The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [11]
I liked to think my dinners perked up the men some. They sat elbow to elbow on the two benches along the dining table and joshed, bragging about having the dirtiest jobs or about having the meanest bosses. This went on until I served their pie. Those men loved pie, but for some reason it changed their talk. Maybe it was because pie made them think about their people back home. Maybe it took them back to when they were boys and how they watched their mamas roll the crust. I didn’t know. But when I served pie, the men’s voices got deeper and the joshing quieted down.
One of these days, the men said after licking their forks clean, they’d quit their stinking jobs and go back home, cash in their pockets. Looking back, they said, thinking about it now, they weren’t sure why they ever left. If someone had told them what it was like in the slaughterhouses, they would have stayed put.
It was the money that brought them to the city, that’s what it was. But who could save money in a place like Chicago where nothing was free? Back home, now that was a different story. Neighbors were friendly, bosses were fair, and the girls were the prettiest in the world. Home, the men said, stretching the word long. Home. Someday, they’d go on back home.
I listened to the men while I scrubbed dried-up, crusty pans in the kitchen. This dining-room talk was nothing new. I had been working for Mrs. DuPree since I was seventeen.
When the coffeepot was empty and their plates scraped clean, most of the men went upstairs. Some of them played cards in their rooms or wrote letters home. Others moseyed into the kitchen. I’d come to expect this from the ones what didn’t have wives or sweethearts waiting for them in some far-off place like Louisiana or Alabama.
At first, Mrs. DuPree didn’t allow the men in the kitchen, but by the time I was twenty-five, she pretended not to notice. Likely she thought I was an old maid and that the men looked at me as nothing more than an older sister. But maybe there was a spot of kindness buried somewhere in her heart. She had a son of her own far away from home. Maybe she understood that a man needed to lean against a kitchen wall. Watching a woman tidy up was good for easing homesickness.
But not all of the men saw me as a sister. Some of them tried to court me.
One particular evening it was Thomas Lee Patterson who spoke up. Four other men ringed the kitchen. “Miss Reeves,” he said. “That strawberry pie was right tasty.”
“Crust didn’t do like it should,” I said, drying the last pan.
“Puts my grandma’s to shame, it was that good.”
“Better not let her hear that.”
He grinned, straightened up, and looked at the other men. I felt their eyes telling him to go on, give it a try. I shook my head a little to warn him off. Thomas Lee didn’t seem to see. Instead, he took a steadying breath. “What say, Miss Reeves? How about me walking you on home tonight?”
The air tensed.
“Oh my,” I said. I tilted my head, acting like I was considering the offer. But I wasn’t. Thomas Lee was as good as the next slaughterhouse man, but that was what he was: a slaughterhouse man. I had lived in the district since I was eleven and knew all there was to know about such men. Dad was one until he slipped and fell in a mess of hog guts and blood, knocking himself senseless for a night and a day. When he came to, his face drooped, his left hand dangled by his side, and one of his legs didn’t do like it should. He never was able to work again.
There was something about slaughterhouse work that soured a man; even my mother said so.