The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [69]
And we want to know what happened to Pearl and the babies. We want to bring them home. Mama wants them here. But we do not know where they are. This has taken the Life right out of Mama. I am worried about her.
August 16
This Letter is worrying me. I promise you I will finish it tonight.
Sister every body is nervous here. We are careful to stay on our side of town. So many Southern Negroes have moved to Chicago to work in the factories for the War Effort that the White People and some Negroes too are saying there are too many. That is what they said in East St Louis and look what happened to Johnny. Johnny never hurt a fly. You are lucky to be where you are. Nobody can say The Badlands is crowded with too many Negroes.
This is Sad News. I am sorry to be the one to tell you.
Your loving sister,
Sue
P.S. Quince Armstrong sent some of Johnnys music. He said that Johnny wrote them. Having them is a comfort to Mama.
I folded the pages, careful to keep the same creases. I put the letter in the envelope. Johnny had been dead almost ten weeks, and I never even had a feeling about it. When we were children, I always knew when something was wrong with him. I could read his face; I could tell what he was thinking. He could do the same with me. When Mama scolded one of us, it hurt both of our feelings. If one of us did good on a school examination, we were both happy. That was, I always believed, because Mama raised us as twins. Johnny was just eleven months and three days older than me.
We weren’t twins, though. I was everyday plain, but not Johnny. He was the one with a God-given gift. He played the piano. He played so well that his music glided in the air like loose strands of light blue silk long after he bowed his head and his fingers left the keyboard.
Pain squeezed my chest. Johnny couldn’t be dead. But the words were on paper, and those papers were in my hands, and that made it true.
I put the letter back in my apron pocket. I got my shawl. I walked through the kitchen. “Mind the girls,” I said to Mary.
“Mama?” she said.
“Mind the girls.”
I put the shawl over my head. I went out into the rain and stepped off of the porch into the mud. I sank up to my ankles. I lifted each foot, one at a time, the mud sucking at my boots. It coated the hem of my dress. I made my way down the rise to the barn, seeing nothing but Johnny’s face. From the time he turned fourteen, his brown eyes carried a nervous look. That was about the time when Dad started talking about Johnny being old enough to work in the slaughterhouses.
“My hands,” he would tell me when no one else was around. “Butchering will kill my hands.”
“You don’t have to,” I always said. “Not you. You’re meant for more.”
I pictured him bent over a piano, his long fingers barely touching the keys. I saw a swinging baseball bat smack the back of Johnny’s head, knocking him into the front of a brown upright piano, its wood scarred with cigarette burns. Sheets of music scattered as the last notes that Johnny ever played crashed under his collapsed weight.
“Isaac,” I said when I got to the barn door.
“In here,” he called.
I stepped into the barn and wiped the rain from my face. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. Isaac was with Jerseybell in her stall. The rotten stink coming from her was so strong that I put my hand to my nose like that would make a difference. I went to her stall. Long, ropy strings of dark drool hung from her open mouth.
“I was just coming to get Mary,” Isaac said when he saw me. “I need a hand. Had to send John out to upright a few fence posts. A little rain’s nothing to him.”
“Isaac,” I said, but that was as far as I got. My mouth wasn’t working