Little House on the Wasteland

Twenty-Nine: Dark Clouds

One day, dark clouds appeared on the horizon. At first, Laura felt a thrill. The rains had come at last! Pa would be so pleased.

The soy crop had continued to struggle. They had survived on meat and wasteturnips and a meager harvest of gourds and carrots, but Ma and Pa had begun to fret over what they would do come winter.

With rain, perhaps it was not too late for a bountiful harvest. Laura ran to tell Pa about the clouds. She found him kneeling beside the firepit, melting down spent bullets and molding them into fresh ones. When Laura bounded up to him, full of excitement about the coming rain, he set down his mold. He stood, eyes on the distant horizon where Laura was pointing. He stared off for a long time. Slowly, his brow began to crease. A look came across his face, as dark as the approaching clouds.

Then he said, "Laura, find your mother. And your sisters. Get everyone inside the shanty. Quickly now."

Pa's voice was soft, but there was something frightening about it. Laura hurried to find Ma and Mary and Grace and tell them what Pa had said. As she raced across the fields, she looked back at the clouds. They were closer now. On second look, they were not like any rainclouds she had ever seen. They did not seem to float above the earth as other clouds did. Instead, they seemed to rise up from the very surface of the wasteland itself, towering tall and black into the sky.

"Laura!"

Laura turned. There was Mary. She was heading towards the shanty. Grace toddled beside her, holding Mary's hand, but Mary was having trouble managing both her crutch and her sister at the same time. Laura ran to them. She scooped up Grace, and the three of them hurtled towards the little shanty as fast as they could.

The wind had suddenly picked up. It whipped Laura's tunic this way and that. Mary's bonnet was knocked clean off. It dangled behind her from the strings around her neck as she raced alongside Laura, her one leg hurrying to keep pace with Laura's two.

As they neared the shanty, they saw Ma, ripping drying clothes from the clothesline and piling them in her arms. She shouted to them. Her words were snatched up and carried off by the wind, which roared fiercer and fiercer all around them.

When they reached the shanty, Laura set Grace down. Laura turned, and there was Ma. She thrust her bundle of damp laundry into Laura's arms.

"Stay inside," she told Laura and Mary.

Laura stood there at the threshold. Her breath was caught in her chest. The slats of the shanty were beginning to rattle, and the wind was whistling through the gaps. The noise rose and rose into a horrible shriek. Inside, Grace started to cry.

Looming out beyond the soy field, bigger and bigger, was the cloud. It stretched from north to south, a great towering wall of darkness, brown and gray and ominous. As it billowed towards them, it seemed to writhe and throb like a living thing.

Laura had heard of dust storms on the Wastes, but in her wildest imaginings she had not pictured anything so big and terrible. She retreated into the shanty and set the laundry down in a corner. Then she sat with Mary and Grace beside their bedrolls and watched Ma and Pa run outside and then back in again. Anything fragile or precious, Ma and Pa grabbed it and pulled it back under the protection of the shanty's crinkled iron roof.

At one point, Pa climbed up onto a stool and began nailing their old lectricmade tarp to the eaves of the shanty. It was the same tarp that they had camped beneath so many nights on the long road to the Wastes. Now it hung down over shanty's open front like a curtain. Pa worked quickly. When the tarp was stretched out as far as it could go, he crossed to the other side and began hanging hemp sheets from the opposite corner of the roof. Sheet by sheet, he tried to enclose the shanty as best he could.