Written because I read "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan, and the fact that Sheldon and Penny are from two of the states hardest hit during the Great Depression seized my brain and would not let go.
Fandom(s): The Big Bang Theory
Title: i have suffered shipwrecks right from the start
Ship(s): Sheldon/Penny
Rating/Warnings: K+ / none
Word Count: 2, 428
Summary: The land will always be with you, even if you leave. Sheldon and Penny in 2012, and those who came before them in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
"Miles to water, miles to wood, and only six inches to hell."
- old High Plains aphorism
I.
Sheldon would have been delighted to take the train from California to Nebraska, but time is of the essence in this particular situation. Every nanosecond of him not being there to state his case concretizes the possibility of Penny once again reconsidering his niche in her life. Sheldon has already made the painful, nerve-wracking transition from friend to boyfriend to live-in; he has no desire to experience another routine-upsetting paradigm shift. And so, the day after Penny storms off to her parents' house in a whirl of angry tears, he books the first flight out.
"You're following her. How sweet," Raj croons as he drives Sheldon to the airport. "Like you're the ion and the dust to her nucleus. That's beautiful, man."
"Kindly spare me the ridiculous astrophysics metaphors," Sheldon snaps.
Penny is not a comet. She burns too brightly for that. A supernova, maybe.
II.
"It's over," her grandfather said the sixth year the wheat failed to grow. "This land's time is done."
The next morning, she packed her bags and snuck away from the homestead, past the emaciated horses and the broken-down jalopy and the withered fruit trees. By the time she reached the train station, she was covered in dirt and sweat.
You could turn back, she told herself as courage flickered and doubt took its place. You could stick it out here, and wait for the rains to come.
But she was nineteen years old in 1936. She'd had enough waiting to last her a lifetime.
And so, with no clear plan in mind, with only grit from the dusters and her heart stuck in her throat, Patricia Lane bought a ticket, boarded a train, and got the hell away from Nebraska.
III.
On the way over, Sheldon has plenty of opportunity to analyze what he and Penny fought about, where they went wrong. He takes comfort in logic, in the neat and organized rhythms of cause-and-effect, but as far as mental exercises go, this one takes the cake in futility.
He makes a list of the things that do matter:
1) I raised my voice.
2) I said terrible things.
3) The look on her face when I said them.
IV.
In Oklahoma City, Patricia found a job as a waitress in a diner. It was thankless work; the hours were long and the patrons ate with heads bowed, as if their shoulders were weighed down by the financial slump that had defeated them all. Sometimes Patricia got customers who had fled the merciless heat of No Man's Land- those were the worst. Rail-thin and rough-skinned, they ordered the cheapest items on the menu and guzzled water like it was going out of fashion, their mouths set in grim, tight lines.
They told her their stories. She couldn't have stopped them if she'd wanted to. The words poured forth, unsentimental yet uneasy, their speakers trying to come to terms with the truth of them.
"There was this one Sunday in April," a middle-aged farmer began, and Patricia's heart sunk because she knew what day he meant. 1935. She, too, had lived the terror of it.
"The dust appeared and covered everything," said the farmer. "Even the sky. Total blackness. Couldn't see my hand in front of me. I felt… I felt…"
"Erased," Patricia finished.
His cracked fingers shook as he lifted a forkful of beans to his lips. He looked broken the way her grandfather did when they had to shoot their last remaining cow for a government dollar.
"Yes, erased," said the farmer, nodding. "The earth, it swallowed me up."
V.
Sheldon takes a cab from the airport, and it malfunctions approximately three-fourths of the way to the Lane farmstead. Of course it would do this. His life has been a case study in disaster ever since Penny waltzed into Apartment 4B.
He gets out and pays the driver. He sighs, and starts walking.
VI.
A man's deep, unmistakable Texas drawl rang through the quiet diner, asking for more coffee. Patricia walked over to his table and poured. When she straightened up, there was something like an electric jolt, because his eyes were as blue as the ocean. Or as blue as she imagined the ocean would be. She'd never seen it for herself. In those dry, parched years, the thought of all that water just sitting around was unbearable.
"Thank you, Miss…?"
"Patricia," she supplied. "Patricia Lane."
"Name's Soren," he said. "Soren Cooper."
He was tall, with broad shoulders and a trim waist and skin weathered and browned by hours in the sun. Everything about him screamed rancher. Perhaps he was a descendant of one of those XIT cowboys, that vast and sprawling farmland of old, that was now nothing but tatters and skeletons, shriveled by the drought.
"You gonna be in town long?" asked Patricia.
He shrugged. "There is nothing left for me in Texas."
He raised his cup to her in a parody of a toast. He looked at her in a way that made Patricia wish she was still beautiful, that the famine hadn't stretched her skin over her bones, that streaks of her blonde hair hadn't gone permanently gray with stress and fright that first harvest when the locust swarms came and devoured the meager crops.
But love and beauty were luxuries far beyond the reach of farm girls, in the thirties.
VII.
Sunlight bears down on the plains. The air is prickled by heat, ripe with dung and apple blossom. Sheldon is sweating. He does not like to sweat. He wipes the detested beads of moisture off his brow as he squints at the stalks of corn and wheat standing tall under the clear blue sky.
This is familiar. Even when he'd visited it for the first time last year, it had been familiar. He grew up in a place like this. He escaped from a place like this. It strikes him once again that he and Penny are the children of farmers, and they both refused this legacy.
Why didn't you stay in Omaha? He remembers asking her this once.
She had been quiet for a while, and then she'd told him about her great-grandmother's sister, who ran away from home during the Great Depression and was never heard from again- years later, the family discovered that she'd perished in a 1936 dust storm in Oklahoma, when the roof of the diner she'd been working at caved in. There had only been a few survivors.
Patricia Lane was my idol, Penny had said. She still is.
Why? Sheldon had inquired, because in those early days of their relationship there had been so much that he had yet to understand. She came to no good in the end.
True, Penny had conceded with a shrug. But, before she died, she found out that there were other ways to live.
VIII.
There were no jobs for cowboys in Oklahoma City. Soren hung on for a few weeks, during which he had his evening meals at the diner and walked Patricia home every night. He never spoke of Texas as it was now, but he told her about the Texas his great-grandparents had known, a Texas of waist-high bluestem and rolling green turfs, over which the mighty bison herds had thundered before white men snuffed them out for good. Patricia repaid him with stories of Nebraska before the drought, how her family had grown wheat and orchards right up to the point that the rains did not come and never came again.
"I know Texas, a little bit," she said. "Your dust is orange. Kansas dust is black. Oklahoma is red. No matter how carefully we patched up the cracks in the house, the dust always managed to creep in."
"The first storm happened just as I closed a deal on some cattle," he mused. "I shook the buyer's hand, and there was a powerful charge. We both fell to the ground. But it still took us a while to learn you can't touch anyone during those things, on account of the static."
What Patricia didn't tell him is that the storms had killed her sister. The baby had started hacking up soil from her lungs, and after that it was only a matter of days until the final sleep. She did not tell him that because she herself had counted it a blessing the child would not grow up in a wasteland, and she was afraid he would say the same.
"I am leaving this weekend," he continued tentatively. "I am going to Colorado. To be with my wife and children."
Patricia had steeled herself for heartbreak the second she looked into those ocean-blue eyes. What startled her was how weak and tepid the disappointment felt. Like she didn't have the energy for it. The drought had hardened the plains, and maybe it had hardened her, too. After all, what was a man's betrayal, compared to the land's?
IX.
Sheldon is almost there. He can make out the Lane house, rising like an island from the sea of golden crops. But the bright sunlight and the exhausting heat are wreaking havoc on his senses; the edges of his vision are blurred, and he is seeing things that are not there. Mirages. Stetson-hatted shadows of his father and his great-grandfather, waist-deep in wheat.
Was Great-Granny the love of your life? Missy's high-pitched lisp floats back to him, from the far reaches of childhood memory, caught on wisps of Midwestern air.
The love of my life is the land, he remembers his great-grandfather joking in that thick, creaky old drawl. But your Great-Granny was all right. There had been laughter, and then there was a soft, solemn pause. And then, I met a girl once, though, back in the nineteen thirties, when the land turned sour. A waitress, with the greenest eyes…
Sheldon does not know why he thinks about this now.
X.
Soren popped in at lunch time, his boots polished, his bags packed, his train leaving in a few hours. Patricia had just served him his meal, when suddenly the world went… dark.
There were a few uneasy murmurs, a few startled screams. Patricia had experienced enough dusters to know that outside the earth was whirling through the air, blotting out the harsh light of the midday sun, particles of dirt settling on the rooftops and windowsills, covering the city like a blanket. She and Soren hunkered down under the table, careful not to touch. Even just a brush of a hand against another could send them both reeling. There was a high, keening noise- the howl of the desecrated prairies- and then an absence of light.
And, no, this was not worse than Black Sunday, but it somehow was, because Patricia had gone to Oklahoma to escape, but the land had found her again. She wanted to weep in frustration.
"Patricia." Soren's voice cut through the chaos. A hoarse whisper of fear in the gloom.
And her throat was all choked up with dust and tears and darkness, but the thing was this: Patricia had been the one to kill the cows, because her grandfather couldn't. They needed the money. It hadn't felt right to shoot animals she'd helped raise from birth, but she was done watching them stumble blindly around nibbling at tumbleweeds, done putting dishrags in buckets of their milk to soak up the dirt. No cattle could survive in Nebraska in 1934. She'd looked into each and every one of those poor damned creatures' eyes as she pulled the trigger, and, fuelled by her helpless rage, she'd promised herself that whatever came, the Great Plains would not break her. She would force those memories down, and she would live.
She scooted closer to Soren, close enough to feel his heat. "I'll sing you a song," she offered. "My mama sang it to the dying baby. It's meant to give comfort. Teach it to your kids, all right? Pass it on to them. Teach them there's nothing so bad as what people can't make good again."
"Yes," he said. "Please."
Patricia did not have a great voice. But what she lacked in talent, she made up for in flair. It was a Lane thing. Maybe she and her family would survive these godforsaken years of dirt, and maybe she would someday have a descendant who would set stage and screen on fire.
As the bitter, beloved earth rolled over them all, she cupped a hand over her mouth to keep out the worst of the debris. She looked at the dim silhouette of the man beside her, and she sang her mother's song.
"Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur…"
XI.
Sheldon knocks, and it's Penny who opens the door. The sight of her almost undoes him; he trembles with the sheer relief of it. It is most peculiar that on the way he'd felt like a hero on a quest to reclaim his lost princess- he'd imagined her falling into his arms as the numbers ricocheted up to a new high score- but here and now, between this earth and this sky, he is anything but heroic. He is covered in dust and sweat, and he is tired.
I'm sorry, he wants to tell her. You infuriate me on a regular basis. Your table manners are appalling. You have a deplorable tendency to steal the covers and leave me freezing in the middle of the night. And yet I love that you hightailed it out of Nebraska and never looked back, and that you pump your fist whenever you beat me at Halo, and that you cried when the Doctor didn't get to say it back to Rose. I love your voice in the mornings and the way you roll your eyes at my jokes and, do you know, back then I loved how you always smelled like cheesecake from the restaurant, and now I love the way you wheedle me for a massage after a long day on set. I could spend the rest of my life solving for the parabolas of all your smiles, and I could be a good man but I need you to show me how, please give me another chance-
Those are the words. He cannot force them out. His tongue is too dry, his throat too parched.
"Water, please," Sheldon rasps. The Great Plains have found him again; he is speaking in his father's voice. "I'm thirsty."