Read Online The Personal History of Rachel DuPree by Ann Weisgarber - Free Book Online Page A

afternoon. I didn’t think twice. I turned around and went back. Mrs. DuPree was gone.
    “What’s the matter with you?” Trudy said. “You got what you wanted. You got her son, a man with land. Where’s your pride?”
    Traveling on a train to Nebraska, I thought. I had to come back. Isaac didn’t know where I lived. If I wasn’t at the boardinghouse when he came for me, he might not try all that hard to find me. But that wasn’t the kind of thing I was willing to say out loud. I said, “I need the money. I’ll stay as long as she’ll let me in the door.”
    Trudy shrugged her shoulders. “It’s your funeral.”
     
     
     
    Mrs. DuPree placed a newspaper advertisement for my job. That brought all kinds of women to the back door, but none of them suited Mrs. DuPree. “Too nervous. She’ll break every dish I own,” she told Trudy about one woman. “Hands shake. She probably drinks.” Of another she said, “Shifty. That one will steal me blind.” One woman, still nursing, wanted to bring her baby with her. Once a gray-headed white woman showed up begging for the job. “Poor white trash,” Mrs. DuPree said. “Won’t have her kind in my house.”
    Trudy thought Mrs. DuPree turned away all those women just so she could keep on tormenting me.
    “You think you’re marrying a rich man,” Mrs. DuPree said on those days when she was so angry I believed I could smell her bitterness. “You better think again, you conniving little cheap tramp. I know your kind, coming up from the South, looking for easy money. Think you’re marrying up, a dark girl like you snagging my son. Well, think again, missy. Marry my son and he’ll never see a penny of my money. You’ll be the ruin of him. You mark my words, you’ll bring him down.”
    Other days though, Mrs. DuPree talked to me only through Trudy. “She’s wanting you to stay late again,” Trudy would say. “Wants the oven scoured and polished all over again. Told her you just did it yesterday, but that wasn’t good enough. Said you were sloppy.” Or, “Now she’s got you cooking for her friends, wants you to make chicken and dumplings for Preacher Teller. Mercy, Rachel. I don’t know how you’re standing it, her being so nasty. Why don’t you go on and quit, you don’t need this job.”
    But I did. I was buying for my own home now—cooking pots, a frying pan, and dishes and cups for two. One by one I packed each thing in the traveling trunk Mama bought secondhand for me. I was not going empty-handed into this marriage.
    Mid-June came and went.
    At first I worried that Isaac had been killed, scalped by Indians. But then a letter addressed to Mrs. DuPree came from Nebraska and she turned even meaner.
    “He didn’t write you, did he?” Mrs. DuPree said to me.
    I tried to smile.
    “Of course he didn’t. He’s forgotten all about you. But Lydia Prather, he hasn’t forgotten her. He’s quite taken with her.”
    I tried to ignore Mrs. DuPree. I did my best to keep my hopes up. Isaac was an army man; he was a man of his word. But he hadn’t written; he hadn’t tried to explain why mid-June had come and gone. In my heart, I believed the worst. He had my statement for the claim. He didn’t need me.
    Days passed. Heartsore, I cooked for the boarders and kept still when Mrs. DuPree talked about Lydia Prather. Each night I went to bed beside my sister Sue, worn out but too hurt to sleep. On the last of June, Mama said it was time to put Isaac DuPree behind me. She patted my hand when she said this. She and Dad didn’t like it that I’d agreed to marry a man they hadn’t met. But Mama liked it even less that Isaac DuPree had hurt me. The next day, the first of July, me and Sue carried the traveling trunk with its pots and pans up to the attic.
    Mama thought I should do the same with my plum-colored wedding dress. She thought I’d never forget Isaac DuPree as long as the dress hung from a peg in my room. She was right, but I couldn’t bring myself to