Cimarron, Oklahoma; April 1937

”Well, Rudy, shall we spend the next ten minutes chewing the fat, or would you rather I just get the truth over with?”

I don’t reckon that’s how most doctors disclose the inevitable to their patients. Delicacy seems as if it ought to be generously heaped alongside the act of informing a man whether he’s likely to live or die.

Here in Cimarron, though, folks lost time and patience for things as frivolous as tact a long time ago.

“Oh, I can handle it, Doc.” I pull in a long, leisurely gulp of air, and the breath costs me a lot more than it ever used to. My lungs are sluggish. Unwilling. The innards of my chest might as well have shriveled into something as brittle and dry as dead cacti. I stifle the hacking cough that’s dogged me for so many months that lately, I’m hardly aware of it at all.

I glance to my left. Olive’s round, brown-sugar gaze couples with mine, and the next breath comes harder.

Briefly, my daughter looks less like her sixteen years and more like the small, knobby-kneed girl I used to cart to bed on my shoulders at the day’s end. She’d get that same spooked look back then, too: when I’d tell her goodnight and bend down to dim the lamp in her room. How long did it take me to convince her that she had nothing to dread from the dark?

“Hold on. Maybe you should wait a minute.” I reach for Olive’s hand. “Honey, go on out ahead of me, okay? I’ll be there soon.”

“I’m not a kid anymore, Papa.” Olive tilts her head and inspects the flaking yellow plaster overhead. She doesn’t sound defiant; only matter-of-fact. “I can handle the truth just as well as you can, and you might like it if I’m sitting here when you hear it besides.”

I wince. Sure, she might not be my footloose, frolicking child anymore. The drought, the dust storms, the bleached, broken land— all of it made good and sure that my daughter grew up long before she ever should have. But I’m still her father. She’s no woman yet.

I lack the stamina to challenge her though, so instead I eke out a chuckle.

“I suppose out with it then, Doc. Am I gonna kick the bucket soon?”

I reach for her fingers and squeeze them, as if to assure her that I won’t go down without a fight, but as usual, she doesn’t reciprocate.

Doc Sutton shakes his head. For a second, I muster the nerve to hope.

“The dust . . . it’s hardened your lungs, Rudy. Dust pneumonia, if you want the official term they’ve coined for it. I’d advise you to get yourself and Olive out of Cimarron if I thought it would buy you more time. But you said that you’d rather I tell you the truth, so I’m not going to say that.”

I suspected it before we ever sat down, but hearing it in such plain speaking still renders me as stunned and slack-jawed as if the man had stood up and backhanded me.

“So . . so I, ah, I don’t really have a chance, then?”

Doc Sutton sighs.

“I heard your brother Dale is hightailing it out of here,” he says. “Taking Ivy and the kids to California. Must have had all of Oklahoma that he can take.”

I guess we’re already back to chewing the fat. I won’t hold it against him. I’m more suited to small talk than discussing death. Mentioning my brother seems a mite callous, though. Even for someone from Cimarron.

“Yep. He leaves next week. Quitting seems to be all the rage these days, you know? Our old man left him that farm. Dale poured heart and soul into it all these years. He might’ve bequeathed it to his boys if he’d but held on a spell longer. Wayward. That’s what my pa would say after he’d finished taking a few turns spinning in his grave.”

“Everything has a price,” Doc Sutton grants. “You’ll miss your cousins, Olive?”

Olive shrugs. Her face is blank. Flat as the Oklahoma prairie. I know the truth; her heart will break when Dale’s kids are gone. But I also know she won’t risk her pride enough to confess it.

“I expect,” is all she says. “Things are different now, though. We don’t see much of them anymore, what with all the work on the farm and all.”

Doc Sutton nods. He turns to me. “You ever thought about giving the old home place up, Rudy? Going west with your brother? Doctors get it wrong every day, you know. You and California just might prove me mistaken.”

“Not a chance, Doc. There’s no honor in giving up and running off, and I always did mean to leave the farm to my daughter, just as my old man left it to me.”

It’s our family’s way, no matter what notions Dale’s gone and taken to.

“Of course,” the doctor says. “I remember your father, Rudy. You’d do him proud. You and Olive both. She used to make me think so much of Aggie, but she’s grown up to be the spitting image of you.”

As I hand Olive up into the wagon outside, I ask, “You want to stop by and see Mama on the way back?”

She folds her hands, settling them in her lap. “If we’ve got the time. It’s been a long while since we’ve been down to see her.”

She’s right, to my shame.

We used to drive an automobile to town— nothing fancy, just a 1920-something Chevy grain truck, but an auto nonetheless— until the dust started clogging the engine and the cylinders. As our old mare strains the wagon across a road that drought and wind have boiled into a mess of bone-colored sand, I sit back and let the reins droop in my hands. Oklahoma rolls out listlessly before us: a barren, erratic sea of soil that’s as pale and powdery as flour, brutalized by the sun and hurled up into monstrous devil-storms by a wind so visceral that at times it feels almost human in its need to harm. No green thing grows in these parts; not even thistles or yucca are tough enough for this dirt anymore. People no longer complain about how long it’s been since we last saw rain. If they haven’t forgotten, then they’re probably trying to.

But no matter how much it tests me, I’d never dream of accusing this land or calling it hateful names the way my brother does.

“We’re here,” Olive says, and I’m ashamed to be fuming at Dale when I ought to be reaching out to my girl.

From the looks of the churchyard, the dust hasn’t shown much respect even for the dead. The ground is like salt under our boots. Thanks to the perpetually shifting sand, a few of the stones have fallen flat on their faces. We’re both relieved when we locate Aggie’s and find it still upright. Olive slips to her knees and presses a hand to the slim granite slab.

“Do . . . do you remember her much?” I ask clumsily.

I’m terrible at this kind of talk. Aggie was the one who could reach anyone with just a smile and a few words. Oh, she’d had a devilish temper, too, and a fondness for saying scandalous things. Folks either loved her or they hated her, but if they loved her, it was outright adoration at first meeting, like it had been with me.

Olive pinches her eyes shut. “I remember planting zinnias with her every spring. And a dress she made me for my birthday one year. It was pink. You know the one?”

I start to stammer that I don’t, but then recollection flashes to life in my head. My girl chasing lizards in our yard, wearing a riot of wildflowers in her hair and a cotton dress as pink as raspberry juice. Aggie had a penchant for the most outrageous colors. Her frocks were all sunrise orange, saturated violet, dizzyingly bright blue. I think she kind of enjoyed the stares that those crazy dresses earned her, for she’d toss her head and grin and say, “Life’s too short for me to be the practical type.”

That’s one of my favorite memories of her. I’d clean forgotten about it. Up until now.

Olive’s still talking. “Papa . . . I wasn’t going to say anything yet. But . . . Uncle Dale and Aunt Ivy asked me if I wanted to go to California with them.”

For the second time today, I’m left reeling. “Olive . . . what?”

Apparently it’s not enough for my brother to betray our family’s legacy and abandon everything our father worked himself to death to leave him. Now Dale thinks he’s running off with my daughter too.

He’s lucky he’s nowhere within reach of my knuckles right now, that’s for sure.

“Papa, you heard what Doc Sutton said. Maybe he’s wrong about you. But we’ll never know if you don’t get out of here. And even if you won’t . . . I don’t want to stay.”

“No.” I grip Aggie’s tombstone, borrowing its stability. My eyes and my chest burn with things I have no idea how to explain. I’m pretty sure one of them is rage, though. Rage so white-hot that the sheer force of it could keep me alive long enough to chase Dale all the way to the ocean and teach him a lesson.

“It wasn’t just me attached to our home here, Olive. Your mama loved it too. She never would have told me to just give up on the home I’ve worked so hard to give you. We hoped . . . we planned that your children would grow up on the same ground that you did. And whether it’s sooner or later, I want them to put me right here when I’m gone. Next to your mama.”

“What about me?“ Olive argues. She’s never talked to me like this before. Her resolve fairly jars me. “You really think Mama would have stuck around, if God had taken you first instead of her? This place was still good when she was alive to have hopes and plans. But it isn’t anymore. Just look at it. And if I ever have any children, I’ll dare to hope for better for them. Uncle Dale says that, and he’s not wrong.”

“This place is still good,” I say fiercely. I cough into my palm and wipe it on my trousers. “Rain doesn’t just vanish forever. The land just needs time, that’s all.”

“Time you don’t have, Papa.” Olive stands up and looks at me. The yearning in her eyes melts my anger like lard on a griddle. But there’s something else there, too. “You can love something with all your heart and still know when it’s time to leave.”

Inside, I reply, Or someone?

“Your mama was an artist, you know,” I tell Olive. “Give her a brush and a tray of watercolors, and she could show you anything you wanted in the world.”

We’re almost back to the farm now. Along the seam where it aligns with the prairie, the sky is inflamed, as red as a fresh wound. Like whatever sickness ails Oklahoma has begun to infect the horizon, just as certainly as it’s infected me.

I’ve done a pretty poor job of honoring Aggie’s memory. I focus on the farm instead— I always have. When she died, I lost myself in work because it felt safer than losing myself in sorrow. I haven’t dug her sketchbooks out of her old hickory hope chest in years. I told myself that I kept her paintings tucked away to preserve them from the dust.

Maybe if I’d sooner shared with Olive how deeply her mother cherished this land, she wouldn’t have been so easily persuaded to disown it.

Olive’s been subdued ever since our dispute in the graveyard. “I don’t remember ever seeing her paint.”

“She was gonna go to art school, in some highfalutin city back East. But— well, we got married. She said painting Oklahoma would be enough for her. I’ll bet she would have been famous, but she gave it up. For me, if I’m being honest.”

“I never even knew.” Olive shakes her head. “I want to see her paintings, Papa. Where are they?”

I hear it again: that new determination that leaves me feeling like I don’t really know my daughter. To my surprise, I’m relieved. Doc Sutton is wrong— a little of Aggie still lingers in Olive after all. She’s not wholly her father. Thank God.

We do the chores together. Then I lead the way to the attic. Dust plumes up out of the hope chest when I raise the lid, and I’m barely able to save myself from gagging on it. When Olive flips open Aggie’s leather-bound watercolor journal, she gasps and splays her fingers over her mama’s creations with something akin to worship.

“Mama did these? They’re amazing, Papa. You weren’t kidding. She really would have been famous.”

“Yep.” I squint at the artwork, laboring for breath. I didn’t figure it would be this hard. It’s been eight years, but it feels like I stashed away Aggie’s paintings only yesterday.

“Our farm was about all she’d paint. She sure had a knack for making it look its best, didn’t she?”

I recognize each landscape Aggie’s watercolors depict, for I’ve stood and walked and worked my hands to the bone in every one. She’s captured the homestead and the prairies around it in all their varying moods— pewter-gray on a frosty January morning, then ablaze with yellow cactus blossoms and blanket flowers in spring, then ripe-bronze in October when the harvest turns. Sometimes she honed in on the bold and the jazzy, like a sunset or a monsoon, but sometimes she dedicated an entire sheet of paper to the small things not everyone might appreciate, like the burnt-green details of the grass in midsummer or a single sunflower blooming by a fence post.

“Yeah,” Olive breathes. “Did she ever. But why didn’t she ever paint anything else?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I should have asked, but I never did.

I’ve heard that knowing you’re probably going to soon leave the world alters how you perceive everything that’s in it. Maybe it’s true, for as I show my wife’s work to our daughter for the first time, I see Aggie’s motives in a different cast, and I think I finally understand her.

It breaks me more than receiving my own death sentence ever could have.

“It wasn’t really Oklahoma she loved,” I say. “It was me.”

Olive digests this in silence. At length, she asks, “Do you think she’d still paint it now if she were here?”

“I don’t reckon she’d need as many colors as she used to,” I admit, otherwise at a loss. “Do you think she would?”

“No.” Olive stands up, setting Aggie’s book aside. She was right, all along. That’s no child looking me in the eye and speaking her mind with all the conviction and spirit that her mother might have, long ago. “She’d see you, fighting every day in this blasted dust just to get air in and out of your chest, and she’d see me, and I think she’d love us both to say that enough is enough.”

I look up at my daughter. I see the grit with which she’s borne all she’s suffered. Grit I doubt if she learned from me. And I consider what I’ve always thought I knew about honor, and land, and what I care about most in the world.

When I get to my feet and pull her into my arms, I taste the sting of my own tears.

“I don’t know what I ever did to deserve the way your mama loved me. But the least I can do now is follow her example.”

Olive stares at me, as baffled by my emotion as by my words. Then perception flashes in her gaze. Her face opens up, but then she looks away, as if she doesn’t dare believe me.

“You’ll let the farm go, Papa?” she whispers. “You might never see it again.”

“I’ve taken enough time loving the farm. Whatever time I’ve got left, I’m gonna spend it showing you that I love you more. You have no idea how proud she’d be of you, kid.”

For the first time in ages, my girl hugs me back.

“Not only of me,” she says.