Peter and James stood mesmerized, not so much by the sight of it but the sound—the rumbling of so many jack feet pounding the dust, kicking up dust swirls as they sprinted and darted and tumbled over one another in one big pell-mell of panic. Ears and feet and tails and dust, corralled by the dogs and men on horseback. Shots fired, echoed, and the rabbits clumped blindly, funneling into the pit created by the fences.
Peter put his hands over his ears and watched the sky, where birds circled, returning from somewhere. Ellen wondered where the birds nested with no more trees around.
She looked away when they started clubbing the jackrabbits, just as she always did. The sound brought tears to her eyes. She wiped them, tightened her jaw, and tried to not let the boys see. The crying of those rabbits wasn’t so different from the sounds the cattle had made when the government men came out to shoot them all for a dollar each. She supposed she’d fallen for Josiah long before that day, but after what he did that afternoon with those dying cows, and right in front of those government men, she’d never again questioned why she’d married him. Another necessary evil. The cows were going to die anyway. But she couldn’t deny the fact that what Josiah had done had reminded her too much of Jeremiah, which was probably why none of them had ever spoken about it.
The jackrabbits again stole her focus.
Peter pushed his hands harder against his ears and closed his eyes so tight the skin around them wrinkled. His dimples disappeared as he puffed his cheeks out, holding in the air for a few seconds before letting out a loud cry of his own, an ear-piercing ululation that even got some of the clubbers to stop clubbing.
But not all.
Just then the circling birds started squawking, panicked like the jackrabbits, before they suddenly flew south in a cluster.
The jackrabbits that had yet to be corralled began defying the flow, and many sprinted south like the birds. Ellen picked up James to keep him from being trampled. He, too, had begun to cry, although not as loudly as Peter, who trembled now as thousands of jacks followed the birds, dozens of them brushing over their feet and ankles, fleeing in a panic.
More men stopped clubbing.
Nicholas Draper dropped his bat and watched the exodus of the birds as more joined the flight, all headed south. Ellen couldn’t hear what Nicholas said to Windmill at that moment because of all the crying from Peter and James and the jacks, but she could read his lips: What’s going on?
Windmill shook his head, looked around. He didn’t know either.
The air felt different, like the pressure had shifted, although there was still no breeze.
The dogs that had been herding the jacks began sniffing the air, and the horses, tails switching, did the same. One horse bucked his rider. Another spun in a circle, chasing its tail.
Wilmington approached, staggering, and then he dropped to one knee, clutching his temples.
“Wilmington!” screamed Ellen. Had the bullet just moved? She held James against her hip with one arm and coaxed Peter with the other. Peter wouldn’t budge. Bringing him had been a bad idea.
Wilmington made it to his feet. “It’s bad. Real bad, Ellen. The pressure.”
“What pressure?”
“Like when I can feel a duster coming, except ten times worse.” He winced, breathing heavy. “Where’s Josiah? Where’s Orion? We gotta go. Gotta shut this thing down.”
The sky was still clear and blue. Nobody would believe him.
Ellen didn’t believe him.
The day was too nice. Too perfect.
The rabbits’ cries reverberated as if the dust had walls. Josiah was in the mix, beating those rabbits with a fury that made Ellen want to cry harder. Like he was taking out some deeply held rage.
She handed James over to Wilmington. “Hold him.” She hiked up her dress and high-stepped into the scrum. Jacks sprinted through her legs and around her ankles. She told Nicholas Draper to head on home, and Windmill too. A big duster was on the way. They didn’t question Miss Goodbye. None of the kids ever did. She took a bat right out of Dr. Craven’s hands in midswing and told him to start getting people home. He’d started to ask why before noticing the seriousness in her eyes—she’d given him that look.
Ellen plowed on toward Josiah, screaming his name over and over until he finally looked her way.
He must have noticed the blood smear she now felt across her face. “Ellen?”
“Josiah, we’ve got to go. Something isn’t right.”
He looked to the sky, where the birds screeched in rhythm with the rabbits.
“Temperature’s dropping.” Josiah spotted Orion across the way. “Orion!”
Orion wasn’t taking part in the actual clubbing—he was still in his tuxedo—but he was deep in the mix and puffing on his cigar. He removed the nub from his mouth when he saw Wilmington not taking part anymore. He was holding his grandson and motioning for him to come.
“We’ve got to go,” Ellen screamed again. “A duster is coming. The mother of all dusters.”
Josiah looked to be in a stupor. She grabbed his shirt atop his shoulder and yanked until he fell into a mound of dead jackrabbits. He got to his feet and followed her over the slain animals. And that’s when she saw it, coming from the north, from Kansas—what she at first had mistaken to be the horizon because of the sheer width of it. But it wasn’t the horizon. Horizons didn’t move like that. It was the biggest and blackest duster she’d ever seen, stretching like pitch and tar for what had to be hundreds of miles east and west because she couldn’t find the ends of it. It was an inch tall at first, but that quickly changed, growing by the second even though no sound yet accompanied the arrival and no breeze moved the air.
Orion stepped over the dead rabbits with his eyes peeled toward the dark line over the horizon. He dropped his cigar nub to the ground. “Run,” he said first to Ellen and Josiah, lips moving with no more words coming out, probably calculating in his head how much dirt from how many states was coming their way. And then his voice returned, loud enough to reach the town folk who hadn’t already dropped their bats and clubs to do so and turn toward what was coming. “Run!”
Ellen rode in the back as she had on the way to the rabbit drive, except now she was in the middle, an arm around each boy as they watched out the window at all that growing blackness.
Josiah pressed hard on the gas, and the car responded, but not without a groan and some rumbling from the undercarriage. Dust swirled from so many cars leaving at once, panicked like Ellen had never seen during one of the dusters. Wilmington slumped forward with his fingers on his temples. She leaned up and touched his shoulder and asked if he was okay. He nodded but said nothing.
It was sunny like the entire day had been, and then all of the sudden it grew darker. The duster had stretched high enough to block out that same sun, like an entire mountain range had lifted from the earth.
Even as they watched it roll in, all was quiet and the air remained still. But that all changed in a snap. The wires connected to the poles began to hum. The temperature plummeted, the wind rushed in, and suddenly their car felt like it weighed nothing at all. Josiah did his best to keep control, but the doors rattled and the wheels shook.
Four hundred yards from town, their Motel T short-circuited and rolled to a stop. Josiah cursed and swore until James started crying again. Josiah hit the steering wheel with the meat of his hand, three times like hammer blows, and then he jumped from the car. Static permeated the air. Ellen’s arm hair tingled. He shouldn’t have removed the chains.
There was no time to ponder. They’d have to walk the rest of the way. She ushered the boys out and opened the door for Wilmington, who took a minute to hunch over with his hands on his knees.
Dozens of other cars had stalled. Those that were still running had already picked up walkers until there was no more room in them. Those remaining hunkered away from the wind and closed their eyes to slits as abrasive dust began to clip their skin. They were totally unprepared—no masks, goggles,
damp rags or nothing. Many of them had left their windows open at home to allow in the fresh air throughout the day, but all they’d be letting in now was what Wilmington had predicted to be the lifted soil from at least four states.
Peter was walking too slowly, stunned by the black, roiling wall preparing to bury them—like a tornado spinning sideways, picking up soil, chewing it up and slamming it back down to the ground as it moved—so Josiah picked the boy up and hurried on with him.
Grown men struggled to stay upright.
Ellen clenched her stomach muscles against the tumult and urged herself onward, trying like the dickens to keep the dust from James’s face, which was practically buried against her chest. The main dust hadn’t even hit them yet. It was approaching town like a great big wide open mouth, though, big enough to swallow all of Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas and Colorado in one big gulp.
Another car stalled—Dr. Craven’s. He practically fell out as the door swung open, and he left it that way as he ran. He spotted Ellen and their group and then came along to help Wilmington make his way back to town.
Their clothes rippled in the wind. An electricity pole splintered with a crunch and then snapped in half as the buzzing wires pulled it to the dust, the lines flashing with blue-fire current. A stalled car had both doors open on the north side, and a gust of wind picked it right up and overturned it. The Goodbyes avoided it as the car spun clockwise on its roof.
Roof shingles lifted from houses and flew through the air like fleeing birds. A shovel spiraled through the dusty air like a spear, and the blade stuck in Ned Blythe’s barn door with a twang and wobble.
“Keep going,” Ellen screamed like she was in a war zone. Josiah took the lead with Peter, doing his best to be the windbreaker as the Bentley Hotel loomed near. But the front edge of the duster had already swallowed the north side of Nowhere—First Baptist gone in a blink, the black rolling clouds now a good two thousand feet up into what minutes ago had been the sky.
The darkness grew as if everything it swallowed gave it energy. Every parcel of dirt that peeled away gave it fuel.
Ellen lowered her head as the dust grew heavier. But she had to see. They had to keep going. People were hiding under cars, ducking into sheds and outhouses. A blue Model T swerved into an electricity pole, and the front hood buckled. Steam hissed into the floating dust. The family inside quickly got out and started walking, the father ordering them to link hands like a human chain and hold on for their lives. “Whatever it takes, do not let go!”
It was a good idea, and they were not the only ones to do it. But Ellen needed both hands to secure James in the wind, and Josiah needed both to hold the larger Peter. Visibility was down to only a handful of feet. Finding their home would fall to instinct now.
The rolling dirt at ground level was coal black, and it hit them like a wall. Ellen dropped to her knees. James cried and coughed, but not as loudly as Peter. She could hear the boy but not see him or Josiah, even though she knew they were only a few feet away.
“Ellen,” shouted Josiah.
“I’m here,” she yelled back, taking in a mouthful of black dust, which she immediately tried to spit out. The void had become so real she couldn’t tell if Josiah was in front of her or behind her now. She got to her feet and plowed into the wall, refusing to die like this. “Wilmington? Josiah?” No answer. Why isn’t Peter crying?
The wind scoured off fresh dirt and slammed it back down as it rolled along, engulfing Nowhere. Static shot through cars, across power lines—lightning strikes that fizzled, unable to illuminate because the black dust was so thick. The duster roared like a tornado. Buildings splintered and cracked. Dust scraped and pinged off every surface as more and more soil ripped from the earth. James’s tears muddied his face, but it was so black she could barely make out his eyes. She couldn’t see her own hands, so she increased the pressure of her hold.
“Ellen?” It was Josiah again, but he sounded far away. “Ellen?” Closer this time, but then his voice faded.
“Josiah?” She ate more dust and hacked and coughed until her eyes bulged. This dirt was different than the other dusters, like the wind had gone deeper into the soil to lift up what had been dormant for centuries—dirt mixed with the blood and bones from all those buffalos and Indians killed in order for the white men to take over the land.
Where was Jeremiah? Was he stuck out in it like they were or already dead from yesterday’s duster? Dust stung her eyes like bees. A wind gust knocked her down again, but she managed to keep hold of James. She got to her feet and continued on, hoping it was in the right direction. There was no way to tell. No markers. Nothing but roiling, black, coal-like dust.
An arm brushed her shoulder, and then a powerful hand gripped her elbow. “I’ve got you,” said Wilmington. The only father she knew, hers having passed years ago. He knew Nowhere like the back of his hand, had always claimed he could walk the town blindfolded. Now was his chance. But how was he still on his feet? How had that bullet not moved yet?
She heard his voice but couldn’t see his face. “I’ve got you,” he said again as they stumbled together through the tumult. “Keep your face down,” he said. “Chin to your chest and protect my grandson.” She did just that and held on for dear life, counting off the seconds in her head until they formed minutes.
The bell inside the Bentley Hotel chimed, once, twice, three times, but even it sounded dust-muted. Orion must be safe inside. He was ringing the bell to give people an audible landmark. We must be close. Her foot hit something hard. Wilmington guided her hand to a wooden railing. The steps up were familiar. They’d made it.
“Ellen!” It wasn’t a question this time. She saw the whites of her husband’s eyes and the relief they held. He ushered her and James and Wilmington inside and did his best to close the door against the dusty drift that had formed inside the threshold. Coughing resonated like echoes in a cave, not only in their house but across the town as the duster roared through like a train, scraping and peeling and boiling and slamming dirt like fist falls from a God who’d abandoned them.
Josiah lit a lamp as they all gathered in the kitchen, where Wilmington had resealed the windows before they left for the rabbit drive. Just in case, he’d told Ellen. But even with the windows covered, so much dirt still spun through the house that all they could see of each other in the lamplight was silhouettes. The walls creaked. The wind howled. Dust clicked and clacked off the roof like dice on wood, except louder, magnified and incessant.
Wilmington found a blanket and draped it over the large kitchen table. Josiah weighted the blanket down with a box full of horseshoes, and then they all gathered underneath, with the lamp. Then, finally, Ellen could make out features from some of their faces—Wilmington’s right eyeball. Josiah’s hair. Peter’s hands— he’d somehow been aware enough to drag that typewriter down with him and was punching the keys. Ellen wiped muddy tears from James’s face and cleared caked dirt from his nostrils and mouth. For a second she feared he’d stopped breathing, but he was just eerily calm—or terrified—blinking enough to show he was alive.
The clacking of the typewriter keys took their attention from the horrifying sounds of the duster. Peter’s fingers working faster and faster, but controlled somehow, like there were words connected to the key strikes and not just some random punching.
Outside cried a voice, a woman’s voice, distraught. “Nicholas! Nicholas. Oh, dear God—where are you? Nicholas?”
Ellen’s heart skipped. “Nicholas Draper.” She made a move as if to duck back out from under the kitchen table, and Wilmington stopped her.
“No, Ellen.”
“Nicholas Draper. He’s one of my students. He must be lost. He’s out there, Wilmington.”
“Nicholas . . . Nicholas . . .”
Without noticing exactly when, she could make out all of their faces now under the kitchen table. They were all coated with black dust, like coal miners.
Josiah sat with his legs folded, rocking sli
ghtly forward almost like Peter, staring so intently at the kerosene lamp in the center of where they sat that he almost looked right through it. Had he even heard Mrs. Draper calling for her son?
Just two nights ago Ellen had been locked in the schoolhouse with the students. She recalled Nicholas telling the story about a cow that was full of dust when they cut it open. She imagined him now, lost and alone, swallowed up in the dust and breathing it in like his cow must have before it died.
“I’m going,” she said.
But then Josiah’s voice stopped her cold. “It’s okay, Nicholas. I’ve got you.” He continued to rock, blinking intermittently, so focused on the lamp that Ellen feared it might combust. Josiah was there in body, but it was like the inside of him had jumped clean out and been replaced by someone else. Even the voice was slightly off. He blinked finally. “Stay hunkered down, Nicholas. That’s your name, right? Everything’s gonna be fine.” He pretended to be rubbing something that wasn’t there.
“Josiah?” said Ellen. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he hunkered down even lower, as if shielding someone.
“Nicholas . . .” Mrs. Draper was out there still calling for her son.
Ellen shifted under the table. “I’ve got to go help.”
“He’s fine, Ellen.” Josiah sounded more like himself again. “He’s got him.”
“Who’s got him, Josiah?”
“Jeremiah.”
“What?”
“Jeremiah,” Peter repeated, still typing. “Jeremiah’s got him.”
Ellen gulped. It was like a dream had invaded a nightmare and she was only half-lucid through both. Dust poured atop the house, atop the town. Must be what it sounds like to be alive in a coffin and buried as the soil is shoveled on top. The wind howled. A window shattered. Dust swooped across the floor with the shattered glass and skittered under the blanket-curtain. They all started coughing. How long have we been in the house? How long were we on the road? How long can this nightmare last?
What Blooms from Dust Page 9