The coffee can sat on the windowsill of the two-room farmhouse and collected what the wind brought. In January of 1933, the can was empty and bright, its tin sides still bearing the faded red label of the A&P grocery in Boise City, a label that promised a product called Eight O'Clock Coffee, something that had not been seen in this kitchen since the autumn of 1931. By March, a fine grey silt had begun to accumulate at the bottom of the can, no thicker than a sheet of writing paper. By May, the silt had risen to the height of a man's thumb. By July, the can was half full. The dust that filled it was the topsoil of Cimarron County, topsoil that had once grown winter wheat and sorghum and the kitchen garden behind the sagging porch, topsoil that now traveled freely across the Oklahoma panhandle, entering lungs and eyes and the spaces between floorboards, settling into coffee cans and soup bowls and the pages of the family Bible. The Hollis family did not empty the can. There was no point. The wind would bring more.

The farm ledger sat on the kitchen table, its binding cracked and its pages yellowed at the edges. Homer Hollis had purchased it at the dry goods store in Keyes in 1928, the year the wheat price was good enough to make a man believe in the future. The first pages were written in a careful, squared hand, the numbers aligned in columns that balanced. Seventy acres planted. Yield per acre estimated at twenty-two bushels. Price per bushel: ninety-eight cents. The margins in 1928 showed a profit of one hundred and twelve dollars after seed and feed and the interest payment to the First National Bank of Boise City. In 1929, the margins narrowed to forty-three dollars. In 1930, the ledger showed a loss of eighteen dollars, and the handwriting began to change. The numbers leaned. The columns no longer aligned. In 1931, Homer stopped writing the yield per acre and wrote only the total, and the total was a number smaller than any number that had appeared before. In 1932, there was no harvest at all. The wheat had come up thin as a sick man's hair and then the wind had scoured it away, and the page for 1932 contained only a single line in a hand that had begun to tremble: Nothing came up. The page for 1933 was still blank on the morning of the fifteenth of August, but the foreclosure notice from the First National Bank had arrived three days earlier and was pinned to the front door with a nail that had once held a horseshoe for luck.

The foreclosure notice was printed on heavy cream-colored paper that felt officious and expensive to the touch. The bank's letterhead was embossed. The language was legal and precise and entirely merciless. It listed the property: the northwest quarter of Section 18, Township 3 North, Range 8 East of the Cimarron Meridian, one hundred and sixty acres more or less. It listed the debt: four hundred and thirty-seven dollars and twenty-two cents. It listed the consequences: foreclosure, auction, eviction. The nail that held it to the door was a six-penny common nail, rusted along the shaft from years of Oklahoma weather, and it had been driven into the wood by Homer Hollis on the morning of the fourth of July, 1928, because Mae Hollis had said that a horseshoe above the door brought good fortune and Homer had laughed and said they could use all the fortune they could get. The horseshoe was gone now, taken down sometime in the winter of 1932 and sold to the scrap dealer in Boise City for twelve cents, which had bought one loaf of bread and a half-pound of salt pork. The nail remained.

The family Bible lay open on the sideboard in the front room, its leather cover cracked in patterns that resembled the dried bed of the Cimarron River. This Bible had belonged to Homer's mother, Eudora Hollis, who had brought it from Missouri in a covered wagon in 1892, and her name was written inside the front cover in a script that suggested a girl who had attended school until the age of fourteen. Below her name were the names of her children, written in the same careful hand, and below those were the names of Homer and his siblings, and below those were the names of Lula and Junior. But beside the name of Junior Hollis, the ink had been crossed through with a single heavy line that had bled into the paper. Junior Hollis had been buried in the churchyard at Keyes in April of 1933, three weeks after his eighth birthday, his lungs filled with the same dust that filled the coffee can. The doctor from Boise City had written dust pneumonia on the death certificate, and the death certificate was folded inside the Bible, between the pages of the Book of Job, which Homer had not read but had chosen because Mae had once told him that Job was about a man who lost everything and still believed. The death certificate was typed on a machine that had a sticky letter e, and the word deceased appeared three times on the document, each time with the letter smeared slightly, as if the typewriter itself had been reluctant to print it. Below Junior's crossed-out name, Lula's name remained, written in the same hand but with a small ink blot at the end of the final a, where the pen had paused.

The scale in the corner of the kitchen was a Fairbanks platform scale, Model 41-3052, purchased from the Montgomery Ward catalog in 1926 for the weighing of feed and flour and the occasional hog. On the morning of the twentieth of August 1933, the scale held the last sack of flour in the Hollis household. The sack weighed forty-eight pounds, which was eight pounds less than the standard weight of a sack of flour, but it had been opened and used sparingly for six weeks, and Mae Hollis had measured it out by the half-cup for biscuits that came out flat and grey and tasted of the dust that had gotten into everything. The flour sack was made of cotton printed with a floral pattern in faded blue, and Mae had been saving the cloth to make a dress for Lula, who was eleven years old and still wearing a dress that had belonged to her mother when she was nine. The scale registered forty-eight pounds, and beside the flour sack sat a tin of baking powder that had been empty since February, and a jar of sorghum molasses that had been scraped so clean that the inside of the glass was transparent, and a salt shaker that contained only a few grains of salt and a great deal of dust. The scale had a second platform, for counterweights, and on this platform rested a single object: the brooch that Mae had inherited from her grandmother, a cameo carved from shell and set in tarnished silver, which she had placed there not to weigh but to remember what weight meant, and the cameo showed the profile of a woman who looked nothing like Mae but who had carried this same brooch across the Atlantic from a village in Cornwall in 1847, and now it sat on a scale in a farmhouse in Cimarron County, weighing less than an ounce and more than a century.

The mantel above the wood stove had once held three objects: a clock that had stopped at twenty minutes past four on an afternoon in 1931 and had never been wound again, a tintype photograph of Homer and Mae on their wedding day in 1919, and a small glass vase that Lula had filled with dried wildflowers in the spring of 1930. The clock was still there, its hands frozen at four-twenty, its brass pendulum motionless behind the glass door. The vase was still there, empty now, the wildflowers having crumbled to powder years ago. But the space in the center of the mantel, where the wedding photograph had been, was empty now except for a rectangle of darker wood where the tintype had shielded the mantel from the sun. The tintype itself was in the pocket of Homer's coat, the one good coat he owned, which he had worn to church in Boise City before the church had closed for lack of a minister and before the coat had been patched at both elbows with fabric cut from a flour sack. The photograph showed Homer in a borrowed suit that was too large in the shoulders and too short in the sleeves, and Mae in a white dress that her mother had made from a tablecloth, and both of them were smiling in the way that young people smile when they have no reason to believe that anything can go wrong. The photograph had been on the mantel for fourteen years, and then one evening in July of 1933, Homer had taken it down and put it in his coat pocket, and no one had asked why, and no one had mentioned the empty space on the mantel, and the empty space remained, growing darker each day as the sun through the kitchen window continued to bleach the wood around it.

In the dirt yard between the farmhouse and the barn, approximately forty feet south of the porch steps, a child's shoe lay half-buried in the dust. It was a boy's shoe, size two, made of brown leather that had once been polished on Sunday mornings with a brush that Mae kept in a cigar box under the sink. The shoe had belonged to Junior Hollis, and it had been lost in the yard sometime in the winter of 1932, when Junior had been playing in the snow that fell that December, the last snow that Cimarron County would see before the drought hardened into something permanent. Junior had come inside with one foot bare and Mae had scolded him and sent him back out to find the missing shoe, and he had searched for an hour, digging through the snow with his bare hands, but the shoe was gone, and in the spring when the snow melted, the shoe was still there, buried now in mud that dried into dust, and no one had the heart to pick it up, so it remained, its leather cracking in the Oklahoma sun, its laces rotted away, its shape slowly filling with the same fine silt that filled the coffee can on the windowsill.

The jar of preserves sat on the highest shelf of the pantry, behind the empty Mason jars and the boxes of canning lids that would never be used. It was a quart jar of peach preserves, put up by Mae Hollis in August of 1931 from the last crop of peaches produced by the tree behind the barn, a tree that had died in the drought of 1932 and whose bare branches still stood against the grey sky like the arms of a drowning man. The preserves were the color of amber, and the peaches inside were suspended in the glass like specimens preserved for a museum that no one would ever visit. Mae had intended to open them for Christmas dinner in 1931, but Christmas had come and there had been no dinner worth opening preserves for, so she had saved them for Easter. Easter had come and gone, and then Thanksgiving, and then another Christmas, and the jar remained unopened, because there was always a reason to save it for something better, some occasion that might justify the sweetness, and there was never an occasion good enough, and the preserves had become not food but a promise, a testament to the belief that someday there would be a meal worth opening a jar of peaches for. The label on the jar was written in Mae's hand on a scrap of brown paper: PEACHES AUG 1931. The ink had faded until the letters were barely legible, but the jar remained, and the peaches remained, and the future they were being saved for remained always just beyond the horizon.

The Model A truck sat in the barn with its engine block cracked and its tires gone flat. Homer Hollis had purchased it in 1929 with the profits from a wheat crop that had seemed like the beginning of something, and he had driven it to Boise City and back on Saturday nights when there was money for gasoline, and he had taught Junior to sit in the driver's seat and pretend to steer, and he had promised Mae that someday they would drive it all the way to California, where the oranges grew and the ocean smelled like salt instead of dust. The truck's odometer showed 47,823 miles, and the last mile had been driven in October of 1932, when Homer had attempted to start the engine on a morning that was ten degrees below freezing and the block had cracked with a sound like a gunshot. The crack ran from the water jacket to the cylinder wall, and the engine would never run again, and the truck had been pushed into the barn by Homer and a neighbor named Gantry who had since moved to Texas to live with his sister. The truck bed was filled with objects that had been loaded there for a journey that would not happen: a trunk containing Mae's winter coat and the children's schoolbooks, a crate of empty canning jars, a box of nails and screws that Homer had saved from various projects over the years, a hammer with a cracked handle, a kerosene lantern with no kerosene, and a burlap sack containing forty pounds of seed corn that Homer had been saving since the harvest that never came.

The sack of seed corn was the heaviest object in the truck bed. It had been purchased from the feed store in Boise City in the spring of 1932, when Homer had still believed that the rains would come and the land would forgive him for whatever he had done wrong. The corn was a hybrid variety called Oklahoma Gold, developed by the agricultural experiment station at Stillwater, and it was supposed to be resistant to drought and heat and the various afflictions that visited corn in the panhandle. Homer had paid eight dollars for the sack, which was six dollars more than he had, and the feed store owner, a man named Peterson who had known Homer since they were boys, had extended him credit on the strength of a handshake and the memory of better years. The corn had never been planted. The rains had not come. The seed corn sat in the truck bed now, forty pounds of potential that had become forty pounds of weight, and the choice that faced Homer Hollis on the twentieth of August 1933 was not a moral choice but an arithmetic one: the corn could be planted next spring, if there was a next spring, or it could be ground into meal to feed the family through the winter, or it could be loaded into a truck that would never run and carried to a destination that did not exist. The seed corn weighed forty pounds, and the ledger on the kitchen table showed a debt of four hundred and thirty-seven dollars and twenty-two cents, and the coffee can on the windowsill was three-quarters full of dust, and the arithmetic of these objects was clear and final and admitted no argument.

The battery radio sat on the floor beside the wood stove, its wooden cabinet scarred by years of Oklahoma heat and cold, its dial marked with the call letters of stations that no longer reached Cimarron County. On the evening of the nineteenth of August 1933, Homer turned the radio on for the first time in three months, and the batteries still had enough charge to bring in a voice from Washington, D.C., a voice that spoke of forgotten men and a New Deal and the promise that the government would not let the land die. The voice belonged to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it came through the speaker tinny and distant and full of static, and Mae sat in the chair by the stove with her hands folded in her lap, and Lula sat on the floor with her back against the wall, and Homer stood by the radio with his hand on the dial, and they listened to the voice that promised help that would come too late. The radio's batteries died before the fireside chat was over, and the voice from Washington faded into silence, and the only sound in the farmhouse was the wind that carried the topsoil of Cimarron County past the windows, and the dust that settled on the radio, on the floor, on the hands of the people who sat in the darkness.

The wheelbarrow behind the barn had rusted through in three places and could no longer hold water or grain or anything that was not solid enough to support its own weight. It had been used to carry feed to the hogs that had been sold in 1931, and to carry manure to the garden that had died in 1932, and to carry Junior's body, wrapped in a sheet, from the farmhouse to the wagon that had taken him to the churchyard at Keyes. The wheelbarrow leaned against the barn wall now, its wooden handles splintered, its iron wheel seized with rust, and no one had touched it since April, and no one would touch it again. Beside the wheelbarrow, the garden tools hung on nails driven into the barn wall: a hoe with a broken handle, a shovel worn down to a nub, a rake missing half its teeth. These tools had once turned the soil of the kitchen garden, soil that had produced tomatoes and green beans and the carrots that Junior had liked to eat raw, pulled straight from the ground and wiped on his shirt. The tools were rusted now, and the garden was buried under six inches of dust, and the carrots were gone, and Junior was gone, and the wheelbarrow leaned against the barn like a crippled animal waiting to die.

The trunk in the front room was made of pine and had been built by Homer's father in 1906 as a wedding gift for Eudora. It measured forty inches long by twenty-two inches wide by eighteen inches deep, and it had crossed the Mississippi River on a ferry and the plains of Kansas on a wagon and had come to rest in Cimarron County with everything the Hollis family owned inside it. On the morning of the twenty-second of August 1933, the trunk was open on the floor of the front room, and Mae was filling it with the objects that could not be left behind. The family Bible went in first, wrapped in a flour-sack cloth. Then the jar of peach preserves, still unopened. Then the cameo brooch from the scale. Then Lula's one good dress and Homer's one good coat and the tintype wedding photograph from Homer's pocket. The trunk could not hold everything. The coffee can stayed on the windowsill. The ledger stayed on the kitchen table. The scale stayed in the corner. The horseshoe nail stayed in the doorframe. The child's shoe stayed in the yard. The Model A truck stayed in the barn with its cracked engine and its forty pounds of seed corn and its odometer frozen at 47,823 miles. The Hollis family climbed into the back of a truck belonging to a neighbor who was also leaving, and the trunk was loaded in after them, and the truck drove east toward the state line, and the dust rose behind it in a cloud that blocked out the sun, and the things that stayed behind settled into the silence of the farmhouse, where the wind continued to blow and the dust continued to fall and the coffee can on the windowsill continued to fill, grain by grain, until there was nothing left to distinguish the inside of the can from the outside, and all the objects of a life became indistinguishable from the earth that had claimed them.