The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [73]
But this was a different September. The canning jars on the cellar shelves were empty, and there was no need to line the dirt floor.
Sitting on the porch in the twilight, I pulled my shawl closer. I thought about Johnny in some potter’s field far from home. I hoped that someone had prayed over him. I wanted to think there was a cross to show where he rested. I hoped that his fingernails were clean and that someone had thought to fold his hands on his chest. Isaac stood up, jarring my thoughts. He whistled for Mary and John, and the shrillness of it ran clear through me. I tensed, my back arching.
John and Rounder bobbed out of the wash that now had a stream running through it. They loped up the rise, both of them muddy, John’s hands pressed together making a cupped circle.
John spun to a quick stop in front of Isaac and me. “Look,” he said, darting a nervous look at me. The children had been careful around me all day. In their eyes, Johnny’s death made me a stranger. It turned me into a woman what hollered at them for no good reason. I forced a smile.
He opened his dirty hands just enough to show the head of a green-speckled toad he’d captured. “He’s a jumper. Watch.” John fell to his knees on the porch, and I heard something give way in his pants. One more thing to mend, I thought. John put his cupped hands on the ground. “Get back, Rounder,” he said.
With his finger, John poked the toad. Rounder let out a great woof of excitement. Startled, the toad jumped a short length of the porch, its back legs dangling high in the air. It plopped into a sudden landing, folding its spotted legs beneath itself.
John sprang forward, scooped up the toad, and turned to me, waiting for me to say something. “My,” I said. He grinned, and in that instant he looked just like Isaac.
“That’s some toad,” Isaac said. “Must have gone a good foot and a half, maybe even two. And he’s a little fellow. Let’s see for sure. Get your ruler, John. I’ll hold your toad.”
I looked toward the barn. “Call again for Mary, would you?”
Isaac did, but his whistle was not all that shrill or long. His mind was on that far-jumping toad. I got up. “I’ll go get her,” I said. “She must be where she can’t hear.”
“I’ll go,” Isaac said, but he was down on the porch floor with John, measuring the jump with the ruler.
“I feel like walking,” I said. And I did. All of a sudden, I was restless. I felt like doing something hard. I felt the sudden urge to drag all the rag carpets from the house so I could beat the dust out of them. I even had it in me to polish the cookstove, and after that I wouldn’t have minded going out in the pasture and picking up a wheelbarrow load of cow chips.
The baby, I thought, fear shooting through me. That was what had me all stirred up. I’d be giving birth any time and I didn’t know how it was going to go.
“Jumped twenty-two inches, Daddy. Just look at that,” John was saying as I walked down the rise toward the barn. “Isn’t he some kind of jumper? Didn’t I tell you?”
“You’re right about that, son. Let’s try him again.”
Their voices faded as I made my way to the barn, mud sticking to my boots. At the barn door I stopped, taken aback by the swarms of flies and by a stink that reminded me of meat gone bad on an August day. “Mary, bedtime,” I called. “Daddy’s been whistling for you.”
She didn’t answer. Holding my shawl close, I stepped into the barn and waited for my eyes to get used to the sudden dark. My nose pinched against the stink. I swatted at the flies, sorry that I hadn’t thought to bring my bandanna to keep them from my mouth and nose.
“Mary? You in here?”
“I’m over here with Jerseybell,” Mary said. “She’s bad.”
I went to the stall. Jerseybell was down and on her side. Mary sat beside her, running her hand along the cow’s flank. “I’ve been trying to tell her she’s got to eat,” Mary said. “She’s got to get up, but she won’t do it. It’s like she doesn’t care.”
I found a lantern and took a match and a piece of sandpaper from my apron pocket. I struck the match;