Now he loves Canaan more than maybe even Mama does. He says the day he got off the train in this town was the luckiest day of his life.
MAY 28, 1934
I only have a moment to write this. I’ve asked Mama about the postcard.
It was late yesterday afternoon. We’d just finished gumming clean sheets over the windows after four days of dusters. The best time to talk to her about anything is when her hands are busy, when she sometimes lets her thoughts run free.
“Mama,” I asked. “Who is Lenore?”
Her hands paused on the windowsill, and then she resumed her work. “She was an old friend.” And then, as if she’d thought better of leaving it open-ended, she added, “She died.”
“A close friend?” I asked.
She sat back on her heels and studied me. “No,” she said. “No, not really. I knew her in England, when I was very little. We drifted apart after that.”
“Oh,” I said.
She squeezed me on the shoulder then went back to work. Squeezing me and Beezie is her way of telling us how much she loves us because she’s not the kind of person who says it.
And that was it. She made a show of being done, left the room, washed up her brush and bucket, and went upstairs to her room. Like I said, talking to her can be like talking to a stone. At least she didn’t ask where I got the name in the first place.
But last night, when I went down for some milk after bed, I heard something shuffling in the pantry. At first I thought it was a mouse, but then I heard someone sniffing. The walls are thin, and to avoid waking us upstairs, she’d closed herself in there to cry.
The wind is back again. I’ve come to hate the sound of it.
JUNE 5, 1934
I’m sitting here at the edge of the mudhole pond, perched on a rock, putting off cleaning the chicken coop. There’s only a slight breeze drying the sweat on my skin; the sun is blazing. The windmill across the yard is spinning, but where it used to churn up water it just creaks and spins the dust. Still, our home is beautiful even now. You can see all the way to the edge of the earth, it feels like.
I’ve been reading Jane Eyre but finished it too fast. I’m so desperate for excitement I’ve committed to reading every one of Mama’s books in the library, but at this rate I’ll be through them in a few months. We’ll never be able to afford another book after that, and then I’ll just have to stare at the walls.
In front of me, Galapagos and Sheepie are bickering like an old married couple. We don’t let Sheepie run free anymore because last week the Chiltons next door lost their dog, Blinkers, in a storm, so to pass the time he’s started trying to herd Galapagos. Right now she’s gazing at him with what could only be called amused disgust. Nobody can get Galapagos to do anything she doesn’t want to do.
I wonder about her now, after the postcard. Over the years, Mama’s made her several little wooden overhangs for shade on the best side of the pond. And though we’ve had to cut back on so many things—only have three chickens left and one sad cow—she brings the turtle buckets of water to drink and cool her feet. She shares with her our meager tomato crop, blackberries she’s managed to find or buy, or anemic lettuce leaves she’s clawed out of the spindly garden.
“She’s just a teenager,” she says. “She needs her food.”
And it’s as if Galapagos knows she’s royalty. She likes to sun herself and forage around in the morning, bask for a bit in the sun, and then head for shade and watch us work, craning her neck like she’s watching an interesting play.
Still, I’m not writing because of Galapagos, but because of what Mrs. Chilton said this morning when she came over. She was standing there in our kitchen, scuttling her two youngest children away from Beezie—who was extravagantly coughing on all her dolls to make sure they wouldn’t play with them. (Beezie’s had the cough for weeks, and often uses it to evil purpose.)
The kitchen was full of the static that comes with the dust, and we were all trying to avoid rubbing against each other as we moved around the small kitchen so we wouldn’t get sparks. (In the worst storms, the charge in the air has been known to short cars.) Mrs. Chilton has seven children, so her hair always looks like she’s just been shocked anyway. She once said to Mama, “Cathy isn’t much to look at, but you won’t find someone who works harder,” but I don’t hold it against her because I know she’s too tired to think straight.
“David’s talking about going west,” she said, and sipped at her tea, trying to pass it off as a casual statement. “He says he can’t take the poison air. He’s worried about little Lizzie.”
“What’s that?” Mama asked evenly, as if she didn’t know what the west was. She was pounding the life out of a ball of dough. It had been quite a day already because Beezie had torn down the sheets we spent all day plastering and then blamed it on Sheepie. When we pointed out they were covered in her dirty handprints she knelt by Sheepie and lifted one of his paws and tried to convince me that paws look exactly like hands. The dog is her best friend, but it’s not the first time she’s tried to pin her crimes on him.
“That’s what I said to him. Going west would be like jumping into a black hole. What do we have to live for out west? People hate us there.”
Which I know is true. They call us Okies no matter what state we’re from. They make laws to keep us out.
Mama wiped her hair out of her face with her wrists. “The weather will change soon.”
“That’s what I told him, Beth,” Mrs. Chilton agreed. “Mark my words, we’ll never leave that house as long as I live. I may as well die as leave. This is home.”
Mama went on silently with the dough. She’s always taking in information and rarely giving it, and this leads people to think she either agrees or disagrees with them, depending on their mood. But I know Mama is as likely to leave Canaan as she is to leave her own bones behind. Every time I’ve tried to bring up that we should cut our losses and go (before the dust drowns us), she’s conjured up a thousand reasons why we can’t: that we have no money and barely anything left to sell, that things are no better in the cities—no jobs, businessmen selling fruit on the street to live, influenza running rampant, and we don’t know a soul anywhere but here. All of this is true, but still I disagree.
“This town used to be a paradise,” she has said many times, “and it will be a paradise again, if we can just hold on.” She shakes off the gloom, or tries to, with a toss of her head. “We’ve had so many bad years; the good ones are coming. God wouldn’t be mean enough to have it otherwise.
“You’ve always been restless,” she adds.