“Perhaps Rafe should do that,” Elsa said.
Mrs. Martinelli looked up. The small woman was a study in contradictions: she moved with the fast, furtive motions of a bird and looked fragile, but Elsa’s overwhelming impression was of strength. Toughness. She remembered Rafe’s family story, how Tony and Rose had come to America from Sicily with only a few dollars between them. Together they had found this land and survived on it, lived for years in a sod dugout they’d built themselves. Only tough women lasted on Texas farmland.
“I think he owes her that,” Elsa added.
“Wash up. Put your things away,” Mrs. Martinelli said. “We will see you in the morning. Things often look better in sunlight.”
“I don’t,” Elsa said.
Mrs. Martinelli studied Elsa for an agonizing moment, obviously found her lacking, and then walked away, closing the door behind her.
Elsa sat down on the edge of the bed, unable suddenly to catch her breath.
There was a quiet knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said.
Rafe opened the door and stood in the opening, his face dusty. He took off his cap, twisted it in his hands.
Then, slowly, he closed the door behind him. He came toward her, sat down on the bed. The springs protested at the additional weight.
She glanced sideways at him, seeing his perfect profile. So handsome.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Aw, heck, Els, I didn’t want to go to college anyhow.” He gave her a strained smile; black hair flopped across one eye. “I didn’t want to stay here, either, but…”
They looked at each other.
At last he took her hand, held it. “I’ll try to be a good husband,” he said.
Elsa wanted to tighten her hold on his hand, give a squeeze to show how much those words meant to her, but she didn’t dare. She was afraid that if she really held on to him, she’d never let go. She had to be cautious from now on, treat him as she would a skittish cat; be careful to never move too fast or need too much.
She said nothing, and in time, he let go of her hand and left her in his bedroom, sitting on his bed, alone.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, ELSA woke late. She pushed the hair from her face. Fine strands were stuck to her cheek; she’d cried in her sleep.
Good. Better to cry at night when no one could see. She didn’t want to reveal her weakness to this new family.
She went to the washstand and splashed lukewarm water on her face, then she brushed her teeth and combed her hair.
Last night, as she’d unpacked, she’d realized how wrong her clothes were for farm life. She was a town girl; what did she know about life on the land? All she’d brought were crepe dresses and silk stockings and heels. Church clothes.
She slipped into her plainest day dress, a charcoal-gray with pearl buttons and lace at the collar, then pulled up her stockings and stepped into the black heels she’d worn yesterday.
The house smelled of bacon and coffee. Her stomach grumbled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch.
The kitchen—a bright yellow-wallpapered room with gingham curtains and white linoleum flooring—was empty. Dishes drying on the counter attested to the fact that Elsa had slept through breakfast. What time did these people waken? It was only nine.
Elsa went outside and saw the Martinelli farm in full sunlight. Hundreds of acres of shorn wheat fanned out in all directions, a sea of dry, cut, golden stalks, with the homestead part taking up a few acres in the middle of it all.
A driveway cut through the fields, a brown ribbon of dirt bordered by cottonwoods and fencing. The farm itself consisted of the house, a big wooden barn, a horse corral, a cow paddock, a hog pen, a chicken coop, several outbuildings, and a windmill. Behind the house was an orchard, a small vineyard, and a fenced vegetable garden. Mrs. Martinelli was in the garden, bent over.
Mr. Martinelli came out of the barn and approached her. “Good morning,” he said. “Walk with me.”
He led her along the edge of the harvested wheat field; the shorn crop struck her as broken, somehow, devastated. Much like herself. A gentle breeze rustled what remained, made a shushing sound.
“You are a town girl,” Mr. Martinelli said in a thick Italian accent.
“Not anymore, I guess.”
“This is a good answer.” He bent down, scooped up a handful of dirt. “My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family. We plant, we tend, we harvest. I make wine from grape cuttings that I brought here from Sicily, and the wine I make reminds me of my father. It binds us, this land, one to another, as it has for generations. Now it will bind you to us.”
“I’ve never tended to anything.”
He looked at her. “Do you want to change that?”
Elsa saw compassion in his dark eyes, as if he knew how afraid she’d been in her life, but she had to be imagining it. All he knew about her was that she was here now and she’d brought his son down with her.
“Beginnings are only that, Elsa. When Rosalba and I came here from Sicily, we had seventeen dollars and a dream. That was our beginning. But it wasn’t what gave us this good life. We have this land because we worked for it, because no matter how hard life was, we stayed here. This land provided for us. It will provide for you, too, if you let it.”
Elsa had never thought of land that way, as something that anchored a person, gave one a life. The idea of it, of staying here and finding a good life and a place to belong, seduced her as nothing ever had.
She would do her best to become a Martinelli through and through, so she could join their story, perhaps even take it as her own and pass it on to the child she carried. She would do anything, become anyone, to ensure that this family loved the baby unconditionally as one of their own. “I want that, Mr. Martinelli,” she said at last. “I want to belong here.”
He smiled. “I saw that in you, Elsa.”
Elsa started to thank him, but was interrupted by Mrs. Martinelli, who called out to her husband as she walked toward them carrying a basket full of ripe tomatoes and greenery. “Elsa,” she said, coming to a stop. “How nice to see you up.”
“I … overslept.”
Mrs. Martinelli nodded. “Follow me.”
In the kitchen, Mrs. Martinelli took the vegetables from her basket and laid them on the table: plump red tomatoes, yellow onions, green herbs, clumps of garlic. Elsa had never seen so much garlic at one time.
“What can you cook?” she asked Elsa, tying an apron on.
“C-coffee.”
Mrs. Martinelli stopped. “You can’t cook? At your age?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Martinelli. No, but—”
“Can you clean?”
“Well … I’m sure I can learn to.”
Mrs. Martinelli crossed her arms. “What can you do?”
“Sew. Embroider. Darn. Read.”
“A lady. Madonna mia.” She looked around the spotless kitchen. “Fine. Then I will teach you to cook. We will start with arancini. And call me Rose.”
* * *
THE WEDDING WAS A hushed, hurried affair with no celebration before or after. Rafe slipped a plain band on Elsa’s finger and said, “I do,” and that was pretty much that. He looked to be in physical pain throughout the brief ceremony.
On their wedding night, they came together in the darkness and sealed their vows with their bodies, just as they had done with their words, their passion as silent as the night around them.
In the days and weeks and months that followed, he tried to be a good husband and she tried to be a good wife.
At first, in Rose’s eyes at least, Elsa seemed unable to do anything right. She cut her finger when chopping tomatoes and burned her wrist taking freshly baked bread out of the oven. She couldn’t tell a ripe squash from an unripe one. Stuffing zucchini flowers was nearly impossible for someone as clumsy as Elsa. She converted to Catholicism and listened to Mass in Latin, not understanding a word but finding a s
trange comfort in the beautiful sound of it all; she memorized prayers and learned the rosaries and kept one always in her apron pocket. She took confession and sat in a small, dark closet and told Father Michael her sins and he prayed for her and absolved her. At first none of this made much sense to her, but in time it became both familiar and routine, a part of her new life, like no meat on Fridays or the myriad saints’ days that they celebrated.
Elsa learned—to her surprise and to her mother-in-law’s—that she wasn’t a quitter. She woke up each morning well before her husband and got into the kitchen in time to make coffee. She learned to make and eat and love food she had never heard of, made from ingredients she’d never seen—olive oil, fettuccine, arancini, pancetta. She learned how to disappear on a farm: work harder than anyone else and don’t complain.
In time, a new and unexpected feeling of belonging began to creep in. She spent hours in the garden kneeling in the dirt, watching seeds she planted sprout and push up from the earth and turn green, and each one felt like a new beginning. A promise for the future. She learned to pick the rich purple Nero d’Avola grapes and turn them into a wine that Tony swore was as good as his father could make. She learned the peace that came with looking out at a newly tilled field and the hope those fields inspired.
Here, she sometimes thought, standing on land she cared for, here her child would flourish, would run and play and learn the stories told by the ground and the grapes and the wheat.
* * *
THROUGHOUT THE WINTER, SNOW fell, and they hunkered down in the farmhouse, settling into a new routine; the women spent long hours cleaning, sewing, darning, and knitting, while the men took care of the animals and readied the farm equipment for the coming spring. On snowy evenings they huddled around the fire and Elsa read stories aloud and Tony played his fiddle. Elsa learned little things about her husband—that he snored loudly and was restless in his sleep, that he often woke with a cry in the middle of the night, shaken by nightmares.
It’s quiet enough on this land to make you mad, he said sometimes, and Elsa tried to understand what he meant. Mostly she just let him talk and waited for him to reach out for her, which he did, but rarely and always in the dark. She knew the sight of her growing belly frightened him. When he did talk to her, he usually smelled of wine or whiskey; he would smile then, spin stories of their imagined, someday life in Hollywood or New York. In truth, Elsa never knew quite what to say to the handsome, quicksilver man she’d married, but spoken words had never been her forte and she didn’t have the courage to tell him how she felt anyway, that she’d found an unexpected strength in herself on this farm, and in her love for both her husband and his parents she’d become almost fierce. Instead, she did what she’d always done in the face of a painful rejection: she disappeared and held her tongue and waited—sometimes desperately—for her husband to see the woman she’d become.
In February, rain came to the Great Plains, nourishing the seeds planted in the soil. By March, the land was vibrant with new growth—green for miles. Tony stood by his fields in the evening, staring out at the growing wheat.
On this particularly blue, sunlit day, Elsa had opened every window in the house. A cool breeze moved through, carrying the scent of new life with it.
She stood at the stove, browning bread crumbs in the delicious, nutty-flavored, imported olive oil they purchased at the general store. The pungent aroma of garlic browning in hot oil filled the kitchen. They used these bread crumbs, mixed with cheese and fresh parsley, on everything from vegetables to pasta.
On the table behind her, a crockery bowl full of flour, ground from last year’s abundant crop, waited to be turned into bread dough. The Victrola in the sitting room played a “Santa Lucia” record loudly enough that Elsa felt compelled to sing along, even though she didn’t understand the words.
A pain came without warning, stabbed her deep in the abdomen, doubling her over. She tried to be still, held her stomach, waited it out.
But another pain came, minutes later, worse than the first. “Rose!”
Rose rushed into the house, her arms full of laundry to be washed.
“It’s…” Elsa’s water broke, splashed down her stockinged legs, and puddled on the floor. The sight plunged Elsa into panic. For the past months, she’d felt herself getting stronger, but now, as pain upended her, she couldn’t think of anything except the doctor telling her so long ago not to get overexcited, not to put strain on her heart.
What if he’d been right? She looked up in terror. “I’m not ready, Rose.”
Rose put down the laundry. “No one is ever ready.”
Elsa couldn’t catch her breath. Another pain hit, wrenched through her stomach.
“Look at me,” Rose said. She took Elsa’s face in her hands, although she had to get on her tiptoes to do so. “This is normal.” She took Elsa by the hand and led her to the bedroom, where she stripped the bed and threw the quilts and sheets on the floor.
She undressed Elsa, who should have been ashamed to be seen that way, with her swollen belly and shapeless limbs, but the pain was so great she didn’t care.
Such teeth in this pain. Gnawing at her, then spitting her out to breathe for a moment and then biting again.
“Go ahead and scream,” Rose said, helping Elsa to the bed.
Elsa lost her hold on time, on everything but the pain. She screamed out when she needed to and panted like a dog in between.
Rose positioned Elsa as if she were a doll, spread her bare legs wide open. “I see the head, Elsa. You can push now.”
Elsa pushed and strained and screamed. “My … heart’s going to stop,” she said, panting. She should have told them she was sick, that she wasn’t supposed to have children, that she could die. “If it does—”
“It’s bad luck to speak of such things, Elsa. Push.”
Elsa gave one last desperate push, felt a great whooshing relief, and sagged back into the pillows, exhausted.
A baby’s cry filled the room.
“A beautiful little girl with a good set of lungs.” Rose cut and tied off the umbilical cord, then wrapped the baby up in one of the many blankets they’d knitted over the long winter and handed the bundle to Elsa.
Elsa took her daughter in her arms and stared down at her in awe. Love filled her to the brim and spilled over in tears. She’d never felt anything like it before, a heady, exhilarating combination of joy and fear. “Hello, baby girl.”
The baby quieted, blinked up at her.
Rose reached into the velvet pouch she wore as a necklace around her throat. Inside the pouch was an American penny. Rose kissed the penny and held it out for Elsa to see. The coin had two wheat shafts imprinted on the back. “Tony found this on the street outside my parents’ home on the day we were to leave on the boat for America. Can you imagine such good fortune? The wheat revealed our destiny. A sign, we said to each other, and it has been true. This coin will watch over another generation now,” Rose said, looking at Elsa. “My beautiful granddaughter.”
“I want to call her Loreda,” Elsa said. “For my grandfather, who was born in Laredo.”
Rose sounded out the unfamiliar name. “Lor-ay-da. Beautiful. Most American, I think,” she said, placing the penny in Elsa’s hand. “Believe me, Elsa, this little girl will love you as no one ever has … and make you crazy and try your soul. Often all at the same time.”
In Rose’s dark, tear-brightened eyes, Elsa saw a perfect reflection of her own emotions and a soul-deep understanding of this bond—motherhood—shared by women for millennia.
She also saw more affection than she’d ever seen in her own mother’s eyes. “Welcome to the family,” Rose said in an uneven voice, and Elsa knew she was talking to her as well as to Loreda.
1934
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.… The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
SIX
It was so hot that every now and then a bird fell from the sky, landing with a little thump on the hard-packed dirt. The chickens sat in dusty heaps on the ground, their heads lolled forward, and the last two cows stood together, too hot and tired to move. A listless breeze moved through the farm, plucking at the empty clothesline.
The driveway that led to the farmhouse was still hemmed in on either side by makeshift posts and barbed wire, but in several places the posts had fallen down. The trees on either side were skeletal, barely alive. This farm had been reconfigured by wind and drought, sculpted into a land of tumbleweeds and starving mesquite.
Years of drought, combined with the economic ravages of the Great Depression, had brought the Great Plains to its knees.
They’d suffered through these dry years in the Texas Panhandle, but with the whole country devastated by the Crash of ’29 and twelve million people out of work, the big-city newspapers didn’t bother covering the drought. The government offered no assistance, not that the farmers wanted it anyway. They were too proud to live on the dole. All they wanted was for rain to soften the soil and sprout the seeds so the wheat and corn would once again lift their golden arms toward the sky.
The rains had begun to slow in ’31, and in the last three years there had been almost none at all. This year, so far, they had had less than five inches. Not enough to fill a pitcher for tea, let alone water thousands of acres of wheat.
Now, on another record-breaking hot day in late August, Elsa sat in the driver’s seat of the old wagon, her hands sweating and itching inside her suede gloves as she handled the reins. There was no money for gas anymore, so the truck had become a relic stored in the barn, like the tractor and the plow.
A straw hat, once white and now brown with dust, was pulled low on her sunburned forehead, and she’d tied a blue bandanna around her throat. Grit in her eyes made her squint as she made a clicking sound with her teeth and tongue and maneuvered the wagon off the farm and onto the main road. Milo’s plodding, even clip-clop steps rang out on the hard-packed dirt. Birds sat on telephone wires strung between the poles.
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