The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [103]
I had had a baby coming with nobody to help but Mary and John, and it took a knife to get the baby, and he wasn’t breathing, and Isaac hadn’t been there for any of it. He’d said he’d be home by breakfast, but he hadn’t been. He’d thought I’d be all right, but I wasn’t. That’s what he always thought about me—it was what he wanted to think. Now he thought I could make thin supplies stretch over the coming winter. He thought a hired hand would mind me, and this hand—a white boy—would work alongside me. Me and this hand and Mary and John could upright broken-down fences and mend windmills when the snow was high and the north wind blowing hard. I could leave Liz for long stretches to mind her little sisters. He believed I could do all that.
“Isaac?” I said.
His head jerked up, awake all at once. “Rachel,” he said. “Thank God.”
“Where’s John?”
“Asleep, in bed. He’s all right. They all are.” In the dim light I saw Isaac’s eyes flicker toward the cradle. The muscles around his mouth pulled.
“Where were you?”
“A son,” he said, his voice low. “He’s—”
“Where were you?”
He put his hand to his face, pulling at the tight muscles.
I waited, looking at him hard.
“I got here as soon as I could,” Isaac said. “I—” He stopped, cleared his throat, shifting in the rocker as if gathering himself. He went on. “John got lost on the way, got turned around. After he got to Al’s place it took awhile for Mindy to find me. Al and me were out doing a roundup.”
Yes, I thought. While I was birthing this baby—this baby what died—you were picking out cattle, cattle that you expect me to feed and water and tend to this winter with nobody to help but children.
Isaac said, “Mary told me about the squaw.”
“Her name is Mrs. Fills the Pipe.”
He didn’t say anything.
“The Badlands has taken the last of my children,” I said.
Isaac looked at me.
“Me and the children. If you go off to the gold mine, we’re leaving. For the winter.”
“Not this, Rachel. Not now.”
“I can’t run the ranch alone.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t.”
“Do it anyway.”
I looked away. He didn’t believe me. He had it fixed in his mind that I couldn’t leave. I didn’t have any money. This was all talk, that’s what he thought. But he didn’t know. I’d find a way. Like he found a way to buy more cattle.
Isaac got up, his knees popping. He stood over me for a moment, his shadow spreading across the foot of the bed. I couldn’t make out his face, but I knew what he was thinking. Stop complaining. I heard the words as if he was saying them. You knew what you were getting; you asked for this life. You bargained for a year, and I gave you a house and children. I took you out of another woman’s kitchen; I gave you my name. I pulled you up.
Isaac turned and went to the cradle in the corner. He pulled back the cheesecloth and picked up the baby. His back to me, he held our son. The lantern’s light made Isaac’s shadow tall, narrow, and jerky. Outside, the wind whistled low, making a hollow groaning sound. All at once, Isaac’s shoulders slumped and shook, startling me. This man what pushed himself hard every day, what never gave up, what wouldn’t let anyone else give up, this man was crying. I’d never seen him cry before, not even when Isaac Two and Baby Henry died. I didn’t know that he could.
Isaac was a man of ambition; he was the kind of man I thought I’d wanted since the day I saw Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Mrs. DuPree’s parlor. He hadn’t just pulled me up; he’d pulled himself up. The land had done that for him. He believed it would do the same for our children. He’d never let go of it.
But I had to leave; I had to take the children. Maybe there was a time when I would have stood the winter without Isaac. Maybe I even could have gotten us through. But that was before the drought; that was before I’d birthed eight children. That was before I’d lost three boys. And that was before I understood