The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (18 page)

More lightning flashed. “Mama!” they screamed.

“None of that. Liz, look after your sisters.” I turned my back on them and left them under the bed crying. I had to. Jerseybell was our milk cow.

I put on my boots, my duster, and Isaac’s broad-brimmed hat, the one he waxed with paraffin to keep out the rain. I tightened the stampede strings. Outside, the rain was cold and coming down hard. I couldn’t button the coat over my belly, and it flapped wildly in the wind. Going out in this weather was foolish; I knew that. But nothing was going to stop me from getting Jerseybell to the barn.

The ground that had been so hard packed was already turning to mud. It pulled at my boots as I slogged my way to Jerseybell. Pain shot through my back, making me walk hunched over like an old woman. Jerseybell strained against her rope, twisting her head from side to side, her chin low to the ground. My wet hands slipped as I tried to untie the taut rope from the wooden stake. Poked-out nails ringed the top of the stake to keep Jerseybell from sliding the rope up and off. They stopped me from doing the same. I worked at the knot, sharp pain piercing my torn fingernail. The sky lit up with lightning. I could get struck dead. My girls would be left all alone under the bed until Isaac got home and found them. I worked harder at the knot, my nail bleeding, the rain in my eyes. The knot gave. I grabbed the rope and as I did, Jerseybell dragged me a few yards. I dug in my heels.

I tried to turn her toward the barn. Thunder rolled, shaking the ground. Wild-eyed, Jerseybell worked against me. She dragged me a few more feet.

“Jerseybell,” I screamed above the storm. “This way, this way.” Streaks of lightning darted across the western sky. I flinched. Jerseybell bolted; the rope jerked from my hand. I reached to catch it. I slipped and fell on my swelled-up belly, the air whooshing out of me.

When I came to, I was on my side, the rain bearing down. I waited for my belly to seize up. It didn’t. I pulled in some air, blew it back out. Still nothing. From somewhere far off, Jerseybell bellowed. I got myself up on my elbow.
It was just a little fall,
I told myself.
It didn’t hurt the baby, it didn’t hurt you. Now get up.
I stumbled from the weight of the wet duster, nearly falling again. Through the rain I saw Jerseybell dart, stop, and start, jerky, as she headed toward the cottonwood.
Get her,
I told myself.
Don’t let her fall in the wash and break her neck.
We needed her milk. I began to move, the mud sucking at my boots.

Halfway to the cottonwood, Jerseybell stopped and bellowed. She turned around in a circle, her front feet churning in the mud. Lightning streaked the dark sky. She bolted again, this time to the barn. I hurried. It hurt to breathe, there was a stitch in my side. My coat flapped in the wind, the baby heavy in my belly.

Jerseybell rammed into the barn wall. She shuddered, and then stood still as if stunned, her sides heaving. I hurried, scared of falling again, the mud slowing me down.

She was still standing there when I got to her. I picked up her rope, heavy with mud. She let me lead her to the barn door. I opened it and took her to her stall. Shaking, I leaned against the stall railing. I wiped the rain from my eyes. I dripped mud. My knees throbbed. My back ached. I had fallen hard; I was fooling myself to say different. It didn’t have to mean trouble, though, not bad trouble. I had fallen once with John, and nothing happened to him. But I hadn’t been nearly as far along.

My legs wobbled. Jerseybell’s breathing was labored, and she was hot to the touch. I was the same way. I wanted to sit and rest but couldn’t, not with the little girls waiting for me. Bracing myself, I went back out into the storm.

I made my way up the rise in the heavy rain to the house. The mud was turning into a mush that oozed like quicksand. I slipped twice, landing on my knees, but the falls were slow and didn’t hurt all that much. I told myself that I had done what needed doing. I had gotten Jerseybell in.

On the open porch, my arms almost too tired to do it, I took off my wet, mud-covered coat and hat and hung them on a wall nail. Before I had both boots off, my dress was soaked. The girls, I knew, were scared stiff. It was cold and my teeth chattered, but I stayed in the rain anyway. I took off my dress and let it fall on the porch floor in a muddy heap.

I stood on the porch in my underdress. I let the rain wash the mud from my legs and feet. I closed my eyes against the lightning. I raised my face. Rain. Sweet, sweet rain. The baby was all right; it had to be. I couldn’t take it any other way. Mud ran from my hair. Rain, sweet rain. I began to cry. No more putting Liz in the well. No more going without water. We were saved.

I drank in more rain. Grit crunched in my teeth. The wind gusted. I shivered with a chill. Winter. Winter was coming. Don’t think about it. God sent this rain to ease your worries. Now stand up and make the best of it. That was what my mother used to say.

The words gave me courage. I drew a ragged breath. I went inside then and saw to the girls.

 

 

 

The worst of the storm passed while I scrubbed the burned pot. The rain didn’t stop though. It rained while I got a fresh pot of mush going and it rained when me and the girls sat down to eat. After supper, I got some water from one of the rain barrels, heated it on the cookstove, and put the girls in the washtub. I scrubbed their hair. I dug the dirt out from between their toes, and I got it out from under their fingernails. I washed their elbows and their ears. I scrubbed and scrubbed and they let me. The girls played—Liz too—laughing as their small hands patted the water. When I finished, I got some more fresh water and washed Emma’s burned hand, even though this made her cry. Everybody sparkling clean, I put them to bed and read them a story. Then I went to the parlor and put a lantern in each of the two windows. There, sitting in one of the red upholstered chairs, I waited for the baby to kick, a sign that it was all right.

A watched pot never boils; that was something my mother always said. And the baby wasn’t going to kick if that was all I thought about. I got up and started a fire in the potbelly stove to get the wet chill out of the house. The rain beat down on the tin roof, and that was a pleasing sound, but the ground had turned into a boggy gray sand. When it got that way a person could sink up to his ankles in it. I didn’t see how Isaac could get everybody home. The horses couldn’t make it. Neither could Mary and John; it’d wear them thin.

It worried me. There weren’t any stars to guide them home. I hoped they had taken shelter in a calving pen. Or maybe, if they were lucky, the three of them had made it to the empty Walker house.

It was easy to get turned around in the Badlands. From time to time we heard stories about someone getting lost and wandering miles off track. Or worse. Last fall, Ralph Nelson, an old-timer who had lived in the Badlands for over thirty years, disappeared. He’d been searching for a handful of stray cattle. When he’d been gone over a week, his sons got worried. They put together a search party, and all of the men—Isaac too—had helped out. After three days of looking, they lost Ralph Nelson’s track and gave up. They figured he was dead in the bottom of a canyon, his neck broken, his body picked over by vultures. They figured the same for his horse.

I told myself Isaac wouldn’t take the chance, not with Mary and John. All the same, I had those lanterns burning in two windows.

The fire in the potbelly stove popped. My thoughts shifted to my parlor. It was my pride. I dusted it most every day and swept the scrap-rag carpet every Tuesday. The children knew better than to sit on the red upholstered chairs or to touch the bookcase, the writing table, or the clock. When I had company—Mindy McKee or Mabel Walker before she sold out and moved back home—I always invited them to the parlor for our visit. The parlor made me feel like a lady.

Most everything in it came from the ranches we had bought over the years. But the framed picture of President Lincoln that hung over the writing table had been Isaac’s since he was a boy.

He admired the president. Mr. Lincoln not only set the slaves free but he also promised every freed man forty acres of farmland once the war was over. The president, Isaac believed, understood what land could do for the Negro race. He understood that land was an opportunity, that it made a man proud. Things would have been different, Isaac said, if Mr. Lincoln hadn’t been shot dead.

Tacked beside the president’s picture was a small yellowed drawing of Ida B. Wells-Barnett cut from a newspaper years ago. That was mine. Through the years I liked to think that she was proud of me for marrying a man with ambition. I liked to think that she was as proud of my wood house as I was. That night, though, as I sat alone in the parlor, it struck me that Ida B. Wells-Barnett might pity me. I lived in the Badlands, a country so backward and harsh that even Indians didn’t want it.

All at once, my cheeks burned with shame. Three days ago I used my hand-painted rose platter to serve broken-up biscuits to Mrs. Fills the Pipe and her family. I gave her and Inez the last of the chokeberry tea. But none of that mattered. Mrs. Wells-Barnett would have served tea to Mrs. Fills the Pipe in the parlor, not on the porch.

She wouldn’t have cared if doing that made her husband angry. She would have done it anyway. Mrs. Wells-Barnett would have asked Mrs. Fills the Pipe about those Indian women what had been used by the army men. She would have asked where those women were now, and she would have asked after the children.

It never entered my mind. Fourteen years ago it hadn’t entered my mind either to worry about the Indian woman what had showed up with her half-breed boy. Or the child she was carrying. Instead, I put them out of my mind. Nothing was getting in the way of me making a home with Isaac.

Mrs. Wells-Barnett would say I’d been wrong.

A restlessness came over me and my teeth took to chattering.
Too late,
I thought,
to worry about what Mrs. Wells-Barnett would say. All that happened a long time ago. Put it out of your mind.
I got up to put a few more cow chips in the stove. The stove door stuck, and I had to pull on it a few times before it gave.

I sat back down, wishing the baby would kick. Even a little tap would be enough. I shifted a few times to find a way to take the ache from my back. I sat up straighter and told myself that helped.

I was proud of the parlor stove. It had four skinny curved legs and a long stovepipe that disappeared into the parlor ceiling. Every summer I took the pipe down and flushed it clear of ashes. I polished the stove to keep it a shiny black. It was mid-October of 1903 when the potbelly stove showed up at our door. That made it, I recalled, about three months after the Indian woman and her half-breed boy had walked up the rise. Me and Isaac had finished building the barn and the two-room dugout. The fireplace in the dugout’s bedroom was small, and I was still cooking outside over an open fire. Mornings were so cold, and evenings too, that I had to wear gloves. That kind of cooking tested my patience, and it shamed me to serve my new husband biscuits that were burned on the bottom and mushy in the middle. The coffee didn’t do right, either. It was either scorched or lukewarm; there was no in between. Isaac never complained. He thought it was good; he was used to army food. I told myself that it didn’t matter. A cookstove could wait. We had spent all our money, I believed, on the cattle, horses, and a plow. So it took me aback when on a cool October day a wagon with two big crates in the bed came up the road. I was alone—Isaac was out in one of the pastures seeing to the cattle. I kept my eye on the wagon for a while, and then when I saw there were three white men sitting on the buckboard, I went inside the dugout. I watched the wagon from the one window in the front.

I didn’t know what to do when the driver turned the two oxen from the road and brought the wagon up the rise to the dugout. After the wagon stopped, one of the men let out a shrill whistle. Behind the latched door, I held my breath. Three white men and one Negro woman.

“Anybody at home?” somebody called out.

Go away,
I thought.

The man called again, this time louder. Isaac would expect me to see what these men wanted. He’d expect me to be able to take care of myself. I got a kitchen knife and put it in my apron pocket. I unlatched the door and stepped outside.

The men started when they saw me. They looked at each other, their eyebrows raised. “Well, well,” the driver said.

I fingered the knife in my pocket. “What can I do for you?”

The driver gave a little snort. His face was lined, and the hair that stuck out from under his slouch hat was gray. His neck was thick, and I figured his arms were too, from the way his coat strained. One of his cheeks bulged. The two other men with him were younger and rail thin, their Adam’s apples bobbing. The driver’s sons, I figured. Their noses all sloped the same way.

The driver narrowed his eyes. “Heard there were Negroes out here.” He worked his mouth, leaned over the side toward me, and spat out some brown juice. It landed a few feet from me. It took everything I had to not run back into the dugout. He said, “Didn’t expect to run across any today.”

“Ain’t that just like Anderson,” one of the other men said, “not to tell us?”

“Yeah, that’s Anderson for you,” the driver said, not taking his eyes off of me. I lowered mine. He said, “You any relations to those other Negroes north of the Black Hills?”

I shook my head.

The wagon groaned as the driver shifted his weight. “My father served with the First Minnesota. At Gettysburg. Had his feet blown off.”

I nodded, my mouth dry.

He waited, and I realized that he expected me to say something. I said to his chin, “I’m sorry.”

He made a grunting sound, and I understood that he expected more from me. I swallowed. “I’m obliged to your father for his sacrifice. And to your mama.” I paused and then looked right at him to show that I meant it. “And to you. I’m much obliged.”