I was drying my hands on my apron as I walked onto the porch just after five o’clock. The fine strands of hair that had come loose from my bun suddenly rose until they were standing high above my head, as the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck rose too. The eerie sensation left me shuddering, and I knew exactly what it meant.

A duster was coming—and given how strong that static electricity was, this was going to be a big one. I took two more steps, looking toward the horizon, but then stopped.

There was no wind to warn us what was coming that day, just a silent wall of black, so high and wide that I wondered if I was seeing things. That couldn’t be a dust storm—not with such clear edges. Dust storms weren’t so self-contained that you could see bright blue sky right above them. They came on slowly, always preceded by a noisy high wind. This one wasn’t following the rules.

“I just got shocked off that metal near the barn, so bad it knocked me down. The wire on the fence is glowing blue too. Feels like a big duster is co—” Henry said behind me, but then he too stopped dead in his tracks. “What in God’s name is that?”

We stood there staring for a beat longer than we should have, because whether we could comprehend it or not, that monstrous black wall was moving toward us, swallowing the flat fields of half-dead wheat.

“Get inside, Lizzie,” Henry said. I ignored him, spinning toward the gate to see if Mother and Dad were, by some miracle, back already. All I saw were the hens running for shelter, and the long, empty drive beside them. “Lizzie!” Henry shouted. “Get inside and get some cloth ready!”

The panic in his voice startled me. I spun back into the house, trembling as I ran to the linen cupboard. I scooped a whole stack of whatever cloth I could find into my arms and threw some sheets on top, and I ran to the pail beside the stove. I’d washed corn bread batter off my hands in that water two minutes earlier, but there was no time to fetch a fresh bucket.

I threw the cloth into the bucket and took it into Mother and Dad’s room. I closed the window, then hung a dripping sheet from the frame, and set the sopping towel near the door, ready to block the gap beneath it. I fumbled in Mother’s dresser for the Vaseline for our noses, then ran through the house. Every window was open, so I closed and latched them all before I went back to the porch.