Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1933

The house had been built in 1892 by a man named Elias Thatcher, who had driven a wagon from Missouri with his wife and three children and a plow and a shotgun and a Bible, and he had chosen the land because it was flat and empty and the government said it belonged to anyone who would live on it for five years and work it. Thatcher lived on it. He built a house of sod — strips of earth cut from the prairie, each one layered with the grass side down so that the roots would hold the soil together, and the house rose from the ground like a mound, and the roof was made of more sod, and the windows were openings in the walls covered with tar paper, and the door was a slab of wood that Thatcher had cut from a cottonwood tree that had grown near the creek that had once flowed through the property but had not flowed in seven years.

The house survived Thatcher. He died in 1906 of pneumonia, and his wife, Mary, died in 1911 of a fever, and their children grew up and left and the house stood empty for three years and then a man named Joseph Delaney bought it at a auction for forty dollars and lived in it for twelve years and raised four children in the sod walls and when the children were old enough he built them frame houses on adjacent claims and the sod house became a storage building and the sod, left undisturbed, continued to hold together, held together by the roots and the dry air and the absence of rain that would have softened the earth and made the walls slump.

The house survived Delaney. He died in 1925, and his wife sold the claim to a man named Walter Briggs, who was a farmer from Kansas who had lost his land in a drought and was trying his luck in Oklahoma, and Briggs lived in the sod house for five years and planted corn and wheat and watched the corn die and the wheat turn brown and fall to nothing, and in 1930 he left, driving a Ford Model T loaded with his possessions — a trunk of clothes, a coffee can of silverware, a rifle, a sack of seed that he would not plant — and he drove west on the dirt road and did not look back and the house stood empty again.

And in the empty house, the objects remained.

A cast iron stove stood in the corner of the main room, black and cracked, with a hole in one of the legs where the rust had eaten through. The stove had been delivered in 1898 by a traveling salesman who had driven a wagon thirty miles from the nearest railroad town, and it had heated the house for forty years, and in its final year of use, in the winter of 1929, it had been filled with coal that Briggs had hauled from the Kansas mines, and the coal had burned hot and clean and then burned out and the ashes had been swept into a tin pan and carried outside and dumped on the ground beside the house, and the tin pan had been left on the ground where it sat in 1933, filled with windblown dust and a dead beetle and a fragment of barbed wire.

The stove's interior was coated with a black crust of soot and burned residue. The top surface had a dent on the right side, made when a metal pot had been dropped in 1914. The door hinge was rusted and partially detached, hanging at an angle that would not allow the door to seal completely. The flue pipe, which had once connected to a chimney made of stacked stones, was disconnected and draped across the floor, rusted through in three places.

A wooden table stood in the center of the main room. It had been built by Joseph Delaney in 1913 from lumber that he had hauled twenty miles from the timber line. The table was four feet square and two inches thick and had four legs that were slightly uneven, because Delaney had not been a carpenter. The surface was stained with rings from hot pots and water glasses and a dark patch in the center where a knife had been driven into the wood during a dispute in 1921 that will not be recorded in any document but is visible in the four-inch hole that the blade made and the splintering that radiated from the impact point like the branches of a tree.

On the table, in 1933, there was an object: a child's shoe. A leather shoe, size four, belonging to a girl named Lily Delaney, who had worn it in the spring of 1923 and had lost it on the road to Cimarron, the town twelve miles east, where her mother had taken her for a pair of shoes because the one she had was too small and had been repaired three times and had held her foot in a position that would have permanently deformed her toes if she had worn it for one season more. Lily had worn the new shoe for exactly one week before she had lost the old one, and the old one had been found three days later behind the woodpile, empty, and had been kept by Lily's mother, Martha Delaney, in a cedar chest in the bedroom, alongside photographs and dried flowers and a lock of hair.

The shoe sat on the table in 1933 because Martha had not had time to pack it when she and Joseph and their three remaining children had left in the autumn of 1930. They had driven a pickup truck loaded with their possessions — blankets, clothes, a typewriter, a photo album, a sack of dried apples, a violin — and they had driven west on the dirt road and had not stopped until they reached Tucson, Arizona, where Joseph's brother lived and had found work for Joseph picking oranges in the spring and harvesting cotton in the fall, and the shoe had remained on the table in the sod house, empty, alone, a leather shell that had held a foot and now held nothing, and the dust had settled inside it and the sunlight had faded the brown leather to a color that was not brown anymore but something between tan and gray, and the sole had begun to separate from the upper along the left side, a crack that had widened from a hairline fracture in 1930 to a two-inch gap in 1933, through which dust and sand and the fine silt of the dust storms had entered and filled the interior of the shoe until it was no longer empty but filled with the substance of the land that had been lost.

A bed stood in the bedroom. It was a frame bed, not a platform, with four iron posts and a mattress that had been filled with straw in 1892 and replaced with horsehair in 1908 and replaced with a thin layer of cotton batting in 1920 and was, in 1933, a compressed and misshapen object that held the outline of a body in the center, the indentation made by decades of weight pressing into the materials, the straw compacted to a density that was almost solid, the horsehair matted and broken, the cotton batting yellowed and thin.

The bed had been made on the morning of March 6, 1933, by a man named Tom Edwards, who had moved into the house in December 1931 after Briggs had left and had rented the property for ten dollars a month, paying in advance for the season because he did not believe that he would need the house beyond the spring. Tom Edwards was a tenant farmer from Missouri who had come to Cimarron County because he had heard, in a letter from a cousin, that the land was flat and the rent was cheap and the government gave away seed to anyone who asked. He had asked. He had received a sack of wheat seed and a pamphlet about soil conservation that he had used to start a fire because the stove would not light and the wood was too damp and the fire needed something to catch.

Edwards made the bed because he was a man who slept on the ground when he arrived at a new place, because he did not trust beds that had belonged to other men, and he slept on the floor of the main room for the first two weeks, on a blanket that he had brought from Missouri, and then he made the bed because the ground was cold and the iron posts conducted the cold from the earth into his body and he could not stop shivering, and making the bed was an act of surrender to the discomfort of the alternative.

The bed in 1933 held the impression of Edwards's body. He had left on June 15, 1933, driving the same Ford Model T that Briggs had driven two years earlier, loaded with a trunk and a rifle and a coffee can of silverware and a sack of seed that had not been planted, and he had driven west and had not looked back, and the bed had remained made, the blankets folded at the foot, the pillow in the shape of a head that was no longer there, the straw mattress holding the indentation of a body that had weighed one hundred and sixty pounds and had been six feet tall and had slept on his back with his arms at his sides and his legs straight, and the indentation persisted after he was gone, a negative space in the compacted straw that held the memory of his shape in the way that a hand holds the shape of a glove that has been removed, not by copying the glove but by being displaced by it, the space that the body occupied continuing to exist after the body has left, a hole in the material world that is defined not by what is there but by what is not.

A photograph lay on the pillow. It was a black and white photograph, eight inches by ten inches, the corners bent and the surface scratched along the bottom edge, and it showed a family of five standing in front of a house that was not this house — it was the house in Missouri, the house that Elias Thatcher had not built, the house that Tom Edwards had not lived in, the house that Lily Delaney had not been born in. The photograph showed a man and a woman and three children. The man was Joseph Delaney. The woman was Martha Delaney. The children were Mary, age eight, James, age six, and Lily, age four. They were standing in front of a frame house with a porch and white-painted railings, and they were wearing their Sunday clothes, and Joseph had his arm around Martha's shoulder, and Mary was holding a book, and James was holding a dog that was mostly out of the frame, and Lily was looking at something that was not the camera, something to the left of the photographer, something that had caught her attention at the exact moment that the shutter had opened and the lens had recorded the light that would, fifty years later, be the only record of her expression on that day.

The photograph had been taken in 1922 by a traveling photographer who drove a bellows camera mounted on a tripod and used glass plate negatives and developed the photographs in a wagon that he had converted into a darkroom, and he had charged fifty cents per photograph and had spent one afternoon at the Delaney claim and had taken twelve photographs, nine of which were purchased. The photograph on the pillow was one of the nine, and it had been kept in a photo album for eight years, and in 1930, when the Delaneys had packed their possessions for the drive to Tucson, they had taken the album and left it behind because it was heavy and the album's binding had broken and the photographs were falling out and Martha Delaney had taken the one photograph she wanted most — the family photograph — and placed it in her apron pocket and had driven to Cimarron and had had a new print made from the negative, which the photographer had sold her for twenty-five cents, and the new print had been kept in a drawer and the original had been left in the album and the album had been left in the house, and the photograph on the pillow in 1933 was the new print, placed there by Martha Delaney in the last hour before they left, because she had remembered it on the road, in the truck, two miles from the house, and she had turned the truck around and gone back inside and taken the photograph from the drawer and placed it on the pillow because she did not know why she had done it and did not have time to think about it and the truck was idling and Joseph was honking the horn and the children were waiting and the photograph was placed on the pillow and they had driven away and the photograph had remained.

The photograph in 1933 showed a family that no longer existed. Joseph Delaney had died in Tucson in 1931 of a heart attack while picking oranges. Martha had resumed her maiden name and lived with her daughter Mary in a small house near the cotton fields. James had dropped out of school and worked in a garage. Lily was seven years old in 1933 and had grown into shoes that were too large and had been given to a cousin who had smaller feet, and she did not remember the house in Oklahoma, because she was four years old when they had left and children of four do not retain memories of places that they have not lived more than a few years, and the photograph was the only thing that connected her to a house that she did not remember and a father who was dead and a mother who had changed her name and a brother who had left school and a life that had been replaced by a different life in Arizona that was, in its material details, similar to the life in Oklahoma — same poverty, same labor, same uncertainty about the next harvest — but was different in the way that every life is different after it is broken and reassembled, the same pieces arranged in a new configuration that is recognizable as the same thing and not the same thing at the same time.

The house in Cimarron County continued to exist in 1933 after the people had left. The wind entered through the disconnected flue pipe and carried dust across the table and into the shoe and settled on the photograph and grayed the black and white image to a color that was neither black nor white but the color of the dust itself, which was the color of the land, which was the color of drought, which was the color of everything that had been lost and replaced by nothing.

The stove stood in the corner, cracked and rusted and filled with the memory of fire that was no longer burning. The table stood in the center, stained and scarred and holding the empty shoe and the dust-gray photograph. The bed stood in the bedroom, made and unoccupied and holding the indentation of a body that was no longer there.

The objects remained. The people did not.

And the dust — the dust was the most complete record. The dust filled the shoe and settled on the photograph and coated the stove and filled the indentation in the mattress and carried, in its molecular composition, the trace of everything that had existed in the house before it was blown away by the wind that had taken the topsoil and the crops and the hope and had left only the objects and the dust and the house that had been built from the earth and would return to the earth when the walls finally slumped and the roof collapsed and the sod would blend back into the prairie and the iron stove would rust to nothing and the wooden table would rot and the photograph would disintegrate and the shoe would become a fragment of leather indistinguishable from any other fragment of leather on the ground, and the house would be gone and the objects would be gone and the only record of the people who had lived there would be the indentation in the mattress and the hole in the table and the crack in the shoe and the gray photograph and the dust in the stove and all of these things, in their material persistence, would outlast the memory of the names Elias Thatcher and Joseph Delaney and Walter Briggs and Tom Edwards and Martha and Lily and James and Mary, who had lived and left and been replaced by other people who had lived and left, and the house would stand empty, holding the traces of their passage in the dents and the stains and the cracks and the indentations, the physical evidence of presence that would remain after the presence was gone, the objects telling, in the silent language of wear and damage and accumulation, the story of the people who had used them and left them and been forgotten, while the objects, patient and material and indifferent to human concerns, remained.