“I still can’t see none,” he said, lightly rubbing his eyes.
I helped him up and led him over to the bucket and used the dipper to pour water directly into his eyes. He blinked while I done it, but mostly managed to keep his eyes open.
“That’s better,” he said. “You don’t look like you’re made of sand now. Everything I been looking at looked sandy.”
“Good,” I said, “ ’cause I feel like I’m made of sand.”
They drank some water then, and I got some of the rabbit out of the icebox and put it on the table. They sat and ate. When Jane had her piece of rabbit down to the bones, she said, “That tasted a little gritty and right near spoiled.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll tell your waiter to tell the chef, and the chef will tell you to go to hell.”
She looked at me and drooped the corners of her mouth. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just making a comment.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “I don’t reckon you been eating all that much that ain’t gritty, sister.”
“And you would be correct,” she said. “I apologize.”
“But it didn’t taste so good,” Tony said.
“That’s ’cause it was a rabbit that had been dead awhile,” I said. “I cooked it hard on account of that. I guess now you’d like dessert and some finger bowls.”
“That would be nice,” Jane said, “and maybe a nice hot towel.”
She grinned at me, and I grinned back. It was hard not to. I hadn’t seen her in a long while, and since I’d last seen her, me and her both had grown quite a bit, and she’d grown in a real nice way.
I had been standing by the table, like a servant, but now I dipped me a cup of water from a bucket and sat down at the table with it.
“What you coming this way for?” I said.
“We come in the storm,” Jane said.
“No you didn’t,” I said. “You couldn’t have come in that storm.”
“Did too,” Tony said. “We darn near died doing it.”
“You couldn’t have,” I said. “That storm was one of the worst I’ve seen.”
“Ought to have seen it close up,” he said.
“If it wasn’t us that come in the storm,” Jane said, “it was a couple looked just like us.”
I shook my head. “I can’t imagine how you did it.”
“ ’Cause Sissy is smart,” Tony said.
“Smart ain’t got nothing to do with sand,” I said, “and if she’s so smart, what in the world has she got you two out in a sandstorm for in the first place?”
Tony turned and looked at Jane like this was a question he hadn’t thought of and felt ought to be answered.
She said, “Well, it wasn’t like we had a choice. The house was nearly blown flat. We could have stayed there in the ruins of it, I suppose, but I decided the better part of valor was to abandon it.”
“The better part of valor?” I said.
“She reads books,” Tony said, as if it was a thing he couldn’t really explain.
“That’s true,” she said, “and someday I’m going to write for a real fine newspaper. The problem is I can’t type. I’m going to find a school somewhere that can teach me, and then I’m going to be a journalist. But I’m going to look around first, learn a little about life.”
“Journalist. That’s what they call them that type on typewriters for newspapers,” Tony said. He looked proud of himself for knowing that.
“Right now,” Jane said, “I’m getting me and Tony out of this gritty hell. I’m going to take me and him somewhere else. We’ll walk if we have to, but I thought it might be better if we drove Old Man Turpin’s Ford.”
“How in the world would you drive Old Man Turpin’s Ford?” I asked “He ain’t much of a loaner kind of person.”
“Oh, well, we thought we’d borrow it,” she said. “Sort of.”
4
Now, before you figure Jane and Tony as just straightaway thieves, I think I ought to do a little explaining.
They told me how they came by their plan, and when I heard it, I sort of liked it and decided to count myself in. I had to. Neither of them could drive a car, and I could. We’d had one once, right up until a month before, when Daddy sold it to pay for some flour and such, and some medicine for Mama. I guess he knew right then that that was the end. When he took that car into town and gave it up for a few dollars, I seen the light go out of his eyes sure as if someone inside his head had pulled a light cord. He was near to being a dead man walking from then on. Only thing that kept him connected to life at all was Mama, and when she died, that was the end of it. If there were any lights left on anywhere inside him, they went dark right then, and that was all she wrote.
But the thing was, Old Man Turpin had a car, and he had died, which was something I didn’t know. No one around our parts had known of him having any next of kin, so there wasn’t anyone next in line for that automobile, and the way Jane explained it, it was a shame to let a good Ford stay under a tarp, get all rusted out and eventually full of dust.
Jane had a way of talking that could get you on her side of things, even when you were certain you weren’t going to agree. I think it was all that reading she did. In her mouth, words were as sweet as candy or as sharp as razors, and she could switch from one to the other in midstream. She was one of them kind that loved to hear herself talk.
What I didn’t know was Jane and Tony’s mama had run off with a Bible salesman, and their daddy, not long after, had a tractor accident while trying to plow out some rows, long after there was any chance of things growing. Way Jane explained it, their dad was real stubborn, right up until the time his Poppin’ Johnny tractor rocked over and caught him under it and squashed him like a bug.
They was going to try and bury him, but couldn’t get him out from under the tractor. He was bedded down good in the sand with the tractor on top of him. Jane come up then with the idea just to shovel sand over him and the tractor, at least until they could have a proper burial, ’cause there were hungry dogs roving around. But the sandstorm had come up and they went into the house and Mother Nature covered him up for them.
Their house, which had mostly been supported by good luck and a prayer, finally blowed down, and they stayed in what was left of it for the night. Next morning they had to dig out a little, and once they were out, they figured their place was done for and they had to leave.
They decided to walk out and try to get some help so maybe they could get their daddy buried proper and find a place to stay. Jane found a couple of her books that hadn’t been blowed away or buried by the sand and put them in a pillowcase. As the storm hadn’t hit yet when they did this, they headed out, got to Old Man Turpin’s, and found him sitting in a rocking chair in his doorway, the door open. He was covered from head to foot in sand.
“It didn’t take no wizard,” Tony said, “to figure he was dead.”
Jane nodded. “I figured he did it on purpose. Just didn’t care anymore, sat out there and let the dust get him. We started looking around in the house. Everyone knows Old Man Turpin doesn’t have any kin, so we knew we weren’t going to disturb anyone. We got some flour sacks and put some things in them he wouldn’t need anymore, like canned goods. I put my books in there with the cans, and we made us packs. Then we went out to his barn and found that Ford under a tarpaulin. Course, then we realized it didn’t do us any good, ’cause neither of us could drive. We covered it up and started out this way, hoping to find somebody to help us, and then the storm hit.”
“Why didn’t you stay there? Turpin has a pretty good house.”
“ ’Cause he was dead on the porch is one thing,” Jane said, “and the other is staying there wasn’t going to get us any farther than there.”
“I thought you was just looking for some help to bury your pa?” I said.
“Was,” she said. “At first. Then me and Tony got to thinking that Pa was pretty well covered up as it was, and what we needed more than anything was just
to be gone from here. I don’t see no cause just to stay around and eat dirt and get old, if I even manage to get old. Way things are going, I’ll be out on some porch somewhere in a chair with the dust covering me up. It’s not much of a future, way I look at it.”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“So,” Jane said. “We left out of there thinking we could find someone who could drive the car, but then we got caught up in another storm before we got very far. Just walking out there in all that dirt is some real trouble. There’s still roads, but they’re pretty covered up too. Not so much I don’t think a car could make it. And if it can’t, I’m still willing to give it a try, if I can get someone to drive.”
“It wasn’t for that old bridge over the creek, we’d have been done in just like Turpin,” Tony said. “We crawled under there and pushed up against the bank. There wasn’t no water in the creek, and we just listened to the wind blow all the morning, and watched that old dry bed get drier and fill up with sand. This afternoon when it was all winded out, we was still sitting, and that sand was over our ankles, but soon as it quit we started out walking, and it was like it was waiting on us to come out of hiding, because we hadn’t gone more than a mile or two when the storm hit us again.”
“Wasn’t nothing for us to do but keep on coming,” Jane said. “And we did. We knew if we lay down and waited somewhere, unless it was some good place like that bridge, we was done for, we’d never get up. We didn’t have any real choice but to put our noses forward and our ears back, like plow mules, and just keep on coming.”
“The wind blowed us down three or four times,” Tony said.
“We found the old fence line that runs from the Thompson property to yours, and we clung to that where it was standing, and we crawled where it wasn’t. When it was standing again, we took to it, and finally we come to your place and you come out to help us.”
Jane paused and looked around.
“By the way,” she said, “where’s your folks?”
I took a deep breath and told them. I was pretty weak by the time I was done explaining.
The last thing I said was “I buried them together in the barn.”
“You seem to be the only one of us that’s any good at getting anyone buried,” Tony said.
Jane just stared at me for a long time, long enough I could see how red-rimmed her eyes were and how the corners of her mouth was cracked from sand getting behind the scarf she’d had on.
“I’m real sorry, Jack,” she said. “Looks like we’re all orphans.”
5
You never knew about the dust storms. Sometimes there wouldn’t be any for a week; then there would be two in one day, or one that would last all day and through the night. Sometimes they went on for days at a time.
I thought over what Jane had said about Old Man Turpin’s car, and though I ain’t a thief, I began to think it was an idea that had some worth. Old Man Turpin wasn’t exactly the friendliest soul who had ever lived. He might have had a wife and family once, but nobody knew of any, and nobody knew him to do anything but farm, and quite well, until the dust storms came and wiped everybody out.
A fella like that wasn’t going to offer us his car, but I figured what we was talking about, being orphans and all and wanting to get out of Oklahoma, was just a form of borrowing. A wide form of it, but I made the whole thing agreeable in my head nonetheless. At least for the moment.
I had some bottles we could cork, and we went out to the barn and filled them, so as to try and have some water without dirt in it. Soon as we run the bottles full, we corked them and wrapped them in towels and put them in a flour sack. We used the pump then to get enough water to wipe our faces and hands and arms down. It was refreshing to be a little cleaner, if not exactly churchgoing in appearance.
But I will add this. With Jane washed up, and her having taken one of Mama’s combs and combed her hair out, she looked good. Like a less clean version of some of those women I’d seen on the covers of magazines, but wearing pants and work boots. I felt a little funny looking at her, like maybe there was some kind of magic in her.
We got a few of the canned goods left in the kitchen and packed those too, and then we decided the thing to do was to wait until tomorrow. If the weather was good in the morning, and the sky in the distance didn’t look like it had a line of storms coming, we’d head out as fast as we could go to Old Man Turpin’s.
I slept in Mama and Daddy’s bed and let Jane and Tony have my pallet in the corner. In the morning we got up and took a look outside. It looked okay.
There was a patch of scrub oaks that ran down by the dry bed of a long-gone creek behind the house. It went a long ways in the direction of Turpin’s place, and that seemed to me to be the way to go. The trees and the creek bank would give us some protection against any sudden storm that might come up, and it was shaded a little. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a plan of some sort.
We went down behind the house with our bags, and it was hard going until we got near the creek bed. The trees had kept some of the sand out, though they were ragged trees. The grasshoppers and birds had stripped all the leaves, and deer and lost cattle had chewed a lot of the bark. It was a bony kind of shade, but it was shade.
The creek was still dry, but we could walk there better than anywhere else because the bottom of it had been full of rocks, and even with the sand on top, it was fairly solid. The sky was as blue as a Jimmy Rogers song. There wasn’t a cloud in the heavens. The wind wasn’t blowing and the sun was high and hot and we were sweaty and tired by the time it was late afternoon and we come up behind Old Man Turpin’s house.
When we got there, we went around to the front porch, and just like Jane and Tony said, the porch was covered in sand, except where they had made a path to the front door. Old Man Turpin was in his chair, though you couldn’t tell it was him or a chair unless you looked real hard. He was just a big mound of sand mostly the color of Oklahoma, with a bit of Nebraska and a lot of Texas worked in, and I’m pretty sure Kansas was swirled in there too.
On the porch I brushed some dirt away from his face, and the first thing I seen was a corncob pipe in his mouth, the bowl all filled with sand. I scraped some more, and then I could see the brim of his hat mashed into his face. He had his eyes closed and his mouth open, and there was sand all in it, like someone had stood there and poured it into him with a funnel. He had drowned in dirt.
“See,” Tony said. “He’s deader’n an anvil.”
“He is, at that,” I said.
I guess we was being pretty casual about death, but for the last couple of years it had been all around us, and as of recent, up close and personal. It was the sort of thing that stunned you at the same time it made you feel as empty as a corn crib after the rats had been in it.
When we got inside the house, I was glad we had brought water, because there was none there. While Jane and Tony laid out some things from our bag so we could eat, I went out to the well and saw that it had filled in with sand. I figured that was why Old Man Turpin had given up. No water. No hope.
Back in the house, we sat down at the table and ate some peaches from cans. We drank some of the water we had brought, then we went outside to the barn to look at the Ford.
Like they’d said, it was under a tarp, so we pulled it off. Sometimes dust storms blew so hard they built up static electricity. Back when we had a car, I seen Daddy go out after a sandstorm, and even though the car was in the barn, enough dust had blown in and over it that when he touched the car door, it knocked him down like a lighting strike. He was dazed for half the day, and considered himself lucky not to have been killed.
So I was careful when I touched the Ford, kind of popping my hand in first, like a snake striking a mouse. When I hit the handle, nothing. I opened the door and looked around for the key, found it stuck up by the sun visor. I tried it and the car started right up without no trouble. Luckily, the gauge showed there was plenty of gas, so we was ready to go. Provided I didn’t wrap th
e car around a tree.
“Hot dog,” Tony said. “We can get out of this place.”
I turned off the car.
I said, “Don’t you think we ought to bury Old Man Turpin?”
Jane put out a hand and leaned on the car. It was black, and though it had been covered tight with the tarp, there was still a faint film of dust all over it. When she moved her hand, her print stayed there. She said, “With us taking his car and burying him too, it might look worse than if we just leave him.”
“We could drop him in that old dry well,” Tony said. “It would look like he fell in.”
“We won’t do no such thing,” I said. “I ain’t no criminal. I’m just taking this car ’cause there ain’t any other choices. Sometime soon enough we can tell someone we took it. Maybe.”
“No one is going to miss it unless they come out to see him,” Jane said. “And I guess they will. Somebody has to miss him for something sometime. But he never liked anyone and no one really liked him. We wouldn’t have come here if we didn’t have to.”
“It was kind of nice he was dead,” Tony said. “It made it easier to take his stuff.”
“Shush, now,” Jane said. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Well,” Tony said, “it was kind of like that.”
“We could leave a note,” I said, “explaining things. We could say where we buried him and that we took the car, and that we did it because we felt we didn’t have a choice.”
“That’s no good,” Jane said.
“I think it is,” I said, and I went back into the house and left a note that said what we was doing, and how we didn’t bury him ’cause we thought people ought to know right where he was, case he was going to a graveyard instead of a plot next to his house. I wrote as best I could how my parents was buried in the barn, and how the property was pretty near being the bank’s anyway, and how they could have it.