Out of the Dust (10 page)

This is not a dream.

There’s no comfort in dreams.

I try to contain the ache as I leave my bed,

I try to still my heart as I

slip from my room with my kerchief of dimes.

Moving slowly down the stairs,

I cross through the kitchen, taking only some

biscuits,

and leave my father’s house.

It’s the middle of the night and I hear every sound

inside me, outside me.

I go,

knowing that I’ll die if I stay,

that I’m slowly, surely

smothering.

I walk through the calm night,

under the stars.

I walk to

where the train stops long enough

for a long-legged girl to latch on

and as my heart races

I feel the earth tremble beneath me and then

the sound of sharp knives,

metal against metal,

as the train pulls up to the station.

Once I might’ve headed east,

to Mr. Roosevelt.

Now I slip under cover of darkness

inside a boxcar

and let the train carry me west.

Out of the dust.

August 1935

I am stiff and sore.

In two endless days on this train, I have

burned in the desert,

shivered in the mountains,

I have seen the

camps of dust-bowl migrants

along the tracks.

There was one girl.

I saw her through the slat in the boxcar.

She stared up at the passing train.

She stood by the tracks watching,

and I knew her.

August 1935

He climbs into my car.

He’s dirty and he has a sour smell.

His eyes are ringed by the soil that comes from riding

trains.

But there’s a deeper shadow to those eyes,

like ashes,

like death.

He needs a hair comb and a shave,

and a mending needle applied to his pants.

He speaks to me,

“Where you from, miss?” he wants to know.

He shows me a picture of his family.

A wife. Three boys.

The photograph is all he carries.

That and the shredding, stinking clothes on his back.

I feed him two of the stale biscuits I’ve been hoarding

and save the rest.

I’ll be hungry tonight,

what with giving my day’s biscuits away.

But I can see the gaunt of hunger in his cheeks.

He asks if I have water and I shake my head,

my tongue thick with thirst.

He eats the biscuits.

He doesn’t care they’re caked with dust.

He finishes eating and crumbs stick to his mustache.

He’s staring hard at me and his eyes water.

“I’ve done it again,” he says.

“Taken food from a child.”

I show him my cloth bag with more biscuits.

“At home,” he said, “I couldn’t feed them,

couldn’t stand the baby always crying.

And my wife,

always that dark look following me.

Couldn’t take no more.

Lost our land, they tractored us out so’s we had to

leave,

rented awhile, then moved in with Lucille’s kin.

Couldn’t make nothing grow.”

I nodded. “I know.”

We talked as the train rocked,

as the cars creaked,

as the miles showed nothing but empty space,

we talked through the pink of the setting sun,

and into the dark.

I told him about Ma dying.

I told him about my father,

and how the thing that scared us both the most

was being left alone.

And now I’d gone and left him.

I told him about the piano,

and Arley Wanderdale,

and how I wasn’t certain of the date,

but I thought it might be my birthday,

but he was sleeping by then, I think.

He was like tumbleweed.

Ma had been tumbleweed too,

holding on for as long as she could,

then blowing away on the wind.

My father was more like the sod.

Steady, silent, and deep.

Holding on to life, with reserves underneath

to sustain him, and me,

and anyone else who came near.

My father

stayed rooted, even with my tests and my temper,

even with the double sorrow of

his grief and my own,

he had kept a home

until I broke it.

When I woke,

the man was gone, and so were my biscuits,

but under my hat I found the photograph of his

family,

the wife and three boys.

Maybe the photograph was

left in trade for the biscuits,

maybe it was a birthday gift,

the one thing he had left to give.

The children in the picture were clean and serious,

looking out with a certain longing.

The baby had his eyes.

On the back of the photograph,

in pencil,

was the address of his family in

Moline, Kansas.

First chance, I’d send the picture back,

let his wife know he was still alive.

I got off the train in Flagstaff, Arizona.

A lady from a government agency saw me.

She gave me water and food.

I called Mr. Hardly from her office and asked him to

let my father know …

I was coming home.

August 1935

Getting away,

it wasn’t any better.

Just different.

And lonely.

Lonelier than the wind.

Emptier than the sky.

More silent than the dust,

piled in drifts between me

and my
father.

August 1935

My father is waiting at the station

and I call him

Daddy

for the first time

since Ma died,

and we walk home,

together,

talking.

I tell him about getting out of the dust

and how I can’t get out of something

that’s inside me.

I tell him he is like the sod,

and I am like the wheat,

and I can’t grow everywhere,

but I can grow here,

with a little rain,

with a little care,

with a little luck.

And I tell him how scared I am about those spots on

his skin

and I see he’s scared too.

“I can’t be my own mother,” I tell him,

“and I can’t be my own father

and if you’re both going to leave me,

well,

what am I supposed to do?”

And when I tell Daddy so,

he promises to call Doc Rice.

He says the pond is done.

We can swim in it once it fills,

and he’ll stock it with fish too,

catfish, that I can go out and

catch of an evening

and fry up.

He says I can even plant flowers,

if I want.

As we walk together,

side by side,

in the swell of dust,

I am forgiving him, step by step,

for the pail of kerosene.

As we walk together,

side by side,

in the sole-deep dust,

I am forgiving myself
for all the rest.

August 1935

I went in with Daddy to see Doc Rice.

Doc said,

“Why’d you wait so long

to show someone those spots, Bayard?”

I scowled at Daddy.

He looked at the wall.

I think

he didn’t care much,

if he had some cancer

and took and died.

Figured he’d see Ma then,

he’d see my brother.

It’d be out of his hands.

He’d be out of the dust.

Now he’s going to wear bandages

where Doc cut the cancer out

the best he could.

And we have to wait

and hope Daddy didn’t

get help too late.

I ask Doc about my hands.

“What,” I say,

“can I do with them?”

Doc looks carefully at the mottled skin,

the stretched and striped and crackled skin.

“Quit picking at them,” he says.

“Rub some ointment in them before you go to bed,”

he says.

“And use them, Billie Jo,” he says.

“They’ll heal up fine if you just use them.”

Daddy sits on my bed

and I open the boxes,

the two boxes

that have been in my closet

for years now.

The dust is over everything,

but I blow it off,

and Daddy is so quiet

when he sees

some of the things

that’re still so strong of Ma,

and we end up keeping everything but a palmful

of broken doll dishes.

I thought once to go through these boxes with

Ma,

but Daddy is

sitting on the edge of my bed.

My mouth feels cottony.

I fix dinner

and Daddy tells me about

when he was a boy.

He says, “I wasn’t always sure

about the wheat,

about the land,

about life in the Panhandle.

I dreamed of running off too,

though I never did.

I didn’t have half your sauce, Billie Jo,” he says.

And it’s the first time I ever knew

there was so much to the two of us,

so much more than our red hair

and our long legs

and the way we rub our eyes
when we’re tired.

October 1935

Her name is Louise,

she stayed by Daddy the days I was away.

The first time I met her she came to dinner bringing

two baskets of food.

She’s a good cook

without showing off.

She has a way of making my father do things.

When Louise came to dinner,

Daddy got up and cleaned the kitchen when we were

done eating.

He tied an apron around his middle

and he looked silly as a cow

stuck in a hole,

but Louise ignored that,

and I took a lesson from her.

We walked around the farm

even though she’d probably already seen it

while I was gone.

She didn’t ask to be taken to my favorite places,

the loft in the barn,

the banks of the Beaver,

the field where you can

see Black Mesa on a clear day.

She told me

she knew Daddy and I had a history before her,

and she wished she’d been there for the whole thing,

but she wasn’t and there wasn’t anything to do

but get over it and get on.

We both stared in wonder

at the pond my daddy made

and she said,

a hole like that says a lot about a man.

I didn’t intend to, but I liked her,

because she was so plain and so honest,

and because she made Daddy laugh,

and me, too, just like that,

and even though I didn’t know

if there was room for her

in me, I could see there was room for her in Daddy.

When I asked him if he wanted me

to go off to Aunt Ellis after all,

Daddy said he hadn’t ever wanted it,

he said I was his own and he didn’t like to

think about what Aunt Ellis might do with me.

And we laughed, picturing me and Aunt Ellis

together,

and it wasn’t a nice laugh, but it was

Aunt Ellis we were talking about after all.

The thing about Louise,

I’ll just have to watch how things go and hope

she doesn’t crowd me out of Daddy’s life, not now,

when I am just finding my way back into it.

October 1935

I walk with Daddy

up the slope and look out over the Beaver River.

Louise is back at the house.

She wanted to come

but this is Ma’s place,

Ma’s grave,

Franklin’s too,

and Louise has no business here.

She wants to come everywhere with us.

Well, I won’t let her.

Not everywhere.

Daddy says,

“She could have come.

There’s room enough for everyone, Billie Jo.”

But there’s not.

She can come into Ma’s kitchen.

She can hang around the barn.

She can sit beside Daddy when he drives the truck.

But Ma’s bones are in this hill,

Ma’s and Franklin’s.

And their bones wouldn’t like it,

if Louise came walking up here between us.

October 1935

“I may look like Daddy, but I have my mother’s

hands.

Piano hands, Ma called them,

sneaking a look at them any chance she got.

A piano is a grand thing,”I say.

“Though ours is covered in dust now.

Under the grime it’s dark brown,

like my mother’s eyes.”

I think about the piano

and how above it hangs a mirror

and to either side of that mirror,

shelves,

where Ma and Daddy’s wedding picture once stood,

though Daddy has taken that down.

“Whenever she could,

Ma filled a bowl with apples,” I tell Louise.

“I’m crazy about apples,

and she filled a jar with wildflowers when she

found them,

and put them on that shelf above the piano.”

On the other shelf Ma’s book of poetry remains.

And the invitation from Aunt Ellis,

or what’s left of it.

Daddy and I tore it into strips

to mark the poems we thought Ma liked best.

“We weren’t always happy,” I tell Louise.

“But we were happy enough

until the accident.

When I rode the train west,

I went looking for something,

but I didn’t see anything wonderful.

I didn’t see anything better than what I already had.

Home.”

I look straight into Louise’s face.

Louise doesn’t flinch.

She looks straight back.

I am the first one to back down.

“My hands don’t look real pretty anymore.

But they hardly hurt. They only ache a little,

sometimes.

I could play right now,

maybe,

if I could get the dust out of the piano,

if I wanted to get the dust out of the piano.

But I don’t. I’m not ready yet.”

And what I like best about her,

is Louise doesn’t say what I should do.

She just nods.

And I know she’s heard everything I said,

and some things I didn’t say too.

November 1935