In a Handful of Dust

“That’s stupid, Lynn! Plain, flat stupid!” Lucy sputtered, ignoring the tears that rose in her eyes at the thought of Lynn putting empty handfuls to her mouth, pretending to eat so there would be more for Lucy later. “I can’t make it alone, even if I had all the food in the world. I’d lay down and die right now if I were alone. I thought I could do it, for a while, you know? It was like I was going on an adventure, and I could jam all the scared parts down inside me and look forward to the end of the road. But now I’ve seen new things and most of them bad. Horses bleeding out on the road and Joss’s bone sticking into the air when it’s supposed to be under her skin. I can’t unsee it, and I don’t want to see any more.”

Even as she said it, she knew it was true. She wasn’t like Lynn; she didn’t have the courage to face the long, empty roads and the cloudless sky without someone beside her. The loneliness of the country they traveled through had penetrated her, opening up a well of fear she’d managed to keep covered at home. The blank fields, the vast sky, all spoke of nothingness.

“God, Lynn.” She choked on her fear as she admitted it. “There’s nobody out here.”

Lynn lifted one hand and rested it on Lucy’s shaking shoulder. “I know,” she said. “Here you are terrified we haven’t seen anybody, and I’m thrilled to death.”

Lucy pulled her handkerchief free from her neck and wiped her face, leaving dirty tracks behind. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I can’t stand thinking that if something happened and we died, it wouldn’t matter. No one would ever find us, no one would ever know. And we’d lie out here and rot and maybe no one would ever even find our bones. It’d be like we never were.”

Lynn’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “But we are, little one. And that makes all the difference, whether people know you’re here or not.

“I exist as I am, that is enough.
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.”

Lucy felt a smile tug at the corner of her mouth. “That’s downright cheery, compared to the stuff you usually throw at me.”

Lynn shrugged. “I didn’t write it.”

“Who did?”

“Walt Whitman. You’d know that, and a few things more, if you could’ve been bothered to listen to me when you were little.”

The extent of everything she didn’t know washed over Lucy, as deep as the cold waters of the Mississippi. “I feel so small,” she said, her voice cracking. “At home I mattered, but out here—you and I both—we’re nothing, and we matter to no one.”

Lynn pulled herself up to look at Lucy, gripping her face in her hands. “You matter to me, and even if I were gone, you would still matter to yourself. All that time I spent alone before meeting Stebbs? All I mattered to was myself, and I got by.”

“I’m not like that. I need people.” Lucy took one last swipe at her face with the handkerchief. “So stop thinking you’re doing me a favor by not eating.”

Lynn settled back against the tree. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll promise you that, if you promise me something too. If something should happen, you got to keep going without me. Joss wasn’t a good person, but that didn’t mean all she had to say was wrong. She’s dead-on right when she says you got to want something in your life. Me, all I ever wanted was rain and water, wood to get by, and food for the winter. That way of living is so ingrained in me it’s hard to see anything else. But you, little one, you’re meant for more and you know it. You want to get to California, but wishing alone won’t do it. It’s going to be hard—everything worth doing is.”

Lucy brushed a tear away but didn’t try to deny the truth of Lynn’s words. “Why couldn’t I want something easy?”

“Because that’s not like you. You’ve always been fond of the difficult.”

“True enough. I like you, after all.”

Lynn gave her a halfhearted kick and they settled against the tree together, sipping water and watching the birds fly overhead.

Days later, Lucy pulled Spatter up beside Black Horse, no longer content with riding in silence. “How close are we?”

“To Nebraska? Close. But we’ll be crossing another river to get there, the Missouri.”

“Is it big, like the last one?”

“No”—Lynn shook her head—“doesn’t look to be nearly as big. I think the horses could swim it. The closest bridge to our route goes into a city, and I don’t like the look of it. What you said earlier is right, there’s nobody out here, so where’d they all go?”

“You think everyone is in the cities? But why would they do that, when there’s plenty of streams out here?”

“I don’t know, but the more I think on it, the more it worries me. We’ve had no problem finding water, which isn’t surprising. But nobody’s giving us any trouble about taking it, either, and that’s downright weird.”

Lucy thought of Entargo, and the rotted emptiness of its streets. “What if there was an illness like back home and there isn’t anybody left in the whole state?”