Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse Page A

always needing a wash, but
    from the time I was four,
    I remember being dazzled by her
    whenever she played the piano.
    Daddy bought it, an old Cramer,
    his wedding gift to her.
    She came to this house and found gaps in the walls,
    a rusty bed, no running water,
    and that piano,
    gleaming in the corner.
    Daddy gets soft eyes, standing behind her while she
    plays.
    I want someone to look that way at me.
    On my fifth birthday,
    Ma sat me down beside her
    and started me to reading music,
    started me to playing.
    I’m not half so good as Ma.
    She can pull Daddy into the parlor
    even after the last milking, when he’s so beat
    he barely knows his own name
    and all he wants
    is a mattress under his bones.
    You’ve got to be something
    to get his notice that time of day,
    but Ma can.
    I’m not half so good with my crazy playing
    as she is with her fine tunes and her
    fancy fingerwork.
But I’m good enough for Arley, I guess.
    March 1934

Debts
    Daddy is thinking
    of taking a loan from Mr. Roosevelt and his men,
    to get some new wheat planted
    where the winter crop has spindled out and died.
    Mr. Roosevelt promises
    Daddy won’t have to pay a dime
    till the crop comes in.
    Daddy says,
    “I can turn the fields over,
    start again.
    It’s sure to rain soon.
    Wheat’s sure to grow.”
    Ma says, “What if it doesn’t?”
    Daddy takes off his hat,
    roughs up his hair,
    puts the hat back on.
    “Course it’ll rain,” he says.
    Ma says, “Bay,
    it hasn’t rained enough to grow wheat in
    three years.”
    Daddy looks like a fight brewing.
    He takes that red face of his out to the barn,
    to keep from feuding with my pregnant ma.
    I ask Ma
    how,
    after all this time,
    Daddy still believes in rain.
    “Well, it rains enough,” Ma says,
    “now and again,
    to keep a person hoping.
    But even if it didn’t
    your daddy would have to believe.
    It’s coming on spring,
    and he’s a farmer.”
    March 1934

Foul as Maggoty Stew
    Arley Wanderdale said
    the rehearsals for Sunny of Sunnyside
    shouldn’t take me out of school
    more than twice next week.
    When I told Ma she got angry about
    my missing school to play piano for some show.
    Me and Daddy,
    we’re trying our best to please Ma,
    for fear of what it might do to the baby if we don’t.
    I don’t know why she’s
    so against my playing.
    She says that school is important,
    but I do all right in school.
    I know she doesn’t like the kind
    of music I play,
    but sometimes I think she’s
    just plain jealous
    when I’m at the piano
    and she’s not.
    And maybe she’s a little afraid
    of me going somewhere with the music
    she can’t follow.
    Or of the music taking me
    so far away one day
    I’ll never come home.
    Whatever the reason, she said I couldn’t do it.
    Arley had to get somebody to take my place.
    I do as she says. I go to school,
    and in the afternoons I come home,
    run through my chores,
    do my reading and my math work at the
    kitchen table
    and all the while I glare at Ma’s back with a scowl
    foul as maggoty stew.
    March 1934

State Tests
    When I got home I told Ma
    our school scored higher than the
    whole state on achievement tests and
    I scored top of eighth grade.
    Ma nodded.
    “I knew you could.”
    That’s all she said.
    She was proud,
    I could tell.
    But she didn’t
    coo like Mad Dog’s ma. Or
    go on
    like Mrs. Killian used to do.
    Daddy says,
    “That’s not your ma’s way.”
    But I wish it was.
    I wish she’d give me a little more to hold on to than
    “I knew you could.”
    Instead she makes me feel like she’s just
    taking me in like I was
so much flannel dry on the line.
    March 1934

Fields of Flashing Light
    I heard the wind rise,
    and stumbled from my bed,
    down the stairs,
    out the front door,
    into the yard.
    The night sky kept flashing,
    lightning danced down on its spindly legs.
    I sensed it before I knew it was coming.
    I heard it,
    smelled it,
    tasted it.
    Dust.
    While Ma and Daddy slept,
    the dust came,
    tearing up fields where the winter