Joe Lansdale: All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

“It wasn’t for that old bridge over the creek, we’d have been done in just like Turpin,” Tony said. “We crawled under there and pushed up against the bank. There wasn’t no water in the creek, and we just listened to the wind blow all the morning, and watched that old dry bed get drier and fill up with sand. This afternoon when it was all winded out, we was still sitting, and that sand was over our ankles, but soon as it quit we started out walking, and it was like it was waiting on us to come out of hiding, because we hadn’t gone more than a mile or two when the storm hit us again.”

“Wasn’t nothing for us to do but keep on coming,” Jane said. “And we did. We knew if we lay down and waited somewhere, unless it was some good place like that bridge, we was done for, we’d never get up. We didn’t have any real choice but to put our noses forward and our ears back, like plow mules, and just keep on coming.”

“The wind blowed us down three or four times,” Tony said.

“We found the old fence line that runs from the Thompson property to yours, and we clung to that where it was standing, and we crawled where it wasn’t. When it was standing again, we took to it, and finally we come to your place and you come out to help us.”

Jane paused and looked around.

“By the way,” she said, “where’s your folks?”

I took a deep breath and told them. I was pretty weak by the time I was done explaining.

The last thing I said was “I buried them together in the barn.”

“You seem to be the only one of us that’s any good at getting anyone buried,” Tony said.

Jane just stared at me for a long time, long enough I could see how red-rimmed her eyes were and how the corners of her mouth was cracked from sand getting behind the scarf she’d had on.

“I’m real sorry, Jack,” she said. “Looks like we’re all orphans.”

5

You never knew about the dust storms. Sometimes there wouldn’t be any for a week; then there would be two in one day, or one that would last all day and through the night. Sometimes they went on for days at a time.

I thought over what Jane had said about Old Man Turpin’s car, and though I ain’t a thief, I began to think it was an idea that had some worth. Old Man Turpin wasn’t exactly the friendliest soul who had ever lived. He might have had a wife and family once, but nobody knew of any, and nobody knew him to do anything but farm, and quite well, until the dust storms came and wiped everybody out.

A fella like that wasn’t going to offer us his car, but I figured what we was talking about, being orphans and all and wanting to get out of Oklahoma, was just a form of borrowing. A wide form of it, but I made the whole thing agreeable in my head nonetheless. At least for the moment.

I had some bottles we could cork, and we went out to the barn and filled them, so as to try and have some water without dirt in it. Soon as we run the bottles full, we corked them and wrapped them in towels and put them in a flour sack. We used the pump then to get enough water to wipe our faces and hands and arms down. It was refreshing to be a little cleaner, if not exactly churchgoing in appearance.

But I will add this. With Jane washed up, and her having taken one of Mama’s combs and combed her hair out, she looked good. Like a less clean version of some of those women I’d seen on the covers of magazines, but wearing pants and work boots. I felt a little funny looking at her, like maybe there was some kind of magic in her.

We got a few of the canned goods left in the kitchen and packed those too, and then we decided the thing to do was to wait until tomorrow. If the weather was good in the morning, and the sky in the distance didn’t look like it had a line of storms coming, we’d head out as fast as we could go to Old Man Turpin’s.

I slept in Mama and Daddy’s bed and let Jane and Tony have my pallet in the corner. In the morning we got up and took a look outside. It looked okay.

There was a patch of scrub oaks that ran down by the dry bed of a long-gone creek behind the house. It went a long ways in the direction of Turpin’s place, and that seemed to me to be the way to go. The trees and the creek bank would give us some protection against any sudden storm that might come up, and it was shaded a little. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a plan of some sort.

We went down behind the house with our bags, and it was hard going until we got near the creek bed. The trees had kept some of the sand out, though they were ragged trees. The grasshoppers and birds had stripped all the leaves, and deer and lost cattle had chewed a lot of the bark. It was a bony kind of shade, but it was shade.

The creek was still dry, but we could walk there better than anywhere else because the bottom of it had been full of rocks, and even with the sand on top, it was fairly solid. The sky was as blue as a Jimmy Rogers song. There wasn’t a cloud in the heavens. The wind wasn’t blowing and the sun was high and hot and we were sweaty and tired by the time it was late afternoon and we come up behind Old Man Turpin’s house.

When we got there, we went around to the front porch, and just like Jane and Tony said, the porch was covered in sand, except where they had made a path to the front door. Old Man Turpin was in his chair, though you couldn’t tell it was him or a chair unless you looked real hard. He was just a big mound of sand mostly the color of Oklahoma, with a bit of Nebraska and a lot of Texas worked in, and I’m pretty sure Kansas was swirled in there too.

On the porch I brushed some dirt away from his face, and the first thing I seen was a corncob pipe in his mouth, the bowl all filled with sand. I scraped some more, and then I could see the brim of his hat mashed into his face. He had his eyes closed and his mouth open, and there was sand all in it, like someone had stood there and poured it into him with a funnel. He had drowned in dirt.

“See,” Tony said. “He’s deader’n an anvil.”

“He is, at that,” I said.

I guess we was being pretty casual about death, but for the last couple of years it had been all around us, and as of recent, up close and personal. It was the sort of thing that stunned you at the same time it made you feel as empty as a corn crib after the rats had been in it.

When we got inside the house, I was glad we had brought water, because there was none there. While Jane and Tony laid out some things from our bag so we could eat, I went out to the well and saw that it had filled in with sand. I figured that was why Old Man Turpin had given up. No water. No hope.

Back in the house, we sat down at the table and ate some peaches from cans. We drank some of the water we had brought, then we went outside to the barn to look at the Ford.

Like they’d said, it was under a tarp, so we pulled it off. Sometimes dust storms blew so hard they built up static electricity. Back when we had a car, I seen Daddy go out after a sandstorm, and even though the car was in the barn, enough dust had blown in and over it that when he touched the car door, it knocked him down like a lighting strike. He was dazed for half the day, and considered himself lucky not to have been killed.

So I was careful when I touched the Ford, kind of popping my hand in first, like a snake striking a mouse. When I hit the handle, nothing. I opened the door and looked around for the key, found it stuck up by the sun visor. I tried it and the car started right up without no trouble. Luckily, the gauge showed there was plenty of gas, so we was ready to go. Provided I didn’t wrap the car around a tree.

“Hot dog,” Tony said. “We can get out of this place.”

I turned off the car.

I said, “Don’t you think we ought to bury Old Man Turpin?”