The Personal History of Rachel DuPree (8 page)

She covered it with an old bedsheet, telling me that would keep it fresh until the right man came along. But I knew different. The right man had already come along. For me, it was Isaac DuPree or nobody.

It was the seventh of July, just before dinner, when Isaac showed up at Mrs. DuPree’s back door, I froze right up, unable to move or say a word. “You’re still here,” he said. I didn’t know what to make of that. He said, “We’ll leave in two days. Wednesday morning,” and I was so thankful that he had come for me, that he hadn’t forgotten, that I burst into tears, embarrassing myself before him.

“What’s this?” he said. “You didn’t think I’d back out of our deal, did you?”

I pulled myself together and shook my head.

“I was up in South Dakota, staking your claim. That, and other business, took a little longer than I expected. But just wait until you see it. Three hundred and twenty acres all told. Prettiest piece of country I’ve ever seen.”

That was the last night I cooked dinner in Mrs. DuPree’s boardinghouse. Isaac sat at the head of the table with the boarders. His mother was shut up in her bedroom, spitting mad that he had come for me. The men begged for more stories about the army and about Isaac’s homestead, and he was glad to oblige them. Feeling light on my feet, I served bowls of fried chicken, snap green beans, and sweet yams. I thought I saw pride in Isaac’s eyes as he watched me. When it was all on the table, I went back to the kitchen. There, Trudy said she’d do the dishes—that was her wedding present to me. Tears in my voice, I promised her I’d write; she said she’d come visit. “I’ll look for you,” I said as I hung up my apron for the last time. I took off my hair kerchief. I went back to the dining table, my bag in hand. One by one, I said good-bye to the boarders. I saw the envy in their eyes, but they wished me well, even Thomas Lee Patterson, the man I had snubbed not all that long ago. When I came to Isaac, he gave me a quick nod. I expected him to say something but he didn’t.

I turned back to the kitchen. “Not that way,” Isaac said. I didn’t know what he meant. He got up and took my arm. I stumbled as a shock bolted through me. It was the first time he had touched me. I felt woozy and weak. He tightened his hold. The boarders watched. A few of them grinned. To my surprise, Isaac led me through the parlor to the front door. We stood there not sure what to say to each other. Finally he said, “Wednesday morning. Eight o’clock. I’ll meet you at Preacher Teller’s church. The train leaves at 10:10 A.M.”

“I have a trunk,” I managed to say.

“Have it sent to the station.”

“How?”

He hesitated. In that moment I saw that he understood what he was getting: a woman what didn’t know anything about the world. He said, “Bring your trunk to the preacher’s then.”

He let go of my arm and opened the screen door for me. I went out, hearing the door slap closed behind me. I looked over my shoulder. Isaac was gone. All the same, I held up my hand as if he were there to see me wave good-bye.

Forcing a smile, I stepped off of the front porch and went along the gravel walkway to the walk that followed the street. I hardly knew where I was. The alley was my way home, not this.

Old oak trees lined the walk. Their thick, twisted roots buckled the surface. I picked my way over the roots, sure that I was going to fall. My legs felt loose and my ears rang. My skin was clammy like I was coming down with something. Nerves, I thought. I stopped and steadied myself, pulling in some air. It was then that I saw that the houses on the street were shabby. They wanted paint, and the yards needed trimming. All but Mrs. Du-Pree’s. The neighborhood had once been the home of Chicago’s educated Negroes, but that was before the slaughterhouses got so close. That was when Mrs. DuPree had been the wife of a doctor. That was before her husband died and she was forced to take in boarders. The neighborhood once was grand. But now Mrs. Du-Pree’s son was marrying the help, and that help had just left by the front door.

I started walking again, picking my way over the broken sidewalk, my chin high. Mrs. DuPree might have the money for a second boardinghouse, but this neighborhood was where she lived. Mrs. DuPree was on her way down, I told myself, but the next Mrs. DuPree—me—was on her way up.

 

 

 

On my wedding day, Dad hired a horse cab and took me to Preacher Teller’s. My mother and Sue had to work. So did church friends and neighbors, Trudy too. But standing in the front row of the church was Johnny, my older brother. I was so happy to see him that I nearly laughed. He worked nights playing piano in a saloon, and it had been years, I figured, since he had seen this side of eight o’clock. His eyes were streaked red and the smell of cigarettes clung to his suit. But his face was fresh shaved and it lightened my heart to have him there.

He was proud of me for marrying Isaac. He’d said so from the start. “You’re making something of yourself. Didn’t I always say that you would?” he had said. “You’re the smart one—you’re getting out of this stinking city.”

“You will too,” I said.

After the ceremony, I kissed Dad good-bye. “I’m proud of you, girl,” he said, and this brought tears to my eyes. Up until that day, he had made out like he was glad Isaac hadn’t come for me. He hadn’t had anything good to say about Isaac DuPree. He didn’t care that Isaac DuPree came from a good family. In his day, Dad had said more than once, a man paid at least one visit to a woman’s parents before proposing marriage.

I kissed Dad again. When I hugged Johnny, I whispered, “Come see me—us—in South Dakota.”

“When you get yourself a piano in your parlor,” he said, “I’ll be on the next train out. I’ll play for the cows.”

“See you real soon then.”

An hour later me and Isaac boarded the 10:10 A.M. and began our journey to South Dakota.

S
outh Dakota. The land of opportunity. But that was before the drought, that was before me and Isaac put a child in the well. That was before we did it the second time. The second time, Liz screamed when Isaac told her he needed her. She screamed until I put my hand over her mouth and held her lips together. It was wrong what we were doing to her, but Isaac was right about the horses and Jerseybell. They had to be watered.

Like before, I latched Alise and Emma in their room. I went with the others to the well, none of us saying anything as we walked against the wind. Isaac carried Liz, who cried into his shoulder, her arms around his neck. At the well we knew what to do, we knew what to expect, and that made it all the worse. We were getting used to doing this thing. We were giving in to it.

Afterward, Isaac watered our four horses and then hitched two of them, Bucky and Beaut, to the wagon. He was holding true to his promise to get supplies, and John was going with him.

Me and the girls—I had to make Liz—went down the rise to the barn to see them off. John waited on the buckboard, all grins. It had been a good while since he’d been to Scenic; it had been Mary’s turn the last time. I gave Isaac a small cloth bag. “Soda biscuits and a can of pears,” I said. “It’s all I’ve got.”

“It’s enough.” He quickly touched my arm and then he hoisted himself to the top of the wheel. The wagon rocking some, Isaac settled on the buckboard, finding the worn spots where he always sat. He took the reins from John and giddyupped the horses. Creaking, the wagon lurched, and they pulled away, Rounder lagging behind them likely as hot, thirsty, and hungry as any of us.

Me and the girls stood watching on the hard dirt road that ran along the bottom of the rise. We wore our bandannas tight over our noses. The wind blew so hard that the three little girls fastened themselves to my legs to stay upright. Even Mary leaned into me. Isaac sent Rounder back home, and we waved good-bye until the wagon and horses were nothing but an unsettled cloud of dust.

Standing on the road, I felt peculiar and unseated. During our first years in the Badlands I always went to town with Isaac. I didn’t want to be left by myself. I went even after Mary and Isaac Two were born. But when John came along it was too much to pack up the children and travel all those miles. The road was rough and pitted and made the babies cry. So I stayed home and worried. I’d worry that Isaac’d get caught up in a storm, or that a horse would kick him in the head, or that he’d get lost somehow and I would never see him again. I missed him so much that I’d cry over the least little thing. A meadowlark’s song left me crying in my apron. In the winter when the sun lit up the snow like diamonds in a Chicago jewelry store, sudden tears choked my throat.

But today wasn’t like that. I wasn’t all that much worried about Isaac or John; they’d be all right. It was Liz’s screams from this morning that had me this way. I couldn’t shake the sound. Maybe I never would.

“You coming, Mama?” Mary called. She and the girls were halfway up the rise to the house.

“I’m coming,” I called back.

I wanted my mother—that was a part of my peculiar feeling. I always wanted her with me when our babies were being born. That was natural. And three years ago, when Mama wrote me that Dad had died from the influenza, I grieved something awful that I wasn’t there for his burial. But this was different. This was the same feeling I had had last night. I was homesick for the people I’d left behind in Chicago.

Jerseybell, the milk cow, caught my attention. She was tethered to a stake by the root cellar where a patch of grass grew in the shade. Her back was humped like it pained her, and she wasn’t chewing, just drooling. Panic fluttered in my belly. Jerseybell had been dry this morning when Mary tried milking her.

Put one foot in front of the other,
I told myself.
Put your mind to your chores.
That was the best cure for worry and homesickness. Back in the house, I put on a pot of the last of the pinto beans and swept out the kitchen. I sent out everybody but two-year-old Emma to pick up cow chips. A home couldn’t ever have enough cow chips. They kept the fire going in the cookstove, and they kept the furnace hot in the winter.

Emma at my feet, I found the wooden baby cradle in the barn, and later, when its padding had aired on the clothesline, I stuffed the saggy parts with Miss Bossy’s feathers. Midmorning I put Emma down for a nap. Mary let Star and High Stepper, our other horses, out of the corral to free range. The girls all came in from the fields, and it wasn’t long after that when a four-foot snake twisted its way out from behind the cookstove. Liz, who chanced to be in the kitchen at the time, screamed, waking up Emma. Mary and Alise ran in from the porch in time to see me chop off the snake’s head with Isaac’s bowie knife.

“It’s nothing but a bull snake,” I told Liz, who stood frozen by the kitchen table. Mary took Liz by the hand and got her out on the porch. I quieted down Emma, and then I dragged the snake out. It was still twisting some. Liz covered her eyes, saying how it was the one in the well, how it’d come to get her.

“That’s good,” Mary said. “’Cause it’s dead. Can’t get you now.”

Me and Mary each took one end of the snake. Liz pressed herself flat against the outside wall of the house. We carried it to the barn for Mary to skin. It would be supper.

Back at the house, I had Liz come inside with me. I got the three little girls’ rag dolls for them to play with under the kitchen table. I put the iron on the cookstove to heat and set up my ironing board. Alise and Emma played a game of pretend, but Liz just laid on the wood floor, holding her doll to her chest. I couldn’t see her eyes but I imagined that the hollowness was still there.

There had to be water in town,
I thought.
Isaac had to bring some home. No matter what it cost, he just had to.

The iron was hot now. I hadn’t washed our clothes and bed linens in weeks, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be pressed. Mama was probably busy ironing too, in the laundry room at the Chicago Palmer Hotel. I pictured her hands—tough, scarred, and her knuckles big from so many years of handling hot irons. Sue worked at the Palmer too; she would be one ironing board over from Mama. Sue was light and airy and nothing ever bothered her, not even the stink from the slaughterhouses. She was smart, though. She could spell. Me and my brother Johnny used to play a game with her. We’d pick out the biggest words we could find in the newspaper. We’d show them to her real quick, then spin her around in a circle. Spell
clamorous,
we’d say. Spell
diplomatic.
Try
harbinger.
She always got them right. She had a gift.

I shook out Isaac’s shirt, then laid one of the sleeves on my ironing board, my hands stretching the cotton material, working out some of the wrinkles. I picked up my iron. Two months after I married Isaac, Sue married Paul Anders. He’d been asking her to marry him since she was sixteen. Now they had two boys and two girls. That was enough, Sue wrote, after the last one was born. As for Johnny, it was harder to picture him. Three years ago he’d married Pearl Williams, a slaughterhouse widow with a baby girl not quite two years old at the time. Mama thought Johnny could’ve done better, and it shamed her all the more that Pearl was showing when Johnny finally got around to marrying her. Their son was born a few months later. When I heard all that, I felt bad. Johnny would never get out of Chicago. But he surprised me. Last year him and Pearl took the children to East St. Louis. Johnny made good money there, Sue wrote. He had a job playing the piano six nights a week at a downtown theater.

As for Isaac’s mother, I knew she was doing just fine. People like her always were. Two letters ago Mama wrote that Mrs. DuPree had three boardinghouses now. Likely she was sitting pretty with all those boarders to preach to and all that hired help to boss around. And all her money, I couldn’t stop thinking about all her money and how just a little of it would be a big help to us. Isaac should think of it; he should put his pride aside and ask.

My throat tightened. Home. I wanted to go home.