Black Sunday

Chapter 1: The Sound of Leaving

The Hendersons left on a Tuesday.

Opal watched from the fence post where she liked to sit mornings before school, her bare feet hooked through the wire, her chin on her knees. Their truck was a 1928 Ford with a cracked radiator and a mattress roped to the roof, and it came down the section road trailing a plume of tan dust that hung in the air long after the engine noise faded. Mrs. Henderson sat in the cab holding her baby. Mr. Henderson drove with both hands on the wheel and his jaw set like a man walking into a fight. Their two boys rode in the back among the furniture, and the younger one—Teddy, who was in Opal's class—raised his hand once, a small wave that might have been goodbye or might have been him swatting a fly.

Then they were gone.

Opal counted on her fingers. The Hendersons made seven families since Christmas. Seven families who had loaded up and pointed their trucks toward Amarillo or Tucson or the promise of California, which was just a word people said now the way they used to say heaven—like it was a place too good to be real but you had to believe in it anyway because what else was there.

She climbed down from the fence and walked back toward the house. Windhollow Farm. That was what her grandfather had named the place when he homesteaded it in 1901, because of the way the wind came through the draw behind the barn and made a low, hollow sound like someone blowing across the mouth of a jug. Opal's grandfather had thought it was beautiful. Opal's father said the old man must have been touched in the head, because there was nothing beautiful about wind that never stopped.

The house was a white clapboard box with a porch on the south side and a root cellar underneath. It had been white once, anyway. Now it was the color of old teeth, scoured by four years of dust that got into everything—your hair, your food, your eyes, the seams of your clothes, the works of the clock on the mantel so that time itself seemed to grind slower. Opal's mother had given up washing the windows. What was the point? The dust came back before the rags were dry.

Inside, the kitchen smelled like coffee and kerosene. Hattie Crockett stood at the stove with a dish towel pressed over her mouth and nose, the way she always did now when she cooked, because the flour dust and the wood smoke set off the coughing. She was thirty-four years old but looked fifty. Her hair, which had been the color of dark honey in the photograph on the mantel, was streaked with gray and pulled back in a knot. Her hands were red and rough. But her eyes were still the same—brown and warm and quick, the kind of eyes that noticed everything and forgave most of it.

"Hendersons are gone," Opal said.

Hattie nodded without turning from the stove. "I know. Luella came by yesterday to say goodbye. Gave me her canning jars." She paused. "Said she wouldn't need them in California."

"Will they come back?"

"No, baby. I don't think so."

Opal sat at the table and pulled her schoolbook toward her, but she didn't open it. She was thinking about Teddy Henderson's hand raised in the back of the truck. She was thinking about how many empty desks there would be at school today. She was thinking about the sound the truck made as it went away—the rattle of pots and the creak of rope and the engine coughing like a sick animal—and how that sound was becoming the most familiar sound in Burnt Fork County. More familiar than birdsong. More familiar than church bells. The sound of leaving.

"Opal. School."

"Yes, ma'am."

She gathered her book and her lunch pail, which held a biscuit and a piece of salt pork and an apple so wrinkled it looked like a old man's face. At the door she stopped and looked back. Her mother had set down the dish towel and was leaning against the counter with her eyes closed, one hand pressed flat against her chest. Just breathing. Just trying to breathe.

"Mama?"

Hattie opened her eyes and smiled. "Go on now. Tell Miss Ivy I said good morning."

Opal walked the mile to school along the section road, which was really just two ruts in the dirt with tumbleweeds piled against the fence on either side. The land was flat in every direction, flat the way a table is flat, flat the way the sea must be flat though Opal had never seen the sea. The wheat fields that had once made this country rich—her grandfather's generation had called it the breadbasket of the world—were bare now, plowed under and blown away. What was left was hardpan and dust and the stumps of fence posts sticking up like rotten teeth.

The sky was the color of a bruise. Not storm-dark, not yet, but that yellowish-gray that meant the dust was up somewhere to the north or west, a haze that turned the sun into a pale disc you could stare at without squinting. Opal had read in a magazine at the drugstore that people in New York City had seen dust from Oklahoma on their windowsills. She tried to imagine that—her dirt, her father's dirt, landing on some stranger's window three states away. It seemed impossible and also exactly right. Everything here was leaving. Even the ground.

The school was a one-room building with a bell tower and an American flag that snapped and faded in the wind. There had been thirty-two students at the start of the year. Now there were fourteen. Miss Ivy Greenleaf stood on the steps ringing the bell with the determined cheerfulness of a woman conducting a symphony for an empty concert hall.

"Good morning, Opal."

"Good morning, Miss Ivy. Mama says good morning too."

"How is your mother?"

"She's fine," Opal said, which was what you said.

Inside, the desks were arranged in rows, and the empty ones had been pushed to the back so the room wouldn't look so hollow. Opal took her seat near the window. Sonny was already there, two rows up, his thin shoulders hunched over his reader. Her brother was small for eight, with a narrow chest and dark circles under his eyes that made him look like a raccoon. He breathed with a faint whistle, like a teakettle that someone had taken off the heat but hadn't quite stopped singing.

"Hey, Sonny."

He turned and grinned. He had lost his two front teeth and hadn't grown the new ones yet, which gave him a jack-o'-lantern look that Opal found both ridiculous and dear. "Hey, Opal. Did you see the Hendersons go?"

"I saw."

"Teddy said California has oranges big as your head."

"Teddy Henderson is a liar."

"He is not. His mama told him."

"Then his mama is a liar too."

Sonny looked hurt, so Opal reached over and mussed his hair, which was the same dark honey color their mother's used to be. "Maybe they do have big oranges," she said. "I wouldn't know. I've never been."

"Are we going to California?"

"No."

"How do you know?"

"Because Daddy says we're not."

This was true, as far as it went. Roscoe Crockett had said, more than once and with the kind of iron in his voice that didn't invite discussion, that no Crockett had ever run from a fight and he wasn't about to be the first. The farm had been his father's and his father's father's, and he would hold it until God Almighty pried it from his hands. He said this at supper, he said it at church, he said it to the men at the feed store who were selling their equipment for pennies on the dollar. He said it so often and so firmly that Opal had begun to wonder if he was trying to convince himself.

Miss Ivy called the class to order. There were fourteen of them, ages six to fifteen, and she taught them all in one room with one chalkboard and a set of textbooks so old that President Coolidge was still in office inside their pages. Today's lesson was geography. Miss Ivy unrolled the map of the United States and pointed to Oklahoma.

"Who can tell me what this region is called?"

A boy named Curtis Plank raised his hand. "The Dust Bowl, ma'am."

Miss Ivy's smile tightened. "That's what the newspapers call it, Curtis. The proper name is the Southern Plains. And it wasn't always like this. Twenty years ago, this was some of the most productive farmland in the world." She traced the outline of the panhandle with her pointer. "The soil here is—was—some of the richest on earth. Deep, dark topsoil, built up over thousands of years by the buffalo grass that held it in place."

"What happened to the grass?" asked a girl named Pearl.

"We plowed it up," Miss Ivy said. "During the Great War, wheat prices were high, and everyone plowed up the grass to plant wheat. Millions of acres. And when the rain stopped and the wheat died, there was nothing left to hold the soil down. So the wind took it."

She said this simply, the way you'd explain how a glass broke—it fell, it shattered, that's what happens. But Opal heard something else underneath the words. Anger, maybe. Or grief. Miss Ivy was from back east somewhere, had come to Oklahoma five years ago to teach because she believed in public education the way some people believed in God—completely and without much evidence that it was doing any good. She was tall and thin and wore her hair in a braid and had a way of looking at you over her spectacles that made you feel like the only person in the room.

After school, Opal walked home with Sonny. He moved slowly, stopping every few hundred yards to catch his breath. The whistle in his chest was louder in the afternoon, when the dust was up. Opal carried his book bag along with hers and didn't say anything about the stopping, because saying something made him ashamed and shame made his breathing worse.

They passed the Dorsett place, where old Lafe Dorsett sat on his porch with his fiddle across his knees. Lafe was eighty if he was a day, brown and gnarled as a fence post, with white hair that stood up like dandelion fluff. He had been a cowboy in the Territory days, before statehood, and he knew songs that nobody else knew—songs about cattle drives and Indian fights and women whose names had been forgotten by everyone except the men who loved them and the fiddlers who played their tunes.

"Hey there, Crockett children," Lafe called.

"Hey, Mr. Dorsett."

"You want to hear a tune?"

Opal looked at Sonny, who nodded. They sat on the porch steps and Lafe played "The Brazos River Waltz," which was a song about a cowboy who fell in love with a girl at a dance and then lost her when the river flooded and she was swept away. It was a sad song, but Lafe played it with such sweetness that the sadness felt like something you could hold in your hands, something with weight and warmth, not empty or bitter but full.

When he finished, Sonny clapped his small hands together. Lafe grinned, showing the three teeth he had left.

"Mr. Dorsett," Opal said, "where did you learn that song?"

"From a fella named Chalk Dawson, up in the Cherokee Strip, back in ninety-three. He learned it from a Mexican drover, and who the Mexican learned it from, God only knows. That song's been passed hand to hand like a dollar bill, and it's worth more than most of them."

"Does anybody else know it?"

"Not that I know of. Chalk's dead. The Mexican's dead. Most everybody from them days is dead." He looked at his fiddle. "When I go, I reckon it goes with me."

Opal thought about that all the way home. A song that lived inside one old man's fingers, and when those fingers stopped, the song stopped too. It seemed like a kind of dying that was worse than regular dying, because at least when a person died, other people remembered them. But when a song died, there was nothing left at all. Not even a grave.

At supper, Roscoe said the blessing and they ate beans and cornbread and the last of the salt pork. Roscoe was a big man, broad-shouldered and thick-armed, with hands that could gentle a horse or split a fence rail. His face was weathered dark, with deep lines around his eyes from squinting into wind and sun. He had been handsome once—Opal had seen the wedding photograph—but now he looked like something the land had used up and was getting ready to throw away.

He ate without talking. He had been quiet lately, quieter than usual, and Opal had noticed him sitting on the porch after dark, staring at nothing, his jaw working like he was chewing on words he couldn't swallow.

"Hendersons left today," Hattie said.

Roscoe grunted.

"That's seven since Christmas."

"I can count."

Hattie looked at her plate. Sonny looked at Opal. Opal looked at her father and wanted to say something—what, she didn't know, something that would crack open the silence and let the air in—but the silence was too thick, too heavy, like the dust itself, and she couldn't find a way through it.

After supper, Hattie washed the dishes and sang. She always sang when she washed dishes—old hymns, folk songs, lullabies she'd learned from her own mother in the hills of eastern Oklahoma. Her voice was a clear soprano that had once carried to the back of the church without effort, but now it was thinner, breathier, with a rasp underneath like sandpaper on wood. She sang "Down in the Valley" and "Shenandoah" and a lullaby called "Hush Little Starling" that she said her grandmother had brought from Tennessee.

Opal dried the dishes and listened and thought about Lafe Dorsett's fiddle tune dying when he died, and she thought about her mother's voice getting thinner every month, and she thought about the Hendersons' truck disappearing into the dust, and she felt something she couldn't name—a pressure behind her eyes, a tightness in her throat, not quite sadness and not quite fear but something in between, like standing on the edge of a high place and looking down.

That night she lay in bed and listened to the wind. It never stopped, the wind. It came from the north or the west or sometimes from every direction at once, and it carried the dust with it, fine as flour, sharp as ground glass. She could hear it hissing against the windows, sifting under the door, piling in the corners. In the next room, Sonny coughed in his sleep—a wet, rattling cough that made Opal's chest hurt in sympathy.

She thought about all the things that were disappearing. The families. The farms. The songs. The stories. The way the land used to look, which she could barely remember—green wheat waving in the wind, meadowlarks singing from fence posts, thunderstorms that brought rain instead of dirt. All of it going, going, gone, like a photograph left in the sun until the image faded to nothing.

Somebody ought to do something, she thought.

But she was twelve years old, and she didn't know what.