The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (25 page)

He didn’t say anything.

“She needs to meet some nice Negro boys before she thinks the only boys what count are white.” Or Indians, I almost said.

“What are you saying?”

I paused. “There’s going to come a time when our children’ll have to go home.”

“This is home.”

“Chicago,” I said.

“There’s no need for that. Zeb Butler will help. Him and Iris.”

“What?”

“They know most of the Negroes in the Dakotas, Nebraska and Iowa too. They’ll know who’s right for Mary. And for John, when it comes time.”

Zeb Butler and Isaac had served together at Fort Robinson. He had quit the army a year or so before Isaac and had gone to Sioux Falls. Him and his wife, Iris, rented rooms in their house to Negroes passing through town. Me and Isaac had stayed at their home on our way from Chicago to the Badlands. They were rough people. Zeb Butler drank too much to suit me. I didn’t want them having anything to do with our children.

“But not before Mary’s sixteen,” Isaac was saying. “She’s not getting married before then. We need her here.” He paused. “I’ll find her a rancher, a good man who knows what he’s doing, someone proud to have her.”

“Maybe that’s not what Mary has in mind. Maybe she wants to be a teacher, maybe even a nurse.”

“She’s a rancher’s daughter. She’ll want her own land.”

It would never be hers, I thought. It’d always be her husband’s. But Isaac was right. Mary was born to the life. Someday she’d want her own house, and marrying was the only way our girls would have anything. I’d been taken aback when Isaac first told me how it worked. “This will all be his,” he had said a day or so after Isaac Two, our first boy, was born.

“And Mary’s,” I said. She was a year and a half.

“She’s a girl,” Isaac said. “Ranch land always goes to the oldest boy so the land stays intact, doesn’t get split up. Then it goes to his oldest boy. That way it stays in the family, keeps the family name.”

“But Mary?”

“She’ll marry a man with his own land. I’ll see to it.”

“What if we have more sons?”

“They’ll work for me and Isaac Two until they’re ready to go out on their own, get their own ranches.”

Put that way, it seemed sensible. But it hadn’t gone that way. Negroes hadn’t come to the West, and Isaac Two had slipped on a pile of rocks. The ranch was going to John.

Isaac said, “Zeb Butler’ll know of ranchers, Negro ranchers in need of a wife. And John’ll want a woman from around here, one who has a taste for the work. He won’t find that kind in Chicago.”

Isaac was talking about our children like they were cattle. Their marriages would be bargains for land. Just like ours had been. Isaac would do the bargaining for his children and they’d go along with it. They’d want to please him. Grown up and married off that way, they wouldn’t know the first thing about courting, about sharing ice cream sodas or about going to dances. They wouldn’t know anything about falling hard in love and how that made everything easier to bear.

I said, “You’ve got this all worked out.”

“Ever since Mary was born.”

I felt sick. I saw the girls married off to men what worked them hard and treated them rough. I pictured John’s wife—worn out and little more than a ranch hand. That wasn’t what I wanted for them; our children should have better. I had to make Isaac see that too.

I gathered up an old memory, a favorite that I pulled out sometimes to soften the hard times. I said, “Remember when Mary was about a month old and we went to Interior?”

“No.”

I had to help Isaac remember. “Well, on that day it’d turned warm again even though we had had a heavy frost just a few days before. You called it Indian summer. You said it was our last chance to go to town before the cold set in. I hadn’t been in months. I was proud to go—I had Mary to take.” I laid my hand on his arm and felt the hardness in his muscles. “Remember?”

“No.”

“I had my shopping to do. I was in the store holding Mary; I was waiting for Mrs. Johnston to finish up with Mrs. Nelson. When she did, Mrs. Nelson came over and asked to see Mary. It surprised me; most usually she wasn’t all that friendly. Then I recalled that her children were all grown up and moved off. I could see she wanted to hold Mary so I let her. She ran her finger over Mary’s cheek and she put the tip of her finger to her eyelashes. She told me that a girl with such eyelashes would break every boy’s heart what looked her way. Me and her smiled over that.” I stopped. Mary had been such a little thing. At the time I couldn’t imagine her anywhere close to grown.

I said, “You were waiting by our wagon. ‘Let’s find a patch of sunshine,’ you said, ‘and have our dinner before heading home.’ But we never did. Because across the street in front of the blacksmith’s was a wagon, and there was a white girl sitting on the buckboard. Remember her, Isaac?”

“No.”

“I do, just like it was yesterday. She had brown hair—braids—and freckles everywhere. I’ll never forget her face. She was plain, but there was something pretty about her—her eyes maybe. She couldn’t have been a day over sixteen, if that. One of her horses was missing, it must have thrown a shoe. But she didn’t seem to mind in the least because she sat there playing her guitar like she was home in her own parlor.”

“A mandolin,” Isaac said. “Somebody asked her and that’s what she said.”

“That’s right. A mandolin. It was the prettiest music. People stood around listening, enjoying themselves. For once nobody was in a hurry to get home to their chores. The girl told somebody her and her husband were from Billings, clear over in Montana. They were on their way home. I thought,
Husband? She’s too young to be married; she isn’t even wearing her hair up.

“But here’s what I especially like remembering about that day. You took Mary from me—she was asleep by then. You tucked her into her basket and put her on the floor of our wagon, right under the buckboard. Then you looked right into my eyes and I remember thinking, Why, Isaac’s not the least bit sorry he married me. I’ve made him glad. He wanted a son but he got a daughter and still he’s glad. My heart nearly busted wide open, I was that happy.”

Isaac turned over on his side to face me. “You never complained,” he said. “As hard as I worked you, you never complained.”

“You didn’t either,” I said. Then, “You remember what happened next?”

“No.”

“You bowed, like a gentleman from a book, and said, ‘Mrs. DuPree, will you do me the honor of this dance?’ Before I knew it, we were dancing right there in the middle of the street in front of all those people.”

“It was a waltz,” Isaac said.

“That’s right, it was. It was our first dance. Married a whole year—more than a year—and we had never danced. Because we’d never courted.”

Isaac said, “You kept your head down. All I could see was your bonnet.”

“Couldn’t imagine what all those white people were thinking about us. But at the same time, I wanted that sweet music to go on forever. I knew I was the luckiest woman in the world, married to you and having Mary. It was the finest moment of my life.”

It was also when things changed between me and Isaac. It was when I became his wife.

I said, “When she stopped playing, the girl tipped her head to us like we had pleased her. Then you swung me up on the buckboard, and we rode off. We were halfway home before we thought to stop for dinner.”

I was quiet so we could both think about that. After a while I said, “Everybody needs a sweet time in their lives.”

“I don’t disagree with that.”

“That’s what I want for our children, a dab of sweetness mixed in with all the hard work. Because that’s mostly what it is. Hard work.” I put my finger on his cheek. “They need to do their own choosing.” I felt the rough stubble of his beard.

“I won’t hold a gun to them.”

“You won’t have to. They’ll do anything to please you.”

“I’m their father.”

“And that’s a big thing.”

Isaac didn’t say anything.

I thought about the freckle-faced girl sitting on the buckboard that long-ago day in Interior. It was the end of October, her horse had thrown a shoe, and she and her husband were far from home. Everybody needed something to fall back on when they were having hard times, and for that girl it was her mandolin.

I thought about the root cellar with its empty shelves. I thought about snowdrifts as high as a man. I thought about water frozen in buckets and white blizzards that burned people’s sight away. In blizzards, grown men were known to get lost between their houses and their barns. If they were lucky and found their way home, they were grateful that the worst thing that happened to them was frostbite. They were grateful if they only lost tips of noses, fingers, or a few toes. If a winter was particularly hard, cow chips for stoves ran low and children fell sick with chest ailments. Women died too, leaving their children motherless.

Our children needed something to fall back on during hard times. Isaac thought land was enough. I knew different. During hard times a person had to be able to say that it wasn’t always so hard. A person needed to say, Once I played hopscotch with girls my age, once I played baseball with boys like me, and once I sang and clapped my hands at a neighborhood dance.

Isaac’s breathing told me he was asleep. Tears came to my eyes. For him, everything was settled. He was going to Lead to work the mine this winter. Me and the children were staying behind. When it came time, he’d find a hardworking woman for John and men with land for our girls. Isaac was doing it for the ranch. The ranch was his way of lifting up our children. He didn’t want his daughters to cook and clean for white people. He didn’t want John in a slaughterhouse or taking white people for rides on hotel elevators. But that didn’t mean ranching was easy. It didn’t mean that a marriage based on a bargain lifted the heart.

“They need a dab of sweetness,” I whispered. “For the hard times.”

I got up, went to the parlor, struck a light, and sat at the writing desk. I got out two sheets of paper and blew the grit off of them. Isaac was going to Al McKee’s tomorrow, and a few days later Mindy was going to Interior to take the train home. On one sheet of paper I wrote a letter to Mindy McKee.
Good-bye.
On the other, I wrote a letter to Mama.
Can we come?

T
he next morning just before breakfast, Isaac came up from the barn, bare chested but wearing a fresh pair of overalls. His face, hair, and arms shined from the scrubbing he had given himself at the pump. The children, seated at their places along the kitchen table, stared at him. They knew what he’d been doing. Isaac always opened up the belly of a cow when it died of a sickness.

“Where’s Mary?” he said.

“Out walking,” I said, spooning mush onto our plates. “She’s taking it hard. Said she can’t eat.”

“She’ll be all right once we get the new milk cow.”

Isaac was going to the McKees’ for the horses and the cow. I had stayed awake most of the night thinking about the letters I had written and worrying about the baby, wanting it to kick. It hadn’t, but the bleeding had quit, and I tried to take that as a good sign.

Isaac said, “Jerseybell had pneumonia like I thought. That and her front belly was full of dirt. Pebbles too. Must have licked up fifteen pounds’ worth. Thank God for the rain. Maybe she’ll be the last to go down.”

“The good Lord willing,” I said, but the words had a hollow sound. I put my hand to the letter in my left pocket. We were bound to lose more cattle this winter. “I’ll get your shirt,” I said to Isaac. “So we can eat.”

He nodded and then glanced at the children. Their mouths were puckered and their eyes were big with sadness. Jerseybell was dead. Isaac gave a little shake as if to gather himself. Then he pulled air deep into his lungs making a show of filling his chest up with kitchen smells. He blew the air back out, his chest collapsing to its regular size. “Fresh bread,” he said. “Nothing like it in the whole world.” He grinned at the children. “Know what?”

“What?” John said.

“Your mother won me over the very first time I ate some of her bread. That and her biscuits. I said to myself, This little gal’s more than pretty; she knows her way around a kitchen.”

“Gosh,” Liz said.

“That’s right, Liz. I was a confirmed bachelor till I had a bite of your mother’s bread. I fell to my knees right then and there and begged Miss Rachel Reeves to be my wife. Let that be a lesson. John, you marry a girl who cooks like your mama and you’ll be a happy man. And girls, you make good bread and the world’s yours for the asking.”

“Daddy,” Mary said from the doorway. “You’re making that up. It takes more than bread.”

“Mary,” I snapped.

She put her head down. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

Isaac let that hang for a moment and then gave a sharp nod. “Apology accepted.”

Mary had it right, I said to myself, but not how she thought. Isaac was making it up, doing it to get the children’s minds off of Jerseybell. But all the same, I didn’t like what he’d said. Isaac never got down on his knees for anybody, and he surely hadn’t for me. I had been nothing more than the kitchen help until he figured he could stake an extra claim in my name. But that wasn’t the kind of story anybody wanted to tell their children.

I said, “This bread’s turning cold. I’ll get your shirt.”

 

 

 

It took the rest of the morning for Isaac and John to get Jerseybell out of the barn. Waiting made my nerves bad. I wanted Isaac to get on the road to Al McKee’s and then back home with the new milk cow. But Jerseybell came first. Our barn cat had gone missing during the winter, and without him, rats would be drawn if Isaac didn’t cart Jerseybell off.

It was a hard job. The horses were at Al’s, and strong as Isaac was, he couldn’t haul Jerseybell out of the barn without them. After breakfast, he sharpened his saw. I knew how it would go; I had helped once before when years back a cow had died all tangled up in barbwire. Isaac would likely start with Jerseybell’s legs, then her head. She was big; likely he’d saw her trunk in half, maybe into thirds.