Sarah Zettel: Dust girl

Probably shy . I smoothed down the bedcovers. The Hoppers would want to wash up, I realized. So they needed towels. I started out again, thinking about what we had left in the linen cupboard, but something caught my eye and I stopped.

The Imperial’s thresholds and doors all had a dark walnut varnish that was still smooth despite being nearly fifty years old. On the doorjamb, though, right at waist height, a pale crescent had been gouged out of the wood.

I straightened up and hurried down the hall. I tried hard not to think about how that fresh crescent-shaped, splintery gouge was at the same height as little Clarinda Hopper’s twitchy upper lip.

Mrs. Hopper, of course, found the rooms charming. She strutted about the sitting room with its old-fashioned mahogany and burgundy velvet furniture as if she was in the Waldorf-Astoria. I opened the doors off the sitter to show the two bedrooms and the private bath. The smile on her perfectly-done-up mouth never once wavered. Of course, she also hadn’t taken off her tinted spectacles, so I couldn’t exactly be sure how much she really saw.

Mr. Hopper only seemed to notice the brass, cannon-shaped lighter on the mantel. He lit himself a cigarette and blew a fat cloud of smoke at the ceiling, his whole frame relaxing instantly.

The older girl, Letitia, seemed less enthusiastic. She prodded suspiciously at the sofa cushion before she sat down. Clarinda, on the other hand, saw the big bed in the master bedroom. She made a beeline for it, climbed aboard, and started bouncing up and down. I grinned. It was the most normal thing I’d seen any of those kids do.

William came charging in from across the hall. “Pa, I’m hungry!” he shouted as he barreled through the sitting room to join his sister in jumping on the bed.

“Me too!” cried little Clarinda. “I’m hungry!”

“Hungry, hungry!” chanted both kids, bouncing hard enough now to make the brass headboard bang against the wall.

“Yeah, Pop.” Hunter strolled in and flopped down on the sofa next to his sister. “It’s about time for something, isn’t it?”

“I have to say, I’m famished as well.” Letitia looked over the rims of her spectacles at me. Her eyes looked big and black in the dim room. “There must be something here.”

Mr. Hopper blew out another big cloud of smoke. “Well, Miss Callie, what about it?”

“Yes, sir.” I tried to sound brisk, but I was tired. Hauling all the big sheets and blankets and making up all the beds in the thick heat had already been a lot of work. My arms felt like lead. I had a hundred and fifty dollars to earn, though, and I’d known it wasn’t going to be easy. “I’ll have to get to the store, but I’ll be back shortly. If you’d like to wash up…?” I gestured toward the bath and the stack of clean towels.

“Fine idea. Be off with you then.” He waved his cigarette toward the door and I was off with me.

I tried to tell myself I didn’t have to hurry that much. It wasn’t like they could up and leave. They were stuck here until the roads got dug out. With a big duster, that could take days. But something inside me didn’t think getting the Hoppers mad would be any kind of good idea.

Outside, I squinted into the wind and got my bearings down the line of dust that had been Front Street. What few people still lived in town must have sealed themselves into their shuddering houses. Alone, I waded through sand up to my ankles, and I passed drifts that would have been up to my knees. I could breathe and see just fine, but that wasn’t a comfort anymore, because it wasn’t right. There was no way I should be able to walk through this. Nothing human could.

I gritted my teeth and bent double into the wind. I couldn’t think like that. I had to keep moving.

I hadn’t forgotten the voices from this morning. My ears strained, waiting for them. I wanted to hear them. If I heard them, maybe I could follow them, find out who they belonged to.

But it wasn’t those dusty wind voices I heard.

“Take this hammer…”

I stopped and immediately sank halfway up my shins. Somewhere, a muffled, distant, draggy voice was singing.

“Take this hammer, carry it to the captain!” THUMP! The line ended in a crash like somebody kicking a door.

“Take this hammer, carry it to the captain!” THUMP!

“Tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone.” THUMP!

The verse dissolved into a bout of coughing. I turned slowly, trying to pick out where the voice was coming from.

“If he ask you, was I running?” THUMP!

It was hard to tell over the wind, but it started to sound like the jailhouse.

“If he ask you, was I running?” THUMP!

It sure didn’t sound like Sheriff Davis making all that noise, not that I’d ever heard him sing.

“If he ask you, was I running?” THUMP!

So if it wasn’t the sheriff singing in the jailhouse, who was it?

“Tell him I was flyin’, tell him I was flyin’.” THUMP!

The jail was the only building on Front Street besides the post office that was made of actual brick. It was small, just a box big enough to hold two desks and a cell with two cots.

“Hello?” I kicked a tumbleweed back from the jailhouse door. The front room with its two desks was empty. Nobody had sealed it up. Dust had made a desert out of the floor and piled itself high in all the corners.

“Hello?” called a boy’s voice from the back. “Is somebody there? Help!”

The Slow Run cell didn’t have barred walls like the ones in the movies. The solid steel door had just one little window at the top. Right now, the window also had the top of a boy’s tousled head and two blue eyes peering through.

“Help! Please! I can’t get out!”

Which kinda seemed like the point of being in jail. “How’d you get in?”

“I was too slow hopping a reefer and they locked me up.” I didn’t know for sure what a reefer was, but I guessed it had something to do with train cars. Sheriff Davis didn’t like hobos and bindle stiffs in his town any more than he liked Indians or Negroes or Mexicans. Everybody knew if he caught a vagrant, no matter how young, he shipped them out to work off the fines by chopping cotton or digging ditches.

“This fella ran in and yelled something about a God Almighty big duster kicking up out there, and the sheriff took off. I don’t think he’s coming back. Please, let me out.”

It was hard to tell from just the top of his head, but the boy didn’t look much older than me. Still, he might have been a thief, or worse. Some of them were. Then I thought how there wasn’t a window in there. I thought about being locked up alone in the hot dark, with the storm going on, and about being on the other side of that door having somebody turn around and walk out.

I didn’t know what this kid had done, but right then I knew it wasn’t enough to deserve that.

The big iron key still hung on a hook behind Sheriff Davis’s desk, so I had the door open in a few seconds. The boy tumbled out, kicking through the dust drifts.

“Thank you,” he mumbled, then ducked past me to the little sink. He drank down a tin cup full of water, gasped, and drank down another. It must have been an oven in there. His face was flushed under all the dirt, and he was shaking. He didn’t smell so good either. I didn’t look in the cell to see if they had a toilet in there, ’cause I had a feeling I didn’t want to know.

“You okay?” I asked.

He nodded, but then his face kind of twisted up and he coughed hard and spat brown into the sink. He stayed there, hanging on tight to the sides of the basin, until he wasn’t shaking so much. Then he straightened up so I could get a better look.