Yesterday morning was so breezy and bright and lovely, we could never have guessed what was coming. Mama and I were out enjoying the weather, our faces up to the sun, and Ellis was pumping water as best he could while a baseball game echoed from his wireless. Beezie was halfway between him and us, drawing in the dirt with sticks.
Mama had just said to me, “You know, the weather is so fine. Maybe I’ll go for a walk.” She crossed the grass to Galapagos and gave her a nice long scratch on the neck and then walked off down the drive. I watched her, worried. It wasn’t like her to stroll as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
I kept thinking, Get up and sweep, and was trying to will myself into it when a small flock of blackbirds crossed the sky. I was thinking it was unusual to see so many, when a bigger, thicker flock came squawking across the horizon. I’d just looked across the yard at Ellis, and he at me, when his radio blared out, crackled, and died.
Something wobbled inside me.
Now the sky was full of birds, flying in our direction, veering a little to the left, a little to the right in waves.
When I saw the storm itself, moving in behind them, I didn’t recognize it. I thought illogically that it was a mountain range—that maybe it had gotten clear enough to see all the way to Colorado.
But it was growing and moving. A sickness clutched at my stomach. It wasn’t a storm but a wall coming toward us.
I could see Mama’s figure for a moment between the trees, very small, and I yelled for her, but she didn’t hear me. She was facing away from the incoming disaster, unaware.
The wind was already pulling at my skirt by then. Suddenly Ellis and I were both moving, running toward Beezie. I grabbed her by the armpits just as we reached each other and turned for the bunkhouse. The wind had picked up so strongly it knocked me over, and I shoved Beezie toward Ellis. He clutched her as I made my way behind him.
We burst through the door just as the light went dim, the dust blocking the sun so thickly I couldn’t see two feet in front of me.
We huddled into a corner. I held the bottom of my skirt over Beezie’s nose and mouth and told her it was going to be okay. Ellis had his arms around both of us, as if he could shield us from the gritty air. My eyes and throat burned.
Around us the roof and walls moaned. I just knew that any minute they could collapse and crush us to death, or that we’d suffocate on the dust blowing through the seams in the walls.
“The world is ending!” Beezie shrieked, and it felt like a terrible thing, that nature could allow someone so small and helpless to feel so much fear. A helpless rage at God rose up with my panic.
The minutes passed, and the storm only blew harder.
When the light returned, a few minutes later, it came fast and sudden. The wind fell, and it was like someone had pulled a shade off the sun. We stood slowly.
I walked to the door and peered outside, then opened it a crack when Ellis came up behind me, touching my arm. I gasped.
We stepped out into a new world. It may as well have been the surface of the moon. The fences were gone, buried. Mama’s truck was gone, buried. The house still stood, but the porch was buried too.
We shielded our eyes from the sun and looked down the drive, dumbfounded.
Dirt up to its waist, a figure was stumbling toward us.
Mama was making her way home.
JULY 30, THREE IN THE MORNING
I haven’t slept. The static is so heavy in the air I can see it weaving along the fence outside, an eerie, crackling blue light. It feels like the earth has shifted under my feet, even more than it did in the storm.
Late last night, as I was writing my last entry, Mama knocked on my door, standing with a bundle of something in her arms, all wrapped in fabric. She held it so gently and carefully that at first I thought she was carrying a porcelain doll.
She walked in and sat on my bed and motioned for me to sit beside her. She looked pained as she tried to speak.
She took a deep breath, kneaded the bundle in her arms nervously.
“Yesterday . . . I thought I might not make it back home.” She swallowed hard. “For the first time, I thought I’d never see you and Beezie again. And of all the terrible things I was feeling, I regretted most that you would never see these.”
She unwrapped the bundle and laid it down on the bed between us—it was a pile of letters, wrinkled and worn and all in their envelopes.
“These will tell you some things about me,” she said. “And about you.”
She handed them to me, and I laid my hand on them in wonder and surprise and fear, because of Mama’s expression. I sorted through them gently, all addressed from Lenore Allstock, Forest Row, England.
Mama cleared her throat and couldn’t meet my eyes. “You can ask me about them, if you want. After you’re finished. It’s a gift I should have given you long ago,” she said, pulling her hand away stiffly. “But it’s a painful gift. And I’m”—she sucked in a breath—“I’m so sorry for that.”
And now here I am, hours later. I’ve unwrapped Mama’s painful gift.
Just after I finished, I trudged through the thick drifts of dust in the yard to Ellis’s bunkhouse. I climbed into his bed and pulled the covers around both of us. I kissed him awake. Groggy, he tried to hold me at length to look at me, but I was insistent, kissing him until he softened his grip and gave in. His hands trembled on my arms.
“Cathy.” He leaned his forehead against mine, ran his nose down the side of my neck. “What’s gotten into you?”
I wanted to tell him, but I also wanted to hold the secret of Mama’s letters to myself for a while longer. “Come with me,” I whispered, against his cheek. “We have to go.” He pulled his head back to look at me, kissed me on the lips, still groggy. “I can’t make it through another storm,” I said. “Beezie can’t make it through another storm.”
His eyes glittered in the dark as he studied me. He swallowed hard, and his voice was uneven when he spoke again. “I could never go. Going is a mistake. Cathy,” he said, propping himself up, more and more alert. “We’ll take Beezie to a different doctor. We’ll figure out something better to cover the cracks in the house, so the dust won’t get in.” He swallowed nervously. “Don’t pin your hopes on something out there that doesn’t exist,” he said, “or some ball of light or anything else. Pin them on me.”
I didn’t reply. I laid my head against him. His heart was pounding fast inside his chest. We lay there in the dark, and my mind kept racing. If I don’t go now, I kept thinking, I never will.
I stayed there till his heart slowed and his breathing grew even. After a while he fell asleep, but my heart kept pounding. I slipped away.
Back in my room now, and I still can’t shake the feeling I could leave tonight. I thought if I wrote it down it could help me choose, but it only stirs up my confusion more. Dawn is still a long way off, and there’d be time to go before Mama woke. Nobody would stop us.
All this time I’ve lived in Canaan, even at the darkest moments and even when I’ve disagreed with her, I’ve always believed in Mama’s word, and that what she wants is what we want, and that we all belong to each other.
But it isn’t true.
LENORE
PART 1
MARCH 2, 1919