Joe R. Lansdale - All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky

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 authors 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 Childrens Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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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, 19311939Juvenile Fiction. [1. Dust Bowl Era, 19311939Fiction. 2. Automobile travelFiction. 3. OrphansFiction. 4. Brothers and sistersFiction. 5. Depressions1929Fiction. 6. OklahomaHistory20th centuryFiction. 7. TexasHistory20th centuryFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L2795All 2011

[Fic]dc22
2010029260

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v3.1

To Bud and OReta Lansdale.
They survived the Great Depression,
and their memories of that time inspired
many of the stories Ive written,
including this one.

Thanks to Stephanie Elliott, my editor;
Krista Vitola, her assistant; and Danny Baror,
my agent, for their time and help.

T he 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 dont 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 lungsthe dirty pneumonia, the doctor had called itfinally clogged up good and she couldnt breathe and there wasnt 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. Hed 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, Id have got the message.

It hadnt 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 dont 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 cant tell you how empty I felt. I even thought about taking that plowline and doing to myself what Daddy had done.

But I didnt 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 cowards way out, and I hadnt never been no coward and wasnt about to start. Still, I broke down and started crying, and I couldnt stop, though there didnt 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 shovel when I was done.

I started to say some words over them, but the truth was I wasnt feeling all that religious right then, so I didnt say nothing but I love you two. But you shouldnt have gone and killed yourself, Daddy. That wasnt 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 hadnt 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. Wasnt 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 couldnt get no worse.

But I was wrong.

T here 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 hadnt eaten and the sand and the drought hadnt killed. Some of that green was our gardens. We didnt want to give it up to rabbits, and on account of that, the rabbits was herded and killed.