MAY 25, 1934
This morning in church we prayed for rain and President Roosevelt. I spend most of my time in church trying to keep Beezie from picking her nose or whispering loud and embarrassing observations like how if Jesus knew for sure he was going straight to heaven things weren’t that bad for him anyway. Beezie’s so tiny she may just as well be half elf, but she’s a hellcat and everyone knows it. Meanwhile they barely notice me at all. Even Mama calls me her brown bird: I’m not pretty, and I blend in. But Ellis says if I’m a brown bird, I’m a vulture, for the way I circle the house in the evenings. I’m so restless I could fly out of my skin.
Ellis is the one who told me to start writing things down. At church, he sits at the end of our family bench, and when I glance his way, his head is invariably bowed. When I’m bored during the service I let myself picture him asleep in the bunkhouse—in my mind, I kiss him awake.
After service we made our way through the chattering, cheerful Sunday crowd gathered outside the church door, catching up with each other on the week’s happenings. On Main Street the heat and the sun beat down on us all like a fist. As usual, everyone went out of their way to talk to Ellis. He’s not a vulture but a peacock, dark-haired, always with a twinkle in his eyes like he just heard a joke, and a smile like he never met a stranger. People are drawn to him. He’s the town pet.
We stopped in at Jack’s store. While Mama bartered some old farm tools for flour, Ellis and I picked out other things we needed and loaded them onto the counter. I handled an apple and then put it down because the store is mostly a museum of things we can’t have.
“They say the last storm blew dust all the way to New York, Beth,” Jack was saying to Mama as she stood looking down at a newspaper on the edge of the counter. He looked drawn, worried, like everyone does all the time now. “They say some places in Texas, it’s piled up in drifts that can cover cars.”
“God will bring the rain,” Mama replied. She has the slightest bit of an English accent. It always stands out. She moved here from England when she was young, and she’s always said the grass there is so green and wet it looks like a carpet, that the trees that fill the woods are as covered in green as limes.
Mama is full of faith, but recently mine has been running through my fingers, dribbling out. I can’t seem to catch it.
Jack’s daughter Lyla darted out of the back of the store and gave us a happy wave, because like everyone else, she’s in love with Ellis. The only difference is, I think he loves her back. They’re both seventeen, a year older than me. Ellis likes to annoy me by calling me “the kid,” but Lyla shoots him looks when he does it, standing up for me.
Ellis stepped forward, leaned on the counter, and tapped his fingers as Lyla loaded a shelf. “Any way you all can do better than three cents on this apple?” he asked, pulling it from where I’d replaced it. I was mortified, but Lyla smiled and slid it into a bag with the flour for free. That’s the effect Ellis has on people. I know I’ll end up giving most of it to Beezie anyway, but it still gives me a warmth inside.
Ellis was just stepping up to whisper to me when something else grabbed our attention—both at the same time.
It hung behind the cash register, tucked sheepishly below eye level: a poster, dominated by a beautiful dancing girl in a long gold skirt and big hoop earrings. Behind her were lions, a cobra twirling out of a basket, a man holding barbells, a Ferris wheel. The words Ragbag Fair—Coming Soon! were written across the top in red.
“Whoa,” I said, gaping.
“Whoa,” Ellis echoed. “Would you look at her.”
I slapped his arm and shook my head. It wasn’t the dancing girl I was drawn to but the picture tucked away at the upper-right corner like an afterthought: a bolt of lightning threading through a pair of gnarled old hands, and these words beside it: Would you pay $10 for Eternal Life? You Can at the Electric! Midnight Shows Only!
“What’s the Electric?” I asked Jack.
“One of the exhibits, I guess. They’ll be here for weeks, sounds like. Paid me two dollars just to hang it here, but . . .” He looked sheepishly at Mama. “I might just take it down and give the money back.”
“That’d probably be best,” Mama said, eyeing the poster doubtfully. Mama’s a timid sort. She’s never broken a rule in her life, and these kinds of carnivals are frowned on by just about everyone.
But all the way home, I was thinking about the poster—the old, wrinkled hands, the lightning bolt.
Ellis once told me that if they had a way of weighing people’s souls along with their bodies I’d be 2 percent fat, 10 percent water, and 90 percent unattainable desires. (Ellis has made a lifelong career out of telling me about myself, but he can’t do math.) He says I talk about rain and daydream about rain and think about rain so much that the only way I’ll ever be happy is if I am reincarnated as a puddle. Every place we’ve ever seen a photograph of, I’ve told him I want to see it.
Anyway, I often tell Ellis things I’d tell no one else, but if I told him how badly I wish I had that ten dollars for the Electric, he’d laugh in my face. I want him to think well of me. He hates superstition as much as he hates cities and spinach and snakes.
Ellis came to us three years before the dust, just after Daddy died. It was the middle of a bone-cracking winter. He was eight years old, and I was seven. Farmers would meet the trains, full of orphans escaping the poverty of the cities, and pick them out like puppies.
I wasn’t supposed to be there that night. Mama needed a strong, healthy, older boy to help with the heavier farm work Daddy had left behind, but I wanted a little sister so badly that I lay in the back of the truck to stow away so I could pick her out myself. (I didn’t know then that Mama was carrying Beezie.)
As it turned out, neither of us got our wish. We got there too late, and there was only one child left unwanted—the right age for Mama, but pale and skinny and delicate, standing alone and coatless on the platform, shivering like crazy. When Mama offered him her coat, he said no thank you and that he wasn’t cold. He was trying to look strong and dependable, but very unconvincingly. I could see the compassion in Mama’s eyes.
“No,” I whispered. “I don’t want him. Please, Mama, no.”
But I knew she’d have pity on him, like the little birds the cats are always after, and the little newborn calves I’ve seen her puff back to life with her own breath.
“Well,” Mama said, after we stood there in front of him for a few minutes. “Come with us.”
The first thing I said to him, once we were in the truck—him sitting in the back and still not wrapping his arms around himself—was “We wanted a girl.”
He had the good nature to look sorry. I’ve been in love with him ever since.