The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [7]
The wind had settled into a breeze, and we didn’t need our bandannas. I sat down beside him in the other rocker and put my mending basket on the floor. Isaac put his head back to study the sky. When we built the house, I had hoped for a porch with a roof, but we ran out of wood. “Next year,” Isaac had said at the time. Over my knees, I flattened the shirt that Liz had worn and studied the rip, wanting to set it right.
Liz was a lot like Isaac. She could take on a shine like something funny had just crossed her mind, and like Isaac, she could take the most everyday thing and turn it into a story worth hearing. But she didn’t look the least bit like him even though she was almost as light as him. Like me, she was little-boned and short.
Squinting, I jabbed the thread at the needle’s eye a few times.
Isaac said, “Look there.” He pointed northward across a stretch of prairie land that swelled up into small hills and dipped into easy valleys. Just past was a craggy string of sandstone buttes. Their stony points were stark against the softening sky. I knotted the thread and poked the needle back into the pincushion. The biggest butte, the one close to the middle of the range, was called Grindstone Butte. The western sun had caught it just right—it shimmered like a storybook castle of gold with handfuls of diamonds tossed here and there.
“Still something, isn’t it?” Isaac said.
I pushed together the sides of the tear in the shirt and pinned it with my straight pins. The baby gave a little kick; I shifted some in my chair. I said, “What we did today was bad.”
“I didn’t take any pleasure in it either.”
“Liz is scared.”
“She’s all right.”
“She’s gone all quiet. Her eyes have a bad look.”
“She’ll be all right.”
“We can’t do it to her again. We can’t.”
“Damn it. What do you want me to do?”
“I—”
“Snap my fingers? Do some kind of rain dance? Is that what you have in mind?”
I winced. “No.”
“Lose the horses? Jerseybell? Let the children go without?”
My resolve crumbled.
“What then?”
“I don’t know.” I stared off at the Grindstone without really seeing it. Years back I had learned this. Isaac was smart; he knew what to do. Then there was this. A man and his wife fell apart when they fought. Even when they didn’t see eye to eye, they had to put their shoulders together and push in the same direction. Folks who didn’t, didn’t stand a chance. Not in the Badlands.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re doing what you have to, I know that. Just wish there was another way.”
He didn’t say anything. He sat in his rocker, stiff and unmoving as he stared off to where the sun was meeting up with the horizon. Grindstone and the other buttes were orange by then, and their long shadows darkened the pastureland. The dried stalks of prairie grasses swished in the breeze. Far off, cattle bellowed their hunger and thirst. It was a sound I had come to hate. It was the kind of sound that made my chest tighten. It was the kind of sound that made me want to put my hands over my ears.
Isaac stood up, put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled.
“Coming,” John called back. His voice was far away—he must be behind the barn. Then Mary called back too, sounding just as far off. I wanted Isaac to say something to me. I wanted him to say he forgave me for questioning his judgment. But he didn’t say it. He just stared off, watching Mary and John climb the rise, Rounder lagging behind as he nosed through the grass.
Mary and John were halfway up the rise by then, the dried-out grasses crackling under their feet. Strangers might say that Mary and John didn’t look to be related—the girl so dark and the boy a mild shade of brown. But the dimples on their left cheeks were the same; all our children carried that gift. It came from me.
“Nothing,” John said when he got closer. Like every night, he’d been checking his rabbit