The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [40]
All at once, a rich, dark smell filled the kitchen, the kind of smell that made me light-headed with pleasure. Keeping my eyes closed, I filled my lungs with it, and just that quick, I was grinding coffee beans in Mrs. DuPree’s boardinghouse kitchen. Mrs. DuPree considered coffee one of life’s great pleasures. Me too. Every Friday morning, Samuel, the delivery boy from Telly’s Market, brought two five-pound sacks of dark beans to the kitchen door. Those beans, Samuel told me once, had traveled all the way from South America. I tried to picture South America from my geography lessons, but I couldn’t place it. I’d been out of school too long. So one Saturday afternoon, after I’d finished for the day at Mrs. DuPree’s, I took the streetcar and went to the free library. There, I rounded up my courage and asked the white man behind the counter if he could tell me where South America was. For a minute he looked at me over his eyeglasses like he wasn’t sure he had heard right. Likely he wasn’t used to twenty-year-old Negro women asking about South America. He tapped his forefinger twice on the counter. Then the library man got up, nodded for me to come, and without a word, he led me past the rows and rows of tall shelves filled with books. He stopped at a table where there was a big globe of the world. He tipped it and gave it a little twist. With a nod, he indicated a continent that was wide in the middle and then thinned down to a narrow point at the bottom. The countries were different colors: brown, and blue, and green, and a few were pink.
“This where coffee comes from?” I whispered.
He moved his finger to one of the countries. Brazil.
I looked closer. “Is Chicago on here?” I said.
The library man tipped the globe and pointed. “Here.”
With my eye, I traveled the distance from Brazil to Chicago. After that I took extra pleasure in grinding those Brazil beans, scoops and scoops of them, into coffee as fine as the sand that trickled in the three-minute hourglass I kept by the stove. The smell of those beans, I once told Trudy the housemaid, was even better than the taste of coffee.
Isaac was waiting for me to say something. I opened my eyes. A small burlap bag of coffee beans dangled right before my eyes. As good as it smelled, as good as the memory was, I didn’t like it. “What’d it cost?” I said.
“It’s a small bag,” he said. “It’s been weeks.” He took my left hand and when he saw my wrapped finger, the one I’d hurt in the outhouse when Liz was hiding in the dry wash, he raised an eyebrow.
“Caught my nail,” I said.
He put the bag of beans in my palm. “There’s rain coming. I believe that calls for a cup of coffee.”
“But the cost.”
“Can’t go to town for supplies and not get coffee.” Isaac put his hand on the small of my back and pulled me as close to him as my belly allowed. I turned my face away from him, gripping the coffee sack, crushing it, making my torn fingernail throb all the more. He’d bought it to keep people from talking, to keep them from seeing that we were having hard times. He had bought it to remind Mrs. Svenson that he owned the Circle D, a twenty-five-hundred acre spread.
Isaac kneaded his fingers along my backbone, working out the ache, aiming, I knew, to tear down my anger. Stop it, I wanted to say to him. We’re broke and pride made you buy coffee.
His fingers rubbed the knobs on my spine. My good sense began to drift. His fingers felt so good working out the aches. I was so tired. My knees began to give way; so did my anger. I leaned my big belly against him, wanting him to take the weight of it, wanting Isaac to make me a young woman again, when everything was good and easy.
He picked up my free hand, and even though Alise and Emma were underfoot, he pressed the palm of my hand to his lips. My fingers curved around his cheek, feeling how he hadn’t shaved that morning. It was then that I saw he was tired. The skin around his eyes sagged. The drought was taking its toll, and that made me feel bad for him. I breathed Isaac in, smelling the sweat of hard work. What difference