Free The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber Page B

inside with me. I got the three little girls’ rag dolls for them to play with under the kitchen table. I put the iron on the cookstove to heat and set up my ironing board. Alise and Emma played a game of pretend, but Liz just laid on the wood floor, holding her doll to her chest. I couldn’t see her eyes but I imagined that the hollowness was still there.
    There had to be water in town, I thought. Isaac had to bring some home. No matter what it cost, he just had to.
    The iron was hot now. I hadn’t washed our clothes and bed linens in weeks, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be pressed. Mama was probably busy ironing too, in the laundry room at the Chicago Palmer Hotel. I pictured her hands—tough, scarred, and her knuckles big from so many years of handling hot irons. Sue worked at the Palmer too; she would be one ironing board over from Mama. Sue was light and airy and nothing ever bothered her, not even the stink from the slaughterhouses. She was smart, though. She could spell. Me and my brother Johnny used to play a game with her. We’d pick out the biggest words we could find in the newspaper. We’d show them to her real quick, then spin her around in a circle. Spell clamorous, we’d say. Spell diplomatic. Try harbinger. She always got them right. She had a gift.
    I shook out Isaac’s shirt, then laid one of the sleeves on my ironing board, my hands stretching the cotton material, working out some of the wrinkles. I picked up my iron. Two months after I married Isaac, Sue married Paul Anders. He’d been asking her to marry him since she was sixteen. Now they had two boys and two girls. That was enough, Sue wrote, after the last one was born. As for Johnny, it was harder to picture him. Three years ago he’d married Pearl Williams, a slaughterhouse widow with a baby girl not quite two years old at the time. Mama thought Johnny could’ve done better, and it shamed her all the more that Pearl was showing when Johnny finally got around to marrying her. Their son was born a few months later. When I heard all that, I felt bad. Johnny would never get out of Chicago. But he surprised me. Last year him and Pearl took the children to East St. Louis. Johnny made good money there, Sue wrote. He had a job playing the piano six nights a week at a downtown theater.
    As for Isaac’s mother, I knew she was doing just fine. People like her always were. Two letters ago Mama wrote that Mrs. DuPree had three boardinghouses now. Likely she was sitting pretty with all those boarders to preach to and all that hired help to boss around. And all her money, I couldn’t stop thinking about all her money and how just a little of it would be a big help to us. Isaac should think of it; he should put his pride aside and ask.
    My throat tightened. Home. I wanted to go home.
    I looked at the little girls under the kitchen table as I put the iron back on the stove. This was their home, I told myself. Our home. Not Chicago. I was lucky to have so much. I had a house, a wood house. I was the only one in my family able to say that. A person didn’t just walk away from her house, not even when times were bad.
    Something inside of me bucked at that. This drought was driving out homesteaders right and left. I used to feel sorry for them, but not anymore. At least the drought was over for them. Their mouths weren’t dried up like they’d been chewing grit. They weren’t watching their cattle die, and they weren’t dropping their children into water wells.
    But they had other worries, I told myself. Most everybody did. Things were going to get better here. They had to—it couldn’t stay dry forever. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and put your mind to your work.
    Later that day, when the sun was burning its hottest and the wind blowing its strongest, me and the girls sat down to a noon dinner of beans and half-filled cups of lukewarm water. The girls all made faces. I had strained the water but it still clouded up with silt. The beans