The wind blew across the plains, picking up clods of dirt as it ran past, and I gripped my son's shoulder, as if by some instinct. Soon the dust would blow through the cracks in our log cabin, and the kitchen -- the tiny corner we called the kitchen -- would soon fill with what looked for all the world like soot. That we could take. The ground and the wind had been trying to kill us for years. We were used to it. But lately we'd had to contend with spiders. Tarantulas. Tough sons of bitches that put their front two legs up in front of them, threatening anyone who dared approach, who dared stomp them flat with a boot, who dared chop them in two with a shovel. And you would have thought, after killing about ten of them, that the rest would get the message, that they would get the hell out of my house. But they kept coming, crawling in through all those cracks in the boards that I cursed myself for being too lazy to repair when times were good, when food grew upon the land, when I didn't have to watch my son's ribs stick up on his chest, his cheeks turn sallow and pale.

It was the spiders, you see, that got him in the foot. He was barefoot, of course, and the bite tiny as you like, but his foot swelled up like a ripe grapefruit..