by Karen Hesse
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.