by Karen Hesse
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,