The panic in his voice startled me. I spun back into the house, trembling as I ran to the linen cupboard. I scooped a whole stack of whatever cloth I could find into my arms and threw some sheets on top, and I ran to the pail beside the stove. I’d washed corn bread batter off my hands in that water two minutes earlier, but there was no time to fetch a fresh bucket.
I threw the cloth into the bucket and took it into Mother and Dad’s room. I closed the window, then hung a dripping sheet from the frame, and set the sopping towel near the door, ready to block the gap beneath it. I fumbled in Mother’s dresser for the Vaseline for our noses, then ran through the house. Every window was open, so I closed and latched them all before I went back to the porch.
The wind was picking up—a gentle breeze now rustled my static-ravaged hair. The storm was moving so fast—already at the far reaches of our farm. The duster would swallow the house in minutes.
“Henry!” I shouted, my voice breaking. “Henry, hurry!”
He sprinted up the stairs onto the porch, grabbing my elbow to tug me inside. I stopped to close the door, then tore the drapes down from a nearby window to stuff them under the door—one more gap plugged, although I knew it would make little difference.
Henry had the presence of mind to take the tub of batter I’d made and drop it over the fire, instantly smothering the flames with a sizzle and a burst of oddly delicious, corn-scented smoke. Next he scooped a lantern off the kitchen table, and I followed him back to Mother and Dad’s room. While I pushed the wet towel beneath the door, he lit the lantern.
“We can sit on the bed today,” Henry reminded me when, out of habit, I moved to sit on the floor. I felt a pang of distress.
“They’re out in this,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“There isn’t even any glass in that car.”
“I know, Lizzie. They’ll stop at someone’s house. They’ll find shelter. They know what to do.”
We could see the road when we moved the sheet over Mother and Dad’s window. In that direction, it might have been an ordinary afternoon. The wind was picking up, stirring the dust around the house, but the sun was still shining. As I spread gobs of Vaseline under my nose, I stared at the road, hoping to see the Hoover cart.
The golden afternoon light was tinged with brown and gray, and then the whole world took on a red-brown sheen, as if the glass became colored. Then, so quickly I could scarcely believe it, the light faded away until I couldn’t even see the empty driveway, not three feet from that bedroom window. We had been swallowed into the belly of the beast.
“Henry,” I croaked, as swirling dust began to creep in through the cracks in the roof, the walls, the floor—carried by startlingly icy air. Henry already had his wet cloth over his mouth and nose, and he motioned for me to do the same. It had been so still all day, but now the wind began to thunder against the house, until the whole structure was shaking, and so were Henry and I. We sat side by side in a terrible, terrified silence, listening helplessly as the barn of the chicken coop collapsed, and as a window in another room of the house shattered.
“Do you think this is the end of the world?” I asked Henry after a while, my voice small.
“Don’t be silly, sis,” he said. “It’s just another storm. It’s a bad one, sure, but it’s just a storm.”
By then, there was so much dust in the air in Mother and Dad’s bedroom that my eyes were watering. I closed them because there was no point keeping them open—I could only just make out the flame in the lantern two feet away from me. In the rush of the wind outside, I imagined I heard sounds of suffering—a horse neighing, chickens clucking their distress, coughing and crying and someone hollering for help.
“Do you hear that?” Henry said suddenly.
There it came again.
Help. Come help. Please. Oh God. Please.
We both shot off the bed but Henry reached out to stop me.
“You stay—”
“Like hell I will.”
For only a split second, he hesitated. Then he fumbled for my hand and squeezed it fiercely.
“Do not let go of me,” he hissed. “If we lose each other, we’re gone. Do you hear that?”
“Stop babying me and just go!”
I followed Henry by feel, not by sight. He had the lantern in his hand, but I could tell from the cautious steps he took that it wasn’t helping much.
Henry stumbled near the door, and I felt the crunch of corrugated iron beneath our feet—a piece of the barn roofing had come through the window. He struggled but managed to pull the door open, only to find that walking outside in that wind thick with dirt was like swimming through cement. We were making such slow progress that I was starting to fear we’d be dead from suffocation before we even figured out who was calling out for us.