Read Out of the Dust for Free Online Page B

in young
    Calb Hardly
    or his precious Wildcats.
    March 1935

Dust Storm
    I never would have gone to see the show
    if I had known a storm like this would come.
    I didn’t know when going in,
    but coming out
    a darker night I’d never seen.
    I bumped into a box beside the Palace door
    and scraped my shins,
    then tripped on something in my path,
    I don’t know what,
    and walked into a phone pole,
    bruised my cheek.
    The first car that I met was sideways in the road.
    Bowed down, my eyes near shut,
    trying to keep the dust out,
    I saw his headlights just before I reached them.
    The driver called me over and I felt my way,
    following his voice.
    He asked me how I kept the road.
    “I feel it with my feet,” I shouted over the
    roaring wind,
    I walk along the edge.
    One foot on the road, one on the shoulder.”
    And desperate to get home,
    he straightened out his car,
    and straddled tires on the road and off,
    and slowly pulled away.
    I kept along. I know that there were others
    on the road,
    from time to time I’d hear someone cry out,
    their voices rose like ghosts on the howling wind;
    no one could see. I stopped at neighbors’
    just to catch my breath
    and made my way from town
    out to our farm.
    Everyone said to stay
    but I guessed
    my father would
    come out to find me
    if I didn’t show,
    and get himself lost in the
    raging dust and maybe die
    and I
    didn’t want that burden on my soul.
    Brown earth rained down
    from sky.
    I could not catch my breath
    the way the dust pressed on my chest
    and wouldn’t stop.
    The dirt blew down so thick
    it scratched my eyes
    and stung my tender skin,
    it plugged my nose and filled inside my mouth.
    No matter how I pressed my lips together,
    the dust made muddy tracks
    across my tongue.
    But I kept on,
    spitting out mud,
    covering my mouth,
    clamping my nose,
    the dust stinging the raw and open
    stripes of scarring on my hands,
    and after some three hours I made it home.
    Inside I found my father’s note
    that said he’d gone to find me
    and if I should get home, to just stay put.
    I hollered out the front door
    and the back;
    he didn’t hear,
    I didn’t think he would.
    The wind took my voice and busted it
    into a thousand pieces,
    so small
    the sound
    blew out over Ma and Franklin’s grave,
    thinner than a sigh.
    I waited for my father through the night, coughing up
    dust,
    cleaning dust out of my ears,
    rinsing my mouth, blowing mud out of my nose.
    Joe De La Flor stopped by around four to tell me
    they found one boy tangled in a barbed-wire fence,
    another smothered in a drift of dust.
    After Joe left I thought of the famous Lindberghs,
    and how their baby was killed and never came back
    to them.
    I wondered if my father would come back.
    He blew in around six A.M.
    It hurt,
    the sight of him
    brown with dirt,
    his eyes as red as raw meat,
    his feet bruised from walking in worn shoes
    stepping where he couldn’t see
    on things that bit and cut into his flesh.
    I tried to scare up something we could eat,
    but couldn’t keep the table clear of dust.
    Everything I set
    down for our breakfast
    was covered before we took a bite,
    and so we chewed the grit and swallowed
    and I thought of the cattle
    dead from mud in their lungs,
    and I thought of the tractor
    buried up to the steering wheel,
    and Pete Guymon,
    and I couldn’t even recognize the man
    sitting across from me,
    sagging in his chair,
    his red hair gray and stiff with dust,
    his face deep lines of dust,
    his teeth streaked brown with dust.
    I turned the plates and glasses upside down,
    crawled into bed, and slept.
    March 1935

Broken Promise
    It rained
    a little
    everywhere
but here.
    March 1935

Motherless
    If Ma could put her arm across my shoulder
    sometime,
    or stroke back my hair,
    or sing me to sleep, making the soft sounds,
    the reassuring noises,
    that no matter how brittle and sharp life seemed,
    no matter how brittle and sharp she seemed,
    she was still my ma who loved me,
    then I think I wouldn’t be so