The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber

Author:Ann Weisgarber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101190364
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-29T10:00:00+00:00

The worst of the storm passed while I scrubbed the burned pot. The rain didn’t stop though. It rained while I got a fresh pot of mush going and it rained when me and the girls sat down to eat. After supper, I got some water from one of the rain barrels, heated it on the cookstove, and put the girls in the washtub. I scrubbed their hair. I dug the dirt out from between their toes, and I got it out from under their fingernails. I washed their elbows and their ears. I scrubbed and scrubbed and they let me. The girls played—Liz too—laughing as their small hands patted the water. When I finished, I got some more fresh water and washed Emma’s burned hand, even though this made her cry. Everybody sparkling clean, I put them to bed and read them a story. Then I went to the parlor and put a lantern in each of the two windows. There, sitting in one of the red upholstered chairs, I waited for the baby to kick, a sign that it was all right.

A watched pot never boils; that was something my mother always said. And the baby wasn’t going to kick if that was all I thought about. I got up and started a fire in the potbelly stove to get the wet chill out of the house. The rain beat down on the tin roof, and that was a pleasing sound, but the ground had turned into a boggy gray sand. When it got that way a person could sink up to his ankles in it. I didn’t see how Isaac could get everybody home. The horses couldn’t make it. Neither could Mary and John; it’d wear them thin.

It worried me. There weren’t any stars to guide them home. I hoped they had taken shelter in a calving pen. Or maybe, if they were lucky, the three of them had made it to the empty Walker house.

It was easy to get turned around in the Badlands. From time to time we heard stories about someone getting lost and wandering miles off track. Or worse. Last fall, Ralph Nelson, an old-timer who had lived in the Badlands for over thirty years, disappeared. He’d been searching for a handful of stray cattle. When he’d been gone over a week, his sons got worried. They put together a search party, and all of the men—Isaac too—had helped out. After three days of looking, they lost Ralph Nelson’s track and gave up. They figured he was dead in the bottom of a canyon, his neck broken, his body picked over by vultures. They figured the same for his horse.

I told myself Isaac wouldn’t take the chance, not with Mary and John. All the same, I had those lanterns burning in two windows.

The fire in the potbelly stove popped. My thoughts shifted to my parlor. It was my pride. I dusted it most every day and swept the scrap-rag carpet every Tuesday. The

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