On Shifting Sand (11 page)

“Knew what?”

I take a final drag on my cigarette and stub it out—half-smoked—on the railing.

“Nothing. I’m going back inside.” But there is no way to go inside except through him, and he doesn’t seem willing to move, even though I say, “Excuse me,” and “Let me pass, please.”

“What does he need to know, Nola?”

His words are smoke and I breathe them in.
Why you’re here,
I answer silently.
How you saw my picture and had to meet me.
But then I seize with a fear of being wrong, that he never saw the picture at all, and there’s no way for me to not sound crazy, or worse, vain.

“Nothing,” I say, feeling foolish. “It’s silly.”

To my relief, he moves aside, but catches my arm as I walk past. “I’ll go. Tomorrow if you want. But I’d like to stay—if nothin’ else, long enough to finish the job Russ has for me. Then, trust me, I’ll move on.”

I resist the urge to thank him and walk over the threshold, through
the nearly empty storeroom and empty shop. His touch, still, burns at my wrist, somehow smothering every touch from my husband. Not until I’m halfway up the stairs do I stop.

“The job Russ has for me.”

Apparently my husband has a secret too.

  CHAPTER 7
  

T
HREE MORE STORMS
over the next two weeks. Four, if you count the one that blew for just an hour or so over the span of an afternoon. Most wouldn’t, because we hadn’t the time to clean up after the previous one before it rose up, so we let the dust mingle as one adulterous mess.

Greg told us in his last letter that experts—men who hadn’t spent a day in this region before earth rose up—can trace the origin of the dust by its color. Red dust is from Oklahoma. Black, Kansas. Yellow, Texas—to the point the very sky loomed green. State by state, the whole world is shifting, one grain at a time. I remain, watching that which blows away, and cleaning up what stays behind.

Another family leaves at the next dust-free dawn—the Gillicks—but I don’t bother to go pick through what they left behind. They were poorer than poor to begin with, and the best I can hope for is to recover items I’d given them in better days. They drive away, abandoning a dried-up farm and five chickens that some kind soul rustles up and
fries for an impromptu congregational dinner. Seems we all look as thin and bedraggled as those chickens, and it is a meager offering of dishes that line the table in accompaniment. Our plates are sparse, with tiny spoonfuls of this and that, the women filling up on biscuits, leaving most of the meat for the men. Russ partakes of nothing, busying himself with pastoral duties, shaking hands and hugging children. I assume the responsibility of ladling punch, my stomach too twisted in knots to enjoy so much as one slice of Merrilou Brown’s white cherry pie.

Jim is here, too, on the outskirts of everything, drinking a Coca-Cola, and anybody who happens to catch the two of us in a single glance would never think we are anything more than strangers. They wouldn’t know that, while their pastor prays at the bedsides of their sick, this man and I pass a novel back and forth between us, reading fewer and fewer pages each day in favor of conversations about what life would be like with unlimited access to riches and beautiful things.

The air is warm with the promise of summer and, for once, completely still. We’re gathered on what used to be a green lawn on the side of the church, the grass now sickly and scant. Pa is due to arrive for our regular Sunday gathering, and I’ve positioned Ronnie and some of his friends at the head of the street to watch for him and bring him here when he arrives, not that there will be much left to feed him. When it’s almost two o’clock and there’s still no sign, I pull Russ away from the latest chapter in the story of Miss Lana’s ever-growing thyroid and tell him I’m worried.

“He didn’t go to the house?” Russ asks.

“No, I sent Ronnie to check.”

“What do you think we should do?”

He’s shuffling in place, hands in his pockets, because he knows exactly what we should do. It falls on me to voice it.

“We need to go out there—to his place—and check on him.”

“He won’t like that.”

It’s true, he won’t. My pa took a dislike to Russ the first time I brought him to dinner and hasn’t let up much since. Not through the wedding,
nor the birth of Ronnie just a few months later, nor all the years since. The day Russ and I took up living above the store, Pa said there wasn’t a need to gather again at his table, and our visits there have been rare at best, and only when one of the hands he used to employ came into town to tell us of a need. Like the time Pa split his head clean open after falling off a ladder, or when Boo, his favorite hound, was found dead under the porch, and Pa sat up for two days straight. He mourned more for that dog than he ever did for my mother, something only he and I know.

“It doesn’t matter if he’ll like it or not.” Here I am, in the midst of the sheep, raising my voice to the shepherd. His cautionary glance gentles my spirit, not to mention the fear that is growing with every word I speak. “The roads are fine, aren’t they? There’s no reason for him not to be here unless—unless something is bad wrong. Take me out there.”

“I will.” He tries to calm me with a touch, and I stand still for it. “We can go, as soon as everything is cleared up here.”

“Now, Russ.”

“Go home. Make up some dinner for him. Or better yet, put together a plate here. Let me say my good-byes, and we’ll leave.”

I scan the faces of our people, his church. They are what we both have for family these days, our brothers and sisters in Christ playing the roles of cousins and uncles and parents. Russ is the final branch of his family, my brother is a contented bachelor in a faraway land, and my father won’t step a foot across the threshold as long as Russ is behind the pulpit. Despite our familiarity, the congregation has never seen us in such a display of near disagreement, and I offer my cheek for an affectionate kiss to demonstrate to all that Russ and I are of one accord.

I send Ronnie back to the house to get our car ready for the drive, and while he’s gone I fill a plate with the remnants of our feast.

“Is that for your father?” Jim asks. He’s come up beside me and holds the plate while I wrap three biscuits in a scrap of napkin.

“Yes,” I say, not daring to look directly at him in front of all our people. “Russ and I are going to drive out there in a bit. I’m worried he didn’t come into town.”

“Shall I go along with you?”

“Why would you do that?” I find the shallow cake pan I brought with one small square remaining and nestle the overflowing plate beside it, with the bundle of biscuits on top. Jim doesn’t leave my side.

“In case there’s a problem. In case there’s somethin’ wrong and you need help.”

“Russ will be there.”

But even as I say it, one scenario after another rushes through my mind. Pa’s car, slid off the road, wheels dug into drifts of dirt. Or Pa himself, caught in the last storm—lost, disoriented, entombed. These are not figments of fear, but stories we’ve heard from people who have witnessed such tragedy. Children not more than a mother’s reach away from the house, buried to their necks, suffocated with soil. Ranchers found with stiff arms wrapped around wayward calves. Entire families burned from the inside out when the electrical forces hit their automobiles. The wind brings nothing but death upon death, and there’s a dry, hard stone in the pit of me that knows my father is on his way to ashes and dust.

“Come to think of it, that might be a good idea,” I say, looking straight into his eyes. They’re rich and brown with the health of promise, and blur in the face of my own tears. “Pa needs to see a friendly face.”

“He’s never met me.”

“That’s why you can be friendly.”

His smile is purely for my benefit, I’m sure. He’s not been invited up to share our Sunday dinners since that first week, and I’ve told him little about my father. I feel a bittersweet tug on my own lips, a response to his comfort. I want somebody to touch me for reassurance, to ground me before an impending shock, and with Russ encouraging everyone else around, I go limp and still, preparing myself for Jim’s embrace.

He does not disappoint. His hand comes to rest in the soft curve of my neck, his palm warm and encompassing. I can feel my pulse throb against its heel, his fingers curl down the crest of my back, his thumb at the tip of my jaw. This he strokes, in punctuation with his words—“It’s all gonna be fine, Nola. I’m sure your pa’s fine.”

There is a horrible, irrational, and paralyzing desire within me, and I know if I nod or speak or breathe I will be lost to a newer touch. As it is, I cannot stop the new flood of tears streaming down my cheeks, and to my near destruction, he wipes these away.

“I have to find Russ,” I say the moment I know my mouth will not move against him. “Hope to be leaving in the next few minutes.”

To my relief, he puts his cap on and turns away, because I don’t know that I have the strength to break from whatever was binding us up in that moment. My legs have turned to water, enough to bring rain to a million acres, and my body is chilled except for those points of fire where he touched me.

“You all right, dear?”

As always, Merrilou Brown’s appearance is a surprise, and what has been liquid within me turns to ice-cold fear. When I look down, I see her eyes following what mine had been—Jim’s broad shoulders receding into the crowd.

“I’m worried about my father.” It’s enough of a truth to suffice. “He usually comes in for Sunday dinner.”

She turns her gaze to me. “I can see you’re upset. And right to be, in these times. Everything so uncertain. Can we do anything to help?”

“Pray.” It’s what Russ would have said. “And look in on the children if we’re not back by dark?”

“Of course!” She claps her little hands. “Tell them to come over for supper. I’ll make butter cookies.”

I’m promising to relay the invitation to Ronnie when Russ arrives next to me, his arm around my waist, too late to help me stand. He kisses my temple. “Are you ready?”

“Look at you two,” Merrilou says. She steps back and cocks her head as if studying a work of art. “Like you should be in a magazine. Cover of
Life
. Can’t imagine a couple more attractive. Might as well be your wedding day—especially you, Nola. You look just as pink and pretty.”

I should thank her, but we both know it’s not a compliment. Or even the truth. I’m flushed and gaunt, tearstained and haggard. There’s
a fine layer of dust robbing my hair of its natural sheen, turning it two shades lighter and giving it the texture of sand. I’d be hard-pressed to find the kind of flowers that formed my bridal coronet. More than that, I don’t remember any such appreciation on our wedding day. Politeness, yes, as an afterthought over the rumbling of rumors, but nothing close to an open-armed welcome. I’m sure I’m not imagining things. Even though she hasn’t mentioned it, she watched the moment that passed between Jim and me. I prepare myself for suspicious accusations—the likes of which my father would send had he witnessed the scene. Instead, she offers a glance cloaked in a caution only she and I could understand.

Russ tugs me closer. “More beautiful every day, isn’t she?”

“Indeed,” Merrilou says. “And isn’t it amazing how time can leave someone so unchanged.” She winks. “You let those little ones of yours know they can come over for supper. Though I don’t suppose that boy of yours is exactly little anymore, is he?”

“That’s kind of you,” Russ says, and the following thank-you bears his trademark tone of gracious dismissal.