Quiet.
No wind rattling the windows. No dirt raining down from the ceiling.
Elsa opened her eyes in the cautious way they’d all perfected. She pulled down the mud-encrusted bandanna that covered her nose and mouth, and brushed the dirt from her eyes. It took her a moment to focus. When she sat up, dirt pattered to the floor.
She checked on Ant first thing, wakened him by easing the gas mask off his small, bony face. “Hey, baby boy,” she said. “Storm’s over.”
Ant opened his eyes. Elsa could see the effort it took. There was no white in his eyes at all, just a deep, angry red. “I can’t … breathe.” His dirty, blue-veined eyelids fluttered shut.
He’s getting worse.
“Ant? Baby? Don’t go to sleep, okay?”
He tried to wet his lips, kept trying to clear his throat. “I feel … bad … Mommy.”
Elsa brushed the damp hair back from her son’s forehead, felt how hot he was.
Fever.
That was new.
Elsa had a deep fear of fevers, a remnant from her youth, a reminder of her own illness.
Elsa uncovered the pitcher beside the bed and poured water into the crockery basin. Then she dipped a washrag into the lukewarm water and
wrung out the excess and laid the cool, damp cloth across his forehead. Water dripped down the sides of his face.
Elsa poured a small bit of water into a glass, helped him to take two aspirin. “Pretend it’s your grandma’s lemonade. Sweet and tart.” She gave him a teaspoon of sugar laced with turpentine. It was the only remedy they knew to combat the dust he breathed in, even with the mask on.
Ant drank a tiny amount and gulped down the sugar, then closed his eyes and sank deeper into the pillow.
Elsa had just released a breath when he suddenly arched up, his body seizing, his fingers curling into claws, his red eyes rolling back in his head.
Elsa had never felt so helpless in her life. There was nothing she could do; she sat there, watching the seizure wrack her little boy. The seconds seemed to last forever.
When it ended, she took him in her arms, held him tightly, too shaky and frightened to soothe him.
“Help me, Mommy,” he said in a cracked voice. “I’m hot.” He needed help. Now.
She didn’t care if there was no money. She’d beg if she had to. “I’ll help you, baby.”
She scooped him into her arms, blanket and all, and carried him through the house. As if from a distance, she heard the family yell at her. She couldn’t stop, didn’t care about anything but Ant.
She made it out to the porch before she realized they had no horse. Nothing to pull the wagon. The driveway stretched out in front of her, desolate and bare.
The ground was hard and flat in places, scoured to hardpan by the wind, which had also torn through barbed wire as if it were strands of hair, ripped it away, sent it flying. There were bits of it on every building; tumbleweeds stuck to it and then were covered in drifts of sand.
She saw a wheelbarrow standing upright, half buried in sand. Could she do it? Push him two miles to town in a wheelbarrow? Of course. She could take him as far as she needed to.
She walked unsteadily toward it and lay him down in the rusted scoop, his spindly legs hanging over the edge. She positioned his head carefully on the blanket.
“Mo-mmy?” he wheezed. “The light … hurts.”
“Close your eyes, baby,” she said. “Go to sleep. We’re going to see Doc Rheinhart.”
Elsa picked up the rough wooden handles and headed for the driveway. “Elsa!” She heard Rose yelling for her, but didn’t stop, didn’t listen. She
was in a panic to go, to get him help. She knew it was crazy, knew she was a little unhinged, but what else could she do?
“Elsa, let us help!”
Elsa plunged forward. The wheelbarrow seemed to fight back. She felt every bump in the driveway, every furrow like a blow to her spine. She made it to the main road.
Desolation. Sand in heaps. Sheds covered by it; fences fallen. She turned onto the road and kept going, breathing hard.
Heat beat down on her. Sweat blurred her vision, ran between her breasts in itchy streams.
She stubbed her toe on something buried in the sand and stumbled. The wheelbarrow was wrenched out of her hands, clattered forward. Ant hit his head on the ground.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Elsa said. Even she couldn’t hear her words, her throat was so dry. She looked down at her left palm, skin torn away, bloody. Her blood darkened the handles.
She resettled Ant in the wheelbarrow and fought to move forward; before she’d taken a full step, she felt a hand on her shoulders.
Tony stood there, with Rose and Loreda on either side of him. “Are you ready to let us help you now?”
“You don’t have to do it all yourself,” Rose said.
“Yeah, Mom,” Loreda said. “We’ve been yelling for you. Are you deaf?” Elsa almost burst into tears. Very slowly, she set the wheelbarrow down. Tony took hold of the handles, lifted the wheelbarrow up, and started off.
Loreda moved in beside him, took over one side.
“You made it nearly a mile,” Rose said, tenderly smoothing the damp hair from Elsa’s dirty forehead.
“I’m just—”
“A mother.” Rose reached down for Elsa’s hands, lifted them, looked at the torn, bloody palms.
Elsa steeled herself. Her own mother would have scolded her for her stupidity in not wearing gloves.
Rose slowly lifted one of Elsa’s hands, kissed the bloody skin. “That used to make it all better for my foolish son.”
“It helps,” Elsa said. It was the first time in her life someone had kissed an injury of hers to make it better.
“Come. My husband is not as young as he thinks. It will be my turn soon.”
 |
LONESOME TREE WAS A ghost town.
Tony pushed the wheelbarrow down Main Street, past the boarded- up storefronts. The once-thriving feed store had been taken over by the Red Cross and converted into a hospital.
The plains cottonwood was gone. Someone must have cut it up for firewood after it died of thirst.
At the makeshift hospital, Tony picked up Ant, who groaned and coughed.
Inside, the narrow building was shadowy and dark. The windows had been boarded up to keep out the dust and wind. Red Cross nurses wore uniforms that had once been starched white and were now a wrinkled gray. A doctor hurried from bed to bed, stopping just long enough at each to make an assessment and bark orders to the nurses following along behind him.
Tony carried Ant into the room. “I have a child here who needs help.”
A nurse approached them. She looked as haggard and drawn as everyone else. “How bad is he?”
“Bad.”
The nurse sighed heavily. “A bed came open this morning.” They all knew that meant someone had died from the dust. The nurse gave Elsa a sad look. “It’s been bad. Come.”
Elsa followed Tony into the room full of wheezing and coughing patients.
They settled Ant on a cot in back, beneath a ten-foot window covered by wooden boards. Even so, the sill was stuffed with rags. To the left, a cot held an old man who fought for every breath. A mask covered his eyes.
Elsa knelt beside her son.
Heat radiated off of him. She touched his hot forehead. “I’m here, Ant.
We all are.”
Loreda sat at the end of the cot. “We’re gonna play checkers. I’ll let you win.”
Ant coughed harder.
Moments later, Rose came back with the doctor. She was holding on to his sleeve in a death grip. No doubt Rose had grabbed the poor man and dragged him over here. Somehow, Rose still had a fire in her. Elsa couldn’t imagine how she kept it lit in all this falling dirt. The doctor leaned down to take Ant’s temperature.
The doctor read the thermometer, then examined Ant and sighed. “Your son is seriously ill, which I’m sure you know. He has a high fever and is suffering from severe silicosis. Dust pneumonia. Prairie dust is full of silica. It builds up in the lungs and tears away the air sacs.”
“Which means?”
“He’s breathing in dirt and swallowing it. Filling up with it. There’s no other way to put it, but you’ve done the right thing to bring him here. This is the best place in town to be in a dust storm. We will take good care of him, I promise.” The doctor glanced down at beds full of wheezing, coughing, sweating, dying patients. “Try not to worry.”
“Is he dying?” Elsa asked quietly.
“Not yet.” The doctor touched her shoulder, gave her a gentle squeeze. “You need to go home now, let me help him.”
Elsa knelt beside Ant’s cot. She buried her face in the hot crook of his neck, nuzzled him. “I’m here, baby boy.” Her voice broke. “I love you.”
Rose gently pulled Elsa to her feet. It took all of Elsa’s self-discipline not to wail or scream or fall apart. She had no idea how she found the strength to turn around and meet her mother-in-law’s sad gaze.
“We have some butter,” Rose said in a tight voice. “We could make him a cookie or two, bring them back tomorrow, along with some toys and his clothes.”
“I can’t leave him.”
The doctor stepped closer. “Everyone here is either an infant, a child, or an old person. Each one has someone who wants to sit with them. There’s no room for visitors. Go home. Sleep. Let us take care of him. For a week at least. Maybe two.”
“We can visit, can’t we?” Loreda said.
“Of course,” the doctor said. “Anytime you want. And there’s other kids here for him to play with when he’s feeling better.”
Elsa said, “What if—”
The doctor stopped her. “You’re going to ask what they all ask. Here’s what I can say: If you want to save him, get him out of Texas. Take him somewhere he can breathe.”
Rose put an arm around Elsa; it was the only thing that kept her upright. “Come, Elsa. Let’s go make our boy some treats. We’ll bring ’em by tomorrow.”
|
ELSA STOOD AT THE edge of the dead wheat field. Dry brown dirt lay in dunes as far as she could see. It was nearly four o’clock now and still the sun beat down. Hot and dry. The windmill turned slowly, creaking, doing its best.
She wanted to believe that rain would come back and the seeds would sprout and this land would thrive again, but hope was something she could no longer afford, not when Ant was lying on a cot, coughing up the dirt in his lungs, burning with fever.
Dust pneumonia.
That was what they called it, but it was really loss and poverty and man’s mistakes.
She heard footsteps behind her; they came with that new shuffling-sand sound, a kind of whisper, as if man were afraid now of disturbing the earth that had turned on him.
Tony came to a stop beside her. Rose stepped into place on her other side.
“He’s dying here,” Elsa said.
Dying.
It wasn’t just Ant. It was the land, the animals, the plants. Everything. The sun had burned everything to dust and the wind had blown it all away. Millions of tons of topsoil gone.
“We need to leave Texas,” Elsa said. “Yes,” Rose said.
“We can sell the cows to the government. That’ll help some.” Tony said. “They’ll give us thirty-two bucks for the two cows.”
Elsa drew in a deep, painful breath and stared out at the dead, brown land. She didn’t want to go into the unknown with no job and almost no money. None of them wanted to leave. This was home.
Above their heads, the windmill creaked and the blades turned slowly. Together, they walked back to the farmhouse, dust rising from their feet.
