The Worst Hard Time Part 6

Even with Vaseline in their noses and respiratory masks over their faces, people could not keep from inhaling grit. Dust particles are extremely fine, sixty-three microns or smaller. By contrast, a period at the end of a typewritten sentence is three hundred microns. It could take less than an hour outside to darken one of the masks distributed by the Red Cross. The windows of houses were covered with wet sheets and blankets, the doors taped, the wall cracks stuffed with rags and newspapers. Men avoided shaking hands with each other because the static electricity was so great it could knock a person down. They also put cloth on their doork.n.o.bs and metal oven handles to inhibit the electric jolt. Car owners used chains, dragging them along the street as a ground for the electricity in the air. Hospitals postponed operations because they could not keep their surgical wards clean. And flour mills in Kansas had to curtail work because the dust mingled with grain.

"Rarely a day appears when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over," wrote Caroline Henderson, a Mount Holyoke College graduate and a farmer's wife who lived in No Man's Land just north of Boise City. Out of college, she had fallen for a farmer, and they made a go of it during the wheat boom. Their well gave them enough water to grow a big garden, slake the thirst of hogs, chickens, and cows, and even bring a few flowers to blossom. The wheat s.h.i.+ned in the good years, and Caroline had a telephone installed and got a daily newspaper delivered, bringing the world to their homestead. The bust left the Hendersons living a subsistence life in a place where people seemed to age rather quickly. A forty-five-year-old woman looked sixty, it was said, and a man of the same age without a deeply creased face was a rarity. They lost the phone, the newspaper, the garden, the farm animals, and all their crops. By 1934, they had gone three years without income from the land. Caroline's daily tasks began to seem ever more meaningless and hopeless. She clung to small things-a houseplant in the windowsill, pictures of the farm when it was full of grain, a belief in tomorrow. And through the first three years of the dust, she never lost her faith in the land. She felt "a primitive feeling of kins.h.i.+p with the earth-our common mother," Caroline said, writing in a letter to a friend. She made hand towels out of cement sacks and used cheap lye for was.h.i.+ng clothes, though it left her hands so rough it frightened her. By 1934, they did not even bother to plant a crop. The Hendersons had some chickens, a few animals, and a garden, enough to keep them alive. Caroline gathered cow chips for fuel, but as the pasture disappeared, and the animals starved, the supply of "prairie coal" dried up as well.

Like her neighbors, Henderson's thirst for the base elements of life grew with every arid, dust-filled day.

"We dream of the faint gurgling sound of dry soil sucking in the grateful moisture," she wrote to a friend in the East, "but we wake to another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred."

12. The Long Darkness THE DUST PRESSED HARD on the High Plains when Hazel Shaw traveled over the state line to Clayton to have her baby in the spring. Expectant mothers were told to stay in the hospital or a rest home for a month before their delivery date, and Hazel did not want to take chances. Boise City had no hospital. In New Mexico the air was supposed to be cleaner at the higher ground a mile above sea level. From Clayton, the horizon was not all flat: mesas and ancient volcanoes broke the skyline, and on those days when the light was just right in the evening it was as enchanting as the best parts of New Mexico. The light was one of the reasons the Herzsteins loved Clayton. In town, Charles got his wife settled into a boarding house near the hospital, the doors and windows sealed three times over with sheets and tape to keep pregnant women from breathing particles. on the High Plains when Hazel Shaw traveled over the state line to Clayton to have her baby in the spring. Expectant mothers were told to stay in the hospital or a rest home for a month before their delivery date, and Hazel did not want to take chances. Boise City had no hospital. In New Mexico the air was supposed to be cleaner at the higher ground a mile above sea level. From Clayton, the horizon was not all flat: mesas and ancient volcanoes broke the skyline, and on those days when the light was just right in the evening it was as enchanting as the best parts of New Mexico. The light was one of the reasons the Herzsteins loved Clayton. In town, Charles got his wife settled into a boarding house near the hospital, the doors and windows sealed three times over with sheets and tape to keep pregnant women from breathing particles.

Charles returned to Boise City. After one week, a message came: it was time. He fired up the Model-T and headed down the dirt road to New Mexico. The distance was barely sixty miles, but with the drifts it could take half a day to make the drive. Even though the road was mostly straight, and he was driving on a cloudless day in April, Charles could not see more than a few car lengths ahead of him. Every driver in No Man's Land knew this kind of blizzard well by now. He paced the Model-T, afraid of cras.h.i.+ng head-on with another car coming out of the dust the other way. At times, it was like vertigo, or driving in s.p.a.ce. He hung his head out the window to keep track of the roadside ditch, and in that way he was able to follow a line toward Clayton. The message had been urgent-Hazel was starting her contractions, the baby was on its way. Sand heaved up and over the front of the car, swirling, creeping across the hood and into his lap. On sections of the road where the wind had sc.r.a.ped everything down to hardpan, the traction was good, and Charles sped up, doing nearly thirty-five miles an hour. But just as he started to make good time, the car plowed into a drift. He was stuck, the Model-T held by dust that had glommed onto the width of the road. He jumped out and tried to scoop away sand with the shovel he always carried. But the drift was too deep, and even as he shoveled, more dust blew onto the dune. The Model-T was trapped in nearly three feet of sand.

Unable to free the car, he took off on foot. There was nothing to see in any direction, just the predatory beige sand in his eyes, his hair, blowing against his face. The authorities had warned people not to travel alone and particularly not to walk when a duster was on. In Kansas, one farmer's car broke down and he set out on foot for help. He suffocated to death. But Shaw had no choice. His wife was giving birth. If he stayed in the car and waited for help, he could be buried by the time somebody came along. It would be dark in a few hours.

He followed the ditch line of the road until it came to a narrow lane that angled away to a small farmhouse. He figured he had walked, at a brisk pace, two miles. Shaw banged on the door of the shack and explained to the farmer what had happened. The farmer started his tractor and the two men rode back to the car. After tugging, digging, and a push from the tractor, they were able to free the Model-T.

Shaw continued toward Clayton. Anxious, thinking about the baby, worried about more drifts, he kept the speed up, pus.h.i.+ng the car to its limit. When he came to a sudden swerve in the road, he was going too fast to correct his speed. The Model-T teetered on two wheels and tipped on its side. For an instant, Shaw thought he was pinned. He was bruised and bleeding but otherwise all right. As he crawled out the window, he saw two wheels still spinning in the dust. He was able to pry the car out of the dust and tip it back, right-side up. The engine started. He finished the drive and made it to St. Joseph's Hospital. Just as Hazel went into her high contractions, in walked a bruised, bleeding, dusty man, his eyelids clogged with mud, his fingers oiled and dirty.

Hazel gave birth to a girl late that day, April 7, 1934. They named her Ruth Nell. She was plump and seemed healthy, but the doctor was concerned about taking her outside. The air was not safe for a baby. He ordered Hazel to stay in the hospital for at least ten more days and remarked that the young family might want to consider moving out of No Man's Land. Others were b.u.t.toning up their homes and getting out before the dust ruined them. But the Lucas family had planted themselves in this far edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle at a time when there wasn't even a land office for nesters. They were among the first homesteaders. What would it mean for the pioneers to leave? And if they moved, it was not just the uncertainty of where to go and what to do but also the feeling that they would never again own something. It was a big step down from working on your own quarter-section to being adrift, with strangers staring at you like just another piece of Okie trash, saying you should be deported. Deported! Where? Uprooted, nesters were tumbleweeds. At least here, a hungry man had pride of place and owners.h.i.+p. The family optimism ran through Hazel. She and Charles had opened a business in Boise City and were not going anywhere. It was settled: no matter how ugly the air, no matter how dead the ground, how cashless the economy, new life in No Man's Land-Ruth Nell-was something that did not come around very often. The baby had to be savored and given a proper start in the place called home.

For others, 1934 was the worst year. In early May, the temperature reached one hundred degrees in North Dakota. Parts of Nebraska, spared some of the earlier storms, were starting to blow. Fields that had yielded twenty bushels of wheat per acre were lucky to get a single bushel. On eight million acres, crops were so withered that there was no harvest. Another two million acres were fallowed-not planted at all. With ten million acres bare, farmers in Nebraska fell into the same desperate straits as their neighbors to the south.

Not only was 1934 the driest year to date in the arid siege-just under ten inches of rain fell on the Oklahoma Panhandle-but the pockets of original buffalo gra.s.s that had kept sheep and some cattle alive were vanis.h.i.+ng as well, smothered by dusters. About a third of Cimarron County was blowing, by the estimate of the ag man, Bill Baker. Some gra.s.s was under ten feet of sand. Other parts, stripped and buffed by the wind, were as hard as a bas.e.m.e.nt floor. Even the Kohler ranch was losing the last of its gra.s.s, and they had irrigation water from the Cimarron River, a lifeblood that most people had lost. The Kohlers could spread water on the sod but could not keep it free of the galloping sheets of dust. They tried fences and windbreaks, but the rampaging soil skipped over the barriers and drifted anew. Nearly three dozen sheep choked to death in the Kohler corral, gagging on the dust.

Later that year, the government men offered contracts to wheat farmers if they agreed not to plant next year. This idea seemed immoral and not the least a bit odd to people when they first heard about it. Like the cattle slaughters, it was a part of a Roosevelt initiative to bring farm prices up by reducing supply-forced scarcity. In the end, many farmers were not going to plant anyway-what was the use, with no water?-so the idea that they could get money by agreeing to grow nothing was not a hard sell. More than twelve hundred wheat farmers in No Man's Land signed up for contracts and in turn got a total of $642,637-an average of $498 a farmer. Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget. It was designed for poor grain growers, one foot in foreclosure, near starvation, pounded by dirt. And plenty of farmers were starving.

"I fell short on my crop this time," a farmer from Texas wrote President Roosevelt in late 1934. "I haven't got even one nickel out of it to feed myself and now winter is here and I have a wife and three little children, haven't got clothes enough to hardly keep them from freezing. My house got burned up three years ago and I'm living in just a hole of a house and we are in a suffering condition."

For people who had been without income since 1930, a check of $498 was a sufficient enough windfall to keep them on the land, though not enough to run a farm for another year. It allowed them, though, to exist. They paid just enough of their overdue taxes, and just enough of the outstanding interest on their bank loans, and just enough to get seed, to keep them from closing the door and walking away. Without the government, all of Cimarron County might have dissipated in the dust in 1934. For that year, the government bought 12,499 cattle, 1,050 sheep, and gave out loans to 300 farmers. The government estimated that 4,000 of the 5,500 families in six counties of the Oklahoma Panhandle were getting some form of relief, from a few dollars a week to work on road crews to forced scarcity payments. All told, nearly a million dollars came from Was.h.i.+ngton to the distant corner of No Man's Land.

Hugh Bennett thought if he could rest the land in some of these blowing prairie states, nature might have a shot at a comeback. Bennett was trying to change agricultural history. One idea was to put new growth on the bald gra.s.slands, a restoration project that had never been tried before on such a scale. His other idea was to get individual farmers to break down their barriers of property and think beyond their fence lines. It wasn't enough for one farmer to practice soil conservation if his neighbor's land was blowing. Bennett wanted people to see the whole of the living plains, not the squares of owners.h.i.+p.

Bennett put one of Roosevelt's alphabet agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps, to work on some of his early demonstration projects, and tried to inspire them with a sense of urgency about their mission.

"We are not merely crusaders," he said at a rally of CCC workers, "but soldiers on the firing line of defending the vital substance of our homeland."

Oklahoma's governor, Alfalfa Bill Murray, was furious as the first benevolent acts of the New Deal began to arrive on the southern plains. It was making the Sooner state into a bunch of "leaners," as he called them. Of course, Murray had run for president by promising every American an ent.i.tlement to the four B's-bread, b.u.t.ter, bacon, and beans. Patronage flowed from Alfalfa Bill outward. Now his old rival, the dandy with the tilted cigarette holder and the funny accent, was bypa.s.sing him; FDR was the face of salvation. Nearly one in five people were still unemployed, but government jobs had given four million people a paycheck. Because there were far more willing workers than jobs, the government set a quota for each county based on population. Fueled by his customary two pots of black coffee a day, the t.i.tan from Toadsuck railed against Roosevelt and his public works projects, calling him a communist. He quit the Democratic Party in protest of the New Deal. But his power was ebbing away. He could not use the National Guard to halt government help for farmers or to keep people from building roads and bridges. The people in his state loved the new president, and the papers were full of praise for the New Deal. Murray became increasingly irritable. In one speech late in the year, while puffing on a cigar, Murray lit into the president as usual. Just then, a schoolboy raised a voice. Murray exploded, snapping at the child.

"You little screw worm!" the governor shouted at the boy. "Get out of here!" Alfalfa Bill's political career never recovered.

One proposal that Murray had championed was a plan to dam the Beaver River near Guymon, the first sizable town east of Boise City. As envisioned by promoters in No Man's Land, the dam would hold enough water to allow people to irrigate, and then they would no longer have to rely on rain. And if the Beaver ran dry, as it often did, they could mine the big aquifer that underlay the southern plains, the Ogallala, for water. So long as they put water in a pen, it didn't matter how it got there. Hydrologists were just starting to grasp the magnitude of the Ogallala: it was nearly the size of Lake Huron, nestled several hundred feet below the surface. With steam engines and windmills, nesters were barely able to reach the upper part of the aquifer. But what if big natural gas engines were put to work, sucking the water up to make the arid land green? The technology was not there yet, FDR was told. In the meantime, the plan to build a dam in No Man's Land landed with a thud in Was.h.i.+ngton. Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary, was having second thoughts about encouraging people to stay on the land. Ickes believed it was better to give people incentive to leave. The land had been settled on the slogan of "a quarter-section and independence," and now that quarter-section could kill you and people were becoming dependent on the government. Ickes wanted to get the land back into the public domain and move upward of half a million people out of the area. His idea was heresy to some-by peeling back manifest destiny, it was an admission that American settlement in the southern plains had been a colossal failure. By Ickes's reasoning, the High Plains could never be productive farmland again. Why delay the inevitable?

The president had his doubts about reverse homesteading. He did not want an uninhabited expanse of sifting sand in the middle of the country. Why not try and change the land itself? Roosevelt, like his fifth cousin Teddy, was an authentic conservationist from the start. As a child, he learned to love nature and was fascinated by the variety of plant life in the Hudson River Valley. When Roosevelt suggested planting a great wall of trees from the Canadian border to Texas, people derided the plan as a Soviet-style joke. If G.o.d wanted trees to grow on the Great Plains, he would have put them there himself. The wind blew too hard for saplings to take root; there was too little rain. But Roosevelt persisted: why not plant rows, and in between would be farmland protected from the wind, a "shelterbelt"?

"The forests are the lungs of our land," he said, "purifying our air and giving fresh strength to our people." The president asked the Forest Service to draw up a plan, to span the globe and see if there were tree species that could survive the hot breath of the plains in summer and the deep freezes of winter. At the same time, he asked Hugh Bennett and others to examine the larger question that Ickes had raised: whether to encourage any future farming at all, or to empty the plains before it was too late and the nation's midsection became a sandbox.

With the Kohler ranch losing the last of its green, the Cimarron River down to a feeble presence, and the other river in No Man's Land, the Beaver, dried up, the desire for water was all-consuming. Shallow wells, those of about eighty feet or less, were coming up dry, forcing nesters to carry water from neighbors' wells to their homes, or from town. The Boise City News Boise City News ran a front-page picture of a pond the owner had created by pumping water into a basin, using a windmill for power. ran a front-page picture of a pond the owner had created by pumping water into a basin, using a windmill for power.

"CIMARRON COUNTY OASIS" was the cut-line under the picture. In 1934, a simple pond in No Man's Land looked like heaven.

Fred Folkers lost his orchard, the last living thing on his ranch. It had been a struggle to keep the fruit trees alive through the previous two years, but 1934 delivered the knockout blow. In the spring, he had still carried buckets of water to the apples, peaches, and mulberries, but the garish orange sun bore down and the wind lashed away, and the drifts rose uncontrolled and buried the trees up to their necks until they gave up. Folkers was left with bare sticks poking out of the dunes.

Just to the north, the life-draining drought also killed the trees that Caroline Henderson, the college-educated farmer's wife, had nurtured.

"Our little locust grove which we cherished for so many years has become a small pile of fence posts," Caroline wrote to a friend.

The last of the grain left over from the big harvest of three years earlier was gone. Even the tumbleweeds that had kept farm animals alive were in short supply. Folkers had been one of the first nesters to salt his thistle, making it edible for cattle. Now some of his neighbors wondered: why couldn't people eat tumbleweeds as well? Ezra and Goldie Lowery, homesteaders in No Man's Land since 1906, came up with an idea to can thistles in brine. Friends asked them how they could eat such a thing, the nuisance weed of the prairie. It was as dry as cotton, as flavorless as cardboard, as p.r.i.c.kly as cactus. Well, sure. Indeed they tasted like twigs, no debate there. But the Lowerys said these rolling thistles that the Germans had brought to the High Plains from the Russian steppe were good for you. High in iron and chlorophyll. Cimarron County declared a Russian Thistle Week, with county officials urging people who were on relief to get out to fields and help folks harvest tumbleweeds.

The Lowerys also started using a native plant for feed, the flowering yucca that clung to unplowed parts of No Man's Land. They dug up the roots, cut off the spines, and ground the tubes into food for cows. When mixed with a little cake meal, the pulverized yucca roots kept the animals alive, which in turn kept the milk and cream coming at a time when there was no money to buy groceries. But it also meant that yuccas, one of the last plants holding down the powdered prairie gumbo, were now being yanked from the ground. With these two innovations-canned tumbleweeds and ground yucca roots-the Lowerys, a family of five, were able to feed themselves.

It had been a long fall for them. During the wheat boom, the Lowerys traded in their horse and buggy for a Model-T, added two rooms to the house, doubling the size, put up wallpaper to cover the newspaper on the inside walls, got linoleum floors, replaced the scrub board with a hand-cranked was.h.i.+ng machine, and bought a generator, powered by the wind, which allowed the family to listen to the radio. Now their cattle were gone, shot and buried in a ditch. The orchard had died. The fields were bare, and the family was digging roots and canning tumbleweed. Why not leave?

"I'm not gonna put my family in a soup line," said Ezra Lowery. "Not me. We have food here and a roof over our heads."

The experiences of families that had fled served as cautionary tales. A neighbor, Clarence Snapp, and his wife, Ethel, had moved out of Boise City that year to Arkansas, where it was supposed to be wetter, with more opportunity. Clarence had been so poor when he married Ethel that he borrowed his mama's wedding ring; it was meant to be temporary, he said. In Arkansas, Clarence worked in the fields, digging turnips and sweet potatoes. But he never made a dime. He was paid in his diggings, as he told his neighbors when he returned to No Man's Land.

Boise City, Oklahoma, April 1936 The Ehrlichs tried grinding up thistle for cattle feed, but it did not seem to work as it did for the Lowerys; their stock herd was thinning, unable to sustain itself. Newborns came out sickly and small. For Willie Ehrlich, the only surviving boy from a family of ten, who was trying to build a life by following in his father's footsteps, the calves were his future. But he could see at birth that the animals would not live, that they looked half-formed, sickly, not ready for life. Sometimes, it made him cry to kill his calves at birth, using the blunt end of an axe to crush their heads. He was married, with two children of his own, still living with his parents on the homestead the Ehrlichs had acquired in 1900 after getting off the immigrant train. The travails of his father, George, fleeing the czar's army in Russia, surviving that typhoon at sea, and living through the cold hatred of people who thought all German Americans were suspect, gave Willie and his father enough faith they could crawl through this long hole of dirt and depression. The Ehrlichs had established themselves with a typical homestead-160 acres, a quarter-section big enough for cows, a garden, hogs, a few rows of oats, and some wheat. Nearly all of it was gone, reduced to a barren patch in the dun-colored air around the Texas-Oklahoma border. They lived on what they could make and store. After killing a hog, they would trim off the fat and use it for canning gel or mix it with lye to make soap. The meat was salted and rubbed with a solution of brown sugar and brine. They would let it dry for weeks, hanging from the windmill, then rub it again in salt and sugar, injecting the solution near the bones with a syringe. It would go into a bag and hang in the bas.e.m.e.nt for months. They ate everything but the squeal.

Ehrlich's neighbor, Gustav Borth, did not have even a hog to slaughter for his winter sausage, or cow chips for fuel. He borrowed twenty-five dollars from a bank-pledging part of his homestead and his combine to buy coal for his stove. A proud man, descendant of a line of Germans who prospered after Catherine the Great opened Russia to them, Borth was crushed by the America of 1934. Deeply homesick and disillusioned, Borth would go behind the shed of his farm, trying to hide from his family, and there he would cry. His daughter, Rosa, saw him several times as he wept; he was hunched over, the tears pouring out of him. It broke her heart. He sold the last of his cattle to the government for seven dollars a head. With this money, the children wanted shoes. Rosa Borth, age fourteen, had only a single pair, and she had outgrown them. She painted them black for church, white for school. When the weather was warm, she went barefoot. Next year, Rosa's mother told her-shoes will come next year, with the rains. Rosa was frightened after seeing her father, the brave bull who broke the Oklahoma crust by hand, crying behind the shed. She could go a while longer without shoes. Her father was afraid of losing his combine-his last possession of any worth. Borth owed four hundred dollars on the machine that helped deliver wheat in the boom years. Four hundred dollars-it looked like a Mount Everest of debt. He had no money for his little girl's shoes, let alone for payments on a debt like that. His sobs behind the shed were carried by the wind.

Some Germans gave up. They could not go back to the Russian steppe. In Stalin's grip, the old homes were no longer safe. Germans who stayed behind in the villages on the Volga River had been routed, their houses confiscated. In America, the ones who now joined the exodus of tenant farmers from Arkansas, Missouri, and eastern Oklahoma moved to the orchard country of Was.h.i.+ngton State, or north to Minnesota, or to Saskatchewan.

For people in No Man's Land without a cow or a hog of their own, there were three ways to get food. They could wait on the soup line that had opened a few blocks from the courthouse in Boise City. They could wait on another sort of food line, this one courtesy of Sheriff Hi Barrick. If it wasn't sugar from the bootleggers, which the sheriff gave out free, it was roadkill, which he had his deputies bring in for distribution. There were always takers for the critters smashed by a car or a train on a dust-clogged highway or track. Their third option: they could steal food.

Crimes were no longer petty in the sheriff's jurisdiction. One man took a car by force in broad daylight, sticking a gun to the head of the driver.

The sheriff lived in the courthouse, next to the jail; Hi Barrick and his wife, Inez, raised their three boys there. The kids roller skated and played marbles and catch in the hallways, weaving among the legal proceedings and jailings. Inez ran a business on the side sewing suits for lawyers-$3.50 for a three-piece job, tailor-made. Living next to the jail was better than their last home, a dugout. Peering out the window of his home and office, Barrick learned to judge when a heavy duster had moved along by the First State Bank sign across the street. When he could see the sign, it was clear enough to drive.

The handsome mugs of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, in their mid-twenties, were posted in Barrick's office. Joyriding, robbing banks, and killing their way through Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri, the Barrow gang was declared Public Enemy Number One by a law enforcement posse headed by a former Texas Ranger. Bonnie and Clyde made fools of cops in dozens of counties, once kidnapping a lawman and having him steal a car battery to replace one in their stolen roadster. Bonnie wrote a poem for her mama, which the newspapers published. She sensed their imminent death and said that she and Clyde were friends to all but snitches and stoolies. It contributed to their heroic stature among some people in No Man's Land. They robbed banks, just as the banks had robbed people. But they were killers as well, as Barrick reminded people. With that pair on the loose, hungry people floating through town, and bootleggers still selling the hard fuel that was illegal in this part of Oklahoma, the sheriff had no time for politics. Though he was a Republican in a county where eight out of ten people gave their vote to Democrats, Barrick was respected. It was no secret how much he despised working at the foreclosure auctions for John Johnson's bank every Monday on the steps of the courthouse; he had even tried to get out of them until he was told by the court that it was his legal duty to stand by as some nester's land was sold for pennies on the dollar. These forced sales were just about the only real estate business left in No Man's Land. Plenty of farms were for sale on the open markets, but there were no buyers. When asked by a reporter about his plans, Barrick said, "I haven't anything new to say. Just tell 'em I'm running again."

Barrick at least could expect to keep his salary-$125 a month. Some teachers had gone nearly two years without pay, living on the room and board of a student's parents and nothing else. Hazel Shaw thought she could use her "salary," the scrip, to buy groceries. But the bank stopped honoring the school scrip when it became clear the system was bankrupt. The county's coffers were empty. By 1934, more than 60 percent of property owners were delinquent in their taxes in Cimarron County. They stopped paying because they had nothing. For the schools, heated by stoves burning cow chips, with dust drifts covering windows, it meant they could no longer afford books. The children would have to continue with broken-spined, ragged old texts perforated by the abrasive air of No Man's Land. Cimarron County High School fell into further disrepair; it was one of the most forlorn sites in a town of dirty-faced buildings, just two clapboard shacks attached at the shoulder. Before the dust, parents had been able to clean the windows and keep the roof in shape. Now the exterior was worn, as if it had been chipped by vandals, the gutters had fallen away, and the windows were covered with torn sheets splotched with three years' worth of uplifted soil. Children ran the streets, dirty and hungry; some had simply been abandoned.

"We are getting deeper and deeper in dust," the Boise City News Boise City News wrote. wrote.

On May 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed outside a gang member's family home in rural Louisiana, their bodies pummeled with lead from rounds of Browning automatic rifles. Bonnie died in a red dress, her favorite color. She was twenty-four. The papers had a field day with pictures of the former Texas Ranger with his b.l.o.o.d.y prey, and then it was back to the dreary routine of life in a dusty fog.

Buildings that had been fresh-painted in Boise City's blush of youth stood decrepit and raw. A town that had been named for its phantom trees now looked nearly treeless. The train station where suitcase farmers had poured into town stood windblown and empty. The grain silos had not been stuffed with fresh wheat for three years, and dust blew up against the sides of hollow barns and hardened, forming caked barriers. The defiance, evident at the start of the Depression when the county proudly turned down relief, was gone. In its place was a sense of doom, as if No Man's Land were being punished by G.o.d. Some ministers told people they must have done something wicked to deserve these awful times. The newspaper conveyed this sentiment as well; civic chauvinism disappeared from the pages of the Boise City News. Boise City News. The paper ran a front-page drawing of the Grim Reaper with a death grip over No Man's Land and began a piece on the storms with a citation from Ezekiel: The paper ran a front-page drawing of the Grim Reaper with a death grip over No Man's Land and began a piece on the storms with a citation from Ezekiel: "Behold, I have smitten my hand at thy dishonest gain which thou has made."

Hazel Shaw did not think she had come by anything-her little nest in the funeral home, the new baby girl-by dishonest gain. The ministers were referring to the wheat bonanza, which seemed eons ago: all the people buying new cars, dancing late, drinking bootleg hooch, purchasing was.h.i.+ng machines on credit, plowing up more ground to keep up with the unnatural float of grain prices-up, up, up, more, more, more. Hazel was religious, but her G.o.d was not full of vengeance. Her G.o.d was hope. Hazel lived across the street from St. Paul's Methodist Church, a reminder that the Lord was in her neighborhood at all times. At night after she had finished draping the windows in fresh sheets and sweeping out the dust, Hazel rocked baby Ruth Nell to sleep, telling her things would soon get better, the sky would clear again. It was an early winter on the High Plains, the blue northers charging down in October. Some trees never leafed out that year; it was a fall without color, just as it had been a spring and summer of gray.

One morning while Hazel rocked her baby, she saw in the pale light a small coffee box on the steps of the church across the street. She walked outside to her front porch and took a second look. There was a coat thrown over the box. She went inside to start the day's ch.o.r.es and forgot about it. Ruth Nell's crib was in the one corner of the bedroom that Hazel tried to keep spotless. She scrubbed it down daily, washed the baby's blankets. She gummed the windows up fresh. The store in town sold a five-hundred-foot roll of house-sealing tape for thirty-five cents, promoted through an ad that read "Mrs. Housewife, Keep That Dust Out by Sealing Your Windows with Gummed Tape." Her ch.o.r.es done, she visited with her Grandma Loumiza, the original Lucas homesteader who lived south, near Texhoma. Grandma Lou said she'd never seen the land so mean-edged. It was a danger to breathe, and Grandma Lou was starting to show it, coughing until she fell to the ground. A widow for two decades, she was field-tough, able to do any ch.o.r.e a man could do on her homestead. But these fits of hacking were debilitating.

That night, a light snow mixed with dust began to fall, leaving a dirty, frothy covering on Boise City. Hazel noticed the coffee box and the coat still on the church steps; they had been there all day. The next morning, with the temperature well below freezing and several inches of brown snow on the ground from the snuster, Hazel looked outside: the coat and box had not been moved. She walked across the street to the steps, brushed back the snow, stripped away the coat. There was a baby inside, blue-faced, barely moving, perhaps no more than four pounds, no bigger than a garden squash. Hazel rushed home and tried to warm the baby, holding her close and rubbing her. She heated milk and got some hot fluids inside. Her husband summoned the minister, a doctor, and the sheriff. The baby had been out in the cold for at least forty hours, wrapped in nothing but a blue flannel diaper and covered by the coat. The doctor rubbed the baby with oil, then wrapped her in several layers of blankets. Sheriff Barrick did not seem surprised by the discovery. He had a drawl, slower each year, that seldom s.h.i.+fted to higher gear unless he was truly irate. This veteran had seen a lot in the gas-choked trenches of Europe during the Great War, but what he had investigated in the land around his home county of late were new lows for Cimarron County. People were abandoning their children-not in great numbers, mind you, but enough to make the sheriff feel a sense of shame for his fellow Oklahomans.

Nationwide, the 1930s was the first decade in United States history when the number of young children declined. Never before had the birthrate, at less than twenty children per thousand women of childbearing age, been so low.

As the baby's temperature rose, the infant started to cry. Color came to her cheeks. Hazel thought it was a miracle, a baby resuscitated to life after being out in the cold, the dust, and the snow. But it was horrid, as the sheriff said-and, she had to add, evil evil -to think that people would just walk away from a baby, leaving it alone on the church steps in the frigid, dirty air. This ain't the worst of it, the sheriff said. One family had abandoned all three of their children; they were too poor to feed them, said it was inhumane to hold on to the kids. The infant that Hazel found was eventually adopted by a couple east of town. A short time later, word came that the coffee-box baby had died of something that was killing both children and old people throughout the High Plains-dust pneumonia. -to think that people would just walk away from a baby, leaving it alone on the church steps in the frigid, dirty air. This ain't the worst of it, the sheriff said. One family had abandoned all three of their children; they were too poor to feed them, said it was inhumane to hold on to the kids. The infant that Hazel found was eventually adopted by a couple east of town. A short time later, word came that the coffee-box baby had died of something that was killing both children and old people throughout the High Plains-dust pneumonia.

13. The Struggle for Air IN THE WINTER OF 1935, everybody in the Osteen dugout had a cough, raw throat, and red eyes that itched at all times, or trouble getting their breath. The family-Ike, his brother, and two sisters, and the widow living inside a divot in the prairie of Baca County-had tried to seal their home, stuffing rags into wall cracks, gluing strips of flour paste-covered paper around the door, taping the windows and then draping damp gunnysacks over the openings. Wet bed sheets were hung against the walls as another filter. But all the layers of moist cloth and flour paste could not keep the wind-sifted particles out. The dugout was like a sieve. When their Red Cross masks got so clogged it was like slapping a mud pie over the face, they rigged up sponges to breathe through, but the general store in Springfield couldn't keep up with the demand and ran out of sponges. The plow that Ike had used to make money in the wheat boom was almost completely buried. Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress. They tried parking the old Model-A on different sides of the dugout or atop the dunes as a way to keep it from getting buried. In March, the worst dusters yet came from the north. The storms blocked the sun for four days, although it was never completely dark, and packed winds strong enough to knock a person down. It forced the Osteen family inside for three of those days and smothered the Model-A. Ike listened to the incessant crackling of static electricity around the windmill. Poking his head out of the hole, he saw currents running down the windmill and along a wire-a blue flame. Wasn't nothing; his friend Tex Acre said the static at his place was so strong it electrocuted a jackrabbit. Saw it with his own eyes. 1935, everybody in the Osteen dugout had a cough, raw throat, and red eyes that itched at all times, or trouble getting their breath. The family-Ike, his brother, and two sisters, and the widow living inside a divot in the prairie of Baca County-had tried to seal their home, stuffing rags into wall cracks, gluing strips of flour paste-covered paper around the door, taping the windows and then draping damp gunnysacks over the openings. Wet bed sheets were hung against the walls as another filter. But all the layers of moist cloth and flour paste could not keep the wind-sifted particles out. The dugout was like a sieve. When their Red Cross masks got so clogged it was like slapping a mud pie over the face, they rigged up sponges to breathe through, but the general store in Springfield couldn't keep up with the demand and ran out of sponges. The plow that Ike had used to make money in the wheat boom was almost completely buried. Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress. They tried parking the old Model-A on different sides of the dugout or atop the dunes as a way to keep it from getting buried. In March, the worst dusters yet came from the north. The storms blocked the sun for four days, although it was never completely dark, and packed winds strong enough to knock a person down. It forced the Osteen family inside for three of those days and smothered the Model-A. Ike listened to the incessant crackling of static electricity around the windmill. Poking his head out of the hole, he saw currents running down the windmill and along a wire-a blue flame. Wasn't nothing; his friend Tex Acre said the static at his place was so strong it electrocuted a jackrabbit. Saw it with his own eyes.

With each new duster, hope that the Osteen half-section could deliver some measure of relief to the family slipped away. For days, they were not sure on what side of the horizon the sun rose and on what side it set. A black blizzard in February carried such a punch it knocked telephone poles down. By the spring, Osteen's mama wanted only to see her son get through school, and then move to town. Ike was holding on, trying to attend school on the days when the storms would allow his mule to stumble through the sifting dunes. Sometimes he would ride all the way to the schoolhouse only to find it closed on account of the dusters. Every school in the county was closed for a week in March. At one school, children were trapped just before the afternoon school bell, unable to go home. They spent the night holed up behind the thin walls of the wood-frame building, cold and hungry. Stories like that made parents give up on school. It was too risky, and they did not see any reason for it. Life's ambitions and dreams had dried up; people held to a few, desperate desires-a longing to breathe clean air, to eat, to stay warm. School was a luxury.

Ike considered dropping out. There was supposed to be work on a government road job, paving a line across southern Baca County into New Mexico, work that a boy could get if he could lie about his age. He also thought of hopping aboard the train and heading west, seeing what California was all about. He and Tex Acre had talked about lighting out for some place that had trees and water. But Ike's mother said it would break her heart if he left before making it out of high school. She needed at least one child to bring some light into the dugout. He signed up to help with the senior play, Mail Order Bride, Mail Order Bride, staying after school in the tiny gym to work as a stagehand. But in mid-spring, just days before dress rehearsal, practice came to a sudden halt-the play was off. Cots were hauled into the school gym and placed in tight rows. The Red Cross was converting the gym into an emergency hospital. It soon filled with wheezing, fevered people, including some of Ike's cla.s.smates. Nine people died. One of the victims was seventeen, Ike's age, a cla.s.smate who had hoped to graduate with him that spring. staying after school in the tiny gym to work as a stagehand. But in mid-spring, just days before dress rehearsal, practice came to a sudden halt-the play was off. Cots were hauled into the school gym and placed in tight rows. The Red Cross was converting the gym into an emergency hospital. It soon filled with wheezing, fevered people, including some of Ike's cla.s.smates. Nine people died. One of the victims was seventeen, Ike's age, a cla.s.smate who had hoped to graduate with him that spring.

One dirt-filled day blended into another. Starting on the first day of March, there was a duster every day for thirty straight days, according to the weather bureau. In Dodge City, Kansas, the Health Board counted only thirteen dust-free days in the first four months of 1935.

People were stuffed with prairie topsoil. In a report delivered to the Southern Medical a.s.sociation, Dr. John H. Blue of Guymon, Oklahoma, said he treated fifty-six patients for dust pneumonia, and all of them showed signs of silicosis; others were suffering early symptoms of tuberculosis. He was blunt. The doctor had looked inside an otherwise healthy young farm hand, a man in his early twenties, and told him what he saw.

"You are filled with dirt," the doctor said. The young man died within a day.

Prairie dust has a high silica content. As it builds up in the lungs, it tears at the honeycombed web of air sacs and weakens the body's resistance. After prolonged exposure, it has the same effect on people as coal dust has on a miner. Silicosis has long been a plague of people who work underground and is the oldest occupational respiratory disease. But it takes years to build up. In the High Plains, doctors were seeing a condition similar to silicosis after just three years of storms. Sinusitis, laryngitis, bronchitis-a trio of painful breathing and throat ailments-were common. By the mid-1930s, a fourth condition, dust pneumonia, was rampant. It was one of the biggest killers. Doctors were not even sure if it was a disease unique from any of the common types of pneumonia, which is an infection of the lungs. They saw a pattern of symptoms: children, infants, or the elderly with coughing jags and body aches, particularly chest pains, and shortness of breath. Many had nausea and could not hold food down. Within days of diagnosis, some would die.

Desperate parents pleaded with the government men to help their families escape. Their children were being strangled by dust. In a month, a hundred families in Baca County gave up their property to the government in return for pa.s.sage away from land that was killing them. Roosevelt had not yet settled on a plan to relocate people, but there was money available, in piecemeal relief efforts, to help folks forced to move.

The Red Cross declared a medical crisis across the High Plains in 1935, opening six emergency hospitals, including the one in Ike's school gym. But in the homesteads of Baca County, No Man's Land, and southwest Kansas, many people in dire need of care could not get to the medical centers. Secondary roads to withered farms-none of them paved, most of them barely graded-were impa.s.sable in the first months of 1935 because of blowing drifts. And the chill was a force of its own. February was the coldest in forty years. People were stuck in drafty, dust-swept homesteads, meat-locker cold, coughing dirt into their pillows. Fighting for their lives, the sick rode mules or horses over the chop of the dunes to the hospitals. In Beaver County, adjacent to Cimarron, three hundred people were diagnosed with dust pneumonia. Nearby in Liberal, Kansas, nine people who came into the medical facility died of the same thing. In March, one out of every five people admitted to all hospitals in southwest Kansas said they were choking on dust. The next month, more than 50 percent of admissions were for dust-related respiratory ailments.

Jeanne Clark, whose dancer mother had left New York for the High Plains to get help for her own respiratory ailments, came down with a high fever, chills, and chronic cough in her home just north of Baca County. She was put in the emergency hospital in Lamar, Colorado, in a room with wet bed sheets draped over the windows. The former haven for lungers had turned lethal. Jeanne's mother had begun to look for a way out of this maelstrom. She had gone from Broadway's bright lights to a small town where she was starved for light and a clear day, and had been thinking of ways to get back to New York when her little girl came down sick. Jeanne was an only child. The doctor said they did not know if she would live to see Easter Sunday 1935. She slept most of the day, awakened occasionally by her father's cigar smoke. She loved seeing her daddy, but the smoke made her scream.

The Red Cross advised people not to go outside unless they had to and then only with their respiratory masks. Even rail travel was hazardous. A train from Kansas City to Dalhart had to stop several times when pa.s.sengers complained they were choking. The train came to a halt, idling in an effort to let the dust settle enough so that people could scoop out the pa.s.senger cars. Another train in Kansas was derailed when it plowed into a dune that had formed in just a few hours. Despite the Red Cross warning, people had had to go outside. They lived outdoors; the outdoors lived with them. It was one and the same. They had no choice. High Plains nesters were more intimate with the elements than perhaps any other people in the country. They knew black dust came from Kansas, red from eastern Oklahoma, a yellow-orange from Texas. And sometimes all of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas seemed airborne at once: black, red, and orange converging. The sunlight that filtered through these dusters took on eerie hues-sometimes even green. People knew that when the wind blew from the southwest, the duster to follow would go through a range of colors-everything but the golden light they remembered from the first days of breaking the sod. If the dust clouds were high from the south, somewhat thin, they would take the shape of moving mesas, topping out at better than two miles above the ground. And when dusters came from the north, the clouds boiled up like thunderheads and usually carried a heavy load. These black northers were the most hated. Life in the galloping flatlands was a pact with nature. It gave as much as it took, and in 1935 it was all take. to go outside. They lived outdoors; the outdoors lived with them. It was one and the same. They had no choice. High Plains nesters were more intimate with the elements than perhaps any other people in the country. They knew black dust came from Kansas, red from eastern Oklahoma, a yellow-orange from Texas. And sometimes all of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas seemed airborne at once: black, red, and orange converging. The sunlight that filtered through these dusters took on eerie hues-sometimes even green. People knew that when the wind blew from the southwest, the duster to follow would go through a range of colors-everything but the golden light they remembered from the first days of breaking the sod. If the dust clouds were high from the south, somewhat thin, they would take the shape of moving mesas, topping out at better than two miles above the ground. And when dusters came from the north, the clouds boiled up like thunderheads and usually carried a heavy load. These black northers were the most hated. Life in the galloping flatlands was a pact with nature. It gave as much as it took, and in 1935 it was all take.

14. Showdown in Dalhart DRIFTERS, LUNATICS, AND BANKRUPT shopkeepers filled the courtrooms in Dalhart. On many days, the slow grinding of the law against people who could no longer stay afloat was the only business in town. Uncle d.i.c.k c.o.o.n took t.i.tle to a pool hall that was one of the oldest hangouts in town, foreclosing on a debt of $612. The court awarded c.o.o.n four pool tables, four domino tables, twelve chairs, five cue racks, four sets of dominoes, and two cigar cases. Banks foreclosed on red bulls and black steers, on tractors, combines, water tanks, windmills, light fixtures. Simon Herzstein tried but could not find a way to reopen his store in town. By 1935, Herzstein was three years behind on city taxes. He had stayed open through days when not a single s.h.i.+rt sold before finally calling it quits. After Herzstein was foreclosed on $242 in back taxes, the City of Dalhart had t.i.tle to a piece of s.p.a.ce long-occupied by the leading clothier on the southern plains. It became another empty hole in a sagging town. shopkeepers filled the courtrooms in Dalhart. On many days, the slow grinding of the law against people who could no longer stay afloat was the only business in town. Uncle d.i.c.k c.o.o.n took t.i.tle to a pool hall that was one of the oldest hangouts in town, foreclosing on a debt of $612. The court awarded c.o.o.n four pool tables, four domino tables, twelve chairs, five cue racks, four sets of dominoes, and two cigar cases. Banks foreclosed on red bulls and black steers, on tractors, combines, water tanks, windmills, light fixtures. Simon Herzstein tried but could not find a way to reopen his store in town. By 1935, Herzstein was three years behind on city taxes. He had stayed open through days when not a single s.h.i.+rt sold before finally calling it quits. After Herzstein was foreclosed on $242 in back taxes, the City of Dalhart had t.i.tle to a piece of s.p.a.ce long-occupied by the leading clothier on the southern plains. It became another empty hole in a sagging town.

The sign at the edge of Dalhart-"BLACK MAN DON'T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE"-was strictly enforced. In February, a norther came through the High Plains, sending the mercury plummeting to seven degrees. The hazy, arctic air hung on for a week. When two black men got off the train in Dalhart, hungry and nearly hypothermic, they looked around for something to eat and a place to get warm. They found a door open in a shed at the train depot. Inside was some food and shelter from a cold so painful it burned their hands and feet like a blowtorch.

"TWO NEGROES ARRESTED": the the Dalhart Texan Dalhart Texan reported how the men, aged nineteen and twenty-three, had sniffed around the train station, looking for food. They were cuffed, locked up in the county jail, and after a week brought out for arraignment before a justice of the peace, Hugh Edwards. The judge ordered the men to dance. The men hesitated; this was supposed to be a bond hearing. The railroad agent said these men were good for nothing but Negro toe-tapping. The judge smiled; he said he wanted to see it. reported how the men, aged nineteen and twenty-three, had sniffed around the train station, looking for food. They were cuffed, locked up in the county jail, and after a week brought out for arraignment before a justice of the peace, Hugh Edwards. The judge ordered the men to dance. The men hesitated; this was supposed to be a bond hearing. The railroad agent said these men were good for nothing but Negro toe-tapping. The judge smiled; he said he wanted to see it.

"Tap dance," Edwards told the men.

"Here?"

"Yes. Before the court."

The men started to dance, forced silly grins on their faces, reluctant. After the tap dance, the judge banged his gavel and ordered the men back to jail for another two months.

As the ground took flight through the middle years of the Dirty Thirties, the courts had to contend with a new type of mental illness-the person driven mad by dust. Texas, like most states, had a civil procedure for committing people to involuntary confinement in a state inst.i.tution. County courts had jurisdiction. A young judge, Wilson Cowen, impaneled a jury of six to hear a story that was common on the High Plains: a young woman found wandering the streets, muttering incoherent pleas. Cowen was deeply troubled by these insanity trials. He had been elected in the summer of 1934, despite his youth (he had just turned thirty) and his inexperience (he had been in Dalhart for only five years). While running forjudge, Cowen roamed all over Dallam County and saw firsthand how the dirt-packed winds were taking the life out of the place. He drove for days without seeing a single green thing. He saw farmhouses without a chicken or cow. He saw children in rags, their parents too frightened of dust pneumonia to send them to school, huddling in shacks shaped into wavy formations on the prairie, almost indistinguishable from the dunes. He had been a judge less than a year when he was a.s.signed the case of a mother of young children, the thirty-five-year-old widow found on the streets. Bankrupted by the wheat bust, the woman had lost her husband to dust pneumonia, leaving her without a man or a penny to her name. Her children were hungry, dirty, coughing, dressed in torn, soiled clothes. Their house was nearly buried, and inside centipedes and black widows had a run of the place. The worst thing was the wind. It never stopped. One day, the woman simply snapped.

"Dust is killing me!" the woman shouted. Her voice echoed through the redbrick fortress of the Dallam County Courthouse.

Cowen tried to talk to her about what had happened and the steps she could take to recover. The judge told her about the relief house, just opened in town, Doc Dawson's operation. The Doc was broke. All the money he made at the sanitarium had been put into the land, and the land gave back nothing. What was left for him was service, the impulse that had driven the Doc all his life. With a donation from Uncle d.i.c.k, he opened a soup kitchen known as the Dalhart Haven, serving hot beans from a big pot and black coffee, sometimes hot. Dunes were spreading all around the Panhandle, sifting and lengthening, transforming the old XIT lands to desert before the eyes of a panicked citizenry. The Doc's ambition had ebbed to a few goals: live through the dusters, keep the soup kitchen running.

And so Judge Cowen suggested to the shrieking woman, perhaps she could find temporary relief at Doc Dawson's Dalhart Haven.

"Dust is killing me!" she shouted again. "It's killing my children."

Privately, the judge told friends some hope existed if only the government men could find a way to tame the dunes and if the skies could spare some rain. Cowen was encouraged by talk among some of the government men about trying to control the prairie with contour plowing. Conservation Conservation -that was the new word coming from Big Hugh Bennett. He had sent one of his soil scientists to Dallam County, and the man told farmers they had been "practicing suicidal production" on the land. If the government was going to help, people would have to promise, in writing, to change their ways, would have to act as one. But getting a community consensus looked like a hard thing to do at a time when most people were still in shock at the collapse of their lives and their beloved piece of Texas dirt. This tomorrow land was running out of tomorrow people. -that was the new word coming from Big Hugh Bennett. He had sent one of his soil scientists to Dallam County, and the man told farmers they had been "practicing suicidal production" on the land. If the government was going to help, people would have to promise, in writing, to change their ways, would have to act as one. But getting a community consensus looked like a hard thing to do at a time when most people were still in shock at the collapse of their lives and their beloved piece of Texas dirt. This tomorrow land was running out of tomorrow people.

"Dust is killing us all! G.o.d help us."

The court heard how the woman's shack was nearly a tomb under the topsoil, and her children were close to suffocating. An expert told the judge that the woman had lost her ability to care for her children or herself. After half a day's deliberation, the jury agreed. Resisting the tug on his heart, Judge Cowen signed a certificate committing the mother to the insane asylum at Wichita Falls, Texas. Her children were given to the state. Cowen was thirty-one years old when he heard that case. More than fifty years later, it still bothered him.

There were times in the two-room shack shared by five members of Bam White's family that Lizzie White nearly snapped as well, when the pain was too much. The shack had no electricity, no running water.

"The wind," she would say, shaking her head, a haunted look on her face. "Oh, the wind, the wind."

They worked and ate by the light of a kerosene lamp. Keeping the dust out was impossible. Even fresh-cleaned clothes, hanging outside to dry on the line, were at risk. When a duster rushed through, she had to hurry and get the laundry off the line, because there was usually just enough oil in the blowing sand to soil the clothes. Lizzie swept five, six times a day. She had her boys shovel dust in the morning, after it piled up outside the door. Sometimes a big dune blocked the door, and the boys had to crawl out a window to get to it. The dust arrived in mysterious ways. It could penetrate like a spirit, cascading down the walls or slithering along the ceiling until it found an opening. Of course she taped windows and doors, draped everything in wet sheets, turned the pots over, covered the sink. But there it was floating in the kerosene lamp's light, after supper, free-floating. Just the sound of the prairie wind could make her stomach tight, for she knew what would follow. And the sight of her children, these hungry kids, their noses never clean. She kept them out of school on days she feared they might get caught in a blinding duster. The dust pneumonia scared the life out of her. Her sister, who lived to the south, had caught it. Came up with the fever and powerful body aches and had trouble breathing, as if her air pa.s.sages had been cut off. Came up with the coughing all night and day till she broke three ribs. Fever shot up, and then she died before she could find her way to one of the emergency hospitals.

Young Melt's job was to tend the garden, hauling water in pails to a square of ground out by the side of the shack. It was not much to look at, except for the watermelons. They grew big and green, and the Whites counted the days until they could cut one open and submerge their faces in the sweet, wet fruit. Midsummer, amid a string of dusters, the static electricity was crackling like firecrackers. In the evening, when the dust clouds drifted through, Melt went outside to check the garden. He had watered it that morning, but now it was dead, killed by the electric currents of the duster; the leaves were black and the vines collapsed. The static had singed the foliage of the watermelon plants.

Not long after the garden died, the children came home and found Lizzie White buckled over in a corner. She was crying, her face in a towel. The boys looked into their mama's red eyes, felt the towel moist with hot tears.