The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [81]
“And Mary’s,” I said. She was a year and a half.
“She’s a girl,” Isaac said. “Ranch land always goes to the oldest boy so the land stays intact, doesn’t get split up. Then it goes to his oldest boy. That way it stays in the family, keeps the family name.”
“But Mary?”
“She’ll marry a man with his own land. I’ll see to it.”
“What if we have more sons?”
“They’ll work for me and Isaac Two until they’re ready to go out on their own, get their own ranches.”
Put that way, it seemed sensible. But it hadn’t gone that way. Negroes hadn’t come to the West, and Isaac Two had slipped on a pile of rocks. The ranch was going to John.
Isaac said, “Zeb Butler’ll know of ranchers, Negro ranchers in need of a wife. And John’ll want a woman from around here, one who has a taste for the work. He won’t find that kind in Chicago.”
Isaac was talking about our children like they were cattle. Their marriages would be bargains for land. Just like ours had been. Isaac would do the bargaining for his children and they’d go along with it. They’d want to please him. Grown up and married off that way, they wouldn’t know the first thing about courting, about sharing ice cream sodas or about going to dances. They wouldn’t know anything about falling hard in love and how that made everything easier to bear.
I said, “You’ve got this all worked out.”
“Ever since Mary was born.”
I felt sick. I saw the girls married off to men what worked them hard and treated them rough. I pictured John’s wife—worn out and little more than a ranch hand. That wasn’t what I wanted for them; our children should have better. I had to make Isaac see that too.
I gathered up an old memory, a favorite that I pulled out sometimes to soften the hard times. I said, “Remember when Mary was about a month old and we went to Interior?”
“No.”
I had to help Isaac remember. “Well, on that day it’d turned warm again even though we had had a heavy frost just a few days before. You called it Indian summer. You said it was our last chance to go to town before the cold set in. I hadn’t been in months. I was proud to go—I had Mary to take.” I laid my hand on his arm and felt the hardness in his muscles. “Remember?”
“No.”
“I had my shopping to do. I was in the store holding Mary; I was waiting for Mrs. Johnston to finish up with Mrs. Nelson. When she did, Mrs. Nelson came over and asked to see Mary. It surprised me; most usually she wasn’t all that friendly. Then I recalled that her children were all grown up and moved off. I could see she wanted to hold Mary so I let her. She ran her finger over Mary’s cheek and she put the tip of her finger to her eyelashes. She told me that a girl with such eyelashes would break every boy’s heart what looked her way. Me and her smiled over that.” I stopped. Mary had been such a little thing. At the time I couldn’t imagine her anywhere close to grown.
I said, “You were waiting by our wagon. ‘Let’s find a patch of sunshine,’ you said, ‘and have our dinner before heading home.’ But we never did. Because across the street in front of the blacksmith’s was a wagon, and there was a white girl sitting on the buckboard. Remember her, Isaac?”
“No.”
“I do, just like it was yesterday. She had brown hair—braids—and freckles everywhere. I’ll never forget her face. She was plain, but there was something pretty about her—her eyes maybe. She couldn’t have been a day over sixteen, if that. One of her horses was missing, it must have thrown a shoe. But she didn’t seem to mind in the least because she sat there playing her guitar like she was home in her own parlor.”
“A mandolin,” Isaac said. “Somebody asked her and that’s what she said.”
“That’s right. A mandolin. It was the prettiest music. People stood around listening, enjoying themselves. For once nobody was in a hurry to