We are headed for New York.
I know that above anything else I owe you in this letter, I owe you an apology. I’m sorry that I couldn’t bring myself to say good-bye to you. I know I snuck us out of Canaan like thieves in the night. I never dreamt that, between you and me, I’d be the leaver and not the left. And I hope one day you’ll understand that it took all my courage just to go, with none left to tell you I was going.
Our first morning, we managed to hitch a ride from a wealthy couple in a brand-new Buick outside Canaan. Two more rides and long hours of walking have brought us this far since. I’ll never forget the shock of that first morning.
What we saw in the hundred miles we rode that day made my heart sink. Town after town, mile after mile, we passed emptiness and desolation—the ground stripped up and blown away, the acres rolling and featureless like the heart of a desert. Mama used to say that when she arrived in Kansas it was bluestem and birds as far as you could see.
It was treacherous and slow, with dust drifts covering the roads in many places and dirt coating the windshield. At times our driver had to stick his head out the window just to see. We felt lucky though, as we drove past people who were stranded, their cars shorted out or their wagons stuck in the dirt.
It always felt like Canaan was in the eye of the storms that were suffocating us. But driving those miles, I finally understood we have only been a speck in a desert of loss. Ellis, they say it’s us who have torn up the land. If that’s true, how could we have such power to destroy? And can we ever fix it?
I don’t know what turned my steps east instead of west, after slipping Beezie out of bed and packing our few things and making it past you and Mama and the end of the drive and town with her on my back—or why I stood on one side of the road to look for a ride instead of the other. I like to think it’s some inner compass, telling me the way I need to go. But I think probably it was an impulse, and nothing to do with which way was right.
The whole time I stood there, I was so near turning back I started retracing my steps home, hobbling back the way we’d come, already defeated.
And then the Buick appeared in the distance and slowed to a stop in front of us.
And a minute later, we were gone.
Beezie hasn’t forgiven me for taking her. At the time she was too groggy to know what was happening. Now she doesn’t understand I had no choice. I suppose you and Mama won’t understand either.
We heard this morning that the world hasn’t ended back home but that it’s come close, and that the other night Kansas had the storm to end all storms. They say the dust reached ten thousand feet in the air, and the haze stretched all the way to New York and three hundred miles out to sea, dusting the ships like rain. Here, we could only see a haze floating over the sun.
The only thing that keeps me going is my hope that Beezie will get better and Kansas will get better, and that I’ll make it back to you. Though I don’t know if I will, and I don’t know if you’ll wait.
I hope you got the letter I left outside your door—it is from Lenore to Mama. I hope it explains some things I couldn’t say before I left. There were more, but those were about Mama and Lenore before me, and I left them for her to keep for herself. I left them on the kitchen table and then on second thought, I left my journal too. She’ll know about us now, and I hope it doesn’t cause problems for you. But I don’t care for keeping secrets anymore.
Trust in me, you said, the other night. Let me save you.
But it’s clear now that you can’t save us, and Mama can’t save us, and God won’t save us, and the Electric won’t save us.
So we have to try and save ourselves.
P.S. Please tell Mama we are all right. I’m too angry to write to her, and I imagine she’s too angry to want to hear from me.
Love, Catherine
AUGUST 5, 1934
Dear Ellis,
It’s taken two days of walking and catching rides to make it to Harrisburg. Mostly, when we’re not riding, I carry Beezie on my back. I count our money every night, and it’s never enough.
Today we crossed paths with a group of travelers who overlapped us like a big galaxy swirling around a little one—we shared news and a little food and then parted ways. People are drifting all over the country, crisscrossing each other—carrying suitcases, camped beside the road, or sleeping in their cars. We’re homesick all the time, but we’ve decided we can’t get enough of the miles and miles of lush green pine trees. We’ve seen ugly and beautiful things—an airplane pulling an ad that said Smoke Lucky Strike Cigarettes, misty hills and fog-filled lakes that look like they’re out of a fairy tale.
The thing I hate to see is the way people look at us—like we’re carrying something they don’t want to catch.
Last night, Beezie took me by surprise.
“How are you going to marry Ellis if he’s in Canaan and we’re in New York?” she asked. She always picks up on more than you think she does.
“What makes you think I’d marry him?” I said.
She had a coughing fit after that, but it didn’t deter her. “I don’t want you to end up an old maid,” she said as soon as she could breathe again. “All alone.”
“I’m not alone. I’m with you, aren’t I?” I said.
“Doesn’t count.”
“Of course it counts.”
“Not if you’re an old maid.”
I gave up. As you know all too well, you can’t win an argument with Beezie.
She’s wheezing beside me now, in her sleep. I always know exactly where she is because of that whistling sound in her chest that fills me with dread. I’ve taken her out of the dust, but that hasn’t taken the dust out of her.
All day all I think about is taking care of Beezie, and whether this will help her, and I only let my mind wander to other things after she falls asleep—mostly to you and to Mama and Lenore.
The more I think, the more I wonder who am I if I’m not Mama’s and the farm’s, and the girl who’s always been hoping to be yours? I’m trying to find out. And I’m sorry to be so blunt, and to tell you about you and me as if it weren’t you I was talking to. But you are the only person I can show myself to, Ellis. You always made my rough edges feel real.
It’s strange, but what makes me angriest with Mama is not that she lied to me and that all this time I had a mother I didn’t even know about (though I can’t think of Mama as anything but Mama, even now, and it’s hard to think how Lenore was my mother too, though I know it’s true). What hurts me worse is how Mama abandoned her and tried to pull her down when they were kids. I wonder more than anything whether, when the woman who gave me life showed up with me in her belly, was Mama happy to see her? It seems to make all the difference, whether or not she loved her in the end.
Where are you sitting while you read this? Do you still think I’ve made a mistake? Are you angry with me? Do you want to forget me? I wonder these things all the time.
Love, Catherine
AUGUST 6, 1934
Tomorrow, it happens. I’m breathless and maybe more scared than I’ve ever been by any duster. If all goes well, we’ll arrive in New York by walking across the George Washington Bridge. I’m so scared and excited and hopeful and terrified my hands are shaking as I write. What will we find when we get there?
For the last night of our journey I’m sitting here with only our campfire and the big black sky and the millions of stars to keep me company.
Tomorrow feels like flipping a coin. Every moment I wonder if I’ve done the right thing, but tomorrow we begin to find out, and I almost can’t stand the thought of that.
We’ve seen so many other people trailing in the same direction as we are, cars packed to the gills. I want to have hope for them too, but in my mind, I’m ruthless. I want other people to survive, but I want Beezie to survive more. I want to think that I’m special and Beezie is special and that whoever is up there, if anyone is, has His eye on us . . . and that we’ll make it even if other people d
on’t. I want Beezie to be the lucky one. I am so selfish for her welfare I think I could smother anyone who got in the way, and I know that’s evil, and yet I can’t feel any other way.
I’ll mail this from the road tomorrow if I can. And I’ll write again when I can tell you whether New York is going to save or sinks us. I won’t write until I know for sure.
I think it would be too easy, otherwise, to get turned back once we are there. I think now is the time I need to put you and home behind me, if I’m to make any go of it at all.
Love, Catherine
JANUARY 15, 1935
Dear Ellis,
It’s been almost six months since I last saw you, and five since I wrote, and I think this may be the last letter I ever send to you. After so much time, I wonder if you think of me as much as I think of you. And I wonder if you do, what you think. Are you still waiting for me or have you let me go? I think time works differently depending on where you are, and whether you’re the leaver or the left, so I can’t assume I know.
I’m sitting against the living room radiator in an old apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. My face and hands are freezing, but my back feels like it’s on fire. Still, I can’t bring myself to pull away from the heat.
The room is shared with five other people, Okies like me. It’s cramped, shabby, and cold—with peeling paint and mice scrabbling up and down behind the walls.
It’s not where I expected to be, and there’s so much that has changed, and so many things have happened, and some are harder to write than others. I think this whole time, I’ve been trying to keep my promise to you and myself, of waiting until I could say that yes I’m coming home, or no, I’m not. But until now, it’s been hard to make out what’s ahead of me, and at first, the days were just too full to think straight.
It rained the entire first week we arrived in Manhattan, but it was good luck for us. So few people were out in the downpour that I was the first to reply to a Help Wanted sign that was posted at a local laundry. (Jobs are so hard to come by here.) By asking around I rented a spot in this apartment that same night—just a section of the living room, really, shared with three other people separated by sheets—and have lived here ever since.
From that day on, I worked every day all day until I wanted to fall down (and you know I’m used to work). Meanwhile, Beezie didn’t get better . . . she got worse.
As soon as we were settled, I spent what little money we had to take her to a doctor at Mercy Hospital. He barely had to look at her to tell me the problem: that the dust had damaged her lungs so much that they couldn’t flush the bad things out. That’s why even though we’d left home, she was still as bad as ever.
He told me that with time, they could heal, but to watch for fever because that would mean infection. He said if that happened to rush her to him right away. The only thing we could do in the meantime was give her rest, and food, and air—none of which are all that easy to come by here.
When I wrote to Mama that night—just one quick letter, nothing more—to tell her where we were and that we were okay and to ask her to pass that on to you, I didn’t tell her what the doctor said. I don’t know, now, looking back, if that was the right choice or not. I didn’t apologize either. My anger was still too sharp; it outweighed my guilt for leaving. Then again, if she’d known we were leaving she never would have let us go.
Those first weeks, the thing that shocked us most about the city was the absence of the sky. You can’t see it unless you make a point of looking for it—maybe you remember that. Even right now I’m looking out my window at bricks. For someone who grew up with an endless view, it still unsettles me. And I can’t get used to the grayness.
But there are good things too: in place of space there is endless electricity. So many lights you’d think we were living in a constellation. And theaters, music—people gobbling life up like it was about to disappear. You can stay out all night if you want and nobody cares. You can do just about anything and nobody cares; it feels like even God can’t see you. It’s a place that breaks your heart and makes you giddy at the same time.
It was so cold some of those early days that I could swear my blood froze solid. I thought Kansas could be frigid, but it has nothing on the wind tunnels of the avenues. And as fall marched on into winter, Beezie got more lethargic and more sick. It drove me half-crazy having a life—the dearest life I know—balanced in my hands like that, with no one else to lean on. It was like hot coals in my stomach all the time.
Whenever Beezie was at her worst, I talked her through it by talking us to Canaan. I’d describe the day we’d get to go home, riding down the highway, or maybe on a train first class if we were lucky and suddenly, inexplicably rich . . . walking around the bend of Jericho Road that leads to the first sight of the house. In real life I’d take her for walks by the Hudson River to breathe the air until our faces were so cold they felt like they’d fall off.
The truth is that from the first, New York didn’t feel like where we were supposed to be. “It’s not like I pictured,” Beezie pointed out one of those afternoons. “We’re not sparkly here.”
I laughed and said that didn’t make sense. But I do believe, now, that places change you, and that while the city was lit up all around us, we were growing flatter and smaller by the day.
“We need Mama,” Beezie said.
I couldn’t forgive Mama enough to agree yet. I’d think about Lenore, who’d loved me and loved Mama too.
And then I lost my job, by falling asleep on my feet after a long night comforting Beezie. I couldn’t find another one after that—too many desperate people wanting the same thing. I cried the first time we waited on a breadline. It was both the humiliation and my sinking realization that the city was defeating us.
I began to plan our trip home.
But that’s when we met Sofia Ortiz.
LATER—
She swept into our rat-infested apartment one morning with a suitcase and her chin lifted up like she was walking into a palace. She had hair as short as a boy’s, and a bag full of clothes, and nothing else, but it was like she owned everything in sight.
“Sofia,” she introduced herself, giving me and then Beezie a handshake that could break bones. She’d just arrived in the city and rented a corner of the room, which she decorated with anything—sticks she found in the park, pieces of junk from the street—and made it something like home.
She threw herself into cleaning the entire apartment, even the areas that belonged to other people. Instead of annoying everyone, it won them over. When one of our apartment mates asked her why she’d cut her hair so short, she said simply, “It was in the way,” and blew a breath at her bangs. Then she disappeared for hours at a time, and she came back one afternoon with a job at a stable uptown.
She’d often try to help people around the house, offering advice, giving them her undivided attention, talking politics, sharing the news from the papers with people who didn’t read, or who only read Spanish. It was Sofia who first told us about the government projects they were doing back home, buying back big parts of the plains and reseeding them with grass, showing farmers how to plant to keep the soil in place like it used to be.
After that we would see her come and go, but with all of us so busy surviving (I was down to almost nothing of my shrinking savings), we didn’t really talk until one night, when Beezie coughed for hours without letting up.
Sofia emerged from her sheets, disheveled and, I thought, annoyed, and disappeared into the kitchen. When she returned she had a metal bowl full of hot, steaming water in her hands.
“Can I?” she asked, her hair standing up all over the place and her face still smushed from sleep. I nodded.
She knelt by Beezie and unrolled a blanket from under her arm and laid it over Beezie’s head like a tent, putting the bowl of hot water underneath.
“Breathe,” she said, and Beezie did, sucking in air, pushing it out in rattling bursts. “Try to breathe as deeply as you can
.”
Beezie began to breathe more slowly and grow calmer.
“I’ll be right back,” Sofia said. She returned with a little brown bag, pulled out a small jar of some kind of spice and another jar of honey, and poured a little of the hot water out into a tin mug, mixing it all together.
“Saffron helps,” she said.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked. Though she was young like me, she moved with the confidence of someone who knew everything.
Her hands worked in her bag, going through this and that jar as she looked for what she needed. “I’m a veterinarian,” she said, giving me a rueful smile. “I’m a lot of things.”
Beezie had calmed down by this point, and her breath was coming clearer, and Sofia pulled the tent off of her head.
“Beezie? Can I listen to you?”
“Yes,” I said quickly, and Beezie widened her eyes at me accusingly as Sofia put her stethoscope to her chest, then pulled back and put her hand on her forehead. Before Beezie could protest she pulled up her shirt and slapped a mustard pack across the middle of her rib cage.
For a moment Beezie poked and prodded it with her fingers, deciding whether or not to be outraged, I suppose, and then she leaned against me, exhausted.
Sofia sat with us in companionable silence as I rocked her.
“Thank you,” I said quietly, and she shrugged. She cocked her head toward Beezie, then back at me.
“The congestion . . . she’s full of dust,” she said, only half a question.
I nodded.
She shook her head. “The little ones—they get it the worst. It’s a good reason to leave. So many good reasons. I can give you some of this—saffron, mustard. They help. You can try garlic soup too,” she added. “But really, these are mostly home remedies.” She leaned forward and tousled Beezie’s hair. “She should go back to the doctor,” she said.
“We can’t afford it,” I said. “I don’t have a job.”
“I’ll find you one,” Sofia said simply. I couldn’t make out if she was truly so confident or really just good at pretending. I’ve never met someone so talented at making life submit to her.
Midnight at the Electric Page 15