The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [8]
“Maybe tomorrow,” Isaac said.
“Daddy,” Mary said, “Jerseybell’s puny. She’s got the runs.”
“I know it.”
Mary and John stepped back, the sudden sharpness in Isaac’s voice surprising them. “Now go on to bed,” he said to them, “and stop worrying me about that cow.”
“Five pages, Mary,” I said to ease the hurt showing in their eyes. “No more. And just two sips of water. Sips. Understand, both of you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After they went inside, Isaac leaned forward in his rocker, his arms on his legs. He crossed his wrists and let his hands dangle over the sides of his knees. There was a small tear in the knee of his left pant leg. That was one more thing that needed fixing. I’d do it after Isaac went to bed. I folded my mending and closed my sewing basket. I wished he’d say something—anything. From the corner of my eye, I saw him studying the country spread out all around us. He looked tired, the lines around his eyes deep. A wash of tenderness came over me. It was hard on a man when his family had to go without. I wished I could reach out and smooth his worries away.
Until this summer, we had had good luck. Our wheat was suited to the Badlands, and we didn’t have much trouble with grasshoppers. Isaac had an eye for buying cattle that bred easily and stood the winters. Our first spring here, he bought a threshing machine from a homesteader what was selling out. Isaac rented it to other ranchers, and in two years, it paid for itself. As for me, I knew a little something about gardening. On Saturdays, before we had so many children, we got up in the dark and took our produce, eggs too, into Interior and sold them to homesteaders on their way west to Wyoming. There were times we were so worn out we were asleep before dark. But we had twenty-five hundred acres to show for all the work.
“There’s all kinds of ways to earn respect,” Isaac was given to saying. “Owning land’s one of them. A man can’t ever have too much. Especially if that man’s black.”
Maybe that was true. I wasn’t always so sure, although for the most part, folks around here treated us fair. But there was no denying that Isaac was proud of the Circle D. That was what he’d named the ranch after he staked our claims. I was proud too. The first time, though, when I saw where our homestead was, it scared me.
“Where’s everybody?” I asked Isaac that day fourteen years ago when he stopped the wagon in the middle of nothing, jumped down, and said we were home.
He turned in a big circle, taking it all in. “The Walkers are that way,” he said, pointing east. “And Carl Janik is just beyond those buttes.”
I stared until my eyes blurred. There wasn’t the first house, barn, or person. There were only knee-high prairie grasses, buttes too steep to climb, and canyons that split open the earth.
It was so big. All that land and sky, all that openness; there was no end to any of it. It made me feel small. It gave me a bad feeling. I didn’t belong; this place called for bigger things than me. If for one second I lost sight of Isaac, I’d be alone and lost in this country that didn’t have any edges. I said to him, “Will we be all right here?”
“I told you this wasn’t anything like Chicago.”
“I know you did, but this . . .” I couldn’t find the right words to say what I meant.
“Don’t worry about it. The Indians were put down years back,” and that gave me something new to be scared about. The first year I kept a close watch, always expecting half-naked men to rise out of the grasses, streaks of red paint on their faces, scalping knives in hand. I had heard about Indians when I was growing up, and I had paid close attention when Isaac talked about his army days at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. But I never told Isaac I was scared. I even kept still when I saw my first Indians—a flinty-eyed, sneaky squaw with her little boy. I’d never wanted to give Isaac any reason to question my grit. I didn’t want him sending me back to Chicago.
Years later, the Badlands was still big. Big in its dryness. Big in its need to turn everything to dust.
Through the open door I heard Mary reading Swiss