Out of the Dust Read online

  they’ve delivered their harvest too,

  dropping it at the Joyce City grain elevator.

  Daddy asked Mr. Haverstick how things looked

  and Mr. Haverstick said he figures

  he took eight bushels off a twenty-bushel acre.

  If Daddy gets five bushels to his acre

  it’ll be a miracle.

  June 1934

  On the Road with Arley

  Here’s the way I figure it.

  My place in the world is at the piano.

  I’m earning a little money playing,

  thanks to Arley Wanderdale.

  He and his Black Mesa Boys have connections in

  Keyes and Goodwell and Texhoma.

  And every little crowd

  is grateful to hear a rag or two played

  on the piano

  by a long-legged, red-haired girl,

  even when the piano has a few keys soured by dust.

  At first Ma crossed her arms

  against her chest

  and stared me down,

  hard-jawed and sharp, and said I couldn’t go.

  But the money helped convince her,

  and the compliment from Arley and his wife, Vera,

  that they’d surely bring my ma along to play too,

  if she wasn’t so far gone with a baby coming.

  Ma said

  okay,

  but only for the summer,

  and only if she didn’t hear me gripe how I was tired,

  or see me dragging my back end around,

  or have to call me twice upon a morning,

  or find my farm chores falling down,

  and only if Arley’s wife, Vera, kept an eye on me.

  Arley says my piano playing is good.

  I play a set of songs with the word baby in the title,

  like “My Baby Just Cares for Me”

  and “Walking My Baby Back Home.”

  I picked those songs on purpose for Ma,

  and the folks that come to hear Arley’s band,

  they like them fine.

  Arley pays in dimes.

  Ma’s putting my earnings away I don’t know where,

  saving it to send me to school in a few years.

  The money doesn’t matter much to me.

  I’d play for nothing.

  When I’m with Arley’s boys we forget the dust.

  We are flying down the road in Arley’s car,

  singing,

  laying our voices on top of the

  beat Miller Rice plays on the back of Arley’s seat,

  and sometimes, Vera, up front, chirps crazy notes

  with no words

  and the sounds she makes seem just about amazing.

  It’s being part of all that,

  being part of Arley’s crowd I like so much,

  being on the road,

  being somewhere new and interesting.

  We have a fine time.

  And they let me play piano, too.

  June 1934

  Hope in a Drizzle

  Quarter inch of rain

  is nothing to complain about.

  It’ll help the plants above ground,

  and start the new seeds growing.

  That quarter inch of rain did wonders for Ma, too,

  who is ripe as a melon these days.

  She has nothing to say to anyone anymore,

  except how she aches for rain,

  at breakfast,

  at dinner,

  all day,

  all night,

  she aches for rain.

  Today, she stood out in the drizzle

  hidden from the road,

  and from Daddy,

  and she thought from me,

  but I could see her from the barn,

  she was bare as a pear,

  raindrops

  sliding down her skin,

  leaving traces of mud on her face and her long back,

  trickling dark and light paths,

  slow tracks of wet dust down the bulge of her belly.

  My dazzling ma, round and ripe and striped

  like a melon.

  July 1934

  Dionne Quintuplets

  While the dust blew

  down our road,

  against our house,

  across our fields,

  up in Canada

  a lady named Elzire Dionne

  gave birth to five baby girls

  all at once.

  I looked at Ma,

  so pregnant with one baby.

  “Can you imagine five?” I said.

  Ma lowered herself into a chair.

  Tears dropping on her tight stretched belly,

  she wept

  just to think of it.

  July 1934

  Wild Boy of the Road

  A boy came by the house today,

  he asked for food.

  He couldn’t pay anything, but Ma set him down

  and gave him biscuits

  and milk.

  He offered to work for his meal,

  Ma sent him out to see Daddy.

  The boy and Daddy came back late in the afternoon.

  The boy walked two steps behind,

  in Daddy’s dust.

  He wasn’t more than sixteen.

  Thin as a fence rail.

  I wondered what

  Livie Killian’s brother looked like now.

  I wondered about Livie herself.

  Daddy asked if the boy wanted a bath,

  a haircut,

  a change of clothes before he moved on.

  The boy nodded.

  I never heard him say more than “Yes, sir” or

  “No, sir” or

  “Much obliged.”

  We watched him walk away

  down the road,

  in a pair of Daddy’s mended overalls,

  his legs like willow limbs,

  his arms like reeds.

  Ma rested her hands on her heavy stomach,

  Daddy rested his chin on the top of my head.

  “His mother is worrying about him,” Ma said.

  “His mother is wishing her boy would come home.”

  Lots of mothers wishing that these days,

  while their sons walk to California,

  where rain comes,

  and the color green doesn’t seem like such a miracle,

  and hope rises daily, like sap in a stem.

  And I think, some day I’m going to walk there too,

  through New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada.

  Some day I’ll leave behind the wind, and the dust

  and walk my way West

  and make myself to home in that distant place

  of green vines and promise.

  July 1934

  The Accident

  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

  Burns

  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

  Nightmare

  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

  A Tent of Pain

  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

  Drinking

  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

  Devoured

  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

  Blame

  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

  Birthday

  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

  Roots

  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,