Dust girl

by Sarah Zettel

  “I heard you singing,” I said. “That’s how I found you.”

  “I was hoping that’d happen.” He pulled a battered newsboy cap out of his back pocket. “I been singing since the sheriff left. Kept me from going crazy. Shall we?” He bowed and swept his cap like a hotel doorman in the movies.

  I giggled. “Let’s do.” I held out my skirt hem and put my nose in the air and tried to mince out the door. He chuckled, and that made me feel kind of good. At the same time, I thought to myself Jack Holland was a boy who could make people do what he wanted. He had the kind of face that could look all sweet while hiding a world of secrets. I’d have to watch him close while he was in the Imperial.

  My insides did that squirmy thing again. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, but I couldn’t go back on my word.

  “God Almighty,” Jack whispered.

  I stopped. He’d been stuck in that cell and hadn’t seen the storm. He was getting his first look at what it had done.

  “I seen dusters before, but not like this…”

  “Don’t think there’s ever been one like this.” And it was my fault. No matter what Baya said. I knew, somehow, I’d done this. Now I was standing around instead of working for the money I needed to go find Mama. “Come on. We gotta get to the store.”

  We waded through the dust to Van Iykes’s Mercantile. The sky still boiled black, and the dust tried to needle its way into my skin. Jack kept his nose pressed to his sleeve. I kept one eye on the street out of town, looking for cars or people. There was nothing, just the houses hunkering down under the storm. There had to be people behind the curtains, all sealed into their rooms. The town only looked empty; it wasn’t really.

  The dust swirled around and chuckled in my ears.

  The mercantile door was unlocked. The bell rang when I pushed it open.

  “Mr. Van Iykes?” I called. “Mrs. Van Iykes?”

  No answer. Fresh dust snaked inside around our ankles. I blinked hard while my eyes adjusted to the twilight filling the store’s front room.

  Then I wished they hadn’t.

  “God Almighty,” croaked Jack, just like he had when he saw the storm.

  The mercantile was an old-time general store-one big room with the groceries on the left side, dry goods on the right, and hardware at the back. Right then, it looked like it had been hit by a cyclone. The racks of dime novels and magazines were flopped on their sides next to empty barrels. The butcher’s case was busted open, and sharp bits of glass lay glittering on the dusty floorboards. Heaps of cans lay behind the counter on one side, and shredded bolts of cloth on the other. The fridge door flapped open, and the smashed milk bottles lay in stinking white pools. A green trail leaked down from the icebox, where the pistachio ice cream had melted. Flies had gotten trapped in the sticky green puddle on the floorboards and died.

  “Mr. Van Iykes?” I called again. “Mrs. Van Iykes?”

  “I’ll go look upstairs.” Jack vanished up the back steps. I heard him clumping around over my head. I just kept turning in a circle, trying to understand. Then I noticed the books were torn like the cloth was. No. Not torn, chewed. They had holes right through them, and big crescent-shaped chunks taken out of the spines-just like the chunk taken out of the door frame where little Clarinda Hopper had been spying on me.

  That was when I saw how the bones lay on top of the broken glass-pork bones, beef bones, lamb bones, all picked as clean and white as if they’d been in the desert for years.

  Staring at those bones, I barely heard Jack Holland thumping back down the stairs.

  “There’s nobody up there,” he said. “Doesn’t look like it’s been robbed or anything…”

  “What am I gonna do?” I tore my eyes away from the bones. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. No, I didn’t want to understand it. So I told myself, all I really understood was that the Hoppers were back at the hotel, hungry and impatient, and I had their fifty in my pocket. “They’re expecting me to feed them. What am I gonna do?”

  “Whoa. Wait.” Jack held up both too-big hands. “Who’s expecting you?”

  I told him about the Hoppers, and the hundred and fifty dollars. “We need the money,” I said. “I can’t not feed them. They’ll leave and I’ll have nothing.” I knew what I must sound like, worrying about money when it was plain the Van Iykeses had been wiped out by… by something. Wild coyotes, maybe, or crazy people. People went crazy in dust storms sometimes. But I needed that money if I was going to find Mama.

  “Okay.” Jack wiped his hands on his pants. “Okay. Look. There’s still the cans, right? You can make plenty out of cans.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “So you see what you can find. I’ll go look for a wheelbarrow or something we can load up.”

  I didn’t want him to leave me alone in that ruined place, but I nodded. There were a couple of crates behind the grocery counter. I knocked the dust out and started sorting cans. All the boxes had been torn open. Heaps of cornflakes, shredded wheat, and Jell-O powder were vanishing under a coat of dust. I picked out cans of beans and creamed corn and tomato soup and condensed milk and set them on the counter. I added tins of deviled ham, tuna fish, sardines, and Ovaltine. There were even some tinned clams.

  The battered metal bread box on the counter held treasure: two long, squared-off Pullman loaves, still mostly fresh and only a little dusty. I wrapped them in brown paper from the big roll bolted to the counter and added the bread to my rows of salvaged canned goods. For a wonder, the ham and salami hanging over the busted-up meat case were untouched.

  They only took the fresh, my brain said.

  Shut up, I said back to my brain.

  But the barrel of salt pork hadn’t been touched either. I wrapped up some slabs of that too and tried not to feel my hands shaking. I pulled my nerve together and headed down into the cellar. More luck. There was homemade jam on the shelf, and potatoes, onions, and carrots in the bins. Maybe Mr. Van Iykes had been able to chase off whoever robbed the place before they made it to the cellar. Maybe he and Sheriff Davis had gone to round up the robbers and were caught out by the storm and they’d be back soon. They’d be glad to see the money then.

  That idea made me feel better as I helped myself to what I could carry of vegetables and preserves and took it all back upstairs.

  Jack dragged a wheelbarrow inside and started loading groceries. He must have been dog-tired, but he’d said he would work and he was. That spoke better for him than any easy smile. Maybe this would be all right after all.

  While Jack tied a tarp over the barrow, I grabbed the pad of order blanks from the drawer under the cash register and added up the prices for all we’d taken, making guesses on the jam and vegetables. The total was fifteen dollars and eleven cents. I punched the keys on the register. The bells chimed, and the cash drawer shot open.

  I stared.

  There was all of fifteen cents in the drawer, along with a stack of IOUs.

  I’d always thought the Van Iykeses had plenty of money. After all, they ran the only store left in Slow Run. But nobody in the whole town had money to buy anything, so I guess Mr. Van Iykes did what the rest of us did, take the promises and hope.

  I felt bad about leaving another IOU, but I didn’t know what else to do. So at the bottom of the order blank I wrote:

  Mr. Van Iykes:

  I needed some groceries for guests at the Imperial. I will come by tomorrow and pay you for what I took and bring your barrow back.

  Callie

  Writing that down helped me believe the Van Iykeses would be back tomorrow to see my promise bundled with all the others. I shut the order blank in the drawer so it wouldn’t blow away. The register chimed as if for an actual sale. It didn’t know the difference.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Jack. I didn’t want to stay there with the bones and broken glass a minute longer. I wanted to be back in my own home, where there was still a chance I could do something to make a difference.

&
nbsp; Jack looked at me like he understood, grabbed up the handles of the wheelbarrow, and followed me out the back door into the storm.

  7

  All the Hungry Little Children

  “Ah, there you are, Callie! We were beginning to wonder.”

  Mrs. Hopper sailed into the Imperial’s main kitchen while Jack and I were unloading the last of the groceries. We were both streaked with sweat and grime. It had been impossible to push the barrow through the blow dust. We’d had to drag it behind us like a couple of mules hitched to a plow.

  “Why, who’s this?” Mrs. Hopper tilted her chin down so we could just see the green flash of her eyes above the rims of her tinted glasses.

  “Jack Holland, ma’am,” I told her. “He’s here to help out while you stay.” Which was true as far as it went. The Hoppers didn’t need to know where or how I’d found him.

  “Charming!” She held out her hand and smiled. Her teeth were very straight and very white. Jack blushed and shook her hand. “Mr. Hopper will be pleased. He believes in rewarding hard work. Now”-she grew brisk-“as my children made clear before you left, I’m afraid we’re all just a tiny bit hungry. Callie, you’ll put together some tea for us, won’t you?”

  Tea? I hadn’t thought about tea. It was going to be hard enough to pull together a dinner for so many, even with Jack’s help.

  “No hurry, of course,” Mrs. Hopper said in a tone that meant just the opposite. “But as soon as you can.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She beamed at me and sailed out through the swinging doors.

  Tea. I looked at the heap of groceries salvaged from Van Iykes’s. How was I going to make them tea?

  “She’s pretty.” Jack hooked a tall stool out from under the counter and sat down a little too hard.

  That woke me up. I planted my hands on my hips and glared at him. “She’s a guest. So don’t go making a fool out of yourself.” Then I realized he wouldn’t do me any good starved and thirsty, so I filled a glass from the sink and shoved it at him.

  “Who are you calling a fool?” Jack gulped the water down.

  “You, if you go making eyes at married guests.” I plucked the salami out of the crate and a sharp knife out of a drawer and passed him both.

  “I wasn’t making eyes!” He snatched up the salami and swiped a slice off the end.

  “You were! You’re red as a beet.”

  “I am not,” he muttered around his mouthful of hard sausage.

  “Suit yourself.” I shrugged and turned to face the kitchen.

  Except for the Moonlight Room, the kitchen was the biggest room in the Imperial. The two cast-iron stoves sat solidly in the middle of it all, with the bake ovens underneath and the warming ovens on the side. In the corner, the housekeeper’s desk sat under the hook board where we hung the spare keys.

  I started filling the kettle and a couple of big pots. “First thing to do when you’re cooking is get the water boiling,” Mama had told me. “It saves time and you’ll always find a use for it.”

  I remembered playing with pots and pans in here when I was really little, while Mama and the cooks worked, filling the air with the best smells. Gradually, the cooks drifted away and it was just Mama, and then even that ended. Now it was just me. Well, and Jack, but he was just wolfing salami, and I couldn’t really count him yet.

  “You’ll get a stomachache,” I said, shaking out the match I’d used to light one of the burners on the right-hand stove.

  “Already got one,” he told me around another mouthful. “You can pick ’em up for free on the road. Thought I’d see if store-bought is better quality.”

  I peeked in the tin box labeled TEA and found there was actually some tea in it. That was something. “How long you been on the bum?”

  He shrugged. “Not so long. I’m headed to Los Angeles.”

  “Everybody’s headed to California.” I laid out the vegetables on one of the marble counters and wiped a bread knife clean with a dish towel. I threw the towel over my shoulder to keep it handy. “The place must be full up by now.”

  “Of people going to work the crops, sure. But that’s not me. I’m going to be a newspaper writer.”

  “You are?”

  “Sure.” He sat up straighter. “I worked the paper at school. Won a prize for it and everything. They take boys on at newspapers in big cities. Let ’em work as copyboys and learn the trade. Sometimes even for pay, but I wouldn’t mind doing it for free. I could get another job in a city like that. I can do anything. You’ll see.”

  I looked at him, sitting on that stool, in clothes that were too small and all tore up, cutting hunks off a salami he got as charity, and at the same time talking about how he could do anything, like nothing bad had ever happened to him. Jack Holland was either really brave or completely cracked.

  That seemed too big a question to try to answer right then, so I wiped the dust off another section of counter and started slicing up the Pullman loaf instead. Jam sandwiches sounded like something you’d have with tea, didn’t it? And deviled ham.

  Jack wiped his hands on his trousers, found the apron on the clothes hook, and started filling the double sink. “Which dishes you want to use?”

  I pointed to the cabinet where the afternoon china was, plain white with a black border and gold rim. He got it down and started washing it.

  “What was that song?” I asked while smearing jam on bread. “The one you were singing in the jail?”

  “Work song. I heard it from some fellas on a chain gang.”

  I decided not to ask if he’d been on the gang with them. “Sounded pretty good.”

  “Thanks. You figured out what you’re gonna make them folks for dinner?”

  “Manhattan clam chowder. I’ll cook up the carrots and potatoes, and put the clams in the tomato soup with their juice, and season it up. They can have that for a first, with bread. Then ham and beans and biscuits.” We had flour in our little kitchen in the staff quarters, and I’d found an untouched can of Crisco at the mercantile. “Then bread pudding for dessert.”

  “You’re really good at this.”

  “Mama showed me.” I cut the crusts off the bread-they could go into the pudding-and sliced the sandwiches into little triangles to pile onto plates.

  “Where is your mama?” Jack asked.

  “She’s gone.” I grabbed up the tray of tea things and was out the door before he could ask where to. It was heavy and awkward to carry, piled with the towel-covered dishes, the teapot, and the sandwiches, and my hands were tired from all the work I’d already done. I was terrified I’d drop the whole thing on the way to the parlor. I kept my mind on the hundred-and-fifty and gripped the tray tight.

  “Your tea, sir, ma’am,” I said as I backed through the parlor door.

  “There now!” exclaimed Mr. Hopper. I set the loaded tray down on the table and started lifting the towels to show the heaps of sandwiches. “I told you Callie wouldn’t let you all go hungry! Dig in, my own! Dig in!”

  The way those Hoppers fell on my sandwiches, you’d think they were half starved. But then, folks this rich wouldn’t be used to waiting to eat. They probably had servants and everything back home to bring them snacks whenever they rang a bell. It hit me that I’d forgotten the napkins. As I headed off to the downstairs linen cupboard to fetch some, I thought about how Mama used to smile with satisfaction when she fed people dinner, even if it was just salt pork and beans. Now I understood why. It felt good, seeing people enjoy something I’d made like that.

  I’m coming to find you, Mama, I swear, I thought as I took up a big stack of white napkins from the cupboard. I’m leaving just as soon as I’ve got that money.

  I knocked on the parlor door and went in. “I thought you’d need some…”

  I stopped. I stared.

  The sandwich plates weren’t just empty; they were polished clean. I thought the Hopper kids must be playing some kind of trick on me, until Mr. Hopper flicked a bit of deviled ham off his sl
eeve and burped.

  “Pardon me! That was excellent, Callie!”

  There’d been a dozen sandwiches when I left. I’d been gone less than a minute. I lifted the lid on the teapot. That was empty too.

  “I’m afraid Hunter here’s still a bit hungry,” Mr. Hopper went on. “He is a growing boy after all!” Mr. Hopper laughed heartily, but Hunter just licked his lips. His tongue was bright pink against his white face.

  “I’d better make up some more sandwiches,” I heard myself whisper. I didn’t want to be in that room anymore. Not with all those Hoppers looking at me with their big white smiles and their identical dark eyes behind their spectacles.

  “Whatever you have on hand will be fine, I’m certain.” Mr. Hopper clasped his hands across his broad stomach and leaned back on the sofa.

  “But do hurry, Callie,” said Mrs. Hopper. “It’s not just Hunter who still has an appetite. We’ve all had such a long journey today.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I grabbed up the tray and ran back to the kitchen.

  “What’s the matter?” Jack had been busy while I was gone, slicing carrots and onions. He already had a good pile.

  “They ate them.” I set the tray down on the counter. “The sandwiches. They’re gone.”

  “That ain’t possible! Not even if they was starving!”

  “I know.” In my mind I saw the white bones lying in the broken glass on the mercantile floor. I would have given anything not to have that picture in my head just then. “They want more.”

  “More!” cried Jack. “What are you going to do?”

  I forced myself to straighten up. I had to give them what they wanted, or Mr. Hopper might change his mind about the money.

  I told Jack to keep going on the vegetables for the chowder. I sliced up the rest of the Pullman loaf and made a bunch more sandwiches. I still had the other one for the bread pudding. I drained two cans of peaches and forked some sardines into a bowl for good measure.

  “There. This’ll hold ’em awhile.”