Out of the Dust (3 page)

While we sat

taking our six-weeks test,

the wind rose

and the sand blew

right through the cracks in the schoolhouse wall,

right through the gaps around the window glass,

and by the time the tests were done,

each and every one of us

was coughing pretty good and we all

needed a bath.

I hope we get bonus points

for testing in a dust storm.

April 1934

Ma says,

everything we lost

when the banks closed

’cause they didn’t have enough cash to go around,

all the money that’s ours

is coming back to us in full.

Good.

Now we have money for a doctor

when the baby comes.

April 1934

County Agent Dewey

had some pretty bad news.

One quarter of the wheat is lost:

blown away or withered up.

What remains is little more than

a wisp of what it should be.

And every day we have no rain,

more wheat dies.

County Agent Dewey says, “Soon

there won’t be enough wheat

for seed to plant next fall.”

The piano is some comfort in all this.

I go to it and I forget the dust for hours,

testing my long fingers on wild rhythms,

but Ma slams around in the kitchen when I play

and after a while she sends me to the store.

Joe De La Flor doesn’t see me pass him by;

he rides his fences, dazed by dust.

I wince at the sight of his rib-thin cattle.

But he’s not even seeing them.

I look at Joe and know our future is drying up
and blowing away with the dust.

April 1934

Ma says,

“Try putting in a pond, Bayard.

We can fill it off the windmill.

We’ve got a good well.”

Daddy grumbles, “The water’ll seep

back into the ground

as fast as I can pump it, Pol.

We’ll dry up our well

and then we’ll have nothing.”

“Plant some other things, then,” Ma says.

“Try cotton,

sorghum. If we plant the fields in different crops,

maybe some will do better,

better than wheat.”

Daddy says,

“No.

It has to be wheat.

I’ve grown it before.

I’ll grow it again.”

But Ma says, “Can’t you see

what’s happening, Bayard?

The wheat’s not meant to be here.”

And Daddy says,

“What about those apple trees of yours, Pol?

You think they are?

Nothing needs more to drink than those two.

But you wouldn’t hear of leveling your apples,

would you?”

Ma is bittering. I can see it in her mouth.

“A pond would work,” she says,

sounding crusty and stubborn.

And Daddy says, “Look it, Pol, who’s the farmer?

You or me?”

Ma says,

“Who pays the bills?”

“No one right now,” Daddy says.

Ma starts to quaking but she won’t let Daddy see.

Instead, she goes out to the chickens

and

her anger,

simmering over like a pot in an empty kitchen,
boils itself down doing chores.

April 1934

My teacher, Miss Freeland,

is singing

at the Shrine

along with famous

opera stars

from all around the country

in a play called

Madame Butterfly
.

I’ve never heard of that play.

“Most everyone’s heard of
Madame Butterfly
,”

Mad Dog says.

How does that

singing plowboy know something I don’t?

And how much more is out there

most everyone else has heard of

except me?

April 1934

Ma

has been nursing these two trees

for as long as I can remember.

In spite of the dust,

in spite of the drought,

because of Ma’s stubborn care,

these trees are

thick with blossoms,

delicate and

pinky-white.

My eyes can’t get enough of the sight of them.

I stand under the trees

and let the petals

fall into my hair,

a blizzard

of sweet-smelling flowers,

dropped from the boughs of the two

placed there

in the front yard by Ma

before I was born,

that she and they might bring forth fruit

into our home,
together.

May 1934

Daddy was just seventeen

when he fought in the

Great War off in France.

There’s not much he’s willing to

say about those days, except about the poppies.

He remembers the poppies,

red on the graves of the dead.

Daddy says

that war tore France up

worse than a tornado,

worse than a dust storm,

but no matter,

the wild poppies bloomed in the trail of the fighting,

brightening the French countryside.

I wish I could see poppies

growing out of this dust.

May 1934

Ma’s apple blossoms

have turned to hard green balls.

To eat them now,

so tart,

would turn my mouth inside out,

would make my stomach groan.

But in just a couple months,

after the baby is born,

those apples will be ready

and we’ll make pies

and sauce

and pudding

and dumplings

and cake

and cobbler

and have just plain apples to take to school

and slice with my pocket knife

and eat one juicy piece at a time

until my mouth is clean

and fresh

and my breath is nothing but apple.

June 1934

On Sunday,

winds came,

bringing a red dust

like prairie fire,

hot and peppery,

searing the inside of my nose,

the whites of my eyes.

Roaring dust,

turning the day from sunlight to midnight.

And as the dust left,

rain came.

Rain that was no blessing.

It came too hard,

too fast,

and washed the soil away,

washed the wheat away with it.

Now

little remains of Daddy’s hard work.

And the only choice he has

is to give up or

start all over again.

At the Strong ranch

they didn’t get a single drop.

So who fared better?

Ma looks out the window at her apple trees.

Hard green balls have dropped to the ground.

But there are enough left;

enough

for a small harvest,
if we lose no more.

June 1934

The combines have started moving across the fields,

bringing in wheat,

whatever has managed to grow.

Mr. Tuttle delivered the first load to town

selling it for seventy-three cents a bushel.

Not bad.

Mr. Chaffin, Mr. Haverstick, and Mr. French,

they’ve delivered their harvest too,

dropping it at the Joyce City grain elevator.

Daddy asked Mr. Haverstick how things looked

and Mr. Haverstick said he figures

he took eight bushels off a twenty-bushel acre.

If Daddy gets five bushels to his acre
it’ll be a miracle.

June 1934

Here’s the way I figure it.

My place in the world is at the piano.

I’m earning a little money playing,

thanks to Arley Wanderdale.

He and his Black Mesa Boys have connections in

Keyes and Goodwell and Texhoma.

And every little crowd

is grateful to hear a rag or two played

on the piano

by a long-legged, red-haired girl,

even when the piano has a few keys soured by dust.

At first Ma crossed her arms

against her chest

and stared me down,

hard-jawed and sharp, and said I couldn’t go.

But the money helped convince her,

and the compliment from Arley and his wife, Vera,

that they’d surely bring my ma along to play too,

if she wasn’t so far gone with a baby coming.

Ma said

okay,

but only for the summer,

and only if she didn’t hear me gripe how I was tired,

or see me dragging my back end around,

or have to call me twice upon a morning,

or find my farm chores falling down,

and only if Arley’s wife, Vera, kept an eye on me.

Arley says my piano playing is good.

I play a set of songs with the word
baby
in the title,

like “My Baby Just Cares for Me”

and “Walking My Baby Back Home.”

I picked those songs on purpose for Ma,

and the folks that come to hear Arley’s band,

they like them fine.

Arley pays in dimes.

Ma’s putting my earnings away I don’t know where,

saving it to send me to school in a few years.

The money doesn’t matter much to me.

I’d play for nothing.

When I’m with Arley’s boys we forget the dust.

We are flying down the road in Arley’s car,

singing,

laying our voices on top of the

beat Miller Rice plays on the back of Arley’s seat,

and sometimes, Vera, up front, chirps crazy notes

with no words

and the sounds she makes seem just about amazing.

It’s being part of all that,

being part of Arley’s crowd I like so much,

being on the road,

being somewhere new and interesting.
We have a fine time.

And they let me play piano, too.

June 1934

Quarter inch of rain

is nothing to complain about.

It’ll help the plants above ground,

and start the new seeds growing.

That quarter inch of rain did wonders for Ma, too,

who is ripe as a melon these days.

She has nothing to say to anyone anymore,

except how she aches for rain,

at breakfast,

at dinner,

all day,

all night,

she aches for rain.

Today, she stood out in the drizzle

hidden from the road,

and from Daddy,

and she thought from me,

but I could see her from the barn,

she was bare as a pear,

raindrops

sliding down her skin,

leaving traces of mud on her face and her long back,

trickling dark and light paths,

slow tracks of wet dust down the bulge of her belly.

My dazzling ma, round and ripe and striped
like a melon.

July 1934

While the dust blew

down our road,

against our house,

across our fields,

up in Canada

a lady named Elzire Dionne

gave birth to five baby girls

all at once.

I looked at Ma,

so pregnant with one baby.

“Can you imagine five?” I said.

Ma lowered herself into a chair.

Tears dropping on her tight stretched belly,

she wept
just to think of it.

July 1934

A boy came by the house today,

he asked for food.

He couldn’t pay anything, but Ma set him down

and gave him biscuits

and milk.

He offered to work for his meal,

Ma sent him out to see Daddy.

The boy and Daddy came back late in the afternoon.

The boy walked two steps behind,

in Daddy’s dust.

He wasn’t more than sixteen.

Thin as a fence rail.

I wondered what

Livie Killian’s brother looked like now.

I wondered about Livie herself.

Daddy asked if the boy wanted a bath,

a haircut,

a change of clothes before he moved on.

The boy nodded.

I never heard him say more than “Yes, sir” or

“No, sir” or

“Much obliged.”

We watched him walk away

down the road,

in a pair of Daddy’s mended overalls,

his legs like willow limbs,

his arms like reeds.

Ma rested her hands on her heavy stomach,

Daddy rested his chin on the top of my head.

“His mother is worrying about him,” Ma said.

“His mother is wishing her boy would come home.”

Lots of mothers wishing that these days,

while their sons walk to California,

where rain comes,

and the color green doesn’t seem like such a miracle,

and hope rises daily, like sap in a stem.

And I think, some day I’m going to walk there too,

through New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada.

Some day I’ll leave behind the wind, and the dust

and walk my way West

and make myself to home in that distant place
of green vines and promise.

July 1934