Tag: Singers Soldiers and Saboteurs

Gullywasher But No End to Drought

No end to drought

August 31, 1935

Well, that gullywasher and the flood that followed it wasn’t the end of the drought. A couple of months later, Pop found me in the orchard sawing off another dead limb from the Macintosh apple tree.

“Nora, take it easy,” He grabbed my arm. “You’re gonna saw off your fingers.”

I looked over my shoulder. My tears were still streaming. “Our trees are all dying!”

Pop sighed. “I know, Nora, but maiming yourself won’t save them.”

“But, Pop, it all seems so hopeless. We can’t grow a crop. We can’t feed a steer. I can’t go dancing.” I buried my face in my hands.

“And Mom can’t stop coughing.”

“You know what the doctor said.” He gathered me into his arms. “Coughing out all that dust is good.”

I relaxed a bit.

“And at night, she takes that concoction your Aunt Mag mixed up from Grandma’s recipe. It helps her sleep.”

“I know, Pop. Her coughing doesn’t wake me up so much anymore.”

“See. Sometimes I think the old midwives and herbalists like your grandmother know a lot more than the doctors.”

“If the storms would just stop. If I could just see something green—once in a while.”

“You will, Nora. This drought is gonna stop sometime. Your grandparents used to talk about a drought in the 1870s that couldn’t seem to stop, either. And they had locusts. I guess it was pretty bad then, too.”

“You think it will stop?”

“In time, yes. Then you’ll see all the green you want. Wheat and oats and corn and lettuce and green beans. Carrots. What I wouldn’t give for a nice crisp carrot.”

“Or a tomato. Imagine a sweet, ripe tomato, meat filling your mouth, juice running down your chin. I wouldn’t even mind staining my shirt.” I leaned against his shoulder. “Pop, what do you suppose Connor’s eating these days?”

“Remember the letter we got last week. He’s in the Civilian Conservation Corps now. Said they’re sending him to Tahoe National Forest. I imagine they’ll feed those boys very well.”

“I’ll bet it’s pretty and green there. Think about when we took Uncle Lawrence to California—back when it rained here, and we could get away.”

“Sure do. We camped one night at Tahoe.”

“I remember the pine trees rustling in the breeze and the warm pine smell. We could see the stars peeking among the branches.”

“And the air felt so cool.” Pop released me, held my shoulders and pushed me away, looking into my eyes. “Maybe we can go there again when it starts to rain. It’ll take a few years to catch up, but maybe . . .”

“Maybe so, Pop, but you know, I really envy Connor. He’s in that beautiful country. In the woods. Up in the mountains. He probably isn’t even sweating himself dry.”

“Prob’ly not, Nora, but those boys are there to work. And if they’re still out there this winter, it’s gonna be pretty dang chilly.”

“Well, we’re working here, too, and I wouldn’t mind the cold and some snow crunching under my feet. Oh, Pop, I’m so tired of grit in my hair. Grit in my teeth and grit under my fingernails. I can’t ever feel clean. I’m afraid I’ll get stuck here and never see anything else. Never get to see what goes on in other places. Never do anything but what I’m doing right now.”

Pop looked a little startled. “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. Timbuktu. Cairo. London. Paris.”

“Really?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m just so tired of dust.”

“I know, Sweetheart, it really wears you down, doesn’t it?”

“To the nubbins.” I looked at my toes. They were beginning to show through my shoes. “What I wouldn’t do for a whole pair of shoes.” I looked at Pop. “Or the material to make a new dress. I haven’t even had a new dress in years. Neither has Mom—or you, Pop.”

Pop grinned. “I’m not too interested in a new dress,” he said.

I chuckled. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know. It does get depressing sometimes. “But,” he glanced toward the house, “we’d probably better get inside before the beans get cold.”

“Ugh,” I said, grabbing the saw I had dropped when Pop grabbed me. I swung it by my side as we walked to the house.

Categories: Families Fiction Great Plains

Tags:

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

Tags:

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

Tags:

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

Tags:

Singers, Soldiers, and Saboteurs: the next novel

Here’s what follows in audio form.

Hi everyone. Long time, no see. As you all know in your own lives, COVID is not over, but we’re learning to live with it. We’ve had some losses—some of them grievous.

My baby sister died last August.

But even so, we’re moving forward, maybe approaching normal lives. For me, that means writing.

What follows is a possible prologue for my next novel. It’s set during the Great Depression, World War II, and its immediate aftermath. This is the fourth in my series, Singers, Soldiers, and Saboteurs. (I have not necessarily written or published them in order.)

Nora appeared in See Willy See and in Gravy.  I have no title for this new book, so I’m just calling it Nora for now. I’m currently writing scenes in chronological order, but some of them may appear later in the book as flashbacks and some of them may be throw aways.

What I post here provides you an opportunity to glimpse my writing process. These are first drafts and they may change substantially between the time I post them and publication. I will try to post a new scene every second week or more often.

So . . . here she is, Nora Conroy, farm girl, diplomatic staff member, and saboteur. This is a novel and the whole story is made up. BUT, those of you who knew my sister will recognize Nora.

Prologue

Not all resisters worked with firearms or bombs or ducked around hiding in shadows. Some of us worked quietly in offices producing paper, at least at first. The Third Reich operated on paper—schedules, lists, statistics, and individual documents. If you could present a Nazi with the right piece of paper, you could go about your business unharmed. Heaven protect you, however, if you didn’t have that right document.

I didn’t know any of that when I arrived in Paris in February of 1940. I didn’t know anything except that war was coming and I was going to do my best at the American Embassy to keep my country out of it. I didn’t set out to resist anything but boredom. All I wanted when I signed up for the consulate in Paris was an adventure. All the time during the 1930s when my brother wandered around the western states, moving from national park to national park picking watercress and blueberries, trapping little creatures and catching fish to eat, I remained on the family farm eating a steady diet of dry beans.

I remember writing home about my arrival, ecstatic about dining in view of the Eiffel Tower and walking the Champs Élysées. By that time, I’d spent a couple of weeks in Washington D.C. touring the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and some of the Smithsonian. I’d visited the World’s Fair in New York City. Imagine all the new inventions! I wished I could take them all apart and see how they worked.

I’d crossed an ocean on my way to Europe and waited in London for transport to the Continent. While I waited, I visited Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. I found one of the maintenance people and, after much begging and pleading, got to see the inside of the works. WOW!

Before I left for Paris, I’d barely ventured past the borders of Nebraska and here I’d landed in Europe—in Paris, the City of Lights. I’d left the dust of the Dirty Thirties and I planned to see for myself what was going on in the world, and why it seemed to be going crazy. I thought I could help make it better.

I no more than took off my coat that first day in the consulate than I had a pile of exit visas to type. Amazed at the number of Americans in the city, I spent hours making sure they had all their documents. By the end of the week, I was beginning to realize that a lot of Europeans wanted to leave. In fact, I’d begun to realize their desperation and after all, I understood desperation. I’d spent the past decade in the Dust Bowl.

5 Comments

Categories: Fiction

Tags: