Out of the Dust Read online

  who came right by and opened the package up.

  It held a living baby.

  Reverend Bingham took it to Doc Rice.

  Doc checked it, said it was fine,

  only small,

  less than a five-pound sack of sugar,

  and a little cold from

  spending time on the north front steps,

  but Mrs. Bingham

  and the reverend

  warmed that baby with

  blankets and sugar water,

  and tender talk,

  and the whole of Joyce City came forward with gifts.

  I asked my father if we could adopt it,

  but he said

  we stood about as much chance

  of getting that baby

  as the wheat stood of growing,

  since we couldn’t give the baby anything

  not even a ma.

  Then he looked at me

  sorry as dust.

  And to make up for it,

  he pulled out a box with the rest of the clothes

  Ma had made for our new baby

  and told me to drop them by the church if I wanted.

  I found the dimes Ma’d been saving,

  my earnings from the piano,

  inside an envelope,

  in the box of baby Franklin’s nighties.

  She had kept those dimes to send me

  to Panhandle A and M.

  To study music.

  No point now.

  I sat at her piano a long time after I

  got back from the church,

  imagining

  a song for my little brother,

  buried in Ma’s arms on a knoll overlooking the

  banks of the Beaver,

  imagining a song for the Lindbergh baby

  stiff in the woods,

  imagining a song for this new baby

  who

  would not be my father’s son.

  May 1935

  Old Bones

  Once

  dinosaurs roamed

  in Cimarron County.

  Bones

  showing

  in the green shale,

  ribs the size of plow blades,

  hip bones like crank phones,

  and legs running

  like fence rails

  down to a giant

  foot.

  A chill shoots up my spine

  imagining a dinosaur

  slogging out of an Oklahoma sea,

  with turtles swimming around its legs.

  I can see it sunning itself on the swampy banks,

  beyond it a forest of ferns.

  It’s almost easy to imagine,

  gazing out from our house

  at the dust-crushed fields,

  easy to imagine filling in all the emptiness with green,

  easy to imagine such a beast

  brushing an itchy rump against our barn.

  But all that remains of it

  is bone,

  broken and turned to stone,

  trapped in the hillside,

  this once-upon-a-time real-live dinosaur

  who lived,

  and fed,

  and roamed

  like a ridiculous

  long-necked cow,

  and then fell down and died.

  I think for a moment of Joe De La Flor

  herding brontosaurus instead of cattle

  and I

  smile.

  I tell my father,

  Let’s go to the site

  and watch the men chip away with ice picks,

  let’s see how they plaster the bones.

  Please, before they ship the whole thing to Norman.

  I am thinking

  that a dinosaur is getting out of Joyce City

  a hundred million years too late to

  appreciate the trip,

  and that I ought to get out before my own

  bones turn to stone.

  But I keep my thoughts to myself.

  My father thinks awhile,

  rubbing that spot on his neck.

  He looks out the window,

  out across the field,

  toward the knoll where Ma and the baby lie.

  “It’s best to let the dead rest,” he says.

  And we stay home.

  June 1935

  The Dream

  Piano, my silent

  mother,

  I can touch you,

  you are cool

  and smooth

  and willing

  to stay with me

  stay with me

  talk to me.

  Uncomplaining

  you accept

  the cover to your keys

  and still

  you

  make room

  for all that I

  place

  there.

  We close our eyes

  together

  and together find that stillness

  like a pond

  a pond

  when the wind is quiet

  and the surface

  glazes

  gazing unblinking

  at the blue sky.

  I play songs

  that have only the pattern

  of my self in them

  and you hum along

  supporting me.

  You are the

  companion

  to myself.

  The mirror

  with my mother’s eyes.

  July 1935

  Midnight Truth

  I am so filled with bitterness,

  it comes from the dust, it comes

  from the silence of my father, it comes

  from the absence of Ma.

  I could’ve loved her better.

  She could’ve loved me, too.

  But she’s rock and dust and wind now,

  she’s carved stone,

  she’s holding my stone brother.

  I have given my father so many chances

  to understand, to

  reach out, to

  love me. He once did.

  I remember his smile,

  his easy talk.

  Now there’s nothing easy between us.

  Sometimes he takes notice of me,

  like coming after me in the dust.

  But mostly I’m invisible.

  Mostly I’m alone.

  My father’s digging his own grave,

  he calls it a pond,

  but I know what he’s up to.

  He is rotting away,

  like his father,

  ready to leave me behind in the dust.

  Well, I’m leaving first.

  July 1935

  Out of the Dust

  This is not a dream.

  There’s no comfort in dreams.

  I try to contain the ache as I leave my bed,

  I try to still my heart as I

  slip from my room with my kerchief of dimes.

  Moving slowly down the stairs,

  I cross through the kitchen, taking only some

  biscuits,

  and leave my father’s house.

  It’s the middle of the night and I hear every sound

  inside me, outside me.

  I go,

  knowing that I’ll die if I stay,

  that I’m slowly, surely

  smothering.

  I walk through the calm night,

  under the stars.

  I walk to

  where the train stops long enough

  for a long-legged girl to latch on

  and as my heart races

  I feel the earth tremble beneath me and then

  the sound of sharp knives,

  metal against metal,

  as the train pulls up to the station.

  Once I might’ve headed east,

  to Mr. Roosevelt.

  Now I slip under cover of darkness

  inside a boxcar

  and let the train carr
y me west.

  Out of the dust.

  August 1935

  Gone West

  I am stiff and sore.

  In two endless days on this train, I have

  burned in the desert,

  shivered in the mountains,

  I have seen the

  camps of dust-bowl migrants

  along the tracks.

  There was one girl.

  I saw her through the slat in the boxcar.

  She stared up at the passing train.

  She stood by the tracks watching,

  and I knew her.

  August 1935

  Something Lost, Something Gained

  He climbs into my car.

  He’s dirty and he has a sour smell.

  His eyes are ringed by the soil that comes from riding

  trains.

  But there’s a deeper shadow to those eyes,

  like ashes,

  like death.

  He needs a hair comb and a shave,

  and a mending needle applied to his pants.

  He speaks to me,

  “Where you from, miss?” he wants to know.

  He shows me a picture of his family.

  A wife. Three boys.

  The photograph is all he carries.

  That and the shredding, stinking clothes on his back.

  I feed him two of the stale biscuits I’ve been hoarding

  and save the rest.

  I’ll be hungry tonight,

  what with giving my day’s biscuits away.

  But I can see the gaunt of hunger in his cheeks.

  He asks if I have water and I shake my head,

  my tongue thick with thirst.

  He eats the biscuits.

  He doesn’t care they’re caked with dust.

  He finishes eating and crumbs stick to his mustache.

  He’s staring hard at me and his eyes water.

  “I’ve done it again,” he says.

  “Taken food from a child.”

  I show him my cloth bag with more biscuits.

  “At home,” he said, “I couldn’t feed them,

  couldn’t stand the baby always crying.

  And my wife,

  always that dark look following me.

  Couldn’t take no more.

  Lost our land, they tractored us out so’s we had to

  leave,

  rented awhile, then moved in with Lucille’s kin.

  Couldn’t make nothing grow.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  We talked as the train rocked,

  as the cars creaked,

  as the miles showed nothing but empty space,

  we talked through the pink of the setting sun,

  and into the dark.

  I told him about Ma dying.

  I told him about my father,

  and how the thing that scared us both the most

  was being left alone.

  And now I’d gone and left him.

  I told him about the piano,

  and Arley Wanderdale,

  and how I wasn’t certain of the date,

  but I thought it might be my birthday,

  but he was sleeping by then, I think.

  He was like tumbleweed.

  Ma had been tumbleweed too,

  holding on for as long as she could,

  then blowing away on the wind.

  My father was more like the sod.

  Steady, silent, and deep.

  Holding on to life, with reserves underneath

  to sustain him, and me,

  and anyone else who came near.

  My father

  stayed rooted, even with my tests and my temper,

  even with the double sorrow of

  his grief and my own,

  he had kept a home

  until I broke it.

  When I woke,

  the man was gone, and so were my biscuits,

  but under my hat I found the photograph of his

  family,

  the wife and three boys.

  Maybe the photograph was

  left in trade for the biscuits,

  maybe it was a birthday gift,

  the one thing he had left to give.

  The children in the picture were clean and serious,

  looking out with a certain longing.

  The baby had his eyes.

  On the back of the photograph,

  in pencil,

  was the address of his family in

  Moline, Kansas.

  First chance, I’d send the picture back,

  let his wife know he was still alive.

  I got off the train in Flagstaff, Arizona.

  A lady from a government agency saw me.

  She gave me water and food.

  I called Mr. Hardly from her office and asked him to

  let my father know …

  I was coming home.

  August 1935

  Homeward Bound

  Getting away,

  it wasn’t any better.

  Just different.

  And lonely.

  Lonelier than the wind.

  Emptier than the sky.

  More silent than the dust,

  piled in drifts between me

  and my

  father.

  August 1935

  Met

  My father is waiting at the station

  and I call him

  Daddy

  for the first time

  since Ma died,

  and we walk home,

  together,

  talking.

  I tell him about getting out of the dust

  and how I can’t get out of something

  that’s inside me.

  I tell him he is like the sod,

  and I am like the wheat,

  and I can’t grow everywhere,

  but I can grow here,

  with a little rain,

  with a little care,

  with a little luck.

  And I tell him how scared I am about those spots on

  his skin

  and I see he’s scared too.

  “I can’t be my own mother,” I tell him,

  “and I can’t be my own father

  and if you’re both going to leave me,

  well,

  what am I supposed to do?”

  And when I tell Daddy so,

  he promises to call Doc Rice.

  He says the pond is done.

  We can swim in it once it fills,

  and he’ll stock it with fish too,

  catfish, that I can go out and

  catch of an evening

  and fry up.

  He says I can even plant flowers,

  if I want.

  As we walk together,

  side by side,

  in the swell of dust,

  I am forgiving him, step by step,

  for the pail of kerosene.

  As we walk together,

  side by side,

  in the sole-deep dust,

  I am forgiving myself

  for all the rest.

  August 1935

  Cut It Deep

  I went in with Daddy to see Doc Rice.

  Doc said,

  “Why’d you wait so long

  to show someone those spots, Bayard?”

  I scowled at Daddy.

  He looked at the wall.

  I think

  he didn’t care much,

  if he had some cancer

  and took and died.

  Figured he’d see Ma then,

  he’d see my brother.

  It’d be out of his hands.

  He’d be out of the dust.

  Now he’s going to wear bandages

  where Doc cut the cancer out

  the best he could.

  And we have to wait

  and hope Daddy didn’t

  get help too late.

  I ask Doc about my hands.

  “W
hat,” I say,

  “can I do with them?”

  Doc looks carefully at the mottled skin,

  the stretched and striped and crackled skin.

  “Quit picking at them,” he says.

  “Rub some ointment in them before you go to bed,”

  he says.

  “And use them, Billie Jo,” he says.

  “They’ll heal up fine if you just use them.”

  Daddy sits on my bed

  and I open the boxes,

  the two boxes

  that have been in my closet

  for years now.

  The dust is over everything,

  but I blow it off,

  and Daddy is so quiet

  when he sees

  some of the things

  that’re still so strong of Ma,

  and we end up keeping everything but a palmful

  of broken doll dishes.

  I thought once to go through these boxes with

  Ma,

  but Daddy is

  sitting on the edge of my bed.

  My mouth feels cottony.

  I fix dinner

  and Daddy tells me about

  when he was a boy.

  He says, “I wasn’t always sure

  about the wheat,

  about the land,

  about life in the Panhandle.

  I dreamed of running off too,

  though I never did.

  I didn’t have half your sauce, Billie Jo,” he says.

  And it’s the first time I ever knew

  there was so much to the two of us,

  so much more than our red hair

  and our long legs

  and the way we rub our eyes

  when we’re tired.

  October 1935

  The Other Woman

  Her name is Louise,

  she stayed by Daddy the days I was away.

  The first time I met her she came to dinner bringing

  two baskets of food.

  She’s a good cook

  without showing off.

  She has a way of making my father do things.

  When Louise came to dinner,

  Daddy got up and cleaned the kitchen when we were

  done eating.

  He tied an apron around his middle

  and he looked silly as a cow

  stuck in a hole,

  but Louise ignored that,

  and I took a lesson from her.

  We walked around the farm

  even though she’d probably already seen it

  while I was gone.

  She didn’t ask to be taken to my favorite places,

  the loft in the barn,

  the banks of the Beaver,

  the field where you can

  see Black Mesa on a clear day.

  She told me

  she knew Daddy and I had a history before her,

  and she wished she’d been there for the whole thing,

  but she wasn’t and there wasn’t anything to do

  but get over it and get on.