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By Root 573 0

’s bedroom was small, and I was still cooking outside over an open fire. Mornings were so cold, and evenings too, that I had to wear gloves. That kind of cooking tested my patience, and it shamed me to serve my new husband biscuits that were burned on the bottom and mushy in the middle. The coffee didn’t do right, either. It was either scorched or lukewarm; there was no in between. Isaac never complained. He thought it was good; he was used to army food. I told myself that it didn’t matter. A cookstove could wait. We had spent all our money, I believed, on the cattle, horses, and a plow. So it took me aback when on a cool October day a wagon with two big crates in the bed came up the road. I was alone—Isaac was out in one of the pastures seeing to the cattle. I kept my eye on the wagon for a while, and then when I saw there were three white men sitting on the buckboard, I went inside the dugout. I watched the wagon from the one window in the front.

I didn’t know what to do when the driver turned the two oxen from the road and brought the wagon up the rise to the dugout. After the wagon stopped, one of the men let out a shrill whistle. Behind the latched door, I held my breath. Three white men and one Negro woman.

“Anybody at home?” somebody called out.

Go away, I thought.

The man called again, this time louder. Isaac would expect me to see what these men wanted. He’d expect me to be able to take care of myself. I got a kitchen knife and put it in my apron pocket. I unlatched the door and stepped outside.

The men started when they saw me. They looked at each other, their eyebrows raised. “Well, well,” the driver said.

I fingered the knife in my pocket. “What can I do for you?”

The driver gave a little snort. His face was lined, and the hair that stuck out from under his slouch hat was gray. His neck was thick, and I figured his arms were too, from the way his coat strained. One of his cheeks bulged. The two other men with him were younger and rail thin, their Adam’s apples bobbing. The driver’s sons, I figured. Their noses all sloped the same way.

The driver narrowed his eyes. “Heard there were Negroes out here.” He worked his mouth, leaned over the side toward me, and spat out some brown juice. It landed a few feet from me. It took everything I had to not run back into the dugout. He said, “Didn’t expect to run across any today.”

“Ain’t that just like Anderson,” one of the other men said, “not to tell us?”

“Yeah, that’s Anderson for you,” the driver said, not taking his eyes off of me. I lowered mine. He said, “You any relations to those other Negroes north of the Black Hills?”

I shook my head.

The wagon groaned as the driver shifted his weight. “My father served with the First Minnesota. At Gettysburg. Had his feet blown off.”

I nodded, my mouth dry.

He waited, and I realized that he expected me to say something. I said to his chin, “I’m sorry.”

He made a grunting sound, and I understood that he expected more from me. I swallowed. “I’m obliged to your father for his sacrifice. And to your mama.” I paused and then looked right at him to show that I meant it. “And to you. I’m much obliged.”

I lowered my eyes again, sweat running down my sides. I gripped the knife in my apron pocket. The buckboard creaked and somebody tapped his foot. At last the driver said, “I’m looking for someone by the name of Isaac DuPree. You know him?”

I nodded. “My husband.”

“He a Negro too?”

What else would he be? “Yes.”

“How’d a Negro come by this kind of money?”

I didn’t know what he meant. A thick silence hung in the air. Then the driver spat again, his spit landing farther away from my feet this time. “Come on, boys,” he said. The men jumped down from the buckboard. I backed away, my hand searching for the dugout door, but they’d lost all interest in me. They sprang open the wagon’s tailgate and, using rope and muscles, they hauled two crates to the ground. Sweating, they took off their coats and tossed them onto the buckboard. The younger men got crowbars from the wagon bed, and then they all set upon one of the crates, the