All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

2

There was plenty of rabbits for a while, so many that the men and boys would go out in groups and run after them and chase them up against some makeshift fences like they was cattle, then take sticks to them and beat them to death. There was so many rabbits they were eating everything green that the starving livestock and the grasshoppers hadn’t eaten and the sand and the drought hadn’t killed. Some of that green was our gardens. We didn’t want to give it up to rabbits, and on account of that, the rabbits was herded and killed.

Food wasn’t all that handy, so me and Daddy, after killing some rabbits, used to get us a bunch of them and bring them home to eat. We’d got some a couple days back and hung them in the house on a nail. After Mama got worse sick we’d forgot about the rabbits and hadn’t eaten for two days. Now, with Mama and Daddy dead and no one left but me, they’d gone hard and were beginning to smell a little ripe. I decided I was going to skin them, cook them, and eat until I couldn’t eat no more.

The sand was still blowing, and it was coming through the house the way a ghost would walk through a wall. We had got some flour and water and made some paste and glued paper all along the edges of the windows with it, and we put rags up against the door once we got inside, but it didn’t help much. The dust still got in. It was everywhere. In the curtains and on the shelves and in the pages of books, and it coated the face and tipped the tongue and gave everything you ate a trail-spice taste. I was always wiping or washing it out of my eyes.

I had buckets of water pumped up from our well in the barn, it was the one good thing about our place. All the other wells was dry or near dry, but ours kept pumping. The barn kept the sand from blowing in as bad as it might, so our well hadn’t dried up like so many others.

I had put a rag over the water buckets, and the top of the rag was dark with dust. I got the dipper and shook the dust off it and lifted off the rag and dipped me a drink and put the rag back. The water tasted like I was dipping it out of a mud puddle. Rag or not, the dust had got in.

I cut up the rabbits and tossed the innards in an empty bucket. I had been giving things like that to our dog, Butch, but the dog couldn’t stand the sand neither, and one day he went off and didn’t come back. I liked to imagine he had gone out to California and was living under a tree in an orange grove and there were kind folks who gave him food. California was a place some said everyone ought to go. Said there was work there and there wasn’t no sandstorms and there was plenty of water that didn’t taste like grit. After all that had happened, I was thinking on it. It wasn’t like I had a lot to pack. And besides, the bank was going to take back the property any day now.

I cleaned the rabbits and put some sticks of wood in the stove and lit them and fried the rabbits with a little lard and flour. I didn’t have any eggs, so the batter was flakey and mostly fell off.

I ate some of the meat and put the rest in the icebox, which didn’t have any ice but was about as good a place as there was to keep the dust out. I kept thinking about those rabbits, us killing them and them screaming the way they do, like dying women in lakes of fire is the best I can describe it, but truth to tell, there ain’t no words for it. If I thought too much on it, it spoiled my eating, so I tried to think pleasant thoughts, but right then I didn’t have many.

I took some time to step on centipedes, which were all over the place, and I killed a scorpion that was under the table the same way. I didn’t want to lay down and have those things on me. When I was younger, a scorpion had stung me, and I didn’t like it a bit and didn’t want to repeat it.

When I had killed all I could see, I went over and lay down on the bed where Mama had died. I could smell her on the mattress, the kind of sweet smell she had that didn’t have nothing to do with perfume, ’cause she didn’t have any except once a bit of lilac water and it was long gone. It was just Mama’s smell and it made me cry. I cried and cried and finally I went to sleep.

Outside it was still dark and the sand still blew.