The grandfather's plow rusted first at the blade, where the iron met the earth four hundred times, each pass peeling back a skin of topsoil that never quite healed. The rust had a color like dried blood dissolved in water, spreading in rings from the cutting edge toward the handles, which still held the imprint of two thumbs worn into the wood — left thumb deeper than right, the man having favored his left hand, having leaned into the work with the left side of his body, having pushed against Oklahoma ground that was already beginning its slow refusal two generations before anyone named it Dust Bowl. The shed that housed the plow listed three degrees to the east, and the crack in its western wall — a split no wider than a wedding band — admitted the wind each March in a thin continuous whistle that the family had stopped hearing before the youngest child was born. A nest of field mice occupied the moldboard cavity, their bedding composed of dried grass stems, horsehair from a gelding sold in 1929, and one strip of faded calico that matched the dress worn by the grandmother in the photograph that hung in the front room, the photograph whose glass had cracked in the heat of August 1931, a diagonal fissure that bisected the grandmother's face from left temple to right jaw, leaving one eye intact and the other spidered behind glass so that she seemed to watch the room with divided attention, one half focused on the present and one half on something already beyond.

The house itself had been built by the same grandfather, the one whose thumbs had shaped the plow handles. The foundation stones were fieldstone gathered from the original eighty acres, each stone carried by hand across the quarter-mile that separated the eastern boundary from the building site, a distance that could be read in the different composition of the stones — the ones nearest the house bluish with lichen, the ones farthest pink-gray and bare, the sequence of their placement telling the story of diminishing returns, the builder starting with the best stones and finishing with whatever the land would yield, a principle the bank would later apply to the mortgage. The front porch had seventeen boards when laid. By October 1933, fourteen remained. The three missing planks had been pulled up for firewood during the winter of 1931-1932, the coldest winter in the memory of anyone still alive on the property. The nail holes where those planks had been attached to the joists below were eight in number, each hole slightly enlarged by the extraction, each holding a shadow of rust where the nail had oxidized against the pressure-treated fir, which was not in fact pressure-treated but merely fir, and which had begun to rot around the nail holes in concentric damp rings that resembled the growth rings reversed, a dendrochronology of decay.

In the kitchen, the mother's apron hung from a hook beside the stove, the same hook the grandmother had used, the hook being a railroad spike driven into the wall by the grandfather on the day the stove was installed in 1902, driven at a downward angle so that whatever hung from it would not slide free, a small piece of forethought in a life where forethought was increasingly scarce. The apron itself was flour-sack cotton, originally printed with a pattern of small blue flowers on cream ground, a pattern that was still visible in the seam allowances where the fabric had been folded under and stitched, protected from the alkali soap and the sun and the repeated wringing that had faded the exposed surfaces to a uniform pale gray. There were eleven patches on the apron. The earliest patches, near the hem, were carefully stitched in matching thread, the work of a woman with time and patience. The later patches, clustered around the waistband, were fixed with whatever thread was nearest — one with red darning cotton, one with a length of butcher's twine, one with a strand of unraveled burlap sacking that left small fibers on everything the apron touched. The newest patch, dated by its fabric to a flour sack purchased in September 1933, covered a hole above the left hip, and the stitches were wide and irregular, the needle having been pushed through by fingers that trembled, and beside the patch was a stain the color of tea that was not tea, a stain that the mother had tried to bleach out with lemon juice and salt, leaving a faint ring around the stain's perimeter where the bleaching had been more effective than at the center, the center where the liquid had first struck and soaked deepest into the cotton fibers, the center that remained the color of rust and worry.

The kitchen table was pine. On the table, arranged as if for a meal that no one would eat, were three objects. The first was the ledger book — the 1888 McAllister County Bank and Trust ledger, bound in leather that had once been black and was now the gray of a January sky, the corners worn to the board beneath, the spine cracked at the opening where the book had lain flat on this table or the table before this table for forty-five years of quarterly entries. The pages were ruled in blue, with red vertical columns for figures, and the ink of the first entries — 1888, 1889, 1890 — was iron gall, dark brown, written with a nib that pressed hard into the paper, the pressure of a man who believed in permanence. The ink of the later entries — 1929, 1930, 1931 — was fountain-pen blue, and the pressure was lighter, the hand that wrote them having learned that permanence was a wager the land might not honor. There were, between the covers of this ledger, eight hundred entries. Each entry recorded a transaction: a loan against the crop, a loan against the land, a loan against the next year, a loan against the year after that, a consolidation of previous loans, an extension of the consolidation, a restructuring of the extension, a default on the restructuring. The entries did not use the word default. They used "balance carried forward," "adjusted repayment schedule," "revised amortization term." The last entry, dated September 15, 1933, was in red ink, a color that appeared nowhere else in the book, and it took up three lines, and beneath it was a notation in pencil in a different hand — the bank man's hand — that read simply "800 ac. total exposure." The number 800, circled.

The second object on the kitchen table was the family Bible. It was a King James, printed in Philadelphia in 1879, its leather cover the color of dried blood, its pages edged in gilt that had rubbed away at the corners where the fingers of three generations had turned them. The spine was broken at the Book of Job, which meant that when the Bible opened naturally, it fell open to chapters 1 through 14, and the thin paper of those chapters was worn translucent at the margins, the words beneath the words showing through like a palimpsest of suffering. Job 1:21 was underlined in the grandfather's hand: Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. Beneath this, in a different hand — the mother's, lighter, with a tremor — a second faint line, and in the margin a single word in pencil that had been erased and rewritten and erased again, leaving an indentation in the paper where the pencil had pressed, the indentation forming the shape of the word "why" without the ink to make it legible, the word there and not there at once.

The third object on the kitchen table was the foreclosure notice. It was typed on paper the color of a corpse, the official letterhead of the McAllister County Bank and Trust — est. 1881, as if longevity were a virtue — and it was dated October 2, 1933. The paper had been folded three times to fit an envelope, and at each crease the paper fibers had begun to separate, forming gaps that would eventually become tears. The notice used the word "foreclosure" once and "deficiency judgment" twice and "liquidated" once and "possession" three times. It was signed in green ink by a vice president whose name appeared on three other documents in this house — the original mortgage of 1888, the refinancing of 1914, the extension of 1927 — and each signature was slightly different, the "J" of John getting looser with each decade, the "H" of Harrison flattening, the terminal "n" of Johnson acquiring a downward flick that suggested either decisiveness or indifference, which in banking were the same motion. The notice had been placed on the table at 4:17 in the afternoon of October 3, 1933, a time established by the angle of the shadow it cast when the bank man set down his briefcase beside it, the briefcase having left a rectangular depression in the dust that coated the table, a depression measuring 16 inches by 12 inches, the standard dimensions of a legal portfolio, the fine leather of the briefcase having compressed the dust into a surface darker than the surrounding dust, darker because the dust particles had been pressed together, eliminating the air gaps that scattered light and made dust look pale, the darkness being an optical effect and also an exact description of what the briefcase contained.

The bank man had walked across the porch, his right shoe — a wingtip, size 10, recently resoled — leaving a clear impression in the dust that had accumulated on the porch boards since the last rain, which was the rain of April 17, 1933, a rain of twenty-three minutes that had not been enough. His left shoe left an impression too. The toe of the right shoe print pointed toward the front door. The toe of the left shoe print pointed slightly to the left, an angle of approximately 12 degrees from the direction of travel, suggesting a man who walked with his feet turned outward, a man who had perhaps played football or had a hip injury or had simply learned to walk that way and never corrected it. There were no other footprints on the porch. The bank man had arrived in an automobile, the tire tracks of which were visible in the yard, two parallel depressions that compressed the dead grass into the cracking soil, the tread pattern being the diamond-crosshatch of a 1931 Ford Model A, the tire pressure slightly low on the rear right, the depression deeper there by a quarter-inch, the weight of the briefcase and its contents having shifted the car's balance imperceptibly toward the right rear corner, the physics of the transaction inscribed in the earth before the transaction was even announced.

The father's boots stood beside the front door. They were work boots, the leather cracked across the toe joints where the foot had bent ten thousand times, the soles worn thin at the heel where the left foot had dragged slightly with each stride, the left heel exhibiting fifteen percent more wear than the right, a figure derived from the ratio of sole thickness at the left heel (2.1 millimeters) to the right heel (2.5 millimeters), the original sole having been 8 millimeters when the boots were purchased at Grissom's Dry Goods in December of 1929, the purchase recorded in the ledger on a page now faded. The boots were caked with dust from the north field, the field where the father had last planted wheat in October of 1932, the wheat that had failed to germinate for lack of moisture, the field that had been his grandfather's first field and his father's best field and was now his last field, 160 acres of dirt that were technically still dirt and technically still 160 acres and technically still his but only in the sense that a man owns his shadow. The dust on the boots was a particular color — not brown, not gray, but a tired orange-pink, the color of Oklahoma dirt that had lost its humus, its organic matter, its microbial life, its ability to hold water or seed or hope. It was the color of earth that had stopped being soil. The boots had not been worn for four months. The dust that caked them was the dust of the walk away, the dust that had settled in the creases of the leather and dried there, the walk away having occurred on June 7, 1933, a Tuesday, the father having risen before dawn and dressed in his work clothes and sat on the edge of the bed for a period of time that could not be reconstructed because no clock had been running and the mother had not opened her eyes, and then having stood and walked out the front door and into a wind that erased his footprints within the hour, leaving only the boots, which he had taken off and set beside the door before walking on, the act of removal being the only explanation the objects would offer, the objects not being equipped to explain why.

The daughter's schoolbook was on the windowsill of the eastern bedroom, the bedroom that had been the grandmother's and then the father's and was now the daughter's, the bedroom with a view of the apple orchard that had stopped producing in 1930, the trees standing in rows like a geometry problem that had no solution. The schoolbook was a primer, First Steps in Reading, published by Scribner's in 1922, its cover decorated with an illustration of a farmhouse surrounded by green fields and fat livestock, an illustration that the daughter had tried to color with a stub of blue crayon at some point, the crayon marks extending beyond the lines of the illustration, the blue of the sky spilling into the green of the fields, the countryside of the illustration refusing to stay within its boundaries. Inside the book, between pages 14 and 15, was a pressed wildflower — an Indian paintbrush, Castilleja indivisa, its bracts a vivid red even in desiccation — that had been picked in the spring of 1932, the last spring that anything on the farm had bloomed voluntarily. The flower had been pressed between the pages that taught the letter F: F is for Farm, F is for Father, F is for Flower. The same three F's, arranged in a sequence that the publisher had not intended. The desk drawer beneath the windowsill contained, among other items, a stub of blue crayon, a pencil sharpened to its final inch, a button from a dress that no longer fit, and the desiccated body of a grasshopper that had died in August 1933 of unknown causes but probably starvation.

The empty hooks in the kitchen wall numbered seven. They had held, in order from left to right: the copper saucepan (sold, April 1933, to a peddler from Enid), the iron skillet (sold, May 1933, to a neighbor who paid in eggs that were themselves thin-shelled from calcium deficiency in the hens), the enameled stew pot (sold, June 1933, to the woman from the church, who had paid with two jars of preserves and an IOU that would never be collected), the rolling pin (taken by the mother's sister in July 1933, on a visit that ended with both women crying in the kitchen and neither of them knowing exactly why), the bread knife (lost, date unknown, the space on the wall where it should have hung being the only evidence it had ever existed), the ladle (broken, August 1933, when the hook pulled out of the wall, the ladle clattering on the floor and denting at the bowl, the dent making it pour crooked, the crooked pour being the kind of small failure that accumulates into something larger), the meat cleaver (still there, hanging alone on the seventh hook, its blade dark with a patina of use that no amount of wiping could remove). The empty hooks cast shadows on the wall that shifted with the sun, and at certain hours — between 3 and 4 in the afternoon, when the light came through the west window — the shadows of the six empty hooks formed a pattern on the plaster that resembled a hand reaching for something just beyond the frame of the wall.

In the parlor, above the empty fireplace, the mirror was cracked. It had been the grandmother's mirror, brought from Georgia in 1888, its frame carved with grapevines and wheat sheaves, a motif of abundance that had become ironic without anyone making the joke. The crack ran from the upper left corner to the center, a clean diagonal break that reflected the room in two misaligned halves, so that anyone standing before it saw themselves with a gap at the forehead where the two halves failed to meet, a yonic inch of empty reflection between the version of the self in the upper glass and the version of the self in the lower, a gap that was exactly the width of a finger, a finger that could, if inserted into the gap, feel the sharp edge of the glass and the coolness of the wall behind, the coolness that was not coolness but coldness, the plaster having absorbed the decades of winters that the fireplace had not been lit, the wood having been needed for other purposes.

The grandfather's rocking chair occupied the corner where the light never reached. The rockers were worn flat in two places where the chair had touched the floorboards for fifty years, the flat spots polished to a dark shine by friction, the friction of a man rocking and thinking and rocking and deciding and rocking and signing. The armrests were dark where the grandfather's forearms had rested, the oil from his skin having preserved the wood in exactly those two places while the rest of the chair dried and grayed. The cane seat was broken in the center, the break having occurred on the night of November 3, 1932, when the chair had been occupied by the father, who had been drinking from a bottle that was now empty and under the porch, the bottle being a brown glass whiskey bottle of a brand that was no longer manufactured, its label having peeled away in the damp of the crawlspace, the glue remaining on the glass in a pattern that might have been a bird or might have been a man's face or might have been the logo of a distillery in Kentucky that had closed in 1918. The broken seat had not been repaired. The father had not sat in the chair again. The chair remained where it was, its broken center sagging toward the floor, a splinter of cane sticking up at an angle that caught the hem of anyone who walked too close.

The wind began at 2:47 in the afternoon of October 5, 1933, a wind that came from the west and carried with it the topsoil of Cimarron County and Texas County and Beaver County, the entire Oklahoma Panhandle lifted and transported eastward, soil that had been farmed too hard and rested too little and plowed too deep and loved not at all. The wind found the crack in the shed, and the crack in the window of the parlor, and the gap beneath the front door where the threshold had warped, and the hole in the roof above the daughter's bedroom that had been patched with tar paper in 1932 and never repaired properly, and the loose pane in the kitchen window that rattled in its frame, and the chimney that had not been swept since 1931, and the space between the floorboards where the pine had shrunk in five years of drought. The wind carried dust into all these openings, a fine silt that settled on every surface, that filled the depressions in the dust coating the table where the bank man's briefcase had rested, that piled in tiny drifts against the boots beside the door, that coated the ledger and the Bible and the foreclosure notice with a uniform gray-brown, that filled the cracks in the mirror until the crack was no longer a crack but a seam of earth, that sifted into the pages of Job so that the underlined verses were no longer legible, that covered the empty hooks on the kitchen wall until their shadows were indistinguishable from the wall itself, that filled the broken seat of the rocking chair until the sagging cane was level with the dust.

When the wind stopped, at 4:03 in the afternoon, the house was a museum of what had been left and what had been taken. The mother had taken the apron — it was gone from the hook, the railroad spike bare, the dark circle on the wall where the apron had shielded the plaster from the sun now exposed, a patch of original wall color surrounded by the faded yellow of the rest, a negative image of the domestic labor the apron had witnessed. The father's boots remained, full of dust now, ankle-deep in the silt of three counties. The daughter's schoolbook was gone from the windowsill, the Indian paintbrush having been lifted from between pages 14 and 15 and tucked into the pocket of a dress that was being worn by a girl who was walking east on a road she had never seen before. The family Bible remained on the table, open to Job, the wind having turned the pages since the wind did not read and did not care what page it stopped on. The ledger remained, the red number in the last entry having been covered by a drift of dust, the number 800 no longer legible, the debt still existing but no longer visible, a distinction that was the difference between being pursued and being buried.

On the table, where the three objects had been, there was now a fourth object: a matchbook from the Tulsa Bus Station, its cover printed with a graphic of a Greyhound bus crossing a stylized prairie, the sky above the bus an optimistic blue that did not resemble any sky the family had seen in three years, the cardboard cover worn at the corners, one match already torn out and used, the bend in the cardboard strip indicating that the matchbook had been folded back upon itself and carried in a pocket and removed and replaced many times. The matchbook had been purchased on October 4, 1933, price two cents, by a twenty-four-year-old man who had never been further than McAllister and who had spent the last night in the house walking from room to room, touching the walls, touching the table, touching the doorframe, touching the windowsill, touching the empty hooks, touching the mirror, touching the floorboards with his bare feet, leaving no marks that would outlast the next wind but leaving them anyway. The matchbook was the last object to be placed on the table before the house was abandoned to the dust, and it remained there for seventeen years, until a real estate assessor from the bank found it in 1950 and threw it away without reading it, the matchbook's message having already been delivered and received.

The house still stands as the dust rises around it. The grandfather's plow rusts in the leaning shed. The mother's apron hook casts its single shadow on the kitchen wall. The father's boots fill with the dirt of three counties and then four and then five. The chair rocks in the wind that enters and exits and keeps nothing. The ledger and the Bible share the table with the dust that was once the land that was once the promise that was once the grandfather's conviction that he could make something of nothing. The debt is buried, not paid — buried under the same silt that buries the Oklahoma Panhandle, that buries the memory of the rain, that buries the names of the 800 acres that were never going to yield enough, the 800 bushels that were never going to fill the ledger, the 800 promises that were always going to break. The objects hold the story they can no longer tell, and the wind that covers them covers them all the same.