All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

9

We drove all day.

I thought about Old Man Turpin as we drove. I wondered how he afforded such a nice car. It wasn’t but a couple years old and didn’t look to have been driven all that much. I wondered what he thought about when he was alone in his house with his new Ford in the barn and no place to go and his supper on the table with no one to share it with.

He wasn’t a friendly man—he wouldn’t even wave at you if he passed you on the street in town. If he did speak to you, it was usually to complain. He once stopped me on the street to tell me I ought not to eat a peppermint stick while I was walking ’cause I might fall down and it might punch through the top of my mouth and stick me in the brain.

I thought that a little unlikely. I also thought he probably didn’t care if I was brain-stabbed or not. It was just something to complain about. Like Mama used to say about mean folks, they’ve always got some kind of pain of their own, and they don’t mind sharing it.

It must have been that way for him to finally give up and sit on his porch in his rocking chair and let blowing sand that cut like buckshot cover him up while he tried to smoke his pipe. Something like that wasn’t any kind of accident. You had to be dedicated to it.

But all that said, he traveled some. At least as far as that filling station behind us. The old man had recognized the car. Heck, for all I knew, Turpin was a big man around town there. I don’t guess you really know nothing about nobody unless you walk around in their shoes some.

I found a station in a town some fifty miles out of Ferguson, and we got gas there, but we didn’t stop at a café to eat because we was on the run and couldn’t afford time or money for such foolishness now. Jane bought us some pickled eggs from a big jar in the station and some Cokes, and we ate and drank while I drove.

No one had recognized the car at the station, as far as we could tell, so I figured that Ferguson was about as far south as Old Man Turpin went. Or at least, I hoped so. He didn’t strike me as a world traveler, any more than we was.

As we rode, I looked alongside the roads and saw the sand piled there, and beyond the edge of the roads was more sand. It reminded me of pictures I had seen in schoolbooks of the Arabian Desert, and it occurred to me that I had near forgot how things had looked before the great winds had come and picked up all the good earth and thrown it to the sky. Thrown it up there and whirled it around, sorted out what good topsoil remained—and that wasn’t much—and then chucked it all over Oklahoma and beyond. It was hard to remember how things had looked when the woods were thick and the fields were high with green corn and rows of shiny green beans and peanuts and potato tops thick and standing up tall, letting you know if you dug down under them, you’d find some fat potatoes for cleaning, cutting, and frying. Peanuts to parch and crack and eat raw. Plenty of peas to pick and boil up with a chunk of pork rind. All gone now.

It was hard to remember the last time I was truly clean. When there wasn’t any dust under my collar, behind or in my ears, or in my hair. It was hard to remember being able to walk to school, or darn near anywhere except a field, and not have to stop to pour dust out of your shoes.

It was hard to remember when all the earth hadn’t been thrown to the sky.

I thought on all these things as I drove, and I have to admit, it was both bitter and sweet, but it was nice to have my head free of Jane’s words for a while. After the pickled egg and the Coca-Cola, she had grown silent—a condition that I figured was unnatural to her, and on some level didn’t suit her, but right then I was grateful for it.

The sand didn’t come during the day, and by the time we took an old road off the main highway and parked alongside a creek that actually had water in it, under an oak that actually had leaves, it was near nightfall.

The trail wound down off the road and under the tree in such a way we were well out of eyeshot from the highway, but not so deep down we couldn’t be back up there in fifteen minutes.

We had a number of goods we’d brought, and one of those was a small pot. We put that aside, gathered sticks, and made a stack of little ones for tinder and bigger ones for real fuel, and we did all this under the oak tree. We put matches to the sticks and started a fire. Next we opened a can of beans and heated them up in the pot. We dipped the beans out of the pot with a cup, put them in the wooden bowls we had. We each had our own spoon, and had even been smart enough to bring some pepper and salt. The beans wasn’t like Mama used to make them, as they was canned beans we’d had to fight open with a can opener, but they tasted pretty good just the same.

We drank from our bottles of water and then set around in silence with our backs against the tree.

I don’t know how long we sat there, but I do know it was good and dark when we went up to the car. Tony stretched out on the backseat, and I sat behind the wheel and slid the seat back and tried to sleep. Jane leaned against the door on her side.

The moon was bright that night, and it was shining in on her, and the way the light was on her face, she looked like pictures I’d seen of Joan of Arc, or maybe it was someone else, but whoever it was, she was pretty.

I watched her sleep for a while, and then I nodded and went to sleep myself.

In the morning, when I woke up, things didn’t seem as bad as they had the night before.

I got out of the car as silently as I could, walked down to the creek.

It was a wide creek, and unlike those near my home, it was full of water, and the water was running fast. I walked along the creek till I came to a place where it went narrow and was partly fed by a spring. The spring bubbled up out of the ground and ran into the creek and joined up with water coming from some other source. My guess was it was the Red River, as we were heading in the direction of the Texas border. Or so I hoped. So far we were mostly working off the sun’s position and a lot of guesswork and wishful thinking.

I walked back along the bank and enjoyed the cool morning air and the greenery and the way the boughs grew close and shaded things. The trees that grew against the bank had thick roots, and they twisted out from the soil like well ropes and hung over the water. Watching the creek as I walked, I saw fish in the water. They were small, but they were fish.

I found a little willow growing up along the bank, and I got hold of it, bent it back and forth till it snapped off, and then used my pocketknife to clean it of smaller limbs. I cleaned it until I had a fishing pole.

Back at the car, I tried to open the back door as gently as I could. When I did, Tony stirred, looked at me, then turned his face into the seat and went back to sleep. Jane didn’t stir.

I lifted our flour sacks out, two in one hand, one in the other, and carried them down to the oak by the creek. I dug around in one of the bags until I found a ball of twine, and measured me off some and cut it and tied it to the bottom of the pole, ran it to the tip, and let the bulk of it hang. I bent a safety pin I had in place of a button on my shirt, made a hook, and tied it to the twine. I got the empty bean can from last night’s supper and walked along the creek until I saw some soft dirt up on a rise. It was good dirt, not sand. It was the kind of dirt that needed to be in the fields. It was the kind of dirt they had farmed out and scraped off the top of the earth, leaving only the bad earth, the sand that the wind could carry off as easy as if it were talcum powder.

I dug in the dirt with my hands, and it felt good to put my fingers in it. It was rich and full, and it would grow corn as high as a rain cloud. I didn’t know till right then how much I wanted to be away from dried-out Oklahoma. It was like I had been numb until this moment when my fingers went into the dirt. I was feeling things again. Smelling things again, like the rich dark earth and the sharp smell of the trees in the grove. In that moment, the sky seemed bluer and the sun seemed brighter, and at least for a little bit, it seemed as if there might be a brighter tomorrow. My mama always said that. No matter how bad things were, there was always tomorrow, and a possibility it would be brighter. Daddy hadn’t remembered that, but I told myself right then and there that I would.

Eventually, I found some worms. Some of them were grubs. I liked grubs the best for fishing, so I was glad to have them. I filled the can and went back to my fishing line lying beneath the oak. I cut another stretch of twine off the ball and wadded it up and stuffed it in my pocket. I put one of the grubs on the hook I had made from the safety pin and went along the bank with my can and pole until I came to where it was wide enough I couldn’t jump across and deep enough I could have stood in it to my waist. I put my line in there, and found shade beneath a sweet gum that was full with leaves and sat with my back against it.

Daddy and I had gone fishing a bunch of times, and I thought about him while I fished, and without even knowing it was coming, I started to cry. I thought about Mama, and how she would fry the fish after we cleaned them. How after a meal like that, Daddy would churn up some ice cream and we’d sit out on the porch with it in big bowls and eat it and watch lightning bugs fly along.

Mama would put her arm around me, and tell me stories, mostly things her parents had told her. Scotch-Irish stories from the old country about ghosts and leprechauns and such. She told me her parents had died of the smallpox, both of them, when she was a girl. She said a day never passed she didn’t think about them.

Mama always smelled like she had just taken a bath, and her breath was sweet as mint. She never missed telling me she loved me. I tried to remember if I had told her I loved her before she died. I wanted to believe I had.

When I was young, when it rained, I didn’t like the lightning and the thunder, and she would lie down beside me and tell me it wasn’t nothing more than a bunch of little men throwing balls at bowling pins, and that was the noise I heard, and the fire I seen in the sky was just them lighting their pipes.

It seemed so long ago.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a lightning bug.

Or rain.

And I didn’t remember what ice cream tasted like.

All of a sudden, I was crying. It came on hard, with me heaving and bawling like a lost calf. I was glad there wasn’t anyone around to hear me, and when I was through crying, I dipped some water in my palm from the creek and washed my face with it. After that, I was mostly all right.

I don’t know how long I fished, because I dozed a little, but eventually I felt a tug. I pulled up a little perch. I took it off the hook and laid it out on the soft ground, where it flopped around. It was what we called a sun perch, bright with colors and small in length, but pretty fat. I baited the hook again.

Sticking the pole in the dirt so that the line hung in the water, I took the twine out of my pocket and got the perch and ran the cord through its gills, then took it down to the creek and lowered it in on the twine. I tied the twine off to a root sticking out of the bank and went back to fishing.

By the time the sun was up high, I had four perch. I wanted to catch one more, but by then they had quit biting, and I wasn’t up for walking along the creek and trying to find another spot.

I took the fish and gutted them and cleaned them in the cold spring water. I built a fire and got a frying pan out of the flour sack, along with a can of lard. I scooped some lard into the frying pan with my spoon, and when the lard was melting I put the fish in the pan. There wasn’t any flour and egg to make a batter, but they’d fry up good just the same.

One of Jane’s books was in one of the bags, and I got it out to read. It was a book of poems. I wasn’t much on poems, but I read it anyway. I found it was good to move the words around in my mouth and my mind. It had been a while since I had done that, and I had pretty well forgot the fun of reading. I read and smelled the fish fry, pausing now and then to turn them in the lard with my spoon, since we hadn’t been smart enough to bring forks. The smell was starting to make me hungry, and my stomach was growling like a tiger.

I got some salt and pepper and dosed the fish a little with it, and by the time Jane and Tony were awake and come drifting down the hill to the smell of the perch, they were fried up and ready.

When Jane saw that I had been reading her book, she said, “That isn’t Tractor Digest.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I just put the book back in the sack.

“That smells good,” Tony said.

“It’s for all of us,” I said. “Get your plates and spoons.”

We had the fish for breakfast, and they were good, if I say so myself.

And I do.