The house on Route 60 outside Guymon, Oklahoma, was empty as of October 1933. The family had left on a Tuesday morning in September, driving a Ford Model A that had been running since 1928 and that now belonged to a man named Earl Whitfield who had paid four hundred dollars for it and the two acres of dust that surrounded it. The family -- the Millers -- had not sold the house. They had abandoned it. They had left their belongings on the porch and in the rooms and in the yard, and they had driven west toward California with everything they could carry and everything they could not.

What remained was a record. Not a written record -- no journals, no letters, no photographs. The Millers had taken those. What remained were marks: physical traces left by the passage of human bodies through a domestic space over the course of seven years, eight months, and twelve days.

The marks were on the floor. In the kitchen, the linoleum was worn to gray in a path from the door to the stove to the sink to the table and back to the door, a loop worn into the material by seven years of bare feet and rubber-soled shoes and the dragging of a flour sack and the pushing of a chair. In the kitchen, on the wall beside the stove, a dark circle of grease and soot marked the place where the cast iron skillet had sat for seven years, the iron leaching its minerals and its carbon into the painted plaster, leaving a shape that was exactly the shape of the bottom of the skillet.

The marks were on the stairs. The third step from the top sagged two inches. This was the step where William Miller, age thirty-four, had stood most often when he was thinking, and the wood had compressed under his weight, fiber by fiber, year by year, until it could no longer support the weight and gave way. The fourth step crackled when stepped on. This was the step that Mary Miller, age thirty-one, had avoided her entire marriage, and the wood had weakened along the grain from the deliberate avoidance, from the millions of footsteps that had bypassed it, from the stress concentration on the adjacent steps that had been forced to carry more than their share.

The marks were in the bedroom. On the headboard of the bed, teeth marks: seven small punctures in the pine wood, arranged in a row, made by a child who had been teething at some point in the seven years and whose jaw had pressed against the headboard while crying and whose teeth had pressed through the paint and into the wood and left a record that would outlast both the child and the teeth. The mattress on the bed had a permanent depression in the center, shaped like a human body, compressed by the weight of a sleeping person over two thousand five hundred nights.

The marks were on the windows. The glass of the west-facing window in the kitchen was clouded at eye level -- a horizontal band of smudge and residue approximately five feet from the floor, stretching the width of the window. This was where Mary Miller had stood, morning after morning, looking west toward California, watching the dust storm that had been building since May and that would, in three months, become the worst storm of the decade and would, in six months, force the family to leave. The smudge was a layer of human oil and dust and the salt of breath on glass, deposited by a hand that had pressed against the window and watched the world end slowly, day by day, grain by grain.

The marks were in the yard. A circle of dead grass, ten feet in diameter, where the clothesline had been strung for seven years. The grass inside the circle was brown and dead, killed by the shadow of the line and the weight of wet clothes that had been hung, wrung, and removed, every day from spring through fall, from April to October, for seven years. Outside the circle, the grass was yellow and brittle but alive. The circle was a precise geometric record of domestic labor, of wet linen suspended in Oklahoma air, of soap and water and friction and the endless repetition of keeping clothes clean in a world that was covered in dust.

The marks were on the well. The bucket rope was frayed to a diameter of three-quarters of an inch, worn down from two inches by seven years of friction against the wooden well cap. The rope was cut at the bottom, exactly at the point where the bucket had been tied, and the frayed end hung loose, swaying in the wind, recording the motion of a body that had been lowered and raised seven thousand times, each time drawing water from a well that was seven years old and getting shallower every year, the water table dropping, the depth increasing, the rope lengthening, the effort increasing, until the rope could no longer support the weight and broke, and the bucket fell into the dark water below, and the well was no longer useful, and the family left.

The marks were inside the walls. When Earl Whitfield took a hammer to the kitchen wall in November, opening the lath and plaster to inspect the wiring, he found something that was not wiring. Inside the wall cavity, between the studs, packed into the space where the insulation should have been, was paper. Every piece of paper the Miller family had owned: grocery lists, newspaper clippings, a catalog page from Sears Roebuck showing a new stove that cost two hundred and fifty dollars, a photograph of William Miller's father standing in front of a wheat field in 1921, a letter from Mary's mother in Missouri that began "Dear Mary" and ended with three lines that were never finished because Mary had folded the letter and put it in the wall and never taken it out again.

The paper was pressed flat by the studs and the lath and the plaster, compressed into a sheet that was the thickness of a book and the texture of plywood. Earl Whitfield pulled it out in one piece, unfolded it, and stood in the empty kitchen holding a wall full of paper, and he understood that he was holding seven years of a human life, compressed between two wooden studs, and that the life was now empty and the paper was all that remained, and that the paper was not a record of the life but was, in its own way, the life itself, flattened and compressed and hidden inside a wall, waiting for someone to open the wall and find it.

The marks were on the table. In the center of the kitchen table, a ring of white dust, approximately four inches in diameter, that was not dust but the mineral residue of a glass of water that had sat in that spot on the table for seven years, the water evaporating slowly over months and years, leaving behind the calcium and magnesium and trace minerals that had been dissolved in the Oklahoma well water, arranged in a perfect circle that was exactly the shape of the base of a glass that had been set down on a wooden table one morning and had never been moved.

The marks were everywhere. The house was full of them. They were on the floor and the walls and the windows and the well and the table and the stairs and the bed and the stove and the yard. They were the physical trace of seven years of human presence, recorded in wear and compression and smudge and dust and dried mineral and compressed paper and frayed rope and teeth marks in pine wood. They were the evidence of a life that had been lived in a house on Route 60 outside Guymon, Oklahoma, in the years between 1926 and 1933, in the time between when the wheat fields were green and when they were dust, in the time between when the family stayed and when they left, in the time between when the world was Oklahoma and when the world was California, a direction, a hope, a direction that was also a hope, and the marks were the record of that transition, written not in words but in the physical evidence of a body moving through space, day after day, year after year, leaving marks in everything it touched, marks that would remain after the body was gone, after the house was empty, after the family had driven west and the dust had covered the tracks behind them and the world had moved on.