“And then you came rolling into town.”
“What do I have to do with it?”
“Everything, Ellen. You coming here had everything to do with everything.” He opened the front door, squinted into the sunlight, and tipped his hat. “Now go do something about that hair.”
“Soon as you do something about that big nose of yours, Josiah.”
He waved without turning.
She bit her lip on the way out to the porch. Josiah was already walking across the street. He took a right down Main and just kept walking and walking until he looked an inch tall. He stopped in the distance, and she realized he’d found the car they abandoned yesterday during the storm. He opened the driver’s side door, slid inside, and closed it. She expected him to start it up and drive it back home, but he just sat there. Five minutes he sat there, then ten, and then she couldn’t watch anymore. “Sit in that car all day if you want, Josiah. See if I care.”
All the windows were open at the Worst house. Inside, Jeremiah and Peter looked busy cleaning. The only two in town who were digging out. The only two who seemed to care about anything.
Ellen craved a cigarette, even though she had never smoked, other than those couple of times she and Jeremiah sneaked behind the Goodbyes’ barn and puffed on some rolled butts with the oil smell from the tractor just over their shoulders.
“And then one thing led to another.” She smirked, but it was short-lived. The front door banged closed behind her, and James stood barefoot in the dust. She picked him up. “How’d you get out of your crib?”
“Climbed out,” he said.
“Who taught you to do that?”
“Daddy.”
“Well, your daddy’s a fool.”
Jeremiah tossed and turned in bed that night.
Dreaming. Surrounded by dust. Chased by scratchy laughter he couldn’t locate no matter how hard he tried. But eventually the dust settled, the voice went away, and what remained was a memory from when Jeremiah was a boy. He couldn’t recall the exact age but knew he’d been young enough to feel the empty space with his tongue from where a tooth had recently fallen out.
His father had summoned him to the kitchen table, which was where he and Josiah usually got lectured whenever they did something wrong. Jeremiah didn’t know what he’d done this time, so he made sure to pay attention to his father’s every word.
“Jeremiah, do you know what it means to covet?”
Jeremiah shook his head.
“Means to hunger for. Thirst for. Crave.”
“Is it bad?”
“Sometimes can be—if what you covet is for power. If that power you covet starts to change who you are. You see what I’m getting at?”
Jeremiah shook his head.
“That quarter in your pocket, Jeremiah. It’s just a quarter. What say you do like the other children and spend it on some gum or a cola.”
Jeremiah looked into the other room, where Josiah sat on the couch with his head lowered. “We were just playing a game.”
“Sometimes your coin games hurt feelings.”
“’Cause I can’t lose?”
Wilmington tightened his jaw like he did when he was mad but trying not to be. “I’ll give you two options, Jeremiah. One, you hand me over that coin for a few days and give it a rest. Two, you take it down to Blythe’s Food Store and buy a couple of colas for you and your brother. Let it trickle into Nowhere’s economy.”
Jeremiah removed the coin from his pocket and made his daddy think he was about to give it to him. But power sometimes made you do funny things. Instead of handing it over, he flipped it and let it settle on the kitchen table. The gesture didn’t please his daddy, but at least Jeremiah had made a decision—or rather the coin had made it for him.
“Tails it is.” Jeremiah scooped up the coin and headed for the front door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“To go get me and Josiah a Coca-Cola.”
Jeremiah woke in the middle of the night when he heard dust tapping against the Worsts’ bedroom window. The memory of that coin toss in front of his father was still with him.
Afterward he’d walked down the road to spend that quarter on a cola for himself and Josiah. He remembered thinking that it was fine by him to spend that quarter at the food store; he could always get another one. Nowhere was booming in those days, and quarters weren’t hard to come by. All you needed to do was walk inside the Bentley Hotel and look down. Locating a coin on the sticky floor was as easy as finding a goldenrod in the wheat fields. He could have done both blindfolded.
He looked out the window. Josiah’s car was still parked down the road. Yesterday morning he’d seen his brother leave the Goodbye house and walk toward that car like a drifter, then get inside and close the door. Is he still in there? He’d checked a few times during the day, and Josiah had still been sitting behind that wheel, doing a bunch of nothing.
Jeremiah grabbed a spare pillow from the bed, knocked dust from it, and then carried it from the house. He walked down the road as dust floated across the moon. When he got to the car, he opened the door, and there was Josiah, sleeping across the front seat with his head crooked against the inside of the passenger’s door.
Jeremiah leaned in and slid the pillow beneath his brother’s head.
Told him to sleep tight, and then he closed the door.
TWELVE
The next day, Orion chimed that church bell inside the Bentley.
Ellen’s legs were heavy and lethargic from having moved very little since the big storm, and last night’s duster seemed to have set her feet in quicksand. Her brain told her to sit down and let another day tick away, but she felt trapped inside their own home.
Panicked and fidgety all of a sudden, she stood abruptly from the kitchen table and looked out the window above the sink. She chewed her fingernail and then headed for the front door.
“Where you going?” Wilmington asked, monotone, from his place at the table.
“I’ve got to get out of this house.” The bell gonged again from across the street. She looked back at her father-in-law. “You coming?”
He pushed himself up from the table with an annoyed grunt. “I’m coming. Matter of fact, I’ve got some things I need to get off my chest.”
This gave her pause. He’d said it like he was angry, which wasn’t like him. But the entire town seemed angry now; why shouldn’t he be angry too? They’d all been given doses of that dirty medicine.
She carried James outside to where the air was clear and the skies blue, but she’d learned her lesson not to be fooled. Even yesterday, an hour after Josiah walked down the road and closed himself up inside their abandoned car, another duster had come through, not as big and nasty as the day prior or the one that hit last night, but enough to bury them deeper—especially with no one making an effort to dig out.
Almost no one.
Over at the Worst house, all the windows and doors were open. Dust filtered out as Jeremiah and Peter swept. “Only ones in town with any energy,” Ellen whispered in James’s ear. “Sometimes I wish he was your father.”
She didn’t realize what she’d said until the words were already out, but luckily James was too young to understand and probably wasn’t paying attention anyway. Still, it was a terrible thing to think, let alone say, and she wasn’t convinced she even believed it. She never would have married Josiah if she hadn’t loved him. But it was true what they’d told each other in the kitchen yesterday: they weren’t the same people they’d married. Maybe being parents had changed them, but she didn’t think that was it. James just had the misfortune of coming into the world about the same time the earth started peeling up.
If anything, it was the dust that changed them.
The dust and the drought.
Had everyone else not been moving as slowly as she now was toward the Bentley, she might have been embarrassed by how long it took her to shuffle across the road. But the entire town was lethargic and hea
vy legged, physically and mentally weighed down by all that dust. Her heart beat slowly, like cold syrup stubbornly clinging to the morning jar. She had to remind herself to put one foot in front of the other.
Orion rang the bell again.
“Hold your horses, old man.” She whispered to James, “He’s an old man—yes, he is. A lonely old man who should know better than to ring that bell all the time. He’s never been married because he’d annoy any woman who’d come close with all that constant positivity.”
James laughed. Was it because he agreed? Had he taken in a dose of that medicine too? She stopped suddenly and pointed down the road in the opposite direction, where their Model T was now virtually buried in black dust.
Josiah had never come home last night. She assumed he’d stayed all night in the car, was probably there even still. Just then the car door opened. Or tried to. The latest duster had blocked him in. The door would only open to about a foot wide. Josiah tried to shimmy through but wouldn’t fit. If he had a brain, he’ d use the passenger door, thought Ellen. There wasn’t a drift over there. But instead the window rolled down, and the next thing she knew Josiah was falling out of it in a slow roll down the drift.
At one time she and James would have found it funny, watching Josiah tunnel through an open window into all that dust, but neither one of them laughed now. James didn’t even smile, and he’d been watching the entire thing. Whatever was in that dust had numbed the both of them.
Orion’s church bell chimed again.
James said in a monotone, “Hold your horses, old man.”
“That’s right,” Ellen whispered, turning toward the hotel. “You tell him good, James.”
“Hold your horses, old man.”
They didn’t wait for Josiah, who was brushing himself off as he staggered down the road. Seemed like half the town was ignoring the bell. The ones who did come arrived wearing clothes that hadn’t been changed in days, their faces covered in dust—too tired even to wash themselves.
Orion didn’t even greet anyone on the porch, as was his custom. He was inside, sitting on a chair and gonging that low-hanging bell as if his legs didn’t work anymore. He’d taken off his tuxedo jacket. His white shirt was unbuttoned to midchest, where sprigs of white hair jutted. His top hat was on the floor beside his feet, and his wispy white hair was disheveled, recently slept on, pushed out at a tangent that made Ellen wonder if he hadn’t fallen asleep with that side of his face pressed against the curve of that bell. When she got closer she noticed indentations in his cheek.
“Orion,” said Ellen. “You look like the ghost of something long dead.”
Orion looked up, dead behind the eyes. “From dust to dust, Ellen.”
He offered no more, so she carried James over to her customary stool in front of the bar and a stone’s throw from the piano, which sat vacant. Typically the Bentley Hotel filled within five minutes of Orion’s bell chiming, but this gathering took twenty minutes to only half fill it, and those who’d come looked put out, like they’d been rudely interrupted from all the nothing they’d been doing.
Probably just sitting and staring. Ellen had what the rest of the town had. Whatever that duster had brought with it, she’d taken it in too. But by the looks of some of the others, she didn’t seem to have it as bad. Her husband walked in and took a seat at a round table occupied only by his father on the other side. The two of them stared like enemies for some reason.
Father Steven sat against the back wall, staring the same way at Sister Moffitt one table over. Sister Moffitt was usually the one who suggested bingo or cards, but today she suggested nothing. She looked angry for even being there and sat with her elbow on the table and her chin resting in her palm. All of a sudden she said to Orion, “You’ve gained weight.”
Without much enthusiasm he said back to her, “You’ve gained ugly, Sister, especially around the ugly area. Ugly on top of ugly. You know what that equals?”
She scoffed. “You.”
Orion let it go, then lazily chimed the church bell again.
Dr. Craven held a dart from the dartboard in his hand, and he was poking it in and out of the tabletop like he was creating a picture in the wood. Windmill was there too, across the room, staring at Ellen, probably still stewing from what the doctor had told him the other day. But it was true. “Stare all you want, Windmill,” said Ellen. “You’re still only a boy.” Then she wished she could shove those words back in, but what was said was said and couldn’t be unsaid.
Windmill’s eyes blurred with fresh tears, and Ellen looked away, not feeling the guilt she supposed she should have felt after muttering something so mean and ugly. She whispered in her son’s ear. “Just speaking my mind, James. It’s what we need more of, right? Just telling it straight. Giving that boy a good dose of that truth medicine.”
Phillip Jansen walked in with an empty mailbag over his shoulder and collapsed into a chair that nearly toppled. He placed the pathetic, dusty satchel on the table and said to Orion, “What’s this about, old man? Nobody likes your meetings anymore. Try as you might, there ain’t no way we can relive what it was like here in the twenties. So let’s get on with it.”
Nobody was shocked by what the postman said, because underneath the ugliness was the cruel truth of it. Orion was always trying to rekindle something that couldn’t be rekindled, and finally someone had said it.
Orion lowered his head so low his chin brushed the white hairs on his chest, and he looked to be crying. Wilmington started to comfort him but stopped before he’d even lifted from the seat. Like he just couldn’t spare the effort.
Phillip Jansen rested his elbows on the table, atop that dusty mailbag, his eyes darting around the room because everyone was watching him. “What?”
Toothache leaned against the back wall, his right arm peeling a corncob-sized patch of wallpaper from it. “Man you never was good at delivering the mail.” He took what he’d ripped from the wall and tore that in half. “Always putting stuff in the wrong boxes.”
Sheriff McKinney mumbled, “What he say?”
Deacon Sipes had a horseshoe in his hand and made as if to brain Toothache with it. Toothache flinched. He leaned back too far, and one of the chair legs snapped. The room chuckled lazily when he hit the floor. No one moved to help. Deacon Sipes put the horseshoe on the table, and it rattled heavily. “Don’t talk no more, Toothache. Ain’t nobody wants to try and decipher what you say. It’s like fingernails scraping down Mrs. Goodbye’s chalkboard. Always has been.”
Deacon noticed Phillip grinning. “He’s right, though, mailman. How hard is it to put the mail into those boxes? But half the time, back when we used to actually get the mail, I’d end up with Ned Blythe’s.”
Ned looked up from his slouched position on a stool. “And I’d end up with his. My wife would shiver every time she touched the mail with the name of Deacon Sipes on it, like it was dirty from some virus.”
“Least when I talk I don’t look like a mouse nibblin’ on cheese,” said Deacon.
Ned let that go, but he chewed his lower lip like he was wrangling to let something loose. His wife had died four years ago, and he looked to be pondering whether the insult had been directed at him or her.
She did look like a mouse when she nibbled on a corn cob. Ellen was glad that thought had stayed in, because Ned now looked on the verge of crying. And it was bad enough that his food store hardly had anything on the shelves anymore. But looking at Phillip now made her sick to her stomach, and Toothache, as dumb as he was, had made a good point. “I think James here would make a better mailman than you, Phillip Jansen. Orion and Wilmington here, they had so much pride in this town that they handmade every mailbox. Every new resident got one within a week of their arrival.”
“Polished and everything,” said Wilmington. “Orion, when his mind wasn’t too busy wondering what all the women in town looked like under their dresses, attached every one of those yellow flags with the delicacy of one putting the final icing touc
hes on a cake.”
Orion still had his head lowered, not denying what Wilmington had said. Instead he was nodding as if he’d just repented and unburdened his sins in front of Father Steven and Sister Moffitt at the same time.
Sister Moffitt said, “I remember the days when I’d look out my window and see that yellow flag sticking up from the mailbox and glowing in the thought of having mail.”
“It was a clever idea,” Wilmington said to Orion, who nodded in acknowledgment without looking up.
Phillip said, “Wasn’t my fault the mail dried up like the Ogallala.”
Sheriff McKinney said, “But it was your fault I didn’t get my catalogue for three weeks because you misplaced it.”
“That was five years ago, Sheriff,” said Phillip. “Back when you had hair on your head and a stomach that fit in your pants. How do you continue gaining weight when the rest of us can’t seem to keep it?”
“Yes,” said Father Steven. “You keep getting fatter, Sheriff. Where are you getting your food?”
Sheriff shrugged. “At the gettin’ place, Father.”
Richard Klamp said, “Why are we here anyway? Why’d you call this silly meeting, Orion? I need a nap worse than you need a comb.”
Moses Yearling said from across the room, “To talk about what to do with your clothing store now that nobody shops there anymore.”
“Well, you’re not even one of us, rainmaker,” said Richard. “You’re a rainmaker that can’t even make it rain. You need to pack your bags and go.”
Maglin Mulraney, from his table in the corner, said, “One of my cows is missing.” He pointed toward the sheriff. “I bet he took it and he’s been feasting all by himself. That’s how come he’s gaining all that fat.”
Sheriff McKinney turned in his chair. “Your cows are as dumb as you are, Mulraney. Probably went out and got lost in a duster.”
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