SHADOWS IN THE DUST

Dead snakes were strung belly up along the barbed wire fences. Cassie knew this had begun with the Sioux, who killed snakes to provoke the rains. She remembered how the farmers had ridiculed them. But that was before the land dried up.

The once thick sea of grain was now the barren landscape that stretched for miles past invisible borders of Kansas. Cassie felt the sick fields all her around fall silent as she stood on the front porch and looked down the dirt road that ended where the earth met the sky. Her narrowed eyes were sharply focused then widened at the rising red mass that grew over the horizon as bits of fence post disappeared in its wake. Cassie felt she was watching thunder being born. It was a wall that kept climbing higher. Motionless signs started to quake as the cloud roared near. They disappeared once the moving wall overtook them and the gusts of wind grew forcing up Cassie’s blue dress.

Everyone knew where the dust came from by its color. Black dust came from Kansas, grey from Colorado, and she knew this storm was coming from Oklahoma. She saw something else too, like a shadow down the road some distance away. As she squinted through the wind, Cassie realized what it was; a man walking at a steady pace about a quarter mile ahead of the storm.

The wind was getting stronger. She tried to hold down her dress as bits of dried grain were pelted against her calves and thighs. Then in a sudden gust she was pushed back and pinned to the front door.

Across the field she saw the red giant swallow the man whole. Instinctively she called out, “Pahhh” but her father had gone out early to work in the fields. She tightened her mouth while tiny chips of dead field were shoved up her nose, into her ears, and eyes.

The wind whipped dirt hard against her skin. Cassie was thrust through the front door, dust trailed in behind her. That dead earth, stripped of its top soil, blew through every slit in the house. It seemed the whole state of Oklahoma slammed against the thin wooden door’s grainy surface. Closing it was like pushing a crate filled with stones.

The Sears Roebuck Catalog pages flapped and bank notices flew up in the air and scattered. With her forearms about to snap, Cassie dug her feet into the floor. Her toe nails clawed at the boards. One nail got caught in a knot of the wood and broke. She howled and a sudden rush of strength surged through her as she managed to lock the chain latch of the door shut.

Papers and letters ruffled on the floor. The doors of the cabinets in the kitchen vibrated, the few dishes they owned rattled, and in the living room her father’s rifle shook on the rack. The door behind her began to opened and close against the metal links of the chain. Her short breaths mixed with spit. Cassie blinked madly against the burn of assaulting particles. She tried to breath in air but only managed to cough out more dirt.

Slowly making her way across the room, Cassie’s trembling hands groped at the air for a chair, or the table, or the counter. As she limped she could feel that her foot was covered in blood. She felt the throbbing of her toe deep in her throat.

Cassie knocked into the table’s once smooth surface made coarse by the storm. She latched onto it as if it were drift wood. On the table there was a rag, which she grabbed and quickly put over her mouth.

The windows, with their homemade plaster seals, gave way. Whenever she opened her eyes, tiny fragments of dust cut into her pupils. She wanted to make her way to the pantry and lock herself in not to come out for days.

From the table in the middle of the living room, Cassie launched herself between the dresser and a wall closet to the kitchen. There she crouched and curled into a ball. She covered her face with her hands as tears swelled in her eyes.

The only thing to do was to wait. To do what her father always told her to do. Pray. Pray for his safety and pray that those responsible for all this damnation would be punished by God.

I hope Papa finds that cable he rigg’d up to the house. Ain’t nothing worse than being caught outside in the storm. Lost to the storm. The man-. The man she had seen vanish earlier on the road flashed through her mind. Her heart pounded. God, please bring my Papa home. Don’t let him be swallowed up like that man, even if he is three sheets to the wind when he comes on back.

The wind ruffled through the pages of the catalog that had blown into the kitchen near the back door. Like a cluster of side winders in the desert, the bank notices glided over the sitting room floor. She gave up moving and curled into a ball.

Then her father’s wheel barrel railed into the side of the house. The shock of it jolted Cassie forward and she landed on her stomach near the entrance to the kitchen. The sound whistled with a wild rage. Cassie cuffed her ears against the high-pitched wind squealing through the cracks of the wood.

“It ain’t right! It just ain’t right,” shouted the girl above the whirling wind. She curled her fist and punched the floorboard. Blood throbbed under her skin.

When the storm began to peak, for Cassie, it all seemed to stop. The room still filling up with burning dust, became muffled and distant. The back door thrashed open and slammed against the wall without a sound. Papers fluttered silently about her feet and face. Cassie’s hair lashed her forehead and whipped against her shoulders. A picture frame blew off the dresser in front of her. Glass shattered but, to Cassie, it appeared that all movement had nearly frozen and she felt no attachment to her surroundings. It was as if she had willed the storm to freeze as it slashed through the home.

Raising her arms, she called out towards the ceiling, “What have you ever done for me? You ‘spect me to learn something? How’m I supposed to-,” her coughing started up. All of her energy she thought she had left had been spent on those words and now she might die choking on gainless soil.

Cassie wiped the corner of her mouth. She looked up once more, addressing what she felt that she saw just beyond the ceiling, “Papa says all us round here, all of us are blessed. That our faith is bein’ tested like Job’s was.” Now the rustling papers began to slow and the back door swung easily in the slight breeze left over.

“He says it’s only last’ this long because people all over are loosin’ their love for You.” Cassie paused. Dry brown tear tracks were chipping off her cheeks. Her toe hand and head pulsed. A deep one toned hum vibrated in her ears. That ringing seemed to linger over the motes in the air that just begun to hover softly toward the floor.

In a hoarse whisper she said, “Why make a bet with the devil to prove a point? Why put anyone through all this sufferin’? There ain’t no truth in it for me and I’m tired of fancy words that tell me to believe when it seems there ain’t nothing to believe in.”

The sun light streamed through the soiled windows and broke into the room. In a daze Cassie stared at the front door from where she had fallen near the kitchen entrance. The front door latch had been torn off and the door was left flapping open with a broken chain dangling from it.

She had not known it but her father, Mr. Brown, had made his way to the house by the wire strung from the far fence to the back door. He stood in the threshold looking through the kitchen into the living room where Cassie sat. The dust was settling. On his hands, blood covered cuts made by the wire were packed in with red dirt.

He had heard the words that had poured from his daughter’s mouth. At first he had only heard incomprehensible shouts, but as the storm calmed the shouts became clear heresy. The man crept behind his daughter, who faced the front door and was rocking back and forth on the splintered floor. His hand rose high over his head and swooped down, landing on the back of her skull.

“You brought this on us.” His words boomed from his gut. Half stunned from the blow, Cassie crawled across the floor reaching for the front door that gaped halfway open across the room.

“What in the hell did that lie’n mother of yours teach you? Cause I know that blasmee never come out of my mouth.” he watched his daughter struggle on the floor, her hand groping the empty air for the front door. With his head cocked to the side he bent down and grabbed a fist full of Cassie’s soil caked mousey brown hair.

“Did that woman, rottin in her grave, teach you nothing about God?”

With her back to him Cassie spit out, “No Papa. Everything I learned about God I learned from you.”

Mr. Brown’s face became redder than the cloud of dust that had just torn through his field. He wound his daughter’s hair around his fist and jerked her head back. He grabbed her throat and tightened his hold, his thumb pushing against her jugular.

Mr. Brown crouched over his daughter and hammered each syllable into her ear, “That is not what I taught you girl!” He withdrew his hand from her throat and pushed Cassie forward. She landed on her the palms of her hands gasping for air.

Scrunching his face her father circled around her. He bent down so his lips were next to her ear. With breath that reeked of rancid decaying flowers in moonshine he whispered, “That is not what I taught you, and you know it.” The acrid stench of his spit soured in Cassie’s nose while she was still trying to catch her breath. Her face resembled a rotten plum.

Mr. Brown straightened up and casually walked a few feet into the kitchen. He looked back at Cassie’s face and absently asked “You sick or something?”

Between catching her breath, and what she felt was spitting up a lung, Cassie choked out, “I think I need a doctor.”

“Yea, well, you find some money you give it to me, then I may consider take’n you over to town to see a doctor, figure out what’s wrong with you. After what you jus said no way you being forgiven for by anyone who matters.”

He opened the ice box only to curse at it for being empty. Cassie’s eyes were clearing and she saw the photograph of her mother, that had fallen off of the dresser, lying on the floor. She stepped towards it. The glass had cracked over the black and white image of a woman no more than twenty-five years old with a tightly wrapped bun. In the photograph her mother had been standing in the spot Cassie had fallen, between the kitchen and the family room. The woman’s two dark lips hinted at a smile, but her eyes were fixed on the front door.

Cassie remembered that her mother hated tying back her hair and that she saw her with her hair down only once with waves of auburn pouring over shoulders. Cassie couldn’t remember her mother after that. Then she realized where she stood.

Mama always told me that mountains don’t move for nothing or nobody… maybe sheda known better than to-

Across the room she heard the ice box slam shut, “Damn hobos. They ain’t right in the head you know. Saw one of ‘em just for I came in here. Barely saw him, I shoulda say, wish I hadn’t. Through all that dust he jus looked like a shadow. Get ya self killed walking like that.”

As he spoke Cassie recalled the man. She watched him as if he were now before her taking one step, then another step. Steady. He never once looked behind him, never tried to run away. He let himself go.

Looking into an overturned pitcher Mr. Brown called out, “Looks like you gonna have to go pump some water from the-,” but as he turned around all he saw was the empty living room and open front door.

He swept the pitcher off the table. It crashed to the floor and shattered into small pieces of broken clay. Leaping into the living room, he ripped the Winchester off the gun rack. As he stomped toward the front door the floorboards bent under his feet. He left the door swinging behind him. From the front porch he saw his daughter walking through the broken dry grains of his field toward the road.

In front of her all Cassie saw was a land stripped, penetrated, and ripped apart. She had seen it break, but now, just as she imagined that she had willed the storm to stop, she began to see that she could change the fruitless soil.

Cassie stumbled in the direction in which she had seen the dark man heading right before he was engulfed. One step, another, Cassie closed her eyes and lowered her head. With each step forward the ground, to her, seemed to become soft, to moisten. It appeared, to her, that tiny leaves were making a soft applause against her toes and ankles. She believed that the dew showered the blood off of her foot. She opened her eyes and imagined herself in a field of grass glazed with water droplets.

At the same time she felt as if she could see directly behind her, the porch coated with red dirt, her father with his gun among the crumbling grey-yellow remnants of wheat in front of the house, and so Cassie waded deeper into her vision. She did not stop or slow her pace as Mr. Brown’s eyes were level on the sight of his gun. He trembled the metal rifle in the breeze, cocked it, and took aim.