Lizzie
Mother was baking bread. I smelled it in the air before my eyes opened at dawn, the delicious scent overpowering the ambient scent of dust.
Today was going to be a good day. We had fresh bread and Mother knew about Judge Nagle and she thought I was strong like her.
“I talked to Dad last night,” Mother murmured as I came into the kitchen. My jaw dropped, and she smiled sadly. “We don’t keep secrets from one another and he needed to know.”
“Was he...?”
“He took it about as well as you’d expect. Makes it even more important that we have some time together today. That’s why I’m making us a picnic,” she told me firmly.
“That bread I smell?” Dad called gruffly from the bedroom.
“Yes, Hank. Get yourself up and dressed. We’re going out.”
“I don’t feel—”
“Hank.”
I couldn’t even see Dad’s face, but I could sense the change in mood. There was a stretch of silence and then a heavy sigh before I heard him moving about in the bedroom. Mother and I shared a smile.
“One down,” she said under her breath. “One to go.”
There was no resisting Mother in that mood—Henry wouldn’t even try. I threw my arms around her, feeling a rush of affection.
“I love you, Mother,” I said. The words felt stiff and awkward on my tongue, and for the briefest moment, I wasn’t sure how she’d react. She loved me—of course she loved me—but did she want to hear me say it? Mother’s arms wrapped around me and she squeezed me back, hard.
“I love you too, honey. Now, boil me up some eggs. We’re having egg sandwiches.”
It was the perfect day for a picnic. After weeks of that constant wind that left us so tired, the day was completely still. The dust haze cleared and the heat felt promising instead of menacing, like the spring days of old.
A basket full of egg sandwiches and some bread and butter pickles didn’t fix a single thing, but it did give us an excuse to take the Hoover wagon into Dalhart, where we sat in the park beneath some trees. It had been some months since Daddy even made an attempt to leave the farm, and I couldn’t actually remember the last time we’d all been out together for fun. We sat on a rug as Mother poured sweet tea from a thermos into little metal mugs.
“No sadness today,” she announced. “I don’t want anyone talking about the drought or the wheat or the farm or what’s going to happen. Today, we’re just together.” She made eye contact with each of us, then added pointedly, “Got it?”
We all nodded obediently, and for the next few hours, it was like we didn’t have a care in the world.
Later that afternoon, Dad and Mother left me and Henry to do the Sunday chores while they went into Oakden to drop the eggs off at the grocer. As the cart rolled out the gate, I glanced up at them and saw that Dad had his arm around Mother, and she was resting her head on his shoulder as he drove.
The picnic had gone a long way to soothing the ache in my soul, and something about that brief glimpse of the affection between my parents settled the last of it.
“What are you cooking for dinner?” Henry asked.
“Who says I’m cooking? Mother just said we have to do it.”
“Lizzie, please. You know I can’t cook.” He held up his hands, always stained with dirt and rough from work, his fingernails black and chipped. “These hands were made for man’s work.”
I held up my hands too. They looked exactly like Henry’s, only smaller. He grimaced, then said wryly, “Geez, no wonder you can’t find a boyfriend.”
“Shut up, Henry,” I exclaimed, but I was laughing as I said it, because he seemed so much better that afternoon. The day off the farm seemed to have lightened his mood. “I think I’ll make us hot water corn bread and heat up canned rabbit to go with it.”
Henry had a love-hate relationship with that canned rabbit meat. Jackrabbit had been breeding like crazy through the drought, and the population was now dangerously out of control, so the community had to reduce numbers. We would line up in a giant square, across acres of land, spaced out at first but gradually coming closer together, pushing the rabbits into a fenced area in the middle. There, the animals would be clubbed to death, and the carcasses distributed for food. Jackrabbit drives were unpleasant—brutal, even—but we knew they were necessary. Henry knew those animals would destroy our crops and breed until they took over every square inch of our land, but he could not stand to see them suffer, and as hungry as we were, he struggled to eat them.
“Is there anything else?” he asked.
“Not that I know how to cook.” I shrugged. He sighed, nodding in resignation. “We have to wash some clothes too.” I was dreading that task even more than the cooking. We were washing the clothes in handmade soap, formed with tallow and lye. It was hell on my hands.
“Well, since you’re doing the washing and the cooking, the least I can do is to fetch you the water,” Henry announced.
“So gentlemanly of you,” I muttered. “And then what are you going to do?”
“I might take a nap.” My jaw dropped, and he threw his head back and laughed. “I’m kidding! Mother asked me to shovel some of the dirt away from the barn in case we get another storm.” The dirt was halfway up the side of the barn now. We’d only been shoveling it away from the door, doing the bare minimum to get the animals in and out.
“Henry, we are idiots,” I said suddenly. “We should have offered to take the eggs in for them.”
Henry and I looked at one another, and then we both started laughing.
I was drying my hands on my apron as I walked onto the porch just after five o’clock. The fine strands of hair that had come loose from my bun suddenly rose until they were standing high above my head, as the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck rose too. The eerie sensation left me shuddering, and I knew exactly what it meant.
A duster was coming—and given how strong that static electricity was, this was going to be a big one. I took two more steps, looking toward the horizon, but then stopped.
There was no wind to warn us what was coming that day, just a silent wall of black, so high and wide that I wondered if I was seeing things. That couldn’t be a dust storm—not with such clear edges. Dust storms weren’t so self-contained that you could see bright blue sky right above them. They came on slowly, always preceded by a noisy high wind. This one wasn’t following the rules.
“I just got shocked off that metal near the barn, so bad it knocked me down. The wire on the fence is glowing blue too. Feels like a big duster is co—” Henry said behind me, but then he too stopped dead in his tracks. “What in God’s name is that?”
We stood there staring for a beat longer than we should have, because whether we could comprehend it or not, that monstrous black wall was moving toward us, swallowing the flat fields of half-dead wheat.
“Get inside, Lizzie,” Henry said. I ignored him, spinning toward the gate to see if Mother and Dad were, by some miracle, back already. All I saw were the hens running for shelter, and the long, empty drive beside them. “Lizzie!” Henry shouted. “Get inside and get some cloth ready!”
The panic in his voice startled me. I spun back into the house, trembling as I ran to the linen cupboard. I scooped a whole stack of whatever cloth I could find into my arms and threw some sheets on top, and I ran to the pail beside the stove. I’d washed corn bread batter off my hands in that water two minutes earlier, but there was no time to fetch a fresh bucket.
I threw the cloth into the bucket and took it into Mother and Dad’s room. I closed the window, then hung a dripping sheet from the frame, and set the sopping towel near the door, ready to block the gap beneath it. I fumbled in Mother’s dresser for the Vaseline for our noses, then ran through the house. Every window was open, so I closed and latched them all before I went back to the porch.
The wind was picking up—a gentle breeze now rustled my static-ravaged hair. The storm was moving so fast—already at the far reaches of our farm. The duster would swallow the house in minutes.
“Henry!” I shouted, my voice breaking. “Henry, hurry!”
He sprinted up the stairs onto the porch, grabbing my elbow to tug me inside. I stopped to close the door, then tore the drapes down from a nearby window to stuff them under the door—one more gap plugged, although I knew it would make little difference.
Henry had the presence of mind to take the tub of batter I’d made and drop it over the fire, instantly smothering the flames with a sizzle and a burst of oddly delicious, corn-scented smoke. Next he scooped a lantern off the kitchen table, and I followed him back to Mother and Dad’s room. While I pushed the wet towel beneath the door, he lit the lantern.
“We can sit on the bed today,” Henry reminded me when, out of habit, I moved to sit on the floor. I felt a pang of distress.
“They’re out in this,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“There isn’t even any glass in that car.”
“I know, Lizzie. They’ll stop at someone’s house. They’ll find shelter. They know what to do.”
We could see the road when we moved the sheet over Mother and Dad’s window. In that direction, it might have been an ordinary afternoon. The wind was picking up, stirring the dust around the house, but the sun was still shining. As I spread gobs of Vaseline under my nose, I stared at the road, hoping to see the Hoover cart.
The golden afternoon light was tinged with brown and gray, and then the whole world took on a red-brown sheen, as if the glass became colored. Then, so quickly I could scarcely believe it, the light faded away until I couldn’t even see the empty driveway, not three feet from that bedroom window. We had been swallowed into the belly of the beast.
“Henry,” I croaked, as swirling dust began to creep in through the cracks in the roof, the walls, the floor—carried by startlingly icy air. Henry already had his wet cloth over his mouth and nose, and he motioned for me to do the same. It had been so still all day, but now the wind began to thunder against the house, until the whole structure was shaking, and so were Henry and I. We sat side by side in a terrible, terrified silence, listening helplessly as the barn of the chicken coop collapsed, and as a window in another room of the house shattered.
“Do you think this is the end of the world?” I asked Henry after a while, my voice small.
“Don’t be silly, sis,” he said. “It’s just another storm. It’s a bad one, sure, but it’s just a storm.”
By then, there was so much dust in the air in Mother and Dad’s bedroom that my eyes were watering. I closed them because there was no point keeping them open—I could only just make out the flame in the lantern two feet away from me. In the rush of the wind outside, I imagined I heard sounds of suffering—a horse neighing, chickens clucking their distress, coughing and crying and someone hollering for help.
“Do you hear that?” Henry said suddenly.
There it came again.
Help. Come help. Please. Oh God. Please.
We both shot off the bed but Henry reached out to stop me.
“You stay—”
“Like hell I will.”
For only a split second, he hesitated. Then he fumbled for my hand and squeezed it fiercely.
“Do not let go of me,” he hissed. “If we lose each other, we’re gone. Do you hear that?”
“Stop babying me and just go!”
I followed Henry by feel, not by sight. He had the lantern in his hand, but I could tell from the cautious steps he took that it wasn’t helping much.
Henry stumbled near the door, and I felt the crunch of corrugated iron beneath our feet—a piece of the barn roofing had come through the window. He struggled but managed to pull the door open, only to find that walking outside in that wind thick with dirt was like swimming through cement. We were making such slow progress that I was starting to fear we’d be dead from suffocation before we even figured out who was calling out for us.
“Help...” The voice came again, and this time I knew it was Daddy. Henry sped up, just a little, stumbling forward down the stairs of the porch. I lost him for a brief second, so threw myself forward and went weak with relief when my hand landed on his shoulder.
“Call again, Daddy!” Henry shouted.
“Henry. I’m over here!” Dad called back.
“Keep calling so we can follow your voice!”
Slowly we inched toward the sound of Dad’s voice, but it was only when I kicked the wheel of the car by mistake that I realized we’d overshot our mark.
I tugged on Henry’s shoulder to pull him in the right direction and we felt our way along the car. Finally, my hand connected with hair, covered in a layer of soft dirt.
“Mother!” I cried. I pulled the car door open and bent down to shelter behind it. Mother was curled in a ball between the back and front seats.
“Oh, honey,” she wheezed, and then she gave a spluttering fit of coughs. “Clever girl. You...found us.”
She sounded hoarse and weak and defeated. I took the wet cloth off my mouth and pressed it over Mother’s, ignoring the way she fumbled at me to protest. I tried to stifle the immediate urge to cough, but every breath I took now filled my lungs with unfiltered dirt. Soon, I was coughing and wheezing just like Mother.
“How far are we from the house?” Dad shouted.
“Close,” Henry shouted back. “Maybe twelve feet?”
“I tried to find my way but I was too scared I’d get lost and wouldn’t get back to Mother in the car.”
We figured it out quickly from there. I’d follow Dad, holding on to the back of his shirt. Dad would carry Mother, throwing her over his shoulder so one hand was free to hold on to Henry’s hand, and Henry would lead the way.
Henry said it was only twelve feet or so from the car to the house, but every single step into that swirling black dust felt like a marathon. I was dizzy from lack of air, like every panting breath I sucked in only brought me closer to suffocation. By the time we made it back to the bedroom, and Henry closed the door and propped the towel beneath it, I couldn’t take another step. I sank to the floor in a heap by the door. The wet cloths we’d taken outside were now dripping with mud—a whole other kind of suffocation. There was no way to filter the air other than to pull our dry shirts up over our mouths—a measure so ineffective we wouldn’t have bothered, except that we were desperate for any measure of relief.
For an hour, we sat and waited. Finally, the wind began to slow and then the darkness lifted, and then after all of that, the thickness of the dust in the air started to ease.
I was too exhausted to be relieved. Crumpled in that weary heap by the door, I was gradually becoming aware that I was hurt—that the sand-filled wind outside had burned my exposed skin, especially my cheeks.
Henry was the first to rise. He came to my side, gently swept the dust from my head and the uninjured skin of my face with his fingertips.
“You’re bleeding here,” he said gently, motioning toward my face.
“I figured,” I whispered back, both of our voices raw and thick. He helped me up and dust poured down from my clothes, running down my body like waterfalls after rain. I blinked over and over again, trying to clear my blurry vision, only to realize that my eyes were as burned as my skin was. I wouldn’t see clearly again until they healed.
“Mother? Dad?” I croaked, fumbling toward the bed. I could hear the rattling of Mother’s breathing even from the door, even over the sound of the fading wind. But it was only when I came closer that I realized how bad she was. Dad had her in his arms, and he was touching the skin of her face gently, whispering in her ear. He was wearing a strange, panicked smile on his face, as if he were trying to stay calm. One side of his face was bruised, the skin around his eye black and purple and swollen.
I sat gently beside Mother and took her hand. It was icy cold, so I rubbed it to warm it between my fingers.
“What happened?” Henry asked, coming to the side of the bed beside me.
“Tried to beat the duster but it came on so fast,” Dad said hoarsely. “Never seen anything like it. I completely lost my bearings once it got dark—kept getting in and out of the car trying to figure out where we were. Couldn’t find any landmarks I recognized, and the barn wasn’t where I expected it to be, so I thought we’d come in the wrong gate. Jesse was flailing, knocking the cart around as she reared up, so I got out to let her off her harness, but she knocked me to the ground. That’s the last thing I remember for a while.”
“Why is Mother in such bad shape?” I asked Dad, and he looked stricken.
“She must have unhitched Jesse and then she somehow hauled me back into the car, because by the time I came to, I was in the back seat and she was curled over my face, trying to keep the dust off me. I don’t know how long she was exposed like that. Too long. The dirt was filling up around us in the car. I thought we’d drown in it.”
We all looked to Mother then. Her lips were tinged with blue, and the skin on her face had a gray hue.
“We need a doctor,” Henry said.
“How?” Dad said brokenly, looking toward the window. It was light out again, but the sun would set soon, and all I could see was dust. The barn was completely buried—I could tell from the height of the mound that it had collapsed under the weight of dust. Poor Joker was gone, and whether she ran out into the storm or suffocated, Jesse was as good as gone too.
Our nearest neighbor was three miles away, and just like us, the Hutchinson family had neither a phone nor a car. There was a chance if one or more of us tried to walk there, even through the dark and the tail end of the storm, we’d find they were not in any position to help us. And then we’d have a three-mile walk home in the dark to contend with.
“I’ll go,” Henry said.
“You can’t,” Dad said flatly, shaking his head. Henry opened his mouth to protest and Dad exclaimed, “Goddammit, Henry! Would you think something through for once in your goddamned life? What if the storm rears up again? The only reason Mother and I didn’t suffocate right away was that we had the car to shelter in. It’s not worth the risk.”
“But—she looks—” Henry started to say. Then he broke off.
“Dad,” I whispered, a different kind of tear filling my eyes now. “I don’t know if Mother can wait until tomorrow.”
“Well, she has to,” Dad snapped, but then his expression crumbled, and he looked between me and Henry, remorse in his gaze. “She’d kill me if I let you go out there again. We just have to wait.” He turned his attention back to Mother, and he kissed her forehead and whispered gently, “You have to hold on, Ida, you hear me? Just until the sun comes up. Then we’ll get you help.”
Henry went outside to bring us fresh water and to survey the damage, but he refused to give us details of what he’d seen. Dad stayed in the bedroom with Mother, but I got a broom and started to clean. I swept so much dirt out of that house that there were piles of it, two and three feet high, all along the edge of the porch.
Within an hour, it was dark again—this time as it was supposed to be, because the sun had finally set.
I don’t know when I realized Mother wasn’t going to make it. Maybe I should have known from when I first saw how bad she was, or maybe it was better that I didn’t realize, since there was nothing I could do anyway. Slowly, though, over the hours of that long night, I started to wonder and then I started to suspect and then a heavy dread settled over me.
Dad was crying on and off, sometimes silent tears rolling from his eyes that might have been from the dust anyway. Other times his whole body shook with sobs. Henry sat on the floor in the corner of the room, arms wrapped around himself as he stared off into space. I took a clean damp cloth and wiped the dust from Mother’s face and hands. I wet her lips and tried to trickle water into her mouth. Her breaths grew shallower as the night wore on, and the hint of gray and blue in her skin became more obvious, even in the dim light of the kerosene lamp.
“I’ll go anyway. I’ll walk all the way to Oakden if I have to—” Henry blurted, stumbling to his feet, but Dad shut that right down.
“It’s still windy outside and we have no idea if the whole storm has passed. I am not losing two of you in one night!”
Henry slumped again, and the next time I tried to get Mother to drink some water, it ran from her lips onto the pillow. She was limp and heavy against the bedding.
“Please wake up, Mother,” I choked out. There was still grit in my eyes and in my hair and even between my damned teeth. We were all still covered in the very thing that was taking her from us, and there was no way to fix that. We just had to sit in it. “Mother, I love you. Please wake up.”
Not long after that, she exhaled one last gentle breath and she never took another. By then, we were all too exhausted to cry. We sat around her body on the bed, me and Dad holding her hand, Henry slumped by her thighs. The horrible events of those past twelve hours started to feel warped, like I was caught in a surreal dream. Henry eventually climbed up onto the bed beside Mother’s body, as if he were too tired to hold himself up. I stretched out too, still holding her hand.
I didn’t mean to doze, but the highs and the lows of that day drained every bit of strength from my body and sleep simply overtook me. Sometime later I was startled awake by a loud sound. I sat up, confused and bleary-eyed, then cast my gaze around the room.
Mother’s body was on the bed beside me. Henry bolted upright too, his eyes as red-raw as the skin on his face.
But Dad was nowhere to be seen. I went to slip off the bed to look for him and to investigate the sound, but Henry put his hand out to stop me.
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
“But where is—”
“Stay here,” he hissed, and something about his tone scared me so badly, I did. I watched him run from the room, my heart starting to race with a fresh wave of confused dread. Then I finally looked at Mother.
The sun was rising outside and she was bathed in the delicate light of a new day—casting a pinkish glow over her skin. I touched her cheek, telling myself we got it wrong and she was still there—but her skin was cold and she was really gone. How on earth would we go on without her?
Not all of us would.
Some of us wouldn’t even try.
And then I knew what the sound had been. I scrambled from the bed after Henry, running through the house and over the dusty porch, stumbling through the mounds of soft earth that had been dumped all over our home and yard.
I came to a screaming halt when I rounded the corner of the house closest to the bench seat and that Texas live oak. The sun was rising behind the tree, casting vibrant shades of pink and red and gold over the new morning.
In silhouette, I saw the outline of that battered tree and I saw the bench beneath it, and then I saw my brother on his knees in the dirt, cradling my father’s body in his arms.