On May 9, 1934, the day before Juanita was to head back to the 8T8, a duster began as a series of whirlwinds in eastern Montana and the Dakotas and swept east like the vengeance of an angry God. It swirled so high in the air that pilots had to climb to fifteen thousand feet to avoid it, because they couldn’t go around it. The storm was nearly two thousand miles wide and carried 350 million tons of dirt. It fell over Chicago; Boston; New York; Washington, D.C.; and ships three hundred miles out to sea. The New York harbor turned gray, the tulips and grass in Central Park were covered with a fine coating of sand. People atop the Empire State Building stared into a dust soup, unable to see the street below. The dust even seeped into the White House, where President Roosevelt was discussing drought relief.

Emaline and Juanita listened to the radio reports describing the dust filtering into the NBC offices in New York City. Some of the farmers saw it as revenge on the easterners who had not suffered from the ravages of the Dust Bowl. To Emaline, the great dust storm confirmed her deepest fears.

“Do you ever feel as though we’re living at the end of the world, Juanita?”

“Yes, I do. It is bad at night when you lie there listening to the wind and you think it’s all going to blow away. Everything. There will be nothing left here but sand dunes and the wind will blow night and day forever.”

“It’s good to know I’m not the only one. I thought perhaps I was going mad.”

“Perhaps we are all going mad, Emaline. The times make us so.”

25.

EARLY ONE MORNING IN THE SPRING OF 1936, Emaline staggered up from the well, carrying a five-gallon bucket of water in her good left arm, her weight balanced against it. She wore a man’s castoff shoes and a man’s old overalls under a linsey-woolsey dress worn thin from too many washings, a scarf tied over her hair to keep the dust out. It was an unusually warm day for March and she was not feeling well. She would have to make the usual half dozen eggs for Jake’s breakfast. For some reason, the thought of eggs made her want to vomit. The sun was barely up, the cows were bawling to be milked. Jake’s Hampshire hogs crowded around the trough waiting to be fed. They nosed at her legs and knocked her off-balance. The horses leaned patiently against the fence, waiting for her to fork hay into their manger. The rooster crowed again. He was so much like Jake, strutting and crowing, gussied up, with his tail feathers fanned out for the neighbor ladies and raising a racket before dawn. She hated that rooster. One of these days, she’d turn him into a chicken pie.