The farmer—Will Bunting—stood by the driver’s-side door, dressed in coveralls and a shirt with only one sleeve. A banged-up cowboy hat was pulled low over his dusty face.
“Whoa,” Mom said, drawing the gelding to a halt, tilting back her sun hat.
“Heyya, Rafe,” Will said, spitting tobacco into the dirt at his feet. “Elsa.” He pulled away from the overburdened car, walked slowly toward the wagon. When he got there, he stopped, said nothing, shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Where yah goin’?” Daddy asked.
“We’re licked,” Will said. “You know my boy, Kallson, died this summer?” He glanced back at his wife. “And now there’s the new one. Can’t take it no more. We’re leaving.”
Loreda straightened. They were leaving?
Mom frowned. “But your land—”
“Bank’s land now. Couldn’t make the payments.”
“Where will you go?” Daddy asked.
Will pulled a creased flyer out of his back pocket. “California. Land of milk and honey, they say. Don’t need honey. Just work.”
“How do you know it’s true?” Daddy said, taking the flyer from him. Jobs for everyone! Land of opportunity! Go West to California!
“I don’t.”
“You can’t just leave,” Mom said.
“Too late for us. A family can only bury so much. Tell your folks I said goodbye.”
Will turned and walked back to his dusty car and climbed into the driver’s seat. The metal door clanged shut.
Mom clicked her tongue and snapped the reins and Milo began plodding forward again. Loreda watched the jalopy drive past them in a cloud of dust, unable suddenly to think about anything else. Leaving. They could go to one of the places she and Daddy talked about: San Francisco or Hollywood or New York.
“Glenn and Mary Lynn Mounger left last week,” Daddy said. “They headed for California, just up and left in that old Packard of theirs.”
It was a long moment before Mom said, “You remember the newsreel we saw? Breadlines in Chicago. People living in shacks and cardboard boxes in Central Park. At least here we’ve got eggs and milk.”
Daddy sighed. Loreda felt the pain of that sound, the hurt that came with it. Mom would say no. “Yeah, I reckon.” He dropped the flyer to the floor of the wagon. “My folks would never leave anyhow.”
“Never,” Mom agreed.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, LOREDA SAT out on the porch swing after supper.
Leave.
The sun set slowly on the farm around her, night swallowing the flat, brown, dry land. One of their cows lowed plaintively for water. Soon, in the darkness, her grandfather would start watering the livestock, carrying buckets of water from the well one by one, while Grandma and Mom watered the garden.
The creaking whine of the porch swing chain seemed loud amid the quiet. She heard the jangling of the party-line telephone come from inside the house. These days, a phone call meant nothing fun; all anyone talked about was the drought.
Except her father. He wasn’t anything like the farmers or shopkeepers. Every other man seemed to live or die by land and weather and crops. Like her grandfather.
When Loreda had been young and the rain reliable, when the wheat grew tall and golden, Grandpa Tony smiled all the time and drank rye on the weekends and played his fiddle at town parties. He used to take her by the hand and walk with her through the whispering wheat and tell her that if she listened, there were stories coming from the stalks themselves. He would get a clump of dirt in his big, callused hand and hold it out to her as if it were a diamond and say, “This will all be yours one day, and it will pass to your children, and then to your children’s children.” The land: he said it the way Father Michael said God.
And Grandma and Mom? They were like all the farm wives in Lonesome Tree. They worked their fingers to the bone, rarely laughing and hardly talking. When they did talk, it was never about anything interesting.
Daddy was the only one who talked about ideas or choices or dreams. He talked about travel and adventures and all the lives a person could live. He’d repeatedly told Loreda that there was a big beautiful world beyond this farm.
She heard the door open behind her. The aroma of stewed tomatoes and fried pancetta and cooked garlic wafted her way.
Daddy came out onto the porch, closed the door quietly behind him. Lighting up a cigarette, he sat down on the swing beside her. She smelled the sweetness of wine on his breath. They were supposed to be conserving everything, but Daddy refused to give up on his wine or his hooch. He said drinking was the only thing keeping him sane. He loved to drop a slippery, sweet slice of preserved peach into his after-supper wine.
Loreda leaned into him. He put an arm around her and pulled her close as they glided forward and back. “You’re quiet, Loreda. That ain’t like my girl.”
The farm transitioned around them into a dark world full of sounds: the windmill thumping, bringing up their precious water, chickens scratching, hogs rooting in the dirt.
“This drought,” Loreda said, pronouncing the dreaded word like everyone did around here. Drouth. She fell silent, choosing her words with care. “It’s killing the land.”
“Yep.” He finished the cigarette, stubbed it out into the pot full of dead flowers beside him.
Loreda pulled the flyer out of her pocket, unfolded it with care.
California. Land of milk and honey.
“Mrs. Buslik says there’s jobs in California. Money lying in the streets. Stella said her uncle sent a postcard saying there’s jobs in Oregon.”
“I doubt there’s money lying in the streets, Loreda. This Depression is worse in the cities. Last I read, over thirteen million folks were out of jobs. You’ve seen the tramps that ride the trains. There’s a Hooverville in Oklahoma City that’d make you cry. Families living in apple carts. Come winter, they’ll be dying of cold on park benches.”
“They aren’t dying of cold in California. You could get a job. Maybe work on the railroad.”
Daddy sighed, and in that exhalation of his breath, she knew what he was thinking. That was how in tune she was with him. “My parents—and your mom—will never leave this land.”
“But—”
“It’ll rain,” Daddy said, but there was something sorrowful about the way he said it, almost as if he didn’t want rain to save them.
“Do you have to be a farmer?”
He turned. She saw the frown that bunched his thick black brows. “I was born one.”
“You always tell me this is America. A person can be anything.”
“Yeah, well. I made a bad choice a few years back, and … well … sometimes your life is chosen for you.” After that, he was quiet for a long time.
“What bad choice?”
He didn’t look at her. His body was sitting beside her, but his mind was somewhere else.
“I don’t want to dry up here and die,” Loreda said.
At last he said, “It’ll rain.”
SEVEN
Another scorcher of a day, and not even ten in the morning. So far, September had offered no respite from the heat.
Elsa knelt on the linoleum kitchen floor, scrubbing hard. She had already been up for hours. It was best to do chores in the relative cool of dawn and dusk.
A scuffling sound caught her attention. She saw a tarantula, body as big as an apple, scurrying out from its hiding place in the corner. She got to her feet and used the mop to chase it outside. It was crueler to send the spider back out into the heat than to crush it with her shoe. Besides, she barely had the energy to stomp on the spider, let alone the will strong enough to care. She had trouble lately doing anything that didn’t result in food or water.
The key to life in this dry heat was conservation of everything: water, food, emotion. That last one was the biggest challenge.
She knew how unhappy Rafe and Loreda were. The two of them, as alike as grains of sand, had more trouble these days than the rest of them. Not
that anyone on the farm was happy. How could they be? But Tony and Rose and Elsa were the kind of people who expected life to be hard and had become tougher to survive. Her in-laws had worked for years—him on the railroad, her in a shirtwaist factory—to earn the money to buy their land. Their first dwelling here had been a dugout made of sod bricks that they’d built themselves. They might have come off the boat as Anthony and Rosalba, but hard work and the land had turned them into Tony and Rose. Americans. They would die of thirst and hunger before they’d give that up. And although Elsa hadn’t been born a farmer, she’d become one.
In the past thirteen years, she’d learned to love this land and this farm more than she would have imagined possible. In the good years, spring had been a time of joy for her, watching her garden grow, and autumn had been a time of pride; she’d loved seeing her labor on the shelves of the root cellar: jars filled with vegetables and fruits—red tomatoes, glistening peaches, and cinnamon-scented apples. Rolls of spiced pancetta made from pork belly and cured hams hanging from hooks overhead. Boxes overflowing with potatoes and onions and garlic from the garden.
The Martinellis had welcomed Elsa in and she repaid that unexpected kindness with a deep devotion, a fierce love for them and their ways, but even as Elsa had merged deeper into the family, Rafe had veered away. He was unhappy, had been for years, and now Loreda was following her father’s path. Of course she was. It was impossible not to be captivated by Rafe’s charm and caught up in his impossible dreams. His smile could light up the room. He’d fed his impressionable, mercurial daughter a steady diet of dreams when she was young; now he passed along his dissatisfaction. Elsa knew he said things to Loreda, complained of things that he wouldn’t say to his parents or his wife. Loreda had the greatest part of Rafe’s heart, and had from her first breath.
Elsa went back to scrubbing the kitchen floor, and then went on to scrub the floors in all eight rooms, washing dust off the woodwork and windowsills. When she finished that chore, she gathered up the rugs and took them outside and hung them, beating the dirt out of them with a stick.
The wind picked up, ruffled her dress. She paused in beating the rug, sweat running down her face, between her breasts, and tented a hand over her eyes. Past the outhouse, a murky, urine-yellow haze burnished the sky.
Elsa tilted her sun hat back, stared out at the sickly yellow horizon.
Dust storm. The newest scourge of the Great Plains.
The sky changed color, turned red-brown.
Wind picked up, barreled across the farm from the south.
A Russian thistle hit her in the face, tore the skin from her cheek. A tumbleweed spiraled past. A board flew off the chicken coop and cracked into the side of the house.
Rafe and Tony came running out of the barn.
Elsa pulled her bandanna up over her mouth and nose.
The cows mooed angrily and pushed into each other, pointing their bony butts into the dust storm. Static electricity made their tails stand out. A flotilla of birds flew past them, flapping hard, cawing and squawking, outrunning the dust.
Rafe’s Stetson flew off his head and tumbled toward the barbed-wire fence and was caught on a spike. “Get inside,” he yelled. “I’ll take care of the animals.”
“The kids!”
“Mrs. Buslik knows what to do. Go inside.”
Her kids. Out in this.
The wind was howling now, slamming into them, shoving them sideways. Elsa bent into it and fought her way to the house against the wind-driven dust.
She inched up the uneven stairs and across the gritty porch and grabbed the metal doorknob. A current of static electricity knocked her off her feet. She lay there a second, dazed, coughing, trying to breathe.
The door opened.
Rose yanked her to her feet, pulled her into the rattling, howling house.
Elsa and Rose ran from window to window, securing the newspaper and rag coverings over the glass and sills. Dust rained down from the ceilings, wafted from infinitesimal cracks in the window frames and walls. The candles on the makeshift altar blew out. Centipedes crawled out from the walls, hundreds of them, and slithered across the floor, looking for somewhere to hide.
A blast of wind hit the house, so hard it seemed the roof would be torn off.
And the noise.
It was like a locomotive bearing down on them, engines grinding. The house shuddered as if breathing too hard; a banshee wind howled, mad as hell.
The door opened and her husband and Tony staggered in. Tony slammed the door shut behind them and threw the bolt. A crucifix fell to the floor.
Elsa leaned back against the shuddering wall.
Elsa could hear her mother-in-law’s breathy, scratchy voice as she prayed.
Elsa reached sideways, took her hand.
Rafe moved in beside Elsa. She could tell that they were both thinking the same thing: What if the children had been out on the playground? This storm had come up fast. With everything dying these days, there were no strong roots to anchor the soil to the earth. A wind like this could blow whole farms away. At least that was how it felt.
“They’ll be okay,” he said, hacking through the dust.
“How do you know?” she yelled above the sound of the storm.
The despair in her husband’s eyes was all the answer he had.
* * *
LOREDA SAT ON THE floor of the quaking schoolhouse, her brother tucked in close beside her, both wearing bandannas drawn over their mouths and noses bandit-style. Ant was trying to be brave, but he flinched every time a particularly fierce gust of wind hit the building and rattled the glass.
Dust rained down from the ceiling. Loreda felt it collecting in her hair, on her shoulders. Wind battered the wooden walls, wailed in a high, almost human scream. Panicked birds kept hitting the glass.
When the storm first struck, Mrs. Buslik had called them all in and made them sit together in the corner farthest from the windows. She’d tried reading a story, but no one could concentrate, and in time no one could hear her voice, so she gave up and closed the book.
There had been at least ten of these dust storms in the past year. One day this spring, the wind and dirt had blown for twelve straight hours, so long that they’d had to cook and eat and do chores in the raging dust.
Grandma and Mom said they should pray.
Pray.
As if lighting candles and kneeling could stop all of this. Clearly, if God was watching the people of the Great Plains, He wanted them to either leave or die.
When the storm finally ended and silence swept into the schoolhouse, the children sat there, traumatized and big-eyed and covered in dirt.
Mrs. Buslik slowly unfolded from her seat on the floor. As she stood, dirt rained down from her lap. The sand outline of her body on the floor remained behind, a dirt design. She went to the door, opened it to reveal a beautiful blue sky.
Loreda saw Mrs. Buslik sigh with relief. The exhalation made her cough. “Okay, kids,” she said in a scratchy voice. “It’s over.”
Ant looked at Loreda. His freckled face was brown with dirt above the bandanna that covered his mouth and nose. By rubbing his eyes, he’d given himself a raccoon look. Tears hung stubbornly onto his lashes, looking like beads of mud.
She pulled down her bandanna. “Come on, Ant,” she said. Her voice was thin and scratchy.
Loreda and Stella and Ant retrieved their book bags and empty lunch pails and left the schoolhouse. Sophia shuffled along behind them, her head hung.
Loreda held Ant’s hand firmly in hers as she stepped from the building.
Town was catastrophe-quiet. The carbide arc streetlamps—such a source of community pride four years ago when they had been installed—were lit because people and cars and animals needed light to find safety in the storm.
They walked up Main Street. Tumbleweeds were caught in the boardwalk. Windows were boarded up, from both the Depression and the dust storms.
When they neared the train depot, Stella
said, “It’s gettin’ bad, Lolo,” quietly, as if she were afraid her voice would carry all the way to her parents’ house.
Loreda had no answer to that. In the Martinelli house it had been bad for years. She watched Stella walk away, shoulders hunched as if to protect her from whatever hardship was waiting; she climbed over a new dune of sand that had been swept into the street and turned the corner on her way home. Sophia followed her sister.
Loreda and Ant kept walking. It felt as if they were the only two people left in the world.
They passed several FOR SALE signs on fence posts, and then there was nothing. No houses, no fences, no animals, no windmills. Just endless brown-gold dirt molded into hills and dunes. Sand piled up at the base of the telephone poles. One pole was down.
Loreda was the first to hear the slow, dull clip-clop of hooves.
“Mommy!” Ant yelled.
Loreda looked up.
Mom drove the wagon toward them; she sat strained forward, as if she wanted Milo to move faster, faster, but the poor old gelding was as exhausted and thirsty as the rest of them.
Ant pulled free and started to run.
Mom brought the horse to a halt and jumped down from the wagon. She ran toward them, her face brown with dirt, her dress shredded into fraying strips from the waist down, apron flapping, her pale blond hair brown with dust.
Mom swept Ant into a hug, pulled him off his feet, twirled him around, as if she’d thought she’d never see him again, and covered his dirty face with kisses.
Loreda remembered those kisses; Mom had smelled of lavender soap and talcum powder in the good years.
Not anymore. Loreda couldn’t remember the last time she’d let Mom kiss her. Loreda didn’t want the kind of love that trapped. She wanted to be told she could fly high, be anything and go anywhere—she wanted the things her father wanted. Someday she would smoke cigarettes and go to jazz clubs and get a job. Be modern.
Her mother’s idea of a woman’s place was too sad for Loreda to bear.
The Four Winds Page 7