The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [46]
It was one night later when Isaac unpinned his army insignia. At the time, one thing didn’t seem to have anything to do with the other. Now, though, I saw it different. I had Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s words about buffalo soldiers and Indian women fixed in my mind.
Sitting on the bed, I tucked the dusty rag under the mattress. With my hands, I lifted each leg up onto the mattress. My feet and ankles were swelled up and my skin felt too small to fit. I eased myself back on my elbows and then down onto the mattress and onto my side, the ticking crackling and shifting under me. My spine seemed to sigh with aches.
I ran my hand along the side of the bed where Isaac should be. I thought it likely that he’d rather sleep in the barn than come back to the house. I wondered how it would be between us in the morning, what we’d say to each other, if we’d say anything. Then my thoughts went back to that agency squaw and her half-breed boy. He’d be about eighteen. He was some man’s son. Could be that man didn’t know. Or if he did, he didn’t care.
That was how it’d been in Louisiana. When I was a girl there, living in the quarters with my family at the Stockton sugarcane plantation, Willie Lee Short was a Negro child with light brown hair and skin that turned fair in the winter. He was Mr. Stockton’s bastard—everybody knew it. Mr. Stockton couldn’t keep from pestering Sally, Willie Lee’s mama, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it other than leave and try to make her way somewhere else. Slave days were over, but that didn’t mean much to Sally. Where could she go, a young woman alone with a child? Folks in the quarters shook their heads over her. They were sorry for her. They were just as sorry for Willie Lee, what was expected to help his mama in the fields but wasn’t allowed to step foot in his daddy’s house.
Miss Wilma, the oldest woman in the quarters, once said that was because Mr. Stockton didn’t want the fruit of his sin sitting in his parlor.
Now, the thought stunned me. A sudden stabbing ache pierced my heart and I felt my insides give way. I squeezed my eyes tight. Not Isaac, I told myself. Not Isaac. Not that.
9
IDA B. WELLS-BARNETT
It was the next day when the wind died all at once. The sudden quiet startled me—the hushed stillness was a sound all of its own. Me and Liz had been scraping burned spots from baking pans when it happened. The quiet came on so quickly that my hands kept working even though I leaned toward the kitchen window, unsure what could be big enough to stop the wind.
“Mama,” Alise said from under the kitchen table. She and Emma held their rag dolls. “Mama, listen.”
There was nothing—no howling, no whistling around the corners of the house, no rattling prairie grasses. We went to the porch. Everywhere, dried bushes of tumbleweed had come to a stop in wide, open places. A turkey vulture, on the ground by the porch, stood stunned as if it had fallen from the sky. The few leaves left on the cottonwood dangled lifeless.
“What is it, Mama?” Liz said.
I went to the edge of the porch. The clouds were flat and stretched out, and along their bottom edges there was a faint orange glow. Isaac had said there was rain in the Black Hills. Maybe he was right; maybe it was coming this way. I shaded my eyes. The sun was as brassy as ever.
“Weather,” I said to the girls, fighting down a wave of hope. “‘Just weather.”
I went to the side porch and stepped down, startling the vulture. It hopped a few steps, its bold black eyes watching me. I hated vultures, and I clapped my hands to get rid of it. Giving me one last hard look, it stretched its wings, stuck out its breast, and beat the still air. It gave a skip and then took off, but only to the barn. It landed on the roof and looked back at me. My skin prickled.
The air was steamy, and my face was damp around the sides of my