"The Antidote"

Karen Russell's depiction of the Dust Bowl is a call to remembrance of past sins.

• Every hide brings a penny bounty. So many turnipy sweating bodies and a festive feeling in the air like a penny rubbed between two fingers, like blood shocked into a socket. A smell that reminds you of the room where babies are born. When you try to turn and run away, Papa grabs you... “Settle down, Harp—” Papa is angry. He pours your name over your head like scalding water.
• You are screaming with the rabbits. Your birthday wish is to get to the end of this sound. Quiet comes at last. The men’s arms rest against their sides like tools in a shed. Women are hanging the dead jacks to dry by their long ears. Every twitching rabbit’s foot has stilled. Inside of you, the screaming continues.
• * It felt as if a knife had scraped the marrow from my bones. Something vital inside me had liquefied and drained away, and in its place was this new weightlessness. Lightness and wrongness, a blanketing whiteness that ran up my spine and seeped out of my mouth. Bankrupt was the word that rose in my mind.
• We were four years into the worst drought that any newcomer to the Great Plains had ever experienced. Other beings kept older diaries. Cored cottonwood trees told a millennial story written in wavy circles that no politician had cared to read. Congressmen train themselves to think in election cycles, not planetary ones.
• * Uz had been having brownouts for months. Plagues of jaws and mandibles. Grasshoppers rattled down on the tractor cabs from hissing clouds. Thousands of jackrabbits fanned over the Plains, chewing through anything green. Winged indigo beetles blew in from God alone knew where, husks shaped like hourglasses that nobody on the High Plains had ever seen before 1931. Red sand from Oklahoma and black dirt from Kansas and dove gray earth from the eastern plains of Colorado formed a rolling ceiling of dust above Uz that flashed with heat lightning.
• The prairie witches... Absorbing and storing my customers’ memories. Banking secrets for the townspeople of Uz. Sins and crimes, .. As an attic knows about its ghosts. Their dead were alive inside me, patiently waiting to be recollected. The weight of these deposits refreighted me. After a transfer, I often felt a heavy ache in my rib cage or my pelvis—sometimes a swimmy brightness like goldfish circling my chest
• You cried out, and I realized with wonder that I was the one You were calling for. I was the answer to your question. The antidote to your distress, your fear, your ravening hunger, your life-thirst. I stared into your fierce, dark eyes, born open. We fluttered in and out of sleep together, in a dream of milk and heat and love. Then came the block of hours which were stolen from me
• * Then I’d remember: she’d been murdered and I’d been sent to live with her gray-haired brother. Every morning that I wake up here, I enter and exit that same tunnel of facts. I wake to a view of the fallowland, tangled in my dead mother’s blue cotton sheets in my dead mother’s bed, a bad dream that has continued for almost two years without interruption.
• When I found him, the fog of hope cinched itself into a disappointment that was exactly Harp Oletsky’s height and shape. This rat-gnawed corncob of a man
• her gift for reviving sick birds and bald plants; her laughter that fell like rain inside our house, washing the sticky sadness from the walls; her habit of sticking out her tongue when she was reading or sewing. Right from the start, I understood that I was going to be alone with her. My mama’s only pallbearer. Even dead, she still needs my care.
• “Female basketball is a freak show.” Dottie Iscoe clearly did not know about Babe Didrikson and the Barnstorming Reds, or the AAU tournaments with their prize money and college scholarships. We all held on to the prospect of being a prospect.
• * Black Sunday began as a gash in the western sky, growing wider and wider and spilling down dirt instead of blood. Sometimes I imagine the glee of those journalists at the New York City papers—typing up the story of our worst day in their fancy language. Adjusting the margins and pushing our tragedy into a skinny column, just like old Marvin at the funeral home shoving a tall corpse into a tight suit.
• April 14 broke without augury, and then at 3:00 p.m., not half an hour after I said goodbye to Ed and got back on the road, midnight ran over the sun. It was darker and louder than any moonless night has ever been. The soil rose in mutiny against the farmer.
• Lada’s girl came to Uz with a little smirk tied to her face. Not a smile. More like a bowline knot. I confess that I enjoyed watching it unravel. It proved to me that my niece was a child after all.
• * that is a sight that will never leave me. The waves of earth crashing over the prairie. The sky exhaling all her birds.
• As if we are lucky to be alive at all in the world that they control. Ask any stone or flower if it feels grateful to be here. Your mother does not have much advice to pass on, but I can tell you when to be wary. You should be grateful is a sentence that the powerful wield like a cudgel.
• I refused to feel grateful to Dottie. But I did feel a jolt of sky-blue surprise. Kindness has its own electric current.
• The Sheriff never pays me for taking these strangers’ deposits. He comes to the boardinghouse without warning and drags me to Cell 8. Once I saw his wife sponging blood off a wall, and I thought: That is all I am to Victor Iscoe. He needs me to sponge up people’s dangerous recollections.
• “Get off that telephone, big ears,” my uncle shouted at me from the kitchen. “I should have never gotten wired up.” <> “Doomsday is everybody’s business, Uncle!”
• Church ladies threw Bible verses at me with the same frenzy that they tossed lilies and clumps of sod at the open graves, eager to seal up a hole. I got the sense they would have loved to bury me, too. Tidier that way. In the hours and weeks following her death, people crossed the street to hug me and offer me their condolences, shoving them my way with potluck flair. A month later, these same people crossed the street to avoid me. Like I was a little hatchet walking around town.
• _So Job died, being old and full of days.
  Full of days. That line always struck me. Even as a boy, I felt a heaviness when Papa read it. Some premonition of age. Old Uzians seemed as arid as the land to me, wrinkled and brittle. Yet I heard that line and I understood that in some secret region their rivers ran full of days. Soon enough, their life’s time would overrun its banks.
• Otto’s land dumped on top of my land when the wind blew from the southeast. My land dumped on Otto’s when the wind changed direction. Turns out, these lines we’d drawn so painstakingly around what we owned, they only existed on paper. There was some excitement in that, I’ll admit. Everything mixing with everything else, as dust does.
• By 1934, I was living on the runoff of my labor. Do that for long enough, you start to feel like a dog trying to quench his thirst with his sweat. You’re paying the bank for the privilege of working your land. That’s the whole trap of it.
• Cherry began rolling into and out of her trances almost instantly. “Oh, I worked in a brothel,” she told me. “I’m just refining a trick I learned on my back. I’ve got years of ‘going blank’ and blinking back to life under my belt. Kettle is just teaching me vocabulary. I already knew how to do it, I just didn’t know to call it witchcraft.
• * No one would ever guess that I had once carried a baby to term. But the space You left in me remained open. With each passing day, it seemed to deepen and widen. Every witch I’ve ever met has experienced a shock from which she never recovered, a loss that is ongoing—the way I lost You. I scan every crowd for a face that might be yours. I see your absence everywhere. So you see, Son, in this strange way, You birthed me. When You vanished from my arms, I became a prairie witch... Cherry takes a mechanical view of what happened inside us. We survived a blast that opened a door. In most people, the door becomes a wall again. Time heals it. Time seals it shut. For us, there is no more door. There is a permanent opening—a vacancy. Space for rent.
• * “Damn. I bet whoever took him makes a killing selling babies.” To my horror, I heard a door shut and settle on its hinges inside him. Your abduction made sense to him. Money had made sense of it. His face puckered effortfully in unconvincing sympathy, but was he outraged? Was he surprised? No, “it all added up”—the theft of my baby transformed into the columns on a profit and loss statement.
  Why should money make evil comprehensible to anyone? But it does precisely this. Greed, violence, cruelty—money can explain them. Money can make the most heinous act seem like a sane one. A business decision, a necessary calculation. Evil’s genius is to costume itself as sense.
• All those expiring Polish songs, unsung by any Oletsky for half a century. Glue stuck half the pages together. It hurt my stomach to think about the trapped notes.
• Coach was still frowning at us. “There’s more, ladies,” he said. <> And once again, I failed to guess how bad things can get from one minute to the next.
• Coach is often praised by other light-skinned men at our games, within earshot of Nell, for coaching Nell. It happens at every game we play, Home and Away. Other White people call Coach “an enlightened man” for doing what any child of five does naturally. Nobody had to teach us how to play together.
• He stared without interest at the miracle in front of him. Wide eyes empty as a pantry.
• * My wheat field shimmered like a shallow lake in the afternoon light. Green piled on green from the barn to the road, the even stands shifting with the dry wind. City people think that blue is the color of water, but farmers know otherwise. Plants are where the water goes and grows—and green is the color water wears all spring.
• God invented a thousand clocks, and winter wheat is one of the most beautiful. Green in its infancy becomes the husky red-gold of a mature crop in a matter of weeks.
• As a boy, I felt certain that my family was cursed. <> Now that I’ve been alive for nearly half a century, I know how commonplace the most outrageous tragedies turn out to be.
• Still, I won’t forget the true story of how my brother died. I won’t pay a prairie witch to put Frank out of my mind. He still draws breaths inside me. I do not want to lose my brother a second time.
• Smiling did not seem to come naturally to my mentor. I pictured a needle diving and resurfacing, stitching the witch’s face on.
• I remembered my mother unpinning her hair at night, shaking her bun loose across her bare shoulders. Time came swinging down around us, and I felt us relaxing into each other’s presence.
• Afterward we rode the trolley car and I saw something that looked like an orchard of glowing clementines in downtown Omaha. So many tiny electrified lights. I asked my nonna if I could pick one, and she laughed and said no, they were for everyone, but I could take them home in my mind.
• It burns in a hue for which I have no name. A color that to my watering eyes seems newborn in our world. It reminds me of too many earth colors at once. Snakeskin in sunshine. Oily rainbows. Mother-of-pearl seashells. Blue-black corn kernels. Blood rounding out of a child’s cut finger. Wings shaking off water. Somehow it’s all of them and none of them. The stars look dull as rocks above this blazing light... Whatever keeps shining out of the fallowland persists inside me well past dawn. Daylight doesn’t extinguish its memory.
• We were given false names on our first day... Mine was Anne Fayeweather, a costume that made me sound to myself like a wooden doll with blond braids... We were reassured by the Examiner, in his patronizing gurgle, that sexual deviance was not always proof of evil. It could also be, he said, a sign of feeble-mindedness.
• My fingers walked to the lilies of the field, Mathew 6:28, as if they were traveling home. These were Nonna Onofria’s favorite verses. I wanted to be a lily, growing instead of toiling.
• * I could see the dim shapes inside the automobiles rattling down on the road, and it shocked me to realize that I was such a shape to them, a flash of color bleeding off, a pebble ticking off the glass. Even close up, we must not have seemed quite real to these motorists. We must have looked pitiable to them. Or—worse—picturesque. A row of pregnant women kneeling among the beans and peas and viny gourds.
• Four weeks. Five weeks. It was a slow race to meet Your gaze.
• I had at least a hundred cousins that I’d never met and for whom I could feel nothing but a queasy sense of superiority, and then the pity that is pride’s afterthought... I grew up nourished by a story, the story of my good fortune—I was an American citizen, I lived in the richest country in the world, where I would learn English, work hard, marry well, and improve upon my parents’ great sacrifice.
• My true self huddled behind my maze of bones, peering through my eyeholes.
• After Nonna died, I lost my faith that anything had weight. Giancarlo’s arms around my waist settled me back into myself.
• I felt a smile spilling messily all over my face... Laughter brimmed in the witch’s voice, lifting it a full octave. I felt a spike of game day joy.
• “Listen, I won’t let anybody hurt you,” I said. Tenderness rushed into my voice like blood to a cut. It surprised us both.
• This was exactly what the CCC men were doing on the vacant land west of the depot, I noted. Planting saplings as windbreaks. Seeding cover crops. We could do that same work inside of people. We wouldn’t be lying to hurt anyone. No—we’d be dropping anchors inside them. Weighting them down, so they did not blow off.
• “Now, Mrs. Wheeler,” said the Antidote, bricked up behind her smile. “You know the rules. It’s your secret from here on out.
• “At least the case is closed,” said Ellda in her porcelain voice.
• What word exists to describe that feeling of extinction, expansion? Anybody watching would have seen seven dirty young women, tossing a ball above melting chalk lines. Only we understood what we were doing. The wonderful, terrible stakes of every pass. We were stitching ourselves together. As night descended, we had successfully remade ourselves into a ferocious, panting animal. The Dangers. One team, plural.
• Not-sap. Not-flint. Not-frost. I am overly familiar with the bone color of winterkill. The bludgeoned yellow of wheat that’s been cooked by the drought. Those are the colors in which I’d paint my life story. Not this marvelous hue. Wonder is not a comfortable place to reside, I am learning.
• When you’re late, even your shadow becomes a disturbance. I know this because I’m an early bird, and early birds’ nests are continuously disturbed by new arrivals. I keep my shadow tucked neatly beneath me, inconveniencing nobody.
• He was staring up at me with his sparse shock of black hair and a child’s hungry eyes, as if he wanted to spoon my luck out of me and spread it golden on toast.
• Photographs substitute for memories, he told me at our first meeting. “You must strive to become part of the environment. To be an unobtrusive presence.
• My mother seemed to feel she was dishonoring the subjects of my portraits by seeing them framed through my eyes. A photograph was a “misremembering,” she told me. “But everybody misremembers vividly, Mama,” I’d said.
• Later I learned he did the same thing to Mydans and Evans and Lange and Shahn. But in the beginning, it felt so personal. Depending on how much he hated the work I’d made, he might punch along the edges.
• When I became a Resettlement photographer, Arthur Rothstein’s Fleeing a Dust Storm had already been reproduced a hundred times in newspapers around the country... My guess is that Arthur Rothstein, with his genius for storytelling, gave these two characters some direction. It is an incredible photograph. It shows you what you might see if a camera could pierce the heart of a black blizzard. If there were sufficient light for the camera to record it. If the high winds didn’t make even ordinary sight all but impossible.
• I wanted only to jump into my trance, but the new buoyancy wouldn’t allow it. I shut my eyes and pictured the stars winking out. I begged the night sky to open inside me, so that I could exit the room.
• Vick rubbed his head, feeling agitated. It had been a stroke of genius to use the rabbit’s feet to stitch the open cases together. Solving seven murders at once? It was his finest moment as a lawman.
• If the murdered girls had been, instead of Nina Rose and Olga Kucera, some woman without prospects or family in town. Those girls made for a salable tragedy—they had their whole golden lives ahead of them. But women were always going missing. That was a fact of life throughout the howling world.
• Percival’s scowl deepened, not in thought but in submission to reality. His expression changed very gradually. It was like watching a boot heel sinking into the mud, a terrible fact forcing itself into his awareness. At last he gasped, and the light left his eyes.
• The moon sulked down on them through a scrim of reddish dust. The wailing seemed to approach the pair from every direction, but without any hurry, like a trap closing in slow motion.
• He recognized them now. The high school team. They’d won the Region 7 championship, big news for a sleepy town last year. He’d seen them racing downcourt with their pale and dark hair lifting behind them like claws. <> “If these girls belonged to anyone, they wouldn’t be out here alone a quarter to midnight …”
• * I’d just completed one of the best days of my life, and to my great surprise I expected more of them. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I saw golden grain in my field, laid against the fallow strips. Carloads of wheat, bound for all parts of the world. I felt that I was, for the first time in the history of our family, speaking American.
• I saw that I had violated his idea of how my visit should go: I was not overly grateful. I was not dishonest. I did not remake my face into a flattering mirror of the man and his work.
• A sheriff in a rural county may not sound like much power to scrap over. But taking conscious deposits has been a rapid education. I have learned a great deal more about where power flows and what it does.
• We shared whatever solutions we could find to the problem of time—the gangplank of our one-year sentence, waiting to meet our babies, waiting for freedom from waiting.
• I knew something troubling. Hardy got it from Shakespeare. King Lear. And Lear was talking about himself, not his daughter. That’s how fathers and kings see themselves, I guess. More sinned against than sinning.
• “That’s a fermata,” Zintka explained to me, pointing at the nothingness that spread between the tree trunks—the columns of darkness.
  “A fermata?”
  “It’s a musical term. I think about it often here. It means ‘a pregnant pause.’ ”
• I have swallowed lifetimes, and lost them. It feels miraculous that I can still recollect any fraction of the past. Urgently I feel that I must share with You the little that I do know, and remember. Otherwise we “fallen women” will shrink away into objects of pity, living curios. Counterfeiters like me will continue to erase us from sight. Nathalee’s secret, Stencil’s jokes, Zintka’s hitchhiking. Please carry them with me. Please go on knowing us, Son.
• * I hadn’t known—no one had ever told me—that I was a soldier in a war. We newcomers to the Great Plains were invited out here by the U.S. government to hold ground. The Homestead Act, the Dawes Act, all part of a battle plan. Over time, light-skinned children would grow old in this West with no memory of an earlier home, no awareness that they were the daughters and the sons of an invading army—second- and third- and fourth- and fifth-generation Americans. Putting Native lands into White hands. Putting forests and plains into production. Turning soil into cash.
• * You loved to roller-skate. It was one of the first things I ever learned about You. That night, You kicked like a jackrabbit, wild under my ribs.
  Melody giggled, sounding as drunk as I felt. We had finished Stencil’s hooch. You might assume this would make four hugely pregnant women even more ungainly. Would you believe me if I told you that we soared? It was a foolish risk. It was a necessary risk—one we were choosing to take. Carving up the wooden floor felt nothing like carving our initials into the dormitory walls...
  Icarus should have hit the roller-skating rink—it would have gone so much better for him. Flying around in a circle on the wooden floor, safe from the fatal sun. We skated four across, like a single graceful wing. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, spinning faster and faster. Two hearts accelerating inside each of our huge bodies.
• Q: What is the evil this world runs on? A: Better you than me.
• As time passed, my shame became a line of fire and I cowered behind it, afraid to acknowledge my part in the loss of her son, even to myself.
• Valeria, who talks to animals as if they are visiting dignitaries from a superior planet, seemed embarrassed by my reaction.
• I could see the other Dangers were wilting in the face of all that love. Loneliness is unhelpful as fuel. I pushed that feeling aside and felt around for more useful ones—jealousy, blame, rage, contempt. These I can pump up into my body. My uncle says I live on top of an oil field of anger. Never a bad thing on game day.
• * Rolling our ankles and taking elbows to the stomach? Every one of us absorbed those blows for the team. I felt annoyed at the tiny Ellda kneeling in my imagination. I wanted to banish her smiling, heart-shaped face from my awareness. Her sticky, unwashed hair and her eagerness to be a good sport, to help the team out—all things that girls are trained to do from birth. What’s done is done, Ellda. The thought was like a loose knot I had to keep retying.
• Was I doing it wrong? She held me low on my waist and pulled me against her, like the braver boys at school dances. Our hands went anywhere they pleased. Nobody was chaperoning them.
• “No! Stay with me!” Her voice jumped an octave and she grabbed my shoulders. “Stay in your body tonight, Oletsky.” Her fear felt like a valentine to me in the dark lobby.
• But I could see that it was work. Real spooky work. She was in a kind of trance, squinting at the sky through a wire frame, choosing which clouds to corral... She told me that the stark contrast between the shallow water of the harbor and the open sea made for beautiful black-and-white prints. I thought I understood her way of looking into things, although I felt too clumsy to put words to what I knew from the farm. How I also read tones and textures in my fields to learn about the world below the soil. How light on the surface helps me conjecture about the depths.
• The sky looked unbreakably blue.
• “All right. You’re hiding in our kitchen. Miss Allfrey is developing pictures underground. The sun is setting in an hour. Should I be gathering linens, Uncle?”
• * Withdrawing money from a bank, that’s a happy affair. Withdrawing a memory from the witch nearly killed me. Her words parted me like a knife tugging through a rabbit, opening me from stomach to neck. Into that seam poured the light of my father’s days. My ribs flared, trying to make room for Tomasz Oletsky’s life.
• The Chancellor publicly spoke of his wish to expel us. He planned to rid his German Empire of Poles one way or another—either by forced exile, or by “germanizing” us. These threats colored my youth like ink in water. I was nine years of age when the soldiers burned our church. Kulturkampf was the German word for our nightmare. “The Polish Question” had one solution.
• How does any man assess the integrity of another? The Agent had fine clothes and black calfskin boots with rounded shanks. The shoeblack made them glow like a December lake. He was a little overweight and spoke in a genial, meandering tone—not at all what I had expected from a merchant selling us America.
• * We passed towns under construction, and towns already abandoned—part of my education was learning to distinguish between them. The signs of life became easier to interpret. The surveyors’ white flags meant a town was newborn. Laundry draped on the sides of hills marked the roofs of sod houses. Cavelike clouds promised water but delivered only shadows. Ania held my hand as we waded into the tallgrass prairie at a water stop, sending up swirling mists of pale blue and yellow butterflies.
  The train was paused for a full day by the migrating buffalo. The great herd looked like a mountain in pieces, tumbling toward us. Hundreds flowed across the tracks. Horned beasts that rose a head above the tallest man in our party... Those men who had firearms shot at the buffalo, and dozens fell with blooming chests and terrible, unforgettable cries.
  Take those cries from me. Take the memory of the great creatures staggering in circles.
• an older Pawnee name: Pahuku. A sacred place to our neighbors, although I never learned why. It felt like heresy even to wonder about heathen beliefs. The Pawnee Confederacy was a nation of four different Caddoan-speaking nations, and living beside the reservation, I learned these names as well: the Chaui, the Kitkahahki, the Pitahawirata, and the Skidi. <> Reservation was certainly a Yankee word. Whereas the Republican River—which I had assumed had been named for the young republic of America—in fact had come from early French mapmakers’ respect for the Kitkahahki political system.
• “He shot the old man to test the power of his new gun.”... “Nothing happened to him.” She shook her head with a patient sort of sorrow. “The fellow who pulled the trigger is still living right outside Columbus. Everybody knows who done it, too. No mystery there. Some saw.”
• The Indians had backfired, preventing Mitchell’s fire from spreading, the innkeeper explained. Even so, after General Mitchell’s ten-thousand-mile prairie fire, their game had nothing to live on.
• The federal government was determined to bring someone to trial for the murder of a White settler named McMurty. This Agent, in his sagacity, had seen the mob violence brewing, he told me. He explained his strategy. He had refused to release the annuities owed to the Pawnee people by the government “until some Pawnees were in custody.” He spoke freely to me—I suppose I was no one to fear.
• A broken promise by the government sounds quite removed from one’s own life, but I could measure it precisely in the thinness of a Pawnee child’s wrist and the phlegmy thickness of her grandmother’s cough. I stood behind them at the trading company and felt that knowledge rattle into me. How was any of this my fault? I did not come to America to kill Indians... Eventually my horror rusted over.
• There was a new employee at the school, and what she did to the students was monstrous: “They call her the Counselor. They meet with her and tell her the things that are troubling them. She is hard of hearing, and so they speak into her ear. Tomasz—anything they tell her, everything they say into her strange instrument, it vanishes from their minds. It is evil, what we are doing at that school.”
• * In our home village, a crime committed at night carried a higher penalty—the darkness itself was considered a kind of accomplice, an accessory to murder. In America, everyone who stepped off the platform of the colonist car into the summer of the locusts became a part of the falling night. The long silence, which recruited our silences into it.
• Apparently he had taken the rumor I’d started about “Indians on the warpath” around Uz to heart. Please, Witch, take this memory from me. Ease this rumor I started, and its unintended—its half-intended—consequences, out of my conscience. Let the past stay in the past. Set me free into tomorrow. They call the West “terra nullius.” A blank canvas. My children deserve that. I will not pass these stories down to them. Scrape the blood away from my memory, so that they may paint with sky.
• I cannot begin to understand how this camera chooses and channels these scenes, across the plains of time. But I know the land itself has something to do with it. This land is inside me, teaching me how to see it. Particles of animals, particles of vegetables, particles of soil and sky. To put it in terms that you might better understand, the land is making propaganda for the future of the land.
• Another negative, “Bison Migration,” seems to span centuries. I don’t know if these buffalo are running through the last century or the next one. I have made multiple prints from this same negative, and every one looks different. The grass grows taller and shrinks away to dust, erupts into wildflowers like a children’s choir bursting into song. When I make my test prints, I have a feeling that anything could happen—the herd on the paper might have multiplied, or disappeared.
• I believe we have a choice in all this. There should be a word that means both “blessed” and “cursed,” I have often thought. Maybe that word is “freedom.” Maybe that word is “us.” <> What was a time-traveling camera doing in a Dannebrog pawnshop? Why was I the one who bought it?
• She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I think the counterfeits are making everybody nuts,” she said. “They don’t remember who they are anymore. Don’t have the tools in their toolshed to understand their own lives. If I boarded up your window and painted a blue sky on it, I bet it would make you nuts too.”
• Why did I have to get wrapped up in this? “Murdered women” had not appeared on Roy Stryker’s shooting script. Neither had “monstrous Sheriff,” or “western town of spellbound amnesiacs,” for that matter. Or prairie witches.
• I felt the words beading on my tongue: I cannot risk my life to save another woman’s son. But as it turns out, I can. I am. We are risking everything together at the Founder’s Day celebration... We make a funny sorority in the farmer’s house. Dell’s practically been living in a tunnel with Allfrey, helping to prepare her gallery.
• Time is short, but time also seems to sprawl here—as if the four of us are stretching it out, each of us holding on to their corner of a blue blanket. Our days here are filled with patient urgency. At night we eat together and argue about the right things to say, the right things to do.
• * What would my own History of the West look like? Not Manifest Destiny, but Invisible Loss. The infinity of what might have been, and never was allowed to be. A History of Childless Mothers and Motherless Children. It would include a picture of enduring love. The love that flies with the homing instinct of a bird into and through all weathers, in search of our lost ones, our unforgotten.
  In my History of the West there would also be four pregnant women, roller-skating.
• Your mother is still a powerful witch, Son. I would like to learn a new use for my emptiness—my spaciousness. Look at the rosewood mandolin in the corner of this bedroom. People string catgut over a hole, and send music pouring into the atmosphere. Maybe I can restring myself, and learn how to make music from my hollow place.
• It made me wish my mother was here to tease him with me. Remembering someone you’ve lost can feel like drinking mist. I was thirsty for more.
• “Lada could make a J with her skate blade,” my uncle told me. “Of all the people on the ice, she was the only one who could do that.” His smile made my eyes ache. Forty years later, he was still proud that his sister could autograph the lake.
• “No. I was just pouring myself a warm bath of self-pity.”
• Imagining, like Job before me, that I was at the heart of the mystery. What did the whirlwind do to Job? It spun him around to see all of creation. Forests and mountains, rivers and stars. Whales, crocodiles, hippos, eagles. The storehouse of the snows. The green womb of water. Suddenly Job could hear the voice of God everywhere—not only in the whirlwind, but in all creation. Job got pulled out of his suffering and his confusion, out of the middle of his mind, and replanted with a universe inside him.
  When the whirlwind set Job down again, he was still in Uz, but his field of vision had been transformed. My papa’s deposit had spun me around too, and shown me where to throw my crumb. The bubble of luck meant something different to me now that we had found a purpose for it.
• Surprise is a good teacher. The Graflex Speed Graphic had made portraits of an abundance that looked nothing like the old boom times in Uz—no carloads of wheat next to the shanties and tents of Hoovervilles. Allfrey’s shots were panoramic, but these were not lonely vistas, single farms set against the dying prairie. They were crowded with lifetimes.<> Happiness and beauty and abundance accused me just as forcefully, from the opposite direction.
• In her clear, calm voice, she did what I had been unable to do. She got the room on our side. The speed of it frightened me. A mob swings like a fist. Many times I have experienced the fickleness of the crowd’s support. But I had always been part of the crowd, riding the pendulum composed of my fellow Grangers. Never once had I been on this side of the podium.
• How the goal was to turn “wasteland” into profit, to transform grassland into steaks and leather and wheat for export. To turn Native lands into White ones. Our grandparents and our parents settled across Native lands like a snowbank, and when the spring thaw came, there was a crop of kids like me, like us, with no memory of anything but our childhood on the prairie.
• * we can see clearly what this system of ours produces: end-of-the-world weather and desecrated earth. <> What I wanted to say was that I’d soared as the crow flies inside my father’s memory, and I’d seen more than he was able to see: the plow that broke these plains was the plow that broke my family back in German-occupied Poland: the plow of empire. The plow that displaces and murders people, tearing them from their homes.
• * Thunder shook the windows, through which I witnessed a miracle. <> In the yard of the Grange Hall, on a carpet of dying brown grass, a crowd of dozens stood in silent prayer. People were fanning out, catching the water on their outstretched tongues. I stood, then walked outside to join them. Single droplets became an even sheet. Everything was running paint. The dry air became moist skin. We were all united inside the rain. Something broke loose inside my chest and came rolling down my cheeks. I stood anonymously in the middle of the crowd that had wanted me dead only moments earlier. Every face seemed to bloom. To dilate in water.
• A slow-blinking Harp Oletsky pushed his nose almost to the windshield, trying to find the road. I realized I was holding my camera in the exact same way that the witch held her earhorn and the girl held her filthy ball, using it to anchor me to my purpose, and I smiled. This life will surprise you. A month ago, I knew none of these people.
• The Scarecrow: It was such a little thing that I was able to do to help her. Such a small contribution to the drama unfolding. I inclined into the wind. Ever so slightly, I felt a wall yield. A shift like a bead of rain rolling down a leaf. With all of my will, I urged the hat forward, and the wind met me in this endeavor.
• I saw my opportunity. It was crazy luck, crazy timing—although no crazier than anything else that had happened to me. Just kinder. <> Defense to offense. It’s my favorite pivot. The scarecrow’s hat came free and flew directly into Sheriff Iscoe’s face. The way he howled, you’d think it gouged his eye out. So easily, as if I were stooping to pluck my namesake flower, I picked up his gun.
• “Why would anyone run from a color like that?” Cleo asked. <> I knelt to stroke the cat’s belly, like a witch in a storybook. “Vick did not want to change his reflection in the mirror,” I said.
• More than the hugeness of our sorrows, our losses that we can only absorb with the stupefaction of our animals, soft-eyed and uncomprehending. <> So much of what we have laid up in these Vaults turns out to be happiness. Scrolled maps to other worlds, the dreams we forgot, the unthought possible. The kind, laughing hearts that we had as children, we can recover.
• If the Earth had rolled on its axis after an eclipse, unlidding the sun, it could not have felt any more miraculous to me than Allfrey’s portrait of Lada Oletsky.