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The heat was unbearable, and still the rain didn’t come.

Nobody could remember a summer like it. Day after day, record temperatures were marked by the thermometer Henry pushed into the earth and noted in his ledgers.

There was no relief, not even at night when temperatures remained so uncomfortably high that it felt like midday at midnight.

Emily felt she was going mad. Her cotton dresses stuck to her skin, the starched cuffs and collars scratching and irritating.

Even the flowers on the faded scraps of wallpaper in the pantry seemed to wilt in the heat.

And still the dusters rolled, dumping their filthy cargo over the farms and towns, and a fine layer of dust settled over every physical thing until Emily didn’t know where she ended and the prairie began.

Life became a continual battle against the dust. They smeared Vaseline around their mouths and noses and wore respiratory masks distributed by the Red Cross.

Several times a day, when the dusters rolled, Emily covered the doors with wet sheets and stuffed damp rags and newspapers around the windows to seal them.

Nobody shook hands in the street or touched metal handles, fearful of a shock from the static that crackled in the air.

Chains dragged behind cars to ground them against the electricity.

The dust had even found its way into hospital operating theaters, and the flour mills had to stop production.

When Emily stripped the pillow slips to wash them, the imprint of their heads was marked by the dust that had settled over them while they’d slept.

Even the paint on the outside of the house was flaking away because of the endless onslaught of dust.

Every night, and at church on Sunday, she prayed for rain, for a miracle, for Adelaide to return with the magic man who could conjure moisture from the sky.

She didn’t care what it took to raise the money, didn’t care if some carnival huckster was to profit from their desperation.

If he really could bring the rain, she would give him everything she had in return.

During the stifling afternoons and the long days when she wasn’t at school, Dorothy was given jobs to help Emily and Henry, just like all the local farm children who were expected to pull their weight and help their families.

Dorothy did as she was asked, but she worked sullenly, not willingly.

It was clear that the child had been spoiled by her mother and had never been asked to help with household chores.

Emily bit her tongue as she taught Dorothy the little tricks she’d learned over the years: how to look for the wrinkle when setting jam, how to stick the handle of a wooden spoon into bread dough to test if it has proved, how to scald plucked chickens to kill bacteria, how to put pork fat against a flame to burn off the hairs.

But the child had no patience for such things.

She sulked when Henry went off to the fields without her and grumbled when Emily asked her to help with the cooking and laundry.

She longed to be outside in the fields or in the barn with the animals.

“It’s not fair, Auntie Em. Why do the boys get to do all the fun things? Pieter Anderssen doesn’t have to darn socks or sweep the floors.”

“Is that so? Well, you’re not Pieter Anderssen, so let’s get this wheat ground up and then we’ll see about helping Uncle Henry.”

Just as she refused to waste the surplus corn, Emily found a way to use the excess wheat they couldn’t sell, incorporating it in some way with every meal.

They ground it into a cereal for breakfast, sifted it to make flour for bread, and added it to the juices of a rabbit meat stew to make grits to accompany their supper.

It was hard to digest and left them all with a stomachache, but she couldn’t bear to see it wasted.

When they were finished, Emily told Dorothy she could help Uncle Henry for the rest of the day. “But you’re not to get under his feet, and you’re to pay attention, especially around the machinery, do you hear?”

Dorothy promised she would do exactly as Uncle Henry told her.

She didn’t mind getting her hands dirty, or her knees muddied, or her dresses torn, and Henry indulged her.

He let her ride on the tractor and taught her how to change a tire and how to check the oil on the Model T.

He showed her how to plow a straight furrow, how to clean the dirt from the mare’s hooves, how to oil the saddle with linseed, how to rub the cow’s udders with axle grease to reduce the painful friction from the dust. He proudly told Emily the child was becoming quite the little farmer. He’d grown so fond of her.

“And I’ll still need the eggs collected,” Emily called as Dorothy hurried outside, but the child was already gone, skipping down the road toward the fields, a wicker basket full of corn cakes and coffee swinging in her hand, Toto at her heels.

She was a four-foot-high menace, yet Emily’s heart squeezed as she watched her disappear.

She took the photograph of Dorothy from the dresser drawer and turned it over.

For Auntie Em. The term had never meant much to her.

It was a label she’d adopted by merely being Annie’s sister, but she felt the weight of the words now—the connection and responsibility they carried—and for the first time since Dorothy had arrived in Kansas, Emily felt the child’s absence in the silence that descended on the little house that afternoon.

She went about her chores as usual but found herself pausing by the door, watching at the window, keeping one eye on the fields until she heard the child’s distinctive piping voice in the distance.

Life with Dorothy was a conundrum. When she was in the house, getting under Emily’s feet and disrupting the careful order of things, Emily wished she were elsewhere. When she was elsewhere, the house was oddly silent and Emily missed her.

Only when Dorothy was safely home did Emily’s heart truly settle.

—

Slowly, gradually, they fell into a rhythm.

In the evenings, while Henry puzzled over his accounts and grumbled about government mandates to list the fields as part of Hoover’s wind erosion program, Emily patched up old clothes or played the fiddle, and Toto dozed on Dorothy’s lap as she studied the atlas she’d borrowed from the library.

She liked to make up stories about a little girl who traveled the world and went on daring adventures.

Emily listened patiently as Dorothy recited her work, but she worried that the tone was too dark, the story full of frightening things and wicked witches.

“Do you like it?” Dorothy asked as she finished reading.

Emily tried to be encouraging. “I do, dear. Very much. But isn’t it a bit sad?

The little girl in your story is all alone and afraid.

Maybe you could give her some friends to meet along the way, like how you met Pieter, and Miss Adelaide, and Toto.

It’s more fun to have adventures with friends, don’t you think? ”

Dorothy thought for a moment. “A friend who is brave. And one who is clever. And one who has a kind heart.”

Emily smiled. “Yes. Something like that. And maybe fewer witches.”

—

At supper club that Thursday, Emily mentioned Dorothy’s stories to Laurie Miller.

“She’s so like her mother,” Emily said. “Annie used to make up stories when we were little girls. Her ‘Wonderfuls,’ she called them. Magical lands and talking animals and all sorts of silly ideas. At least her stories were pleasant. Dorothy’s are terrifying. Do you think I should be worried?”

“No such thing as a silly idea,” Laurie said. “A child’s imagination is a precious thing. Encourage it!”

Ingrid agreed. “It might do Dorothy good to express her fears and worries through a story. Maybe if it isn’t all in her head, she won’t have so many bad dreams. Pieter had vivid dreams about his father in the months after he died.”

It wasn’t the worst idea. Emily wrote in her journal every day, capturing her changing thoughts and feelings.

She still struggled to accept that their lives had changed so dramatically, but she was beginning to let go of the things she couldn’t control.

It had helped to write things down, to put shape and structure around such fluid intangible things as feelings.

“As y’all know, I’m more of a talker than a writer,” Laurie continued, “but I always feel better getting things out in the open rather than keeping them in. Why don’t you look through some of Annie’s things with Dorothy.

Encourage her to talk about her mother. Maybe she’ll write her into one of her stories. ”

Emily thought about the box of Annie’s possessions from Chicago still hidden away in the cyclone cellar. Maybe it was time to bring them out and make peace with the memories they stirred.

“That’s a good idea, Laurie. I will. Thank you.”

The conversation turned then—as it always did—to the dusters, and the growing numbers of foreclosure notices, and their mutual longing for rain. They all felt so helpless, and were increasingly worried about their men, who were being pushed to the limit and were on the brink of revolt.

“Millions of farmers across the Great Plains are on their knees,” May said, her voice rising as she voiced her frustration. “Directionless, aimless, hopeless. Zeb found a hobo in the pantry last week, helping himself to our supplies as if he lived there. Half starved, the poor man.”

“Henry found another homeless man sleeping in our barn,” Emily said. “Begged him for food, or work. Had to see him off with the rifle. I’m not afraid of them myself, but I worry about Dorothy coming across someone. You hear such awful stories of drunk drifters and thieves.”

“Hank was telling me about a planned protest march on Washington to demonstrate against Hoover’s disastrous federal aid policies,” Laurie said.

May nodded. “We heard the same. And who’d blame them? Mandatory listing of fields, wheat burns, cattle slaughtered at sixteen dollars apiece—none of it has stopped the dusters. None of it has made any damn difference at all.”

Emily shared her worries about Henry, how he frowned over his ledgers, gazing at the empty columns where he should have recorded yields and earnings.

Their bank account lay as parched and empty as the fields.

Mandatory listing, when the government paid a fee to farmers who left the land fallow as another measure to prevent the dust blowing, had done its own damage.

More acres plowed in desperation had added even more dust to the great smothering clouds that had blown prairie dirt as far as Chicago and New York.

Laurie reminded everyone that back in the spring of ’30, Hoover had stated that the worst effects of the crash would be over within a few months.

“And yet here we are, two years later, and it’s only getting worse.

Wheat selling for nineteen cents a bushel, corn prices at less than nothing.

Even if we could grow a decent crop, it ain’t worth it.

No wonder folk are rioting over food shortages when mountains of grain sit idle at train stations. ”

“Look at us,” May said with a heavy sigh. “Grouching and whining. We’re all ’bout as flat and lifeless as the damn prairie.”

“It’s looking more than likely Hoover will be gone after the election this fall,” Emily added. “FDR is making ground. Maybe he’ll come good on his promise to remember the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

She thought about their first harvest, when the same acreage of wheat that sat fallow now had brought in four thousand dollars.

Nobody needed to be a mathematician or an economist to see how impossible it was.

And it wasn’t just on the prairie where folk were struggling.

The entire country was on its knees. In New York, nearly half a million people were on city relief—just eight dollars a month to get by.

Emily remembered the flophouses and soup kitchens she’d seen in Chicago, the homeless men sleeping on benches in the Great Hall at Union Station, their bedsheets made from yesterday’s newspapers.

“I’ve never seen Henry so desolate,” Emily said. “When I try to talk to him about it, he shuts me out, bottles it all up until he meets the other men.”

“They’re too proud to talk to us about it,” Laurie said. “It near breaks Hank’s heart to list the land, to see once-fertile fields sit fallow as he sits idle himself. He needs to be busy. It’s the helplessness that’s killing him. Eats him up from the inside.”

Foreclosure sales were humiliating and increasingly common. The farmers had all agreed to never bid more than a dime for anything: not for a combine, or a horse, or a hoe. It was the only way they could beat the bankers. Strength in numbers. Unity. The ten-cent sales had become a vital lifeline.

“Let’s just pray Miss Watson comes good and finds that Okie rainmaker,” Ingrid added. “Seems like she might be our last hope.”

“She will,” Emily said. “I’m sure she will. Adelaide didn’t seem like the sort of person to make a promise she couldn’t keep.”

Laurie sighed. “Never thought I’d see the day when we were harvesting promises to make a living, but here we are, ladies. Here we are.”

Emily didn’t play the fiddle that night. Nobody asked, and she didn’t have the energy to offer.

As she arrived home, she drove past the Western Union telegraph boy, cycling back along their track. A sense of dread washed over her. Telegrams usually meant bad news.

At the house, she found Henry and Dorothy making paper planes, seeing whose could fly the farthest. They seemed to be in good spirits.

“Telegram just arrived,” Henry said.

“Yes, I just passed the telegraph boy. Is it…”

“It’s on the dresser.”

Emily picked up the piece of paper, almost afraid to know what it said. But a tired smile spread to her lips as she read the typed message.

Tracked down that Okie rainmaker. Italian American from the Midwest.

Calls himself the Rain Man. Will come as soon as we can. Adelaide.