Later that afternoon, Dad and Mother left me and Henry to do the Sunday chores while they went into Oakden to drop the eggs off at the grocer. As the cart rolled out the gate, I glanced up at them and saw that Dad had his arm around Mother, and she was resting her head on his shoulder as he drove.
The picnic had gone a long way to soothing the ache in my soul, and something about that brief glimpse of the affection between my parents settled the last of it.
“What are you cooking for dinner?” Henry asked.
“Who says I’m cooking? Mother just said we have to do it.”
“Lizzie, please. You know I can’t cook.” He held up his hands, always stained with dirt and rough from work, his fingernails black and chipped. “These hands were made for man’s work.”
I held up my hands too. They looked exactly like Henry’s, only smaller. He grimaced, then said wryly, “Geez, no wonder you can’t find a boyfriend.”
“Shut up, Henry,” I exclaimed, but I was laughing as I said it, because he seemed so much better that afternoon. The day off the farm seemed to have lightened his mood. “I think I’ll make us hot water corn bread and heat up canned rabbit to go with it.”
Henry had a love-hate relationship with that canned rabbit meat. Jackrabbit had been breeding like crazy through the drought, and the population was now dangerously out of control, so the community had to reduce numbers. We would line up in a giant square, across acres of land, spaced out at first but gradually coming closer together, pushing the rabbits into a fenced area in the middle. There, the animals would be clubbed to death, and the carcasses distributed for food. Jackrabbit drives were unpleasant—brutal, even—but we knew they were necessary. Henry knew those animals would destroy our crops and breed until they took over every square inch of our land, but he could not stand to see them suffer, and as hungry as we were, he struggled to eat them.
“Is there anything else?” he asked.
“Not that I know how to cook.” I shrugged. He sighed, nodding in resignation. “We have to wash some clothes too.” I was dreading that task even more than the cooking. We were washing the clothes in handmade soap, formed with tallow and lye. It was hell on my hands.
“Well, since you’re doing the washing and the cooking, the least I can do is to fetch you the water,” Henry announced.
“So gentlemanly of you,” I muttered. “And then what are you going to do?”
“I might take a nap.” My jaw dropped, and he threw his head back and laughed. “I’m kidding! Mother asked me to shovel some of the dirt away from the barn in case we get another storm.” The dirt was halfway up the side of the barn now. We’d only been shoveling it away from the door, doing the bare minimum to get the animals in and out.
“Henry, we are idiots,” I said suddenly. “We should have offered to take the eggs in for them.”
Henry and I looked at one another, and then we both started laughing.
I was drying my hands on my apron as I walked onto the porch just after five o’clock. The fine strands of hair that had come loose from my bun suddenly rose until they were standing high above my head, as the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck rose too. The eerie sensation left me shuddering, and I knew exactly what it meant.
A duster was coming—and given how strong that static electricity was, this was going to be a big one. I took two more steps, looking toward the horizon, but then stopped.
There was no wind to warn us what was coming that day, just a silent wall of black, so high and wide that I wondered if I was seeing things. That couldn’t be a dust storm—not with such clear edges. Dust storms weren’t so self-contained that you could see bright blue sky right above them. They came on slowly, always preceded by a noisy high wind. This one wasn’t following the rules.
“I just got shocked off that metal near the barn, so bad it knocked me down. The wire on the fence is glowing blue too. Feels like a big duster is co—” Henry said behind me, but then he too stopped dead in his tracks. “What in God’s name is that?”
We stood there staring for a beat longer than we should have, because whether we could comprehend it or not, that monstrous black wall was moving toward us, swallowing the flat fields of half-dead wheat.
“Get inside, Lizzie,” Henry said. I ignored him, spinning toward the gate to see if Mother and Dad were, by some miracle, back already. All I saw were the hens running for shelter, and the long, empty drive beside them. “Lizzie!” Henry shouted. “Get inside and get some cloth ready!”