All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

5

You never knew about the dust storms. Sometimes there wouldn’t be any for a week; then there would be two in one day, or one that would last all day and through the night. Sometimes they went on for days at a time.

I thought over what Jane had said about Old Man Turpin’s car, and though I ain’t a thief, I began to think it was an idea that had some worth. Old Man Turpin wasn’t exactly the friendliest soul who had ever lived. He might have had a wife and family once, but nobody knew of any, and nobody knew him to do anything but farm, and quite well, until the dust storms came and wiped everybody out.

A fella like that wasn’t going to offer us his car, but I figured what we was talking about, being orphans and all and wanting to get out of Oklahoma, was just a form of borrowing. A wide form of it, but I made the whole thing agreeable in my head nonetheless. At least for the moment.

I had some bottles we could cork, and we went out to the barn and filled them, so as to try and have some water without dirt in it. Soon as we run the bottles full, we corked them and wrapped them in towels and put them in a flour sack. We used the pump then to get enough water to wipe our faces and hands and arms down. It was refreshing to be a little cleaner, if not exactly churchgoing in appearance.

But I will add this. With Jane washed up, and her having taken one of Mama’s combs and combed her hair out, she looked good. Like a less clean version of some of those women I’d seen on the covers of magazines, but wearing pants and work boots. I felt a little funny looking at her, like maybe there was some kind of magic in her.

We got a few of the canned goods left in the kitchen and packed those too, and then we decided the thing to do was to wait until tomorrow. If the weather was good in the morning, and the sky in the distance didn’t look like it had a line of storms coming, we’d head out as fast as we could go to Old Man Turpin’s.

I slept in Mama and Daddy’s bed and let Jane and Tony have my pallet in the corner. In the morning we got up and took a look outside. It looked okay.

There was a patch of scrub oaks that ran down by the dry bed of a long-gone creek behind the house. It went a long ways in the direction of Turpin’s place, and that seemed to me to be the way to go. The trees and the creek bank would give us some protection against any sudden storm that might come up, and it was shaded a little. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a plan of some sort.

We went down behind the house with our bags, and it was hard going until we got near the creek bed. The trees had kept some of the sand out, though they were ragged trees. The grasshoppers and birds had stripped all the leaves, and deer and lost cattle had chewed a lot of the bark. It was a bony kind of shade, but it was shade.

The creek was still dry, but we could walk there better than anywhere else because the bottom of it had been full of rocks, and even with the sand on top, it was fairly solid. The sky was as blue as a Jimmy Rogers song. There wasn’t a cloud in the heavens. The wind wasn’t blowing and the sun was high and hot and we were sweaty and tired by the time it was late afternoon and we come up behind Old Man Turpin’s house.

When we got there, we went around to the front porch, and just like Jane and Tony said, the porch was covered in sand, except where they had made a path to the front door. Old Man Turpin was in his chair, though you couldn’t tell it was him or a chair unless you looked real hard. He was just a big mound of sand mostly the color of Oklahoma, with a bit of Nebraska and a lot of Texas worked in, and I’m pretty sure Kansas was swirled in there too.

On the porch I brushed some dirt away from his face, and the first thing I seen was a corncob pipe in his mouth, the bowl all filled with sand. I scraped some more, and then I could see the brim of his hat mashed into his face. He had his eyes closed and his mouth open, and there was sand all in it, like someone had stood there and poured it into him with a funnel. He had drowned in dirt.

“See,” Tony said. “He’s deader’n an anvil.”

“He is, at that,” I said.

I guess we was being pretty casual about death, but for the last couple of years it had been all around us, and as of recent, up close and personal. It was the sort of thing that stunned you at the same time it made you feel as empty as a corn crib after the rats had been in it.

When we got inside the house, I was glad we had brought water, because there was none there. While Jane and Tony laid out some things from our bag so we could eat, I went out to the well and saw that it had filled in with sand. I figured that was why Old Man Turpin had given up. No water. No hope.

Back in the house, we sat down at the table and ate some peaches from cans. We drank some of the water we had brought, then we went outside to the barn to look at the Ford.

Like they’d said, it was under a tarp, so we pulled it off. Sometimes dust storms blew so hard they built up static electricity. Back when we had a car, I seen Daddy go out after a sandstorm, and even though the car was in the barn, enough dust had blown in and over it that when he touched the car door, it knocked him down like a lighting strike. He was dazed for half the day, and considered himself lucky not to have been killed.

So I was careful when I touched the Ford, kind of popping my hand in first, like a snake striking a mouse. When I hit the handle, nothing. I opened the door and looked around for the key, found it stuck up by the sun visor. I tried it and the car started right up without no trouble. Luckily, the gauge showed there was plenty of gas, so we was ready to go. Provided I didn’t wrap the car around a tree.

“Hot dog,” Tony said. “We can get out of this place.”

I turned off the car.

I said, “Don’t you think we ought to bury Old Man Turpin?”

Jane put out a hand and leaned on the car. It was black, and though it had been covered tight with the tarp, there was still a faint film of dust all over it. When she moved her hand, her print stayed there. She said, “With us taking his car and burying him too, it might look worse than if we just leave him.”

“We could drop him in that old dry well,” Tony said. “It would look like he fell in.”

“We won’t do no such thing,” I said. “I ain’t no criminal. I’m just taking this car ’cause there ain’t any other choices. Sometime soon enough we can tell someone we took it. Maybe.”

“No one is going to miss it unless they come out to see him,” Jane said. “And I guess they will. Somebody has to miss him for something sometime. But he never liked anyone and no one really liked him. We wouldn’t have come here if we didn’t have to.”

“It was kind of nice he was dead,” Tony said. “It made it easier to take his stuff.”

“Shush, now,” Jane said. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Well,” Tony said, “it was kind of like that.”

“We could leave a note,” I said, “explaining things. We could say where we buried him and that we took the car, and that we did it because we felt we didn’t have a choice.”

“That’s no good,” Jane said.

“I think it is,” I said, and I went back into the house and left a note that said what we was doing, and how we didn’t bury him ’cause we thought people ought to know right where he was, case he was going to a graveyard instead of a plot next to his house. I wrote as best I could how my parents was buried in the barn, and how the property was pretty near being the bank’s anyway, and how they could have it.

I didn’t like the idea of the bank owning my kin’s bodies, but I had always been taught it wasn’t the body that mattered, it was the life inside it. That life was long gone now.

While I was finishing the note, Jane come up, Tony lagging along behind her.

“We really shouldn’t wait around,” Jane said. “We should start trying to make some real ground before another storm settles in. We’re fed and we got a car and we’re ready to go, and I say we should go.”

“Dang right,” Tony said.

I wasn’t all that certain it was the right thing to do, but I was pretty certain it was the only thing to do.

Back at the car, we put our bags of goods on the back floorboard. Jane got in on the front passenger side, and Tony rode in the backseat. There was plenty of room for him and the goods, and even some room left over for another two boys just Tony’s size. That was some big Ford.

I backed us out of the barn and bumped along over the sand. It was slow going, but it was going.

And I won’t lie—theft or not, it felt pretty good to know I had a V8 Ford and my foot on the gas, and that I was driving away from all that death and all that sand, pushing on forward with some kind of hope. I didn’t know right then where I was going. But I knew one thing for sure.

Wherever I was going in that stolen Ford, I was darn sure going to try to get there fast.