All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

3

I dreamed and remembered how things had been before all the sand. It was a memory thin as the film covering an egg yolk, but it was a memory I liked. I thought about when Mama and Daddy had been happy. How I had been happy too. We hadn’t had much, but there was food to eat and time to be together. They talked about the future like there would be one. They did good honest work, and I went to school and did chores, and when we could, we listened to the radio or talked or sang or laughed. Me and Daddy played checkers while Mama washed the dishes. It wasn’t a big life, but it was a good life.

And then the soil got dry and the plants went dead. Wasn’t nothing to feed the stock, and the only thing left to do was eat them, not only so they wouldn’t starve to death, but so we wouldn’t either. We even ate the horse, which turned out to be a little stringy and sweet, so under normal circumstances, I don’t recommend it. Right then, though, I would have eaten horse or dog or most anything. There came a point when it seemed like I was hungry all the time.

After the crops started to fail from it being so dry, the wind came and plucked them up and finished them off. The wind howled like a wolf, and it was full of sand that scraped and chewed and cut down everything in its path. When the wind wasn’t blowing, the starving grasshoppers was coming at us in a wave so dark it blacked out the sun. And the rabbits. So many rabbits. Everything became a big mess of whirling sand, starving rabbits, and buzzing grasshoppers.

Then the memory of that faded, and all I could see was that grave in the barn. Open, with Mama and Daddy wrapped up in it. I was standing over it, looking down. A hand pushed up from inside the tarp, pushed at it so that I could see its shape. It was a small hand. It was Mama’s hand.

I come awake quick, tears running down my face.

The dark was gone and so was the sandstorm. I sat up and listened to make sure, but didn’t hear any wind. Still, the air was full of fine powder.

I got out of bed and went out on the front porch and pushed three inches of dust off the path from the door to the steps with my shoe. Then I scraped the steps clean. The air was still and the sun was high and the sand had changed the way everything looked again. The earth was Oklahoma red, where yesterday it had been Texas white with some Nebraska black thrown in for good measure.

There were big dunes of sand all over the place, and I could see in the distance that the storm had knocked down what was left of our barbwire fence. It didn’t matter. All the cows that had been inside it were long dead anyway.

And then I seen her and him trudging across the sand. She was wearing boots and dungarees and a plaid shirt buttoned close to the neck and at the wrists to keep the dust out. The boy with her was younger than her, and he had on worn overalls and an old brown shirt. They was both carrying flour sacks stuffed full of something.

They was coming along slowly, and I could see they didn’t have no real strength left and was about to fall over, so I started out to meet them. My feet bogged in the sand as I went, and it took me a while to get up to her, and when I was close, I seen the girl drop to one knee. Now that I could see her good I knowed her right off. It was Jane Lewis, which meant the kid was her little brother, Tony. I hadn’t seen them in ages. Mainly because they was known to have lice on a regular basis, which was an affliction of many in the area. I’d had them myself from time to time. Mama, however, had come to the idea that the Lewises were lice-ridden by nature, so I wasn’t allowed what she had called “an association” with them.

Lice or no lice, I went over and got an arm under Jane, helped her up, and took the flour sack from her. It was as heavy as if it was packed with stones.

I said, “It’s me, Jane. Jack Catcher.”

“I know that,” she said.

“Well, all right,” I said.

I helped her toward the house, and Tony came stumbling after. He said, “You know me, don’t you?”

“You’re Tony,” I said. “I know her, I’m bound to know you.”

“I can’t see so good,” he said. “The sand burned my eyes.”

“Can you see to grab onto me?”

He came over and took hold of my shirttail. I helped Jane to the house, and Tony clung to me until we was up the steps and on the porch. Inside, they collapsed on the floor. Jane unwrapped her face and shook her head, snapping sand across the room. When she was through doing that, her dark brown hair fell down to her shoulders, and even dirty as she was, I noted she looked pretty good, though I took into consideration her family’s reputation and watched for lice.

I got a rag that wasn’t as gritty as some of the others and shook it out. I got some water from a bucket and soaked it a little. I took it over to Tony and pulled the covering off his face and wiped him down with it. When I got through wiping, I saw that what I had thought was tan from the sun was brown from the dirt. Underneath it all, he was as white as the belly of a fish. He had a bony face and his hair looked like a rained-on haystack with chicken manure in it, the way it was stuck together in spots.

“I still can’t see none,” he said, lightly rubbing his eyes.

I helped him up and led him over to the bucket and used the dipper to pour water directly into his eyes. He blinked while I done it, but mostly managed to keep his eyes open.

“That’s better,” he said. “You don’t look like you’re made of sand now. Everything I been looking at looked sandy.”

“Good,” I said, “ ’cause I feel like I’m made of sand.”

They drank some water then, and I got some of the rabbit out of the icebox and put it on the table. They sat and ate. When Jane had her piece of rabbit down to the bones, she said, “That tasted a little gritty and right near spoiled.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll tell your waiter to tell the chef, and the chef will tell you to go to hell.”

She looked at me and drooped the corners of her mouth. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just making a comment.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “I don’t reckon you been eating all that much that ain’t gritty, sister.”

“And you would be correct,” she said. “I apologize.”

“But it didn’t taste so good,” Tony said.

“That’s ’cause it was a rabbit that had been dead awhile,” I said. “I cooked it hard on account of that. I guess now you’d like dessert and some finger bowls.”

“That would be nice,” Jane said, “and maybe a nice hot towel.”

She grinned at me, and I grinned back. It was hard not to. I hadn’t seen her in a long while, and since I’d last seen her, me and her both had grown quite a bit, and she’d grown in a real nice way.

I had been standing by the table, like a servant, but now I dipped me a cup of water from a bucket and sat down at the table with it.

“What you coming this way for?” I said.

“We come in the storm,” Jane said.

“No you didn’t,” I said. “You couldn’t have come in that storm.”

“Did too,” Tony said. “We darn near died doing it.”

“You couldn’t have,” I said. “That storm was one of the worst I’ve seen.”

“Ought to have seen it close up,” he said.

“If it wasn’t us that come in the storm,” Jane said, “it was a couple looked just like us.”

I shook my head. “I can’t imagine how you did it.”

“ ’Cause Sissy is smart,” Tony said.

“Smart ain’t got nothing to do with sand,” I said, “and if she’s so smart, what in the world has she got you two out in a sandstorm for in the first place?”

Tony turned and looked at Jane like this was a question he hadn’t thought of and felt ought to be answered.

She said, “Well, it wasn’t like we had a choice. The house was nearly blown flat. We could have stayed there in the ruins of it, I suppose, but I decided the better part of valor was to abandon it.”

“The better part of valor?” I said.

“She reads books,” Tony said, as if it was a thing he couldn’t really explain.

“That’s true,” she said, “and someday I’m going to write for a real fine newspaper. The problem is I can’t type. I’m going to find a school somewhere that can teach me, and then I’m going to be a journalist. But I’m going to look around first, learn a little about life.”

“Journalist. That’s what they call them that type on typewriters for newspapers,” Tony said. He looked proud of himself for knowing that.

“Right now,” Jane said, “I’m getting me and Tony out of this gritty hell. I’m going to take me and him somewhere else. We’ll walk if we have to, but I thought it might be better if we drove Old Man Turpin’s Ford.”

“How in the world would you drive Old Man Turpin’s Ford?” I asked “He ain’t much of a loaner kind of person.”

“Oh, well, we thought we’d borrow it,” she said. “Sort of.”