Tag: Historical novel

It Rained! The End of the Drought?

The end of the Dust Storms?

June 15, 1935

The day after we returned from Red Cloud, I stormed around the house, stripping beds and pulling down curtains.

“Whoa Nora,” Mom said. “I can’t wash this stuff as fast as you drag it out here, and the bedding has to dry before night.”

“I’m just so excited to feel clean for a change.”

Mom coughed a bit then said, “I understand. I’m thrilled too, but we can’t do everything at once.”

“Okay,” I agreed, “I’ll dust and sweep. How’s that?”

“Just take it easy. Don’t stir it up so we can’t breathe.”

Chastened, I grabbed a bunch of dust rags and started shoving piles of dust off the furniture onto the floor. I used the dustmop to pick it up, had to take it outside and shake it out over and over. As I worked, I sang Woodie Guthrie’s song, “You get a line and I’ll get a pole, Honey; You get a line and I’ll get a pole, Babe; You get a line and I’ll get a pole; We’ll go fishin’ in the crawdad hole; Honey, Baby mine . . .”

Pop stepped in from milking and grinned. “I haven’t seen such cheer in months. Hard to believe what a little bit of rain can do.”

“Well, the dust storms are over, and we can live again.”

“Maybe. One gully-washer doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the drought.”

“Don’t be a spoil sport, Pop.”

He chuckled. “I’m actually happy, too. I do hope it lasts. Since it’s too wet to get into the field yet, I’ll help you gals out in here.”

While I worked on shining up the house, Pop helped Mom. He wrung the bedding and moved it into the rinse tub. He had to empty and fill both tubs three times. And he hung everything on the line for Mom. Even though she wasn’t coughing so much now, she hadn’t regained her strength, and Pop always looked out for Mom.

By supper time, we had all collapsed around the table. We ate slowly and lightly. As soon as we finished, I announced that I would go outside and use the remaining daylight to write a letter to Connor. Mom and Pop went to bed.

I sat on the west side of the house looking out at the straggly remains of the orchard.

Dear Connor,

It rained! It rained! It rained! You can come home now. The drought’s over.

We didn’t get just a little drizzle like we’ve been having for the past year and a half. We got a gully-washer. The yard was so muddy, our boots kept getting stuck in it. The bridge washed out at the bottom of the hill, so we’ll need you to help build it back.

We took the horses down to Red Cloud to see the flood on the Republican. It was awful! There were houses and barns floating downstream. I saw a gigantic tree with its whole root system lying on its side. I saw cows and pigs and chickens—and a man. He was floating face down, swirling around in the eddies. Connor, it was awful. Mom said we couldn’t rescue him because anybody who went into that torrent would drown too.

But imagine, Connor. They may never find him. What about his family? They’ll never know what happened to him. They won’t be able to bury him. It’s so awful. I wanted to be sick, but I wasn’t.

Remember when I told you about what we were doing for Mom’s cough? She still coughs some, but not nearly like before you left. The glass cloth keeps a lot of the dust out, but it still seeps in some. She never goes outside when the wind blows, and you know how often that is. BUT it’s over! We don’t need to worry about dust anymore. It can blow all it wants.

I ran out of light about then, so I lit a kerosene lantern and went upstairs to my bedroom. I cleared my comb, brush, and lotion jars off the dressing table that Pop and I had made with orange crates and a board left from some other project. Then I went on with my letter.

I spent the day dusting and sweeping. It will probably take a couple of times to really get it clean, but it’s a start. Pop helped Mom wash the sheets and quilts. They all dried by bedtime in the nice little breeze we had.

I’m so bored here. The rain made everything better, but I’m lonesome and I envy you out there in that Civilian Conservation Corps camp—in Tahoe National Forest. You’re meeting a lot more people. Why don’t they have a program for women too? I could work hard like you do. I already work hard here on the farm, but nobody believes we women can do much. Sometimes I get so mad.

Well, I guess that’s all. Take good care of yourself, and we’ll probably see you when your hitch is up with the CCC.

Nora

I slipped my letter into an envelope, licked it, and set it up on the dresser to mail in the morning. I looked out the window at a full moon that was distorted by the glass cloth, then stripped out of my clothes, slipped a clean nightgown over my head and crawled between clean sheets.

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

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The Great 1935 Republican River Flood

We thought the drought was over

May 31, 1935

Did you ever hear that you’ve got to be careful what you wish for? It has always seemed a weird thing to say—until it rained.

All morning, we watched the clouds billowing and building, turning darker and darker. At about eleven, it began rumbling in the west as we went about our chores—abbreviated as they were by lack of livestock to tend. The sky towered above us when the flash blinded us and the giant red cedar in the yard sizzled. We watched the top of the tree blaze—and then the clouds opened up and quenched the flames.

It rained four inches in half an hour, filling the rain gauge, and it kept on raining. Pop stood in the open doorway watching the deluge as our house filled with the sweet smell of rain, of ozone, of wet soil. We all took the deepest breaths we’d taken in years.

“None of this is soaking in,” Pop said, shaking his head. “If there was any topsoil left after the windstorms, it’s headed down to the Missouri River now.”

It rained, and it kept on raining. I went outside and danced a jig in the mud, splashing myself with filth and laughing.

Our farmstead sits on a tall hill, but the creek in the bottom became a brown torrent, taking out the bridge and all the little critters that couldn’t get to high ground fast enough. At chore time, we slogged through slimy yellow clay in our four-buckle boots. The mud would grab our feet, slurping us into its grip. The boots would have pulled off if not for the buckles. When we finally managed to pull one foot loose, the mud made a loud sucking sound as if it were sad to lose its grip. Sometimes, the release of tension on one foot with the other still stuck, would send us sprawling.

Even though her hair was plastered to her head and her clothes were soaked, Mom told us how happy it made her to walk outside and breathe at the same time—without a mask. She milked the cows and fed the chickens, and she didn’t even seem to mind when she ended up face down in mud soup.

After sixteen months of dust storms and two years of drought, we thought it was over. As soon as the fields dried up, Pop would plant a crop. He’d have to buy seed corn because what he’d already planted had washed down the hills and into the creek. Maybe somewhere in the Mississippi Delta it would come up.

A couple of days after the rainstorm, we managed to get the horses across the creek, which ran inside its banks by then. Pop and Mom and I rode down to the Republican River at Red Cloud. Our little town got its supplies from the rail depot there. It was a long ride—we didn’t often ride the horses, but we’d have to rebuild the bridge before we could take the wagon.

We heard the river long before we saw it, the Republican River flooding, the roar of surging water punctuated with thumps and bumps. When we got to the south edge of town, we got our first glimpse of the carnage. Water filled the valley almost bluff to bluff. The depot, where Pop picked up his carload of fenceposts, was half under water. Whole houses and barns swirled past, smashing into trees that hadn’t given up to the flood. I saw a bloated cow and a bunch of waterlogged chickens sweeping past our vantage point where we stood among a crowd of others there to assess the damage.

Then I spotted a man in a red and white checked shirt, face down, on the crest, turning lazily—head first, then feet first.

“Get him out,” I screamed.

Mom gathered me in her arms. “We can’t, Nora. Anybody going out in that torrent would only drown. Nothing anybody can do for him.”

“Bury him,” I said.

“There’ll be a lot of burying when this is over. They won’t find everybody.”

“But Mom . . .”

“I know, Nora. We are so lucky. We’re all here and we’re all safe.”

“Not Connor.”

“I know, Nora. He’s not here and I miss him every day. But I have to believe he’s safe in that CCC camp.”

I wanted to throw up. That poor man. And what about his family? What if it were Connor and I would never see him again. What if I never knew what happened to him?

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

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Atmospheric Dust Storm

Atmospheric Dust Storm

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.”

Categories: Fiction Great Plains

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