That June Uncle Ray wanted to hire another man to help on the farm. I'd heard him and Pa arguing about it, Uncle Ray saying there was too much work to do what with the storms, and Pa saying there wasn't enough money to hire a hand, and anyways there probably wouldn't even be a crop next year. Their shouting got pretty loud, too, even though they made sure to do it when they thought us kids were out to town or something.

Scared me some, to tell the truth. Uncle Ray was a peaceful man, one of the kindest you ever met. He always had a penny for a piece of licorice that the little Brighton girl sold in the General Store. Always willing to lend us a cloth for a mask when the dust came if we didn't have our own with us. He even knew a few tricks to keep the dust out of the house, like fixing up strips of cloth to put around the cracks in the windows. He's the one who tied the rope from the house to the barn so Pa wouldn't lose his way.

They weren't kin—Uncle Ray was Ma's brother. Nor did he come to live with us when she died; he was there for it all, from the beginning when she was getting headaches, to the end when she couldn't even take a step out of bed. He loved her. He cried when she died, cried as he held me and Rhett and Jo in his massive arms. We were crying too. I reckon we were one big sobbing wet mess, and I can laugh about it now sometimes, but that's just 'cause I got nothing else to do anymore.

I'm sure Pa cried too, but he was a whole different animal than Uncle Ray. Uncle Ray was tough, but quiet-like, so's it'd creep up on you. He was big and strong, but Mrs. Brighton called him a "gentle giant" and he was good with us kids. Pa was tough too, but you knew it right away. He wasn't as big as Uncle Ray, not even by half, but if him and Uncle Ray ever got into a boxing match, I'm not sure who I'd put my money on. Not that they would ever get into a fight; they loved each other just as much as they loved us, I think. That's why it was so frightening to hear them going at it, Uncle Ray's voice just booming out of the house, and Pa barking right alongside him.

But it was Pa's house so Pa won. He did it by compromising, too, which was his usual way of things. He told Uncle Ray that if there were a crop come next year—and we all had our doubts about that—then I was getting of age to help. I wasn't too happy with the thought, but I'd always suspected that work was heading my way, so I began watching Pa and Uncle Ray more closely as they went about their chores. I'd always known it was hard work, but I never realized how hard until I made it a point to pay close attention.

Despite my reservations, I sided with Pa on the argument; I thought we had plenty of hands around the farm. Uncle Ray himself was probably the single greatest asset we had. He came from back East, like his sister, but he had an instinct for the land that I haven't seen in some people born and raised in the midst of it. He could tell you at sunrise if there'd be a blizzard that afternoon; and sure enough, come three or four o'clock, we'd look off to the horizon and see a wall of dirt and dust heading our way. I'll tell you, that was a chilling sight, and I still wake up from dreams about those storms. I've seen some mighty disturbing things—saw the Germans in the concentration camps, saw my first wife and child die in an automobile accident while I was across the street buying a milk shake—but it's those dust storms that still keep me up at night.

Well, those storms and the other thing, of course, which is why I'm telling this in the first place.

Anyways, Uncle Ray could've easily moved back East after Ma died and no one would've blamed him, but he liked the lifestyle. Most nights he stayed out at the farm with us, telling stories until everyone—Pa included—went to bed, then staying up reading and drinking. Other nights he would go into town. He didn't gamble much—we didn't have any money he could lose even if he'd felt like it—but I guess he partook of the female comforts that Wind Falls, Kansas had to offer. It went against Uncle Ray's nature a bit, I guess, him being single his whole life, but then I would learn there were lots of things about Uncle Ray I never knew. He was in the first Great War, you know. I guess he lost a brother over there. He was a cop for some time too; I learned that bit just a few days ago, when some hotshot little reporter from Wichita called me up. I guess that's what got me started on all this, though I didn't need no help remembering. Just needed a little kick start, I reckon.

Everyone knows about the black blizzards that swept across Kansas in the Dirty Thirties. The Dust Bowl is what they call it; to us it was Hell on Earth, and I mean literal not metaphorical. Twister-strength winds, dust blowing everywhere. People died from it—not from the wind but from the dust. Some of them storms lasted days, mind you, two or three days of dust swirling everywhere. These days I can't keep the goddamn dust off the top of my television; you imagine what it was like trying to keep the dirt out of the food, sheets, clothing. Impossible, that's what it was.

You learned to live with it. There was nothing else. You lived with it or you died from it. Ma didn't die from it; she died in childbirth, just took her a few months to catch up. The baby died too, but none of us kids were too upset about that; we hadn't yet gotten used to the idea of having another young 'un running around. I can tell you now that it probably broke Pa's heart, losing both a child and a wife at the same time; I can tell you from personal experience, I think I've already mentioned that. But kids don't know any better, do they? We were upset enough to have lost our mother; guess that was enough sorrow for us to bear.

Anyways, like I was saying, everyone knows about the dust storms, and most can even guess about the damned heat, so bad that some days it got to well over a hundred degrees and stayed there for weeks on end. But not everyone knows everything else. The locusts, for one thing. I know technically they were grasshoppers, and those aren't the same as locusts, but I like a little melodrama and so I call 'em locusts. That's what we called 'em back then. They'd come in swarms, in the early years, eating all the crops. We'd fight 'em with whatever chemicals we could round up but it just wasn't any use—they'd keep coming, their damned claws scratching your flesh if you were unlucky enough to get caught in 'em. I can't swear to this, but I'm pretty sure one even bit me once. Hurt something god-awful, I can tell you.

Then there was the static electricity. I've heard the explanation—all that sand blowing against the metal equipment over a period of time builds up a charge. Back then, all we knew was that if you touched one of the plows that had been left out in the storm, you got knocked on your ass. Sometimes you got knocked out completely; I took a wallop and came to an hour later. Uncle Ray found me, thank God it wasn't little Jo who would've bawled her eyes out, and he was wringing his hands and crouching over me 'cause he was too afraid to move me to a bed. We saw lightning, too, even when there wasn't a storm, and the barbed wire fence we used to keep the chickens in would sometimes glow.

And then there were the rabbits.

You see, them dust storms didn't just affect people. One look at the livestock could tell you that; our cattle wasted away to nothing, 'til we couldn't even get a good piece of jerky from them. The chickens died too, though they lasted longer 'cause chickens will eat just about any damned thing you feed to 'em. But the wildlife of the prairie took a beating too. First it was the larger animals, like the antelope and deer. We'd find their bodies here and there, wasted almost beyond recognition. Then the coyotes began to drop, and that was kinda good because they could be dangerous when they were starving.

I guess when the coyotes went, the jackrabbits were free to multiply to their hearts' content. And they did, too. You've heard the phrase "mating like rabbits," but I did some looking into it, and a single jackrabbit mother can have a litter of six bunnies every month. All year long. And those jackrabbits, they didn't know at first what was going on with the world. They just realized that there weren't no more coyotes, and so they began doing their business. En masse, as they say.

Well, with so many rabbits, they began to eat up all their available food. And when that happened, instead of doing the smart thing and stop mating, they migrated east.

Western Kansas was hit hard. You got up in the morning, walked to the door, looked out, and all you could see were jackrabbits, thousands of 'em. They weren't cute, neither; jackrabbits have got to be the ugliest kind of rabbit, with those big goblin ears and fur the color of diarrheic excrement, if you'll pardon the image. There they were, eating up the last of the vegetation, getting underfoot when you walked to the barn.

Rhett took a few shots at 'em with the gun, but Uncle Ray put an end to that. Said that wasn't how you did it. Rhett asked how you did do it, and Uncle Ray just looked at him for a bit then shook his head and turned away. Rhett came to me, 'cause I was the oldest, and asked how you did it, and I said I didn't know and wasn't sure I wanted to.

I guess Pa didn't know how to take care of jackrabbits either, 'cause later that afternoon I saw him and Uncle Ray talking out back. Uncle Ray was talking hard, trying to get a point across, and making gestures with his arms that seemed wild to me. After a while Pa started nodding, and later that afternoon Uncle Ray went into town. I asked to go along and he thought about it and told me no, but said that he'd bring back some licorice for us kids.

They started putting up a fence the next day. By "they" I mean Pa, Uncle Ray, and a few men from town. It was a big fence, too, perhaps a couple hundred feet in diameter. I knew what it was almost right away, of course: a pen. And I even ascertained as to what they meant to put in there: the jackrabbits. I said as much to Uncle Ray and he smiled at me and patted the top of my head, saying I was growing up fast and had a quick mind about me. Then he stopped smiling and looked hard at me, and I did my best to meet his gaze. After a few seconds he nodded to himself and went off to talk to Pa.

The pen was finished the next day. Pa took Jo and Rhett into town, but I stayed at the house with Uncle Ray. Pa didn't look too happy to leave me behind, but I didn't mind, 'cause it felt good to be surrounded by men, real men of the land.

We began herding the jackrabbits into the pen, using large wooden sticks to prod them along. To herd them we had to wade amongst them, and it was an oddly pleasant feeling, their fur brushing against my legs, feeling them scampering over my feet. I'd never been surrounded by so many warm-blooded critters before, and I wanted to sit down and pet each and every one of them.

Eventually we herded a few hundred into the pen, and one of the men I didn't recognize closed the gate. The men then climbed over the fence, so that they were inside with the rabbits, and I started to join them but Uncle Ray put a hand on my shoulder, saying it was best if I wait just a while. He looked hard at me again and said if I wanted, I could join in the second round-up.

Something dropped in my stomach just then. I think it was in the way the men were holding their sticks now, and I opened my mouth to say something against it, but then Uncle Ray reached down and grabbed a jackrabbit by its hind legs. He lifted it into the air, and the animal squealed and thrashed in his hands, and he stared at it for a few seconds, then swung his stick against its skull.

I can still hear the thud. Soft. Wet. Warm. The rabbit's squeal was cut off instantly, and Uncle Ray dropped it to the ground and grabbed another.

The other men followed his lead, but I watched Uncle Ray the most. I watched him and thought of how he'd held me the night mother died. How he'd stroked behind the ears of Bessie, our most productive milk cow. How he'd swung little Jo around and around, her giggling and him laughing and Rhett and me wishing we were that little again. I saw his hand on mine, guiding it along the barrel of the rifle so I could get a feel for it. Then I saw his hand clutching a rabbit, his other hand clutching a stick, and I watched as he brought the two together and blood sprayed onto his chest and his jeans and he grabbed for another rabbit.

I turned away and ran back into the house. The men didn't stop until near sunset; it took that long to herd all the jackrabbits and kill 'em one by one. I lay in my cot, my face stuffed into my pillow, my tears mingling with the dust that had been worn into the fabric. I heard the men drive off, and I heard Uncle Ray come into the house. The floor creaked beneath him as he stood at the foot of my cot, and I imagined him covered in blood, wielding the stick above my body, and I sobbed harder.

"I guess you weren't ready yet," he said. Even then, I noted the apology in his voice, the regret, the disappointment. I guess he held it against himself for convincing Pa to leave me there that day, 'cause he never looked me in the eyes again. He stayed at the house long after I went away to join the Army, and not once did he and I ever exchange more words than was necessary.

I can still see the rabbits. I have this dream, not every night or even every week, but often enough to make me dread falling asleep. In the dream I'm standing in the prairie as it was back then, dry and barren. In the distance I can see a storm coming in, rolling waves of dirt blotting out the sun and sky. And then the jackrabbits surround me, running not away from the storm but into it. I yell after them to stop, but they are dumb animals and do not listen, and instead run head-long into their slaughter, and I can only stand there and cry, my tears the only water the land will see for years and years.