Out of the Dust

by Karen Hesse

We both stared in wonder

  at the pond my daddy made

  and she said,

  a hole like that says a lot about a man.

  I didn’t intend to, but I liked her,

  because she was so plain and so honest,

  and because she made Daddy laugh,

  and me, too, just like that,

  and even though I didn’t know

  if there was room for her

  in me, I could see there was room for her in Daddy.

  When I asked him if he wanted me

  to go off to Aunt Ellis after all,

  Daddy said he hadn’t ever wanted it,

  he said I was his own and he didn’t like to

  think about what Aunt Ellis might do with me.

  And we laughed, picturing me and Aunt Ellis

  together,

  and it wasn’t a nice laugh, but it was

  Aunt Ellis we were talking about after all.

  The thing about Louise,

  I’ll just have to watch how things go and hope

  she doesn’t crowd me out of Daddy’s life, not now,

  when I am just finding my way back into it.

  October 1935

  Not Everywhere

  I walk with Daddy

  up the slope and look out over the Beaver River.

  Louise is back at the house.

  She wanted to come

  but this is Ma’s place,

  Ma’s grave,

  Franklin’s too,

  and Louise has no business here.

  She wants to come everywhere with us.

  Well, I won’t let her.

  Not everywhere.

  Daddy says,

  “She could have come.

  There’s room enough for everyone, Billie Jo.”

  But there’s not.

  She can come into Ma’s kitchen.

  She can hang around the barn.

  She can sit beside Daddy when he drives the truck.

  But Ma’s bones are in this hill,

  Ma’s and Franklin’s.

  And their bones wouldn’t like it,

  if Louise came walking up here between us.

  October 1935

  My Life, or What I Told Louise After the Tenth Time She Came to Dinner

  “I may look like Daddy, but I have my mother’s

  hands.

  Piano hands, Ma called them,

  sneaking a look at them any chance she got.

  A piano is a grand thing,”I say.

  “Though ours is covered in dust now.

  Under the grime it’s dark brown,

  like my mother’s eyes.”

  I think about the piano

  and how above it hangs a mirror

  and to either side of that mirror,

  shelves,

  where Ma and Daddy’s wedding picture once stood,

  though Daddy has taken that down.

  “Whenever she could,

  Ma filled a bowl with apples,” I tell Louise.

  “I’m crazy about apples,

  and she filled a jar with wildflowers when she

  found them,

  and put them on that shelf above the piano.”

  On the other shelf Ma’s book of poetry remains.

  And the invitation from Aunt Ellis,

  or what’s left of it.

  Daddy and I tore it into strips

  to mark the poems we thought Ma liked best.

  “We weren’t always happy,” I tell Louise.

  “But we were happy enough

  until the accident.

  When I rode the train west,

  I went looking for something,

  but I didn’t see anything wonderful.

  I didn’t see anything better than what I already had.

  Home.”

  I look straight into Louise’s face.

  Louise doesn’t flinch.

  She looks straight back.

  I am the first one to back down.

  “My hands don’t look real pretty anymore.

  But they hardly hurt. They only ache a little,

  sometimes.

  I could play right now,

  maybe,

  if I could get the dust out of the piano,

  if I wanted to get the dust out of the piano.

  But I don’t. I’m not ready yet.”

  And what I like best about her,

  is Louise doesn’t say what I should do.

  She just nods.

  And I know she’s heard everything I said,

  and some things I didn’t say too.

  November 1935

  November Dust

  The wheat is growing

  even though dust

  blows in sometimes.

  I walk with Daddy around the farm

  and see that

  the pond is holding its own,

  it will keep Ma’s apple trees alive,

  nourish her garden,

  help the grass around it grow,

  enough to lie in and dream

  if I feel like it,

  and stand in,

  and wait for Mad Dog

  when he comes past once a week

  on his way from Amarillo,

  where he works for the radio.

  And as long as the

  dust doesn’t crush

  the winter wheat,

  we’ll have something to show in the spring

  for all Daddy’s hard work.

  Not a lot, but more than last year.

  November 1935

  Thanksgiving List

  Prairie birds, the whistle of gophers, the wind

  blowing,

  the smell of grass

  and spicy earth,

  friends like Mad Dog, the cattle down in the river,

  water washing over their hooves,

  the sky so

  big, so full of

  shifting clouds,

  the cloud shadows creeping

  over the fields,

  Daddy’s smile,

  and his laugh,

  and his songs,

  Louise,

  food without dust,

  Daddy seeing to Ma’s piano,

  newly cleaned and tuned,

  the days when my hands don’t hurt at all,

  the thank-you note from Lucille in Moline, Kansas,

  the sound of rain,

  Daddy’s hole staying full of water

  as the windmill turns,

  the smell of green,

  of damp earth,

  of hope returning to our farm.

  The poppies set to

  bloom on Ma and Franklin’s grave,

  the morning with the whole day waiting,

  full of promise,

  the night

  of quiet, of no expectations, of rest.

  And the certainty of home, the one I live in,

  and the one

  that lives in me.

  November 1935

  Music

  I’m getting to know the music again.

  And it is getting to know me.

  We sniff each other’s armpits,

  and inside each other’s ears,

  and behind each other’s necks.

  We are both confident, and a little sassy.

  And I know now that all the time I was trying to get

  out of the dust,

  the fact is,

  what I am,

  I am because of the dust.

  And what I am is good enough.

  Even for me.

  November 1935

  Teamwork

  Louise and I take walks after dinner

  every time she comes.

  By the time we get back

  the kitchen looks pretty good,

  Daddy only leaves a few things he doesn’t

  understand,

  like big pans,

  and wooden spoons,

  and leftovers,

  and that makes me a little irritated
>
  but mostly it makes me love him.

  And Louise, knowing exactly what’s left to be done,

  helps me finish up.

  She was my father’s teacher at the night school class.

  She never married.

  She went to college for two years

  and studied and worked,

  and didn’t notice how lonely she was

  until she met Daddy and fell into the

  big hurt of his eyes.

  She knows how to keep a home,

  she knows how to cook,

  she knows how to make things

  last through winters

  and drought.

  She knows how to smooth things between two

  redheaded people.

  And she knows how to come into a home

  and not step on the toes of a ghost.

  I still feel grateful she didn’t make cranberry sauce

  last month, at the first Thanksgiving we

  spent together.

  Louise made sweet potatoes and green beans,

  and turkey, and two pies, pumpkin

  and chocolate.

  I was so full

  my lids

  sighed shut and Daddy walked with Louise instead of

  me

  out to Ma and Franklin’s grave,

  where he let Ma know his intentions.

  And Ma’s bones didn’t object.

  Neither did mine.

  And when they came back to the house,

  Daddy still cleaned the kitchen.

  December 1935

  Finding a Way

  Daddy

  started talking

  about planting

  the rest of the acres in wheat,

  but then said, No,

  let’s just go with what we’ve got right now.

  And I’ve

  been playing

  a half hour

  every day,

  making the skin stretch,

  making the scars stretch.

  The way I see it, hard times aren’t only

  about money,

  or drought,

  or dust.

  Hard times are about losing spirit,

  and hope,

  and what happens when dreams dry up.

  The tractor’s busted,

  we don’t have the cash to fix it,

  but there’s nothing saying Daddy can’t do the work

  by hand.

  It can’t be any harder than digging a hole

  forty by sixty by six feet deep.

  Daddy bought a second mule with Louise’s help.

  Her betrothal gift to him.

  He walks behind the team,

  step by step, listing the fields to fight the wind.

  Maybe the tractor lifted him above the land,

  maybe the fields didn’t know him anymore,

  didn’t remember the touch of his feet,

  or the stroke of his hand,

  or the bones of his knees,

  and why should wheat grow for a stranger?

  Daddy said he’d try some sorghum,

  maybe some cotton,

  admitting as how there might be something

  to this notion of diversification folks were

  talking about,

  and yes, he’d bring the grass back

  like Ma wanted,

  where he wasn’t planting anything else.

  He’d make new sod.

  And I’m learning, watching Daddy, that you can stay

  in one place

  and still grow.

  I wipe dust out of the roasting pan,

  I wipe dust off Ma’s dishes,

  and wait for Daddy to drive in with Louise,

  hoping she’ll stay a little later,

  a little longer,

  waiting for the day when she stays for good.

  She wears a comical hat, with flowers,

  in December,

  and when she smiles,

  her face is

  full enough of springtime, it makes

  her hat seem just right.

  She brings apples in a sack,

  perfect apples she arranges

  in a bowl on the shelf,

  opposite the book of poetry.

  Sometimes, while I’m at the piano,

  I catch her reflection in the mirror,

  standing in the kitchen, soft-eyed, while Daddy

  finishes chores,

  and I stretch my fingers over the keys,

  and I play.

  December 1935

  KAREN HESSE is the Newbery Medalwinning author of ten books for children, among them The Music of Dolphins (also Scholastic Press), which was named a Best Book of 1996 by both Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.

  Ms. Hesse lives with her husband and two daughters in Williamsville, Vermont.

  Also by Karen Hesse

  The Music of Dolphins

  A Time of Angels

  Phoenix Rising

  Letters from Rifka

  Wish on a Unicorn

  for younger readers

  Lavender

  Sable

  Poppy’s Chair

  Lester’s Dog

  Copyright © 1997 by Karen Hesse

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, a division of Scholastic Inc.

  Publishers since 1920.

  SCHOLASTIC and SCHOLASTIC PRESS and associated logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hesse, Karen.

  Out of the Dust / by Karen Hesse.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family’s wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

  [1. Dust storms—Fiction. 2. Farm Life—Oklahoma—Fiction. 3. Depressions—1929—Fiction. 4. Oklahoma—Fiction. 5. Poetry—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H4364Ou 1997

  [Fic]—dc21

  96-40344

  CIP

  AC

  First Edition, October 1997

  Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-51712-6

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.