The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [28]
The outhouse door banged in the wind. My mouth went even drier. We always kept it latched.
Holding my belly, feeling like I was carrying a twenty-pound sack of flour, I ran.
The outhouse was empty, but I couldn’t shake the bad feeling. I put my ear to the larger toilet hole. Sharp lime fumes stung my nose and eyes. Wind whistled in the deep, dark tunnel.
Straightening, I thought I heard a cry. I put my ear back to the toilet. “Liz!” I screamed into the hole.
Nothing.
Wild thoughts took ahold of me. In Chicago’s slaughterhouse district, children were forever falling into open sewer holes, grown folks too, if they were tipsy from drink. I gripped one end of the wood plank that made the seat and pulled. When those bodies were pulled out, they were swelled up and gray, not looking anything like human beings. I pulled again. The plank gave a little.
I pulled harder. One of the boards cracked, splintering around the nails. “Liz,” I screamed into the pit. “Hold on, I’m getting a rope.”
I backed out of the outhouse and nearly fell, stumbling over Rounder. He barked at me.
“Liiii-zzzz!” Mary called from somewhere behind the barn.
I ran to the barn for the rope. This was all my doing. I’d been daydreaming, thinking about Mama and the Palmer Hotel with its indoor plumbing, and now something bad had happened to Liz. But some of this was her fault; I couldn’t help thinking that too. She’d run off on purpose; she wanted to make me sorry for putting her in the well.
Inside the barn I slowed down, my eyes adjusting to the gloom as I made my way to the wall where we hung the rope. My breathing was loud and quick. Rounder circled tight, hemming me in, meaning to stop me. “Get away,” I shouted. I found the rope and hurried out but stopped, blinded all at once by the sudden glare of the sun. Squinting, I put a hand up to shade my eyes.
Rounder bumped up against my leg, nervous, and without thinking, I patted his neck to calm him. His tongue darted out and licked my fingers. Panting, Rounder tightened his circles around me, and suddenly I understood his meaning. “Liz!” I said. He barked, put his ears flat, and raced off to the wash, a narrow cut in the earth by the cottonwood.
“Mary!” I called, dropping the rope, running.
She came from the trash heap behind the house. I pointed at Rounder, and Mary went after him.
Rounder went down into the part of the wash that was the depth of a grown man. Mary followed him into it, sliding on her bottom, gray dirt tumbling down behind her, dust swirling. I ran, breathing hard, my fingers spread out under my belly. A cramp shot through my side; I hunched up. Isaac Two had slipped from a low boulder. A pointy-edged rock had pierced through his right temple when he landed, killing him. He’d only been five years old.
My legs wobbled; I caught myself.
“Mama! I found her!”
My knees buckled and my legs gave way one part at a time and before I knew how, I was sitting on the ground, my legs folded up under me.
“She’s all right!”
I didn’t try to get up. I sat there thinking how I was going to give Liz a tongue-lashing that child wouldn’t forget anytime soon. But all at once she was throwing herself on me and I didn’t care that she nearly knocked the air out of me. Her arms were around my neck, and I rocked her, back and forth, both of us crying, and that was when I knew that I hated the Badlands.
The shock of this thought stopped my tears. I hated the Badlands. For years I had hated it; I just didn’t know it until then.
“Mama,” Mary said, her voice low. She knelt beside me. “Mama.” Her face was pinched with worry.
I hated the Badlands, I hated everything about it—the bigness of it, the never-endingness of it, the lonesomeness of it. The weight of my hate bore down on me. I wanted to lie down