Lizzie
“Is Mother ready?” Henry called. “Let’s go!” He only saw Betsy at church now, and he didn’t want to waste a minute of his only chance to be with her.
“She’s over at the tree,” I muttered as I peered at myself in the hall mirror, turning this way and that to see myself from all angles. I’d lost some weight that year and my dresses hung on me like sacks, so Mother took in one of her old dresses for me to wear for my Sunday outfit. It was an older style, stiff cotton with little black buttons down the front of the bodice, leading to a heavy flared skirt.
“Go get her, sis,” Henry said, pleading. “You know I hate going over there.”
“So do I,” I said pointedly. There was something unnerving about the way Mother held herself on Sunday mornings when she visited that bench. She often sat slumped and melancholy, as if her grief were still fresh but she had to condense it down into a single hour each week. Elsie had been lost for more than twenty-five years. That Mother was still so sad after all that time never failed to confuse Henry and me.
Henry glanced down at his watch and then sighed impatiently and left the house. I heard movement from Mother and Daddy’s bedroom, so I walked quickly down the hall, knocked, and pushed the door open, holding my breath while I waited to see how Dad was that day. Ever since Henry borrowed that money, the pattern of his good days and bad days reversed. It was as if he’d suffered a terrible injury that left him with a permanent disability—only the injury wasn’t to his body, but to his pride.
Dad wasn’t dressed for church but there were some positive signs. He’d opened the drapes and was sitting up in bed, reading the newspaper we’d brought back from Oakden the previous Sunday. On very bad days, Dad barely seemed to realize I was there. Mother said it wasn’t his fault.
“It’s tiring trying to make sense of things that make no damned sense at all,” she told me. “Your daddy is a farmer to his very bones. When farming isn’t working as it should, he’s just a husk of his real self.”
The drought changed a lot of things and none of it made sense to me either. I still got out of bed and I still did my share. Mother, Henry, and I didn’t have a choice—we had to get used to a new way of operating because running the farm was a four-man operation. The price per bushel for wheat in the 1934 harvest was higher, and that might have been a relief had it not been our worst season ever, both in terms of the condition of the grain and the yield. We sold only six hundred bushels, each one fetching a miserable thirty-three cents.
We didn’t square the debt with Judge Nagle that year. We didn’t even manage to make regular repayments. Henry told me to “keep my chin up,” but I knew it was already too late. Even if we had buckets of rain, there would be no crop this year. I had no idea what we were going to do, other than to throw ourselves on the good graces of Judge Nagle and ask for more time.
“You look pretty as a picture,” Dad said, and if the shock on his face was any indication, he was as surprised by his remark as I was. I did a mock curtsy and mumbled something about it being Mother’s old dress. “Oh, I remember it well. She used to wear it back when we were courting. It suits you just as well as it suited her then.” He set the paper down on his lap and frowned at me. “Lizzie, you’re almost nineteen. When are you going to get yourself a boyfriend?”
“I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said, raising my chin.
“Your mother and I were married by the time she was your age.”
“Daddy.”
“What? You know it’s true.”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for all that,” I muttered, embarrassed.
“Nonsense. Don’t you want a farm of your own? Children?”
“I...” I didn’t want to waste a rare good day by telling him no. “Of course,” I lied, convincing myself that it was okay to lie on Sunday if it was only half a lie. After all, I did want a farm of my own. That I would likely need a husband to go with it was an inconvenient reality I was still trying to make peace with.
“Then maybe make eye contact with some of the boys at church,” Dad suggested, picking his paper up again. “That would be a good start.”
I stopped at the linen cupboard on my way to the Model T, fetching a small towel to protect the dress, then stopped again to pat the horse and to check on her harness. Jesse and Joker were all we had left by way of livestock other than the chickens, and although the chickens still gave us plenty, the horses were the most valuable asset we owned now.
A man from the bank arrived without warning one day to load the tractor up onto the bed of a truck. The only sign we’d ever even owned it was the mound of debt it left behind. Around the same time, we could no longer justify the cost of running the Model T. We tried to sell it, but with so many cars for sale, no one wanted to pay a fair price. Henry and I removed the engine and then took out every bit of glass and superfluous metal from its body, making it as light as possible. When we finished, we rigged up a mechanism to fix the horses to it—turning the car into an elaborate cart. Plenty of others had the same idea. We called them Hoover wagons, after the president we loved to blame for our miserable circumstances.
“Come on, Lizzie,” Henry called impatiently, as I petted Jesse’s nose. She was taking us to church that day, and Henry was already in the “driver’s seat,” holding the reins.
Mother beamed at me from the front passenger’s seat, pleased with his enthusiasm, and I sighed and made my way to the back. The week’s eggs were all packed carefully onto the seat beside me, ready to go to the grocer on the way to church. I wiped my side of the seat with the towel before I climbed in. As Henry steered the cart along the drive, dust billowed up around us, and I looked down at the white dress and felt a pang of despair.
“Dusty today,” Mother said, but the ambient dust those wheels were stirring up was the least of our worries. Dust and sandstorms were blowing through with such regularity that we had a whole routine when we saw one on the horizon. Henry would lock the horses in the barn, Mother would hurry to take any clothes off the line, and I’d run from room to room checking that windows were closed. It was Dad’s job to prepare his bedroom for us all to shelter in. By the time we all ran inside, he’d be ready to close the door behind us and put a wet towel down against the gap beneath it. He’d have food and water inside his closet, tucked under a blanket to shelter it from the dust. Dad would hang a damp sheet over the window to catch the dirt that threatened the gaps. On the bed, he’d have a pail waiting with wet dish towels for us to put over our mouths, and a little tub of Vaseline for us to smear into our nostrils. The dirt in the air during one summer storm had irritated the lining of our noses such that we all had nosebleeds for days.
All of this, and it wasn’t nearly enough. Dirt or sand or dust would sneak in between the gaps in the floorboards or the walls, and by the time the bad storms passed, those wet tea towels would be black or red or yellow with the dirt they’d kept from our lungs, and there’d be mounds of dirt around the skirting boards. Every storm was different depending on whether the soil blew in from Oklahoma or Ohio or Kansas, or maybe the farm right next door. In the beginning, we’d peer at the dirt and discuss its potential origins—analyzing the color and texture and wind direction. By the time the storms were coming almost every week, the novelty of our dirt detective game had worn off. One storm lasted a full twenty-four hours. By then, we were so accustomed to them that we didn’t even panic. We just sat in Mother and Dad’s room and we listened to the wind howl for hours on end.
“How long are we going to be stuck in here?” I muttered at one point.
“That’s the wrong way of looking at this, Lizzie,” Mother gently chided me. “We have a roof over our heads. Somewhere to shelter. We have one another.”
“We aren’t stuck in here,” Henry added. “We’re safe in here.”
But over time, even Mother had grown tired of the relentless storms, and the dust that seemed to permeate every single crevice in our lives. Now when a storm came, we just sat in a miserable, heavy silence, listening to the wind as it bathed our house and fields and vegetable garden and barn in dust.
Even on a beautiful Sunday morning on our way to church, we barely saw the sun or the bright blue sky. All we saw was the dust.
“Good morning, Mrs. Davis,” Judge Nagle greeted us, nodding politely as we mingled in the vestibule of the church before service. “And you too, Miss Lizzie.” His gaze landed on my brother and he added quietly, “Henry.”
“Good morning, sir. Mrs. Nagle, you look lovely today,” Henry said, but he rushed through the words. It was obvious he only had eyes for Betsy, who was standing beside her parents. She looked beautiful as she always did. That day she was wearing a yellow dress with a soft skirt that skimmed her calves. She’d probably made it herself, because Betsy sewed for fun even though she could afford to buy clothes ready-made.
“I love your dress, Lizzie,” she said sincerely. “Those cute little buttons! It suits you so much.”
I flushed, embarrassed at the attention, but remembered my manners enough to thank her before I shuffled away to take my seat. Any other girl might have been mocking me with a compliment for such an old dress, but Betsy was nice. The judge and Mrs. Nagle were good people too, of course, even if I’d become increasingly nervous about Judge Nagle’s demeanor.
Henry said that I was imagining things, but with every passing Sunday, Judge Nagle seemed a little cooler toward us—toward Henry in particular. That made perfect sense to me. Henry borrowed all of that money two years earlier, and he’d promised to repay it by the coming harvest. The judge would know as well as anyone that we had almost no chance of doing that now.
I swallowed the lump in my throat as the service began. Pastor Williams was in good form, bringing yet another variation on the theme of the times. Keep faith. God is in control. Every Sunday it was a similar angle, because what else was there to say to people who were suffering so immensely? Our whole economy ran off produce, and after so many failed crops, farmers had long since run out of savings and were down to their last ounce of faith. The main street of Oakden was one long row of boarded-up windows because all but the most essential stores had already gone bust. I saw how empty the collection plate was each week, and yet every Sunday, Pastor Williams took to that pulpit to thunder about resilience and hope and faith.
“Bow your heads and pray with me,” he said, at the end of the sermon. But as I bowed my head, I glanced across the aisle and felt a chill run down my spine. Everyone else was praying, but Judge Nagle was staring at Henry.
The judge wasn’t angry. He was heartbroken. Somehow, that was worse.
I tried to talk to Henry as we made our way out to lunch, but my brother was busy chatting up the older ladies in church. When I caught his arm, he waved me off impatiently. Being the most handsome and popular boy in town, Henry got a little vacation at church from the stress and isolation on the farm. Most weeks I was content to just find a quiet corner to wait for him to finish charming his way through conversations.
“Miss Davis. You look so lovely today,” a deep voice said. I glanced impatiently toward the source of the voice and found Chad Glass—a boy a few years older than me. He was handsome enough and polite enough, but he was also a mechanic. The last person on earth I’d want to date was someone who didn’t even have a farm to offer me.
“Thank you, Chad. Please excuse me,” I said, stepping around him to chase after Henry.
But my footsteps slowed when I saw that he was with Judge Nagle. The two exchanged some quiet words in the vestibule.Then Henry sucked in a breath as he followed Judge Nagle out the door. I walked briskly after them—reaching the door just in time to see them crossing the street and disappearing together into the courthouse across the road.
I hesitated for a split second before I slipped from the church, jogging unsteadily in Mother’s old shoes until I stood beneath the windows of Judge Nagle’s office. At first I couldn’t hear anything, but a sudden sliding sound fixed that—the judge was muttering about the heat and had opened the window. That allowed me to hear the low murmur of voices.
“...son, I understand. But I know you’ve seen Main Street. More than half of the businesses gone bust are in buildings I hold mortgages on. I still have to pay the bank, but no one is paying me rent. I can’t even sell those stores because this town is dying. I need you to repay me that money. All of it. Some of it. Whatever you can come up with.”
“I’m really sorry, sir,” Henry said. I could imagine my brother maintaining eye contact, looking cool and calm, as he started to panic inside. Part of Henry’s magic charm was his ability to appear neutral even when he was guilty as hell. “As I’m sure you know, the harvest isn’t looking so good this year for us either.”
“Surely you have an asset you can sell.”
“Sir, we don’t even have a tractor anymore. And I tried to sell the car, but no one was buying.”
“Then we find ourselves at an impasse,” the judge said heavily. There was a pause. Then his voice was barely above a whisper as he said, “Henry. I don’t think you appreciate how desperate I am. It’s been almost two years, son. In all of that time you’ve done no more than throw a few pennies my way—you owe me hundreds of dollars.”
“I know, Judge,” Henry said urgently. “I’ll think of something. I really will.”
There was a terse pause. I pressed my hand to my mouth.
“Do you know what would happen if I tried to sue you, Henry?”
“No, sir.”
“The case would go before the court in Dalhart. And do you know who the judge is there?”
“No, sir.”
“Judge Nolan Wickingham. I’m not saying he’d rule in my favor, Henry, but I am saying I went to law school with him and I was best man at his wedding.”
“Sir, I promise you. I’ll do everything in my power to pay you back as soon as I can. But I have nothing for you to take even if you did decide to sue me.”
“You have land.”
“My father has land—” Henry corrected him. I could hear the panic in his voice, and I felt it in my chest.
“I’m not so sure Judge Wickingham would see it that way, Henry. That asset will be yours soon enough. Maybe the courts would see fit to pass the land on to me a little early so that I can sell it to recoup my losses.”
“Sir,” Henry croaked. “I mean no disrespect, but who’s buying farmland right now?”
“No one is buying stores in a dying town in the middle of nowhere—but I know I could find someone to take a five-hundred-acre farm off my hands for the right price.”
“Sir—please.”
“I don’t want to do this, Henry. Do you hear me? I need you to find some money somehow or I’ll have no choice.” I heard sudden movement inside, and, worried that the judge was moving toward the window, I panicked and ran back to the church. I stepped inside just as Mother put her hand on the door, apparently about to come looking for us. She had a plate of food in her other hand.
“Where on earth have you been?” she asked, peering at me in confusion. “You’re missing the luncheon. Go quickly before all the good food goes.” When I remained frozen in place, catching my breath, she dropped her voice and added, “You know as well as I do this is the best meal you’ll have all week. This is not the time to go wandering away!”
I saw Henry and the judge walk into the vestibule a little while later. Henry had Mother’s coloring—warm brown hair and skin that tanned instead of burned—but that day, he was as pale as I’d ever seen him. I waved at him and pointed to the chair beside me, where the plate of food I’d fixed for him was waiting. Beads of sweat covered his brow as he moved the plate to sit down.
“Everything okay?” I asked him.
“Everything’s just fine,” he lied, forcing an unconvincing smile as he began to pick at the food.
The next day, Henry and I went to check on the crop in one of the fields farthest from the house. We rode the horses side by side, their hooves sinking into the thin dust with each step. My cheeks were windburned, and nothing I did seemed to help. I tried smearing them with Vaseline to protect them, but by the time I walked from the house to the barn, the Vaseline was coated in dust. The best I could do was wear a kerchief over the lower part of my face for as much of the day as I could stand. The wind had become relentless, blowing for weeks; the only difference each day was whether it was a gale or a breeze. That day it was somewhere in the middle.
I’d wanted to talk to Henry the previous night, but as determined as I was, he seemed equally determined to avoid me. He’d gone to bed at the same time as Mother and Daddy. Now was my chance.
“I followed you and the judge to the courthouse and listened through the window,” I told Henry, deciding it was best to just blurt it out. The only sign he gave that he’d even heard what I said was the way his mouth tightened. “Do you think he’s right? Could he really take the farm?”
“This is their game—I don’t even know the rules I’m playing by. Maybe Judge Nagle just said he’d take the farm to scare me. He seems as desperate as we are, so I guess that’s possible. I just don’t even know who to talk to. We can’t afford a lawyer of our own. I don’t even have a copy of the contract.”
“So what do we do?” I asked, feeling queasy. Henry brought his horse to a stop and swung down to the ground. He fetched a small spade from the tool kit he kept on his saddle, and in silence, he started to dig—sending dust flying all over the withered plants in the field. Less than half the seeds had germinated that year, and most of the plants that did died before they even formed seed heads. Our fields contained row after row of patchy and deformed brown stalks. Even the weeds were unusually sparse that year—all the soil seemed able to produce was the occasional patch of Russian thistle or bull nettle. The dead thistles rolled all over the fields in the dust storms, getting stuck on the wire and providing a framework for the dust to settle on, until every fence had disappeared beneath a mound of dirt.
“What are you doing?” I asked Henry, but he kept on digging. He dug until his brow was covered in grime from dust and sweat, until his face was red with exertion. I knew that there was no resistance in the soil. And that didn’t change even as Henry dug down twelve inches...two feet...and farther and farther he went, until he was standing in a hole.
After a while, I swung off my horse and stepped closer, touching his shoulder gently to get his attention. Henry looked at me, his eyes wild with panic and rimmed red with sweat and irritation from the dust, and maybe some tears. This wasn’t like Henry—he was usually calm as a cucumber, even when he’d messed up.
“Look at this,” he said, his voice breaking. “Just look at it, Lizzie. They say that there was damp soil all over these high plains, down at the three-feet mark. It didn’t matter how dry the season was—the moisture was always there. But look at this. Just look at it.”
I looked down at the dusty hole he was standing in.
“No wonder the crops aren’t growing,” he whispered miserably. “We’re trying to grow them in a goddamned desert.”
With Henry standing in that hole, for the first time in our lives, I was taller than he was. I clapped my hands onto his shoulders and gently shook him.
“Sorry,” he said. He cleared his throat and lifted his chin. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. Don’t fret—I promise it’s going to be fine. I’ll fix this. Maybe I can get a job on an oil field. Or I read in the paper that there were jobs in El Paso on one of those New Deal projects. I’ll move away...get a wage. Then we can keep the farm and pay him back.”
“Henry.” Mother and Dad seriously considered letting him go off in search of work after the bad harvest in ’31. Dad talked him out of it because he expected things would turn around quickly, and in a good year, or even a reasonable year, it would have been tough to run the farm without Henry. But it was way too late for that. The papers were full of stories of rural folk like us who left their farms, hoping to find better conditions in the cities, only to find things there were a different kind of awful.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered unevenly.
Henry climbed out of the hole. He dusted himself off and he swung himself back up onto the horse.
“The best we can do is go down to the far field and see if there’s any good news down there. Then we go back to the house and we’ll collect the eggs. We’ll feed and water the horses.” He nodded, as if he was talking to himself more than me. “Yep, that’s it. One foot in front of the other. We’ll think only about whatever the next step is and we’ll do that over and over for as long as we have to until things get better.”
After that day in the field, Henry just stopped talking. He was still working as hard as he always did—always fixing something or building something, making the most of every minute of sunlight. But as soon as the sun went down, he went to bed, and most mornings, I had to wake him up because for the first time in his life, he was sleeping in. He didn’t even want to go to church.
One Saturday night, after he’d gone to bed early again, I sat out under the stars on my own, looking up through the lingering dust haze to the stars. I was trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t want to alert Mother and Dad to the situation with the judge because I didn’t want to betray Henry’s confidence, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my brother needed help.
When I heard the door open, I assumed Henry changed his mind about going to bed, but it was Mother who sank into his chair opposite me. I started and almost dropped my mug of Henry’s bathtub gin in my haste to hide it.
“Give me some of that,” she said.
“It’s—uh—Mother—”
“I know about Henry’s grain alcohol, Lizzie,” she said, making a grabbing motion for the mug. Shocked, I passed it to her, only to be even more shocked when she knocked the whole lot back. She shuddered, then exhaled and rested her head against the back of his chair.
“You think you’re like your daddy, don’t you?” she said, eyes still closed.
“I am like Daddy,” I replied. Everyone always said so. Dad and I were famously quick with a scowl or to point out the negative in a situation, unlike Mother and Henry, who were the sunshine to our rain.
“Honey, you’re me all over. You have your dad’s hair and his pragmatic nature, but that’s about it. You’re strong as an ox in body and spirit. Those boys of ours aren’t like us.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“You and me are survivors, Lizzie. We keep moving forward. We find a way, and if there isn’t a way to be found, we make one. Those boys are more inclined to crumble and break than you and I are to even consider giving up.”
“Henry isn’t like that,” I argued. “Henry is like you.”
“Don’t kid yourself, honey. I don’t know what’s going on with Henry at the moment, but that boy is every bit as tormented as your father is on his worst days.”
“Judge Nagle wants the loan settled,” I blurted. Mother sucked in a sharp breath. “He’s pressuring Henry for money. The judge is having trouble of his own because so many of his tenants have gone bust. He says he might sue Henry to get the farm even though the deed is in Daddy’s name. It can’t be true, can it?”
“Honey,” Mother said gently. “If Dad had been able to get that loan from the bank two years ago, we’d have already lost the farm.”
I was startled to realize she was right. Whether the money came from Judge Nagle or from the bank, we still had no way to repay it. I looked out over the moonlit fields and felt a pang of presumptive grief for a loss I hadn’t even realized was inevitable. “Mother, I love this place.”
“I know, Lizzie. I do too. But you know what I love more?” I looked at her, and in the darkness, I saw the gentle smile she offered me. She reached across and squeezed my hand. “This family, honey. Family is everything. I thought I’d already taught you that.”
“You did,” I said. We weren’t the kind of family to say I love you or to express our feelings aloud, but she’d taught me in other ways. Even those hours she spent on the bench near the Texas live oak reinforced to me that what mattered in life was to love so deeply that sometimes you were truly tormented by it.
“The weather let us down, not the judge. At least he gave us a chance and he bought us two more years here. We should be grateful to him, not scared of him or angry with him. Knowing the judge as I do, I know he wouldn’t be demanding money from us unless he really needed it. I bet he’s as distressed about this as we are.”
There was strength and dignity in that statement that astounded me. I stared at Mother in the moonlight—all calm and compassionate, even though she’d just acknowledged she was on the verge of losing everything.
“How are you so strong?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Lizzie. You are just like me. I know they say women are the weaker sex, but there’s nothing weak about the women in this family. The strength of generations runs through our veins. It doesn’t matter what life throws at us—we find a way to keep going. And it seems to me that those of us who are strong have an obligation to care for others when they aren’t.” Mother suddenly pushed herself to a standing position. “You aren’t going to solve this sitting out here on your own tonight. Let’s skip church tomorrow. We can drag Daddy and Henry out for a drive if the weather is good. Maybe they can get some perspective if we get them off the farm.”