Some small gain: A Dust Bowl chronicle

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOME SMALL GAIN

By Jessica Ramer

 

 

G.J. Goodwin woke in his aging Model A sedan to the pungent, almost sweet, smell of ozone and the ceaseless howl of wind. It was Dodge City’s second dust storm in five days. He knew only that he was stranded somewhere between the Nelson farm, where he had visited the family’s ailing patriarch, and his new parsonage.

G.J. switched on the dome light and held his pocket watch directly under the bulb: 5:45. Without starting the engine, he pulled on the headlight knob and peered into the darkness. Even after turning his high beams on, he could not tell where the gravel road ended and farmland began. In the back seat, Clara, pregnant at last after seven years of marriage, lay asleep on her side, her arm cradling her belly. He rolled down the window. Dust cascaded into the car. Sticking his arm out, he gauged its height. It reached above the side view mirror. He knew from the sound that this storm had hours of fight left in it. He turned off the lights. Afraid of suffocating in a buried car, he bent as far out the window as he could and scooped dust with his hat..

Clara stirred and pulled herself into a sitting position.  “I’ll have us dug out in a few minutes,” he shouted over the wind.

“Do you need help?”

“Stay put.”

“Yes, G.J.”  

Desperation and a slight lessening of the storm allowed him to clear away the fine grit faster than the wind deposited it. He worked until he could reach no lower. Pushing with both arms and kicking with one foot, he forced the door open, slogged to the rear of the car—harder than walking over beach sand on his honeymoon—and dug out his wife, who escaped from the backseat as fast as her pregnant body would let her. “Do you want to ride out the storm here or try to walk home?”

1. J. knew the answer before he asked. His wife had feared closed spaces ever since an uncle had locked her in a closet for some childish misdeed.

“I want to go home,” she said.

Keeping one hand on the vehicle, G.J. felt his way to the trunk, retrieved his emergency shovel, and returned to Clara. Removing his tie, he fastened one end to his belt and felt for his wife’s hand. “Hang on! Keep one hand on the car.” Walking a few steps away, he plunged the shovel blade into the dust and twisted. He knew from the feel that he had hit gravel. Moving a few steps to his right, he tried again. This time, the shovel hit dirt. He had found the edge of the road. He walked back and touched the hood ornament. If he headed in the direction the car was pointed, they had a chance of reaching home. Neither said what they both knew—that home was more than ten miles away and they did not know the roads well enough to be sure they would not head onto open prairie. But to remain in the car was to risk being buried alive if the dust storm lasted long enough.

he storm shrieked with greater force. G.J. reached back for his wife. Clara shouted something inaudible above the din. Her fingers slid over his collar and tugged at his undershirt. Masks. He ripped the garment into two pieces, tying her mask first, then his. Equipped with this inadequate protection against the storm, the couple headed, they hoped, toward home with G.J. breathing a silent prayer each time he stabbed the ground and felt loose gravel. They had trudged, he guessed, two miles when the wind accelerated. Dust stung his face.

G.J.’s belt tightened and went slack. His wife had dropped the tie. He yelled “Clara.” No reply. Fearful of becoming disoriented, he did not turn. Instead, he backed up slowly, testing the ground with his heel before putting his whole foot down. His left heel struck something. Hands grasped his leg and tugged as Clara pulled herself up. Reaching behind him, he pushed Clara’s end of the tie through a buttonhole in her coat and felt her hands knot it. Bound together, they slogged on.

The sky grew darker. The temperature dropped. Wearing only a light coat and without his undershirt, G.J. began to shiver. To distract himself, he hummed a folksong his Nova-Scotian great-grandmother had taught him when he was a boy, “The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie.” The song he and Clara had sung together during their courtship. When he reached the stanza about the lass combing back her yellow hair, G.J.’s belt cut into his midsection. Losing his balance, he tumbled down a knoll. Something hard struck his shoulder. He extended his hands vertically along its cylindrical surface and then horizontally across a connecting beam. A fence. A farmyard. His wife’s hand brushed against his.

Clinging to the fence with his right hand, he felt for something, anything, with his left.  Clara grabbed his hand and placed it on something hard and curved. A wagon wheel, the bottom two-thirds buried in dust. G.J. helped his wife over the fence and into the wagon bed. Higher than a car, it would remain above drifted soil. He climbed in after her and reached up. A canvas cover stretched over a wooden frame. G.J. recalled newsreel footage of farmers fleeing the dust bowl in mule-drawn wagons because they were too poor to afford cars. Whoever owned this wagon had covered it because he planned to travel in it. He breathed a silent prayer for the family forced to flee in this creaky vehicle.

Clara felt for his hand and placed it on her midsection. The baby, due in less than two months, kicked. They stayed awake for what felt like hours then slept again.

Silence woke them. Rising to his knees, G.J. peered through the opening in the canvas and gazed at the purple, red, and apricot-hued clouds in the morning sky, colors made more vivid by the lingering dust. “Clara, look at this sunrise!”

She scooted on her knees across the wagon bed until she reached him and put her arms around his waist. “I’ve never seen a sunrise this beautiful. I guess it’s true. There really is no great loss without some small gain,” she said, repeating the country saying she had learned from farmwives at their first church.

G.J. looked to his right. The roof of a sod building, whether home or barn he could not tell, protruded just above a dune formed by the wind. G.J. pointed to it.

“Heavens!” Clara said. “I hope no one’s living there.”

Together, they walked toward the structure until they saw a door, the bottom two-thirds submerged beneath a loamy drift.

G.J. cupped his hands. “Is anybody there?”

A young, male voice replied, “Seven of us,”

“Hang on. I’ll dig you out.”

“There’s a shovel in the barn.”

“I’ve got one with me.”

Walking back with his wife, he said, “Stay in the wagon.”

“Yes, G.J.”

Forty minutes later, his hands blistered, his back aching, G.J. freed the family. The young man was the family’s teen son. His father had migrated to Oregon to look for work after two years of crop failure and a tornado that destroyed the house. “He built us this soddy to live in until he could send for us,” he said. The family had planned to follow him last week, but after the first dust storm had decided to remain. G.J. and Clara stayed with the family for the rest of the day, helping them dig out their equipment and the stretch of road running past their farm. In exchange, the family offered their guests what they had—stale bread, salt pork, and the last of the sauerkraut made after the fall harvest. When the road was cleared, the young man accompanied the Goodwins to their car and helped dig it out. G.J. turned the ignition key. The car sputtered. He tried again. More sputtering. On the third try, the engine started with a cough as if it, too, had breathed in dust.

Sitting in the passenger seat, his wife dropped her head to his shoulder and blinked back tears.  G.J. bent his head toward hers for a moment. “Let’s go home,” he said.

In the parsonage, they found that wind had forced dust through tiny gaps between door and jamb, windowsill and sash and had sanded the finish off the piano Clara had scrimped for years to buy. In the backyard, their five hens kept for eggs lay dead in their outside coop, feed and water untouched. “Suffocated,” he said.  They had been dead too long to eat.  He buried them in the backyard.

Clara cleared her throat. “The spring garden will grow the better for it.”

“It’s a gain. But a small one, to be sure.”

In the kitchen, dust had infiltrated the cotton flour sack printed with rosebuds. Clara coughed as she sifted the mixture a tablespoon at a time, but the particles, fine as flour, passed through the metal screen. Unwilling to waste food, she baked gritty dough into bread as coarse as an emery board and rolled the remainder into pie crusts covering canned cling peaches, the only uncontaminated food in her pantry. Their teeth crunched with each bite.

Standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes, Clara coughed. And wheezed. And coughed. G.J. left the kitchen table where he was preparing next Sunday’s sermon and tapped Clara’s back. Taking a clean handkerchief from her apron pocket, she wiped her mouth. Phlegm darkened by dust showed on the white cotton. She met his eyes. She did not have to say what they both knew: dust pneumonia.

A new moon and soil that had not yet settled to the ground rendered everything black. “There’s a Red Cross hospital for dust pneumonia patients in the next county, but I don’t have enough gas to get you there tonight.”

Clara strained to inhale before answering. “They can’t do much.” Clara said, each of her words separated from the next by a strained inhalation.

He brewed a pot of strong coffee to open her lungs and make breathing easier.  After Clara drained her cup, he poured out the last kerosene from the metal can, mixed it with lard, and slathered her chest with it. He sat next to her all night, offering her coffee, fanning her face, and praying until he dozed off.

Awakened by a surviving rooster crowing in the distance, he dragged himself, heavy with fatigue, to the bedroom window and parted the curtains. Sunlight illuminated the clapboard church east of the parsonage, imparting a majesty to the humble structure, its one stained glass window behind the pulpit reflecting half the colors of the rainbow. Bed sheets rustled. Clara offered a feeble smile. He felt her forehead. Fever. A high one.

“I’m taking you to the hospital.”

Clara shook her head.

“Your chances are better there than here.”

Clara moaned.

“You’re going.”

Clara said nothing, her silent assent. G.J. placed a dry kitchen sponge over her nose and bound it in place with a kitchen towel, the makeshift mask used by rural poor. “The car will stir up a lot of dust as I drive.” He carried her to the car. Stopping for gas, he asked for directions. The Red Cross hospital, the attendant told him as he washed the windshield, was about sixty miles away—a three-hour drive on unpaved country roads. G.J. scanned the horizon for signs of a coming storm. Seeing none, he headed southwest toward the hospital.

            Clara clutched her handkerchief to her mouth and coughed up phlegm. G.J. sang “The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie.” His wife shook her head. He switched to “In the Garden,” the hymn she played on her piano and sang every Easter. She closed her eyes and mouthed the words. G.J. approached a rutted stretch of road. “Hold on tight.” Clara winced and held her belly. Glancing at the odometer, he said, “We’ve only got about ten miles to go.” At the makeshift hospital located behind a mortuary, G.J. carried her inside and answered questions posed by a Red Cross volunteer. A nurse wheeled Clara behind a curtain.  G.J. sat in the outer room watching dozens of dust pneumonia sufferers ask for help. Four hours later, constricted sobbing emanated from the other side of the curtain.

“That’s my wife,” he told the clerk. “What’s going on?”                                        sx          

“Let me admit this patient and I’ll check.”

Twenty minutes later, a nurse emerged from behind the curtains. “Mr. Goodwin?”

G.J. raised his right hand to chest level. “That’s me.”

“Your wife has gone into labor.”

Seven weeks early. “We’re going to transport her to the county hospital in Cimarron. It’s just a few miles away.”

He jumped in his car and waited near the hospital’s only entrance. An orderly wheeled Clara out the door and into an old K-16 ambulance. “I’ll meet you there,” he called to her before the rear doors slammed shut.

He arrived after his wife had disappeared into the maternity ward. Just before midnight, a nurse emerged from behind double doors. “It’s a girl,” she said.

“Will she make it?”

“She has a chance.”

“How much of a chance?”

The nurse paused and raised her eyes toward the ceiling. “She has a fight ahead of her, but I’ve seen babies smaller and more premature than she is make it.” She took him to the newborn ward and pointed out his daughter, scrawny, hairless, and lying in a lighted glass box. He looked for an oxygen tank but saw none. “We’re the only hospital within two hundred miles that has incubators,” she told him. “If your daughter had been born anywhere else, her chances wouldn’t be as good.”

“What about my wife?”

“It’s too soon to tell.”

“Can I see her?”

The nurse hesitated. “If you only stay a minute.  She’s very weak.”

She ushered him into the maternity ward. Clara lay pale from blood loss and gasping from pneumonia but alive. She managed a smile. “She’s beautiful. We finally have our baby.”

“I’ve seen her. She’s a beauty all right. But I’ve got to go back to Dodge. Easter’s the day after tomorrow and if I don’t show up on Easter Sunday, my congregation will fire me. And we’ve got a little one to feed.”

Clara almost laughed before a coughing fit seized her.

G.J. took her hand. “I’ll be back Monday morning.”

By Monday, Clara’s fever had dropped from 103 to 101.

“Your wife will live,” the doctor told G.J. “But she will never be strong. She should avoid gardening or anything that exposes her to large amounts of dirt and dust.”

“For how long?”

“I’m not sure. But probably for the rest of her life.”

“How long will she live?”

The doctor raised his eyebrows and shook his head as if apologizing for his ignorance. “I don’t know. We don’t have enough experience with dust pneumonia to say.”

When G.J. returned on the Monday after Easter, Clara sat propped up in her hospital bed. Her skin was white, not gray, and she coughed less. She had even put on some lipstick. “You look as beautiful as you did the day I married you.”

She waved away the compliment with a flutter of her hand, but her cheeks flushed. “The doctor let me hold Abigail for the first time this morning. He said if she’s lived this long without major problems, she’ll probably be okay.”

G.J. closed his eyes for a moment before bending down and kissing his wife’s forehead.

Twenty days later, the doctor waylaid G.J. and spoke to him in whispers outside Clara’s hospital room before he discharged her and the baby. “Make sure your wife carries a dusk mask with her at all times in case another dust storm blows up.” He hesitated before saying in a lower voice, “Children who were born premature may be a little slow and need extra help with school work. But she should be smart enough to be a good wife and mother, which is all anyone can ask.” G.J. thought of illiterate farm wives who pretended to read the church hymnals and shuddered for his daughter. Before leaving the hospital, Clara tried the mask on and looked in the mirror. G.J. could not see her face beneath the black rubber, but she said, “I look like a soldier in the trenches preparing for a gas attack.”

Abigail fretted all the way home, emitting feeble cries with every bump, but she fell asleep the moment Clara laid her in the cherry-wood cradle G.J.’s father had made for him before he was born. He looked down at the child he had feared he would never have and touched her shoulder. “You’re small. But you’re not a small gain to me,” he said, choosing to push worries about her future out of his mind.

 

The End