Dust Girl: The American Fairy Trilogy Book 1 (3 page)

My first sight of my father’s piano was sort of disappointing.
It was the same kind of upright piano you could see in any parlor in town. The only remarkable thing was that its pale wood was absolutely clean. Not a speck of dust marred the curlicue and thistle flower carving across its front. The white keys all but glowed in the dark.

“Now, Callie, I want you to play,” said Mama.

“Play?” I shifted my weight uneasily.

“Yes. Sit down, and play the piano.”

This is it. She’s gone right round the bend this time
. “I can’t play piano, Mama,” I reminded her. “You never let me learn.”

“Well, you’ll just have to do your best.”

“But why?”

“So your father will hear you.” Her knuckles turned white as her hands clutched at each other. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried, but he won’t listen to me.”

Disbelief slackened my jaw again. “That’s because he’s
gone
, Mama! He left us!”

“He just doesn’t know what kind of trouble we’re in.” Her demeanor remained terribly calm. “But he’ll know it’s you playing his piano and he’ll have to answer you.”

“That’s crazy, Mama!” I screamed. “You’re crazy!”

The slap was so sudden, I didn’t even know why my cheek hurt, or why the world spun. But there was Mama, rearing up over me as angry as I’d ever seen her, hand raised high.

“Calliope Margaret LeRoux, you will do as you are told!”

My knees buckled, sitting me down hard on the bench. Dazed, I scooted around to face the piano. The keys were smooth white and pure black, reflecting what little light oozed between the velveteen drapes.

Waiting for me
. The thought popped into my spinning mind as I stared at those shiny keys.
They’ve been waiting a long time
.

I touched a black key with a tentative finger. One thin note lifted into the stuffy room. My heart fluttered in my chest, and my blood went still in my veins.

Mama nodded. “Louder, honey. He’s got to hear you.”

I fit the fingers of my left hand to the white keys, the ones on my right to the black. Something rose inside me. It pushed against my heart and crowded my dust-filled lungs.

“Mama …” The thing was trying to get down to my hands, and there was no telling what it would do once it did.

“Play, Callie!”

I pressed down on the keys. A chord, a full, clear moment of music rang through the room. Its vibration resonated through the keys, through my skin, and into my finger bones. It caught hold of that thing inside and pulled.

My wrists lifted. My fingers rearranged themselves on the keys. My left hand started to rock and jump back and forth on the low, deep keys, making a steady beat. At the same time, my right hand danced up and down across the high, bright keys, setting a lively melody free to soar through the room.

Boogie. I was playing boogie-woogie, joyous, infectious, dangerous music. Music that made Reverend Schauenbergh slam the pulpit and bellow about the end of the world. But Reverend Schauenbergh was long gone, and here at the end of the world this music had blown into my head, and into my suddenly nimble hands.

“That’s it, Callie!” cried Mama. “Play loud!”

Mama. Mama, who’d let her mind trickle away waiting for a man who would never come back. Mama, who’d kept us here while the dust crawled into my lungs. She should have gone, she should be gone.…

“No, Callie. Oh, no. I know you’re angry, but you mustn’t play for me, not like that. Play for your papa, honey. Play him back to us.”

Anger burned at the base of my throat. It swelled in my dust-filled lungs and surged down my hands. Papa was the last person to sit at this piano. My fingers touched the keys like his did. Papa had gone off and left us, left
me
to choke and die in the dust.… The beat under my left hand grew harder; the dance in my right grew faster. I was going to die. The man who had played this piano, he broke my mama’s heart so hard her mind broke with it, and he didn’t even know I was alive. I breathed in music the way I breathed in the dust. Breathed it in and poured it out again, loud and wild and sick and angry.

“No, Callie!” cried Mama. “Not like that!”

But Mama seemed a long way away. Mama was already gone. And I was here. For just this little while, I was still
alive and my papa was going to know about it. Just this once, wherever he was, whoever he’d left us for, he was going to hear me. The whole world was going to hear.

There she issss!
cried a voice, low and wild as the wind rattling the shingles.
There! THERE!

“Calliope,
stop
!”

The world spun like when Mama had slapped me, and something hard slammed against my shoulder. I gasped, coughed, and shuddered. I was on the floor of the stage with Mama standing over me, trembling. She must have knocked me off the bench. I was stunned and furious, but only for a minute.

The music had stopped, but the other sound, the roaring sound, hadn’t. Mama went white. She ran to the windows and yanked back the curtains.

“No,” whispered Mama.

On the edge of the flat Kansas prairie, a range of midnight-black mountains loomed over Slow Run. But they weren’t standing still like mountains should. Those mountains surged and boiled, and they lumbered slowly forward.

Heeeerrrre!
the mountains roared.
Sheeee’ssss heeeerrrre!

“Dust.” I struggled to my feet, coughing the whole way. “Mama, it’s a duster!”

Mama ran out of the Moonlight Room without looking back. Weak as a kitten, I staggered down the stage steps and into the hallway after her.

A door slammed.

Oh, no. No, please, no
.

I stumbled into the kitchen, and a gust of wind almost knocked me over. The door swung free on its hinges.

“Mama!” Dust slammed into my eyes and nose and filled my open mouth. Reeling, I snatched the napkin off the remains of my breakfast and pressed it over my face.

“Go away!” Mama screamed from outside. “Go away! She didn’t mean it! She’s just a child! She didn’t mean it!”

Yes, she did
, laughed the voice.
Yessss, she did! Weeee sssseeeee you noooow! Weeee got you now!

“No!” I hollered into the cloth. “Leave her alone!” My flailing hand hit the threshold, and the mountains tumbled down over me.

A burning, roaring darkness swallowed me, like I was Hansel and Gretel’s witch shoved headfirst into the stove. I shrieked and swallowed dust. The floor hit my knees, my chest, my chin. I lay there, blind, deaf, and burning. Grit scraped every inch of my skin, and the storm wind drove it in like needles. My head went dizzy, and a dozen different pictures flashed in front of my blind eyes—Reverend Schauenbergh shouting that this was the end of the world; Dr. Kenny’s rattletrap Model T rolling down the road; my hands on the gleaming piano keys; people dancing in an arena with a crowd cheering them on; a huge, ugly man striding grimly through the dust with a sawed-off shotgun tucked under his arm; a skinny, mangy dog staggering through the storm; Mama stretching her arms out as the mountains poured down.

Mama. Have to find Mama
.

I fumbled with the corners of my napkin and got it knotted around my face. I found the door frame and hauled myself up. Hanging on tight, I made myself open my eyes, just a crack.

Lightning flashed overhead, and for a heartbeat, I could see the wind. Red, beige, and black, it billowed and moaned past the door. The steps had already vanished under drifts of dust. So had the path to the henhouse. So had the henhouse.

“Mama!”
What if she’s fallen? What if the dust already buried her?

Lightning flickered again, showing a black shadow against the whirling red dust, a human shape staggering through the storm. I made to rush forward, but I stopped. I could barely see, and all the landmarks were gone. What if I got out there and couldn’t find the way back? It happened in blizzards. We could both be lost a few feet from our back door.

The thought of blizzards gave me an idea. Mama kept a clothesline on a shelf in the canning room. I ran for it and threw the coil over my shoulder. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, but I gritted my teeth until they hurt and I managed to get one end of the rope knotted around the doorknob.

With the other end tied around my waist, I stepped off the back porch and sank right up to my knees in hot dust.

Each step forward wrenched another cough out of me.
Each step brought the silhouette in the dust a little closer, but behind that thickening screen of dust, it kept changing its shape. First it was a person. Then it was a skinny dog. Then it was a person again.

The silhouette crumpled. I screamed and lunged forward, scrabbling in the dust. A hand grabbed mine. I heaved myself backward so hard I almost fell.

But it wasn’t Mama who staggered upright in front of me.

It was a man.

Dust sluiced off the stranger’s shoulders and was whipped away by the wind. He was tall and skinny and dark. His eyes flashed beneath a wide-brimmed, high-crowned hat. But all I could really see was that he wasn’t my mother.

“Mama!” I screamed past the man. Dust poured straight down my throat. I gagged and heaved. A big, rough hand clamped across my mouth, shoving my scarf back into place.

The wind gusted hard, driving dust into my eyes, and the hand slithered away as the man fell to his knees again. Dust filled up the whole world, and my lifeline was stretched taut. No matter how bad I wanted to, I couldn’t go any farther. The stranger slumped down lower, his hands digging into the hot dust, looking for solid ground to hold him up.
I didn’t know who or what he was, but I couldn’t leave him out here.

Hanging on tight to the rope with one hand, I tugged on the man’s shirtsleeve until he staggered to his feet again. I pressed his hand to my shoulder so he could hold on to me. His grip tightened, signaling he understood.

I found the rope with my fingers, and hand over hand, I followed it. There was nothing to hear but the roaring wind. Nothing to see but the rolling red-tinted darkness. That bony hand clamped tight to my shoulder was the only way I knew the stranger stayed with me.

After what felt like a year in that roaring dark, my toes hit the back steps. I kept one hand on the rope and groped with the other until my fingertips found the kitchen door. Fumbling, I gripped the handle and yanked it open. The man fell inside behind me, sprawling full length on the floor.

“Mister!”

The man didn’t move. He lay there, still as death among the dust drifts on the yellow linoleum.

Water. Had to get water. There was water in the icebox. I gulped a swallow straight from the pitcher, and coughed and choked and spat red mud into the sink. Even with the door shut, the dust hung in the air, as thick as coal smoke. The wind howled all around, and the dust scrabbled at the windowpanes, prying at the seams, looking for the weak spots. My throat was still choked half full with dust but I could breathe, and think.

I got down on hands and knees and tugged against the fallen man’s shoulders until he rolled onto his back.

“Mister, wake up!” I splashed water onto his face. “We can’t stay here! Wake up!”

The stranger’s eyelids snapped open. For a second, I saw two black holes where his eyes should have been. But then he blinked, and they were just eyes.

“Get up!” I hollered over my shoulder as I ran to grab the clean dish towels off the shelf by the stove. “We gotta get in the parlor!”

The man said nothing, just followed me as I staggered through to the ladies’ parlor carrying the water jug and towels. The chandelier had only one bulb left, but it lit when I flipped the switch. Dust turned the light hazy and pink. So it was red dust. Kansas dust is gray. It’s Oklahoma dust that’s red. This was Oklahoma blowing over us.

I kicked the door shut and stuffed the dish towels into the water jug to wet them down.

“Here, get the windowsills.” I shoved a wet towel at the man. He stared at it like he’d never seen such a thing before. But as I jammed my own roll of damp cloth beneath the door, he seemed to get the idea.

All around us the Imperial groaned long and slow, complaining as it leaned into the wind. We kept stuffing towels around the edges of the doors and the one window behind its velveteen draperies until they were all used up. Then we both kind of backed into the middle of the room and stood there, panting. Finally, I had a chance to take a
good long look at the stranger I’d pulled out of the storm. He was an Indian—Apache, maybe, or Shawnee. He had copper-red skin, a long face, and a long mouth to go with it. His skin hung loose around his bones and dragged the corners of his mouth down, making him look like the saddest thing in the world. He wore his black hair in two club-shaped pigtails tied with leather thongs and blue beads. Somehow he’d kept hold of his hat. It was as black as his eyes, with a couple of feathers stuck into a furry band that had a loose end dangling over the brim like a tail. His bright red shirt and blue jeans were stiff with dust.

“Did you see a woman out there?” I asked. “My mother?”

His black eyes emptied right out, the way Mama’s did when she talked about Papa. My heart froze.

“I saw a white woman, dressed all in sorrow.” He had a deep, rumbling voice, like he was pulling it right out of the ground. “She called for her lover.”

“Where’d she go?”

Light and shadow shifted in his black eyes. He blinked and shook his head. “Sorry. Can’t see that far.”

I felt light, like my feet didn’t touch the floor. I couldn’t hear anything right. I thought maybe I had gone deaf from the pounding the wind had given my ears. I drifted over to the window and shoved the red velveteen back with both hands.

Outside was gone. There was only a wall of shifting dirt
pressed up against the window. I’d have thought we were buried, but the wind rattled the glass in its frame as if it was a burglar checking the latch.

Mama was out there.

“It’s my fault,” I whispered.

“How your fault?” asked the man.