The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [59]
I told myself Isaac wouldn’t take the chance, not with Mary and John. All the same, I had those lanterns burning in two windows.
The fire in the potbelly stove popped. My thoughts shifted to my parlor. It was my pride. I dusted it most every day and swept the scrap-rag carpet every Tuesday. The children knew better than to sit on the red upholstered chairs or to touch the bookcase, the writing table, or the clock. When I had company—Mindy McKee or Mabel Walker before she sold out and moved back home—I always invited them to the parlor for our visit. The parlor made me feel like a lady.
Most everything in it came from the ranches we had bought over the years. But the framed picture of President Lincoln that hung over the writing table had been Isaac’s since he was a boy.
He admired the president. Mr. Lincoln not only set the slaves free but he also promised every freed man forty acres of farmland once the war was over. The president, Isaac believed, understood what land could do for the Negro race. He understood that land was an opportunity, that it made a man proud. Things would have been different, Isaac said, if Mr. Lincoln hadn’t been shot dead.
Tacked beside the president’s picture was a small yellowed drawing of Ida B. Wells-Barnett cut from a newspaper years ago. That was mine. Through the years I liked to think that she was proud of me for marrying a man with ambition. I liked to think that she was as proud of my wood house as I was. That night, though, as I sat alone in the parlor, it struck me that Ida B. Wells-Barnett might pity me. I lived in the Badlands, a country so backward and harsh that even Indians didn’t want it.
All at once, my cheeks burned with shame. Three days ago I used my hand-painted rose platter to serve broken-up biscuits to Mrs. Fills the Pipe and her family. I gave her and Inez the last of the chokeberry tea. But none of that mattered. Mrs. Wells-Barnett would have served tea to Mrs. Fills the Pipe in the parlor, not on the porch.
She wouldn’t have cared if doing that made her husband angry. She would have done it anyway. Mrs. Wells-Barnett would have asked Mrs. Fills the Pipe about those Indian women what had been used by the army men. She would have asked where those women were now, and she would have asked after the children.
It never entered my mind. Fourteen years ago it hadn’t entered my mind either to worry about the Indian woman what had showed up with her half-breed boy. Or the child she was carrying. Instead, I put them out of my mind. Nothing was getting in the way of me making a home with Isaac.
Mrs. Wells-Barnett would say I’d been wrong.
A restlessness came over me and my teeth took to chattering. Too late, I thought, to worry about what Mrs. Wells-Barnett would say. All that happened a long time ago. Put it out of your mind. I got up to put a few more cow chips in the stove. The stove door stuck, and I had to pull on it a few times before it gave.
I sat back down, wishing the baby would kick. Even a little tap would be enough. I shifted a few times to find a way to take the ache from my back. I sat up straighter and told myself that helped.
I was proud of the parlor stove. It had four skinny curved legs and a long stovepipe that disappeared into the parlor ceiling. Every summer I took the pipe down and flushed it clear of ashes. I polished the stove to keep it a shiny black. It was mid-October of 1903 when the potbelly stove showed up at our door. That made it, I recalled, about three months after the Indian woman and her half-breed boy had walked up the rise. Me and Isaac had finished building the barn and the two-room dugout. The fireplace in the dugout