What Blooms from Dust
Page 19
Rose was already down the porch and approaching the car. The lights atop it were caked with mud, and one lone tumbleweed clung to the bumper like it was holding on for dear life.
The car door opened. A man in a brown hat got out, but he wasn’t a lawman. He wore civilian clothes, dusty and weather-beaten. The back door on the driver’s side opened, and a boy about Peter’s age jumped out as if he’d been suffocating. Two suitcases, a pillow, and a washboard slid out behind him onto the dust. The boy squinted in the sunlight and then shielded his eyes with a cupped hand.
Rose stopped. Must have noticed it wasn’t the law.
On the far side of the car, a woman emerged, black hair tousled and blowing in the breeze, shaking her head at the sight of the town. Two more kids, both younger than the first, stumbled out, and then a shovel and what sounded like a crate of dishes fell out to the dust.
Must have fit their entire house inside that car.
Rose had now engaged them in conversation, and by that time Jeremiah recognized who they were: Reginald and Emory Rochester, with a brood that had grown since he’d last seen them. They’d probably had those two little ones when Jeremiah was behind bars.
“Okies come back home to roost,” he said to himself, opening the door to step out onto the porch. He’d always liked the Rochesters. They were good, honest people who had moved to Nowhere at the beginning of the twenties. Emory had taught alongside Ellen at the schoolhouse. But then they’d left town.
Without thinking of how the Rochesters might react upon seeing him, Jeremiah approached their car with a welcoming smile.
Reginald said, “Hello, Josiah.”
Jeremiah didn’t answer, but he did stop about ten feet away, close enough for the Rochesters to get a better look, and when they did, Emory hurried to corral her kids and hide them behind the far side of the car.
Reginald stumbled back against the hood and fell to the dust.
Rose made a move to help him up—by the inward slope of both cheeks, the man looked exhausted and starved, as did his wife and kids—but Reginald held up a hand and told her to stay back. “Both of you.” He stared at Jeremiah. “How’d you get out?”
“I busted out, Reginald. But you’ve got nothing to fear from me. I mean no harm.”
Rose said, “It’s true what he says, mister.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m Rose Buchanan. I’m a reporter from New York.”
“What are you doing here? Where is everybody?”
She ignored the first question and deferred to Jeremiah for the second one.
“Something’s happened to the town, Reginald.”
The man’s eyes darted from house to house, fidgety. “What’d you do with your family?”
“They’re inside. Safe.” Jeremiah took two paces forward, and then a third, offering his hand to help the man up.
“Then why don’t they come out?” Reginald stared at Jeremiah’s outstretched hand. “I was preparing for Wilmington or Orion to come out with their rifles and tell me to go back.”
“Why would they do that?”
Reginald finally took Jeremiah’s hand, but quickly let go and wiped it on his shirt once he was on his feet. “They weren’t happy when we left in the first place. Called us cowards.”
Emory spoke over the top of the car, her voice not nearly as soft and sweet as he remembered. Life as an Okie would do that to you. “Ellen wasn’t too pleased with me either for going.” She gulped, still clutching her two youngest—a boy and a girl, probably twins. “Leaving her to tend to all those kids by herself. She still upset at me?”
Jeremiah surveyed the town. One of the swinging doors inside the Bentley swayed in the breeze, and a tumbleweed blew by. “I don’t think this town’s feeling much of anything anymore.”
“What’s your meaning?” asked Reginald.
“Let’s get you and your family some food, Reginald. I’ll explain as we eat.”
They all gathered around the table inside the Worst house and ate beans and drank well water.
Rose managed to get the stove working enough to boil three near-rotten potatoes she’d found in the cabinet. The Rochesters were ravenous, clinking forks off their plates like they were in a race to clean them. Starving like the town, but certainly not by choice. Not much was said until they finished, and by the glances Reginald and Emory were giving as they chewed, they still weren’t comfortable sitting at the same table as the infamous Coin-Flip Killer.
So Jeremiah did the talking while they ate, explaining the best he could about the Black Sunday blizzard and what that dust had done to the town folk—in particular, the three stages he’d noticed everyone going through. “First they turned mean. Then they turned quiet.”
“And then what?” Reginald wiped his face with a napkin. “You said there were three.”
Jeremiah and Rose shared a glance.
Rose said, “They’ve given up, Mr. Rochester.”
The man looked up from his second plate of beans. “Call me Reginald. And how so?”
“They don’t hardly move anymore,” said Jeremiah. “It’s like they don’t even have the will to survive.”
“Or the energy,” Rose added. “They’ve stopped eating. We’re doing what we can to get fluids into them, but most don’t even have the power to swallow.”
“They aren’t actively trying to do themselves in, but . . . that’s exactly what’s happening.”
Emory covered her mouth, but too late to mute her gasp. She gave her husband a look that said, You see? I told you we never should have come back.
Jeremiah said, “You can go from one house to the next, and you’ll see. They’re still alive in the sense that their hearts are beating, but mentally . . . they’re gone.”
“What are you going to do?” Emory asked. “I mean . . .” She covered her mouth again, and tears welled in her eyes.
“We haven’t quite figured that out.”
Peter was typing in the back room. Even with the bedroom door closed, the clacking echoed. The Rochesters had periodically looked back toward the sound as they’d eaten.
“Peter,” Jeremiah yelled. “Come out here.”
The clacking immediately stopped. The door opened, and Peter showed himself in the hallway. He wasn’t wearing his typical smile. The boy had turned solemn ever since he witnessed the blood running from Ellen’s forehead.
Emory said, “Who is he?”
“Name’s Peter Cotton. He’s a bit of a question mark, but he’s a good kid.”
“Who does he belong to?”
“He’s mine, I suppose.”
“Yours?”
“I took him on,” said Jeremiah. “Found him out alone.” He didn’t feel like explaining that he’d accidently bought him.
Rose took the lull in conversation as a good time to place a hand on his injured shoulder and say, “He’s a changed man. He’s not what the newspapers called him.”
Reginald looked at his kids and then focused on Jeremiah. “You didn’t kill those men like they say?”
Jeremiah shook his head. “No, I didn’t. I buried their bodies, but I didn’t kill them.” He swallowed hard, an involuntary movement he hoped wouldn’t be a tell, because he did believe he’d sent those men to their graves. He put his elbows on the table and changed the subject. “Why did you bring your family back . . . to this?”
Emory started crying, and Reginald did his best to console her, but something told Jeremiah that the two of them had been fighting about life for a while now. “Life’s no easier on the road. I’ll just say that.”
“There’s signs up everywhere in California,” Emory blurted. “They say No Okies Allowed. They don’t want us. Nobody wants us. We’re no different from the Indians and the blacks and the Mexicans.” She paused as Reginald rubbed her back, but she wasn’t finished. “They put us on the same signs. The same signs.” She looked down at the table and sobbed. Reginald tried to rub her neck, but she told him to not touch her.
“You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Reginald. In times like this, there are no right and wrong answers. Just the decisions we’ve gotta make.”
Reginald nodded. He looked to be on the verge of crying too, but was staying strong for his kids. He looked down the table and gave them a forced smile.
Peter stood there, taking it all in, showing zero interest in getting to know the Rochester kids as Jeremiah had hoped. He shuffled his feet, clearly wanting to be elsewhere. So Jeremiah waved him back to his room, and seconds later he began typing again.
Reginald got every last bit of bean juice up with his fork and slid it into his mouth. A quick smile emerged, sudden, like he’d just remembered something.
Jeremiah eyed him. “What is it?”
“Just that not all my memories of you are bad.” He looked at Rose. “He tell you about what he did at the auctions?”
Rose shook her head. “There’s a lot he hasn’t told me. We only officially met a couple days ago.”
“That so?” Reginald raised his eyebrows. “You just looked more familiar with each other than that.” He wiped his face with a napkin and leaned forward like he’d been wanting to tell somebody something for a long time—anybody who would listen. “Anyway, it took several months for the Depression to hit us out here in the plains. Our banks hung in a little longer. Then money stopped moving. While the rest of the country was starving, our threshers and silos were still full of wheat, but it was stacked to the clouds almost with nowhere to go, on account of how low the prices had dropped. You remember the foreclosures, Jeremiah?”
Jeremiah nodded. How could I not? Too many families had gone bankrupt on what turned out to be shaky loans—cars and tractors and appliances and farms with payments due and no way to pay. They’d all had more wheat than they knew what to do with, but it was near worthless, and people couldn’t begin to pay for what was owed. So foreclosures had been daily happenings, along with auctions where the banks took back what was theirs because nobody could even afford to bid.
“So Jeremiah here comes in and starts bidding at those auctions with the coins he collected, putting pennies and dimes on each one just to keep those properties alive and in the hands of whoever lived on them. What’d they start calling them?”
“Ten-cent sales,” said Jeremiah, unable to conjure the same enthusiasm.
“That’s right. So Jeremiah puts in those really low bids, then he tells the judge he’ll put a bullet in his belly if anyone even tries to outbid him—especially any of those out-of-towners coming in trying to make a run on some cheap property. So Jeremiah wins the auctions, then he gives the property back to the people that were foreclosed on.”
Rose smirked. “Kind of like Robin Hood?”
“That’s it—like Robin Hood, except with coins and a pistol. And then there was the day the bank closed. You remember, don’t you, Emory?”
“I remember. But Reginald—”
“You see, everyone in town had turned on Mr. Russell, who owned the Nowhere Bank. They assumed he was getting fatter than he already was. But then we walked out one morning and there was a sign outside the bank that said—” Reginald snapped his fingers. “What was the word?”
His wife said wearily, “Insolvent.”
“Yes. Insolvent,” said Reginald. “The bank just up and closed, with all the town’s money gone. Just gone. Backed by nothing except Mr. Russell’s word, which turned out not to be worth even a—”
“Get on with it, Reginald,” Emory said.
“Well, we were out there chanting that Mr. Russell was a thief and a coward. Somebody even threatened to knock the doors down if he didn’t come out. We knew he was in there because we saw the curtain move. But what we didn’t know was that his car was already puttering out back. He was fixing to sneak out the rear door and drive off unnoticed. But Jeremiah didn’t let that happen. He put his arm through a window—cut it up bad too—and unlocked the door. And next thing you know he’s dragging Mr. Russell out by his collar, and Mr. Russell is begging for his life. Because back then . . .”
“Back then what?” asked Rose.
“Well, Jeremiah already had a reputation . . .” Reginald glanced at Jeremiah and looked like he was ready to backtrack. But after an affirmative nod from Jeremiah, he went on. “A reputation for not exactly following the straight and narrow where the law was concerned. I remember Josiah tried to stop him. But Jeremiah, right on the steps of the bank, pulled a coin out and flipped it. Let it land right on Mr. Russell’s chest too, and he unholstered his pistol while that coin was in the air. He covered the coin with his palm and told Mr. Russell the rules while the whole town watched. He said, ‘Heads, and you’ll lose yours. Tails, and I’ll let you go with yours slinking between your legs.’”
Reginald shook his head, reminiscing, almost in awe. Jeremiah wasn’t proud of the story, but it felt good to see somebody smile in the telling of it. And in hindsight, it hadn’t turned out as bad as it once seemed. “Mr. Russell liked to have soiled his pants right there on the steps. He was sweating like a pig under that bright sun. Anyway, the coin turned up tails, but Jeremiah here pulled the trigger anyway and said ‘Bang.’” He looked at Jeremiah. “You knew there wasn’t a bullet in that chamber, didn’t you?”
Jeremiah nodded, ready for the story to be over. His shoulder throbbed, and he needed more morphine.
“So he lets Mr. Russell up, even brushes off the man’s lapels, and tells him to get on out of town and never come back. And then he pulls the trigger again and fires that next bullet up into the sky.” Reginald slapped his leg. “I’m telling you—Mr. Russell jumped higher than I’d ever seen a man jump and took off running for his car. I swear it wasn’t five minutes before he was out of town.”
Jeremiah stood from the chair. “You best get to unloading that car out there.”
Reginald gently gripped his wife’s arm. “I suppose so.” He digested Jeremiah’s tone clear enough. Story time was over. “I rode by our old house,” he said. “It’s still standing, but we’ll have our fair share of cleaning to do.”
Rose stood with them, but Jeremiah couldn’t help but notice the glance she’d given him after hearing the story. Like she was in awe too.
All I did was let a man live.
A man the entire town, at the time, probably wanted dead.
“We’d be happy to help get your house in order,” Rose told them.
Emory shook her head. “Thank you. But this is our cross to carry.”
Jeremiah said, “It don’t need to be like that.”
“Maybe tomorrow will be different,” she said as Reginald gathered the family to leave.
Before they reached the door, Emory faced Jeremiah. “You think later this evening, Ellen would see me?”
Jeremiah nodded, and thought, She doesn’t understand.
“I’ll take you there myself,” he said. “But she probably won’t even remember who you are.”
A duster hit midday but only lasted twenty minutes, arriving just after the Rochesters had finished unloading the police car they’d found abandoned days ago.
After the dust stopped blowing, Jeremiah and Rose walked to the Goodbye household and found Wilmington asleep in his bed, covered in a fine layer of dust. Josiah sat on the couch with his eyes closed and, although he breathed normally, was unresponsive to their nudges on his shoulder. His stomach was growling, begging almost.
Ellen was on her bed, sitting up against the headboard with her eyes open. Jeremiah wiped dust from her nose, but the touch barely registered. James was cradled in her lap, as lethargic as she was, but with a diaper and trousers that were so soiled they’d soaked a large patch of Ellen’s dress as well.
Rose eased the little boy from Ellen’s arms, rooted through a broken dresser for clean clothes, and changed James on the foot of the bed. She hugged him and kissed th
e top of his head, then gave Jeremiah a what-do-we-do-now look.
He thought at first they should take the child with them and started to suggest as much. But then he noticed the look in Ellen’s eyes. A tiny shift. She was staring at James in Rose’s arms. Perhaps he was the anchor still keeping her tethered to shore, the last reason to hold on to her sanity.
Ellen mouthed two words: “My baby.”
Rose saw it too, and walked the boy back to his mother, positioning him in her arms as close to the way he’d been as possible. James settled back, coughed three times, and closed his eyes.
“My baby.”
Jeremiah promised Ellen he’d be back but got no response, so he and Rose exited the house. The sun was inching down over the horizon, a smear of pink and purple that could have been beautiful under different circumstances.
Down the road the Rochesters had their windows and doors open and were whisking out clouds of dust that created eerie nimbuses in the light cast from oil lanterns.
“They won’t finish by nightfall.”
He and Rose nodded to one another, knowing what they needed to do, despite Emory insisting they would dig out on their own. They crossed to the Worst house to gather shovels and brooms. Before going, Jeremiah walked down the hallway to Peter’s room, where the typewriter was busy. The door was closed, and the boy didn’t respond when he knocked, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. Jeremiah turned the knob and peeked inside. Peter sat at the desk, clacking away with his two index fingers.
“We’re going down the road to help the Rochesters dig out,” said Jeremiah. “You can come if you want.”
“Down the road,” Peter said, never looking up from his work. “Help the Rochesters dig out.” He pulled a typed page from the machine and carefully folded it in thirds like he’d done with the note he’d given Jeremiah the other night. He placed it on a pile of similarly folded pages beside his typewriter, immediately loaded another, and started right into what Jeremiah assumed was a sentence of some sort. “Come if you want. Down the road,” said Peter. “Rochesters dig out. Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater.” He grinned.