WHERE THE DUST SETTLES

The flour sack dress on the clothesline had been hanging there since Tuesday. By Friday afternoon the dust had crusted it stiff as cardboard, and when the wind came through at four o'clock the entire line of washing leaned sideways like a row of gray specters bowing to something unseen. No one took the dress down that day. No one took it down the next day either. On Monday morning it was still there, and the dust had thickened another quarter inch.

The windowsill in the kitchen told the story in layers. A fine red-brown silt accumulated at the rate of a teaspoon per hour on days when the wind came from the northwest. On the twenty-third of March the layer measured two fingers deep by noon. A child's fingertip had traced a word there before breakfast — the letters M-A-M-A — and by three in the afternoon the word had filled in completely, erased by the sky's relentless deposition. No new word was written to replace it.

In the barn the ledger book sat open on the scarred pine desk. The entries for 1931 filled seventeen pages in a careful, block-lettered hand: twenty-three bushels of winter wheat at thirty-eight cents a bushel, eight dollars and seventy-four cents total. The entries for 1932 covered eleven pages, the handwriting smaller, the numbers lower. Thirty-one cents a bushel. Then twenty-seven. The entries for 1933 stopped on February fourteenth. Below that date the columns were blank, though someone had drawn a single horizontal line across the page, the pencil pressed so hard the graphite had torn the paper. The line did not reach the right margin. It stopped two inches short.

The shotgun had lived in the barn for eleven years, hanging on two iron hooks above the tack room door. The stock was worn smooth where three generations of hands had gripped it — the grandfather's thumbprint a dark oil stain near the trigger guard, the father's palm impression overlapping it, and a fresher set of prints from smaller hands that had learned to shoot tin cans off fence posts in 1929. On the morning of March thirtieth the gun was no longer on its hooks. The iron hooks were bare, and the dust on them was undisturbed, which meant the gun had been lifted straight up and carried out, not knocked or brushed against. In the kitchen the gun stood in the corner behind the door, barrel down, the stock leaning against the yellow wallpaper where the pattern of roses had faded to ghosts.

The mail slot in the front door had admitted four letters from the First National Bank of Boise City in the month of March alone. The first three were still sealed, stacked on the hall table beneath a copy of the Panhandle Herald dated January 1929. The fourth envelope lay on the kitchen table, torn open, the single typewritten page inside refolded three times until it was a tight white square the size of a matchbook. The word FORECLOSURE appeared in capital letters three times on that page. On the back of the envelope someone had written a single word in pencil: June. The pencil had been sharpened with a kitchen knife, not a proper sharpener — the wood around the lead was splintered and uneven.

Maybelle Jessup's hairbrush sat on the dresser in the northeast bedroom, the room that caught the morning light through a window that had been patched with flour paste and newspaper in the winter of 1931. The brush was walnut-handled, a gift from a Sears Roebuck catalog order placed in better times — the order number 447-8921 was still written in pencil on the underside: ninety-eight cents plus seventeen cents shipping. In the bristles, wound around the wooden pegs, were strands of hair the color of dried corn silk. In January the brush had held perhaps a dozen strands. By the first week of March the count had risen to thirty-one strands visible without magnification. Someone had been brushing harder, longer, and winning fewer battles. On the dresser beside the brush a small glass bottle of Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription stood half empty, the amber liquid settled into two distinct layers — a clear top portion and a cloudy sediment below — which meant it had not been shaken or used in some time.

The Bible on the parlor table was a King James edition printed in Philadelphia in 1908, the black cloth cover worn to gray at the corners. The pages were onionskin thin, and in the Book of Ruth a pressed cotton boll had left a rust-colored stain that bled through three chapters. The underlining in the early books matched the handwriting in the ledger — steady, upright, the pencil strokes even. But in the later books a different pencil had been at work, a softer lead, the strokes lighter and more hurried. Job 1:21 was underlined twice: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away. Beneath that verse, in the second handwriting, was written: May 1932. In the Book of Exodus someone had circled the words let my people go with a thumbnail pressed into the margin, leaving a crescent-shaped indentation.

The biscuit tin on the top shelf of the pantry was a Windmill brand tin, its painted blue windmill flaking off in chips the size of fingernail clippings. This tin had held the emergency money since the autumn of 1929 — a collection of silver dollars, Walking Liberty half-dollars, and two five-dollar gold pieces wrapped in a scrap of muslin. Every month the tin grew lighter. The muslin cloth, when unwrapped in December 1932, had contained seventeen dollars and fifty cents in silver. By January 1933 the cloth held eleven dollars. By February: six dollars and forty cents. On March fifteenth the muslin cloth was wrapped around three Walking Liberty half-dollars and nothing else. On March sixteenth the cloth was empty. The gold pieces had disappeared sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and no one had spoken of it.

The letters from California arrived in pink envelopes that smelled faintly of orange blossoms, the return address written in a looping script: Mrs. Harold P. Wainwright, 427 Magnolia Avenue, Bakersfield, California. The first envelope was dated December 8, 1932. The second: January 3, 1933. By March there were seven envelopes, all opened, all refolded, all kept in a cigar box under the northeast bed. The cigar box had once held White Owl Perfectos — the price stamp on the bottom read 15 cents — and the lid was decorated with a snowy owl whose eyes had been worn away by the friction of being opened and closed. The latest letter, dated March 22, contained the words shopkeeper's son and decent position and room prepared and please come soon. At the bottom of the cigar box, beneath the letters, lay a Union Pacific railroad timetable for the Los Angeles Limited service, the departure time from Boise City circled in red pencil: 7:42 AM, April 4.

The family photograph on the mantelpiece had been taken at the Cimarron County Fair in September 1927, the year the wheat had grown shoulder-high and the price had hit a dollar twelve a bushel. Four faces looked out from behind the glass: Elmer Jessup in his Sunday collar, his hair oiled flat, his mouth set in a line that was trying to be a smile. Cora Jessup beside him, her hands folded, wearing the blue cotton dress that had cost three yards of fabric at twelve cents a yard from the dry goods store in Keyes. Maybelle, twelve years old then, her hair in braids, standing in front of her mother's skirt. And a boy of fourteen with his father's jaw and his mother's eyes, wearing a cap pulled low, squinting into the September sun. On the glass over the boy's face a cross had been scratched with something sharp — a hatpin, perhaps, or the point of a scissors. The scratches were deep enough to gouge the photographic paper beneath, so that the boy's features were replaced by a white blur. The scratches were not new. They had been there since June 1929.

The cough medicine bottle — Dr. Kilmer's Swamp-Root Kidney Liver and Bladder Cure, though it had been used for a cough — sat on the nightstand in the southwest bedroom. In the third week of January the bottle had been full to the label. By the end of February the amber liquid was down to the bottom third. On March fifth the bottle was empty, and a thin ring of dried syrup marked the level where the last dose had been poured. The bottle was never refilled. Beside it, a glass of water showed a film of red dust on the surface. On the pillowcase below, a dark stain the size of a dinner plate marked where someone had coughed through the night and into the morning.

The work boots by the back door had soles worn smooth as river stones. The right boot had a hole in the toe where the leather had cracked and curled back like a dried leaf. Newspaper had been stuffed inside for warmth — a fragment of the Boise City News dated November 12, 1932, the headline visible through the hole: WHEAT FUTURES DROP TO RECORD LOW. The boots had not been worn outside since the second week of March. Dust had settled in the creases where the leather folded at the ankle.

The calendar on the kitchen wall was a 1933 edition from the Cimarron County Co-op Elevator, the kind they gave free to farmers who brought in more than a hundred bushels a year. The photograph for March showed a field of wheat in Kansas, golden and waist-high, a photograph that had been taken somewhere else, some year that was not this year. The squares for March first through twenty-ninth had been crossed off with the stub of a carpenter's pencil. The square for March thirtieth was not crossed off. Neither were the squares for the thirty-first, nor any of the April squares. On April first a new X appeared in the first square, but the hand that made it was different — the lines were lighter, the angle of the cross more diagonal. The next day's square was crossed off too. Then the third. Then the marks stopped at April third.

On the morning of April fourth, before sunrise, the front door stood open for forty-seven minutes. The kitchen chair nearest the door had been pulled back from the table and not pushed in again. The coffee pot on the stove was still warm at six-fifteen, half a cup of chicory coffee still in the bottom, the grounds settled in a pattern like a tiny mountain range. The shotgun was still in the corner behind the door — it had not moved since March thirtieth. But on the kitchen table a new arrangement had appeared: the mother's wedding ring, a thin gold band purchased in 1909 from a jeweler in Enid, Oklahoma, for four dollars and eighty-five cents, was placed precisely in the center of the torn foreclosure notice. Beside it, the four sealed bank letters had been opened — not torn across the top but slit neatly with a knife — and arranged in chronological order. On the top envelope, in the mother's handwriting, was written: I have spoken to the Lord and He has spoken back.

The packed suitcase on the front porch was a brown leatherette case with brass clasps, the kind sold by Montgomery Ward for two dollars and ninety-eight cents. Inside were three cotton dresses, two pairs of stockings, a Bible with no underlining, the cigar box of California letters, the Union Pacific timetable, and the Walnut-handled hairbrush. The suitcase had been placed beside the front door at some point between midnight and four in the morning, and no one had come to claim it. The dust began to settle on the brass clasps even as the eastern sky turned the color of a healing bruise.

In the barn the ledger book remained open on the desk. In the margin beside the final entry of February fourteenth a new line of writing had appeared, the letters small and precise: April 4, 1933. Paid in full. Below those words the father's hand — the first hand, the hand that had built the farm, planted the wheat, kept the accounts, loaded the shotgun — had drawn a second horizontal line beneath the first, and this time the line reached all the way to the right margin. The pencil was laid parallel to the book's spine. The lamp beside it had burned all night, and the oil reservoir was dry.

The family photograph on the mantelpiece was gone. The dust on the shelf where it had sat for five years showed a clean rectangle the size of a postcard, bordered by the undisturbed gray that had accumulated around it. Someone had lifted the picture carefully, straight up, leaving the dust-frame intact. The nail it had hung from was still in the wall, and from the nail a single length of butcher's twine dangled, cut clean at the end.

At seven-forty-two in the morning the Union Pacific westbound left Boise City with twenty-three passengers. Among the tickets collected by the conductor was one purchased three days earlier for a single passenger, destination Bakersfield, California, twenty-one dollars and sixty cents one way.

In the southwest bedroom the stain on the pillowcase had been joined by a second stain, fresher, darker. The glass of water on the nightstand was half empty. The cough medicine bottle was still empty. The window in this room faced west, toward the dead wheat field, toward the line of Russian thistle that had blown against the fence and piled four feet high. Through the window the dust was visible as a perpetual haze, the horizon erased, the sky the color of old bandages. And on the windowsill the dust continued to accumulate, settling grain by grain, indifferent to what lay beneath it, burying the day as it had buried all the days before.