“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!”
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.