The Worst Hard Time (33 page)

Bennett had been in touch with weather stations in the South. Black Sunday had changed everything. The storm's detritus—or perhaps it was a new duster—was moving east, picking up dirt in other states, even if it no longer had enough force and density to blot the sun. Bennett had been scheduled for another round of testimony before the Senate in midweek. After checking with the progress of the eastbound roller, he asked for a delay. The storm that blanketed New York and Washington one year earlier had been an eye opener. As Bennett told an aide, "When people along the eastern seaboard began to taste fresh soil from the plains two thousand miles away, many of them realized for the first time that somewhere, something had gone wrong with the land."

He wanted them to get another taste. On Friday, April 19, five days after Black Sunday, Bennett walked into Room 333 of the Senate Office Building. He began with the charts, the maps, the stories of
what soil conservation could do, and a report on Black Sunday. The senators listened, expressions of boredom on the faces of some. An aide whispered into Big Hugh's ear. "It's coming."

This prompted a broad diversion, more on Pliny and Jefferson, jokes about his own farm and how hard it was to maintain the place. Keep it up, the aide told Bennett again, it will be here within an hour, they say.

Bennett told how he learned about terracing at an early age, about how the old ground on his daddy's place in North Carolina was held in place by a simple method that most country farmers learned when they were young. And did he mention—yes, again—that an inch of topsoil can blow away in an hour, but it takes a thousand years to restore it? Think about that equation. A senator who had been gazing out the window interrupted Bennett. "It's getting dark outside."

The senators went to the window. Early afternoon in mid-April, and it
was
getting dark. The sun over the Senate Office Building vanished. The air took on a copper hue as light filtered through the flurry of dust. For the second time in two years, soil from the southern plains fell on the capital. This time it seemed to take its cue from Hugh Bennett. The weather bureau said it had originated in No Man's Land.

"This, gentlemen, is what I'm talking about," said Bennett. "There goes Oklahoma."

Within a day, Bennett had his money and a permanent agency to restore and sustain the health of the soil. When Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act, it marked the first time any nation had created such a unit. Immediately, 150 CCC camps were reassigned from the Forest Service to Bennett's renamed Soil Conservation Service to augment the few troops he already had on demonstration projects. They would work "to the task of ending the waste of our land," as Roosevelt said, dispatching his restoration army. In all, about 20,000 people were sent to the southern plains. They came from the cities, from universities, from farms in other parts of the country. The president signed the act before April had ended, the worst month for those stuck in the blowing dirt.

But the administration was of two minds about what to do, for
Roosevelt also created, at the same time, the Resettlement Administration. The purpose was to give loans, averaging about seven hundred dollars a family, for people to start anew or to buy land for the same purpose. Though he was still reticent about encouraging a massive exodus, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7028, granting federal authorities the power to buy back much of what it had given away in homesteads over the previous seventy-three years. The executive order was a stunning reversal of everything the government had done with the public domain since the founding of the republic. To some people who had staked their lives to land once heralded by the government as a source of "health, wealth and opportunity" and remembered when it paid for trainloads of nesters to the agricultural frontier of the arid lands, it smelled like one thing—a push to depopulate the plains.

In Dalhart, John McCarty took a fresh vow, in public: this will not stand! His anger burned through his prose and carried his voice. If they want to kick us out—we'll show them! McCarty announced formation of the Last Man Club, himself as president, open to anybody who agreed to stay put. No matter how hard the dust blew, no matter how deeply people were buried in sand, they would not retreat. His people were Spartans. They would hunker in their dust bunkers "until hell freezes over," he said. And then they would skate on the ice over hell. He printed enrollment cards that read:

Barring Acts of God or unforeseen personal tragedy or family illness, I pledge myself to be the Last Man to leave this country, to always be loyal to it, and to do my best to cooperate with other members of the Last Man Club in the year ahead.

A person signed their name at the bottom, next to McCarty's signature, and was given a number. Last Man Number One was Ealy Moore, a rawhide-skinned former XIT trail boss now reduced to telling stories about the long-gone grass. Uncle Dick Coon, now said to be the only wealthy man left in town, was Last Man Number Two. The third man to join was Texas governor James V. Allred, who had been enrolled by Uncle Dick on a visit to the capital. It was a political
stunt, but it worked, spreading the word of this defiant band of nesters in the middle of the Dust Bowl. Doc Dawson, destitute, suffering from ill health, running the soup kitchen, was Last Man Number Four. It wasn't just geezers, McCarty noted. Wilson Cowen, the young judge, was Last Man Number Thirty-One. If this elite group of citizens, Spartans whose mark on the land was as clear as the stakes originally planted by the Comancheros a hundred years earlier, wasn't evidence of the iron will of those in the middle of the Dust Bowl, what more proof could a person ask for?

A week after Black Sunday, banners went up around town: "
RALLY TONIGHT—LAST MAN CLUB.
" McCarty's speeches were filmed by newsreels and sent to theaters across the country. He still looked like a young Orson Welles, with his athletic build and shock of dark hair. Behind him was a larger banner of the Last Man Club.

"Are we gonna stay here till hell freezes over?" he thundered.

"Yes!"

"I ask you again: how long are we gonna stay here?"

"Till ... hell ... freezes ... over!"

The cheers spilled onto Denrock Street, where the dirt from Black Sunday had yet to be shoveled away, and onto cars stuffed with children, dishes, pots and pans, a few rickety chairs, and other belongings, families fleeing the lethal dust. Even as Judge Cowen joined the Last Man Club, he knew many people had to leave town or face death. "Exodusters," they were called. One Dalhart family asked the judge if he might buy them a tire to get them on their way. Other families with a cup or a hat in front of their belongings begged for gas money to launch them west. But hadn't they heard about the signs at the California border, warning Exodusters to turn back, that there was no work in California? Maybe. But there wasn't anything to hold a person to Texas, either. In Texas, per capita annual income was $298—half as much as California. Judge Cowen ordered a Dalhart filling station to grant people leaving town ten gallons of gasoline—worth about $1.90—and one secondhand tire. The offer was open to Dallam County residents only. It was the least they could do, the judge said, for somebody who had survived the blowing dirt of the last four years.

Over poker and drinks at the DeSoto Hotel, people carped at the
handout of gas and tire. Deserters, they called those who packed up and left. No guts. Why should Dallam County give them anything? The people who decided to stick it out, to grab a root and growl with McCarty, were fired up by all the attention that came to the Last Man Club. They were Spartans—goddamn right!—but they had one big question: what would they do while growling?

For starters, they could kick some rain from the clouds. Tex Thornton, the former wildcatter, now full-time rainmaker, had his tool kit of explosives, his payment from the city, and was ready to start bombing the skies to bring moisture down on the Panhandle. He certainly had the endorsement of McCarty, who believed that all the shortgrass prairie really needed was a little rain and then the country would rise again.

"If you get a chance, meet Tex Thornton," McCarty wrote. "Tex handles this soup TNT and nitro-glycerin like it was so many sticks of wood. He is a real fellow."

McCarty urged people to join his Last Man Club quickly.

"I'm going to close the membership list with the first big rain because after we get a genuine soaker everybody will be wanting to stay and those who have gone away will want to come back."

His writing served a dual purpose, for McCarty was not only editor of the
Texan,
but he was now also director of the Chamber of Commerce, which had hired Thornton. Tex was waiting for just the right conditions before he worked his meteorological magic. By early May, he was ready and set up operations four miles out of town. The first evening, with a curious crowd watching, Thornton fired off his TNT rockets, one charge every ten minutes or so. Some of them carried as much as ten sticks of dynamite. The wind and dust blew as usual, obscuring Tex himself as he went through his rounds. After a few hours, people trickled home. In town, people could hear the thunder from Thornton's pyrotechnics well into the night. Doc Dawson wandered outside every half an hour, craned his neck, looking to the sky. Wind and dust. No rain.

The next day, Tex resumed his bombing. A smaller crowd showed up this time. Tex fired off a couple of duds, which blew up in the ground, creating his own dust storm that chased the crowd away.

"Gotta work on that," he said. "Needs some tinkering."

The fireworks continued through the afternoon and into the evening. Dawson strolled around town, taking in the sorry state of Dalhart as it tried to rally itself with aerial bombings and a Last Man Club. The acts of defiance felt good, but the town looked pathetic—no leaves on bare trees, dunes piled high on the sides of buildings, houses chipped to gray wood, the sand plowed like snow at the edge of town. Dawson would "howdy, neighbor" to people he had known since he pulled into the startup town in 1907, and they would "howdy" back. But a second exchange usually ended in details of something dark: news of a loved one suffering from dust pneumonia, a looming bankruptcy. People were at their breaking points. Almost everyone was sick with a variation of duster lung siege.

Thornton started up again the third day in the afternoon. Towns east of Dalhart complained that Tex was only sending more dust their way and asked him to stop.

"Just about got it right," Tex said.

The sky took on a beige look, which deepened to cinnamon brown as the wind carried a fresh duster into town. Tex aimed his explosives at the dust clouds, firing round after round until the thickening duster forced him into retreat at the dinner hour. After supper, with the winds taking a breather, Thornton was back at it. He attacked the sky until nearly midnight. The
crack crack
of explosives kept the Doc and most of Dalhart from sleeping. Dawson wandered outside in his nightshirt, held his hands palm-side up. Wind and dust. No rain. The sky looked eerie, light flashing at the base of dust clouds from the big calcium flares that Tex had sent up.

On day four, Tex Thornton rested. The forecast, as indicated by the barometer, called for colder temperatures, little moisture in the air—nothing fat enough to bomb. As for his failure to date, Tex said he needed only a bit of refinement. The problem was that he had to get his explosives directly into the belly of the clouds. He produced small gas balloons for precise aerial delivery and announced resumption of the rainmaking tomorrow morning, at a new location out of town. Tex tethered his balloons to a kite string, loaded them with bombs, and set
them aloft. He came equipped with a special dust suit and mask, designed to keep him in place no matter what the sky threw back at him.

As the temperature dropped, low clouds moved in. There were reports of snow in Clayton and other parts of New Mexico, just to the west. Tex continued firing at the sky until dark. That night a light dusting of snow fell, one tenth of an inch. McCarty was ecstatic. It snowed the next day as well, changing to sleet with warmer temperatures. Of course, it also snowed in Denver, Albuquerque, and Dodge City, places that had not felt a rumble from the hands of Tex Thornton. Still, a grateful citizenry thanked the rainmaker from Amarillo. He had done his job. Some even thought the drought was over. They massed that night for a final rally on behalf of the Last Man Club.

"How long are we gonna stay here?" McCarty asked.

"Till hell freezes over!"

"That's right. Till hell freezes over!"

Tex tipped his hat, packed up his weather balloons, his nitro, and his TNT, and went on his way. "I did the best I could," he said. "I'm mighty glad for the people of Dalhart."

Optimism did not follow the snow flurries forty-eight miles north into Boise City. The town was reeling after Black Sunday, stripped bare. A few days after Hazel Shaw buried her baby, she returned home to the empty funeral home and the one-bedroom apartment. The crib haunted her. The church across the street glared back, housing an angry God. Grandma Lou finally had been laid to rest in Texhoma after the funeral procession had retreated back to Boise City, hunkered down for the night, and then resumed the march to her grave the next day. All things in No Man's Land, the landmarks of Hazel's life, had lost their meaning. She felt alone, staggered by depression. The questions, tinged with guilt, played over and over: Could she have done something to save Ruth Nell? Should she have tried to flee earlier? Why did they stay in Boise City so long, with the power of the storms building every day, the dirt so deadly?

The wind found any openings, carrying fresh black and brown powder into the apartment, rekindling the doubts. She busied herself
with chores, but at times she simply broke down. It seemed useless: the repetitive tasks of cleaning a surface or a curtain or a floor that would sprout a new growth of prairie whiskers within half a day. She drove to homesteads of other Lucas family members and got further depressed. The roads were a hazard. But she felt so claustrophobic, so cornered; she had to see some green, to find clear sky, to escape the trapped enclosure of the dusted apartment. There was nothing that spring to indicate the new season: not a sprout or sprig of new life. The dead cattle, some with their eyes frozen and glazed over with sand, were pinned in grisly repose against fences holding tumbleweeds and dirt. Her uncle C.C. cut open the stomach of one dead cow that had wandered onto his land. His autopsy found the stomach packed so solidly with dust that it blocked food from getting any further. Other postmortems found the same thing: animals dead from starvation caused by internal suffocation. The dust was killing everything in No Man's Land.