The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [25]
But today wasn’t like that. I wasn’t all that much worried about Isaac or John; they’d be all right. It was Liz’s screams from this morning that had me this way. I couldn’t shake the sound. Maybe I never would.
“You coming, Mama?” Mary called. She and the girls were halfway up the rise to the house.
“I’m coming,” I called back.
I wanted my mother—that was a part of my peculiar feeling. I always wanted her with me when our babies were being born. That was natural. And three years ago, when Mama wrote me that Dad had died from the influenza, I grieved something awful that I wasn’t there for his burial. But this was different. This was the same feeling I had had last night. I was homesick for the people I’d left behind in Chicago.
Jerseybell, the milk cow, caught my attention. She was tethered to a stake by the root cellar where a patch of grass grew in the shade. Her back was humped like it pained her, and she wasn’t chewing, just drooling. Panic fluttered in my belly. Jerseybell had been dry this morning when Mary tried milking her.
Put one foot in front of the other, I told myself. Put your mind to your chores. That was the best cure for worry and homesickness. Back in the house, I put on a pot of the last of the pinto beans and swept out the kitchen. I sent out everybody but two-year-old Emma to pick up cow chips. A home couldn’t ever have enough cow chips. They kept the fire going in the cookstove, and they kept the furnace hot in the winter.
Emma at my feet, I found the wooden baby cradle in the barn, and later, when its padding had aired on the clothesline, I stuffed the saggy parts with Miss Bossy’s feathers. Midmorning I put Emma down for a nap. Mary let Star and High Stepper, our other horses, out of the corral to free range. The girls all came in from the fields, and it wasn’t long after that when a four-foot snake twisted its way out from behind the cookstove. Liz, who chanced to be in the kitchen at the time, screamed, waking up Emma. Mary and Alise ran in from the porch in time to see me chop off the snake’s head with Isaac’s bowie knife.
“It’s nothing but a bull snake,” I told Liz, who stood frozen by the kitchen table. Mary took Liz by the hand and got her out on the porch. I quieted down Emma, and then I dragged the snake out. It was still twisting some. Liz covered her eyes, saying how it was the one in the well, how it’d come to get her.
“That’s good,” Mary said. “’Cause it’s dead. Can’t get you now.”
Me and Mary each took one end of the snake. Liz pressed herself flat against the outside wall of the house. We carried it to the barn for Mary to skin. It would be supper.
Back at the house, I had Liz come inside with me. I got the three little girls’ rag dolls for them to play with under the kitchen table. I put the iron on the cookstove to heat and set up my ironing board. Alise and Emma played a game of pretend, but Liz just laid on the wood floor, holding her doll to her chest. I couldn’t see her eyes but I imagined that the hollowness was still there.
There had to be water in town, I thought. Isaac had to bring some home. No matter what it cost, he just had to.
The iron was hot now. I hadn’t washed our clothes and bed linens in weeks, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be pressed. Mama was probably busy ironing too, in the laundry room at the Chicago Palmer Hotel. I pictured her hands—tough, scarred, and her knuckles big from so many years of handling hot irons. Sue worked at the Palmer too; she would be one ironing board over from Mama. Sue was light and airy and nothing ever bothered her, not even the stink from the slaughterhouses. She was smart, though. She could spell. Me and my brother Johnny used to play a game with her. We’d pick out the biggest words we could find in the newspaper. We’d show them to her real quick, then spin her around in a circle. Spell clamorous, we’d say. Spell diplomatic. Try harbinger. She always got them right.