The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (3 page)

Alise turned her head on the pillow. “What’s the matter, Liz?”

Liz stuck out her bottom lip.

I shuffled through the book, page after page of make-believe about kings wanting sons, poor men seeking gold, and beautiful young women waiting to be rescued by princes.

“Honey,” I said, looking at Liz, “you got a story you’d like to hear?”

She shook her head but said, “Rapunzel.”

I found the story and held the book as close to the lamp as I could. My reading eyes were fading on me. Isaac used a magnifying glass to read by, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I already felt like an old woman. I’d rather guess at the words. I knew the stories well enough to do that.

Squinting some, I read. The girls listened as if the story might be different this time or as if they had never heard of Rapunzel, the girl with the long fine hair like spun gold who lived locked in a tower pining for her handsome prince.

“Prayers,” I said when the story ended, and together we thanked Jesus for looking after us and keeping us safe. “Sleep tight,” I told them and kissed each one on the cheek. I picked up the lamp.

“Mama?” Liz said.

I turned back.

“Mama, there was a snake. In the well.”

Alise and Emma looked at Liz, then looked at me. I put the lamp on the dresser and felt Liz’s forehead. I said to her, “You aren’t scared of snakes, are you? You’ve never been before.”

Liz gripped my hand. “It was in the well and it came at me.”

“Did it hurt you, honey?”

“It tried to. I kicked it and it hissed me.”

Alise and Emma sucked in their cheeks.

I said, “But you got it?”

Liz shook her head. “It went behind a rock but I saw its eyes. They were red. It’s waiting to get me, Mama.”

Emma’s face screwed up. I put my fingertips on her lips and patted them, hoping to keep her from crying. “A red-eyed snake, why, that’s the best kind,” I said. “That’s a good snake, just surprised to see you, Liz, that’s all. Not used to seeing a child in the well. Probably just curious.”

Liz puckered her forehead. She wanted to believe me, I thought, but was finding it hard to do.

“A friendly snake?” Alise said.

“Like a bull snake,” I said. “Now go on to sleep.”

I pried Liz’s hand from mine and kissed the back of it. I wanted to take away her fear. I did. But that wasn’t how it worked. She had to carry it all by herself. Like we all had to. But looking at her in her bed, I knew I had to stop that fear from getting bigger.

I said, “Think about Rapunzel with all that yellow hair.”

Liz nodded.

“I’ll leave the lamp.”

 

 

 

Isaac was outside on the porch in his rocking chair. His pencil was behind his ear and his accounts book was on the plank floor by his left-hand side. Like always in the evening, he’d been recording the day. It was his way to keep a constant tally on the cattle, the weather, and any money spent and any money earned. I wondered if he had made mention of Liz in the well. I wondered if he recorded that I didn’t like it, and that it took Mary to help him. I figured I’d never know. The book was Isaac’s. It wasn’t mine to read.

The wind had settled into a breeze, and we didn’t need our bandannas. I sat down beside him in the other rocker and put my mending basket on the floor. Isaac put his head back to study the sky. When we built the house, I had hoped for a porch with a roof, but we ran out of wood. “Next year,” Isaac had said at the time. Over my knees, I flattened the shirt that Liz had worn and studied the rip, wanting to set it right.

Liz was a lot like Isaac. She could take on a shine like something funny had just crossed her mind, and like Isaac, she could take the most everyday thing and turn it into a story worth hearing. But she didn’t look the least bit like him even though she was almost as light as him. Like me, she was little-boned and short.

Squinting, I jabbed the thread at the needle’s eye a few times.

Isaac said, “Look there.” He pointed northward across a stretch of prairie land that swelled up into small hills and dipped into easy valleys. Just past was a craggy string of sandstone buttes. Their stony points were stark against the softening sky. I knotted the thread and poked the needle back into the pincushion. The biggest butte, the one close to the middle of the range, was called Grindstone Butte. The western sun had caught it just right—it shimmered like a storybook castle of gold with handfuls of diamonds tossed here and there.

“Still something, isn’t it?” Isaac said.

I pushed together the sides of the tear in the shirt and pinned it with my straight pins. The baby gave a little kick; I shifted some in my chair. I said, “What we did today was bad.”

“I didn’t take any pleasure in it either.”

“Liz is scared.”

“She’s all right.”

“She’s gone all quiet. Her eyes have a bad look.”

“She’ll be all right.”

“We can’t do it to her again. We can’t.”

“Damn it. What do you want me to do?”

“I—”

“Snap my fingers? Do some kind of rain dance? Is that what you have in mind?”

I winced. “No.”

“Lose the horses? Jerseybell? Let the children go without?”

My resolve crumbled.

“What then?”

“I don’t know.” I stared off at the Grindstone without really seeing it. Years back I had learned this. Isaac was smart; he knew what to do. Then there was this. A man and his wife fell apart when they fought. Even when they didn’t see eye to eye, they had to put their shoulders together and push in the same direction. Folks who didn’t, didn’t stand a chance. Not in the Badlands.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re doing what you have to, I know that. Just wish there was another way.”

He didn’t say anything. He sat in his rocker, stiff and unmoving as he stared off to where the sun was meeting up with the horizon. Grindstone and the other buttes were orange by then, and their long shadows darkened the pastureland. The dried stalks of prairie grasses swished in the breeze. Far off, cattle bellowed their hunger and thirst. It was a sound I had come to hate. It was the kind of sound that made my chest tighten. It was the kind of sound that made me want to put my hands over my ears.

Isaac stood up, put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled.

“Coming,” John called back. His voice was far away—he must be behind the barn. Then Mary called back too, sounding just as far off. I wanted Isaac to say something to me. I wanted him to say he forgave me for questioning his judgment. But he didn’t say it. He just stared off, watching Mary and John climb the rise, Rounder lagging behind as he nosed through the grass.

Mary and John were halfway up the rise by then, the dried-out grasses crackling under their feet. Strangers might say that Mary and John didn’t look to be related—the girl so dark and the boy a mild shade of brown. But the dimples on their left cheeks were the same; all our children carried that gift. It came from me.

“Nothing,” John said when he got closer. Like every night, he’d been checking his rabbit traps.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Isaac said.

“Daddy,” Mary said, “Jerseybell’s puny. She’s got the runs.”

“I know it.”

Mary and John stepped back, the sudden sharpness in Isaac’s voice surprising them. “Now go on to bed,” he said to them, “and stop worrying me about that cow.”

“Five pages, Mary,” I said to ease the hurt showing in their eyes. “No more. And just two sips of water. Sips. Understand, both of you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

After they went inside, Isaac leaned forward in his rocker, his arms on his legs. He crossed his wrists and let his hands dangle over the sides of his knees. There was a small tear in the knee of his left pant leg. That was one more thing that needed fixing. I’d do it after Isaac went to bed. I folded my mending and closed my sewing basket. I wished he’d say something—anything. From the corner of my eye, I saw him studying the country spread out all around us. He looked tired, the lines around his eyes deep. A wash of tenderness came over me. It was hard on a man when his family had to go without. I wished I could reach out and smooth his worries away.

Until this summer, we had had good luck. Our wheat was suited to the Badlands, and we didn’t have much trouble with grasshoppers. Isaac had an eye for buying cattle that bred easily and stood the winters. Our first spring here, he bought a threshing machine from a homesteader what was selling out. Isaac rented it to other ranchers, and in two years, it paid for itself. As for me, I knew a little something about gardening. On Saturdays, before we had so many children, we got up in the dark and took our produce, eggs too, into Interior and sold them to homesteaders on their way west to Wyoming. There were times we were so worn out we were asleep before dark. But we had twenty-five hundred acres to show for all the work.

“There’s all kinds of ways to earn respect,” Isaac was given to saying. “Owning land’s one of them. A man can’t ever have too much. Especially if that man’s black.”

Maybe that was true. I wasn’t always so sure, although for the most part, folks around here treated us fair. But there was no denying that Isaac was proud of the Circle D. That was what he’d named the ranch after he staked our claims. I was proud too. The first time, though, when I saw where our homestead was, it scared me.

“Where’s everybody?” I asked Isaac that day fourteen years ago when he stopped the wagon in the middle of nothing, jumped down, and said we were home.

He turned in a big circle, taking it all in. “The Walkers are that way,” he said, pointing east. “And Carl Janik is just beyond those buttes.”

I stared until my eyes blurred. There wasn’t the first house, barn, or person. There were only knee-high prairie grasses, buttes too steep to climb, and canyons that split open the earth.

It was so big. All that land and sky, all that openness; there was no end to any of it. It made me feel small. It gave me a bad feeling. I didn’t belong; this place called for bigger things than me. If for one second I lost sight of Isaac, I’d be alone and lost in this country that didn’t have any edges. I said to him, “Will we be all right here?”

“I told you this wasn’t anything like Chicago.”

“I know you did, but this . . .” I couldn’t find the right words to say what I meant.

“Don’t worry about it. The Indians were put down years back,” and that gave me something new to be scared about. The first year I kept a close watch, always expecting half-naked men to rise out of the grasses, streaks of red paint on their faces, scalping knives in hand. I had heard about Indians when I was growing up, and I had paid close attention when Isaac talked about his army days at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. But I never told Isaac I was scared. I even kept still when I saw my first Indians—a flinty-eyed, sneaky squaw with her little boy. I’d never wanted to give Isaac any reason to question my grit. I didn’t want him sending me back to Chicago.

Years later, the Badlands was still big. Big in its dryness. Big in its need to turn everything to dust.

Through the open door I heard Mary reading
Swiss Family Robinson
to John. It was his favorite book; Isaac’s mother had sent it when he was born. It occurred to me that we weren’t so different from those people shipwrecked on an island. Like them, there was nobody but us to pull us through. It called for hard work and determination. But money would be a help. Things would be easier if all our money hadn’t gone for Ned Walker’s land. Isaac had bought it this past spring when the drought was just a small worry. It was an opportunity, he had told me then. Just like it had been when he bought the Peterson ranch seven years ago and then Carl Janik’s land a few years later.

Off in the distance, the buttes turned dusky, their edges fading in the twilight. I wanted to make things right with Isaac; I wanted to get rid of the uneasy silence that sat between us. “Tomorrow,” I said, “I appreciate you going to town. I know you wanted to move the cattle.”

He leaned back in his rocker. “I’ll move them as soon as I get back. John and Mary’ll help.”

I eased back too. The sharpness was gone from Isaac’s voice. He was like that. His words could cut the meat off of a person’s bones, but just as quick, he could forgive and forget.

Above us, the darkening sky was wide and open, stretching farther than a person could see. There was a half-moon; it was low. Below it and a little off to the side, a star bigger than all the others shined bright.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Isaac said, “if the train’s bringing water in for folks. I’ve heard that they did that before, a few years before we got here.”

I waited, my hands on top of my swelled-up belly.

“While I’m in town I’ll ask around, see if there’s any.”

Relieved, I blew out some air.

“Still have to water the horses in the morning. Can’t risk losing them.”

I tensed.

“I’ll be gone more than a day. The children have to have water. You do too.”

Liz, I thought.

Isaac laid his hand on the arm of my rocker. “I’ll get us through this, Rachel. I always have.”

“I know that.” I sank back into my rocker. I had let Liz down.

 

 

 

I couldn’t sleep that night from the worry of it all. I dreaded morning when we’d put Liz back in the well. In the dark, I laid on my side in our narrow, low-slung bed, Isaac’s back pressed up against mine. His breath came out in short puffs as he slept. I imagined Liz’s eyes staring at me. My mind skipped from that to worrying about money, about how we didn’t have any. I worried about all the cattle that were dying, and I worried about the price worn-out cattle would get at market next month. I worried about the coming winter, and I worried about the baby what was just a few weeks off. Then I got to worrying about water, and that turned my mouth even drier. I thought about having a long drink of cool water, and that set the baby off, pushing on me. I got up and went outside.