“You owe me extra for that,” Carlisle said, pulling the car back onto the road.
Dr. Stober didn’t answer, just touched his tongue to his sandpaper teeth, then wiped them with the handkerchief he found balled within his fist. This was the world we have made, he thought. Everything hammered and mortared and roofed and fenced had become as insubstantial as sand castles on dunes. When they reached Dorland a little while later, the light was still mauve. The queerest thing about the storm’s aftermath was the absence of shadows; not even the buildings on the town’s small Main Street could cast one.
105
The old leather belt was there, the one Ansel had used to keep himself attached to the tractor on long night rides, and Ansel considered tying himself on, but he wasn’t sleepy. He could see Sonia’s house in the distance: the frowsy brush of cottonwood trees, the bluish roof of the two-story house, the line of ash on the eastern side.
The house was still two hundred yards away when the storm began to take into itself the dirt through which he rode on the vibrating seat of the tractor. He had not hitched up the trailer this time, but still he could go no faster than seven, maybe eight, miles per hour. He pulled the handkerchief up over his mouth and nose, as he had always done, pushed his hat down farther on his head, and increased his speed slightly. The chugging became a whine, and he licked his lips under the handkerchief.
The wind, when it shoved him, was so fierce and skin piercing that he bent over to protect himself the way he had once protected Aldine, his arms and legs retracting into his rib cage as if remembering some primitive incarnation, when the body was part shell. He tried to take in breath, but dirt flew into his throat, and in his first coughing fit, he tipped backward and fell, striking the field with his shoulder and tumbling over. He had thought, when he climbed onto the tractor, that he would ask the doctor, when he saw him, if there was a treatment he could try. He would figure out a way to pay the man, over time, for the use of the car, and he would get through this bad time as he had gotten through others.
The tractor moved dumbly on, sightless, until it reached the road, on the other side of which was a fence erected by Horace Tanner. The nose of the tractor struck a well-buried post and chugged weakly for a while, then gave out when the front wheels of the tractor were buried several inches deep in powdery dirt.
106
It was four o’clock and the air was still orange-pink when Dr. Stober stepped out to urinate beside a tractor that had been parked haphazardly by the road. Empty houses, rusted cars, mailboxes with the doors hanging down like the tongues of dogs—he’d been seeing all these things since stepping inside the post office in Dorland and receiving directions to the Price farm. A roofless house, a pack of dogs, a wandering pig, he’d seen it all—but to just park a tractor midway into the road and leave it?
It was only when he put out his hand to steady himself and felt the warmth of the tractor’s engine that it occurred to him to look in the direction from which the tractor had come. He saw a blue heap that was almost certainly human, small in the midst of the scudded soil and motionless, arm askew. He looked over at Carlisle in the driver’s seat of the car, hunched over and fumbling with something, a cigarette, most likely.
Dr. Stober turned back toward the form. “Hello there!” he shouted. “Are you all right?”
The heap didn’t stir.
“Hello?” he shouted again. Behind him, he heard Carlisle open the car door.
The doctor began by trotting, but the closer he came to the blue clothes and the stillness, the slower his pace. He walked the last few steps in dust that puffed up into his cuffs and shoes, and when he stood over the dead man’s body he didn’t know which bothered him more: that the ear canal was entirely filled with dirt, like a child’s bucket, or that the soil by the man’s mouth was as dark with blood as the bed in which Lucy died.
Carlisle drew up behind him, and stared down at the body. They both stood staring for a few moments. Carlisle stubbed out his cigarette and put it into his shirt pocket and said, “He’s dead, in’t he?”
“Yes,” Dr. Stober said. “He’s very dead.”
107
It wasn’t a long storm, not like the other one. Aldine stood up when the darkness browned bit by bit and she stood at the window with screaming Vivien, whose tiny nostrils were red from her anxious daubing. When she wiped her own nose, she expected the cloth to come away brown, but it didn’t. Her nose was not dirty, and Vivien’s nose was not black inside.
Aldine bobbed up and down fruitlessly, a little dance that she did when the baby cried, or when she didn’t, as if a swayed baby wouldn’t need to cry. She willed Ansel to drive out of the gloom. She could go out and walk to Sonia’s house, she reasoned, but the air around the barn and the house was still fog-thick with dirt, and she knew Vivien shouldn’t be breathing it. Look at Neva. Maybe the littlest had the weakest filters in their little pink throats.