The front door of the Cooley homestead on Section 14, Township 3 North, Range 7 East of the Cimarron Meridian had a porcelain knob with a hairline crack running from the spindle collar to the rim, a crack that had been there since 1927 when young Thomas Cooley, then twelve, slammed the door against a dust devil and the knob struck the oak frame. The crack had been sealed with a dab of flour paste, now dry and yellowed, and the knob itself had developed a wear pattern: the right side, where callused thumbs pressed to turn it counterclockwise, was smooth as river stone, while the left side retained its original factory gloss. In the summer of 1933, the thumb-polish spread three millimeters further toward the spindle, because Martha Cooley began opening the door left-handed after her right wrist swelled from pulling the well rope one hundred and twelve times in a single morning when the water table dropped another four feet.

The kitchen table — a slab of cottonwood planed flat by Elijah Cooley, the grandfather, in 1908, the year the family arrived from Missouri — measured seventy-one inches by forty-two inches. Its surface told the census of the household. At the southeast corner, a dark oval where Elijah had set his coffee cup every morning for twenty-five years, the tannin staining deeper than the surrounding woodgrain. At the north edge, a series of shallow grooves — seven parallel lines — where Martha cut bread each evening with the serrated knife that had belonged to her own mother. At the center, a rectangular outline lighter than the rest of the wood, measuring eight inches by ten inches, where the family Bible had rested since 1922, its leather cover shielding the cottonwood from sun and dust and the accidental drips of bean broth. On the morning of March 14, 1933, the Bible was removed, and the lighter rectangle became visible to anyone who sat at the table. By June, the contrast had faded as dust filled the unprotected grain, and by August, the rectangle was nearly invisible, and Martha had stopped sitting at the table at all.

The ledger book — a Dennison's Combination Journal and Ledger, number 387, purchased from the dry goods store in Boise City for thirty-seven cents in January 1932 — contained sixty-four pages of blue-lined paper. The first forty-seven pages were filled with Elijah's handwriting in black ink: entries for seed purchases, feed purchases, the sale of six bushels of wheat at forty-three cents per bushel in August 1932, the sale of a gilt sow to the Woodward brothers for eleven dollars, the repayment of three dollars against the note held by the First National Bank of Boise City, the purchase of two sacks of flour at ninety-eight cents each, the purchase of one bolt of calico at seventeen cents per yard for Martha to make school clothes, the payment of property tax in the amount of fourteen dollars and sixty-two cents for the 1932 assessment year. Page forty-eight was blank. Page forty-nine contained a single entry in pencil, dated September 4, 1932: "Dust. No wheat cut. Owe bank $212.40." The remaining pages through sixty-four were blank. The ledger was found on the kitchen floor on the morning of October 7, 1933, its cover buckled from moisture, its pages rippled, lying three feet from the overturned table, and the ink on page thirty-one — the entry recording the birth of the youngest Cooley child, Samuel, on May 12, 1929 — had dissolved into a pale blue bloom that was no longer legible.

The flour sack in the pantry was a fifty-pound cotton bag stamped with the red and blue logo of the Blackwell Milling Company of Blackwell, Oklahoma. On January 1, 1933, it weighed forty-seven pounds, the original weight diminishing with each scoop of the tin measuring cup that hung from a nail beside the sack. On March 1, it weighed thirty-one pounds. On May 1, it weighed eighteen pounds, and Martha had begun mixing the flour with cornmeal at a ratio of three parts flour to one part cornmeal to make it stretch. On July 1, the sack weighed nine pounds, and the ratio had reversed: one part flour to three parts cornmeal. On August 15, the sack weighed two pounds and six ounces, and Martha was scraping the interior of the cotton bag with a wooden spoon to collect the last dustings of flour that clung to the weave. On August 16, the sack was empty, and the nail beside it held nothing at all. On August 20, a new sack appeared, unmarked, weighing thirty-eight pounds, and the tin measuring cup was back on its nail. The new sack had been delivered by Henry Cooley, the eldest son, who had walked seventeen miles to the Federal Surplus Relief distribution point in Keyes and seventeen miles back, and whose boots — a pair of Red Wing work boots, size eleven, resoled in 1931 with leather cut from a discarded harness — showed new wear on the left heel, where a blister had formed and broken and formed again.

The bedroom shared by Thomas and Samuel Cooley, ages eighteen and four, contained two iron bedsteads painted white, the paint chipped along the headboard rails where restless hands had gripped during the dust storms of 1932 and 1933. Under Thomas's pillow — a feather pillow with a cotton ticking, made by Martha in 1928 — there was a folded copy of the Cimarron County Call dated July 6, 1933, opened to page three, where an advertisement for the Civilian Conservation Corps had been circled in pencil. The circle was drawn twice, the second line pressing harder than the first, creating a groove in the newsprint. Under Samuel's pillow — a smaller pillow, stuffed with cotton batting rather than feathers because the goose had died in the dust pneumonia of 1931 — there was a wooden horse carved from a scrap of cedar, its left foreleg missing, its right ear worn smooth from being held, its tail a series of shallow knife cuts that had darkened with dirt and the oils of a child's palm. On the morning of September 2, 1933, the wooden horse was found on the floor beneath the bed, its position suggesting it had been dropped, and the newspaper was gone from beneath Thomas's pillow, and Thomas was gone as well, and the wear pattern on the front doorknob showed a deeper polish at the point where a hand had turned it at four-thirty in the morning.

The well in the yard was a hand-dug shaft twenty-seven feet deep, lined with native stone that Elijah had quarried from the Cimarron breaks in 1909. The rope was a three-quarter-inch manila line, replaced in 1930, now frayed at the twelve-foot mark where it rubbed against the stone coping during each draw. The bucket was a galvanized steel pail with a wire bail, capacity three gallons, weight when full approximately twenty-five pounds. On August 15, 1933, the bucket brought up water mixed with fine silt, gray rather than clear, and Martha let it settle in a Mason jar for two hours before using it, and the sediment at the bottom of the jar measured three-eighths of an inch. On September 1, the bucket brought up water that was brown rather than gray, and the well made a sound — a hollow echo when the bucket struck the water — that it had not made before. On September 10, the bucket brought up mud, and Elijah stood at the well for seventeen minutes without moving, and the rope showed a new wear mark at the fourteen-foot level from being pulled up empty and let down again.

The toolshed behind the house, a frame structure covered in tarpaper, measured twelve feet by eight feet. Its contents on June 1, 1933, included: one plow with a broken moldboard, one spade with a worn blade, one hoe, one rake missing three tines, one sledgehammer, one post-hole digger, one crosscut saw, one ax with a cracked handle wrapped in friction tape, one toolbox containing three screwdrivers, two wrenches, one hammer with a loose head, a tin of nails of various sizes, and one coil of baling wire. On July 15, the coil of baling wire was gone. On August 10, the ax was gone. On September 5, the spade was gone, and so was the post-hole digger, and the toolbox had been rearranged — the hammer had been moved from the left side to the right side, and the tin of nails had been opened and closed, the lid not quite aligned with the rim. On September 20, the toolshed contained: one plow with a broken moldboard, one hoe, one rake missing three tines, one sledgehammer, one crosscut saw, one toolbox containing three screwdrivers, two wrenches, one hammer with a loose head, and one tin of nails that was half empty. The absent items had been buried with Elijah Cooley, who had died on September 19 of what the county doctor called cardiac failure and what Martha called grief and what the objects recorded as a day when the hammer in the toolshed was not picked up at dawn, and the coffee cup at the southeast corner of the table remained cold, and the ledger book on the kitchen shelf was not opened.

Martha Cooley's wedding ring was a band of fourteen-karat gold, one-sixteenth of an inch wide, purchased from a traveling jeweler in 1910 for the sum of four dollars, which Elijah had earned by trapping coyotes for the county bounty. On September 20, 1933, the ring showed fine scratches on its interior surface, visible only under magnification, from twenty-three years of friction against the skin of Martha's finger. On September 30, the ring was placed on the kitchen table, beside the cold coffee cup, and on October 1, it was gone from the table, and Martha's left hand showed a band of paler skin where the ring had been, a band that was visible for thirty-seven days until sun and wind darkened the skin to match the surrounding tissue, and by then Martha was in Boise City, working at the dry goods store for four dollars a week, and the ring was in the safe of the First National Bank, applied against the debt that had grown to three hundred and forty-seven dollars and twelve cents.

The clothesline behind the house was a length of number nine galvanized wire stretched between two cottonwood posts set in concrete. On a Monday in May 1933, the line held twelve items of clothing. On a Monday in August, it held seven items. On the second Monday in September, it held four items: two of Martha's dresses, one of Samuel's shirts, and one pair of Elijah's trousers patched at both knees with fabric cut from a flour sack, the Blackwell Milling Company logo visible on the inside of the left knee. On the third Monday in September, the line held one of Martha's dresses hanging by itself, and the wind blew the skirt into a shape that suggested a person standing with arms out, and the dress stayed on the line for four days because Martha could not bring herself to take it down, and on the fifth day, a dust storm came and coated the dress in fine gray powder, and the weight of the dust pulled the wire down by two inches at the midpoint, and when Martha finally took the dress down, the dust fell from it in a sheet that held the shape of the fabric for a full second before collapsing.

The cardboard suitcase in the bedroom closet was a relic of 1924 when Martha's sister had visited from Tulsa, a gift she had left behind: a tan fiberboard case with brass-colored latches, the interior lined with faded floral-print paper. On October 6, 1933, the suitcase was removed from the closet and placed on the bed, and its latches were opened, and the following items were placed inside, in order: two of Martha's dresses, folded flat; three of Samuel's shirts, the smallest one still bearing a food stain at the collar; the family Bible, its cover now dusty and the lighter rectangle on the table now indistinguishable from the surrounding wood; one photograph in a cardboard frame showing Elijah and Martha on their wedding day, the emulsion cracked along the fold lines from being kept in the Bible; the carved wooden horse with the missing leg, which Samuel had retrieved from beneath the bed; one spare pair of Samuel's shoes; one envelope containing eleven dollars and forty cents in coins and paper currency; and the Dennison's Combination Journal and Ledger, number 387, its buckled cover pressed flat between the pages of the Bible. The suitcase was closed. The latches were fastened. Martha's hands left faint moisture marks on the brass-colored surface, marks that evaporated within nineteen minutes in the dry air.

The house itself — a four-room frame structure with a gabled roof of cedar shingles — registered the departure. The front door's porcelain knob turned for the last time at seven-thirteen in the morning of October 7, 1933, turned not by a callused thumb from the right side but by a smaller hand from the left side, Martha's hand, and the door swung closed, and the crack in the porcelain that had been there since 1927 shifted by less than a millimeter, and then it did not shift again. The windows were shut, but one window in the kitchen was shut imperfectly, leaving a gap of one-eighth of an inch between the sash and the sill, and through this gap the dust entered over the following weeks, settling on the cottonwood table in a layer that reached one-sixteenth of an inch by November and one-eighth of an inch by December and obscured the coffee ring at the southeast corner entirely. The iron bedsteads in the boys' room developed rust along the headboard rails where the paint had chipped, because no hand wiped them clean. The rope on the well bucket frayed through at the fourteen-foot mark and the bucket fell into the mud at the bottom of the well and was not retrieved. The toolshed's tarpaper roof, torn by a windstorm in November, admitted rain that rusted the hammer's loose head so thoroughly that the handle separated from the head entirely, and the two pieces lay on the floor of the shed, eighteen inches apart, and would remain there until the auction in 1938.

On the kitchen floor, where the overturned table had rested for four days before Martha righted it for the last time, there was a scattering of objects too small to pack: three straight pins, one button from Samuel's shirt, the stub of a pencil sharpened to a length of two and one-quarter inches, and a single dried bean that had rolled under the stove and was not discovered until the house was cleaned for the auction. The bean was a pinto bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, and it had been part of the last pot of beans Martha cooked in the house, on October 5, 1933, a meal shared by Martha and Samuel and no one else, eaten in silence at the table where the Bible no longer sat. The bean measured seven-sixteenths of an inch in length and was perfectly hard, its seed coat intact, its embryo still viable. In the spring of 1934, when the rains returned for a brief season and moisture seeped through the gap in the kitchen window, the bean absorbed enough water to begin germination. A root emerged. A shoot pushed upward toward the light. The bean plant grew six inches before the rain stopped and the dust returned, and then it withered and dried, and its remains lay on the kitchen floor beside the three straight pins and the button and the pencil stub, and the house held all of these things in the dark, and the front door remained closed, and the porcelain knob with its hairline crack and its thumb-polished side faced the empty yard and waited for a hand that would never turn it again.