Summary
In April 1934, Billie Jo and her classmates take their “six-weeks test” while sand blows through every crack in the schoolhouse. The kids are dusty and coughing by the end of the test. She jokes that they should get bonus points for testing during a dust storm. Ma tells Billie Jo that the money the family lost when the banks closed is coming back to them in full. Billie Jo says it is good they’ll have money for a doctor when the baby comes. Billie Jo’s family also learns from County Agent Dewey that a quarter of the wheat has been lost, and every day with no rain means more wheat dies. Billie Jo plays piano to distract herself. Her mother sends her to the store. On the way, Billie Jo sees Joe De La Flor walking his herd of cattle. She winces at the sight of the cows’ visible ribs. She knows their future is drying up and blowing away with the dust.
Billie Jo details an argument between her parents. Her mother insists that Bayard should put in a pond, but he says the water will seep back into the ground as fast as he pumps it from the well. She suggests cotton or sorghum crops. He insists that it has to be wheat, which he has grown before and will grow again. She says the wheat isn’t meant to be there. He says her two apple trees take more water than anything, but she wouldn’t dream of getting rid of them. In May, Billie Jo comments on how her mother has been nursing the two apple trees in their front yard since she can remember. In spite of the dust and drought, the trees are thick with sweet-smelling, pinky-white blossoms. Billie Jo lets the petals fall in her hair. Billie Jo comments that her father fought in World War I in France. He doesn’t talk much about it, but he has told her how bright red poppies grew on the graves of the dead soldiers, in the trail of the fighting. She wishes she could see poppies growing out of the dust.
In June, the apples on Ma’s trees are hard green balls, but in a couple of months they will be ready to go into pies, sauce, dumplings, and cake, and to be eaten fresh. She longs to bring one to school and eat a slice at a time, leaving her breath to smell of nothing but apple. However, on Sunday a red dust blows through, blocking out the sun. Rain follows, but it falls too fast and washes the soil and wheat away. Little is left of her father’s hard work planting the wheat. Many apples have fallen too, but there are enough for a small harvest as long as they don’t lose any more. When the wheat harvest begins, local farmers report back on the decent prices they’ve received at seventy-three cents a bushel. Mr. Haverstick managed to collect eight bushels off his twenty-bushel acres. Billie Jo says it will be a miracle if her father can harvest five bushels.
When school is out for the summer, Billie Jo accompanies Arley and his band, the Black Mesa Boys, to play piano to small crowds for money. Ma discourages it, but the money Billie Jo can earn helps convince Ma, along with the fact that Vera, Arley’s wife, will be there to keep an eye on Billie Jo. Billie Jo loves being in the car with the musicians, singing along together, and being on the road. When a quarter inch of rain comes, Ma is pleased. Billie Jo spots her standing naked out in the rain. The water washes the dust off her full belly in stripes, making her look like a round, ripe, striped melon. Billie Jo learns of the Dionne Quintuplets, five children born to a woman in Canada. Ma sheds a tear trying to imagine what it would be like to carry five babies at once.
One day a boy of sixteen arrives at the farm asking for food in exchange for work. He is thin as a fence rail. Ma feeds him biscuits and milk. Daddy gives him some work to do. Before sending him off, he offers the boy a haircut, a bath, and a change of clothes. The polite boy leaves in a pair of Billie Jo’s father’s mended overalls. Ma comments that the boy’s mother is surely worrying about him. Billie Jo says lots of mothers are wishing that their children will come home. They walk to California, where there is rain. Billie Jo imagines that someday she will leave the wind and dust behind, walking west to “that distant place of green vines and promise.”
An accident occurs in which both Billie Jo and Ma are badly burned. Billie Jo explains that Daddy had put a pail of kerosene next to the stove. It caught fire when Ma poured it, thinking it was water for coffee. Ma runs outside. Billie Jo follows, but then stops to grab the burning pail and throw it out the door. However, Ma has turned around, and the flaming oil hits her apron. Billie Jo pushes her to the ground to put out the flames with her hands. Both women get burned. Doc Rice comes. He cuts away the skin on Billie Jo’s hands with scissors and then pokes pins in her hands to test what she can feel. She only feels any pain when he bathes her hands in antiseptic.
Following the accident, Billie Jo has a horrible dream in which dust has filled her house and wrecked the piano. She goes to the neighbors’ and drags their piano home; however, her hands are pus-dripping lumps when she goes to play. When Billie Jo wakes from this dream, she realizes the part about her hands is real. Billie Jo’s father makes a tent out of a sheet to protect Ma’s burned skin. She smells of scorched meat. She cries out when the baby moves inside her, and she moans day and night. One night Daddy finds the money Ma has been hiding away; he uses it to go out and get drunk in Guymon. This leaves Billie Jo to get water into Ma’s mouth, which is difficult with her burned hands.
In August, during Ma’s childbirth, the doctor sends Billie Jo out of the house to collect water. A plague of grasshoppers moves in and descends on the fields and plants, devouring everything. Billie Jo tries to fight them off, but they eat the apples. Billie Jo doesn’t have the chance to tell her mother, who dies that day while giving birth to Billie Jo’s brother. The baby dies before Billie Jo’s father’s sister arrives from Lubbock to take the child and raise him as her own. Local women wrap up the dead baby and place it in Ma’s arms. They are buried together. The reverend giving the service asks Billie Jo’s father to name the dead baby. Billie Jo says his name is Franklin, like their president. As local women scrub the house, cleansing it of death, Billie Jo overhears them discussing how she threw the kerosene pail. They call it an accident, but Billie Jo knows she is being blamed. She notes that no one mentions her father leaving the kerosene by the stove, or how he drank himself into a daze while Ma writhed and begged for water.
Billie Jo walks away from her family farm until she reaches Arley’s house. She leans her head against the back of it, where no one can see her, and listens to Arley play. At home in September, Billie Jo feels she doesn’t know her father anymore. He looks the same, but he is a stranger. She is awkward with him and wants to be alone, but she is also terrified of being alone. She hides her wounded hands behind her back because he stares when he sees them. She is in pain constantly. Her father spends all his time digging a giant hole—the pond Ma wanted, Billie Jo assumes. He won’t say what he is digging. He sends her to collect boards from old junked box cars. Billie Jo comments that she can forgive him for taking Ma’s money and getting drunk, but she’ll never forgive him for leaving a pail of kerosene next to the stove.
At school, Miss Freeland explains that Oklahomans fed the world during the Great War. The scarcity of wheat sent prices soaring, and the farmers expanded their operations, taking on more land and greater debt. The Europeans didn’t need their wheat when the war ended, but the debts were still there for the Americans. To pay their bills, they pushed more animals onto the land and planted more fields, but with the grass gone, the water that used to hide under the sod no longer collected; the land dried to dust that blew away in the wind.
Analysis
In the Spring 1934 section of Out of the Dust, Hesse builds on the themes of poverty and environmental crisis. At a time when airborne dust is so pervasive that it is getting into the schoolhouse and negatively impacting students’ ability to focus, the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt has, since 1933, been rolling out economic recovery legislation as part of the New Deal. Through massive jobs programs, infrastructure spending, and the large-scale granting of loans, the FDR administration hopes to stimulate the flagging economy and pull the American population out of the Great Depression. Billie Jo is hopeful that the family will get back the savings they lost when their bank collapsed because she knows her parents will need it for the new baby.
Tempering this good news is the less-welcome revelation that there will be yet another measly wheat harvest, with a quarter of the Cimarron County wheat crop having been damaged by the high winds and ongoing drought. The failure of the wheat crop leads Billie Jo’s parents to argue over what to do with the farm going forward. Ma believes they should diversify their plantings with cotton and sorghum, both of which are significantly more drought-tolerant than wheat, which is particularly sensitive to lack of water during its sowing and germination period. It should be noted that the Kelbys do not have modern sprinkler irrigation to keep their crops alive; rather, they rely on surface irrigation—plowed furrows that direct rainwater toward the rows of wheat roots. But because Bayard used to make so much money with his thriving wheat crops, he stubbornly insists that he must continue to plant wheat and hope for better weather to return.
Temporary relief from the stress of finances and doom-inducing weather comes with the apple blossoms of spring. Although apple trees require a lot of water and care when grown in the dry region where the Kelbys have their farm, Ma has dutifully kept her two apple trees alive since they first established their farm. Further developing the theme of hope, Hesse shows Billie Jo basking in the atmosphere of the tree, whose sweet-smelling petals have a therapeutic influence on her. Billie Jo continues to feel joy and hope into the summer, when her mother allows her to travel with Arley and his band, the Black Mesa Boys (named after a local mountain).
Hesse also returns to the theme of escape with the arrival at the Kelbys’ farm of a teenager who has wandered to them in search of food. Based on real-life “dust bowl migrants,” the boy has likely left his Dust Bowl family farm to look for work in the West. However, having no food or money and only rags for clothes, he travels from farm to farm, trading his labor for food. The Kelbys, though they have little themselves, take pity on the boy, giving him food, a bath, and a new set of clothing before he continues on his journey to California, where there is rain and, by extension, work to be done on farms. While Billie Jo often dreams of escaping, this lonely figure provides a grim glimpse of what the reality of leaving one’s home in search of a better life might be like for her.
Toward the end of Summer 1934, the themes of grief and emotional repression arise with the deaths of Ma and Franklin. In a tragic accident, Ma mistakes a pail of kerosene (clear fuel typically used in lamps) for water because Bayard left it next to the stove. When she pours it to make coffee, the fuel ignites. When Ma runs outside to alert Bayard, Billie Jo tries to keep the kitchen from catching fire by throwing the pail out the door. However, she doesn’t see that Ma has turned back inside, meaning the flaming fuel lands on Ma’s apron and burns her all over. Billie Jo pats out the flames, burning her own hands in the process.
While Ma doesn’t die immediately, her burns are so severe that she writhes in pain beneath a tented sheet while Bayard carefully feeds her water. The guilt of having stupidly and dangerously left the kerosene next to the stove becomes unbearable for Bayard, who doesn’t know how to deal with difficult emotions any other way than to disappear on a drinking binge in Guymon. This poor decision to abandon his wife, daughter, and soon-to-be-born child leaves Billie Jo to attempt to care for her mother. However, the fact that Billie Jo's own hands are bandaged makes it difficult for Billie Jo to get water to her severely dehydrated mother’s mouth properly.
While Ma doesn’t die until she is in childbirth, Billie Jo believes that Bayard’s abandonment hastened Ma’s demise, and, by extension, Franklin’s. However, Billie Jo overhears the local women discussing the deaths as Billie Jo’s fault, implicitly blaming her for throwing the pail of kerosene without acknowledging who left the kerosene next to the stove. In this way, Billie Jo’s grief is warped by the resentment she feels for her father and the shame she feels for having contributed to the deaths. Rather than talk about these issues with her father or anyone, Billie Jo pushes down her unpleasant emotions.
