TESTED BY DUST

While we sat taking our six-weeks test, the wind rose and the sand blew right through the cracks in the schoolhouse wall, right through the gaps around the window grass, and by the time the tests were done, each and every one of us was coughing pretty good and we all needed a bath. I hope we get bonus points for testing in a dust storm.  

BANKS

Ma says, everything we lost when the banks closed 'cause they didn't have enough cash to go around, all the money that's ours is coming back to us in full. Good. Now we have money for a doctor when the baby comes. 

BEAT WHEAT

County Agent Dewey had some pretty bad news. One quarter of the wheat is lost: blown away or withered up. What remains is little more than a wisp of what it should be. And every day we have no rain, more wheat dies. County Agent Dewey says, "Soon there won't be enough wheat for seed to plant next fall."

The piano is some comfort in all this. I go to it and I forget the dust for hours, testing my long fingers on wild rhythms, but Ma slams around in the kitchen when I play and after a while she sends me to the store. Joe De La Flor doesn't see me pass him by; he rides his fences, dazed by dust. I wince at the sight of his rib-thin cattle. But he's not even seeing them. I look at Joe and know our future is drying up and blowing away with the dust.  

GIVE UP ON WHEAT

Ma says, "Try putting in a pond, Bayard. We can fill it off the windmill. We've got a good well." Daddy grumbles, "The water'll seep back into the ground as fast as I can pump it, Poi. We'll dry up our well and then we'll have nothing." "Plant some other things, then," Ma says.

"Try cotton, sorghum. If we plant the fields in different crops, maybe some will do better, better than wheat." Daddy says, "No. It has to be wheat. I've grown it before. I'll grow it again." But Ma says, "Can't you see what's happening, Bayard? The wheat's not meant to be here." And Daddy says, "What about those apple trees of yours, Poi? You think they are? Nothing needs more to drink than those two. But you wouldn't hear of leveling your apples, would you?"

Ma is bittering. I can see it in her mouth. "A pond would work," she says, sounding crusty and stubborn. And Daddy says, "Look it, Poi, who's the farmer? You or me?" Ma says, "Who pays the bills?" "No one right now," Daddy says. Ma starts to quaking but she won't let Daddy see. Instead, she goes out to the chickens and her anger, simmering over like a pot in an empty kitchen, boils itself down doing chores.  

WHAT I DON'T KNOW

My teacher, Miss Freeland, is singing at the Shrine along with famous opera stars from all around the country in a play called Madame Butterfly.

I've never heard of that play.

"Most everyone's heard of Madame Butterfly,

Mad Dog says.

How does that singing plowboy know something I don't? And how much more is out there everyone else has heard of except me?

Apple Blossoms

Ma has been nursing these two trees for as long as I can remember. In spite of the dust, in spite of the drought, because of Ma's stubborn care, these trees are thick with blossoms, delicate and pinky-white. My eyes can't get enough of the sight of them. I stand under the trees and let the petals fall into my hair, a blizzard of sweet-smelling flowers, dropped from the boughs of the two placed there in the front yard by Ma before I was born, that she and they might bring forth fruit into our home, together. 

World War

Daddy was just seventeen when he fought in the Great War off in France. There's not much he's willing to say about those days, except about the poppies. He remembers the poppies, red on the graves of the dead. Daddy says that war tore France up worse than a tornado, worse than a dust storm, but no matter, the wild poppies bloomed in the trail of the fighting, brightening the French countryside. I wish I could see poppies growing out of this dust.  

Apples

Ma's apple blossoms have turned to hard green balls. To eat them now, so tart, would turn my mouth inside out, would make my stomach groan. But in just a couple months, after the baby is born, those apples will be ready and we'll make pies and sauce and pudding and dumplings and cake and cobbler and have just plain apples to take to school and slice with my pocket knife and eat one juicy piece at a time until my mouth is clean and fresh and my breath is nothing but apple. 

Dust and Rain

On Sunday, winds came, bringing a red dust like prairie fire, hot and peppery, searing the inside of my nose, the whites of my eyes. Roaring dust, turning the day from sunlight to midnight. And as the dust left, rain came. Rain that was no blessing. It came too hard, too fast, and washed the soil away, washed the wheat away with it. Now little remains of Daddy's hard work. And the only choice he has is to give up or start all over again. At the Strong ranch they didn't get a single drop. So who fared better? Ma looks out the window at her apple trees. Hard green balls have dropped to the ground. But there are enough left; enough for a small harvest, if we lose no more. 

HARVEST

The combines have started moving across the fields,

bringing in wheat, whatever has managed to grow. Mr. Tuttle delivered the first load to town, selling it for seventy-three cents a bushel. Not bad.

Mr. Chaffin, Mr. Haverstick, and Mr. French, 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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 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. 

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 names. 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 new 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 names with my hands. I did the best I could. But it was no good. Ma got burned bad.

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.

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 Eatens' 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 Eatens' 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. 

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.