The wind came from the southwest on the second Tuesday of March 1933, carrying topsoil from counties that no longer had topsoil. The dust settled on everything in the house on Section 14, Cimarron County, Oklahoma — on the windowsills, on the kitchen table, on the spines of the three books in the parlor, on the face of the clock that had stopped at ten minutes past four. The dust was fine as talcum and reddish-brown, the color of dried blood, and it got into the cracks between the floorboards where no broom could reach. By noon the windowsills held dust a quarter-inch deep. A finger drawn through it left a clean line that would be filled again by evening.

The house faced east, but the chair faced west. It was a straight-backed kitchen chair, maple, with a cane seat that had begun to sag in the middle from years of bearing the same weight in the same position. Someone had dragged it across the kitchen floor — the scrape marks were visible in the linoleum, four parallel gouges leading from the table to the window — and set it facing the road that ran due west toward the county line. On the windowsill beside the chair, the dust was thinner, disturbed, as though someone had rested their elbows there. The glass was smudged at a height corresponding to a woman of approximately five feet four inches. The smudge had been made and remade and remade again, layered over previous smudges until the glass was opaque in an oval roughly the size of a face.

The calendar on the kitchen wall was a promotional item from the Boise City Feed and Seed, 1932. The picture showed a field of wheat under a blue sky that no longer existed. The pages for January through September had been torn off. October was still attached. Someone had drawn an X through each day from the first through the nineteenth, the marks growing lighter as the month progressed, as though the pencil were being pressed less firmly. On October 20, the X was barely visible. On October 21, there was no X. The remaining days of October and all of November and December were blank, unmarked, as if the person holding the pencil had put it down and never picked it up again.

Beneath the calendar, tucked into a crack in the wall where the plaster had separated from the lath, there was a letter. It had been folded into thirds, then folded in half, then folded again until it was a square no larger than a postage stamp. The creases were white. The paper elsewhere was yellowed and soft from handling. It had been unfolded and refolded so many times that the fibers at the fold lines were beginning to separate, and if you held it up to the light you could see where the paper would tear next. The handwriting on the envelope was a young man's — quick, sloping, the letters running together — and the postmark read DALHART TEXAS JUN 14 1932. The letter itself had been removed from the envelope and replaced so many times that the envelope flap was torn halfway down the seam. The words inside — written in pencil, the same hand — had been read until the graphite was beginning to lift from the paper in a fine grey powder. The first line was still legible: Dear Ma and Pa and Ruthie. The last line was: I will send for you. The lines in between were harder to read. Certain words had been worn away entirely by the pressure of a thumb moving back and forth across them: wait, soon, money, and a word that might have been home or hope or both.

In the northeast corner of the house, in a room that measured ten feet by twelve, there was a bed. The bed was made of iron, painted white, with a mattress stuffed with cotton batting that had gone flat and hard in the middle. The blankets were pulled tight and tucked under the mattress at the corners so that the surface was smooth and unbroken. The pillow was without a dent. At the foot of the bed, a quilt had been laid across the iron rail — a double wedding ring pattern, blues and creams, the stitches still holding though the fabric at the edges was beginning to fray. Beneath the bed, a pair of boots. They were work boots, leather, lace-up, size nine and a half. The leather was cracked at the toe crease and the soles were worn smooth at the heel. They had been placed side by side, laces tucked inside, toes pointing toward the door as though waiting to be put on. The dust on the boots was thick and undisturbed. A moth had laid eggs in the wool lining of the left boot.

The kitchen table had four chairs. Three of them were pushed in. The fourth was the one at the window, facing west. On the table there were four plates — tin, enameled, chipped at the rims — but only three of them had been used for the midday meal. The fourth plate was clean and upside down. Beside it, a tin cup, also upside down. Beside the cup, a fork wrapped in a cloth napkin that had been folded precisely, corners aligned, as though someone had been expecting company. The napkin had been folded and unfolded and folded again at least once since the last wash because the creases no longer matched.

On the shelf above the stove, a jar of peach preserves. The jar was a quart Mason, the glass cloudy with age, the rubber seal still intact. The preserves inside had darkened from gold to amber to near-black. The label, written in pencil on a scrap of brown paper and tied with kitchen twine, read: For when you come home. The handwriting was a girl's — careful, rounded, the letters formed one at a time. The jar had not been opened. The rubber seal had never been broken. The preserves had been put up in late summer 1932, based on the variety of peach — Elberta, a late-season freestone — and had sat on the shelf through the autumn, through the winter, through the dust storms of spring 1933, undisturbed, unopened, waiting.

In the parlor, on the mantel above the fireplace that had not been lit since the coal ran out in January, there was a photograph in a frame made of tin painted to look like silver. The photograph showed a family of five arranged in front of the house, which was visible behind them, the porch, the windows, the door with its crooked hinge. A man with a sunburned face and hands that hung at his sides like tools he had forgotten he was holding. A woman in a dress the color of the sky in the photograph — pale grey, high-collared, buttoned to the throat. Two girls, one approximately twelve, one approximately eight, both in dresses made from the same bolt of floral print, both barefoot. And a boy, approximately seventeen, taller than the man, wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and trousers that were too short at the ankle. His hair was dark and parted on the left. He was not smiling, exactly, but his mouth was set in a way that suggested he had been smiling a moment before the shutter clicked and would smile again a moment after.

The frame had been taken down from the mantel and replaced at least once. There were two clean rectangles in the dust on the mantel — one where the frame had always sat, and one where it sat now, approximately three inches to the left. Someone had picked up the photograph, looked at it, and put it back not quite where it belonged. The glass over the photograph was smudged in one corner, where a thumb had pressed.

Outside, on the porch, a pair of women's shoes — black, low-heeled, laced, size seven — had been placed by the door. The leather was cracked and the soles were thin but the shoes had been polished recently. The polish was a darker black than the leather, visible in streaks where the cloth had applied it unevenly. The shoes faced the road.

On the porch rail, a coffee can held the butts of hand-rolled cigarettes. The butts were of two kinds: one rolled tight and thin, the paper twisted at the end, the tobacco burned down to a nub; the other rolled looser, thicker, the paper not quite sealed, the tobacco spilling from the end. One roller was economical, the other impatient. The older butts at the bottom of the can were dry and grey; the newer ones on top were still faintly brown and carried the smell of cheap tobacco. The rate of accumulation had increased in recent weeks. The can had been emptied last in late February; since then, it had filled to overflowing, and several butts had fallen to the porch floor and been ground into the boards by the heel of a boot.

The road that ran past the house was County Road 12, unpaved, graded twice a year. During the dust storms it disappeared entirely, and after the storms it reappeared, a little lower each time, sinking into the landscape. The mailbox at the end of the drive was a standard rural delivery box, galvanized steel, the red flag rusted in the down position. The box had been new in 1928. In 1933 it was pitted with rust and leaned slightly to the left because the post had been struck by a truck the previous winter and never straightened. The post was wrapped with baling wire where it had splintered.

Inside the mailbox, a single piece of mail: a seed catalog from the Burpee Company, addressed to Occupant, postmarked February 1933. The pages were stuck together with moisture and dust. No one had opened it since it arrived. It had been placed in the box and left there, because the person who usually collected the mail was no longer collecting it, and the person who now collected the mail did not care about seeds.

In the barn, which stood thirty yards west of the house and leaned five degrees to the south, a plow sat in the center of the dirt floor. It was a single-bottom walking plow, John Deere, the moldboard still bright in patches where the rust had not yet reached. The handles were ash wood, worn smooth by palms, darker at the grip points where sweat and friction had polished the grain to a shine. A pair of leather work gloves hung from the left handle, the fingers curled inward, stiff with dried sweat. The gloves were size large, too large for the man who owned them now, and had belonged to the young man in the photograph. They had not been worn since the previous spring. A spider had built a web between the thumb and forefinger of the left glove.

The field beyond the barn had been plowed the previous autumn but never planted. The furrows were still visible under the dust, long parallel lines running straight to the property line, where they stopped. The soil in the furrows was the same reddish-brown as the dust in the house, but coarser, cloddier, and it held the shape of the plow blade even now, in March, when it should have been broken by rain and frost. But there had been no rain. The soil had been turned and left, turned and left, and the wind had been working on it ever since, carrying it away grain by grain, acre by acre.

Inside the house, in the room with the iron bed, there was a suitcase under the bed beside the boots. It was a cardboard suitcase, brown, with leather corners and two brass clasps that had once been bright and were now green with verdigris. The suitcase was empty, the lid unlatched and slightly open, as though someone had taken everything out of it. Or as though someone had been about to put things in and then stopped.

The suitcase had been purchased at the dry goods store in Boise City in June 1932. The receipt was still in the side pocket, the ink faded but legible: One suitcase, $1.25. The date on the receipt was June 12, 1932. Two days later, the same hand that had purchased the suitcase had written a letter from Dalhart, Texas, postmarked June 14, saying I will send for you. The letter had arrived. The suitcase had sat under the bed, empty, through the summer and the autumn and the winter. The boots had joined it in the spring of 1933, when it became clear that the feet that wore size nine and a half would not be coming back to fill them.

On the kitchen windowsill, beside the chair that faced west, a glass of water had been poured and left. The water had evaporated by half. The remaining half was cloudy with dust. A fly floated on the surface, its legs folded beneath it like a landed airplane, perfectly preserved by the alkali in the Oklahoma dust. The glass had been poured by a woman of approximately five feet four inches who had sat in the chair and watched the road until the light failed, and then she had risen and gone to bed and forgotten the glass, and the next morning the dust had begun to settle on the water's surface, and she had not emptied it, because to empty it would be to admit that she had poured it for someone who was not coming.

On the wall above the bed that was never slept in, a pencil mark at a height of five feet ten inches. The mark was labelled in the same careful, rounded handwriting as the preserve jar: Ellis, June 1931. Beside it, a later mark: Ellis, April 1932. The second mark was half an inch higher. There were no more marks. The wall below the second mark was clean. The wall above it was dusty.

The house on Section 14, Cimarron County, faced east, but everything in it faced west — the chair, the boots, the photograph, the glass of water, the calendar with its stopped Xs, the jar of preserves with its unbroken seal, the letter with its worn-thin words, the empty suitcase with its receipt from June 12, 1932. The wind blew from the southwest, carrying soil from counties that no longer existed. The dust settled on everything. And the mailbox at the end of the drive, its flag rusted in the down position, waited for a letter that had already arrived.