Summary
In October, Billie Jo’s father takes a job with Wireless Power excavating holes for electric towers. She doesn’t believe he’ll drink the money away, because he hasn’t been drinking since Ma died. Billie Jo comments that she can’t even be in the same room as Ma’s piano. Arley tells her that her hands could be used to play again, but she has to try. In November, a real snow falls. Rather than blow away, it is wet and clings to the earth, melting into the dirt. Billie Jo says the grass, wheat, cattle, rabbits, and her father will be happy.
In December, Billie Jo tries piano again because Arley has asked her to play a song with the Black Mesa Boys at Vera Wanderdale’s dance revue at the Palace. Mad Dog is singing. Billie Jo appreciates that Mad Dog treats her normally, like she is someone he knows, and he doesn’t stare at her deformed hands as she struggles to play. At home, she asks her father how Mad Dog got his nickname and what his real name is. Her father stares at her like she is crazy. Billie Jo comments that her mother would have known the answer.
In January 1935, Billie Jo’s grade beats the entire state on the state tests again. Billie Jo wishes she could run home and tell Ma. It would be enough to just hear, “I knew you could” again. At Christmas, Billie Jo makes her father dinner. She wishes she could make Ma’s special cranberry sauce, which he loved, but Ma never showed her how to make it. More dust comes. Billie Jo reports on how Joe De La Flor, the local cattle rancher, can’t afford to feed his cows, so County Agent Dewey comes and shoots the cows behind the barn. However, rain comes down on a Sunday night. In the morning, the farmers nod their heads as they look across their fields. Everyone is grateful for a moment in which they are not under the weight of dust.
Billie Jo and her father dress in their best clothes for the President’s Birthday Ball, where everyone dances hand in hand. At the end, Arley announces they raised $33 for the care of paralyzed infants. An air of hope pervades the place, as if people are almost free of debt, dust, and withered wheat. Billie Jo’s father laughs twice. She can’t believe it. At school in February, the government has sent canned meat, potatoes, rice, and bread from the bakery and milk from the farms. The normally hungry students all gorge themselves until they push back from their desks. Billie Jo’s ears ring with the sounds of satisfied children.
One morning, Billie Jo and her teacher come into the classroom to see that a man has moved his mother, pregnant wife, and two children into the schoolhouse. The man says the dust blew in and they took shelter; he is looking for a job. Freeland says they can stay as long as they want. The students start bringing in food to contribute to the family. The man, Buddy Williams, fixes things around the school. The grandma looks after the kids outside. The family studies the same lessons as the kids from their makeshift apartment in the corner of the room. Two weeks after the mother gives birth, the family moves on in their rusty truck, heading west. Billie Jo chases after them, wanting to go along, but they don’t look back.
Despite the pain in her hands, Billie Jo practices piano every morning for a competition the Palace Theatre is having on Thursday night. She wants the money that comes with the prizes. But more than that, she wants to prove herself. She wants the admiration Mad Dog receives when he sings. She hopes people can see past her disfigured hands if she plays well enough. Maybe then she could feel at ease with herself.
At the competition, she guesses everyone from miles around has come to watch the seventeen performers. She plays “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” The applause makes her forget the pain. She wins third place and gets a dollar; Mad Dog takes second and two dollars. They have to give the ribbon and dollar to her father because she can’t hold anything in her hands.
In March, Billie Jo’s father suggests that he could start attending night school to have something to rely on if the farm fails. She suspects it’s because he wants to spend time with the ladies who take night-school classes. Billie Jo wouldn’t mind if he found a new woman because she wouldn’t have to do as much cooking, but she is still annoyed to think of him spending time with “biddies.” She goes to the piano, her fingers making marks where the dust was sitting.
One night Billie Jo leaves a show at the Palace Theatre and steps into a dust storm so strong she can’t see anything. She struggles to feel the edge of the road with her feet as she makes her way home. There, her father has left a note saying he went out searching for her. He comes back at six a.m., bloody where he cut himself from walking into things he couldn’t see.
Billie Jo says that each half of a local couple died within two months of each other, with the wife succumbing to dust pneumonia. Billie Jo believes Fonda couldn’t go on without her husband, who died two months earlier. Billie Jo says she didn’t want to go on after Ma’s death. Now, she doesn’t want to die, but she does “just want to go, away, out of the dust.”
Analysis
In Autumn 1934, several hopeful events offset the despair and grief felt by Billie Jo and her father. Bayard is able to get a job digging holes for electrical towers. A job like this would have been part of the New Deal effort to make broad investments in infrastructure; in this case, the Wireless Power project had the dual benefit of employing out-of-work farmers while simultaneously bringing electrification to American farm properties, only ten percent of which had access to electricity in the early 1930s. The environmental crisis is also eased somewhat by a snow that falls gently enough to melt into the earth and replenish some of the groundwater needed to keep plants, animals, and farmers alive.
Despite being in mourning, Billie Jo once again places at the top of the ranks when the results of the latest standardized tests come back. In an instance of situational irony, the disheartening, lackluster response Ma had earlier in the book to Billie Jo’s success—“I knew you could”—becomes something Billie Jo wishes she could hear again. However, more positive, hope-inducing things happen, bringing Billie Jo relief. The President’s Ball offers an evening of levity for her and her father, and the government sends enough food to the school in February for the local children to have a rare feast.
Hesse continues building on the theme of poverty with the unexpected arrival of a Dust Bowl migrant family at the schoolhouse. Without anywhere to live, the family moves themselves into the schoolhouse without permission, setting up camp in the corner of Billie Jo’s classroom. But in another instance of situational irony, Miss Freeland responds to the presumptuous family not with antagonism but acceptance. Miss Freeland demonstrates for her students the virtue of being charitable even when they themselves are impoverished, encouraging them to accommodate the family’s needs as they expect their new child. When the Williams family leaves, the theme of escape arises again as Billie Jo wishes she could accompany the family as they continue westward.
In a sign of the place Bayard has reached in his grieving process, he mentions to Billie Jo the possibility of him taking night-school classes so that he has a fallback if their farm should ever fail. Billie Jo comments on the irony of her father’s pessimism sounding like her mother’s, while her own insistence that the farm will thrive again sounds like what her father used to argue. However, she believes that night school is mostly an excuse for Bayard to meet single women. Billie Jo herself knows it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for him to have a partner again, but she nonetheless feels resentful when she considers someone trying to replace her mother.
Hesse returns to the theme of despair with the arrival of new dust storms. Just as things were beginning to improve in Cimarron County, a dust storm kicks up so intensely that it makes it impossible for Billie Jo to see her way home as she leaves the Palace Theatre. Luckily, Billie Jo is smart enough to trace the line of the road using her feet, and eventually she reaches her farm. However, Bayard has gone out to find her, and he comes back hours later bloodied and bruised by the things he bumped into while searching. With this symbolic event, Hesse shows how despair, like the dust, is getting between Billie Jo and Bayard as they try to “find” each other and reconnect.
