The plow had a handle worn smooth in two places, the wood polished to the colour of old honey where Emmett Tucker's right hand gripped it and where his left palm pressed against the crossbar. The handle had been carved in 1927 from a hickory limb that fell during a spring storm. By 1930 the grip marks had deepened just enough to fit his fingers. By 1931 the wood had begun to split along the grain, a hairline crack that widened each spring when the ground refused to yield and Emmett pushed harder, his knuckles whitening, the crack deepening, the splinter catching the pad of his thumb on the morning of April 14th.

The flour tin in the kitchen held nothing. Its galvanized sides had been scoured clean by a rag that Elsie May Tucker worked in circles every Saturday morning for the first three years of her marriage. The tin had been a wedding present from her mother, who had carried it from Boone County, Arkansas, wrapped in a feed sack and tied with butcher's twine. The label on the tin read GOLD MEDAL FLOUR in blue letters that had faded to grey. The tin sat on the second shelf of the Hoosier cabinet, to the left of the sugar canister and to the right of the coffee jar that had been empty since December. On the morning of February 19, 1933, Elsie May opened the tin and looked at the bottom, where three dead weevils lay on their backs. She closed the tin and returned it to its place.

The photograph on the mantel showed Emmett in his Army uniform from 1918, the collar of his tunic stiff against his jaw, his eyes looking past the camera at something the photograph never captured. The frame was made of pressed tin painted to resemble walnut. A crack ran diagonally across the glass, taped with a strip of adhesive that had yellowed and begun to peel at the corners. The photograph stood between a kerosene lamp with a blackened chimney and a Bible whose leather cover had been eaten along the spine by silverfish. On the evening of March 3rd, a gust of wind rattled the window frame and the photograph fell face-down. Nobody turned it upright for three days.

The dust came on a Tuesday. It came as a rolling wall, a black blizzard that turned noon to midnight and buried the horizon under ten thousand tons of topsoil lifted from counties to the north. The dust sifted through the cracks around the windows, through the gap beneath the door, through the keyhole of the Hoosier cabinet. It settled on the photograph, on the flour tin, on the kerosene lamp. It coated the Bible so thoroughly that the words of the twenty-third psalm became illegible until J.T., eight years old, blew the dust away with his breath and the particles hung in the air like a second congregation. The dust lay a quarter-inch deep on the windowsill by morning. Elsie May swept it into a pile with a broom whose bristles had worn down to the binding. The pile sat in the corner of the kitchen for two days before she carried it outside in a coffee can. The coffee can had been used for this purpose seventeen times since January.

The foreclosure notice was tacked to the front door on a morning when the sky was the colour of a healing bruise. The notice was typed on onionskin paper, the letters struck hard enough to leave ridges on the reverse side. The paper fluttered in a wind that carried grit from the south fields. The words FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOISE CITY appeared in the letterhead above columns of figures that showed the mortgage on the quarter-section, the missed payments of 1932, the accumulated interest at six percent, the total sum of four hundred and thirty-seven dollars and eighty-two cents. The notice was signed by a man named Cranston whose signature was a tight coil of ink that resembled a strand of barbed wire. The tack that held the notice was a common carpet tack with a flat brass head, driven through the paper and into the pine door. The tack left a hole when the notice was removed. The hole was never filled.

The auction was held on the first Saturday of April. The auctioneer was a man from Guymon who wore a brown suit with a vest and a watch chain that caught the sun. His voice carried across the yard, past the barn, out to the field where the winter wheat had come up thin and yellow and then died. The items were arranged on planks laid across sawhorses. A butter churn with a cracked dasher. A set of six canning jars, three of them chipped at the rim. A crosscut saw with three broken teeth. A wagon wheel with a split rim. A quilt stitched in the double-wedding-ring pattern, the fabric faded where the sun had struck it through a south-facing window for eleven years. The quilt had been Elsie May's hope chest piece, begun in 1921 when she was seventeen and finished in 1922, the year she married. The stitches were eight to the inch, even and small, the work of hands that had not yet learned to hurry. The quilt sold for seventy-five cents to a woman from Keyes who folded it over her arm and carried it to a Ford truck with a cracked windshield.

The trunk sat in the bedroom at the foot of the iron bedstead. The trunk was made of pine boards covered with stamped tin painted black. The hasp was iron, rusted at the hinge. The leather handle on the right side had torn away in 1929, leaving only the metal bracket. Inside the trunk were the things that would not be sold. A lock of Lula's hair from her first haircut, tied with a piece of embroidery floss the colour of cornflowers. A deed to land in Arkansas that Elsie May's father had given her, the paper folded into quarters and tucked inside a tobacco tin. Three silver spoons from her grandmother's table, the handles engraved with the initial B for Boone. A school composition written by J.T. in the winter of 1932, the letters formed in pencil on ruled tablet paper, the subject being "What I Saw on the Way to School," the answer being a jackrabbit, a tumbleweed, and a car with a California license plate. The composition had a gold star pasted in the corner by a teacher named Miss Holloway who left Boise City in March and was not replaced.

Emmett's cough began in January and worsened through February. The sputum he produced was the colour of the clay from the south forty, rust-brown and thick. The handkerchiefs he used were squares of bleached flour sack, hemmed by Elsie May with thread that had once been white and had yellowed with washing. Each handkerchief went into a bucket of water that turned the colour of weak tea. The bucket sat beside the bed, a galvanized pail with a wire handle and a dent in the side where a mule had kicked it in 1928. The dent had never been hammered out because Emmett had said it gave the bucket character and Elsie May had said nothing and the dent remained. By the first week of March there were twenty-three handkerchiefs in the bucket and the water had turned dark and Elsie May carried the bucket to the wash kettle and boiled the handkerchiefs and hung them on a line that sagged between two posts. The wind filled the handkerchiefs like small sails and the dust coated them before they dried and she boiled them again and hung them inside the house where the dust still found them.

The doctor came from Boise City on a Thursday. He drove a Model A with a cracked headlamp and a spare tire mounted on the running board. His bag was black leather with brass fittings, the clasp worn bright from opening and closing. Inside the bag were a stethoscope with cold earpieces, a bottle of merthiolate, a roll of adhesive tape, a glass syringe in a metal case, and a bottle of codeine tablets that had been prescribed for a different patient in 1931 and never collected. The doctor listened to Emmett's chest for a long time. He folded the stethoscope and put it back in the bag. He wrote nothing on his prescription pad. He accepted a jar of preserved peaches as payment and the jar sat on the seat of his Model A as he drove back toward Boise City and the dust rose behind the car in a plume that hung in the air for fifteen minutes before the wind tore it apart.

Emmett died on the nineteenth of March. The body lay in the front room on the floor because the bed was too narrow to hold a body and the living. The sheet that covered him was the best sheet, the one from Elsie May's hope chest, the one with the crocheted edge that her grandmother had made in 1908. The sheet had been saved for twenty-five years for a purpose no one had named. The sheet covered Emmett from his chin to his feet. His hands were folded on his chest, the fingers curled inward, the nails rimed with soil that would not wash out. The undertaker came from Elkhart, Kansas, in a hearse that was a converted Packard with curtains on the rear windows. He charged forty dollars. Elsie May gave him the three silver spoons and the tobacco tin with the deed to the Arkansas land. The undertaker put the spoons in his vest pocket and the deed in his billfold. He drove away with the body. The Packard left tire tracks in the yard that the wind erased within the hour.

The trunk was carried to the road by J.T., who was eight and strong enough to drag it across the floor but not strong enough to lift it into the truck. The truck belonged to a man named Roscoe Pender, who was driving to California with his wife and his brother-in-law and their three children and a dog that had no name. The truck was a 1929 Chevrolet flatbed with wooden sides and a canvas cover that snapped in the wind. The back of the truck held three mattresses, a crate of chickens, a sewing machine treadle without the cabinet, and a box of tools that clanked on every bump. The trunk went between two mattresses, where the canvas would keep the dust off. Roscoe Pender's wife was named Mabel. She wore a dress made from a flour sack printed with small blue flowers. She had a baby in her arms who had been born in December and had no name yet. Mabel looked at Elsie May and said nothing. The baby slept with one fist pressed against Mabel's collarbone.

The house was left with the door open. The wind pushed through the kitchen, lifted the dust from the floor, scattered it across the Hoosier cabinet, across the shelf where the flour tin still sat, across the mantel where the photograph lay face-down. The photograph would remain face-down for years. The flour tin would gather more dust, and then rain would come through the roof and rust the bottom of the tin, and eventually the tin would fall from the shelf when the cabinet rotted and collapsed. The plow sat in the field where Emmett had left it on the last day he could stand upright. The handle continued to weather. The crack widened. In 1936 a man walking from Texas to Kansas used the plow handle to lever a stone from the ground and the handle broke in half and the man carried one half with him as a walking stick and left it beside the road near Liberal, Kansas, where it was buried by drifting sand and not seen again.

The jar of preserved peaches that Elsie May had given the doctor sat on a shelf in the doctor's pantry in Boise City. The doctor died in 1941 of a heart attack. His widow gave the jar to her daughter, who used it to store buttons. The jar outlasted the doctor, his widow, his daughter, and the daughter's daughter. In 1987 the jar sat on a windowsill in a house in Amarillo, Texas, holding a dozen marbles and a bullet from a .22 rifle. The peaches had been eaten on the evening of April 2, 1933, by the doctor and his wife, at a table covered with an oilcloth printed with roses, while the dust storm that would later be called Black Sunday gathered over the Nebraska line and began its long crawl south.

The trunk crossed the Texas Panhandle in the back of Roscoe Pender's truck. It crossed into New Mexico near Texico, where the dust was thinner and the sky was larger. It crossed into Arizona at Lupton, where the road climbed into pine forests that smelled of resin and nothing of dust. It crossed into California at Needles, where the heat rose from the pavement in waves that made the distant mountains shimmer. The truck broke down in Barstow and Roscoe Pender spent two days replacing the water pump while his family slept in the back under the canvas and the dog that had no name chased jackrabbits across the desert. The trunk sat in the back through all of this, between the mattresses, its black paint chipping, its contents undisturbed: the lock of hair, the deed that was no longer inside the tobacco tin, the school composition, the cornflower thread, and at the bottom, beneath everything, a handkerchief that had been boiled and boiled until the brown was gone and only a faint stain remained, the shape of a handprint, the size of Emmett Tucker's palm, the spread of his fingers.

In the San Joaquin Valley, at a labour camp outside the town of Arvin, the trunk was placed beneath a cot in a tent shared with three other families. At night, when the irrigation pumps fell silent and the only sound was the breathing of children and the distant bark of a dog, the lid of the trunk would open. The lock of hair came out first, then the composition, then the handkerchief. They would be held beneath the light of a kerosene lamp with a clean chimney. Then they would go back into the trunk, in the same order, with the handkerchief on the bottom and the lock of hair on top. The lid would close. The hasp would click. The trunk would wait beneath the cot until the next night, and the next, and all the nights after that, holding what it held, keeping what it kept, while the dust of Oklahoma blew east across the plains and settled on the empty house where the door still swung open in the wind.