“Then maybe make eye contact with some of the boys at church,” Dad suggested, picking his paper up again. “That would be a good start.”
I stopped at the linen cupboard on my way to the Model T, fetching a small towel to protect the dress, then stopped again to pat the horse and to check on her harness. Jesse and Joker were all we had left by way of livestock other than the chickens, and although the chickens still gave us plenty, the horses were the most valuable asset we owned now.
A man from the bank arrived without warning one day to load the tractor up onto the bed of a truck. The only sign we’d ever even owned it was the mound of debt it left behind. Around the same time, we could no longer justify the cost of running the Model T. We tried to sell it, but with so many cars for sale, no one wanted to pay a fair price. Henry and I removed the engine and then took out every bit of glass and superfluous metal from its body, making it as light as possible. When we finished, we rigged up a mechanism to fix the horses to it—turning the car into an elaborate cart. Plenty of others had the same idea. We called them Hoover wagons, after the president we loved to blame for our miserable circumstances.
“Come on, Lizzie,” Henry called impatiently, as I petted Jesse’s nose. She was taking us to church that day, and Henry was already in the “driver’s seat,” holding the reins.
Mother beamed at me from the front passenger’s seat, pleased with his enthusiasm, and I sighed and made my way to the back. The week’s eggs were all packed carefully onto the seat beside me, ready to go to the grocer on the way to church. I wiped my side of the seat with the towel before I climbed in. As Henry steered the cart along the drive, dust billowed up around us, and I looked down at the white dress and felt a pang of despair.
“Dusty today,” Mother said, but the ambient dust those wheels were stirring up was the least of our worries. Dust and sandstorms were blowing through with such regularity that we had a whole routine when we saw one on the horizon. Henry would lock the horses in the barn, Mother would hurry to take any clothes off the line, and I’d run from room to room checking that windows were closed. It was Dad’s job to prepare his bedroom for us all to shelter in. By the time we all ran inside, he’d be ready to close the door behind us and put a wet towel down against the gap beneath it. He’d have food and water inside his closet, tucked under a blanket to shelter it from the dust. Dad would hang a damp sheet over the window to catch the dirt that threatened the gaps. On the bed, he’d have a pail waiting with wet dish towels for us to put over our mouths, and a little tub of Vaseline for us to smear into our nostrils. The dirt in the air during one summer storm had irritated the lining of our noses such that we all had nosebleeds for days.
All of this, and it wasn’t nearly enough. Dirt or sand or dust would sneak in between the gaps in the floorboards or the walls, and by the time the bad storms passed, those wet tea towels would be black or red or yellow with the dirt they’d kept from our lungs, and there’d be mounds of dirt around the skirting boards. Every storm was different depending on whether the soil blew in from Oklahoma or Ohio or Kansas, or maybe the farm right next door. In the beginning, we’d peer at the dirt and discuss its potential origins—analyzing the color and texture and wind direction. By the time the storms were coming almost every week, the novelty of our dirt detective game had worn off. One storm lasted a full twenty-four hours. By then, we were so accustomed to them that we didn’t even panic. We just sat in Mother and Dad’s room and we listened to the wind howl for hours on end.
“How long are we going to be stuck in here?” I muttered at one point.
“That’s the wrong way of looking at this, Lizzie,” Mother gently chided me. “We have a roof over our heads. Somewhere to shelter. We have one another.”
“We aren’t stuck in here,” Henry added. “We’re safe in here.”
But over time, even Mother had grown tired of the relentless storms, and the dust that seemed to permeate every single crevice in our lives. Now when a storm came, we just sat in a miserable, heavy silence, listening to the wind as it bathed our house and fields and vegetable garden and barn in dust.
Even on a beautiful Sunday morning on our way to church, we barely saw the sun or the bright blue sky. All we saw was the dust.
“Good morning, Mrs. Davis,” Judge Nagle greeted us, nodding politely as we mingled in the vestibule of the church before service. “And you too, Miss Lizzie.” His gaze landed on my brother and he added quietly, “Henry.”