On Shifting Sand

by Allison Pittman

  “I still have obligations here. Or have you forgotten about our church?”

  I cross my arms, press them close against me to keep my heart from exploding. “How could I? You’ve never given me a minute of our life to forget about it. But haven’t you noticed, darling, that they’ve forgotten you? Why else are our children hungry? What other explanation is there for the fact that I’ll have to make Ariel’s school dresses out of the curtains left behind in the houses they abandoned? Are you proposing that you’ll drive back here on the weekends to stand behind that pulpit and preach to me and the children?”

  Somewhere in the midst of my diatribe, I’ve crossed from sarcasm to cruelty, and I watch Russ’s jaw work to hold in the words that would pay me back in kind. If he only knew what hidden stones he cannot throw, how little right I have to mock his fidelity, I wouldn’t have the strength to stand against him, let alone speak down from some ill-gotten morality. That reminder alone stills my tongue, and I turn to leave.

  “Stop.”

  My father said the same thing to me once, when I told him that I was going to marry Russ. I was holding a secret then, too, deep within my body. And, like that afternoon, I do not obey.

  Russ returns to Boise City that night. It is the first time he leaves without so much as a kiss, let alone some longer, promise-filled embrace. Not ten minutes after he drives away, I fall into our bed and into an exhausted sleep.

  I wake to find Ariel curled at my side. It is her first day of school, and I hate that it has been tainted by the loss of her beloved Paw-Paw. Still, her enthusiasm has not waned, and her insistent demand that I “wake up wake up wake up” proves to be as effective as the smell of coffee wafting through the house.

  I am still wearing the dutiful black dress from the previous day, and gratefully strip it off, getting some relief for my stifled, sweat-sticky skin. Wrapped in my robe, I scuttle across the hall, splash myself with cool water, and don a cool, thin housedress. In the kitchen I find my brother at the stove, spatula in hand, stirring a pan of scrambled eggs.

  “Bachelor breakfast,” he says, grinning at me over his shoulder. “No biscuits, just bread. I don’t trust myself to toast it. But there is coffee.”

  “Coffee’s all I need.” I pour a cup, having learned to drink it without sugar or cream. “It’s good.”

  “Thought we might head out to the farm after the kids go to school.” He says it as if proposing a simple walk across the street to have coffee cake with Merrilou Brown.

  “You might want to think again,” I say, smiling over the rim of my coffee cup. “I’m not ready for that. And I don’t think you are, either. Who knows what we’ll find?”

  “We’ll have to face it sometime, Sis.”

  “Why today?”

  “What would make tomorrow better?”

  I have no answer that will satisfy either of us. “Let me walk Ariel to school. We’ll leave when I get back.”

  “I want to go to Paw-Paw’s farm,” Ariel whines, but I put a gentle finger to her lips.

  “You’re finally a big girl going to school. That’s much more exciting. Now, go get your mask, and remember to wear it at recess.”

  “I hate the mask,” Ariel says.

  I look to Ronnie. “You too.”

  “Would we have to wear masks if we lived in town?”

  “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “I heard you and Dad talking last night.”

  “The answer is yes,” I say, “if I tell you to.”

  Merrilou Brown stands at the corner where the children cross the street on their way to the school. Under her watchful eye and mine, my girl makes her way with brave little steps, trying valiantly to keep up with her brother. How can she look so much smaller than she did days ago?

  “Grow up fast, don’t they?” Merrilou says. “Next thing you know, they’re gone.”

  “We—my brother and I—are going out to my father’s place to clear up a few things,” I say, not wanting to dwell on the thought of losing another child, no matter what the circumstances. “Ariel’s finished at noon. Can you see her home? In case we run late, or something comes up?”

  “An honor,” she says, holding a sedan to a stop with the mere display of her tiny hand. “I’ll watch over her as if she were my own.”

  Back home, Greg has been tinkering with Pa’s truck to make sure it will take us out to the farm and back, as it hasn’t moved much since its journey to Tulsa.

  “We need to have water,” I tell him, filling a jug from the spigot in the shop. “And if you’ll grab some towels from the linen closet upstairs? I think the chains are in there.”

  Greg complies, unquestioning, and within the hour we are on our way, creating a perpetual cloud of dust. I sit beside him, bouncing in the seat, the road seeming to have disappeared since the last time I drove it. Greg grimaces, gripping the wheel and muttering mild curses under his breath, unfamiliar with both the vehicle and the terrain.

  “You’ll have to let me know when I’m close to the turnoff,” he says. “I don’t recognize anything.”

  “I will.”

  “When’s the last time you were out here?”

  “A few months.” I shrink away in my seat, feeling shame not only for what happened the last time I was at Pa’s place, but for his death and the drought itself. “It was bad then.”

  “I need to see it,” Greg says. “Should have come back sooner.”

  We brought it upon ourselves, this dust. That’s what Pa said, clear up to his dying breath. The dust took that, too. His breath, his life, drowning him with lungs full of the very dirt he loved so much. He grumbled a curse on this murderous land, shaming us all for the greed that choked out the blessings. More crops, more money. All the grasses of God’s creation slashed and uprooted, or plowed under, making way for wheat. We tilled, we planted, we harvested, and we started again. Never satisfied.

  I point out the turnoff from the main road, and we soon see the gate that marks the drive up to the property. It hangs open, sagging on its hinges, tumbleweeds making a solid wall out of the fence.

  “Pa ever see it like this?”

  “Not this bad.” I tell him about the day we brought him to our home, leaving Jim out of the story entirely. “I think he started dying on that day.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that alone.”

  “I wasn’t alone. I had Russ. He was so—”

  At that moment the house comes into view and takes all my words away. Left unchecked, the storms have blown in enough dirt to create a series of foothills up against and over the porch, meaning we will have to dig our way to open the front door.

  Greg stops the truck as close to the house as possible, and before he can hit the switch to turn it off, I suggest we keep it running.

  “Don’t want to get stranded out here,” I say, not sure I want to get out of the truck at all.

  “It’ll be fine.” Greg presses the switch, burying us in silence. “Know where we can find a shovel?”

  “Maybe in the barn?”

  Our gazes follow one another and see that entrance to that structure won’t prove any easier.

  “I have a better idea.” Greg reaches into the truck’s bed and produces a tire iron. Moving with a focused purpose, he scales the semipacked dirt up to the buried porch, and with a series of decisive swings, empties the front window of its glass.

  “You would have gotten quite the whippin’ if you’d done that in the old days,” I say, tentatively poking my head across the sill.

  “Careful, there.” He helps me cross over, and I soon realize the inside of the house was no better protected from the ravages of the wind than the outside.

  “They didn’t seal it up,” I say, mostly to myself.

  “They?”

  “Russ.”

  “And?”

  My expression is enough to dissuade further questions.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?”

  “Papers,” Greg says. “A
will, preferably. He never mentioned one to you?”

  “Never, but then, he’d never confide something like that to me.”

  “And he didn’t bring any papers with him when he left here?”

  “We had a few things—tax records, mostly. Pa barely brought his thoughts.”

  “Then we’ll just look around. It will be assumed that the property will go to me as the eldest, but we could expedite matters with a will. Any idea where we should look?”

  “The desk in his room,” I suggest, along with the idea of a hurricane lamp, as the collected dirt on the windows make the light inside too dim to be of any use.

  “And that would be . . . ?”

  “Kitchen. Follow me.”

  I wait at the doorway and direct him to the lamp, the kerosene, and the matches, my mind reeling with the kiss that marked the last time I was in this room. Once the lamp is lit, the room takes on a grainy, brownish haze, and I imagine this must be what the explorers felt upon discovering the contents of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Only the inner chambers of the pyramids were more protected from the residue of blowing dust than were the walls and windows of my childhood home. To my estimation there isn’t a clean spot to be found. All of Jim’s work to restore it to some semblance of livability has vanished beneath the drifts left behind by endless assaulting storms.

  “The desk?” Greg prompts.

  As far as I remember, I’ve never touched this piece of furniture before. Even in my weekly cleaning chores, going over every inch of exposed wood with an oiled rag, Pa’s desk had been strictly off-limits, even though he kept it closed down tight, denying any access to whatever might be behind the rolling pleats.

  “There must be a key,” I say, touching one tentative finger to the round silver lock.

  Undaunted, Greg grasps the handle and finds it not to be locked at all. He rolls the top upward, exposing an interior consisting of a pen, an inkwell, a pair of thin wire glasses, and a short stack of neat papers. Standing sentry over all of this, a framed photograph of my mother as I’ve never seen her. Young, radiant, wearing a high-collared white dress, her hair a shining mound of black silk adorned with a wreath of tiny flowers.

  “Beautiful,” Greg says, speaking over my shoulder.

  I pick up the photograph and hold it closer to study every soft, sweet feature. “He kept this from us.”

  “Looks like he kept it from himself.”

  “No, I mean this woman. Mother was never this woman. He hardened her.”

  “Life hardens people, Sis.”

  “It doesn’t have to.” I think about that picture Jim secreted away in his bag, and the soft, rounded woman I was on our wedding day—nothing like the thin, brittle creature I’ve become. “I’m keeping this, if you don’t mind.”

  “Bring it with you if you ever have a chance to come visit. We’ll find someplace to make a copy.”

  A quick search through the neat stack of papers yields a series of clipped, orderly receipts, tax notices, deeds, and titles. Nothing like the chaotic bundle Jim found loose on the desk, further testament to Pa’s sharp decline. Finally, a single sheet within a faded envelope with GREGORY written in Pa’s faltering block letters, the same of which fill the page with a simple message:

  UPON MY DEATH, ALL I OWN IS BEQUEATHED TO MY SON, GREGORY MITCHUM, TO DO WITH AS HE SEES FIT.

  It is signed by Pa and witnessed by two people whose names I do not recognize.

  “As I see fit,” Greg says. “Well, that makes things easier.”

  He gathers all the papers in one armful, picks up the lamp, and leads the way down the hall and through the front room haunted with furniture disguised as foothills. I clutch the photograph to my breast, protecting it from the tiny clouds of dust brought to life by our footsteps. It is the only unspoiled thing in the house.

  We go to the front door, forgetting the impediment of the sand hill that kept us from opening it upon arrival. Unwilling to crawl out of what is now his own home, Greg hands the sheaf of papers to me and, using his shoulder and some newfound strength, shoulders the door open, inch by inch, until he’s created space enough for us to squeeze through.

  “You first,” he says, holding our treasures to be passed through the narrow opening once I am ankle-deep in the sand on the porch. “And head on out to the car.”

  I obey, taking one tentative look back over my shoulder with every few steps, waiting for him to join me. It isn’t until I am standing with my hip touched up against Pa’s truck that I see him snake his arm through the door. When he does, he has the hurricane lamp with him. Curious, as it is still full daylight, I am about to shout the question when he turns back to the door, slides one arm inside, and brings it out again. This time without the lamp.

  In no apparent hurry, he navigates the porch and begins walking calmly toward me as the front window fills with a distinctive orange glow.

  “Greg!” I shout, then lower my voice as he joins me at the truck. “What have you done?”

  “As I see fit.” He drops his hands in his pockets and we stand side by side, watching the flames do the first of their terrible work. “Won’t be nothin’ but ashes soon.” In this moment, he sounds exactly like our father, and I can see the stubbornness in his profile.

  “Won’t we get in trouble? What if it spreads? This whole country is a tinderbox.”

  “We’ll watch.” He lowers the truck’s tailgate and perches on the end, patting the iron seat beside him. I refuse, again, a proffered cigarette, and bring my knees up to my chest, resting my chin for the show. Heat bathes our faces, and I want to suggest that we move the truck farther down the drive, but there’s something cleansing about the intensity, and I keep my mouth closed against it. Black smoke belches through the window and is caught up by the wind and blown away. The walls are solid stone, and I imagine my childhood home becoming a kiln, destroying its contents while remaining strong. It is a giant box of fire.

  Greg says softly, “It can’t hurt you anymore.”

  I look at him, surprised. “This place never hurt me. Made me feel a little trapped is all.”

  “Well, Pa then. He can’t hurt you anymore. You just need to let go of all the memories.”

  He speaks like one who has done just that, and there isn’t a doubt in my mind he’s lived for days—weeks, even—without giving this place and the people in it another thought.

  “So, how do you suggest I do that? I don’t have the luxury of a million miles.”

  “You don’t need a million miles, Sis. For starters, you can convince that husband of yours to take me up on the offer of moving east with me. You can get a whole new start there, find the life you were meant to live.”

  “Maybe this is the life I was meant to live.”

  He looks at me then, a searching gaze, as if trying to gauge the truth of my words. I’m not quite sure myself whether I meant them in sincerity or jest.

  Finally he sighs. “Maybe it is. But I want to see you happy. Can’t see how that’s going to happen here. You deserve to be happy, Nola. Everyone does.”

  I want to say, Not everyone, but I don’t want to tread on his graciousness, even if it is born out of guilt. I thread my arm through his and lean my head on his shoulder. “Thanks.” There is nothing else to say.

  After a time—nearly two hours by my estimation—the fire has gorged itself on all the fuel within. The walls and even the roof are charred but intact, and only lazy licks remain.

  “I guess dust doesn’t burn,” I say, wiping the sweat from my brow with a kerchief darkened by soot.

  “It burns enough.” Greg hops down and reaches out his hand. “I’ll be on a train first thing tomorrow morning.”

  He breaketh me with breach upon breach,

  he runneth upon me like a giant.

  I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin,

  and defiled my horn in the dust.

  My face is foul with weeping,

  and on my eyelids is the shadow of death.

  JOB 16:14-16


  CHAPTER 24

  FALL COMES, AND THEN WINTER, bringing no relief from the dust and wind. Still we have no rain, and the respite brought by cooler temperatures serves only to intensify the stinging sensation of dirt against skin. We walk from place to place assuming the posture of some primitive cripple, our backs bent, faces shielded. Our shoulders bear the weight of the earth as it moves against us, one minuscule grain at a time.

  In the mornings when I walk Ariel to school, I hold tight to her hand, fearful that God might take her as he did my other children, using the brute force of nature to snatch her up from my side as punishment for my sin. On days when Ronnie walks her home at lunchtime, I insist he do the same, and at 12:04 every day I peer out the window to make sure he obeys. The sight of them together opens up a sadness that gnaws at me from my womb. Ariel, my tiny, knock-kneed girl, her beautiful hair confined to two tight plaits, her pinched little face obscured by the white mask, her eyes turned to the ground for their own protection, missing out on all the beauty the world might have to offer. Every step a struggle—to keep up with the impatient, strident pace of her brother, to keep upright against the wind. And yet, when she blows inside, I know I’ll see that sweet smile etched in the patch of clean skin the mask has protected, and her eyes will come to dancing life at the sight of Barney, who rises and stretches and arches herself at the sound of our girl’s arrival.

  Ronnie worries me less, as he seems to be the only living thing that isn’t shriveling away before my eyes. He’s soon enough overcome his shame at accepting food from the crates delivered to the shop on a semiregular basis, especially when those deliveries begin to include entire hams and slabs of bacon. I cannot keep enough bread and butter in the house to fill him up. He might well be one of the locusts or the rabbits that God added to the plague of drought and dust, eating everything that dares poke its head out of the ground. I cook for the three of us and share a portion with Ariel, doling out the rest to Ronnie in feigned discovery that there is “just a bit left.” Overnight he grows to be as tall as me. In an afternoon, his shirtsleeves strain at his wrists. I blink, and his shoulders expand to such a breadth that I do not recognize him from the back. And I think, God will snatch him away too. But while I fight for and cling to my daughter, I would launch my son with every blessing within me. He and I share a silent desire to escape.