The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

by Ann Weisgarber

  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.

  9

  IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT

  It 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.

  “What is it, Mama?” Liz said.

  I went to the edge of the porch. The clouds were flat and stretched out, and along their bottom edges there was a faint orange glow. Isaac had said there was rain in the Black Hills. Maybe he was right; maybe it was coming this way. I shaded my eyes. The sun was as brassy as ever.

  “Weather,” I said to the girls, fighting down a wave of hope. “‘Just weather.”

  I went to the side porch and stepped down, startling the vulture. It hopped a few steps, its bold black eyes watching me. I hated vultures, and I clapped my hands to get rid of it. Giving me one last hard look, it stretched its wings, stuck out its breast, and beat the still air. It gave a skip and then took off, but only to the barn. It landed on the roof and looked back at me. My skin prickled.

  The air was steamy, and my face was damp around the sides of my hair kerchief. Jerseybell, tethered in a patch of shade thrown by the house, moved her head slowly from side to side trying to shake away the flies. Slobber hung in thick strings from her mouth. I looked north. The sky was clear that way.

  That was where Isaac was, and I was glad for it. It was better to have him gone than to face the uneasy feeling that stretched between us. We hadn’t had much to say to each other. Both of us, I believed, were still smarting from Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s visit. When I woke up that morning, Isaac was sitting on his side of the bed, his back to me as he pulled on his boots. I watched him, the ache in my heart coming back fresh. I saw Isaac in a new way. He was a man what hated Indians, and yet I believed he had laid with a squaw. He was a man what had turned his back on a child I believed might be his. There was all this and still he was Isaac DuPree. My husband. I reached out and put my fingertips on his back.

  He tensed for a moment and then went back to his boots, grunting some as he worked the left one over his foot. “I’m moving cattle first thing, taking them some feed too,” he said. He didn’t look at me. “John and Mary’ll help. We’ll need a packed dinner.”

  That meant Isaac was taking all four horses and the wagon. It also meant he’d be gone all day.

  “All right.”

  That was all we said.

  On the porch, I looked north once again where the White River still had a trickle of water. I scanned the sky. It felt like a storm—the air was thick as if it held rain. I lifted my arms a little, my sides sticky. It might have felt like a storm, but that didn’t mean anything. The weather liked to tease. I remembered times when big splinters of lightning split open the sky, making the ground shake and roll from the thunder, sending the children crying to me. Curtains of rain would surround the ranch, and yet not a drop would come our way. Other times it would rain for days on end, making me and Isaac fret about the crops and root rot. Then from out of nowhere, right in the middle of a downpour, the sun would show itself, lifting our spirits, making us think that the crops might just be all right after all. But it would keep on raining, us worrying about rot, the sky bright with a rainbow.

  All the same, the orange-tinted clouds off to the west raised my hopes. “Come on,” I said to the girls. “Those pans aren’t cleaning themselves.”

  Back in the kitchen, me and Liz finished scraping the bread pans. I put some beans in my small pot to soak in the littlest amount of water possible. From the window, I saw how a shimmering haze had risen up from the earth, reminding me of Louisiana swamplands. I got a pot of mush going, and it didn’t take long before the hot cookstove turned the kitchen small and close. My feet swelled up, and I had to use the bootjack to get my boots off. The skin on my swollen toes had a peculiar shine to it, and that unsettled me. Horseflies found their way in through the open front door, and the girls got to crying from the bites that made their skin rise up into welts. I lit three smudge pots, a
nd that helped drive the flies back some.

  All that and I couldn’t keep from thinking about Isaac. I had aimed for a man with ambition, and I had gotten him. I had been willing to strike a bargain: a hundred and sixty acres for a chance to be his wife for a year. That year slid into fourteen. It happened because I closed my mind to the idea that an ambitious man cared mostly about what he wanted. I helped Isaac get his land, and I helped him keep it. Like putting Liz in the well; I was a part of that too. But Isaac wasn’t the only one what wanted something. I did too. Our children. Our wood house. Isaac himself. I had gotten what I had bargained for. It was too late to wish it had come about a different way.

  I stirred the mush and poured a few teaspoons of water in it to keep it from sticking. I looked out the window. The clouds still glowed orange, but that wasn’t good enough. They needed to be dark. The whole sky needed to be black.

  The water that Isaac brought home yesterday from Scenic was getting used up fast. Maybe he’d bring some back from the White River. Or maybe the cattle would drink the river dry, leaving nothing for us. Liz was in the parlor wiping dust from the windowsill. I wondered if she was worrying and hoping for rain the same way I was.

  I snapped my dishcloth at the flies crawling over the countertop.

  All at once a pushed-away memory rose up in my mind. I stared out the kitchen window as the memory took shape. The squaw and her half-breed boy came back the day after Isaac had sent them away. I had nearly forgotten that. When Isaac saw her coming back on the road, heading our way, he told me to stay by the barn. Cursing to himself, he got something from his knapsack—I couldn’t see what—but I saw the tight-pressed look on his face. Without another word, he went to meet her, and that scared me. I gripped the shovel with both hands and watched. Something was said; I couldn’t hear what. But not long after, she turned around and walked off, pulling her handcart with the boy sitting in it. I was so relieved that tears came to my eyes. I never saw her again. Or the boy. But six weeks later when Isaac bought his first head of cattle, he brought home only eighteen. That surprised me. On our train trip from Chicago to Interior he had talked about buying twenty, his eyes lit up just from the telling of it. Anything less, he had told me as we sat side by side on our cushioned train seats, would make him look like a greenhorn.