"This is insane," I say after a while.
"Yeah." Maggie turns her head against the wall to look at me. "You're handling it well. I half expected you to be hiding in the corner."
"I've got an excellent distraction." I smile and lean in to kiss her, brushing my lips against hers and then pressing in firmer when she turns into me. Maggie's hand wraps around my waist, and I shift and straddle her. Her grip tightens, her thumb stroking against my ribs under my wet T-shirt. I bite her bottom lip and feel her smile against my mouth, and we make out until I lose track of how long it's been.
The roar peaks and holds and then, slowly, starts to drop. The brown murk on the glass lifts by degrees, and the wind settles into ordinary gusts.
Maggie finally pulls away to listen, her hands moving to my back and caressing me. "That's it," she whispers. "It's passed."
I don't move off her. The storm's done but I'm not, and from the way she looks at me I don't think she's in any hurry either. But also I'm flushed and overheated and the poor pigs need to get back outside.
"Let's finish this later," I murmur against her lips. I kiss her one more time before I stand and offer my hand to pull her up.
Maggie opens the door and I'm not prepared for the damage.
Everything is brown. A fine layer of pale dust has settled over the entire world, the kind that gets into every crease and corner of everything. The drive, the fences, the water troughs, the goat playground, the leaves of the oak — all of it the same matte tan, like someone's dropped a filter over the whole farm. The pig pool is a flat disc of sludge and the light's coming back faded and strange, the sun pushing through the haze still hanging in the air.
"Right," I say, looking at the wreck of it. "I get why this place is called Duster."
54
MAGGIE
Dust doesn't fall off. It works its way into everything and stays there, and you don't sweep it so much as relocate it. Every surface you clear sends up a cloud that resettles on the surface you just did. We started with the animals — let the pigs back out into the open air, checked eyes and noses because dust does damage if it sits in them. The emus, released from the goat shed, conducted a furious inspection of the changed world and drummed at it for a while.
Then the troughs. Every water trough on the property was a bowl of sludge, so we tipped them, scrubbed them, and refilled them. The pig pool was a write-off so we drained it and left it to refill.
The porch was in a bad state and Sloane swept while I hosed down the boards and the kitchen windows. Then we spent a good hour wiping the table, chairs, and the bench until they were something a person could sit on.
The seating area out back was the same job over again. It's slow, stupid work and there's no skill to any of it, just repetition, but Sloane did it without a word of complaint, which is not thewoman who turned up at my gate on her first day, crying about a thirty-minute walk.
It's almost five now and the light's gone normal again. The farm looks less like a disaster and more like a place that's had a very bad day.
I'm just about to suggest we call it a day when Ruthie's Buick pulls up, crawling up through the settling dust. She climbs out in a housedress and a pair of rubber boots and surveys the farm with her hands on her hips.
"Well," she says. "He had a go, didn't he?"
"Who did?"
"The Lord's opponent." She jerks her chin at the brown world. "You don't get a day like this without help from below, Maggie. That was not natural weather. That was a message."
"It was a wind advisory, Ruthie."
"It was a wind advisory," she agrees, "doing the Devil's work." She shakes her head. "I just wanted to make sure you were in one piece and the animals weren't hurt."
"Thanks for checking, they're fine. Sloane's here and we got everyone in before it hit." I shrug. "Bit shaken. No harm."
"Good. Good." She nods, satisfied, and then her eyes go to Sloane, who's come over to join us. Ruthie takes in the state of her. "Look at you. Nothing like a hard day's work, huh?"
"I've found dust in places I didn't know I had," Sloane says, wiping her brow.
"Well, doesn't that just—" Ruthie stops, like she's overcome, and pats Sloane's filthy arm. "There's a girl. There's a girl who came to us with nothing but designer handbags and now look. The Lord moves, is all I'll say. The Lord moves."
"He sure does," I say, and avoid looking at Sloane while trying to keep a straight face.
"The main road's clear, by the way," Ruthie goes on. "County had the graders out on the highway by three — they don't messaround, on account of the pileups. But the church—" She breaks off and presses a hand to her chest. "Oh, the church, Maggie. You wouldn't believe it. The whole front of it is buried. The wind came across the Hendersons' field and drove every speck of it straight at our doors, and now there's a drift up the front steps higher than my knee, and the windows on the north side are packed solid with dust, just packed, you can't see a thing through them. It's dark as a cellar in there. Doris went to open up for choir practice and couldn't get in."
"Can't the county clear it?" Sloane asks.
