Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse Page B

I’m alone.
    My father’s digging his own grave,
    he calls it a pond,
    but I know what he’s up to.
    He is rotting away,
    like his father,
    ready to leave me behind in the dust.
Well, I’m leaving first.
    July 1935

Out of the Dust
    This is not a dream.
    There’s no comfort in dreams.
    I try to contain the ache as I leave my bed,
    I try to still my heart as I
    slip from my room with my kerchief of dimes.
    Moving slowly down the stairs,
    I cross through the kitchen, taking only some
    biscuits,
    and leave my father’s house.
    It’s the middle of the night and I hear every sound
    inside me, outside me.
    I go,
    knowing that I’ll die if I stay,
    that I’m slowly, surely
    smothering.
    I walk through the calm night,
    under the stars.
    I walk to
    where the train stops long enough
    for a long-legged girl to latch on
    and as my heart races
    I feel the earth tremble beneath me and then
    the sound of sharp knives,
    metal against metal,
    as the train pulls up to the station.
    Once I might’ve headed east,
    to Mr. Roosevelt.
    Now I slip under cover of darkness
    inside a boxcar
    and let the train carry me west.
    Out of the dust.
    August 1935

Gone West
    I am stiff and sore.
    In two endless days on this train, I have
    burned in the desert,
    shivered in the mountains,
    I have seen the
    camps of dust-bowl migrants
    along the tracks.
    There was one girl.
    I saw her through the slat in the boxcar.
    She stared up at the passing train.
    She stood by the tracks watching,
    and I knew her.
    August 1935

Something Lost, Something Gained
    He climbs into my car.
    He’s dirty and he has a sour smell.
    His eyes are ringed by the soil that comes from riding
    trains.
    But there’s a deeper shadow to those eyes,
    like ashes,
    like death.
    He needs a hair comb and a shave,
    and a mending needle applied to his pants.
    He speaks to me,
    “Where you from, miss?” he wants to know.
    He shows me a picture of his family.
    A wife. Three boys.
    The photograph is all he carries.
    That and the shredding, stinking clothes on his back.
    I feed him two of the stale biscuits I’ve been hoarding
    and save the rest.
    I’ll be hungry tonight,
    what with giving my day’s biscuits away.
    But I can see the gaunt of hunger in his cheeks.
    He asks if I have water and I shake my head,
    my tongue thick with thirst.
    He eats the biscuits.
    He doesn’t care they’re caked with dust.
    He finishes eating and crumbs stick to his mustache.
    He’s staring hard at me and his eyes water.
    “I’ve done it again,” he says.
    “Taken food from a child.”
    I show him my cloth bag with more biscuits.
    “At home,” he said, “I couldn’t feed them,
    couldn’t stand the baby always crying.
    And my wife,
    always that dark look following me.
    Couldn’t take no more.
    Lost our land, they tractored us out so’s we had to
    leave,
    rented awhile, then moved in with Lucille’s kin.
    Couldn’t make nothing grow.”
    I nodded. “I know.”
    We talked as the train rocked,
    as the cars creaked,
    as the miles showed nothing but empty space,
    we talked through the pink of the setting sun,
    and into the dark.
    I told him about Ma dying.
    I told him about my father,
    and how the thing that scared us both the most
    was being left alone.
    And now I’d gone and left him.
    I told him about the piano,
    and Arley Wanderdale,
    and how I wasn’t certain of the date,
    but I thought it might be my birthday,
    but he was sleeping by then, I think.
    He was like tumbleweed.
    Ma had been tumbleweed too,
    holding on for as long as she could,
    then blowing away on the wind.
    My father was more like the sod.
    Steady, silent, and deep.
    Holding on to life, with reserves underneath
    to sustain him, and me,
    and anyone else who came near.
    My father
    stayed rooted, even with my tests and my temper,
    even with the double sorrow of
    his grief and my own,
    he had kept a home
    until I broke it.
    When I woke,
    the man was gone, and so were my biscuits,
    but under my hat I found the photograph of