The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [47]
That was where Isaac was, and I was glad for it. It was better to have him gone than to face the uneasy feeling that stretched between us. We hadn’t had much to say to each other. Both of us, I believed, were still smarting from Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s visit. When I woke up that morning, Isaac was sitting on his side of the bed, his back to me as he pulled on his boots. I watched him, the ache in my heart coming back fresh. I saw Isaac in a new way. He was a man what hated Indians, and yet I believed he had laid with a squaw. He was a man what had turned his back on a child I believed might be his. There was all this and still he was Isaac DuPree. My husband. I reached out and put my fingertips on his back.
He tensed for a moment and then went back to his boots, grunting some as he worked the left one over his foot. “I’m moving cattle first thing, taking them some feed too,” he said. He didn’t look at me. “John and Mary’ll help. We’ll need a packed dinner.”
That meant Isaac was taking all four horses and the wagon. It also meant he’d be gone all day.
“All right.”
That was all we said.
On the porch, I looked north once again where the White River still had a trickle of water. I scanned the sky. It felt like a storm—the air was thick as if it held rain. I lifted my arms a little, my sides sticky. It might have felt like a storm, but that didn’t mean anything. The weather liked to tease. I remembered times when big splinters of lightning split open the sky, making the ground shake and roll from the thunder, sending the children crying to me. Curtains of rain would surround the ranch, and yet not a drop would come our way. Other times it would rain for days on end, making me and Isaac fret about the crops and root rot. Then from out of nowhere, right in the middle of a downpour, the sun would show itself, lifting our spirits, making us think that the crops might just be all right after all. But it would keep on raining, us worrying about rot, the sky bright with a rainbow.
All the same, the orange-tinted clouds off to the west raised my hopes. “Come on,” I said to the girls. “Those pans aren’t cleaning themselves.”
Back in the kitchen, me and Liz finished scraping the bread pans. I put some beans in my small pot to soak in the littlest amount of water possible. From the window, I saw how a shimmering haze had risen up from the earth, reminding me of Louisiana swamplands. I got a pot of mush going, and it didn’t take long before the hot cookstove turned the kitchen small and close. My feet swelled up, and I had to use the bootjack to get my boots off. The skin on my swollen toes had a peculiar shine to it, and that unsettled me. Horseflies found their way in through the open front door, and the girls got to crying from the bites that made their skin rise up into welts. I lit three smudge pots, and that helped drive the flies back some.
All that and I couldn’t keep from thinking about Isaac. I had aimed for a man with ambition, and I had gotten him. I had been willing to strike a bargain: a hundred and sixty acres for a chance to be his wife for a year. That year slid into fourteen. It happened because I closed my mind to the idea that an ambitious man cared mostly about what he wanted. I helped Isaac get his land, and I helped him keep it. Like putting Liz in the well; I was a part of that too. But Isaac wasn’t the only one what wanted something. I did too. Our children. Our wood house. Isaac himself. I had gotten what I had bargained for. It was too late to wish it had come about a different way.
I stirred the mush and poured a few teaspoons of water in it to keep it from sticking. I looked out the window. The clouds still glowed orange, but that wasn’t good enough. They needed to be dark. The whole sky needed to be black.
The water that Isaac brought home yesterday from Scenic was