“Myfatherhas land—” Henry corrected him. I could hear the panic in his voice, and I felt it in my chest.
“I’m not so sure Judge Wickingham would see it that way, Henry. That asset will be yours soon enough. Maybe the courts would see fit to pass the land on to me a little early so that I can sell it to recoup my losses.”
“Sir,” Henry croaked. “I mean no disrespect, but who’sbuying farmland right now?”
“No one is buying stores in a dying town in the middle of nowhere—but I know I could find someone to take a five-hundred-acre farm off my hands for the right price.”
“Sir—please.”
“I don’t want to do this, Henry. Do you hear me? I need you to find some money somehow or I’ll have no choice.” I heard sudden movement inside, and, worried that the judge was moving toward the window, I panicked and ran back to the church. I stepped inside just as Mother put her hand on the door, apparently about to come looking for us. She had a plate of food in her other hand.
“Where on earth have you been?” she asked, peering at me in confusion. “You’re missing the luncheon. Go quickly before all the good food goes.” When I remained frozen in place, catching my breath, she dropped her voice and added, “You know as well as I do this is the best meal you’ll have all week. This is not the time to go wandering away!”
I saw Henry and the judge walk into the vestibule a little while later. Henry had Mother’s coloring—warm brown hair and skin that tanned instead of burned—but that day, he was as pale as I’d ever seen him. I waved at him and pointed to the chair beside me, where the plate of food I’d fixed for him was waiting. Beads of sweat covered his brow as he moved the plate to sit down.
“Everything okay?” I asked him.
“Everything’s just fine,” he lied, forcing an unconvincing smile as he began to pick at the food.
The next day, Henry and I went to check on the crop in one of the fields farthest from the house. We rode the horses side by side, their hooves sinking into the thin dust with each step. My cheeks were windburned, and nothing I did seemed to help. I tried smearing them with Vaseline to protect them, but by the time I walked from the house to the barn, the Vaseline was coated in dust. The best I could do was wear a kerchief over the lower part of my face for as much of the day as I could stand. The wind had become relentless, blowing for weeks; the only difference each day was whether it was a gale or a breeze. That day it was somewhere in the middle.
I’d wanted to talk to Henry the previous night, but as determined as I was, he seemed equally determined to avoid me. He’d gone to bed at the same time as Mother and Daddy. Now was my chance.
“I followed you and the judge to the courthouse and listened through the window,” I told Henry, deciding it was best to just blurt it out. The only sign he gave that he’d even heard what I said was the way his mouth tightened. “Do you think he’s right? Could he really take the farm?”
“This is their game—I don’t even know the rules I’m playing by. Maybe Judge Nagle just said he’d take the farm to scare me. He seems as desperate as we are, so I guess that’s possible. I just don’t even know who to talk to. We can’t afford a lawyer of our own. I don’t even have a copy of the contract.”
“So what do we do?” I asked, feeling queasy. Henry brought his horse to a stop and swung down to the ground. He fetched a small spade from the tool kit he kept on his saddle, and in silence, he started to dig—sending dust flying all over the withered plants in the field. Less than half the seeds had germinated that year, and most of the plants that did died before they even formed seed heads. Our fields contained row after row of patchy and deformed brown stalks. Even the weeds were unusually sparse that year—all the soil seemed able to produce was the occasional patch of Russian thistle or bull nettle. The dead thistles rolled all over the fields in the dust storms, getting stuck on the wire and providing a framework for the dust to settle on, until every fence had disappeared beneath a mound of dirt.
“What are you doing?” I asked Henry, but he kept on digging. He dug until his brow was covered in grime from dust and sweat, until his face was red with exertion. I knew that there was no resistance in the soil. And that didn’t change even as Henry dug down twelve inches...two feet...and farther and farther he went, until he was standing in a hole.
After a while, I swung off my horse and stepped closer, touching his shoulder gently to get his attention. Henry looked at me, his eyes wild with panic and rimmed red with sweat and irritation from the dust, and maybe some tears. This wasn’t like Henry—he was usually calm as a cucumber, even when he’d messed up.
“Look at this,” he said, his voice breaking. “Just look at it, Lizzie. They say that there was damp soil all over these high plains, down at the three-feet mark. It didn’t matter how dry the season was—the moisture was always there. But look at this. Justlook at it.”
I looked down at the dusty hole he was standing in.
“No wonder the crops aren’t growing,” he whispered miserably. “We’re trying to grow them in a goddamned desert.”
With Henry standing in that hole, for the first time in our lives, I was taller than he was. I clapped my hands onto his shoulders and gently shook him.
“Sorry,” he said. He cleared his throat and lifted his chin. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. Don’t fret—I promise it’s going to be fine. I’ll fix this. Maybe I can get a job on an oil field. Or I read in the paper that there were jobs in El Paso on one of those New Deal projects. I’ll move away...get a wage. Then we can keep the farmandpay him back.”
“Henry.” Mother and Dad seriously considered letting him go off in search of work after the bad harvest in ’31. Dad talked him out of it because he expected things would turn around quickly, and in a good year, or even a reasonable year, it would have been tough to run the farm without Henry. But it was way too late for that. The papers were full of stories of rural folk like us who left their farms, hoping to find better conditions in the cities, only to find things there were a different kind of awful.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered unevenly.
Henry climbed out of the hole. He dusted himself off and he swung himself back up onto the horse.
“The best we can do is go down to the far field and see if there’s any good news down there. Then we go back to the house and we’ll collect the eggs. We’ll feed and water the horses.” He nodded, as if he was talking to himself more than me. “Yep, that’s it. One foot in front of the other. We’ll think only about whatever the next step is and we’ll do that over and over for as long as we have to until things get better.”
After that day in the field, Henry just stopped talking. He was still working as hard as he always did—always fixing something or building something, making the most of every minute of sunlight. But as soon as the sun went down, he went to bed, and most mornings, I had to wake him up because for the first time in his life, he was sleeping in. He didn’t even want to go to church.
One Saturday night, after he’d gone to bed early again, I sat out under the stars on my own, looking up through the lingering dust haze to the stars. I was trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t want to alert Mother and Dad to the situation with the judge because I didn’t want to betray Henry’s confidence, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my brother needed help.
When I heard the door open, I assumed Henry changed his mind about going to bed, but it was Mother who sank into his chair opposite me. I started and almost dropped my mug of Henry’s bathtub gin in my haste to hide it.
“Give me some of that,” she said.