April 11, 1935

I’d carried buckets of water from the windmill to mix with the dust in the garden, turning over the resulting soil. I was going to plant those vegetables I’d planned last summer. When I began hearing geese honking, I looked toward the sound and saw geese and ducks flying in confused clusters with songbirds, all squawking and quacking and twittering. They appeared to fly in a panic. I turned to where they’d come from in the north. A black wall swept toward me in silence, stretching from east to west as far as I could see.

I stood staring. I couldn’t move. The curtain moved swiftly, rolling over hills and houses, windmills and fences. I smelled dust but heard no wind. I couldn’t understand. We’d had plenty of dust storms in the past fourteen months or so, but a roaring wind always pushed them. What I saw looked like the end of the world, but I heard nothing.

Strangely, I felt no fear—just awe at the beautiful, terrifying sight.

As Armageddon swallowed the neighbor’s barn, I began to hear Pop’s voice. “Nora! Get in the house!” But the words were meaningless in the face of such enormous power. “Nora!” Pop yelled in my ear. He scooped an arm around my waist, propelling me to the house.

“What was that?”

Pop shook me gently. “What were you thinking?”

“What was that?”

“Pop sighed. “I don’t know. I stepped out of the barn and there it was, coming fast.”

“The wind, Pop. I didn’t hear the wind.”

“I know. It’s like the dust was falling like rain—like a gully-washer. I don’t know what it means, how it moves, where it came from.”

Mom bustled in from the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“We don’t know,” Pop told her. “We seem to be having a dust storm without the wind.”

“How . . .”

“We don’t know.”

In moments, the house went dark. We heard the tick, tick, ticking of sand and dust tinkling against the windows. Mom felt her way to a kerosene lantern, and some matches she kept on the shelf beside it. The lantern only gave enough light to see each other dimly if we stood close together. Our eyes itched and we tried to breathe carefully. Not too deeply. The air felt heavy. Mom began coughing her familiar hack.

I felt my way to the kitchen for some scissors and the cheesecloth we’d brought home after our visit with Doc O’Neill almost a year earlier. I doubled over several layers and tied it around Mom’s nose and mouth, snipping the end.

“Can you breathe through that?”

“Well enough. You’d better cover up too—and make one for your father.”

The glass cloth we’d taped over the windows breathed with us, puffing out and in with a snap. We stared at each other, or rather at the white spots covering our noses and mouths. Mom coughed. We were going to need a lot more cheesecloth if this kept up.

Winter snows the year before had amounted to nothing, and spring rains hadn’t materialized yet either. The nice, rich topsoil that had helped Pop grow bumper crops of wheat and oats was piling up around the equipment and over the fencerows. After every storm Pop had to scoop a pile of it away from the barn doors on the west. Pasture the previous summer had become crisp and then gone under layers of dust. Pop had planted winter wheat, but it never germinated. Still hoping for spring rain, he’s set aside what little corn he grew for seed, but with the dust raining down on the fields, it would take a lot of real rain to grow a crop.

Mom had suggested that we send the cattle east to Otoe County, so we sent them to her Uncle Wesley Hickok who took them on shares. We sure couldn’t feed them.

The glass cloth was relatively clear, but the grid of stitching that held it together made it rather opaque. I kept looking out anyway, hoping I could see something out there. “The birds,” I said. “Pop, did you see all the birds flying before that curtain?”

“Curtain?”

“Yeah. It didn’t look like a cloud. It looked like a curtain.”

“Huh. I heard them. That’s part of what got me out of the barn to see what was going on.”

“I suppose we’ll lose all the chickens out chasing grasshoppers.”

“Animals are smart,” Mom said. “I heard the chickens squawking and I think they were running for the chicken house.”

“I guess we’re pretty much like the chickens.” I hesitated a moment, pulling a chair out from the table and plopping down on it. “I wish I could lay an egg.”

“What?” Mom said.

“At least it would be something useful.” I leaned my elbows in the grit on the table. “I can’t see to read. I can’t go outside and finish turning over the garden. If we took a roast out of the icebox, it would be covered with grit before we could get it into a pot. It’s too early to go to bed. I’m plumb bored out of my mind.” I glanced at Mom’s and Pop’s white masks. “I wish it would rain.”