11
Lizzie
Dallam County,Texas
1935
“Is Mother ready?” Henry called. “Let’s go!” He only saw Betsy at church now, and he didn’t want to waste a minute of his only chance to be with her.
“She’s over at the tree,” I muttered as I peered at myself in the hall mirror, turning this way and that to see myself from all angles. I’d lost some weight that year and my dresses hung on me like sacks, so Mother took in one of her old dresses for me to wear for my Sunday outfit. It was an older style, stiff cotton with little black buttons down the front of the bodice, leading to a heavy flared skirt.
“Go get her, sis,” Henry said, pleading. “You know I hate going over there.”
“So do I,” I said pointedly. There was something unnerving about the way Mother held herself on Sunday mornings when she visited that bench. She often sat slumped and melancholy, as if her grief were still fresh but she had to condense it down into a single hour each week. Elsie had been lost for more than twenty-five years. That Mother was still so sad after all that time never failed to confuse Henry and me.
Henry glanced down at his watch and then sighed impatiently and left the house. I heard movement from Mother and Daddy’s bedroom, so I walked quickly down the hall, knocked, and pushed the door open, holding my breath while I waited to see how Dad was that day. Ever since Henry borrowed that money, the pattern of his good days and bad days reversed. It was as if he’d suffered a terrible injury that left him with a permanent disability—only the injury wasn’t to his body, but to his pride.
Dad wasn’t dressed for church but there were some positive signs. He’d opened the drapes and was sitting up in bed, reading the newspaper we’d brought back from Oakden the previous Sunday. On very bad days, Dad barely seemed to realize I was there. Mother said it wasn’t his fault.
“It’s tiring trying to make sense of things that make no damned sense at all,” she told me. “Your daddy is a farmer to his very bones. When farming isn’t working as it should, he’s just a husk of his real self.”
The drought changed a lot of things and none of it made sense to me either. I still got out of bed and I still did my share. Mother, Henry, and I didn’t have a choice—we had to get used to a new way of operating because running the farm was a four-man operation. The price per bushel for wheat in the 1934 harvest was higher, and that might have been a relief had it not been our worst season ever, both in terms of the condition of the grain and the yield. We sold only six hundred bushels, each one fetching a miserable thirty-three cents.
We didn’t square the debt with Judge Nagle that year. We didn’t even manage to make regular repayments. Henry told me to “keep my chin up,” but I knew it was already too late. Even if we had buckets of rain, there would be no crop this year. I had no idea what we were going to do, other than to throw ourselves on the good graces of Judge Nagle and ask for more time.
“You look pretty as a picture,” Dad said, and if the shock on his face was any indication, he was as surprised by his remark as I was. I did a mock curtsy and mumbled something about it being Mother’s old dress. “Oh, I remember it well. She used to wear it back when we were courting. It suits you just as well as it suited her then.” He set the paper down on his lap and frowned at me. “Lizzie, you’re almost nineteen. When are you going to get yourself a boyfriend?”
“I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said, raising my chin.
“Your mother and I were married by the time she was your age.”
“Daddy.”
“What? You know it’s true.”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for all that,” I muttered, embarrassed.
“Nonsense. Don’t you want a farm of your own? Children?”
“I...” I didn’t want to waste a rare good day by telling him no. “Of course,” I lied, convincing myself that it was okay to lie on Sunday if it was only half a lie. After all, Ididwant a farm of my own. That I would likely need a husband to go with it was an inconvenient reality I was still trying to make peace with.
“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.”