Summary
In April 1935, Billie Jo confesses to being heartsick over Mad Dog Craddock. Despite her antagonistic feelings toward him, she would like him to “court” her. However, she knows he can attract any girl, and doesn’t believe there is any reason he would want to be with her. She is restless and storms up to her room, ignoring her father when he asks what’s going on with her. Billie Jo notices her father has raised spots on his nose and cheek. His own father had the same spots, but Billie Jo’s father isn’t doing anything about it. At school, Billie Jo hides her scarred hands when she runs into people. Mad Dog looks at her with a mix of kindness and antagonism. He sometimes walks with her in silence.
The Oklahoma Panhandle is so dry that everything is going up in flames. Part of the school catches fire but it is quickly put out. It terrifies Billie Jo to go back into the building. Boxcars have been burning too. People don’t talk about the fires with Billie Jo directly; they know how fire changed her life. Blizzards of dust block the mail delivery, burying the train tracks. A letter from Aunt Ellis inviting Billie Jo to live with her in Lubbock, Texas was waiting in a mailbag. Billie Jo doesn’t want to go to her aunt's, but she does want to leave. More people migrate away, saying they’ll return when there’s rain.
A two-day break in the dust storm leads Billie Jo and her father to believe the worst is over. They debate about going to a funeral for a distant relative in Texhoma. On the drive there, a giant black dust cloud blankets the sky. The dust and wind swarm their truck and they run for cover in a small house with the entire funeral procession. The woman opens her house to everyone, and they help tack sheets up to block the dust from getting in the cracks. Back home, the wind has blown open the front door and two feet of dust lies in ripply waves on the floor. The tractor in the barn won’t start and the animals aren’t doing well. Billie Jo’s father tries to start the truck again, but the ignition won’t turn over.
In the aftermath, Mad Dog comes by to see how Billie Jo and her father are doing. He lingers a while, but Billie Jo doesn’t believe he is courting her. He says he loves the land but is prepared to leave the farm if a radio singing gig in Amarillo turns into a real job. A Canadian photographer named James Kingsbury visits the community to take photos of the “oddness” of the drought and dust storms. Locals show him the sandiest farms and boniest cattle. Kingsbury was the first to photograph the Dionne quintuplets, which made them famous but also led to the children being taken from the mother and father to be displayed like freak show curiosities. Billie Jo wonders what might happen to the Oklahomans after he takes photos of their dust.
The US government’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) lends Billie Jo’s father and other farmers grant money to keep the farms functioning. Billie Jo’s father is assured that he won’t have to pay anything back if the crops don’t come in. At graduation, Billie Jo is invited to play piano; it has been so long that she just sits and stares at the keys. Miss Freeland weeps and Arley hangs his head. Billie Jo knows she let them down, but she is too stubborn to cry. She thinks that Doc Rice might be able to tell her what to do about her hands, but she isn’t going to him, just as her father isn’t going to him to treat his spots.
A hope-inducing snow falls wetly; it turns into a rainy mist. Then it rains steadily. Instead of washing over the earth, the soil absorbs the rain. After three days of this, the rain falls harder. Billie Jo’s father dances outside with the rain as the nearly finished pond fills. He is inspired to go to the barn and tinker with the tractor until he gets it running again. With headlights on, he goes out to freshened fields feeling certain everything will grow again. The rains bring back the grasses and the cattle can go feed on the pastures again. Joe De La Flor sings while riding his horse again.
However, the hope is smothered by a wind that kicks up from the west, bringing dust again. Billie Jo had just removed the tape from the windows; now there is dust on the dishes she’d cleaned. She says Mrs. Love is taking applications for boys to join the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Though Billie Jo is too young and not a male, she longs to work for the CCC somewhere far from the dust.
On Sunday afternoon, crowds of locals gather at the Joyce City Hardware and Furniture Company to listen to a WDAG radio performance of Mad Dog singing live from the Amarillo Hotel. Through the speakers, Mad Dog’s voice fills the store’s aisles. It pains Billie Jo not to be there with him and Arley. Everyone is proud and happy at the end of the performance, but Billie Jo can’t cheer with the others because her throat is tight. She knows Mad Dog sings so well that he’ll go as far from Oklahoma as he wishes.
A baby is abandoned on the front steps of the local church. Reverend Bingham, Doc Rice, and the reverend’s wife warm the baby, who is healthy. Locals come forward with gifts as word spreads. Billie Jo asks her father if they can adopt it. He says there’s little chance of them being given the baby, but lets Billie Jo donate the baby clothes Ma had been saving for Franklin. In the box, Billie Jo finds the dimes she’d earned and that Ma saved for Billie Jo to attend Panhandle A & M to study music. She believes there’s no point now.
Billie Jo comments that dinosaurs used to roam Cimarron County; their fossilized bones have shown up in the green shale. It gives her a chill to imagine a dinosaur sunning itself on the swampy banks of an Oklahoma sea. She imagines green ferns replacing all the dusty areas. She thinks of Joe herding brontosaurus instead of cows. She begs her father to go to the site where the bones are being excavated. He rubs the spot on his neck and looks out across the field toward the knoll where Ma and the baby are buried. He says, “It’s best to let the dead rest.” They stay home.
Analysis
At the beginning of Spring 1935, Hesse returns to the theme of emotional repression. In a reserved, roundabout manner, Billie Jo admits to having a crush on Mad Dog Craddock, a local farm boy whose good looks and talent as a singer have provoked envy in Billie Jo. However, Billie Jo will not make her desire known to Mad Dog, preferring to disregard her feelings and convince herself that there’s no way he would choose her over other girls. It seems Mad Dog also doesn’t know how to express his feelings, walking in silence with Billie Jo and looking at her with a confusing mix of kindness and antagonism.
Hesse further develops the theme of emotional repression with Bayard’s denial about the spots that have suddenly grown on his face. Both Billie Jo and Bayard are aware of the fact that Bayard’s own father had the same spots, which proved cancerous. However, rather than treat the spots, Bayard seems to accept them, as if accepting his inevitable death. Meanwhile, Billie Jo doesn’t know how to express her concern, so both father and daughter mirror each other’s stubbornness and choose to ignore the potentially fatal growths on Bayard’s face.
The theme of escape arises with the news that Aunt Ellis, Bayard’s sister, is inviting Billie Jo to come live with her in Lubbock, Texas. This is the first solid opportunity to escape her surroundings that Billie Jo has been offered; however, she doesn’t relish the prospect of living with her aunt. This suggests that, regardless of her feelings toward her aunt, Billie Jo is more attached to Cimarron County and the people there than she may realize when she fantasizes about escaping.
Meanwhile, escape becomes a necessity for some: more massive dust storms mean that greater numbers of local people are abandoning their farms to find work in California, which is looked to as a land of promise because agriculture in the state is actually expanding in the 1930s and unemployment benefits are higher. The plight of those living in the Dust Bowl has become an international news story, attracting the attention of Canadian photographer James Kingsbury. In this part of the book, Hesse is alluding to the historically significant black-and-white photos that Kingsbury took of the Dust Bowl.
The theme of escape also arises in another historical allusion when Billie Jo expresses her desire to join the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a major jobs program established through the New Deal legislation. The CCC aimed to give jobs to unemployed young men; this work was usually manual labor related to the development and conservation of government-owned rural lands, with CCC employees undertaking projects such as bridge, road, and trail construction. The popular program ran for nine years, closing once outside employment opportunities arose and the Roosevelt administration began to shift the focus of government programs to the war effort in the early 1940s. Unfortunately for Billie Jo, the CCC, for all its virtues, was a product of its time and only sought to employ men.
