January 1933

The kitchen of the house on Section 14, Township 5 North, Range 18 West of the Cimarron Meridian, Beaver County, Oklahoma, contained the following objects on the morning of January third, nineteen hundred and thirty-three.

A cast-iron cookstove, black and heavy, manufactured by the Charter Oak Stove Company of St. Louis, Missouri, in 1919. The stove had been purchased new for thirty-four dollars and brought west in a freight wagon. Its firebox held the cold gray remains of the last fire, kindled with twisted stalks of last year's broomcorn and fed with split lengths of Osage orange, a wood so dense it burned hotter than coal. On the stovetop sat a graniteware coffeepot, blue with white speckles, chipped at the spout. Beside it, an iron skillet seasoned to a black gloss by eight years of cornbread and salt pork.

A pine table, six feet by four, built by hand from lumber milled at the Beaver River sawmill. The table's surface bore the marks of its years: concentric rings from hot skillets, the pale scar where a hatchet had slipped during the dressing of a deer, the faint indentation of letters pressed through paper by generations of pencils. On the table, a kerosene lamp with a glass chimney filmed with soot on the inside, where no hand could reach to clean it. Beside the lamp, a tin plate holding the remains of the evening meal: cornbread crumbs, a smear of sorghum molasses congealing in the cold, the thin white bone of a jackrabbit's foreleg.

A Hoosier cabinet against the east wall, its enameled metal work surface scarred by flour and lard, its upper compartment holding a sack of white flour stamped Gold Medal, half full. The lower cabinet held a sack of cornmeal, nearly empty, and a gallon tin of sorghum molasses. In the flour bin, a printed cotton sack that had once held ten pounds of Pillsbury's Best and now waited to be washed, cut, and sewn into a child's dress. The pattern on the sack showed small blue flowers, their petals faded by the sifting of flour, their stems tangled into the weave of the cotton.

On the windowsill, three Ball Mason jars. The first contained the pickled remains of last summer's garden: cucumber spears floating in cloudy brine. The second held dried beans, brown and white mottled, the variety known as October beans. The third was empty, its glass filmed with dust that no amount of washing seemed to remove, dust that had been seeping through the window frames since the first big blow of the previous spring and that had never fully been conquered.

Against the back door, a broom made of broomcorn stalks bound with baling wire, its bristles worn to an angle by the perpetual campaign against the dust. The door itself, constructed of vertical planks nailed to horizontal battens, did not close flush against its frame. A gap of a quarter inch ran along the bottom, and through this gap the dust entered, fine as face powder, gray as a winter sky, settling on every surface with the patience of something that knew it had all the time in the world.

A family Bible lay on a small shelf beside the door. It was a King James Version, published by the American Bible Society in 1901, its leather cover worn soft at the corners, its pages edged in gilt that had dulled to the color of old brass. On the flyleaf, in ink that had faded from black to brown, four dates had been recorded: a marriage in 1910, and three births — 1912, 1914, and 1922. Below the births, a single death was recorded: 1924, the entry written in a different hand, the letters smaller, as if the writer had been trying to use as little ink as possible.

On a nail driven into the wall above the Bible, a calendar hung from the Beaver County Cooperative Extension. The page showed January 1933. The illustration was a winter landscape — snow on stubble fields, a red barn in the distance — painted by an artist in Chicago who had never seen the Oklahoma panhandle and who had imagined it as a milder version of the Illinois prairie. In the margins of the calendar, a pencil had made notations: the dates of egg sales at the Beaver general store, the date of a doctor's visit for the youngest child's cough, a circled date in late February that read "note due."

In the corner of the kitchen, beneath the window, a wooden crate served as a bed for the youngest child. The crate had once held dynamite, shipped from the Hercules Powder Company of Wilmington, Delaware, to a rancher who had used it to blast stock ponds. Now it held a mattress sewn from flour sacks stuffed with dried corn shucks, and on the mattress lay a quilt pieced from remnants of dresses and shirts and the blue flowered cotton of Pillsbury's Best flour sacks. The quilt was pulled tight across the mattress. The child who slept beneath it had coughed during the night, a dry cough that came in spasms and left a fine spray of something on the pillow slip.

The floor was bare planks, laid in 1918 when the house was built, planed smooth by the passing of feet and the scrubbing of lye soap. Between the planks, dust had accumulated in the cracks, forming thin gray lines that mapped the floor like the contour lines on a surveyor's map. In one corner, where the roof had leaked during the rains of 1929 and never been properly repaired, the planks had warped, their edges curling upward like the pages of a book left open in the sun.

Outside, the Model A Ford sat in the yard. It was a 1929 Tudor sedan, purchased second-hand from a dealer in Guymon, its odometer showing forty-three thousand miles. The right rear tire was flat. The engine had not been started in three weeks. The battery had been removed and brought inside to keep it from freezing, and it sat now on the floor of the pantry, its terminals corroded white, its charge uncertain. On the seat of the Ford, a pair of leather work gloves lay palm-up, their fingers curled inward, frozen in the shape of hands that were not there.

March 1933

By the first week of March, the kitchen on Section 14 contained fewer objects than it had in January. The Graniteware coffeepot remained on the stove, but the stove had not been lit in two days. The woodpile beside the back door had been reduced. The Osage orange was gone. What remained were twists of broomcorn and a few split lengths of cottonwood, a soft wood that burned fast and gave little heat. The skillet still sat on the stovetop, but its seasoning had begun to dull, the black gloss giving way to patches of gray where rust was beginning to bloom.

The table held a different arrangement. A tin plate was still there, but it was empty. The kerosene lamp still stood, but its fuel reservoir was three-quarters empty, and the wick had been trimmed so short that it barely reached the fuel. The glass chimney had been cleaned — someone had reached inside with a rag twisted around a stick — but the soot had been replaced by a different film, a gray bloom thrown by the March winds, the dust that rose from the fields in clouds visible for miles and sifted through every crack and crevice until it coated the inside of the chimney like the bloom on a grape.

A new object had appeared on the table: a notice from the First National Bank of Beaver, printed on yellow paper, its text composed in the formal language of financial obligation. The notice stated that the mortgage on the northwest quarter of Section 14 was in default and that foreclosure proceedings would commence unless payment of one hundred and eighty-seven dollars and forty-three cents was received by April fifteenth. The notice was held in place by a coffee cup that had not been there in January — a white cup with a hairline crack running from rim to base, the crack stained brown by years of coffee, the cup itself half full of gray dust that had blown in overnight.

The Hoosier cabinet was emptier than it had been. The sack of white flour was gone. The cornmeal sack lay flat and empty on the lower shelf. The tin of sorghum molasses had been scraped clean, its interior visible through the open lid, the metal scored by the repeated passage of a spoon. In the flour bin, the printed cotton sack with the blue flowers had been transformed: it was now a dress, size six, hanging from a nail on the back of the door. The dress was clean. It had been ironed. The blue flowers were brighter than they had been in January — the washing had restored their color, or perhaps the contrast with the dust that covered everything else made them seem brighter by comparison.

The three Ball Mason jars on the windowsill had changed. The first now held only brine; the pickles had been eaten. The second held perhaps a half cup of dried beans, too few to make a meal. The third remained empty. But beside the jars, a new object had appeared: a medicine bottle, brown glass with a cork stopper, its label printed in red and black. Dr. Pierce's Golden Medical Discovery. The contents, a dark liquid that smelled of alcohol and gentian root, had been lowered by perhaps an inch. The dosage instructions on the label had been underlined with pencil: "For coughs, colds, and all affections of the throat and lungs."

The family Bible remained on its shelf. No new entries had been added to the flyleaf. The calendar still showed January 1933. The page had not been turned. In the margins, the word "overdue" had been written beside the circled date in late February, the pencil pressed hard enough to tear the paper.

The child's bed in the corner held the same quilt, the same mattress of corn shucks, the same pillow slip. A small bundle of cloth had been added to the head of the bed: a handkerchief, folded into a square, its center marked by a faint brown stain that had been washed but not entirely removed. Beside the handkerchief, a corncob doll with a dress sewn from a scrap of the blue flowered cotton, its face drawn in pencil, its hair made of unraveled binder twine.

The Model A Ford still sat in the yard. The right rear tire was still flat. The battery still sat in the pantry. But the leather work gloves that had lain on the seat in January were gone, and the driver's side door was open, and dust had drifted into the cabin, coating the dashboard and the steering wheel and the seat upholstery with a fine gray silt that the March winds had deposited in the space of a single afternoon.

June 1933

In June, the kitchen contained the same furniture but a different inventory. The cookstove was cold, its firebox empty, its surface beginning to rust in the places where the enamel had chipped. The skillet had been removed from the stovetop and placed on the floor beneath the stove, out of the way, as if someone had been cleaning and had not finished. The Graniteware coffeepot was gone. In its place, a tin can had been set on the stovetop, its label removed but its shape recognizable as a can of tomatoes, now repurposed as a drinking vessel. The tin can held a residue of water at its bottom, and floating in the water were particles of dust that had settled into a fine sediment.

The croker sack that had held cornmeal had been cut open and spread on the floor beneath the Hoosier cabinet, where it served as a rudimentary rug, its burlap fibers catching some of the dust that blew through the cracks. The medicine bottle on the windowsill had been joined by a second bottle, identical in shape but bearing a different label: Dr. Swett's Original Root Beer Extract, a compound that claimed to cure "nervous debility" and "female complaints" and that the general store in Beaver sold for forty cents. The second bottle was half empty. The first bottle, the Golden Medical Discovery, was nearly full; the cork had been replaced and the bottle set aside, its promise of relief apparently unfulfilled.

A new notice had been pinned to the table. The pin was a bent nail, driven through the yellow paper and into the pine with a force that had splintered the wood around the nail head. The notice was from the county sheriff's office. It stated that the premises described as the northwest quarter of Section 14, Township 5 North, Range 18 West, had been sold at public auction on the steps of the Beaver County Courthouse on the twenty-seventh day of May, nineteen hundred and thirty-three, to the First National Bank of Beaver for the sum of four hundred and twelve dollars, and that the occupants were required to vacate by July first. The notice was dated June second. It had been pinned to the table on June third. The dust that had accumulated on it since then was deep enough that the words "July first" were barely legible.

The family Bible had been removed from its shelf and placed on the table beside the foreclosure notice. It was open to the flyleaf. The ink of the recorded births and the single death had faded further, but a new entry had been added in a hand that was neither of the two hands that had made the previous entries. The new entry recorded a death: 1933, the name of the youngest child, written in the same cramped letters as the earlier death, the same economy of ink, the same refusal to elaborate on what had happened or how it had felt. Below the death entry, a pressed flower had been placed between the pages — a blue flower from a flour sack dress, flattened and dried, its petals fragile as ash.

On the floor beside the child's bed, the corncob doll lay face down. One of its binder-twine braids had come loose. A dust drift had formed against its back, piling up like gray snow against a fence post. The bed itself was unmade, the quilt thrown back, the pillow slip gone, the corn-shuck mattress visible through an opening in the ticking. On the windowsill above the bed, the three Ball Mason jars had been replaced by a single jar holding a bunch of dried wildflowers — Indian paintbrush and prairie clover, the last flowers that had bloomed in the pasture before the drought took them.

Outside, the Model A Ford was gone. A rectangle of darker earth marked where it had stood. The grass around the rectangle had been blown flat by the wind, and in the center of the rectangle, where the engine block had sheltered the ground, a small depression held a puddle of water from the last thunderstorm — a storm that had brought more wind than rain, a storm that had turned the sky black at midday and dropped hailstones the size of hen's eggs and left the fields scoured clean of what little topsoil remained. The leather work gloves had not returned. The battery still sat in the pantry, its charge now certainly dead.

September 1933

In September, the kitchen on Section 14 was empty. The cookstove remained, too heavy to move, its firebox door hanging open on a broken hinge. The skillet was still on the floor beneath it, rust now claiming the entire cooking surface. The pine table had been pushed against the wall, its surface covered with dust that had drifted through the cracks to a uniform depth of half an inch. The kerosene lamp was gone. The tin plate was gone. The coffee cup with the cracked rim was still there, on its side, half buried in dust.

The Hoosier cabinet had been stripped of its contents. Its doors hung open. The enameled work surface was bare except for a single mason jar — the empty one that had been on the windowsill in January — now holding a dozen rusty nails that had been pulled from the walls. The hooks where cups and utensils had hung were empty. The flour bin held only a residue of white dust at its bottom, flour mixed with topsoil, fine enough to be mistaken for one another.

The family Bible was gone from its shelf. The shelf itself remained, a length of unfinished pine nailed to the wall studs, now holding nothing but a layer of dust and a single bobby pin, rusted at the hinge.

The calendar had been removed from its nail. The nail remained, driven into the wall above the empty shelf, its head bent from the weight of something that had been hung on it and then pulled away without care. Below the nail, on the floor, a torn corner of the calendar page showed the edge of the word "January" and a fragment of the red barn painted by the artist in Chicago.

The child's bed in the corner had been dismantled. The dynamite crate had been broken apart for kindling, its splintered remains scattered on the floor. The mattress had been dragged outside and left in the yard, where the weather was reducing it to its component parts: corn shucks blowing across the stubble field, flour-sack ticking rotting into the soil. The quilt had been taken. The corncob doll had been taken. The medicine bottles were gone. The only thing left in the corner was a handkerchief, brown-stained now beyond any hope of washing, half buried in the dust and visible only as a pale square against the gray.

The back door was open. It had been open for some time — weeks, perhaps months. The broom that had leaned against it was on the floor, its handle broken, its bristles tangled with dust and dead grass. The wind had been at work through the open door, rearranging the dust into dunes and ripples, scouring the floorboards clean in some places and piling drifts against the walls in others. The dust was in everything. It filled the cracks between the floorboards to overflowing. It coated the windowsill so thickly that the outline of where the Ball jars had stood was still visible, three clean circles in a field of gray. It had blown through the gap along the bottom of the door and through the open door and through the cracks around the windows and through the holes in the roof where shingles had been torn away by the March winds, and it had settled into every crevice, every corner, every surface of the kitchen that had once been a home.

On the floor near the table, half covered by dust, a piece of yellow paper showed its corner. It was the foreclosure notice, or the sheriff's notice, or some other document of official loss. The words on it could no longer be read. Dust had filled the creases where it had been folded. Dust had abraded the ink. Dust had rendered the legal language into something indistinguishable from the language of the weather, the mute and patient grammar of erosion, the silent syntax of abandonment.

Outside the house, the field that had been the northwest quarter of Section 14 was indistinguishable from the sky. The dust was blowing again, one of the great black blizzards of that terrible year, and where the field ended and the horizon began was a question that had no answer. The line between earth and air had dissolved. The land was in the sky, and the sky was on the land, and the house — empty, open, filling slowly with the soil of a farm that no longer existed as a farm — was indistinguishable from both.