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I went to our bedroom and undressed. I sat down on our low-slung bed and wiped my feet with a rag, and that was when I remembered.

It was our first summer in the Badlands when the Indian woman showed up. The memory of her came to me as clear as if it had just happened. It was so clear that I recalled the color of her dress, a faded blue. On that day, Isaac was working a shovel up and down, chopping sod that we’d use to build the barn. I was loading the sod in the wagon. The wind was easy, but all of a sudden the hair on my neck stood up. I whipped around and there she was, a few yards off, come from nowhere, her belly filled with a baby. A little boy about four held on to her skirt.

“Isaac!” I said. I’d never seen an Indian before. He whirled around, alarmed by my cry. When he saw the woman, he buckled—he was that startled. “Isaac,” I said again, all the more afraid.

He dropped the shovel and nearly ran to the woman. He took her elbow, she flinched, and he pulled her with him, and in doing so, knocked the little boy down. Isaac kept on pulling the woman down to the road, his steps long and angry, the woman barely keeping up, her single thick braid swinging as she tried to yank her arm away from him. I watched; the little boy did too, me and him too stunned to move.

The boy let out a little cry. That was when I took a closer look at him. “Lord,” I said out loud. “You’re a Negro.” It was in his hair and in his lips. I went toward him and the boy drew into himself, scared, and I saw he had Indian in him too. That was in the color of his skin and in the sharpness of his nose. I must have come too close because somehow he got to his feet and took off running down to the Indian woman what was on the road now with Isaac. The two of them were arguing. I couldn’t make out their words, but Isaac’s back was rigid and once I thought he shook his finger in her face. She stood up to him, though; her back was straight and her head high. Suddenly Isaac gave her a push on the shoulder, and that upset me because she was so big with a baby. She stumbled, off balance. The push seemed to settle things, though. The woman gathered up her boy and helped him climb into her handcart. Then, like a horse, she pulled the cart and they moved slowly up the road.

I ran, my skirt held high, to Isaac, who stood on the road, his arms crossed, watching the woman and the boy as dust rose around them.

“Who is she?” I said, catching my breath.

“Agency squaw.”

“What’d she want? And that boy, did you get a good look at him?”

Isaac shook his head and then started up the rise to where we had been cutting sod. I hurried to catch up. I didn’t know what to think; I didn’t know what to say. All at once, he stopped, and I nearly bumped into him. He looked back toward the woman and her boy as they plodded, the wheels of the cart creaking.

“She’s looking for a handout,” Isaac said. “Like they all do. Don’t ever give them anything, Rachel. That’s the first thing you need to know about Indians. They’re like stray dogs. Once you give them a scrap, they never leave.”

“I won’t. But that boy, did you see his face?”

“No.”

“He’s got Negro in him.”

A shadow crossed over his face and for a moment I thought his eyes darkened. I stepped back. My mouth went dry. I was alone in the Badlands with a man what I barely knew.

“I hate them,” Isaac said. “I hate what they are, and I won’t have them on my property.”

I nodded, quick to agree, relieved that it was the squaw what caused the darkness in his eyes and not me. I glanced back at the woman and her boy on the road.

“Forget them,” he snapped, heading back to where he’d dropped his shovel. “We have a barn to build.”

We didn’t say much to each other the rest of that day. Isaac wore a broody look and I did my best to work hard, not wanting to displease him. But from up on the rise while he chopped sod and I loaded it in the wagon, I watched from the corner of my eye as the woman made her way west along the road, one slow step at a time. Sometimes I lost sight of her and the child in those places