THE DAY THEY LEFT, EMALINE COULDN’T BEAR to look back as the sedan groaned down the lane to the county road. Red was excited, jumping up and down in the back seat while Molly tried to lick his face, but Emaline wanted to bawl. The cattle were gone, the horses gone, pigs gone, chickens gone, turkeys gone, pasture gone to dust. She hadn’t bothered to plant a garden for someone else to raise. A few things had come up on their own, but they were already losing the battle to the weeds. The house, which Colonel Amen had painted fresh back in 1933, was scoured almost to bare wood on the north and west sides by sand and grit from the endless dusters. Tumbleweeds had drifted thick against the fences, because it was no longer worth the trouble to clear them, and dust was piling into the web of the weeds. It was easy to imagine dunes and deserts here, much harder to conjure up an oasis. But they had been lucky. Folks with decades on the land often lost it all and left with barely enough money for gasoline to get them to the next town.

It was April 30, 1938. She had been married to Jake McCloskey for nearly five years and this was all she had to show for it, a son who wasn’t hers and a ten-year-old Dodge Brothers sedan with everything they had left piled on the trailer in back and a job waiting for Jake in Oregon, if they could get there. A thirteen-hundred-mile trip ahead and they had a hard time even making it the fifteen miles to the Wyoming state line. After two flat tires and the Dodge overheating once, they still weren’t out of Nebraska. At this rate, it would take them a month to get to Oregon. With the first flat, Jake was able to change the tire, but he had only the one spare. When the second tire went flat, he had to find the leak, patch it, pump the tire up again, put it back on the axle. The overheating worried him more. They were on level ground and the temperature was around sixty degrees. Climbing the mountains on a hot day would require gallons of water. He already had a dozen canvas water bags stuffed into every available space on the car and trailer and dangling from the mirrors. Even that might not be enough. It was awkward driving with the heavy trailer attached. On the slightest downgrade, he could feel the trailer pushing them along and it would be hard to slow the rig going downhill without burning the brakes. If he got up any speed at all on level ground, the trailer started whipping back and forth. Even at thirty miles an hour, it seemed that it might careen off the road into the barrow pit and drag them along with it.