by Harold Bakst
Just then, a grasshopper landed on the ground next to Jennifer. As if the ground were too hot, it jumped up with a click and landed several feet away. Then a second grasshopper landed farther off, hopped with a click and settled near her. These were followed by a third and fourth grasshopper, also hopping with clicks and resettling, and then by still others, all landing here and there, hopping with clicks, and relan-ding like so much popping com. Before long, there were so many grasshoppers falling to the ground, the two excited chickens were having better luck in catching them.
Then the hum grew louder. The sun darkened. And as Jennifer glanced up, seeing the sun dimmed as if behind a scrim, the great cloud burst upon the land like a blizzard of frenzied flecks and glinting sparks, the air filled with a whirring roar. Isaac Caulder, moving off, was lost from view. Indeed, so thick was the blizzard that objects much closer—the well, the stall where the mule bayed wildly, the dugout itself—all disappeared in the blinding storm. Jennifer and her children became quickly spangled with dropping, clinging grasshoppers, which struck hard, like hail. Jennifer frantically tried brushing them off, only to have more settle upon her. “Get inside!” she finally shouted over the din as she shielded her mouth with one hand. She rushed to sweep her children, whom she could hardly see, to shelter.
“Get them off!” cried Emma, cringing frozen where she had been working in the garden and covering her face. Jennifer ushered both her and Peter toward the dugout.
The ground had quickly become inches thick with grasshoppers, and each footstep squished several of them into a slimy mash, smearing the children’s bare feet. Only paces from her door, Jennifer herself slipped on the slushy bodies. As she pushed herself up, her open hand crunched even more of them. Peter darted out to help his mother, but Jennifer lifted herself and pushed him back into the dugout, whereupon she slammed the door behind her.
“Get them off!” repeated Emma, her hands swiping at her sleeves and dress, whose green hem had attracted a particularly thick congregation of grasshoppers. Her mother and brother swiped away at her dress. By the time the grasshoppers had been knocked off, the hem was gone.
Shuddering, Peter next began to shake his own shirt, for grasshoppers had dropped into it, and Jennifer began to shake out her dress. Emma helped, knocking away grasshoppers from her mother’s tusseled hair and onto the dirt floor, where many insects crawled about on long, backward-jointed legs.
Meanwhile, beyond the window, the wide open prairie was no longer to be seen but only the thick roiling air. Some grasshoppers were trying to climb up the panes, only to slide back down again, their bulbous eyes staring blankly inside. Others, in whirring flight, kept thudding against the panes. One pane, which had already been cracked during the transfer from town, now broke, and grasshoppers began flitting into the dimly lit room and settling on the floor, table, chairs, and walls. A few sizzled when they landed on the stove, and a few struggled and then drowned in a pot of water.
Jennifer rushed to stuff one of her blouses into the jagged opening of the window. Meanwhile, those grasshoppers already inside were everywhere eating. They ate into a sack of flour, they pressed themselves into a sugar bowl, they blanketed a loaf of bread, they filled a basket of vegetables from the garden, and they set upon some folded linen lying on the crate. They even gnawed at the sweat-stained handle of the scythe leaning in the comer. Jennifer started for the broom, but its bristles were already being devoured. “Swat them with the books!” she ordered.
“Will they eat us, too?” cried Emma, as she timidly poked at grasshoppers feasting on a McGuffey Reader.
Jennifer knocked them off and grabbed a book. “They will not,” she said, her voice trembling. “This will pass.”
And the three went about the room, swatting at the alldevouring creatures with books. When they were done, the room was splotched with crushed grasshopper bodies. Most of the clothing and linen were in tatters. What did survive was stained by the insects’ brown spit, which was like tobacco juice.
Meanwhile, the roar outside had stopped. The windows once more showed blue sky and open land. “Did they go?” asked Peter, still grasping a book.
Jennifer went to the window. The grasshoppers had not gone. The grass from the dugout to the horizon was scythed down and flat, buried beneath a thick mat of the seething insects. Here and there, a solitary grasshopper took off like a stray spark from the smoldering mass.
The maddened mule had run off, his tether eaten through by the grasshoppers. The hay-covered stall itself had caved in from the weight of the dropping insects. The two chickens, perhaps feeling luckier, were crazed by the manna, and, though they had already become fat and round and could not move so fast, they continued to walk atop the churning insect bodies, their scrawny necks stretched downward as they plucked up grasshopper after grasshopper.
Jennifer threw her tattered shawl about her shoulders and stepped outside. “Momma, don’t!” cried Emma. She made as if to follow, but neither she nor her brother were eager to step barefoot onto the insects.
“Close the door!” said Jennifer, turning. Her children did so to keep more grasshoppers from spilling in. Then they hurried to a window.
“Maw!” came Peter’s muffled voice from behind the pane.
But Jennifer walked away from the dugout. As she did so, she stirred up grasshoppers in her path, sending them hopping and flying in sprays and splashes. It wasn’t long before the lower part of her skirt was covered with the clinging insects. But she paid them little mind. She passed the garden, where all that could be seen of her vegetables were shards of watermelon rind embedded in the mat of jostling insects. She stopped by the well. Its sod wall was covered with grasshoppers. The bucket held a soup of dead and drowning insects. An acrid smell arose from both the bucket and from the well pit. And as she looked out at the unearthly vista, Jennifer saw no bird, no butterfly, but she heard something else upon the wind—the crunching of millions upon millions of tiny jaws eating, eating…
What madness! thought Jennifer. The sky forever buffets this land, and pounds it, and spits on it, and tears at it!
And yet, even as she gazed upon a prairie once more besieged, she knew that the sod below was already pregnant with the grasses and flowers that would emerge next spring. Then, as happened the year before, and would no doubt happen every year, there would return a fresh sea of grass— bluestems mostly, but others, too—and there would be all those hosts of recurring, stubborn flowers: the mats of cat’s paw and pasque flower, the many asters and daisies, the aptly named bird’s-foot, the milkweed with its swarms of monarch butterflies, the goldenrod, the great sunflower, and perhaps even—so it seemed—the prairie widow.