A Sky Full of Dust

Chapter 1: The Assignment

The office smelled of mimeograph ink and stale coffee, and Joanna Rawlings told herself this was exactly what she wanted.

She had arrived in Oklahoma City three days prior, stepping off the train from Wichita with a single suitcase and a letter of appointment folded into her coat pocket. The letter was from the Agricultural Extension Service, Division of Emergency Relief, and it promised a position in accounting and record management. Joanna had imagined a desk near a window, columns of numbers that behaved themselves, and the quiet satisfaction of making figures balance at the end of each day.

She had not imagined the man sitting across from her now.

His name was Gerald Poole, and he was the state liaison for the Extension Service—a thin man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a habit of drumming his fingers on whatever surface was nearest. He had been talking for ten minutes about the crisis in the western counties, about topsoil that had simply blown away, about families eating tumbleweeds boiled in salt water. Joanna listened politely and waited for him to get to the part about her desk.

"So you see, Miss Rawlings, the situation is dire." Poole pushed a folder across the table. "We're deploying mobile relief units to the worst-hit areas. Seed distribution, farming guidance, basic supply coordination. The federal government is funding it, but we're short on personnel."

"I understand," Joanna said. "And you need someone to manage the accounts for these units."

Poole's fingers stopped drumming. He looked at her with something between sympathy and amusement. "No, Miss Rawlings. I need someone to run one."

The silence that followed was the kind that reshapes a life, though Joanna didn't know it yet. She stared at the folder. Inside were maps of the Oklahoma panhandle—Cimarron County, Texas County, Beaver County—marked with red dots where homesteads still held on. There were dozens of them, scattered across distances that made her chest tighten.

"I'm a bookkeeper," she said.

"You're a college-educated woman with organizational skills, and right now that makes you more qualified than half the men we've sent out there." Poole leaned back. "I won't lie to you. The county relief coordinator in Boise City—man named Earl Fenton—he's not enthusiastic about this unit. He thinks it's a waste of resources. He's given us eight weeks to show results, or he pulls the funding."

"Eight weeks."

"Eight weeks. You'll have a truck, a budget for fuel and supplies, and a team of three."

"Who are they?"

Poole opened a second folder. "Faye Buchanan. Widow, fifty-one years old. She homesteaded in the panhandle for twenty years before losing her place. Knows every back road, every creek bed, every family still hanging on out there. She volunteered."

Joanna studied the name. "And the others?"

"Bessie Tompkins. She's an agronomist out of Langston University. Brilliant woman—published two papers on drought-resistant grain varieties. The men in our agricultural division wouldn't work with her, so she's been sitting in a storage room cataloging seed samples for six months." Poole's expression darkened briefly. "She's colored. That'll be a complication in some of the townships."

Joanna said nothing. She had grown up in Kansas, and she knew what he meant.

"The third is Hazel Dalton. Seventeen. Her family's farm went under last spring—father took the rest of them to California. She stayed behind. She's been working as a mechanic at a filling station in Guymon. The girl can fix anything with an engine, and out where you're going, that's worth more than a medical degree."

Joanna closed the folder. Through the window, Oklahoma City hummed with its ordinary business—streetcars clanging, men in hats crossing intersections, a world that still made sense. Out west, the sky was a different color. She had seen photographs in the newspapers: black blizzards rolling across the plains like walls of night, houses half-buried in drifts of dust, children with rags tied over their faces.

"Why me?" she asked. "You must have people with field experience."

"The people with field experience are all men, and they're all assigned to units that Fenton actually supports." Poole met her eyes. "I'll be honest, Miss Rawlings. Fenton approved this unit because he doesn't believe four women can accomplish anything. He thinks you'll drive out there, get scared, and come back in a week. That's why he said yes."

"And you think differently?"

"I think the panhandle is dying, and I'll take help from anyone willing to give it."

Joanna looked at the maps again. The red dots seemed to pulse like distress signals. She thought about her desk in Wichita, the one she had left behind—the neat rows of ledgers, the predictable hours, the slow erosion of her spirit that she had mistaken for contentment.

"When do I leave?" she said.

---

She met the truck before she met the team.

It was parked behind the Extension Service warehouse on the south side of town—a 1929 Ford Model AA with a flatbed that had been fitted with wooden side rails and a canvas cover. The paint was the color of rust because most of it was rust. The tires were bald on the inside edges, and the windshield had a crack running from corner to corner like a river on a map.

Joanna walked around it twice, then climbed up onto the flatbed and looked underneath the canvas. Crates of seed stock—sorghum, millet, Sudan grass—were stacked alongside boxes of pamphlets, a first-aid kit, two five-gallon water cans, and a set of hand tools that looked older than she was.

"She's ugly, but she runs."

Joanna turned. A girl was standing at the rear of the truck, wiping her hands on a rag that was dirtier than her hands. She was small and wiry, with sun-bleached hair cut short and practical, and she wore overalls that had been patched so many times they looked like a quilt.

"Hazel Dalton?" Joanna asked.

"Yes, ma'am." The girl tucked the rag into her back pocket. "I already replaced the fuel pump and cleaned the carburetor. She'll make it to Boise City, at least. After that, I'll need parts."

"How do you know what parts you'll need if you don't know what'll break?"

"Everything breaks out there, ma'am. It's just a question of when."

Joanna climbed down from the flatbed. Hazel couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but she moved with the easy confidence of someone who understood machines the way other people understood conversation. There was grease under her fingernails and a smudge of oil on her cheek, and she looked at the truck the way a mother looks at a difficult child—with exasperation and fierce loyalty.

"You can call me Joanna."

Hazel considered this. "I'll try, ma'am."

They were loading the last of the supplies when Faye Buchanan arrived. She came around the corner of the warehouse like a woman who had been walking into hard wind her whole life—shoulders forward, chin up, eyes narrowed against a brightness that wasn't there. She was tall and lean, with iron-gray hair pulled back in a bun and a face that had been handsome once and was now something better: memorable.

"You're the bookkeeper," Faye said. It wasn't a question.

"I am."

"You ever been past Woodward?"

Joanna shook her head.

"Then you don't know what you're getting into." Faye set down a canvas duffel bag and looked at the truck. "That's what they gave us?"

"Hazel says it runs."

"Hazel's seventeen. At seventeen, everything runs." But Faye's mouth twitched at one corner—not quite a smile, but close. She extended a hand, and her grip was like a fence post. "I know the territory. I know the people. You tell me where you want to go, and I'll get us there."

Bessie Tompkins was the last to arrive, and she came by bus from Langston, a town sixty miles northeast. She was a compact woman in her mid-thirties with steady dark eyes and a quiet bearing that Joanna would later learn concealed a mind like a steel trap. She wore a pressed cotton dress and carried a leather satchel stuffed with papers and a worn copy of a USDA soil conservation manual.

"Miss Rawlings?" Bessie offered her hand. "I'm told we're going to save the panhandle."

"We're going to try."

"Good. Trying is honest." Bessie looked at the truck, at Hazel tinkering with the engine, at Faye studying a road map spread across the hood. "I should tell you—I requested a field assignment nine times. They told me there was no appropriate placement. What they meant was there was no placement where a colored woman wouldn't cause trouble."

"Will you cause trouble?" Joanna asked.

"I intend to grow things in soil that everyone says is dead. If that's trouble, then yes."

Joanna looked at her team. A widow who knew the land. An agronomist the system had tried to bury. A teenage mechanic who had already lost everything. And herself—a bookkeeper who had never driven past Woodward.

Eight weeks. She folded the map and put it in the truck.

"Let's go," she said.