The boy was reluctant but handed the typewriter over.
Jeremiah handed him the rifle.
The boy seemed leery of the weapon, so Jeremiah told him it wasn’t loaded. “It can’t hurt anybody.” The boy smiled again.
“Pretend to shoot those rabbits or something.”
“Pretend to shoot those rabbits.” Instead, the boy dragged the rifle barrel behind him in the dust as he walked. “Pretend to shoot those rabbits. Heads or tails. What’s your name, son? Pretend to shoot those rabbits.”
Jeremiah just let him mumble. No wonder that poor woman had picked this one to sell out of the three. He was liable to drive a person insane. He chuckled, and the boy looked up at him, asking with those big eyes, What’s funny, Mr. Goodbye?
Nothing, he wanted to say. Just as far as buying a kid goes, seems I got me a defective one.
Instead Jeremiah grinned, stuck his unlit cigarette between his lips just to taste the tobacco, and jerked the boy a nod. Together they walked toward the approaching black clouds carrying a typewriter and a rifle barrel carving a meandering groove in the dust.
Making Nowhere by sundown was no longer an option.
Jeremiah guessed they were less than two miles away from the town center, but the duster was nearly upon them and the boy looked anxious. His mumbling had grown quieter but incessant, and instead of dragging the rifle he was hugging it like a blanket.
Fifty yards away stood a sod house, seemingly abandoned. They hurried for it. The rolling black cloud coming at them resembled a thunderboomer, except without the thunder. The black got closer and taller, coiling and rolling like a snow avalanche on its side, silent until the dust started to hit them like tiny glass slivers. They coughed and shielded their eyes. Visibility was suddenly down to ten feet. The sod house disappeared, reappeared, and then vanished in the black dust again. But Jeremiah had seen enough of it to redirect their course. A couple of minutes later he felt the scratchy side wall, a small square window, and, a few paces down, a door.
Something crackled in the air, and the boy jumped.
What at first Jeremiah thought to be lightning strikes turned out to be static electricity, currents of blue and yellow sizzling around the blades on a nearby windmill. Another current shot across the dust like a prairie fire.
Jeremiah pushed the boy inside and closed the door the best he could—a mound of dust had blown inside, jamming it. Black dust still filtered in through the inch-wide crack. They coughed and heaved and spat wet dust on the floor. The boy sneezed black snot and wiped it on his sleeve. Jeremiah looked around. Clearly nobody home.
He found a sheet bundled against the stove and secured it over the door. If only he had water to wet the sheet down. It would have to do. The boy mumbled in the dark corner, holding the typewriter again instead of the rifle. He punched keys even though there was no paper or ribbon in the machine, and it seemed to help keep him calm.
“Keep doing that,” said Jeremiah, searching the sod house for any form of light. “Keep punching those keys.”
“Keep punching those keys,” said the boy. “Those keys. Keep punching those keys.”
Truth be told, the melodic snapping of those keys proved to calm Jeremiah as well.
The boy coughed into his fist and then resumed hitting the keys, as if writing an imaginary letter. How long would the duster last? In prison, although Jeremiah had had no window in his cell, he’d once heard dust scratching the walls nonstop for days.
Twenty minutes later the wind picked up, and the sod walls shifted. Black dust sifted from the roof, sneaked in through the closed window, and continued to blow in around the sheet. The boy typed faster, mumbling under his breath with the hint of a smile.
Jeremiah’s eyes adjusted to the dark. A small tin of Vaseline rested on the floor. He blew dust from his nostrils and coated them with the stuff. He called the boy over and helped do the same to his nostrils.
“That better?”
The boy nodded, mumbled. “That better? That better?”
Jeremiah shushed him.
Wind howled, black dust tapped against the walls, and static electricity crackled.
Jeremiah hunkered in the corner, trying to create a pocket where dust couldn’t go, but it just wasn’t possible. A minute later he felt the boy’s weight leaning against him, burrowing into the valley between his chest and shoulder. Jeremiah at first held his arm up as if afraid to touch the kid, but then slowly lowered it in protection against the dust. He patted the boy’s back, told him to close his eyes and think good thoughts of blue skies and buffalo grass.
He wondered if the boy wasn’t a catalyst of sorts, because for the first time in a long while Jeremiah found himself thinking of the baby boy he and Ellen had been due to have. The one no one ever knew about.
And then his thoughts were interrupted by a voice.
“Peter,” the boy said. “Peter.”
Jeremiah looked down at the head of hair below his chin. “You trying to tell me something? Is that your name?”
“That your name?” the boy mumbled, nodding. “Peter . . . Peter . . .” He grew silent for a beat or two, and then said, “Pumpkin eater. Had a wife but couldn’t keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell . . .”
Jeremiah, so amused that his heart grew warm, spoke along with him. “. . . And there he kept her very well.”
Dust flicked the windows and walls.
“Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” said the boy. “Had another and didn’t love her.”
Jeremiah hadn’t recited the rhyme since he was a boy, yet it came back easily. “Peter learned to read and spell, and then he loved her very well.”
The boy went quiet. Jeremiah could make out the letters on the typewriter keys. The boy punched the letter P, then E, T, E, and finally R.
Jeremiah patted the boy’s back again, shushed him quiet, and continued to shield him from the dust. “Close your eyes now, Peter. Get some rest.”
THREE
Ellen Goodbye was stubborn.
She was a schoolteacher, and come rain or shine, black blizzard or thunderboomer, she was going to teach the children of Nowhere. Half the town wondered the point of it all. What was the learning for? They were right in the middle of the end of days. What would adding two and two get them besides four?
“It’ll get them one step closer,” Ellen would tell the naysayers.
“Closer to what?”
Closer to leaving this place, she’d think, unable to shake the sight of her little boy, James, of late, hacking and wheeze-coughing himself to sleep every night. Instead she’d change course. “Better to fill those fresh brains with good knowledge than let ’em harden with all this dust.”
It hadn’t rained worth a hoot in four years, and when it did, it flash-flooded. Worst drought in history—locals in the southern plains pronounced it “drouth,” but no matter how it was said, it showed no signs of going away.
So Ellen wasn’t waiting; plus it did her good to get out of the house, especially with how her husband, Josiah, was wallowing of late, sneaking drinks of corn liquor in between his coughing fits, staring out the window at what used to be their wheat field and was now miles of dust.
After kissing James on the head, she’d left the house yesterday as usual, despite the warning from Josiah’s father, Wilmington, who’d clutched his head where the bullet had entered three years ago and claimed he felt a duster coming. Like the pressure from that bullet was some kind of weather vane. She didn’t believe him; the dusters simply couldn’t be predicted. And anyway, Wilmington said he felt a duster coming every morning. He liked to hedge his bets and say he told you so.
But with that bullet still lodged in his head, Wilmington was just happy to be alive—tempting fate every day now, trying to see how far he could stretch his luck. Dr. Craven had warned him not to move about too much. The bullet might move. “And if the bullet moves, it’s good-bye, Mr. Goodbye.” The doctor had laughed when he said it, just as Ellen did now remembering.
If she’d listened to her father-in-law yesterday, she wouldn’t have gotten trapped in the schoolhouse with all the kids overnight. She wouldn’t have worried herself half to death about Josiah not watching their son properly while she was gone. But she was stubborn. Determined was more like it. Determined to teach these kids something. Didn’t matter if her fellow teacher had become an exoduster. Mrs. Emory Rochester and her husband had uprooted their family and left town in search of some grass, leaving Ellen alone to teach all the kids. Didn’t matter that the banks had frozen up and the state could no longer pay. She was still going to hammer the words and numbers into their heads if it killed her. She’d been working free for the past ten months anyhow. And seeing the kids lifted her heart, which did its best to sink every day under so much dust.
They’d been in the middle of arithmetic when the duster hit, seventeen kids with ages that ranged from eight to thirteen. They were learning pounds and ounces. Ten-year-old Nicholas Draper was telling a story about how their last cow died two days prior. All skin and bones, but when they cut her open they’d found her belly full of black dust.
“I bet that weighed a lot of pounds, Mrs. Goodbye.”
Ellen was about to agree, sadly of course, when eleven-year-old Rachel Finnigen pointed toward the window. The sun was blotted out. The wind howled. Black dust tapped against the windows, intermittently at first and then in torrents.
Dusters could come out of nowhere. That was the town joke, at least, but when they hit, nothing was funny about it. Ellen and the children knew the drill well enough. There were two buckets of water by the schoolhouse door and a pile of stained sheets that used to be white. It was harder now to prepare for the storms without Emory. Ellen hoped she’d found that green grass, but doubted it. The oldest kids dunked the sheets in water, wrung them out, and hung them over the windows and doors to catch at least some of the dust that got through. Even with the precautions, fat dust motes circulated across the classroom. The students hunkered low. There were tables along the back wall beneath the chalkboards, and they gathered underneath. William Trainer, the oldest— everyone called him Windmill because he was fixing to be as tall as one—carried two wet sheets and hung them from the tabletops like curtains hanging down to protect them from the increasing amount of dust inside the room.
Ellen lit a candle. Windmill lit another; he was the only one allowed to play with fire. He fancied himself an artist. He dripped wax onto paper they kept under the tables and made pictures for the rest of the kids. They sang songs for an hour and told stories for another while dust pummeled the school walls and static electricity crackled like lightning. Ellen passed around Vaseline, and they took turns applying it around their nostrils. Eventually she and Windmill blew out the candles, and some of the kids fell asleep—the ones that didn’t miss their mothers and fathers. The ones that did cried. Ellen stroked their backs and reminded them not to worry. She’d never seen a duster that didn’t eventually pass, and this one would be no different.
How many days in a row now?
Come morning, the sun was high in the sky. Dust covered the floor and desktops. One window was broken. Windmill knew how to replace the small pane of glass and promised to have it done by lunch.
Ellen said there wouldn’t be school today, not after they’d been forced to spend the night together. They’d resume school tomorrow. She couldn’t wait to get home and check on James.
Windmill looked sad. He didn’t have much of a family to go home to; his father was a drunk and his mother, like half the town, had fallen prey to the dust pneumonia. Ellen knew that Windmill had a crush on her. She’d playfully remind him that she was married, with a three-year-old, but he still followed her around like a lost mutt.
Ellen bundled all the muddy sheets into a canvas satchel to be washed later. She escorted the kids outside, counting heads as they stepped into the warm spring sunshine. Most everyone was digging out—sweeping dust from porches, shoveling dust from buried cars. Ned Blythe pulled dust from his mailbox by the armful and then went into a sneezing fit. Front doors were propped open and brooms whisked busily inside the houses and businesses—Richard Klamp’s clothing store; the opera house; Blythe’s Food Store, which hardly had any canned food left; Dr. Craven’s office, which was constantly full of coughers; and the post office, where Phillip Jansen’s mailbags remained empty.
The Nowhere Bank had been closed down since the fall of 1931 and now stood a dilapidated eyesore, broken windows boarded up and painted over with graffiti. It looked like some long-forgotten building ripped from the Old West—swinging doors and all—so inviting for one and all to come leave their money. Some in town wanted it knocked down. It was too painful a reminder of how the bank had fleeced them, like so many banks across the country, backing its promises up with nothing but words, toothy smiles, and greasy handshakes. But Wilmington demanded it stay because it was a reminder.
Of what once was, thought Ellen as she walked through town, remembering what Jeremiah had done the day the bank closed its real doors—the swinging doors were just for show—and how the town had cheered him.
Some of those same town folk had now given up, and their doors stayed closed. What was the point in digging out when another black blizzard could rush through as soon as they put the broom down?
Ellen understood both sides of it.
But now the air was calm, the sky clear.
Noise carried; all that coughing sounded like a tuberculosis hospital. Nowhere Hospital, run by the Catholic sisters, was overrun with coughers.
Somewhere under all the dust were paved roads from when Nowhere had prospered. Every so often, when the wind blew just right, pavement and curbs showed themselves. Not today. Ellen used the buildings as beacons, as well as the telephone lines, although there was no operator anymore inside the telephone office. Mrs. Culver and her husband had left in the spring of 1933, sneaking off in the middle of the night to avoid the scorn, and that luxurious home-to-home conversation they’d once thought magical had gone by the wayside.
Just another exoduster. Another Okie.
Sometimes Ellen wondered, though, if she and the others that stayed weren’t the nonsensical ones.
She passed the town square, the courthouse, and then the jailhouse. Sheriff McKinney was taking a break from sweeping. He waved. Ellen politely waved back, but something inside warned her not to encourage him too much. He’d been acting strangely of late, staring when it wasn’t proper, like he sensed that she and Josiah were in a rut and he was looking to step in. That thought gave her the shivers. And those dead rattlers he’d hung belly-up from the fence around the courthouse, ten of them right in a row, gave her the shivers too. He claimed it would help bring rain, but they’d been hanging there for ten days now with no offerings from the sky.
Her pace quickened up Main Street, where her house stood two stories tall facing the Bentley Hotel. Orion Bentley was digging out too, cheerful as always, but with that air of falsehood that always bothered her—like on the surface he was sunshine and roses, but a smidge sad within. No one could be so charming and welcoming all the time. It wasn’t natural. Orion paused to puff on his cigar. He waved—like he always did with the ladies—then he resumed cleaning. Instead of using a broom, he pendulum-swung a throw rug like it was an elephant trunk, clearing a path up the hotel steps and toward the front door, creating a minor duster of his own.
The Bentley had wooden swinging doors like the bank, giving it the look of an Old West saloon. Its cavernous lobby boasted a piano and a bar that stretched across one side of the room. Back when the town was at full capacity and money circulated like a disease, the entertainment at the hotel had stretched from dusk until dawn, with music and dancing, singing and card playing, billiards and talent shows.
Those things still resonated, but like a ghost would, or the thrum from a recently extracted tooth—echoes more than anything. Still, no one dug out faster and with more gust
o after a duster than Orion Bentley. To him two was still a crowd, and a crowd meant a party.
Ellen wished Orion a good day and then headed for her house, which was Wilmington’s house really. She and Josiah had planned on building their own but never got around to it. Once Wilmington got hit with that stray bullet the day Jeremiah was arrested, she’d told Josiah they should just stay and take care of him anyway. Besides, there wasn’t any money to build their own, and no banks for lending.
Speaking of her father-in-law, he was out of the house again, digging around in what used to be their garden—vegetables, potatoes, and a few rows of corn. Now it was a slanted dust drift topped with thistle. In the past month Wilmington had begun to test the waters of Dr. Craven’s instructions, venturing to their front porch when the air was clear or walking across the street to bump gums with Orion, but he certainly had no business with a shovel.
She hurried across the street. James must have survived the night fine; otherwise Wilmington wouldn’t have been outside working. They would have come found her had her baby’s condition gotten worse. Unless Wilmington was trying to uncover what lay on the other side of the fence—their family cemetery.
“Wilmington, put that shovel down. What are you doing?”
Sweat dripped from his wrinkled brow. His face was hard-lined from decades under the sun, but still handsome beneath the specks of white in his hair. “You ask funny questions, Ellen. What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“Hopefully not fixing to dig a new grave.”
“The boy’s fine.”
“I was referring to you.”
“Ah, it ain’t moved in three years. It ain’t gonna move now.” They’d spoken so much of the bullet that they didn’t have to mention it by name anymore.
Ellen heard no coughing or crying. Her eyes blinked toward the house.
“Josiah got him to sleep a few hours ago.” Wilmington leaned on his shovel. “Coughed half the night.” He raised his eyebrows. “The duster . . .”
What Blooms from Dust Page 3