Out of the Dust (4 page)

I got

burned

bad.

Daddy

put a pail of kerosene

next to the stove

and Ma,

fixing breakfast,

thinking the pail was

filled with water,

lifted it,

to make Daddy’s coffee,

poured it,

but instead of making coffee,

Ma made a rope of fire.

It rose up from the stove

to the pail

and the kerosene burst

into flames.

Ma ran across the kitchen,

out the porch door,

screaming for Daddy.

I tore after her,

then,

thinking of the burning pail

left behind in the bone-dry kitchen,

I flew back and grabbed it,

throwing it out the door.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know Ma was coming back.

The flaming oil

splashed

onto her apron,

and Ma,

suddenly Ma,

was a column of fire.

I pushed her to the ground,

desperate to save her,

desperate to save the baby, I

tried,

beating out the flames with my hands.

I did the best I could.

But it was no good.

Ma

got

burned

bad.

July 1934

At first I felt no pain,

only heat.

I thought I might be swallowed by the heat,

like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,”

and nothing would be left of me.

Someone brought Doc Rice.

He tended Ma first,

then came to me.

The doctor cut away the skin on my hands, it hung in

crested strips.

He cut my skin away with scissors,

then poked my hands with pins to see what I could

feel.
He bathed my burns in antiseptic.

Only then the pain came.

July 1934

I am awake now,

still shaking from my dream:

I was coming home

through a howling dust storm,

my lowered face was scrubbed raw by dirt and wind.

Grit scratched my eyes,

it crunched between my teeth.

Sand chafed inside my clothes,

against my skin.

Dust crept inside my ears, up my nose,

down my throat.

I shuddered, nasty with dust.

In the house,

dust blew through the cracks in the walls,

it covered the floorboards and

heaped against the doors.

It floated in the air, everywhere.

I didn’t care about anyone, anything, only the piano. I

searched for it,

found it under a mound of dust.

I was angry at Ma for letting in the dust.

I cleaned off the keys

but when I played,

a tortured sound came from the piano,

like someone shrieking.

I hit the keys with my fist, and the piano broke into

a hundred pieces.

Daddy called to me. He asked me to bring water,

Ma was thirsty.

I brought up a pail of fire and Ma drank it. She had

given birth to a baby of flames. The baby

burned at her side.

I ran away. To the Eatons’ farm.

The house had been tractored out,

tipped off its foundation.

No one could live there.

Everywhere I looked were dunes of rippled dust.

The wind roared like fire.

The door to the house hung open and there was

dust inside

several feet deep.

And there was a piano.

The bench was gone, right through the floor.

The piano leaned toward me.

I stood and played.

The relief I felt to hear the sound of music after the

sound

of the piano at home.…

I dragged the Eatons’ piano through the dust

to our house,

but when I got it there I couldn’t play. I had swollen

lumps for hands,

they dripped a sickly pus,

they swung stupidly from my wrists,

they stung with pain.

When I woke up, the part

about my hands

was real.

July 1934

Daddy

has made a tent out of the sheet over Ma

so nothing will touch her skin,

what skin she has left.

I can’t look at her,

I can’t recognize her.

She smells like scorched meat.

Her body groaning there,

it looks nothing like my ma.

It doesn’t even have a face.

Daddy brings her water,

and drips it inside the slit of her mouth

by squeezing a cloth.

She can’t open her eyes,

she cries out

when the baby moves inside her,

otherwise she moans,

day and night.

I wish the dust would plug my ears

so I couldn’t hear her.

July 1934

Daddy found the money

Ma kept squirreled in the kitchen under the

threshold.

It wasn’t very much.

But it was enough for him to get good and drunk.

He went out last night.

While Ma moaned and begged for water.

He drank up the emergency money

until it was gone.

I tried to help her.

I couldn’t aim the dripping cloth into her mouth.

I couldn’t squeeze.

It hurt the blisters on my hands to try.

I only made it worse for Ma. She cried

for the pain of the water running into her sores,

she cried for the water that

would not soothe her throat

and quench her thirst,

and the whole time

my father was in Guymon,
drinking.

July 1934

Doc sent me outside to get water.

The day was so hot,

the house was so hot.

As I came out the door,

I saw the cloud descending.

It whirred like a thousand engines.

It shifted shape as it came

settling first over Daddy’s wheat.

Grasshoppers,

eating tassles, leaves, stalks.

Then coming closer to the house,

eating Ma’s garden, the fence posts,

the laundry on the line, and then,

the grasshoppers came right over me,

descending on Ma’s apple trees.

I climbed into the trees,

opening scabs on my tender hands,

grasshoppers clinging to me.

I tried beating them away.

But the grasshoppers ate every leaf,

they ate every piece of fruit.

Nothing left but a couple apple cores,

hanging from Ma’s trees.

I couldn’t tell her,

couldn’t bring myself to say

her apples were gone.

I never had a chance.

Ma died that day
giving birth to my brother.

August 1934

My father’s sister came to fetch my brother,

even as Ma’s body cooled.

She came to bring my brother back to Lubbock

to raise as her own,

but my brother died before Aunt Ellis got here.

She wouldn’t even hold his little body.

She barely noticed me.

As soon as she found my brother dead,

she

had a talk with my father.

Then she turned around

and headed back to Lubbock.

The neighbor women came.

They wrapped my baby brother in a blanket

and placed him in Ma’s bandaged arms.

We buried them together

on the rise Ma loved,

the one she gazed at from the kitchen window,

the one that looks out over the

dried-up Beaver River.

Reverend Bingham led the service.

He talked about Ma,

but what he said made no sense

and I could tell

he didn’t truly know her,

he’d never even heard her play piano.

He asked my father

to name my baby brother.

My father, hunched over, said nothing.

I spoke up in my father’s silence.

I told the reverend

my brother’s name was Franklin.

Like our President.

The women talked as they

scrubbed death from our house.

I

stayed in my room

silent on the iron bed,

listening to their voices.

“Billie Jo threw the pail,”

they said. “An accident,”

they said.

Under their words a finger pointed.

They didn’t talk

about my father leaving kerosene by the stove.

They didn’t say a word about my father

drinking himself

into a stupor

while Ma writhed, begging for water.

They only said,

Billie Jo threw the pail of kerosene.

August 1934

I walk to town.

I don’t look back over my shoulder

at the single grave

holding Ma and my little brother.

I am trying not to look back at anything.

Dust rises with each step,

there’s a greasy smell to the air.

On either side of the road are

the carcasses of jackrabbits, small birds, field mice,

stretching out into the distance.

My father stares out across his land,

empty but for a few withered stalks

like the tufts on an old man’s head.

I don’t know if he thinks more of Ma,

or the wheat that used to grow here.

There is barely a blade of grass

swaying in the stinging wind,

there are only these

lumps of flesh

that once were hands long enough to span octaves,

swinging at my sides.

I come up quiet

and sit behind Arley Wanderdale’s house,

where no one can see me, and lean my head back,

and close my eyes,
and listen to Arley play.

August 1934

President Roosevelt tells us to

plant trees. Trees will

break the wind. He says,

trees

will end the drought,

the animals can take shelter there,

children can take shelter.

Trees have roots, he says.

They hold on to the land.

That’s good advice, but

I’m not sure he understands the problem.

Trees have never been at home here.

They’re just not meant to be here.

Maybe none of us are meant to be here,

only the prairie grass

and the hawks.

My father will stay, no matter what,

he’s stubborn as sod.

He and the land have a hold on each other.

But what about me?

August 1934

I don’t know my father anymore.

He sits across from me,

he looks like my father,

he chews his food like my father,

he brushes his dusty hair back

like my father,

but he is a stranger.

I am awkward with him,

and irritated,

and I want to be alone

but I am terrified of being alone.

We are both changing,

we are shifting to fill in the empty spaces left by Ma.

I keep my raw and stinging hands

behind my back when he comes near

because he

stares
when he sees them.

September 1934

The heat from the cookstove hurts my burns,

and the salt,

the water, and the dust hurt too.

I spend all my time in pain,

and

my father spends his time out the side of the house,

digging a hole,

forty feet by sixty feet,

six feet deep.

I think he is digging the pond,

to feed off the windmill,

the one Ma wanted,

but he doesn’t say. He just digs.

He sends me to the train yard to gather boards,

boards that once were box cars

but now are junk.

I bring them back, careful of the scabs and the

raw sores on my bare hands.

I don’t know what he needs boards for.

He doesn’t tell me.

When he’s not in the hole, digging,

he works on the windmill,

replacing the parts

that kept it from turning.

People stop by and watch. They think my father is

crazy

digging such a big hole.

I think he’s crazy too.

The water will seep back into the earth.

It’ll never stay put in any old pond.

But my father has thought through all that

and he’s digging anyway.

I think to talk to Ma about it,

and then I remember.

I can almost forgive him the taking of Ma’s money,

I can almost forgive him his night in Guymon,

getting drunk.

But as long as I live,

no matter how big a hole he digs,

I can’t forgive him that pail of kerosene

left by the side of the stove.

September 1934

A volcano erupted in Hawaii.

Kilauea.

It threw huge

chunks

into the air,

the ground shook,

and smoke

choked everything in its path.

… sounds a little

like a dust storm.

September 1934

In my closet are two boxes,

the gatherings of my life,

papers,

school drawings,

a broken hairpin,

a dress from my baby days,

my first lock of hair,

a tiny basket woven from prairie grass,

a doll with a china head,

a pink ball,

three dozen marbles,

a fan from Baxter’s Funeral Home,

my baby teeth in a glass jar,

a torn map of the world,

two candy wrappers,

a thousand things I haven’t looked at

in years.

I kept promising to go through the boxes

with Ma

and get rid of what I didn’t need,

but I never got to it

and now my hands hurt.

And I haven’t got the heart.

September 1934