A Cup of Dust Read online

  Then again, Mama kissed me all over my face and held me close. Ray’s mother didn’t so much as look at him twice in a week. That didn’t make sense to me whatsoever. I thought Ray Jones was the nicest thing to look at in all Cimarron County, dirty toes and all.

  I joined him, but I went down the steps knowing Mama would holler if I’d jumped.

  “Mama said to give this to you,” I said, handing over one of the biscuits.

  The year before, he would have gotten mad about me giving him something like a biscuit. Would’ve slumped off and not come back around for a couple days. Things had gotten harder for his family, though. All the families in Red River had it rough. Folks were less likely than before to refuse a biscuit or a can of beans. They’d take the food but didn’t like meeting the eyes of the giver after.

  I wondered why they held onto shame like that.

  Ray ate eagerly, without dropping so much as a crumb. I figured he was even more hungry than I was. Still, as much as I wanted to shove it in like Ray did, I knew Mama was watching, so I ate real dainty, just like she’d taught me. I didn’t even try to spit the grit out from my mouth. I just let it crunch between my teeth.

  Wasting food in front of Ray would have been a sin.

  Ray’s family didn’t always have enough to eat. I knew that because Daddy had told me. But he’d also said I wasn’t to ever say a word about it to Ray or any of the Joneses. It shamed them enough to take the relief the government sent. Daddy said they didn’t need a little girl dumping more embarrassment on top of them. Having the government truck stop in front of their old dugout once a month did plenty of that.

  I hadn’t gotten to see what was on that truck. Daddy got paid at the end of every month so we always had more than enough. One hundred and twenty-five dollars could buy all the groceries we needed. Mama had told me never to tell Ray or anybody else about how much Daddy made. I also wasn’t to tell that Mama sometimes dropped off loads of food to neighbors when they weren’t home or that she often paid off a family’s bill at Mr. Smalley’s store. She liked to surprise them.

  Meemaw had told me they would have refused the food or money if they knew where it had come from.

  “Wanna go out to the old cabins?” Ray asked me, wiping the sweat off his upper lip before popping the last bite of biscuit into his mouth. “I hear one of them got its roof caved in.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess so.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Shoving hands back into his pockets, Ray started walking. He checked over his shoulder to make sure I followed.

  I sped up. The last thing I wanted was for him to think I was a slowpoke.

  “My pa seen a picture show last week,” Ray said. “He was over to Boise City for work or something.”

  I knew Ray’s father hadn’t been working. It was more likely that he was gone doing the “something.” Whatever that meant. But when Mama and Daddy talked about Mr. Jones, they both stopped short of saying what was wrong with him and raised their eyebrows. When I’d asked, they’d just said he was thirsty.

  Why he had to go off to Boise City to relieve his thirst when Red River had drinking water, I couldn’t figure out.

  “My pa said there was this newsreel before the movie.” Ray coughed and spit. “Said they done a story on a man who got hung for sticking up a bank. They said his head popped clean off.”

  “Did not.” I knew Ray liked to tease me.

  “It’s the God’s honest truth,” he said. “Pa said the hangman forgot to put the bag over the fella’s head. All the folks that watched got sick to their stomachs.”

  “That isn’t true.”

  Ray laughed and gave me a sideways grin. When he made that face, I couldn’t tell if he was saying the truth or not. “He said the man’s head turned purple before it busted open.”

  The picture that created in my head was enough to keep me full of nightmares for a good month.

  We passed by the house where Pastor Ezra Anderson lived with his crazy old wife, Mabel. She was the kind of crazy that would get up in the middle of the night, screaming about seeing demons floating above her head. And she was the kind of crazy that thought a jar of old brine was a good birthday present.

  Most people stayed clear of her, and Pastor kept her inside almost all the time. But if a scary story needed telling, it usually had something to do with a thing Mad Mabel had done throughout the years.

  Meemaw had said she wasn’t always crazy. She said Mrs. Anderson used to be a real nice lady, after she took Jesus into her heart. Meemaw’d also told me that Mrs. Anderson made the best goulash this side of Berlin.

  Something had just snapped in her mind, Meemaw had told me. One day she was all right and the next she was the town loony. Nobody could make heads or tails of it.

  But Pastor wouldn’t leave her no matter what, and Meemaw had said that was the mark of a good man.

  “Would ya look at that,” Ray said, nudging me. “Look what Mad Mabel’s done now.”

  All along Pastor’s fence were hung dead snakes, belly up, drying in the sun. The mouths hung wide, and the eyes were open but dull. I wondered how she’d found so many of them and how she’d killed them without getting bit. Thinking on it made a chill travel up my backbone.

  “Why’d she do that?” I whispered.

  “Probably thinks it’ll make it rain or something.” Ray cleared his throat. “Come on. Them things give me the willies.”

  Not twenty paces from us, the sharecropper cabins lined the road, half buried in the land. Dugouts, they were called. Mama said she’d sooner live in Daddy’s truck than in one of those dugouts. She told me the centipedes skittered on the walls and fell in people’s hair when they were sleeping.

  It made my scalp itch to imagine it.

  Ray’s family lived in the first dugout on the right. When I’d asked him once about the centipedes, he told me he ate them alive. He’d catch them in his mouth when they dropped from the ceiling. Said he liked the way they tickled on the way down. Then he’d given me that sideways grin and raised his eyebrows.

  I never could tell when he was joshing me.

  Mrs. Jones stood to the side of their front door, shaking a rug, dust falling off it. When she looked our way, she nodded, not smiling like Mama would have.

  When I dreamed of ghosts, they looked like Mrs. Jones with empty eyes, see-through as glass. I didn’t think I had ever seen her smile. If she’d ever had so much as a happy thought, I wouldn’t have known it to look at her. She was about as blank as an empty sheet of paper.

  We kept on walking. Past a pile of things folks had left when they took off, leaving Red River forever. A bed frame and a rusted-out basin, a half-buried hand plow, and a couple old tires. We climbed over a broke-down tractor, Ray turning the steering wheel this way and that before jumping back to the ground. I couldn’t hardly remember when all the cabins had people living in them. It had been such a long time since things were good.

  Ray led me farther down the line of shacks and stopped right in front of the very last one. It was all the way above ground and had a cellar, even. The porch sloped so badly I wondered if somebody could stand on it without sliding right off. The one window had a half-broken-out pane of glass and a dingy piece of cloth hanging across it, shredded and bleached by years of scorching from the sun. A big skull of some animal hung on the outside wall right next to the door.

  Of all the haunted places in No Man’s Land, that one made me feel the loneliest.

  The family that had lived there left a year or so before, off to find work out West. Nothing but orange trees that needed picked, they had said. Work for everybody who’d want it.

  When I’d asked Daddy why we didn’t pack up and leave, he’d said that everything we had in the world was right there in Red River. I’d told him I would work picking oranges in California if he’d let us move. All he’d said was that it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

  “It don’t look like that roof caved all the wa
y in,” Ray said, cocking his head to one side. He climbed up on the porch to look in the window. “Nah. Just half of it. I’m going in for a look-see.”

  I crossed my arms and watched him.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “I can’t go in there.” I shook my head.

  “Come on, Pearl. Just for a minute.”

  “My mama would tan my hide if I went in there.”

  Ray stepped around a pulled-up nail in the porch. “Nobody’s in there. They ain’t lived here for more than a year.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want a whupping.” Mama wouldn’t have whupped me, and I knew it. Still, I didn’t want to get in trouble for breaking her rules.

  Neither of us said a word about why Mama had such a rule, but we both knew. The folks who had last lived in that cabin were Negro. Mama wasn’t a hateful woman or one to prejudice. She just thought people should stick to their own kind.

  Somehow, though, it had been okay for Negroes to wash our clothes and clean our house. When I’d asked Mama about that, she didn’t have an answer other than, “They’re just different than us.”

  “If you’re gonna be a little girl about it, I’ll go in by myself.” Ray stepped closer to the door. “You can go on home. I don’t need you tagging around.”

  I couldn’t have Ray thinking I was being a little girl. I scrambled up on that porch, making sure to miss stepping on shards of broken glass and dodging the pulled-up, rusty nails. I ducked through the door ahead of him.

  It was brighter inside than I expected. The half-caved-in roof let in plenty of light. With all the dirt mounded up on one side of the floor, it was hard to imagine that anybody had ever lived there, let alone a whole family with kids and everything.

  They’d left nothing but a box of trash. Or at least somebody had come along and took what had remained. It was just four walls, a window, a door, and a pile of dirt that stacked all the way up to where the ceiling had been.

  Ray had walked in behind me. He elbowed me, “What’s that?”

  He took a few steps before squatting next to the box. It was nothing special. Just an old crate with a blue stamp smudged on the wood. He reached in and grabbed a yellowed newspaper. Mouse droppings rolled off it. He held it up, squinting to look at the date, but it had been rubbed off long before. Torn edges at the bottom told me that something had been important enough to get ripped out. An article or a picture, maybe.

  Ray took the insides of the paper and flipped through them, leaving me the front page. I ran my fingers along the tear, the soft edge tickling my skin. What could have been so important that somebody kept just one part of the paper, I wondered.

  “There’s funnies still in here,” Ray said, drawing my attention away from the missing article. He turned the paper toward me, showing me the treasure he’d uncovered. I hadn’t seen his happy, little-boy smile in too long.

  Ray and I eased onto the dust pile in the corner of the room. We made divots in the dirt with our backsides. The dirt was soft as flour. The firm part of Ray’s shoulder supported my back. Metal from his overall strap dug into my skin and his warm breath smelled sour. I didn’t tell him to move, though.

  “Read ’em out loud,” he whispered. Ray couldn’t read more than a couple words. He’d told me so one time, making sure I promised to never tell anybody else. He said the letters do-si-doed across the pages when he tried putting them in order. He’d quit coming to school after he learned to write his name. As far as he cared, that was all the school knowledge he needed.

  “Which one first?” I asked.

  “Start with Dick Tracy.”

  We read through all the comics, every single one of them. A couple times Ray leaned forward and let his chin rest on my shoulder, our cheeks almost brushing together.

  For somebody who couldn’t read, he sure liked stories. He’d get pulled right into the middle of them. I wished I knew how to fix his eyes so he could read the words for himself whenever he wanted.

  Once we’d finished with the funnies, Ray pointed at the paper on my lap. I’d almost forgotten it was even there.

  “What’s that say?” he asked, hitting the headline with the knuckle of his middle finger.

  I shook the paper a little to work out the wrinkles and rested it on my knees.

  “‘Jimmy DuPre struck down in Red River,’” I dragged my finger under the words as I read them. Just saying that name, Jimmy DuPre, made goose pimples stand up on my arms.

  When I dreamed of monsters, I saw Jimmy DuPre’s rat face.

  I’d heard tales about Jimmy DuPre most of my life. All the kids in Red River had. He’d become something of a myth and a caution for children to make good choices and do the right thing.

  Better obey your parents or you might end up like Jimmy DuPre. Don’t sass the teacher—you don’t want to go the way of Jimmy DuPre. Go to church, do your chores, say a prayer before meals so you avoid the epic fate of Jimmy DuPre, who ended up dead in the street, a bullet stuck in his chest.

  “Read it.” Ray knocked me forward with his shoulder.

  “Quit it, would ya?” I said. “You know what it says.”

  As much as I didn’t want to, I read it to Ray, even though we both knew the story. Jimmy DuPre, a boy from Kentucky or somewhere, had come to Oklahoma. He stuck up a bunch of banks and killed a couple people along the way. He was hiding in Red River when the urge to rob somebody else got to him. Problem was, he stuck up Mr. Smalley’s grocery store while Daddy was picking up a bag of flour for Mama.

  Jimmy ended up dead. Daddy was the one who shot him. That was it. End of story. Jimmy was the bad guy and Daddy the hero.

  Clean your plate and mind your manners so you’ll end up like the good sheriff Tom Spence.

  Ray studied the picture of Jimmy DuPre and cocked his head, squinting. “He never should have come to Red River.”

  I handed the paper to him so he could look at it closer.

  “I would’ve thought he’d have sense enough not to hide out in a small town. Boise City would have been a better place.” Ray shook his head. “Why anybody would pick to live here is beyond me.”

  “You think you’ll ever leave?” I asked.

  “I’m fixing to.” He crumpled the article about Jimmy DuPre into a ball. “I won’t go taking from anybody else to do it, though. Not like he done.”

  “Would you come back?”

  “Nah. I wouldn’t think about this place again.” He dropped the paper ball on the floor and kicked it. It scuttled across the dirt to the other side of the room.

  If Daddy had given me bruises like the ones I sometimes saw on Ray, I’d want to leave, too.

  “Ain’t nothing here. Nothing but dirt,” he said.

  “And rabbits.” I smiled at him, but he didn’t look at me.

  “I’m about sick of all the rabbits.” He shook his head. “I hate them.”

  “There’s a drive tomorrow. I saw a sign at the store.”

  Daddy’d told me the jackrabbits had come looking for water, but there wasn’t much to find. They’d take over a field, blending in with the dirt. When they moved all at once, it looked like the land was moving and shaking.

  Just about every other Sunday that year, the men had gotten together to catch as many of the jackrabbits as they could. The varmints had nibbled up every green thing the dust storms didn’t bury. Daddy had never let me go to one of the drives. He made me stay home with Mama and Meemaw and Beanie. He’d told me that it wasn’t good for a woman to be out in the fields on the Sabbath.

  How it was fine for the men to un-holy the Sabbath Day, I didn’t know. But I didn’t dare ask him. Daddy hardly ever said anything about one of the commandments, so I knew he was serious about that one.

  “You coming to the drive?” Ray asked.

  “Girls aren’t allowed at those,” I answered.

  “Sure they are. Plenty of girls come.”

  “Mama needs me at home.”

  Ray fell back, sprawling out on the dirt. He lifted
one of his hands, putting it behind his head. I saw that he’d started sprouting a little hair under his arm, just a couple wiry ones. I figured he was awful proud of the few he had, the way he smiled when I looked at them.

  “Rabbit drives is men’s work, anyhow,” he said.

  “I could do it.”

  “Couldn’t neither. It would make you cry.” He stood up and grabbed my hand, pulling me to my feet. “A girl like you ain’t made for man’s work.”

  I had never won an argument with Ray Jones, and I didn’t figure I was like to. So I let him pull me out of the cabin and onto the porch and didn’t snap back at him, much as I would have liked to.

  “The other day I seen a jackrabbit get caught in a piece of barbed wire.” Ray squinted, looking across the wide land. “The air was all full of static like it does. That dumb rabbit got zapped so hard it cooked it all the way through.”

  “You’re lying.” I let go of his hand.

  “Am not. It singed all the fur off and everything.” Ray hopped off the porch. “Just needed a little salt and pepper’s all. Tasted just fine.”

  “You never ate that.” I stepped off the porch and shoved him. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t?” He grinned sideways. “Ask my ma. She’ll tell you. Said it was the best thing she’d ever ate.”

  I rolled my eyes, trying to pretend I wasn’t even a little tickled by his story.

  Under our feet, the ground rumbled. We looked at each other and smiled. Without thinking twice we both took off running toward the sound of the train whistle. The tracks weren’t far off from the sharecroppers’ cabins. We got to them long before the train reached the old, boarded-up depot. I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting. Ray held one hand like a visor, shielding his eyes from the sun-glare.

  “How many cars you think this one’s got?” Ray watched the engine chug toward us. “You think there’s any hobos?”

  Roaring and blowing at my skirt so I had to hold it down, the train rushed by. My hair raised up and waved all around my head, and my heart thudded. Ray and I turned, watching as it went.