OVER WHIST and gin rummy, during chicken plucking and berry picking, after baseball games in the pasture among cow pies, the stories come as talk and chatter. Your parents were only children during the Dirty Thirties, but you could swear you lived through that time with them. “You’ll never know what it was like,” your mother says, but you do, you do. Her words recast the light, spin the earth into dust the wind never stops turning over and over in its restless hands.
Not yet born, invisible, you stand beside your mother as she slips into the flour-sack pyjamas her mother stitched by hand. You feel the coarseness of the cotton on your skin. You squish your toes inside the shoes that never fit. At Christmas, you breathe in the rare citrus smell of the orange that must be shared among seven children, the youngest sister getting a whole one to herself because she was ill as a baby and has curly hair. By the barn, you watch your grandfather hitch his horses to the wagon and drive to town to wait in line for the train from the East. He hates being there, but he doesn’t let it show. He uses the time to visit with his neighbours, though he keeps his back straight and looks down the tracks with blue eyes leached a paler blue by the sky’s cloudless stare.
The train at last arrives with apples and hay from Ontario, smoked cod from Newfoundland, turnips that taste sweet—the few grown at home are bitter—clothes that carry the smell and grime of those who’ve outgrown them. Sometimes, mixed in with the fraying wool sweaters and pants with see-through knees, there are books with brittle yellow pages. To your delight, a few have pages missing. You claim one as your own, fill in where the story pauses before it picks up again. You change the setting, using the names of your birthplace. You call up the sere images you’ve inherited as you have your freckled skin and your mother’s fretting, her capacity for worry and hard work. This ache, this country of wind and dust and sky, is your starting point, the way you understand yourself, the place you return to when there’s nowhere else to go. It is the pared-down language of your blood and bones.
Your words go deeper, darkened by drought’s long shadow. It sweeps across the fields and towns and everything that lives here, even in the cities with their glass and concrete and watered greens. Wherever you go, you speak with the earth on your tongue, in the accent passed down for generations. It’s a lengthening of vowels, a dusty drawl thin enough to be carried some distance by the wind.