We both stared in wonder
at the pond my daddy made
and she said,
a hole like that says a lot about a man.
I didn’t intend to, but I liked her,
because she was so plain and so honest,
and because she made Daddy laugh,
and me, too, just like that,
and even though I didn’t know
if there was room for her
in me, I could see there was room for her in Daddy.
When I asked him if he wanted me
to go off to Aunt Ellis after all,
Daddy said he hadn’t ever wanted it,
he said I was his own and he didn’t like to
think about what Aunt Ellis might do with me.
And we laughed, picturing me and Aunt Ellis
together,
and it wasn’t a nice laugh, but it was
Aunt Ellis we were talking about after all.
The thing about Louise,
I’ll just have to watch how things go and hope
she doesn’t crowd me out of Daddy’s life, not now,
when I am just finding my way back into it.
October 1935
Not Everywhere
I walk with Daddy
up the slope and look out over the Beaver River.
Louise is back at the house.
She wanted to come
but this is Ma’s place,
Ma’s grave,
Franklin’s too,
and Louise has no business here.
She wants to come everywhere with us.
Well, I won’t let her.
Not everywhere.
Daddy says,
“She could have come.
There’s room enough for everyone, Billie Jo.”
But there’s not.
She can come into Ma’s kitchen.
She can hang around the barn.
She can sit beside Daddy when he drives the truck.
But Ma’s bones are in this hill,
Ma’s and Franklin’s.
And their bones wouldn’t like it,
if Louise came walking up here between us.
October 1935
My Life, or What I Told Louise After the Tenth Time She Came to Dinner
“I may look like Daddy, but I have my mother’s
hands.
Piano hands, Ma called them,
sneaking a look at them any chance she got.
A piano is a grand thing,”I say.
“Though ours is covered in dust now.
Under the grime it’s dark brown,
like my mother’s eyes.”
I think about the piano
and how above it hangs a mirror
and to either side of that mirror,
shelves,
where Ma and Daddy’s wedding picture once stood,
though Daddy has taken that down.
“Whenever she could,
Ma filled a bowl with apples,” I tell Louise.
“I’m crazy about apples,
and she filled a jar with wildflowers when she
found them,
and put them on that shelf above the piano.”
On the other shelf Ma’s book of poetry remains.
And the invitation from Aunt Ellis,
or what’s left of it.
Daddy and I tore it into strips
to mark the poems we thought Ma liked best.
“We weren’t always happy,” I tell Louise.
“But we were happy enough
until the accident.
When I rode the train west,
I went looking for something,
but I didn’t see anything wonderful.
I didn’t see anything better than what I already had.
Home.”
I look straight into Louise’s face.
Louise doesn’t flinch.
She looks straight back.
I am the first one to back down.
“My hands don’t look real pretty anymore.
But they hardly hurt. They only ache a little,
sometimes.
I could play right now,
maybe,
if I could get the dust out of the piano,
if I wanted to get the dust out of the piano.
But I don’t. I’m not ready yet.”
And what I like best about her,
is Louise doesn’t say what I should do.
She just nods.
And I know she’s heard everything I said,
and some things I didn’t say too.
November 1935
November Dust
The wheat is growing
even though dust
blows in sometimes.
I walk with Daddy around the farm
and see that
the pond is holding its own,
it will keep Ma’s apple trees alive,
nourish her garden,
help the grass around it grow,
enough to lie in and dream
if I feel like it,
and stand in,
and wait for Mad Dog
when he comes past once a week
on his way from Amarillo,
where he works for the radio.
And as long as the
dust doesn’t crush
the winter wheat,
we’ll have something to show in the spring
for all Daddy’s hard work.
Not a lot, but more than last year.
November 1935
Thanksgiving List
Prairie birds, the whistle of gophers, the wind
blowing,
the smell of grass
and spicy earth,
friends like Mad Dog, the cattle down in the river,
water washing over their hooves,
the sky so
big, so full of
shifting clouds,
the cloud shadows creeping
over the fields,
Daddy’s smile,
and his laugh,
and his songs,
Louise,
food without dust,
Daddy seeing to Ma’s piano,
newly cleaned and tuned,
the days when my hands don’t hurt at all,
the thank-you note from Lucille in Moline, Kansas,
the sound of rain,
Daddy’s hole staying full of water
as the windmill turns,
the smell of green,
of damp earth,
of hope returning to our farm.
The poppies set to
bloom on Ma and Franklin’s grave,
the morning with the whole day waiting,
full of promise,
the night
of quiet, of no expectations, of rest.
And the certainty of home, the one I live in,
and the one
that lives in me.
November 1935
Music
I’m getting to know the music again.
And it is getting to know me.
We sniff each other’s armpits,
and inside each other’s ears,
and behind each other’s necks.
We are both confident, and a little sassy.
And I know now that all the time I was trying to get
out of the dust,
the fact is,
what I am,
I am because of the dust.
And what I am is good enough.
Even for me.
November 1935
Teamwork
Louise and I take walks after dinner
every time she comes.
By the time we get back
the kitchen looks pretty good,
Daddy only leaves a few things he doesn’t
understand,
like big pans,
and wooden spoons,
and leftovers,
and that makes me a little irritated
but mostly it makes me love him.
And Louise, knowing exactly what’s left to be done,
helps me finish up.
She was my father’s teacher at the night school class.
She never married.
She went to college for two years
and studied and worked,
and didn’t notice how lonely she was
until she met Daddy and fell into the
big hurt of his eyes.
She knows how to keep a home,
she knows how to cook,
she knows how to make things
last through winters
and drought.
She knows how to smooth things between two
redheaded people.
And she knows how to come into a home
and not step on the toes of a ghost.
I still feel grateful she didn’t make cranberry sauce
last month, at the first Thanksgiving we
spent together.
Louise made sweet potatoes and green beans,
and turkey, and two pies, pumpkin
and chocolate.
I was so full
my lids
sighed shut and Daddy walked with Louise instead of
me
out to Ma and Franklin’s grave,
where he let Ma know his intentions.
And Ma’s bones didn’t object.
Neither did mine.
And when they came back to the house,
Daddy still cleaned the kitchen.
December 1935
Finding a Way
Daddy
started talking
about planting
the rest of the acres in wheat,
but then said, No,
let’s just go with what we’ve got right now.
And I’ve
been playing
a half hour
every day,
making the skin stretch,
making the scars stretch.
The way I see it, hard times aren’t only
about money,
or drought,
or dust.
Hard times are about losing spirit,
and hope,
and what happens when dreams dry up.
The tractor’s busted,
we don’t have the cash to fix it,
but there’s nothing saying Daddy can’t do the work
by hand.
It can’t be any harder than digging a hole
Daddy bought a second mule with Louise’s help.
Her betrothal gift to him.
He walks behind the team,
step by step, listing the fields to fight the wind.
Maybe the tractor lifted him above the land,
maybe the fields didn’t know him anymore,
didn’t remember the touch of his feet,
or the stroke of his hand,
or the bones of his knees,
and why should wheat grow for a stranger?
Daddy said he’d try some sorghum,
maybe some cotton,
admitting as how there might be something
to this notion of diversification folks were
talking about,
and yes, he’d bring the grass back
like Ma wanted,
where he wasn’t planting anything else.
He’d make new sod.
And I’m learning, watching Daddy, that you can stay
in one place
and still grow.
I wipe dust out of the roasting pan,
I wipe dust off Ma’s dishes,
and wait for Daddy to drive in with Louise,
hoping she’ll stay a little later,
a little longer,
waiting for the day when she stays for good.
She wears a comical hat, with flowers,
in December,
and when she smiles,
her face is
full enough of springtime, it makes
her hat seem just right.
She brings apples in a sack,
perfect apples she arranges
in a bowl on the shelf,
opposite the book of poetry.
Sometimes, while I’m at the piano,
I catch her reflection in the mirror,
standing in the kitchen, soft-eyed, while Daddy
finishes chores,
and I stretch my fingers over the keys,
and I play.
December 1935
KAREN HESSE is the Newbery Medalwinning author of ten books for children, among them The Music of Dolphins (also Scholastic Press), which was named a Best Book of 1996 by both Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.
Ms. Hesse lives with her husband and two daughters in Williamsville, Vermont.
Also by Karen Hesse
The Music of Dolphins
A Time of Angels
Phoenix Rising
Letters from Rifka
Wish on a Unicorn
for younger readers
Lavender
Sable
Poppy’s Chair
Lester’s Dog
Copyright © 1997 by Karen Hesse
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, a division of Scholastic Inc.
Publishers since 1920.
SCHOLASTIC and SCHOLASTIC PRESS and associated logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hesse, Karen.
Out of the Dust / by Karen Hesse.
p. cm.
Summary: In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family’s wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.
[1. Dust storms—Fiction. 2. Farm Life—Oklahoma—Fiction. 3. Depressions—1929—Fiction. 4. Oklahoma—Fiction. 5. Poetry—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H4364Ou 1997
[Fic]—dc21
96-40344
CIP
AC
First Edition, October 1997
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
e-ISBN 978-0-545-51712-6
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.