Free The Year Everything Changed by Georgia Bockoven Page B

to wear over our faces. Most mornings it wasn’t the sun that woke us but someone coughing up something that looked like tobacco juice.
    Right up to the end, even when he couldn’t see three feet past the end of the tractor, Pa tried to work the fields. He’d have me and Bobby Ray walk the rows so he could follow, the blade digging into the dirt and half of it blowing away.
    I remember sitting on the porch one night talking about where all that dirt was going to land when it finally settled again. Half of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Missouri was floating around in those clouds. Bobby Ray said he liked thinking it was headed for New York to bury the men who ran the banks.
    I wandered around the house for a long time after everyone left like I expected to find something.
    The mattresses were gone, but not the beds that had held them. Closets held the “maybe” clothes—maybe it would fit one day or maybe it could be cut down or let out for someone else to wear. The sideboard in the dining room still held linens, the cupboards in the kitchen the dishes Ma had saved to buy at the five-and-dime.
    I just kept going from room to room until finally the quiet and the emptiness convinced me that it wasn’t home anymore, that when I left there would be no reason to look back because nothing that counted was there anymore.
    It stuck in my throat that someone from the bank would decide what was worth selling and what would be thrown away. Once planted, the frustration took root and grew like nothing had grown on the farm in a long, long time. My anger against the wind and the drought and the dust, the unfairness of Ma leaving her wardrobe, of Pa leaving his pride, of everything I couldn’t do anything about had a name—the Guymon First National Trust Bank.
    Knowing what I had to do, what had become the only thing I could do, I took my suitcase out on the porch and spent the next hour hoisting the wardrobe back into the house. I waited around until sunset watching a coil of dust gather on the horizon. Panic-stricken birds raced the cloud, the weaker ones falling out of the sky, dying from sheer exhaustion.
    When the worst of the dust and wind came through, rabbits and coyotes and all manner of wild things died of suffocation, some in their dens, some looking for a place to hide, some just lying down and giving in.
    I swore I wasn’t going to be one of them. I was sixteen years old, and I wasn’t going to let anyone or anything stop me from going and doing and seeing and succeeding. Nothing was going to hold me back or hold me down.
    The air turned still before it kicked up a spit of dust. Just enough wind to do what I had in mind. I went into the kitchen and pulled the matches from the drawer beside the old wood-burning stove. The clothes in the closets caught quick and burned hot, and I had to race to reach the other bedrooms. Before I bolted for the front door I stood in the middle of the living room and felt the power of what I’d done, the heat burning my face and drying the first tears I’d shed since I was five and saw my grandpa gored to death by a bull.
    Outside I watched just long enough to be sure the wind would finish what I’d started, then turned my back and headed for Oklahoma City.
    “Now I understand why you feel the way you do about banks,” Lucy said.
    Her words snapped Jessie back into the world that was coming to an end instead of just beginning. “I got carried away. Sorry.” He was embarrassed. “There’s nothing more boring than listening to an old man ramble on about things that don’t matter to anyone but him.”
    She knew better than to argue; he would think it condescending. She eyed him.
    “What?”
    “I’m trying to picture you at sixteen.”
    He chuckled. “I was short and skinny and had a cowlick that axle grease and a brick couldn’t hold down.”
    Their entrées arrived. Lucy made a show of eating her first bite, licking her lips and closing her eyes in rapt