A Cup of Dust

by Susie Finkbeiner

  Beanie seemed glad, too. She sat on the floor by Meemaw’s rocking chair, her head on our grandmother’s knee. I thought for sure she would fall asleep right there with Meemaw playing with her curls.

  Daddy and Millard went out on the porch to sip cups of coffee and smoke cigarettes.

  Mama and I stayed at the table with Esther and the girls. Jael and Tamar still worked on eating their dumplings. All the rest of us had been done a long time before.

  Mama had served coffee to Esther, promising sweet bread whenever the girls were ready for it.

  Esther closed her eyes with every swallow of coffee, the slightest upturn at the corners of her mouth. I didn’t think she would ever finish that first cup for fear of having no more. I wanted to tell her that Mama would make her as much as she could drink.

  But Mama wouldn’t have liked for me to say something like that. She would have worried about it making Esther feel ashamed.

  “Goodness me,” Mama said. “I think I’m going to get me another cup of coffee. Would you like some, Mother?”

  Meemaw nodded and hummed her yes from the living room.

  “Esther, you go on and drink that up. I’m fixing to put a fresh pot on the stove.” Mama smiled. “Christmas comes but once a year.”

  “So long as you’re making more.” Esther finished her cup and exhaled, her eyes closed. “I do appreciate it.”

  Meemaw had told me so many times about the Good Samaritan. Right then, as she perked another pot of coffee, Mama sure looked a lot like a Good Oklahoman to me. And she did it all while humming “Silent Night.”

  I wished so deep that one day I could be a little like her.

  Mama came back to the table to collect the empty plates. When she got to Jael and Tamar’s, she leaned close to them.

  “You girls still working on that?” she asked.

  Wide-eyed still, both the girls nodded. The way they ate, slow and with such little bites, about made me cry.

  “They ain’t seen that much food in a good while,” Esther told Mama. To the girls, she nodded. “Don’t you girls make yourselves sick eating.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jael mumbled.

  “I’m happy to send some along with you folks.” Mama put the plates in the sink. They clinked against each other. “I don’t know as we can eat all we’ve got left over.”

  “Now, I won’t take no more from your table,” Esther said. “Folks is hard up all over, and I don’t got a mind to take from nobody.”

  “I’d be glad to send food along. Truly,” Mama said, her back toward us.

  “I seen a man walking down the road.” Esther wiped a finger under her nose. “This was near about thirty miles east of here. I seen him with a shovel, scraping up dead animals off the side of the road. He said he was fixing to eat it. It weren’t fresh meat, and I told him so much.”

  Mama held the edge of the counter as if she’d collapse without its support. “How horrible,” she said.

  “We never been that hard up.” Esther shook her head. “God’s been providing.”

  “Please let me send food along with you.” Mama turned, her eyes sparkled with tears. “I wouldn’t feel right unless I sent you folks with something.”

  “It sure would be a kindness.” Esther stood and collected the used glasses, carrying them to the kitchen. “Let me wash up these dishes for you.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll wanna work it off. Pay you back for your hospitality.”

  “I won’t hear of it. Today’s Christmas.” Mama tried her best to smile. “Nobody’s doing dishes today. Go on and rest a bit. The coffee should be ready soon.”

  Esther watched Mama for a minute before sitting back down at the table.

  “That man that was here,” Esther said. “He’s a hobo ain’t he?”

  “You mean Eddie?” Mama brought over the cups.

  “I believe so.” Esther looked over at Tamar and touched her shoulder. “I seen him at the camp.”

  I knew she meant the Hooverville.

  “That so?” Mama asked.

  “You okay, darlin’?” Esther asked, giving her attention to the girls.

  Tamar nodded, but her face wore a frown. “Getting full up.”

  “Don’t force it in.” Esther turned her head toward Mama. “Y’all don’t mind having him here? That hobo.”

  “I suppose not. He’s done no harm to anybody.” Mama checked her sugar bowl, scraping a spoon against the bottom of it. “I don’t have but a grain or two of sugar.”

  “As for me,” Meemaw said from her rocking chair. “I don’t trust that man.”

  “You made that clear, didn’t you?” Mama asked, taking the coffee off the stove. “I sure am sorry I don’t have any sugar for your coffee, Esther.”

  “That’s all right. I take it black.” Esther blinked a few times. “I ain’t had coffee in so long I wanna be able to taste it.”

  Mama poured three cups, one for each lady.

  “Pearl, will you get the sweet bread off the counter?” she asked. “It’s sliced already.”

  When I carried over the plate, Tamar started crying. A quiet, shake-the-shoulders cry.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Beanie asked. She’d gotten up from the floor and stood a foot from the table. “Why’s she crying?”

  “I don’t got no more room,” Tamar said, still crying.

  “Honey, you don’t have to eat it all right now.” Mama grabbed a fresh hanky from her pocket, handing it to the little girl. “I’ll send some with you. I’ve got a whole other loaf just for you and your sister.”

  “What if I ain’t never hungry again?” Tamar asked.

  “You will be. And when you are, you can eat it then.”

  “Are you okay now?” Beanie asked, leaning forward to look at Tamar. “Can you stop crying now?”

  Tamar nodded and dried her face with the hanky. She sipped from her water glass and pushed her lips into a smile.

  “That’s a girl,” Mama said. “You go ahead and keep that hanky, too.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” the girl whispered.

  Jael and Tamar sat on the same chair all through dinner. Even with plenty of chairs empty after most excused themselves, they still shared. Their bodies were so little, they fit just right.

  I didn’t mean to stare, but I couldn’t hardly help myself. They weren’t shorter than me, not really. Their legs hung long off the end of the chair. It was just that they had no meat on their bones. I wondered if they ever had.

  Their feed-sack dresses hung off them with no shape. No buttons. It was like someone had just cut holes in the bags for their heads and arms.

  I ran my finger over the soft green of my own dress. Felt the way it tugged in the back to fit better.

  I figured out how to be like Mama and the Good Samaritan.

  “May I be excused, please?” I asked, pushing out of my chair. “Just for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  Mama nodded.

  I went straight to my room. There, I grabbed a couple things from my closet and returned to the table.

  Jael and Tamar looked at the fabric draped over my arms and their mouths opened as wide as their eyes.

  “You can have these if you want them,” I said. I handed each of them a dress that I’d grown out of. “If it’s all right with your mama.”

  Before they even looked at the dresses, they turned to Esther and waited for her to nod her head. I was so glad she would let them keep the clothes.

  The girls touched the dresses, so gentle, like they worried the cloth would fall apart under their fingers. They met eyes, and I thought they were talking to each other without words.

  “That’s real nice of you,” Esther said, holding her fresh cup of coffee with both hands. She blinked out her tears. “Real nice, darlin’. What do you girls say?”

  They both told me “thank you” and put the dresses in their laps.

  “Wouldn’t you like to try them on?” Mama asked, dabbing at the corner of one eye. “I
’ll let you go in my bedroom to change, if you’d like.”

  The girls nodded their heads, making their bobbed hair swing against their cheeks. Mama showed them where her room was and pulled the door to.

  “You are good,” Beanie said. She looked me right in the eyes for the first time I could remember.

  When Jael and Tamar came out from Mama’s room, they were even more shy than before. They took small, shuffling steps and kept their heads lowered.

  “Look at you girls,” Mama said. “How beautiful.”

  The girls touched the sides of their new dresses. The fabric was from a couple sugar sacks, but they were clean and had flowers printed all over them. Mama had made those dresses just for me, not knowing how pretty a couple other girls would look in them after I’d gotten my use out of them.

  Tamar dared a smile, and that made her sister smile, too. Not big smiles. Tiny, shy, just-for-themselves smiles.

  Tamar and Jael sat on either side of me while I read to them from my book of fairy tales. They wanted to hear the story of Cinderella. I didn’t reckon either of them could read, so I changed the story so the evil stepsisters didn’t chop off their toes or get their eyes pecked out by birds.

  I would have hated for them to have nightmares on Christmas night.

  “How about I scrub the girls’ other dresses?” Mama offered. “It won’t take me but a minute and a little lye.”

  “Oh, no.” Esther shook her head. “I can’t have you doing that. You done so much already.”

  “It’s nothing at all.”

  “I haven’t gotten to wash them dresses in weeks. Not since we left home.” Esther used her knuckle to stop a tear in her eye. “I’m so ashamed.”

  “With all this country in a scrape, you’re going to be embarrassed by a couple dirty dresses?” Mama tilted her head. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Esther smiled. Mama brought that out in folks.

  She had a way.

  I pulled the blankets back from Beanie. She always stole them from me when she rolled over. In her sleep, she grunted but didn’t fight me for the covers.

  She’d fallen asleep about as soon as her head hit the pillow. Meemaw’s soft snores from the other room told me that she was sleeping sound, too.

  My thoughts kept me awake. I wished I could slow them down. My body was tired, and I wanted to rest.

  All I could think about, though, was Tamar and Jael and their wide-and-wondering eyes. I worried for them. The next morning, they would be hungry and have a little something to eat that Mama sent with them. They would have fresh, clean dresses to wear.

  But then they would be hungry again and again until the food ran out. One day they would grow too tall for the dresses. Either that or the fabric would wear thin.

  I worried at the pictures in my head of them eating jackrabbits or tire-flattened animals while wearing their filthy, too-small dresses.

  What I had to tell myself over and over that night was that they had gone to bed that Christmas with full bellies. I tried to remember that God loved them more than the sparrows He’d fed and the lilies He’d clothed.

  I just hoped they would find other Good Oklahomans along the road.

  A couple days after Christmas, Mama asked Daddy to go on down to the Hooverville to check on Esther and the girls.

  “I don’t like them staying down there without a man to watch over them,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

  Daddy agreed and made his way out the door.

  “Can I go, too?” I asked, already double knotting my shoe.

  “I guess that would be all right,” Daddy said.

  “Take your jacket,” Mama called after me.

  Daddy and I walked at a nice, easy pace and kept our voices still. What I liked about Daddy was that I never felt lonely with him, even when we were quiet together.

  He helped me up and over the stacked-up sand and into the Hooverville. It still smelled as bad as I remembered it, but the makeshift camps were less zigzag and more even lines.

  “They’re staying this way,” Daddy said, putting his arm around me, guiding me down one of the lines. “Stick close to me, darlin’.”

  We walked past a man bent over the engine of a truck, a handful of kids huddled together under a flimsy tarp, a group of men squatting low in the dirt. A few of the folks greeted Daddy, and he stopped to ask after them.

  Daddy was kind to them. He listened to their troubles and their plans. He wished them luck and left them with slight smiles on their faces.

  In the Hooverville, my daddy was famous because he was good.

  We reached a spot in a line of camps, and Daddy humphed and scrunched his face to one side.

  “That’s where they were camped,” he said.

  The space was empty, but I could see where something had been dragged, leaving a shallow ditch in the dirt.

  They were gone. Not even so much as a scrap of paper left behind. My heart ached.

  “Hey, fella,” Daddy called to a man standing nearby. “You know what happened to the family that was here? A woman and two little girls.”

  The man removed his hat and rubbed at his forehead with a wrist. He let his eyes follow the drag mark where the camp had been.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Seems just the other day they got on a truck with a family and rode off. Don’t know where at they went to.”

  “Thanks kindly.” Daddy nodded once like men did and took my hand.

  We walked out of the camp, Daddy once again helping me over the pile of dirt. When he noticed I was crying, he wiped the tears with his thumb.

  “Pearlie, people have got to keep moving,” he said. “That’s the way of the world. If they sit too long, they’ll never get ahead.”

  I didn’t understand but didn’t ask him to explain. It didn’t matter.

  The way of the world never seemed to make folks happy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I had waited all the days between Christmas and Sunday to wear my new, green dress. Each morning, I’d peek at it in the closet and hold it up against myself to make sure I hadn’t outgrown it, even though I knew that wasn’t like to happen so fast.

  When I got up for church that Sunday, I pulled the dress off the hanger as careful as I could and stepped into it. The buttons eased into the holes, and I smoothed the collar. I tried doing my hair the way Mama had done it on Christmas. All I did was twist it into a sloppy mess.

  The pretty hairpin Mama had given me was in a small cedar box on the top shelf of my closet. I poked around the arrow heads and old pennies before I got to the hairpin and pressed it into the palm of my hand.

  I knew that Mama would be happy to put my hair up for me.

  Charging down the steps, I realized that I didn’t smell oats cooking or coffee perking. And Mama hadn’t baked the day before, so we had no biscuits or bread for breakfast. I wondered what we had to eat. A little nagging fear spread through me that we’d run out of food.

  I got to the bottom of the steps when I heard Daddy and Mama. They were standing face-to-face in the living room.

  “What are we going to do?” Mama asked, her voice sounding far away.

  “I don’t know,” Daddy said. “Only thing we can do is get Hank Eliot.”

  Hank Eliot the mortician.

  Gasping air, I held onto the wall. Someone had died.

  My mind went to Ray and Mrs. Jones first. I thought maybe the roof of their dugout collapsed, or a rattlesnake got one of them, or the pneumonia that took Baby Rosie.

  I wouldn’t let myself think about one of them going the way Mr. Jones had. It would have been more than I could take.

  “How will we pay?” Mama asked.

  Daddy’s answer was a long sigh.

  My feet had grown too heavy, anchored to the bottom step. Air chopped its way into me, but jolted right back out. My heart thudded so hard it hurt.

  “Mother had some money in her mattress.” Daddy coughed.

  It was true. Meemaw did keep money in her m
attress. “Just in case,” she had told me. And that money was needed to pay Hank Eliot because someone had died.

  Someone.

  I needed to know who.

  “She wouldn’t have wanted that money to go for that,” Mama said.

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  My legs became weak, wobbling and threatening to collapse under me. I forced my feet to move from the step and into the living room.

  “Tom,” Mama said, covering a hand over her mouth. “It’s too much. All that’s going on. I can’t take it all anymore.”

  “Mama?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “Oh, darlin’.” Mama rushed to me and pulled me up into her arms.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Meemaw,” Daddy said, his voice soft as velvet. “She’s passed on.”

  Meemaw had told me once about the wailing women in the Bible. It was their job to cry and carry on when a family lost somebody. They wanted folks in town to know that they were suffering.

  The way I wailed, everybody in Red River must have heard. And when Beanie came to us, she added to the carrying on.

  Mama decided we weren’t going to church that day.

  Still, I wore the green dress.

  “I want to see Meemaw,” I said, sitting by Mama. All my crying had dried out, replaced by a floating, numb feeling.

  “You don’t have to,” Mama said.

  Daddy brought both Beanie and me a glass of water. I was glad for it. My mouth had no wet left in it. I took a sip. The cool water soothed my throat and chilled me. Then the sadness burned the cool off and made me cry all over again.

  “I miss her already,” I managed to say.

  “Me too.” Mama held me, taking the glass. I heard it tap on the floor.

  “I want to see her before they come to take her away.”

  Mama nodded and used her sleeve to wipe my eyes. “Let’s wash your face first. Okay?”

  She led me to the kitchen and wet a washcloth with cold water Daddy had just pumped. She pushed it against the skin of my face, dabbing it under my eyes and over my forehead. The fingers of her other hand pulled up on my chin, lifting my face so she could see my eyes.