Out of the Dust (2 page)

I played so well

on Wednesday night,

Arley put his arm across my shoulder

and asked me to come and

perform at the President’s birthday ball.

Ma can’t say no to this one.

It’s for President Roosevelt.

Not that Mr. Roosevelt will actually be there,

but the money collected at the ball,

along with balls all over the country,

will go,

in the President’s name,

to the Warm Springs Foundation,

where Mr. Roosevelt stayed once when he was sick.

Someday,

I plan to play for President Franklin Delano

Roosevelt himself.

Maybe I’ll go all the way to the White House in

Washington, D.C.

In the meantime,

it’s pretty nice

Arley asking me to play twice,
for Joyce City.

January 1934

We haven’t had a good crop in three years,

not since the bounty of ’31,

and we’re all whittled down to the bone these days,

even Ma, with her new round belly,

but still

when the committee came asking,

Ma donated:

three jars of apple sauce

and

some cured pork,

and a
feed-sack nightie she’d sewn for our coming baby.

February 1934

It was Daddy’s birthday

and Ma decided to bake him a cake.

There wasn’t

money enough for anything like a real present.

Ma sent me to fetch the extras

with fifty cents she’d been hiding away.

“Don’t go to Joyce City, Billie,” she said.

“You can get what we need down Hardly’s store.”

I slipped the coins into my sweater pocket, the

pocket without the hole,

thinking about how many sheets of new music

fifty cents would buy.

Mr. Hardly glared

when the Wonder Bread door

banged shut behind me.

He squinted as I creaked across the wooden floor.

Mr. Hardly was in the habit

of charging too much for his stale food,

and he made bad change when he thought

he could get away with it.

I squinted back at him as I gave him Ma’s order.

Mr. Hardly’s

been worse than normal

since his attic filled with dust

and collapsed under the weight.

He hired folks for the repairs,

and argued over every nail and every

little minute.

The whole place took

shoveling for days before he could

open again and

some stock was so bad it

had to be thrown away.

The stove clanked in the corner

as Mr. Hardly filled Ma’s order.

I could smell apples,

ground coffee, and peppermint.

I sorted through the patterns on the feed bags,

sneezed dust,

blew my nose.

When Mr. Hardly finished sacking my things,

I paid the bill,

and tucking the list in my pocket along with the

change,

hurried home,

so Ma could bake the cake before Daddy came in.

But after Ma emptied the sack,

setting each packet out on the

oilcloth, she counted her change

and I remembered with a sinking feeling

that I hadn’t kept an eye on

Mr. Hardly’s money handling,

and Mr. Hardly had cheated again.

Only this time he’d cheated himself, giving us

four cents extra.

So while Ma mixed a cake,

I walked back to Mr. Hardly’s store,

back through the dust,

back through the Wonder Bread door,

and thinking about the secondhand music

in a moldy box at the shop in Joyce City,

music I could have for two cents a sheet,

I placed Mr. Hardly’s overpayment on the counter

and turned to head back home.

Mr. Hardly cleared his throat and

I wondered for a moment

if he’d call me back to offer a piece of peppermint

or pick me out an apple from the crate,

but he didn’t,

and that’s okay.

Ma would have thrown a fit
if I’d taken a gift from him.

February 1934

In Amarillo,

wind

blew plate-glass windows in,

tore electric signs down,

ripped wheat
straight out of the ground.

February 1934

Ma has rules for setting the table.

I place plates upside down,

glasses bottom side up,

napkins folded over forks, knives, and spoons.

When dinner is ready,

we sit down together

and Ma says,

“Now.”

We shake out our napkins,

spread them on our laps,

and flip over our glasses and plates,

exposing neat circles,

round comments

on what life would be without dust.

Daddy says,

“The potatoes are peppered plenty tonight, Polly,”

and

“Chocolate milk for dinner, aren’t we in clover!”

when really all our pepper and chocolate,

it’s nothing but dust.

I heard word from Livie Killian.

The Killians can’t find work,

can’t get food.

Livie’s brother, Reuben, fifteen last summer,

took off, thinking to make it on his own.

I hope he’s okay.

With a baby growing inside Ma,

it scares me thinking, Where would we be without

somewhere to live?

Without some work to do?

Without something to eat?

At least we’ve got milk. Even if we have to chew it.

February 1934

After seventy days

of wind and sun,

of wind and clouds,

of wind and sand,

after seventy days,

of wind and dust,

a little

rain

came.

February 1934

In the kitchen she is my ma,

in the barn and the fields she is my daddy’s wife,

but in the parlor Ma is something different.

She isn’t much to look at,

so long and skinny,

her teeth poor,

her dark hair always needing a wash, but

from the time I was four,

I remember being dazzled by her

whenever she played the piano.

Daddy bought it, an old Cramer,

his wedding gift to her.

She came to this house and found gaps in the walls,

a rusty bed, no running water,

and that piano,

gleaming in the corner.

Daddy gets soft eyes, standing behind her while she

plays.

I want someone to look that way at me.

On my fifth birthday,

Ma sat me down beside her

and started me to reading music,

started me to playing.

I’m not half so good as Ma.

She can pull Daddy into the parlor

even after the last milking, when he’s so beat

he barely knows his own name

and all he wants

is a mattress under his bones.

You’ve got to be something

to get his notice that time of day,

but Ma can.

I’m not half so good with my crazy playing

as she is with her fine tunes and her

fancy fingerwork.
But I’m good enough for Arley, I guess.

March 1934

Daddy is thinking

of taking a loan from Mr. Roosevelt and his men,

to get some new wheat planted

where the winter crop has spindled out and died.

Mr. Roosevelt promises

Daddy won’t have to pay a dime

till the crop comes in.

Daddy says,

“I can turn the fields over,

start again.

It’s sure to rain soon.

Wheat’s sure to grow.”

Ma says, “What if it doesn’t?”

Daddy takes off his hat,

roughs up his hair,

puts the hat back on.

“Course it’ll rain,” he says.

Ma says, “Bay,

it hasn’t rained enough to grow wheat in

three years.”

Daddy looks like a fight brewing.

He takes that red face of his out to the barn,

to keep from feuding with my pregnant ma.

I ask Ma

how,

after all this time,

Daddy still believes in rain.

“Well, it rains enough,” Ma says,

“now and again,

to keep a person hoping.

But even if it didn’t

your daddy would have to believe.

It’s coming on spring,

and he’s a farmer.”

March 1934

Arley Wanderdale said

the rehearsals for
Sunny of Sunnyside

shouldn’t take me out of school

more than twice next week.

When I told Ma she got angry about

my missing school to play piano for some show.

Me and Daddy,

we’re trying our best to please Ma,

for fear of what it might do to the baby if we don’t.

I don’t know why she’s

so against my playing.

She says that school is important,

but I do all right in school.

I know she doesn’t like the kind

of music I play,

but sometimes I think she’s

just plain jealous

when I’m at the piano

and she’s not.

And maybe she’s a little afraid

of me going somewhere with the music

she can’t follow.

Or of the music taking me

so far away one day

I’ll never come home.

Whatever the reason, she said I couldn’t do it.

Arley had to get somebody to take my place.

I do as she says. I go to school,

and in the afternoons I come home,

run through my chores,

do my reading and my math work at the

kitchen table

and all the while I glare at Ma’s back with a scowl

foul as maggoty stew.

March 1934

When I got home I told Ma

our school scored higher than the

whole state on achievement tests and

I scored top of eighth grade.

Ma nodded.

“I knew you could.”

That’s all she said.

She was proud,

I could tell.

But she didn’t

coo like Mad Dog’s ma. Or

go on

like Mrs. Killian used to do.

Daddy says,

“That’s not your ma’s way.”

But I wish it was.

I wish she’d give me a little more to hold on to than

“I knew you could.”

Instead she makes me feel like she’s just

taking me in like I was
so much flannel dry on the line.

March 1934

I heard the wind rise,

and stumbled from my bed,

down the stairs,

out the front door,

into the yard.

The night sky kept flashing,

lightning danced down on its spindly legs.

I sensed it before I knew it was coming.

I heard it,

smelled it,

tasted it.

Dust.

While Ma and Daddy slept,

the dust came,

tearing up fields where the winter wheat,

set for harvest in June,

stood helpless.

I watched the plants,

surviving after so much drought and so much wind,

I watched them fry,

or

flatten,

or blow away,

like bits of cast-off rags.

It wasn’t until the dust turned toward the house,

like a fired locomotive,

and I fled,

barefoot and breathless, back inside,

it wasn’t until the dust

hissed against the windows,

until it ratcheted the roof,

that Daddy woke.

He ran into the storm,

his overalls half-hooked over his union suit.

“Daddy!” I called. “You can’t stop dust.”

Ma told me to

cover the beds,

push the scatter rugs against the doors,

dampen the rags around the windows.

Wiping dust out of everything,

she made coffee and biscuits,

waiting for Daddy to come in.

Sometime after four,

rubbing low on her back,

Ma sank down into a chair at the kitchen table

and covered her face.

Daddy didn’t come back for hours,

not

until the temperature dropped so low,

it brought snow.

Ma and I sighed, grateful,

staring out at the dirty flakes,

but our relief didn’t last.

The wind snatched that snow right off the fields,

leaving behind a sea of dust,

waves and

waves and

waves of

dust,

rippling across our yard.

Daddy came in,

he sat across from Ma and blew his nose.

Mud streamed out.

He coughed and spit out

mud.

If he had cried,

his tears would have been mud too,

but he didn’t cry.

And neither did Ma.

March 1934