though it was cloudy, it was still full light. Days were long in the Badlands, and dark didn’t come until late. We sat cross-legged on the ground across from one another, the fire in the middle. We were tired, but in a good way. The two of us had spent the day building the walls of the barn with stacks of sod bricks.

“Don’t want to lose it,” Isaac said as he held the insignia in the palm of his hand. Ridges of new calluses were forming along the pads below his fingers. He looked at the insignia for a moment before rocking forward onto his knees and reaching around the fire to give it to me.

“It’s so handsome,” I said. It was two swords that crossed to make an
X.
“Your hat hardly looks right without it. You sure you don’t want to wear it?”

“No. Those days are over.”

The sadness in his voice surprised me. He looked past me like he was thinking about something from a long time ago. I held the insignia before me, turning it to make it glow in the firelight. Maybe he was sorry he’d quit the army. Maybe he wished he hadn’t married me. I said, “What do the swords mean?”

“Means I served with the Ninth Cavalry in the United States Army.”

“That’s a proud thing.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s your favorite thing in the whole world, isn’t it? The army.”

He got up, took the insignia from me, and put it in one of the knapsacks in the wagon’s bed. Then he came back to me and put out his hand. I reached for it and he pulled me to my feet. He ran a finger over my lips. “Right this very minute,” he said, “you’re my favorite thing.”

We’d been married nine days and until then, Isaac hadn’t said what he thought of me. I believed that I pleased him when we laid together under the wagon at night. But that didn’t mean he’d keep me past a year. It didn’t mean I was his favorite thing. I looked up at him, grateful. Then I stood on my toes and boldly slid my hands around the back of his neck. “You are too,” I said.

In the parlor, I unlatched the glass door. Beside the insignia was a framed photograph. I couldn’t remember when I last took the time to study it. I took it out, and even though I couldn’t see it all that sharp, I knew every line and shadow in the picture. It was of Isaac, not yet eighteen, in his work uniform at Fort Robinson. It was the summer of 1890. He was sitting on horseback, his boots pointed up in the stirrups, the reins loose in his right hand, his left hand resting on the saddle horn. His shoulders, not as broad as they got to be, were held back, and he was squinting because the sun caught him full on. There was a half smile on his face like he couldn’t keep from grinning even though army men weren’t supposed to smile for a camera.

Isaac was thirty-one years old when I married him. He had done a lot of living long before I met him. I understood that Isaac told me only what he wanted me to know about his past. I supposed I did the same. When he talked about his army days, it was always of an adventure. One time, though, I heard something that made my blood run cold. It was the night when Fred Schuling stayed with us. Fred had just gotten out of the army and had been to Interior and Scenic, looking for a good place to start his tannery. It was April. Mary was almost seven months old and the dugout was just two little rooms: the narrow kitchen and our bedroom. We were having a warm spell, so Fred didn’t mind sleeping in the barn loft. He had brought a bottle of whiskey, and him and Isaac passed it back and forth—wiping the neck clean each time—a few times during supper. At first, they talked about baseball at Fort Robinson and about the pitcher what took Isaac’s place after his discharge. Then they talked about the officers and some of the enlisted men and what had become of them. After a while, Fred said something about the battle at Wounded Knee Creek.

“That ended them,” he said. “They were stubborn cusses.”

“It was the last of the warriors,” Isaac said. “A sorry day.” He handed the whiskey bottle back to Fred.

“Always wished I’d been there.”

“No. You don’t. It was the bloodiest thing I’ve ever seen.” Isaac picked up his fork, put it back down. “The snow. God, I’ll never forget that red snow.”

The hair stood on my arms. Wounded Knee Creek wasn’t all that far off from our homestead. Indians still lived there. I looked over at Mary. She was in her basket nearly asleep; her eyelids drooped. I said, “Did they kill a lot of soldiers?”

“The Ninth lost one good man,” Fred said. “But the Seventh got there first. They took it on the chin.”

“And the Indians?” I said to him. “Did you get them?”

“The newspapers called it a massacre.”

I picked up Mary and held her to me. I never asked again.

I pressed the picture of the young Isaac to me before putting it back in the bookcase. To his way of thinking, it was one thing to let Indians drink from the well behind the barn. It was another thing to allow them on our porch. They were the enemy. I had forgotten that. It was wrong of me to go against Isaac.

I went to our bedroom and undressed. I sat down on our low-slung bed and wiped my feet with a rag, and that was when I remembered.

It was our first summer in the Badlands when the Indian woman showed up. The memory of her came to me as clear as if it had just happened. It was so clear that I recalled the color of her dress, a faded blue. On that day, Isaac was working a shovel up and down, chopping sod that we’d use to build the barn. I was loading the sod in the wagon. The wind was easy, but all of a sudden the hair on my neck stood up. I whipped around and there she was, a few yards off, come from nowhere, her belly filled with a baby. A little boy about four held on to her skirt.

“Isaac!” I said. I’d never seen an Indian before. He whirled around, alarmed by my cry. When he saw the woman, he buckled—he was that startled. “Isaac,” I said again, all the more afraid.

He dropped the shovel and nearly ran to the woman. He took her elbow, she flinched, and he pulled her with him, and in doing so, knocked the little boy down. Isaac kept on pulling the woman down to the road, his steps long and angry, the woman barely keeping up, her single thick braid swinging as she tried to yank her arm away from him. I watched; the little boy did too, me and him too stunned to move.

The boy let out a little cry. That was when I took a closer look at him. “Lord,” I said out loud. “You’re a Negro.” It was in his hair and in his lips. I went toward him and the boy drew into himself, scared, and I saw he had Indian in him too. That was in the color of his skin and in the sharpness of his nose. I must have come too close because somehow he got to his feet and took off running down to the Indian woman what was on the road now with Isaac. The two of them were arguing. I couldn’t make out their words, but Isaac’s back was rigid and once I thought he shook his finger in her face. She stood up to him, though; her back was straight and her head high. Suddenly Isaac gave her a push on the shoulder, and that upset me because she was so big with a baby. She stumbled, off balance. The push seemed to settle things, though. The woman gathered up her boy and helped him climb into her handcart. Then, like a horse, she pulled the cart and they moved slowly up the road.

I ran, my skirt held high, to Isaac, who stood on the road, his arms crossed, watching the woman and the boy as dust rose around them.

“Who is she?” I said, catching my breath.

“Agency squaw.”

“What’d she want? And that boy, did you get a good look at him?”

Isaac shook his head and then started up the rise to where we had been cutting sod. I hurried to catch up. I didn’t know what to think; I didn’t know what to say. All at once, he stopped, and I nearly bumped into him. He looked back toward the woman and her boy as they plodded, the wheels of the cart creaking.

“She’s looking for a handout,” Isaac said. “Like they all do. Don’t ever give them anything, Rachel. That’s the first thing you need to know about Indians. They’re like stray dogs. Once you give them a scrap, they never leave.”

“I won’t. But that boy, did you see his face?”

“No.”

“He’s got Negro in him.”

A shadow crossed over his face and for a moment I thought his eyes darkened. I stepped back. My mouth went dry. I was alone in the Badlands with a man what I barely knew.

“I hate them,” Isaac said. “I hate what they are, and I won’t have them on my property.”

I nodded, quick to agree, relieved that it was the squaw what caused the darkness in his eyes and not me. I glanced back at the woman and her boy on the road.

“Forget them,” he snapped, heading back to where he’d dropped his shovel. “We have a barn to build.”

We didn’t say much to each other the rest of that day. Isaac wore a broody look and I did my best to work hard, not wanting to displease him. But from up on the rise while he chopped sod and I loaded it in the wagon, I watched from the corner of my eye as the woman made her way west along the road, one slow step at a time. Sometimes I lost sight of her and the child in those places where the road wound around a butte or dipped low into a depression. But they kept to the road and after a while they’d show up again. When I stopped work to start supper, her campfire didn’t look to be more than a few miles off.

It was one night later when Isaac unpinned his army insignia. At the time, one thing didn’t seem to have anything to do with the other. Now, though, I saw it different. I had Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s words about buffalo soldiers and Indian women fixed in my mind.

Sitting on the bed, I tucked the dusty rag under the mattress. With my hands, I lifted each leg up onto the mattress. My feet and ankles were swelled up and my skin felt too small to fit. I eased myself back on my elbows and then down onto the mattress and onto my side, the ticking crackling and shifting under me. My spine seemed to sigh with aches.

I ran my hand along the side of the bed where Isaac should be. I thought it likely that he’d rather sleep in the barn than come back to the house. I wondered how it would be between us in the morning, what we’d say to each other, if we’d say anything. Then my thoughts went back to that agency squaw and her half-breed boy. He’d be about eighteen. He was some man’s son. Could be that man didn’t know. Or if he did, he didn’t care.

That was how it’d been in Louisiana. When I was a girl there, living in the quarters with my family at the Stockton sugarcane plantation, Willie Lee Short was a Negro child with light brown hair and skin that turned fair in the winter. He was Mr. Stockton’s bastard—everybody knew it. Mr. Stockton couldn’t keep from pestering Sally, Willie Lee’s mama, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it other than leave and try to make her way somewhere else. Slave days were over, but that didn’t mean much to Sally. Where could she go, a young woman alone with a child? Folks in the quarters shook their heads over her. They were sorry for her. They were just as sorry for Willie Lee, what was expected to help his mama in the fields but wasn’t allowed to step foot in his daddy’s house.

Miss Wilma, the oldest woman in the quarters, once said that was because Mr. Stockton didn’t want the fruit of his sin sitting in his parlor.

Now, the thought stunned me. A sudden stabbing ache pierced my heart and I felt my insides give way. I squeezed my eyes tight. Not Isaac, I told myself. Not Isaac. Not that.

I
t was the next day when the wind died all at once. The sudden quiet startled me—the hushed stillness was a sound all of its own. Me and Liz had been scraping burned spots from baking pans when it happened. The quiet came on so quickly that my hands kept working even though I leaned toward the kitchen window, unsure what could be big enough to stop the wind.

“Mama,” Alise said from under the kitchen table. She and Emma held their rag dolls. “Mama, listen.”

There was nothing—no howling, no whistling around the corners of the house, no rattling prairie grasses. We went to the porch. Everywhere, dried bushes of tumbleweed had come to a stop in wide, open places. A turkey vulture, on the ground by the porch, stood stunned as if it had fallen from the sky. The few leaves left on the cottonwood dangled lifeless.