Promises of Dust and Ruin

Dodge City, Kansas – Autumn 1934

“How bad is it?” James Whitmore asked, though he already knew.

“Three thousand, two hundred dollars,” Thomas Brennan said with a steady voice. He’d practiced it. “Plus the accrued interest. We received your last payment over a year ago.”

James was a big man, the kind built for work, his strong forearms darkened by the sun. He wore his best shirt. The blue one. The one he always wore to church. Three years ago, on a Sunday, Thomas had unbuttoned it in the dark of the storage shed behind the church, knowing they were buying time with sacrilege. They had been meeting like that ever since. Three years of the two of them meeting in a landscape so empty and open that their secrecy felt like a different kind of dust. The actual dust was now choking the air everywhere.

“The rains,” James pressed. “The rains could still come back, Tom.”

Thomas looked out the window of the back office, watching the dust clouds filter out the sun, which still shone, though now as an obscured ball of orange fire floating beyond. Then he looked back at James.

“The rains didn’t come, Jim. They aren’t going to come.”

“I can make another payment. Spring, if there’s…”

“There won’t be a spring.” Thomas had to say it. He had to watch James understand it. “It’s not stopping, Jim. The banks are calling in everything. We’ve had foreclosure notices backed up for six months. The board is…” He stopped. The bank board and his supervisor were men in Kansas City who looked at these figures and saw nothing but a bottom line.

Thomas told himself he was one of them; that he was a man who followed orders and processed paperwork for the greater good, because the alternative was admitting that he had the power to intervene and had chosen not to use it.

James stood up. He moved to the window, his shoulders taking up the light. Thomas could see the dust on his shirt collar, a permanent thing now, no matter how many times a man washed. The whole town was dust. Ford County was dust. The people who lived here were also slowly becoming dust.

“Your wife,” James said quietly. “Does she know you’re meeting with me?”

“No.”

“She suspects, though?”

“Yes.”

Margaret suspected everything. She suspected James the way a policeman can detect a criminal. She’d always hated James’ wife, Sarah, which was its own admission to knowing things that should have been secret. The two women had been watching their husbands leave, then come back smelling wrong, and telling careful lies. They were two women who understood the truth and who responded with the kind of cruelty that is caused by being a victim of deception.

Margaret had never forgiven Thomas for anything. Not his coldness to her, not his failures in their marriage, not even his existence in her life. The dust hadn’t changed her. It only clarified facts for a woman who believed the world owed her better. She was a woman determined to punish someone for the debt.

“I’m going to lose the farm, Tom,” James said, his hands raised and palms open, begging Thomas to save him.

“Yes.”

There it was. The word he had chosen over everything else.

He could have said No, not yet. He could have said I'll find a way. Thomas had rehearsed those answers, too, in the dark of his bedroom while Margaret slept down the hall. But those answers led to questions he couldn't survive. Questions about why a banker would risk his position to help one farmer. Questions about what that farmer meant to him. And, Thomas feared, questions about what the two of them had been doing in a storage shed behind the church for the past three years. The truth, if it got out, would cost him everything. His job. His social standing. His freedom. In a town like Dodge City, in a time like this, it could even cost him his life.

So Thomas said yes. And it was the most honest thing he had said all day.

“Sarah…” James stopped.

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said with a meaning that turned his stomach. “Jim, I…”

“Don’t.” James turned his back to him. “Don’t. You’ve made your choice… and it isn’t me.”

That wasn’t fair; but it was true. Thomas had made his choice. But Thomas was a banker, and James was a farmer, and Thomas had chosen the system that didn’t care about fairness or choice, or two men who press their foreheads together in the dark and pretend the world outside didn’t exist.

The system cared about margins and defaulted loans. It cared that James Whitmore had borrowed money when the market was rising and couldn’t pay it back when God had decided to turn the Earth itself against them.

“I can still help you,” Thomas said suddenly. “I can… there might be something…”

“No.” James’ voice was final. “No, Tom. You keep your job. You keep your house. You keep your wicked wife who loves your money. That’s the deal, isn’t it? That’s always been the deal.”

Before Thomas could say another word, James was gone. He sat at his desk and looked at the ledger with its neat figures in his careful handwriting. The accounting was devoid of justice or love, and it didn’t tell the story of how James’ skin had been pressed against him in the summer heat before the dust came.

*****

Summer 1931

The storage shed behind the church smelled like hay mixed with motor oil. The sun filtered through gaps in the boards, spilling rays of golden light across James’ bare chest. He was golden, alive, and real in a way that nothing else in Thomas’ life had ever been.

“We could leave,” Thomas said, his head resting on James’ chest. His voice was softened by their state. “You know that. We could just go. Get out of Kansas. Go where nobody knows us and start over, together.”

“And do what?” James asked, though he’d thought about it a thousand times himself. In every meeting in this shed, and in every hour they stole, he had imagined a new life. California, maybe. Oregon. Somewhere green, where the rains still fell with regularity, and a man could breathe without choking on dust.

“I don’t know. We could open an orchard. Or we could find jobs in the government; maybe work in the Parks. We could be together, and free of…” Thomas gestured vaguely toward town, toward the churches and the judgments and the wives waiting at home. “You could teach me farming. You’re good at it. I could learn.”

James ran his fingers through Thomas’ dark hair. He was built strong, like the land, and capable of enduring anything. For the past three months, Thomas and James had been meeting in this shed. And each time, Thomas unbuttoned that blue shirt, and felt James under his touch as they grounded each other in the stolen moment.

“You belong in an office,” James said.

“I belong with you,” Thomas protested. “The bank is just a job. You’re the only thing that matters to me.”

They lay like that as the church bells began to peal, the light shifting across them recasting shadows. A breeze came through the gaps in the boards, carrying the smell of grass and coming rain.

James lay still thinking about what it would cost them to leave everything behind and start over. His farm, his house, the respect he held in the community. Sarah’s kindness. The church where he was regarded as an admirable man. But the weight of Thomas against him, and the possibility of a life that didn’t have to be a lie tugged at him with the force of a large magnet.

When Thomas sat up, James kissed him slowly and deliberately, sealing it with a promise. “We could still do it,” he said. “After the harvest. After I get the fall crop in. We could just go.”

“Yes,” Thomas heard himself say without hesitation. “Let’s make it happen. Let’s build something real… something honest.”

“I’m serious, Tom. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

Outside the rain started falling again. It was a brief shower that relieved the afternoon of its heat. The rains had been coming regularly that year. The wheat was growing tall, turning the landscape into waves of gold. The land was still alive. For now.

*****

It had been a Tuesday in early October when James went to the post office to retrieve the mail. Inside was a letter from the bank notifying him that the foreclosure was official. Thomas had processed and signed it himself, adding it to the Whitmores’ file.

Thomas didn’t go to the farm and he didn’t say goodbye. He was a banker, and bankers don’t do goodbyes. They do paperwork and move on to the next inevitable tragedy on the list.

Margaret was in the parlor when he came home. She was reading a magazine, Vogue, brought in on the train from Saint Louis, a frivolity she purchased monthly despite the hardships of the day. The room was cool and clean and untouched by dust, because Margaret had people to keep the dust out, and money, and the kind of will that bent the world to her preferences.

“You foreclosed on the Whitmore farm,” she said without looking up.

“It was necessary.”

“Of course it was.” She turned a page. “Sarah Whitmore looked absolutely destroyed when she was in town yesterday. Absolutely destroyed. I’m glad. I’ve been waiting years to see that woman brought low.” She smiled at her magazine. “Your department finally did something useful.”

The bile rising in Margaret’s words made Thomas retch as he went upstairs. He locked the bedroom door and sat on the edge of the bed. Margaret would not come to him tonight or any night. Margaret did not believe in marital relations and considered Thomas’ body an imposition on her person. They lived in the same house but not the same world. They were married in the eyes of God and the State. And that, as it were, was plenty.

*****

FORD COUNTY FARMER FOUND DEAD

James Whitmore, 42, of Ford County, was found deceased on his property Thursday morning by his wife, Sarah Whitmore. County officials determined that Mr. Whitmore’s death was caused by an accidental gun shot to the head. Mrs. Whitmore is now managing the property alone. A memorial service will be held at a date and location to be determined.

*****

Thomas set the newspaper down on his desk and didn’t move as he strained to contain his grief.

“Is everything okay, Tom?” his colleague, David Paulson, asked as he stood up and walked over to place a gentle, reassuring hand on Thomas’ shoulder.

“I’m fine,” Thomas said dismissively.

“No. No you are not ‘fine,’ Tom. Tell me what’s going on.”

A single tear fell from Thomas’ eye as he turned to face David.

“No, really. I’m fine.”

“Tom…,” David shifted into an empathetic posture, “talk to me.”

“I’m fine!” Thomas yelled, slamming his fist on the desk. “Just… stop asking. Okay?”

“I’ll leave you alone, Tom,” David said, “but just know I’m here if you need me.” David squeezed Thomas’ shoulder to emphasize the point.

In his mind, Thomas saw James as he’d been three years earlier, before the dust came, when there was still a chance at happiness. Thomas had driven out to the farm on some pretext related to the bank’s business, and James had shown him the new plow he’d bought with the loans he had received, running his hands over it like it was a living thing. The wheat was just growing then, turning the fields into a sea of green that stretched to the horizon. James had stood in the middle of it, barefoot with a plaid shirt tied around his waist. He laughed heartily and said the crop was going to be the best one yet; that they’d have money; that, maybe, Thomas was right to wait so it would all work out for the best.

Then the rains stopped coming, and the winds blew so hard that the topsoil began to erode from the earth, turning it into a landscape of dry, powdery sand where nothing could grow, and hope died.

*****

The problem with being a banker is that you have access to people’s money. You have access to accounts and ledgers and the savings accounts of women like Margaret, who believed that money was a kind of security, a kind of guarantee against being touched by the apocalypse occurring outside.

Thomas quietly transferred three-thousand-two-hundred dollars – the exact amount James had owed – from Margaret’s account and deposited it into a dummy account he had opened in Sarah Whitmore’s name. When Margaret would notice that the money was missing, and she would eventually notice, he had a ready explanation – a poor return in the markets. A minor occurrence, and one that could easily be exaggerated. It was the kind of thing that happened in uncertain times.

He met with Sarah Whitmore at the general store, in the early morning when it was nearly empty. He gave her an envelope with a bank draft and told her it was James’ life insurance – a policy that James had never purchased, and one that he could never have afforded. But the lie required no explanation.

“This is enough,” Thomas whispered, “to get you to California. To start again. Some people are hiring in the agricultural valleys. You’re young enough and strong enough. You can rebuild your life there.”

Sarah’s hands shook as she took the envelope. “Why would you… why should you help me?”

“I can’t undo what happened,” Thomas said. “But I can do this.”

Sarah left for California two weeks later, joining the stream of desperate people heading West, joining the exodus of broken bodies abandoning their farms in the Plains. Thomas heard later that she’d bought a small house and found respectable work after answering a classified ad in search of a personal assistant.

Setting Sarah up for survival wasn’t a redemption for foreclosing on the Whitmore farm; but, helping Sarah get resettled and start a new life was the only thing he could have done to ease the burden of feeling responsible for James taking his own life.

*****

It was a day in November, when Thomas went to the cemetery.

James’ grave was simple. No headstone yet, just a wooden marker with his name burned into it. Thomas knelt, and placed a solitary rose on James’ grave, but he didn’t pray. He had stopped believing in prayer years ago. It happened around the same time he’d come to understand that survival was incompatible with theology.

He could see James’ face in his mind as he had been before he was a man defeated by the land. James, laughing in the storage shed with sunlight on his chest. James, with his hands on the new plow and a certainty of the future. James, pressing Thomas’ face against his neck, both whispering promises they knew they couldn’t keep.

The promise of what they could have been, two men living an honest life on a California farm, growing things that didn’t strip the earth of everything it had. Waking together. Building something lasting. Loving each other openly.

Tears welled up in Thomas’ eyes as he clasped his hands against his face, doubling over in grief. He hadn’t cried like this since he was a child. The sobs came hard, forming knots in his ribs. With each new outburst of grief, his wailing grew louder. But there was no one to hear him. Just the dust, which began to collect on his suit under the clear blue sky.

James didn’t have to die. He could have left town with Thomas before the dust came. The agricultural system could have been regulated. The warnings given by the soil scientists could have been heeded. The banks could have been more lenient. Margaret could have been a kinder woman. Sarah could have not been widowed. James could have had his life. James could have had Thomas.

And Thomas could have done something other than foreclose on the man he loved.

There was so much that could have been different. But Thomas was a banker, and he made his choice on that fateful day to protect his own survival; and, while the choice made him into something that looked like success, it still felt like an afterlife in Purgatory.

Thomas knelt at the grave, pouring his tears into his palms which covered his face and muffled the sobs. He stayed there until the sun began to set. Then, as if nothing had happened, he walked back to his car. He drove back to his house, back to where his wife would be reading Vogue. In the morning he would go back to his job and the life he had secured by causing others their ruin. He would go on living life as he was expected to live it. But without James, it would never be the life he wanted.

When he closed his eyes that night, he remembered James as he had been before the dust came and the rains stopped. He remembered his smile, his laugh, and the way his strong arms felt when wrapped around him in the safety of the shed. He remembered the beams of sunlight, turning his skin golden like the wheat fields outside, and their hearts beating with the promise that they would escape their confinement together. The promise was broken now and irreversible.

“So much,” he thought. “So much that could have been, and now never will be.”

And the dust kept blowing.