All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Joe R. Lansdale

  Jacket art copyright © 2011 by Emmanuelle Brisson/Getty Images

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lansdale, Joe R.

  All the earth, thrown to the sky / by Joe R. Lansdale. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When the devastation wrought by endless dust storms in 1930s Oklahoma makes orphans of Jack, his schoolmate Jane, and her brother Tony, they take the truck of a dead man and set out to find a new start.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89748-1

  1. Dust Bowl Era, 1931–1939—Juvenile Fiction. [1. Dust Bowl Era, 1931–1939—Fiction. 2. Automobile travel—Fiction. 3. Orphans—Fiction. 4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Depressions—1929—Fiction. 6. Oklahoma—History—20th century—Fiction. 7. Texas—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L2795All 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010029260

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To Bud and O’Reta Lansdale.

  They survived the Great Depression,

  and their memories of that time inspired

  many of the stories I’ve written,

  including this one.

  Thanks to Stephanie Elliott, my editor;

  Krista Vitola, her assistant; and Danny Baror,

  my agent, for their time and help.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  About the Author

  1

  The wind could blow down a full-grown man, but it was the dust that was the worst. If the dust was red, I could figure it was out of Oklahoma, where we were. But if it was white, it was part of Texas come to fall on us, and if it was darker, it was probably peppering down from Kansas or Nebraska.

  Mama always claimed you could see the face of the devil in them sandstorms, you looked hard enough. I don’t know about that, it being the devil and all. But I can tell you for sure there were times when the sand seemed to have shape, and I thought maybe I could see a face in it, and it was a mean face, and it was a face that had come to puff up and blow us away.

  It might as well have been the devil, though. In a way, it had blowed Mama and Daddy away, ’cause one night, all the dust in her lungs—the dirty pneumonia, the doctor had called it—finally clogged up good and she couldn’t breathe and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Before morning she was dead. I finally fell asleep in a chair by her bed holding her cold hand, listening to the wind outside.

  When I went to look for Daddy, I found him out in the barn. He’d hung himself from a rafter with a plowline from the old mule harness. He had a note pinned to his shirt that said: I CAN NOT TAKE IT WITH YOUR MAMA DEAD I LOVE YOU AND I AM SORRY. It was not a long note, but it was clear, and even without the note, I’d have got the message.

  It hadn’t been long since he done it, because there was still a slight swing to his body and his shadow waved back and forth across the floor and his body was still warm.

  I got up on the old milking stool and cut him down with my pocketknife, my hand trembling all the while I done it. I went inside and got Mama, managed to carry her down the porch and lay her on an old tarp and tug her out to the barn. Then the sandstorm came again, like it was just waiting on me to get inside. It was slamming the boards on the outside of the barn all the time I dug. The sky turned dark as the inside of a cow even though it was midday. I lit a lantern and dug by that light. The floor of the barn was dirt and it was packed down hard and tight from when we still had animals walking around on it.

  I had to work pretty hard at digging until the ground got cracked and I was down a few inches. Then it was soft earth, and I was able to dig quicker. Digging was all I let myself think about, because if I stopped to think about how the only family I had was going down into a hole, I don’t know I could have done it.

  I wrapped Mama and Daddy in the tarp and dragged them into the hole, side by side, gentle as I could. I started covering them up, but all of a sudden, I was as weak as a newborn kitten. I sat down on the side of the grave and looked at their shapes under the tarp. I can’t tell you how empty I felt. I even thought about taking that plowline and doing to myself what Daddy had done.

  But I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to be like the heroes in books I had read about, who could stand up against anything and keep on coming. I hated to say it about my Daddy, but he had taken the coward’s way out, and I hadn’t never been no coward and wasn’t about to start. Still, I broke down and started crying, and I couldn’t stop, though there didn’t seem to be much wet in me. The world was dry, and so was I, and all the time I cried I heaved, like someone sick with nothing left inside to throw up.

  The storm howled and rattled the boards in the barn. The sand drifted through the cracks and filled the air like a fine powder and the powder was the color of blood. It was Oklahoma soil that was killing us that day, and not no other. In an odd way I found that worse. It seemed more personal than dirt from Texas, Kansas, or the wilds of Nebraska.

  The lantern light made the powder gleam. I sat there and stared at the blood-colored mist and finally got up the strength to stand and finish covering Mama and Daddy, mashing the dirt down tight and flat with the back of the shov
el when I was done.

  I started to say some words over them, but the truth was I wasn’t feeling all that religious right then, so I didn’t say nothing but “I love you two. But you shouldn’t have gone and killed yourself, Daddy. That wasn’t any kind of way to do.”

  I got the lantern and set it by the door, pulled some goggles off a nail and slipped them on. They had belonged to my granddaddy, who had been an aviator in World War I, and though I hadn’t knowed him very well before he died, he had left them to me, and it was a good thing, ’cause I knowed a couple fellas that got their eyes scraped off by blowing sand and gone plumb blind.

  I put the goggles on, blew out the lantern. Wasn’t no use trying to carry it out there in the dark, ’cause the wind would blow it out. I set it down on the floor again, opened up the barn door, got hold of the rope Daddy had tied to a nail outside, and followed it through the dark with the wind blowing that sand and it scraping me like the dry tongue of a cat. I followed it over to where it was tied to the porch of the house, and then when I let go of it, I had to feel my way around until I got hold of the doorknob and pushed myself inside.

  I remember thinking right then that things couldn’t get no worse.

  But I was wrong.

  2

  There was plenty of rabbits for a while, so many that the men and boys would go out in groups and run after them and chase them up against some makeshift fences like they was cattle, then take sticks to them and beat them to death. There was so many rabbits they were eating everything green that the starving livestock and the grasshoppers hadn’t eaten and the sand and the drought hadn’t killed. Some of that green was our gardens. We didn’t want to give it up to rabbits, and on account of that, the rabbits was herded and killed.

  Food wasn’t all that handy, so me and Daddy, after killing some rabbits, used to get us a bunch of them and bring them home to eat. We’d got some a couple days back and hung them in the house on a nail. After Mama got worse sick we’d forgot about the rabbits and hadn’t eaten for two days. Now, with Mama and Daddy dead and no one left but me, they’d gone hard and were beginning to smell a little ripe. I decided I was going to skin them, cook them, and eat until I couldn’t eat no more.

  The sand was still blowing, and it was coming through the house the way a ghost would walk through a wall. We had got some flour and water and made some paste and glued paper all along the edges of the windows with it, and we put rags up against the door once we got inside, but it didn’t help much. The dust still got in. It was everywhere. In the curtains and on the shelves and in the pages of books, and it coated the face and tipped the tongue and gave everything you ate a trail-spice taste. I was always wiping or washing it out of my eyes.

  I had buckets of water pumped up from our well in the barn, it was the one good thing about our place. All the other wells was dry or near dry, but ours kept pumping. The barn kept the sand from blowing in as bad as it might, so our well hadn’t dried up like so many others.

  I had put a rag over the water buckets, and the top of the rag was dark with dust. I got the dipper and shook the dust off it and lifted off the rag and dipped me a drink and put the rag back. The water tasted like I was dipping it out of a mud puddle. Rag or not, the dust had got in.

  I cut up the rabbits and tossed the innards in an empty bucket. I had been giving things like that to our dog, Butch, but the dog couldn’t stand the sand neither, and one day he went off and didn’t come back. I liked to imagine he had gone out to California and was living under a tree in an orange grove and there were kind folks who gave him food. California was a place some said everyone ought to go. Said there was work there and there wasn’t no sandstorms and there was plenty of water that didn’t taste like grit. After all that had happened, I was thinking on it. It wasn’t like I had a lot to pack. And besides, the bank was going to take back the property any day now.

  I cleaned the rabbits and put some sticks of wood in the stove and lit them and fried the rabbits with a little lard and flour. I didn’t have any eggs, so the batter was flakey and mostly fell off.

  I ate some of the meat and put the rest in the icebox, which didn’t have any ice but was about as good a place as there was to keep the dust out. I kept thinking about those rabbits, us killing them and them screaming the way they do, like dying women in lakes of fire is the best I can describe it, but truth to tell, there ain’t no words for it. If I thought too much on it, it spoiled my eating, so I tried to think pleasant thoughts, but right then I didn’t have many.

  I took some time to step on centipedes, which were all over the place, and I killed a scorpion that was under the table the same way. I didn’t want to lay down and have those things on me. When I was younger, a scorpion had stung me, and I didn’t like it a bit and didn’t want to repeat it.

  When I had killed all I could see, I went over and lay down on the bed where Mama had died. I could smell her on the mattress, the kind of sweet smell she had that didn’t have nothing to do with perfume, ’cause she didn’t have any except once a bit of lilac water and it was long gone. It was just Mama’s smell and it made me cry. I cried and cried and finally I went to sleep.

  Outside it was still dark and the sand still blew.

  3

  I dreamed and remembered how things had been before all the sand. It was a memory thin as the film covering an egg yolk, but it was a memory I liked. I thought about when Mama and Daddy had been happy. How I had been happy too. We hadn’t had much, but there was food to eat and time to be together. They talked about the future like there would be one. They did good honest work, and I went to school and did chores, and when we could, we listened to the radio or talked or sang or laughed. Me and Daddy played checkers while Mama washed the dishes. It wasn’t a big life, but it was a good life.

  And then the soil got dry and the plants went dead. Wasn’t nothing to feed the stock, and the only thing left to do was eat them, not only so they wouldn’t starve to death, but so we wouldn’t either. We even ate the horse, which turned out to be a little stringy and sweet, so under normal circumstances, I don’t recommend it. Right then, though, I would have eaten horse or dog or most anything. There came a point when it seemed like I was hungry all the time.

  After the crops started to fail from it being so dry, the wind came and plucked them up and finished them off. The wind howled like a wolf, and it was full of sand that scraped and chewed and cut down everything in its path. When the wind wasn’t blowing, the starving grasshoppers was coming at us in a wave so dark it blacked out the sun. And the rabbits. So many rabbits. Everything became a big mess of whirling sand, starving rabbits, and buzzing grasshoppers.

  Then the memory of that faded, and all I could see was that grave in the barn. Open, with Mama and Daddy wrapped up in it. I was standing over it, looking down. A hand pushed up from inside the tarp, pushed at it so that I could see its shape. It was a small hand. It was Mama’s hand.

  I come awake quick, tears running down my face.

  The dark was gone and so was the sandstorm. I sat up and listened to make sure, but didn’t hear any wind. Still, the air was full of fine powder.

  I got out of bed and went out on the front porch and pushed three inches of dust off the path from the door to the steps with my shoe. Then I scraped the steps clean. The air was still and the sun was high and the sand had changed the way everything looked again. The earth was Oklahoma red, where yesterday it had been Texas white with some Nebraska black thrown in for good measure.

  There were big dunes of sand all over the place, and I could see in the distance that the storm had knocked down what was left of our barbwire fence. It didn’t matter. All the cows that had been inside it were long dead anyway.

  And then I seen her and him trudging across the sand. She was wearing boots and dungarees and a plaid shirt buttoned close to the neck and at the wrists to keep the dust out. The boy with her was younger than her, and he had on worn overalls and an old brown shirt. They was both carrying flour sack
s stuffed full of something.

  They was coming along slowly, and I could see they didn’t have no real strength left and was about to fall over, so I started out to meet them. My feet bogged in the sand as I went, and it took me a while to get up to her, and when I was close, I seen the girl drop to one knee. Now that I could see her good I knowed her right off. It was Jane Lewis, which meant the kid was her little brother, Tony. I hadn’t seen them in ages. Mainly because they was known to have lice on a regular basis, which was an affliction of many in the area. I’d had them myself from time to time. Mama, however, had come to the idea that the Lewises were lice-ridden by nature, so I wasn’t allowed what she had called “an association” with them.

  Lice or no lice, I went over and got an arm under Jane, helped her up, and took the flour sack from her. It was as heavy as if it was packed with stones.

  I said, “It’s me, Jane. Jack Catcher.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “Well, all right,” I said.

  I helped her toward the house, and Tony came stumbling after. He said, “You know me, don’t you?”

  “You’re Tony,” I said. “I know her, I’m bound to know you.”

  “I can’t see so good,” he said. “The sand burned my eyes.”

  “Can you see to grab onto me?”

  He came over and took hold of my shirttail. I helped Jane to the house, and Tony clung to me until we was up the steps and on the porch. Inside, they collapsed on the floor. Jane unwrapped her face and shook her head, snapping sand across the room. When she was through doing that, her dark brown hair fell down to her shoulders, and even dirty as she was, I noted she looked pretty good, though I took into consideration her family’s reputation and watched for lice.

  I got a rag that wasn’t as gritty as some of the others and shook it out. I got some water from a bucket and soaked it a little. I took it over to Tony and pulled the covering off his face and wiped him down with it. When I got through wiping, I saw that what I had thought was tan from the sun was brown from the dirt. Underneath it all, he was as white as the belly of a fish. He had a bony face and his hair looked like a rained-on haystack with chicken manure in it, the way it was stuck together in spots.