The Worst Hard Time (24 page)

Ehrlich's neighbor, Gustav Borth, did not have even a hog to slaughter for his winter sausage, or cow chips for fuel. He borrowed twenty-five dollars from a bank—pledging part of his homestead and his combine to buy coal for his stove. A proud man, descendant of a line of Germans who prospered after Catherine the Great opened
Russia to them, Borth was crushed by the America of 1934. Deeply homesick and disillusioned, Borth would go behind the shed of his farm, trying to hide from his family, and there he would cry. His daughter, Rosa, saw him several times as he wept; he was hunched over, the tears pouring out of him. It broke her heart. He sold the last of his cattle to the government for seven dollars a head. With this money, the children wanted shoes. Rosa Borth, age fourteen, had only a single pair, and she had outgrown them. She painted them black for church, white for school. When the weather was warm, she went barefoot. Next year, Rosa's mother told her—shoes will come next year, with the rains. Rosa was frightened after seeing her father, the brave bull who broke the Oklahoma crust by hand, crying behind the shed. She could go a while longer without shoes. Her father was afraid of losing his combine—his last possession of any worth. Borth owed four hundred dollars on the machine that helped deliver wheat in the boom years. Four hundred dollars—it looked like a Mount Everest of debt. He had no money for his little girl's shoes, let alone for payments on a debt like that. His sobs behind the shed were carried by the wind.

Some Germans gave up. They could not go back to the Russian steppe. In Stalin's grip, the old homes were no longer safe. Germans who stayed behind in the villages on the Volga River had been routed, their houses confiscated. In America, the ones who now joined the exodus of tenant farmers from Arkansas, Missouri, and eastern Oklahoma moved to the orchard country of Washington State, or north to Minnesota, or to Saskatchewan.

For people in No Man's Land without a cow or a hog of their own, there were three ways to get food. They could wait on the soup line that had opened a few blocks from the courthouse in Boise City. They could wait on another sort of food line, this one courtesy of Sheriff Hi Barrick. If it wasn't sugar from the bootleggers, which the sheriff gave out free, it was roadkill, which he had his deputies bring in for distribution. There were always takers for the critters smashed by a car or a train on a dust-clogged highway or track. Their third option: they could steal food.

Crimes were no longer petty in the sheriff's jurisdiction. One man took a car by force in broad daylight, sticking a gun to the head of the driver.

The sheriff lived in the courthouse, next to the jail; Hi Barrick and his wife, Inez, raised their three boys there. The kids roller skated and played marbles and catch in the hallways, weaving among the legal proceedings and jailings. Inez ran a business on the side sewing suits for lawyers—$3.50 for a three-piece job, tailor-made. Living next to the jail was better than their last home, a dugout. Peering out the window of his home and office, Barrick learned to judge when a heavy duster had moved along by the First State Bank sign across the street. When he could see the sign, it was clear enough to drive.

The handsome mugs of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, in their mid-twenties, were posted in Barrick's office. Joyriding, robbing banks, and killing their way through Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri, the Barrow gang was declared Public Enemy Number One by a law enforcement posse headed by a former Texas Ranger. Bonnie and Clyde made fools of cops in dozens of counties, once kidnapping a lawman and having him steal a car battery to replace one in their stolen roadster. Bonnie wrote a poem for her mama, which the newspapers published. She sensed their imminent death and said that she and Clyde were friends to all but snitches and stoolies. It contributed to their heroic stature among some people in No Man's Land. They robbed banks, just as the banks had robbed people. But they were killers as well, as Barrick reminded people. With that pair on the loose, hungry people floating through town, and bootleggers still selling the hard fuel that was illegal in this part of Oklahoma, the sheriff had no time for politics. Though he was a Republican in a county where eight out of ten people gave their vote to Democrats, Barrick was respected. It was no secret how much he despised working at the foreclosure auctions for John Johnson's bank every Monday on the steps of the courthouse; he had even tried to get out of them until he was told by the court that it was his legal duty to stand by as some nester's land was sold for pennies on the dollar. These forced sales were just about the only real estate business left in No Man's Land. Plenty of farms were for sale on the open markets, but there were no
buyers. When asked by a reporter about his plans, Barrick said, "I haven't anything new to say. Just tell 'em I'm running again."

Barrick at least could expect to keep his salary—$125 a month. Some teachers had gone nearly two years without pay, living on the room and board of a student's parents and nothing else. Hazel Shaw thought she could use her "salary," the scrip, to buy groceries. But the bank stopped honoring the school scrip when it became clear the system was bankrupt. The county's coffers were empty. By 1934, more than 60 percent of property owners were delinquent in their taxes in Cimarron County. They stopped paying because they had nothing. For the schools, heated by stoves burning cow chips, with dust drifts covering windows, it meant they could no longer afford books. The children would have to continue with broken-spined, ragged old texts perforated by the abrasive air of No Man's Land. Cimarron County High School fell into further disrepair; it was one of the most forlorn sites in a town of dirty-faced buildings, just two clapboard shacks attached at the shoulder. Before the dust, parents had been able to clean the windows and keep the roof in shape. Now the exterior was worn, as if it had been chipped by vandals, the gutters had fallen away, and the windows were covered with torn sheets splotched with three years' worth of uplifted soil. Children ran the streets, dirty and hungry; some had simply been abandoned.

"We are getting deeper and deeper in dust," the
Boise City News
wrote.

On May 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed outside a gang member's family home in rural Louisiana, their bodies pummeled with lead from rounds of Browning automatic rifles. Bonnie died in a red dress, her favorite color. She was twenty-four. The papers had a field day with pictures of the former Texas Ranger with his bloody prey, and then it was back to the dreary routine of life in a dusty fog.

Buildings that had been fresh-painted in Boise City's blush of youth stood decrepit and raw. A town that had been named for its phantom trees now looked nearly treeless. The train station where suitcase farmers had poured into town stood windblown and empty. The grain silos had not been stuffed with fresh wheat for three years,
and dust blew up against the sides of hollow barns and hardened, forming caked barriers. The defiance, evident at the start of the Depression when the county proudly turned down relief, was gone. In its place was a sense of doom, as if No Man's Land were being punished by God. Some ministers told people they must have done something wicked to deserve these awful times. The newspaper conveyed this sentiment as well; civic chauvinism disappeared from the pages of the
Boise City News.
The paper ran a front-page drawing of the Grim Reaper with a death grip over No Man's Land and began a piece on the storms with a citation from Ezekiel:

"Behold, I have smitten my hand at thy dishonest gain which thou has made."

Hazel Shaw did not think she had come by anything—her little nest in the funeral home, the new baby girl—by dishonest gain. The ministers were referring to the wheat bonanza, which seemed eons ago: all the people buying new cars, dancing late, drinking bootleg hooch, purchasing washing machines on credit, plowing up more ground to keep up with the unnatural float of grain prices—up, up, up, more, more, more. Hazel was religious, but her God was not full of vengeance. Her God was hope. Hazel lived across the street from St. Paul's Methodist Church, a reminder that the Lord was in her neighborhood at all times. At night after she had finished draping the windows in fresh sheets and sweeping out the dust, Hazel rocked baby Ruth Nell to sleep, telling her things would soon get better, the sky would clear again. It was an early winter on the High Plains, the blue northers charging down in October. Some trees never leafed out that year; it was a fall without color, just as it had been a spring and summer of gray.

One morning while Hazel rocked her baby, she saw in the pale light a small coffee box on the steps of the church across the street. She walked outside to her front porch and took a second look. There was a coat thrown over the box. She went inside to start the day's chores and forgot about it. Ruth Nell's crib was in the one corner of the bedroom that Hazel tried to keep spotless. She scrubbed it down daily, washed the baby's blankets. She gummed the windows up fresh.
The store in town sold a five-hundred-foot roll of house-sealing tape for thirty-five cents, promoted through an ad that read "Mrs. Housewife, Keep That Dust Out by Sealing Your Windows with Gummed Tape." Her chores done, she visited with her Grandma Loumiza, the original Lucas homesteader who lived south, near Texhoma. Grandma Lou said she'd never seen the land so mean-edged. It was a danger to breathe, and Grandma Lou was starting to show it, coughing until she fell to the ground. A widow for two decades, she was field-tough, able to do any chore a man could do on her homestead. But these fits of hacking were debilitating.

That night, a light snow mixed with dust began to fall, leaving a dirty, frothy covering on Boise City. Hazel noticed the coffee box and the coat still on the church steps; they had been there all day. The next morning, with the temperature well below freezing and several inches of brown snow on the ground from the snuster, Hazel looked outside: the coat and box had not been moved. She walked across the street to the steps, brushed back the snow, stripped away the coat. There was a baby inside, blue-faced, barely moving, perhaps no more than four pounds, no bigger than a garden squash. Hazel rushed home and tried to warm the baby, holding her close and rubbing her. She heated milk and got some hot fluids inside. Her husband summoned the minister, a doctor, and the sheriff. The baby had been out in the cold for at least forty hours, wrapped in nothing but a blue flannel diaper and covered by the coat. The doctor rubbed the baby with oil, then wrapped her in several layers of blankets. Sheriff Barrick did not seem surprised by the discovery. He had a drawl, slower each year, that seldom shifted to higher gear unless he was truly irate. This veteran had seen a lot in the gas-choked trenches of Europe during the Great War, but what he had investigated in the land around his home county of late were new lows for Cimarron County. People were abandoning their children—not in great numbers, mind you, but enough to make the sheriff feel a sense of shame for his fellow Oklahomans.

Nationwide, the 1930s was the first decade in United States history when the number of young children declined. Never before had the birthrate, at less than twenty children per thousand women of childbearing age, been so low.

As the baby's temperature rose, the infant started to cry. Color came to her cheeks. Hazel thought it was a miracle, a baby resuscitated to life after being out in the cold, the dust, and the snow. But it was horrid, as the sheriff said—and, she had to add,
evil
—to think that people would just walk away from a baby, leaving it alone on the church steps in the frigid, dirty air. This ain't the worst of it, the sheriff said. One family had abandoned all three of their children; they were too poor to feed them, said it was inhumane to hold on to the kids. The infant that Hazel found was eventually adopted by a couple east of town. A short time later, word came that the coffee-box baby had died of something that was killing both children and old people throughout the High Plains—dust pneumonia.

I
N THE WINTER OF
1935, everybody in the Osteen dugout had a cough, raw throat, and red eyes that itched at all times, or trouble getting their breath. The family—Ike, his brother, and two sisters, and the widow living inside a divot in the prairie of Baca County—had tried to seal their home, stuffing rags into wall cracks, gluing strips of flour paste-covered paper around the door, taping the windows and then draping damp gunnysacks over the openings. Wet bed sheets were hung against the walls as another filter. But all the layers of moist cloth and flour paste could not keep the wind-sifted particles out. The dugout was like a sieve. When their Red Cross masks got so clogged it was like slapping a mud pie over the face, they rigged up sponges to breathe through, but the general store in Springfield couldn't keep up with the demand and ran out of sponges. The plow that Ike had used to make money in the wheat boom was almost completely buried. Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress. They tried parking the old Model-A on different sides of the dugout or atop the dunes as a way to keep it from getting buried. In March, the worst dusters yet came from the north. The storms blocked the sun for four days, although it was never completely dark, and packed winds strong enough to knock a person down. It forced the Osteen family inside for three of those days and smothered the Model-A. Ike listened to the incessant crackling of static electricity around the windmill. Poking his head out of the hole, he saw currents running down the windmill and
along a wire—a blue flame. Wasn't nothing; his friend Tex Acre said the static at his place was so strong it electrocuted a jackrabbit. Saw it with his own eyes.

With each new duster, hope that the Osteen half-section could deliver some measure of relief to the family slipped away. For days, they were not sure on what side of the horizon the sun rose and on what side it set. A black blizzard in February carried such a punch it knocked telephone poles down. By the spring, Osteen's mama wanted only to see her son get through school, and then move to town. Ike was holding on, trying to attend school on the days when the storms would allow his mule to stumble through the sifting dunes. Sometimes he would ride all the way to the schoolhouse only to find it closed on account of the dusters. Every school in the county was closed for a week in March. At one school, children were trapped just before the afternoon school bell, unable to go home. They spent the night holed up behind the thin walls of the wood-frame building, cold and hungry. Stories like that made parents give up on school. It was too risky, and they did not see any reason for it. Life's ambitions and dreams had dried up; people held to a few, desperate desires—a longing to breathe clean air, to eat, to stay warm. School was a luxury.