The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [100]
She gave me a questioning look.
“That I needed you?”
“Mary.” She sat down in my rocker. “My sister-in-law’s in a bad way. I was traveling to her; her sons are with me. Mary saw us on the road.”
A handful of days ago, I gave Mrs. Fills the Pipe tea on my porch. When I realized that she was an agency squaw, I wanted her gone. And she wanted to be gone when she found out that I was an army man’s wife. She could have kept going when Mary ran down to the road and begged for help. She could have, but she didn’t. I wondered if I would have done the same for her.
“These boys with you,” I said. “Same ones as before?”
“Yes.”
A few days ago, Mary walked with Franklin and it had made her eyes dance. I hoped that she was walking with him now. I hoped that it lightened her heart. I hoped it did the same for him.
I said, “She’s dying? Their mother?”
Mrs. Fills the Pipe stopped rocking. “I believe so.”
“Leaving her boys,” I said.
Mrs. Fills the Pipe nodded and then set the rocker going again. It wobbled some. The chair had been moved from the slight grooves in the floor that I’d worn from rocking Alise and Emma. Setting the chair right didn’t matter anymore. My baby didn’t need rocking.
Mrs. Fills the Pipe inclined her head toward the baby in my arms. “Some spirits, especially the little ones, play tricks. During the year before the Wanagi Canku.”
I shook my head. I was tired; nothing mattered.
“You’ll see,” Mrs. Fills the Pipe said. “You put the salt jar on the shelf and it falls. The fire, even when there is no wind, flickers and goes out. Something tickles the back of your neck. That is the spirit playing.” Smiling slightly, Mrs. Fills the Pipe pointed her chin at the baby. “You’ll see.”
A month after Isaac Two had slipped and fallen on the rocks, it came to me that his one toy, his red rubber ball with a white stripe, was missing. I couldn’t recall when I’d last seen it. I looked everywhere for it; it was important to find it. The ball had been Isaac Two’s and nobody else’s. I had searched the barn, the root cellar, the outhouse. I even went to where he had died and looked in the places between the rocks.
I never found his ball. Isaac talked me into believing that Tracker, our dog then, had dug a hole and buried it.
And Baby Henry. A few nights after he was born and died, I woke hearing him crying, wanting me. Beside myself, I ran up to the cemetery thinking we’d buried him alive. There, I got down on my hands and knees and put my ear to the fresh-turned grave. Nothing. You were dreaming, I told myself. You saw him die; you saw the light go out of his eyes. He laid cold in the cradle a day and night before we buried him. But the crying happened more than once; it happened night after night for the longest time. It stopped about the time that I knew there was another baby on the way.
“Ghosts,” I said to Mrs. Fills the Pipe.
“Spirits,” she said.
A spirit wasn’t something to be scared of, not like a ghost was. I said, “A year?”
“Yes,” she said. “For a year you must care for the spirit. You must put out food and milk, whatever you think pleases. When the year comes full circle, you give away the spirit’s possessions. Then the journey along the Wanagi Canku begins.”
“And he won’t get lost?”
“The ancestors will be there.”
My father. Johnny. Isaac Two and Baby Henry. Oscar DuPree, Isaac’s father. I couldn’t bring myself to think Isaac and John.
I wrapped my baby boy up in his blanket, and as I did, a gleam of light from my gold wedding band caught my eye. On my wedding day, after Preacher Teller pronounced us man and wife, after I said good-bye to Dad and Johnny, me and Isaac got in the waiting horse cab. I had expected we’d go directly to the railroad station, but instead Isaac gave the driver an address that I didn’t know. I didn’t ask him about it; I was dazed