The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [13]
“I want this house shining,” Mrs. DuPree said, “every pot, every pan, every inch of it shining. Even behind the cookstove. He’s been out in the wilderness so long I’m afraid he’s forgotten how civilized people live.”
“Oh yes, ma’am.”
“And I want the food to be good. I’ll make up a list of his favorites.”
I smiled. “I’ll do my best.”
“See that you do.” She eyed me. My smile was too big to suit her. I made it go away. She said, “Start with the floors—get the marks up. And I want the silver polished and the sideboard waxed.” I nodded and she left.
I waited until I couldn’t hear her footsteps. Then I drew up my skirt, held it above my ankles, and did a little waltz around the kitchen. Isaac DuPree, I sang to myself. Isaac DuPree was coming home. Coming home.
4
SERGEANT DUPREE
Isaac DuPree was a man set apart. Maybe it was because of his blue army uniform with the gold buttons on his collar and the broad yellow stripes on his left sleeve. Or maybe it was because he was tall and even fairer than his mother. But I thought it was more than all those things. Isaac carried himself with pride. When he met the boarders, he looked each man in the eye and shook their hands. When he saw me and Trudy, the housemaid, in the kitchen doorway, he gave a little bow like a gentleman would and that made us smile.
Isaac hadn’t been home but a handful of hours when he wheedled his mother into letting him eat dinner with the boarders. “I’m used to eating with my men,” I overheard him say. “Give me a couple days of civilian life and then we’ll eat in the parlor. Just the two of us. How about it, Mother?”
He had a way with Mrs. DuPree; anybody could see that. I set the platter of sliced roast beef before him on the dining-room table. Mrs. DuPree might have a rule about fraternizing—as she called it—with the men, but there she was, sitting at the same table with them, her at one end, Isaac at the other. She was all dressed up in her black satin skirt and her cream blouse that had so many pleats and layers of lace that it took Trudy a full hour to press it.
“Tell the boys about army life, Isaac,” Mrs. DuPree said as I went back into the kitchen. “Tell them where all you’ve served.”
“Mother,” Isaac said, a grin in his voice, “let the fellows eat in peace.”
“Come on, man,” one of the boarders said. Bill Miller. “Tell us about the army. Never seen a colored man in uniform before.”
This was new dining-room talk. I opened the kitchen door a little wider so I could hear while I heaped mashed potatoes into three serving bowls.
“Wyoming,” Isaac was saying. “Now that’s fine country. That’s where the Yellowstone flows. But it’s the Teton Mountains I’ll never forget, how they rise up out of the flats, bold and mean looking against the bluest sky I’ve ever seen.”
I admired his voice. It was smooth, and as I listened while getting dinner on the table, his voice carried me out of the kitchen so that I was someplace else altogether. I was a soldier with Isaac in the Ninth Cavalry. We were winding our way on horseback along the narrow rim of a Badlands canyon tracking a band of renegade Sioux. I was on the Powder River in Wyoming, then I was in Butte, Montana, keeping an eye out for union men wanting to break the railroads. I was on a naval ship sailing for Cuba, ready to back Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Never before had I met a man whose everyday life was filled with such fine adventures.
After I finished serving the coconut cream pie, I stood tucked in the kitchen doorway, taking care to avoid Mrs. DuPree’s eye.
“How long you been in the army?” Robert Bailey said. “You’ve got a mighty good show of stripes there.”
“Thirteen years.”
Mrs. DuPree said, “Isaac joined the day after he got