Dust

Amelia held her cat close to her chest. From an onlooker’s perspective, it might have seemed as though a tattered scarecrow were standing in front of the house, clad in a faded yellow tablecloth, black rug in its arms, straw braids draped stiffly over its shoulders. Its mother called it from the doorway with a handkerchief clutched in her right hand. “Get inside. There’s another one comin’,” she said. The scarecrow turned helplessly from her post and retreated into the house before dust darkened the sky for the third time that week. 

Try as they might to board up all of the cracks in their old farm house, the Browns always found more dust on the top of their table, inside their beds, and even in their food. Mr. Brown would seek his hammer and nails once the dust had settled enough to set to work again. Mrs. Brown would attempt to salvage the bread in the cabinet and the milk in the pitcher, and Amelia would go out to the barn to check on the cow and chickens while her cat followed faithfully at her heels.

“You know I love you, Charlie?” she would say to the cat. Of course Charlie knew. Amelia would wrap her arms around the cow when she entered the barn, bringing a frown to her face as she felt each one of Mabel’s ribs protruding from her side. A sad “moo” issued from the poor creature when Amelia left without offering food, for there was little food to share. The two remaining hens and rooster in the coop were just as pitiful when Amelia came to them, clucking sadly as she withdrew without bringing food.

As Amelia sank onto the porch step, Charlie padded over and placed her front paws on the girl’s knee. Amelia picked up her companion and immersed her face in the soft black fur. Amelia had very few friends. As an only child on a farm far away from town, she seldom saw other children her age. Every Sunday she went into town for church with her parents. There were only six other children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen there, but her mother desperately wanted her to make friends. She silently hoped that her daughter would meet a boy whose family had some money, and that she would marry him and move to the city with him. Although she had heard that there was a great deal of unemployment in the city, she was convinced that it could not be as impossible a landscape as a forsaken dust plain. Amelia knew none of this of course, for the Brown family was not gifted in verbal communication.

As Amelia stroked her cat, her father approached and sat down next to her to smoke his pipe. Without saying a word, he pulled his daughter close and comforted her with the scent of his pipe and the kindness in his eyebrows. “Everything will be ok. God’s got a plan,” his pipe and eyebrows said. Then they retreated inside, father, daughter, and cat, to where Mrs. Brown was setting out a dinner of milk, toast, and eggs. As Amelia knelt down to Charlie’s bowl with the milk pitcher, her mother warned her, “Don’t be too generous. That’s all the milk Mabel gave tonight.” 

“Yes, ma’am.”

Amelia’s stomach was still grumbling for more food when she gathered the empty plates from the table, but she was used to it. She grew accustomed to crawling into a dusty bed with a hollow belly, and waking up with the taste of hunger in her mouth. It comforted her, however, to always find Charlie curled up at her feet when she fell asleep and woke again.

On Sunday morning, Amelia donned her blue dress for church. Her mother fastened white ribbons on the ends of her lifeless straw braids with a tired smile into the mirror. As the car groaned out of a rusty sleep on the drive, Amelia patted Charlie on her head. “I’ll see you after church, darling,” she whispered, and slipped out the front door. She waved at the house as the car pulled onto the road, although she was sure her mother thought her foolish as evidenced by her deep sigh.

The sermon was long and dry. Several people became dozy, and started to snore before being awakened by the foot next to them. Amelia was glad to get outside for the picnic lunch after service. As she did every Sunday, she sat with the six other people her age. She made no conversation. She preferred to listen to Robert recount his heroic deed of the week in which he saved his family’s farm (twice in one day apparently), or to Mary and Doris’s gossip about their older sisters, or to Paul’s recount of the exciting book he had finished this week, which was interrupted by the siblings James and Bernice who had to tell an urgently funny story. When Mrs. Brown came to retrieve Amelia, she kindly said her goodbyes to her peers to appease her mother. On her way past the food table, however, she made sure to grab a small stack of ham sandwiches to hide in her skirt once seated in the car.

“How were your friends?” Mrs. Brown asked her daughter as soon as they were out of the church parking lot.

“They were well.”

“Did you talk to Robert?”

“No, Ma.”

“How about James?” she pressed.

“No.”                                                                                                   

“Paul?”

“No.”

“Did you even talk to Doris, Mary, or Bernice?”

“No, Ma.”

Mrs. Brown did not speak for the rest of the car ride, but neither did her husband or her daughter. Amelia tried to read what her parents felt in their faces. She knew her mother was unhappy, but not quite angry. Maybe she was disappointed? And her father… he was tired. The lines around his mouth and eyes spoke of exhaustion, but the dust that seemed to fall from his eyebrows with each bump in the road shouted of determination.

Amelia leaped out of the car as it came to a stop in front of the house. She ran inside to greet her cat and scooped it up in her arms. Together, they went around the back of the house to greet Mabel and the chickens in the barn. They sat there for an hour in good company before letting Mabel out into the nearly grass-less pasture and migrating to the swing on the tree in front of the house. Amelia stared at the western horizon which the sun had begun to creep toward. She wondered when the next black cloud would roll over itself from there and into their yard. Into their house. Into themselves. She was so lost in thought that she did not notice her mother’s appearance on the porch.

“Why don’t you talk to those kids at church?” her mother asked. Amelia shrugged, her braids of straw sliding off her shoulders.

“Why don’t you talk to anyone?” Mrs. Brown continued. 

“I do talk to people sometimes,” the girl mumbled.

“When? Give me an example.”

“I talked to you in the car today.”

“I don’t count.”

Amelia let her eyes fall to the ground where Charlie was weaving in between her feet. She picked up her cat and held it close to her, thinking hard about when she last talked to someone in town.

“If only you loved someone as much as you loved that stupid cat of yours.” Mrs. Brown turned and slammed the door behind her. Amelia sought solace from these words in the fur of her black cat, burying her face in the tufts of darkness, which granted a soft “mew” from the loved thing. As much as it hurt to admit, her mother was right. Saying goodbye to a few people didn’t really count as talking did it? Not only had she not talked to another person in at least a year, she didn’t even like to be around other people. The sermon at church had been about “loving thy neighbor,” but if Amelia couldn’t even like others, what did that mean for her?

When she finally looked up, she saw black spots swimming in her vision from pressing her eyes too hard. She blinked a few times and refocused her eyes on the horizon. But those spots weren’t in her eyes. They were in the air. She could already feel the wind on her scarecrow arms and smell the dust in her scarecrow nose. She stood with a start from the swing. The black dust cloud crept silently over the horizon, billowing and rolling over the plains, shoving out and swallowing itself as it came. Amelia ran inside the house just as the cloud eclipsed the sun.

Mrs. Brown was sitting at the table, three handkerchiefs closed securely in her fist. One she gave to Amelia as she approached, and the other she handed to Mr. Brown. As the dust storm enveloped their house, they sat together and waited, handkerchiefs pressed over their mouths and noses. Exactly how long they were frozen there was hard to say. It was long enough to watch piles of dust accumulate around their elbows on the table, around their feet on the floor. The only sound to be heard for a number of hours was the crying of the wind and the creaking of the house around them as the dirt battered it. As the storm calmed and the dust finally settled, a dim moon was revealed shining over the house. The Browns coughed a short chorus upon lowering their handkerchiefs and went to their dirt ridden beds without eating. They had had dust for dinner.

Amelia woke in the morning to the sound of a scream. She ran outside without putting on a robe or shoes and found her mother kneeling in what remained of the pasture. It became clear to her what caused the scream as she approached. Her feet sped into a run, and she collapsed next to the body of Mabel the beloved cow. She reached out her hand to stroke the soft space in between the cow’s glazed and unblinking eyes. Her father appeared behind her, panting from running from the crop. He bent down and surveyed the animal. “Our last one,” he murmured just loud enough for his daughter to hear. He stood and walked over to his wife.

“Is she-” Mrs. Brown began. Mr. Brown nodded as his wife began to cry in his shoulder. 

Amelia had never seen her mother cry before, she had heard it twice from the wall behind her bed at night, but she had never seen it. Upon determining what to do, she stood. She took a step toward her parents, for she was going to wrap her arms around them, but they had turned and were walking back to the house. Amelia fell to her knees beside Mabel and began to cry herself. She sobbed for many hours, and as she did, a malicious character somewhere in her mind sighed, “it’s no use crying over spilled milk.” And Amelia cried harder.

Sometime around noon, Charlie approached Amelia and nuzzled her head up under the girl’s arm, but she continued to cry. The cat made a few circles around the girl and the cow, but Amelia’s tears would not relent. So Charlie returned to the house, where she curled up at the foot of Amelia’s bed to wait.

When Mr. Brown came out, his daughter was faint from hunger and heat. So he carried her into the house and placed her on a chair at the table. Her mother fed her a little bit of bread and put a cup of water to her lips, but she would not drink. Mr. Brown carried her into her bedroom and laid her on the bed where Charlie was waiting.

“Meow.”

“That’s a good girl. Cheer her up will you?” Mr. Brown said, stroking the cat’s back. He turned and exited, leaving the cat to curl up right next to the girl to keep a close eye on her.

In the morning, Mrs. Brown came to her daughter’s bedside with oatmeal. “We’re going into town today,” she said. As Amelia ate her oatmeal with vigor, Charlie stretched herself out over the girl’s legs. When she was done eating, she handed her bowl back to her mother and gathered her cat up in her arms. Once her mother had slipped out of her room, she ambled over to the dresser and set the cat down again. She put on the same nice blue dress that she had worn on Sunday. She rebraided her hair. Amelia heard the car groaning awake in the drive and went to her door. She turned with the door halfway open to say “I love you, Charlie.”

“Meow.”

The girl caught sight of herself in the mirror hanging on the kitchen wall as she passed. She pinched her cheeks to try to achieve a rosy glow, but still looked as lifeless as before. Shaking her head, she followed her mother out into the car. Plumes of rust colored dirt kicked up behind them as Mr. Brown drove the car down the drive and out onto the quiet road. 

Mr. Brown parked the car in front of the General Store in town. Inside, he talked with the man at the counter about where to buy livestock while his wife picked out a block of cheese and a fresh jug of milk. Amelia stood in the back of the store, admiring the ribbons on the wall. Since they seldom had extra money, she hardly ever got new dresses or ribbons. But a girl could dream couldn’t she?

“Hi,” she heard behind her, causing her to jump. She turned to see who interrupted her thoughts to find Paul from church.

“Hi,” she responded timidly.

“I just heard about what happened to your cow,” he said, pointing over his shoulder to where her father was talking to the store owner. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh. It’s alright I guess,” she ventured awkwardly. “There’s no use crying over spilled milk,” she said to fill the silence. And Paul laughed.

“That’s a great attitude! I had no idea you had such a great sense of humor!”

Amelia was surprised to find herself smiling at his response. 

“You have a cat too don’t you?” he asked.

“I do.”

“What’s its name?”

“Charlie,” she said, feeling foolish. “She’s a girl, but I didn’t know that at the time.”

“My brother’s name is Charlie!”

“Paul!” the store owner called from the front of the shop. “Come help me with these bags of flour!” So Paul excused himself and Amelia said goodbye as she followed her parents out the door. This looked to be the start of a promising friendship with another person. Mrs. Brown smiled over at her daughter as they pulled out onto the road, and her daughter smiled back. Amelia considered as she surveyed the flat, dusty landscape, ‘maybe things always have to get worse before they can get better.’