Dust in the Wind

By the time the wind came up from the bottomland the old man had already swept the gallery twice, though there was no use in it because the road lay only 30 yards beyond the cedars and every wagon that passed, every mule, every barefoot child running home before dark, lifted the same red dust into the air until it drifted over the fence and settled again upon the worn planks as though the earth itself possessed some slow and tireless respiration by which it forever breathed itself away and drew itself back again. He closed his eyes, leaned upon the broom handle and watched it happen without surprise.

Only for a moment, and the moment’s gone

It had been so when his father sat in that same chair beneath the same cracked window where the evening light still caught the old glass in wavering patches, and before that when his grandfather had built the house from timber cut a mile west where now there remained only stumps sinking deeper into the ground each winter until even they appeared less the remains of trees than memories the earth itself had almost succeeded in forgetting. And the wind had come then, too. It had entered beneath the eaves before there were children to chase it laughing through the rooms, before there were portraits darkening upon the walls, before there were ledgers in the desk drawer recording acres bought and sold as though the clay cared whose name was written beside it.

All my dreams

He had believed once — as every young man must believe or else never lift an axe nor ask a woman to marry him — that a life was a thing built forward, one day standing upon the shoulders of another until finally there would exist something which neither weather nor sorrow could wholly undo. He remembered thinking this while driving cedar posts into fresh earth with hands so strong the hammer seemed only an extension of his own will, remembered his wife laughing because he had stopped in the middle of the field merely to look across it, seeing not the field itself but the years he imagined already standing there waiting for him like obedient servants.

Pass before my eyes, a curiosity

Yet now he found he could not remember the sound of her laughter without also recalling the enervating silence that followed it.

Dust in the wind

It seemed to him sometimes that memory was no faithful steward but rather another form of wind, moving backward instead of forward, lifting here and leaving there according to no justice a man could discover; preserving the curve of her hand resting upon a windowsill while taking forever the words that hand had signified and that he had failed to understand, returning with painful clarity the smell of rain striking hot dust on a late August evening while refusing him the face of the child who had stood beside him in that rain and who had long since become another old man somewhere beyond the river or perhaps beneath it in a subway jammed with infarcted commuters hanging from the straps, dreaming of escaping all the appurtenances of civilized modern life. Like the wind, memory gave lavishly and stole lavishly. It remembered by forgetting.

All they are is dust in the wind

A wagon rattled past. The driver lifted one hand.

Same old song

The old man answered, though he could not afterward have said whether the face had belonged to Eli Morgan’s youngest boy or to Eli himself as he had looked 30 years before, because lately the years had begun folding together the way fields disappear beneath morning mist until fence and pasture and creek become one grey country without boundary. Perhaps, he thought, there is no boundary. Perhaps what men call the past is only the dust settling where the light happens to catch it.

Just a drop of water in an endless sea

He looked toward the family burying ground beyond the cedars where the stones leaned a little farther each season. His father lay there. His mother. Two children whose names were still sharp upon the marble though no living voice had spoken them aloud for years. The mason had cut the letters deep, believing depth could bargain with time.

All we do

The wind had been reading them away, one grain at a time.

Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Not out of malice. The wind knew nothing of malice. Nor mercy. It crossed the graves as it crossed the cotton rows, the courthouse square, the church door standing open after Sunday preaching, the empty cradle in the attic, the porch where old men watched evening gather among the trees. It made no distinction because distinction belonged to men, and men, with alum-mouthed contrariness, belonged only briefly to themselves.

Dust in the wind

Darkness came so gradually that he did not at first notice it. The broom still rested beneath his hand. Dust had gathered again upon the gallery where moments before he had swept it clean. He might have swept once more. Instead he sat down.

All we are is dust in the wind

The road faded. The cedars became one dark wall against the western sky. Somewhere beyond them the wind continued its patient passage over fields where strangers now planted crops upon land his grandfather had once believed would remain forever in the family, over cabins already fallen into their own foundations, over churchyards where names dissolved back into stone and stone into earth until the earth carried them all without preference, as a mother long past grief carries sleeping children from one room into another without waking them.

Now don’t hang on

Then it came across the gallery again, touching his face with the same cool hand that had touched his father’s, and his father’s father before him, and those forgotten altogether whose bones had long since become indistinguishable from the road itself, and for the first time it seemed to him that the wind was not carrying the dust away.

Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky

The wind was carrying it home. 

Dust in the wind

It seemed to him that life is the father and death is the mother.

Everything is dust in the wind