Mom helped Ant up into the wagon’s front seat, then came to stand in front of Loreda. “You okay?” Mom asked, tucking the hair behind Loreda’s ear, her touch lingering there.
“Yeah. Great,” Loreda said, hearing the sharpness in her voice. She knew it was wrong to be angry with her mother now—the weather wasn’t her fault—but Loreda couldn’t help herself. She was mad at the world, and somehow that meant she was mad at her mom most of all.
“Ant looks like he’s been crying.”
“He was scared.”
“I’m glad his big sister was with him.”
How could Mom smile at a time like this? It was irritating.
“You know your teeth are brown with dirt?” Loreda said.
Her mother flinched and instantly stopped smiling.
Loreda had hurt Mom’s feelings. Again.
Loreda suddenly felt like crying. Before her mom could see the emotion, Loreda headed for the back of the wagon.
“You can sit up here with us,” Mom said.
“Seeing where we’re going ain’t any better than seeing where we’ve been. The view never changes.”
“Isn’t,” Mom corrected automatically.
“Oh, right,” Loreda said. “Education is everything.”
As they headed home, Loreda stared out at the flat, flat land.
All the trees that lined their driveway were dying. The hot, dry years had turned them a sick gray-brown; their leaves had turned into crunchy, blackened confetti and been swept away by the wind. Only three of them were even still standing. The dusty soil lay in heaps and dunes at the base of every fence post. Nothing grew or thrived in the fields. There was not a blade of green grass anywhere. Russian thistles—tumbleweed—and yucca were the only living plants to be seen. The rotting body of something—a jackrabbit, maybe—lay in a heap of sand; crows picked at it.
Mom pulled the wagon to a stop in the yard. Milo pawed at the hard earth beneath his hooves. “Loreda, you put Milo away. I’ll get the preserved lemons and make lemonade,” Mom said.
“Fine,” Loreda said glumly. She climbed out of the wagon and took hold of the reins and led the horse and wagon toward the barn.
Poor Milo moved so slowly Loreda couldn’t help feeling sorry for this bay gelding that had once been her best friend in the whole world. “It’s okay, boy. We all feel like that.”
She petted his velvet-soft muzzle, remembering the day her daddy had taught her to ride. It had been a bluebird day, with wheat a sea of gold all around. She’d been scared. So scared, to climb all the way up onto that grown-up-sized saddle.
Daddy helped her up, whispered, “Don’t worry,” and moved back beside Mom, who looked as nervous as Loreda felt.
Loreda hadn’t fallen off once. Daddy told her she was a natural and told the family at supper that Loreda was the best little horsewoman he’d ever seen.
Loreda had soaked up his praise, grown to fit it. And after that, for years, she and Milo had been inseparable. She did her homework in his stall whenever she could, both of them munching on carrots she pulled from the garden.
“I miss you, boy,” Loreda said, stroking the side of his head.
The gelding snorted, blew wet, sandy mucus on Loreda’s bare arm. “Ick.”
Loreda opened the double doors of the barn that was her grandfather’s pride and joy. The large barn had a wide center aisle where the tractor and truck were parked, and two stalls on either side, both of which opened onto corrals. Two for the horses and two for the cows. A loft that had once been stacked with fragrant green bales of hay was emptying fast. Everyone knew it was her daddy’s favorite hiding spot, that loft; he loved to sit up there and smoke cigarettes and drink hooch and dream big dreams. He stayed up there more and more these days.
As Loreda unharnessed the gelding, she smelled the rubber on the tires and the metallic taint of the engine along with the comforting aromas of sweet hay and manure. In the side-by-side stalls at the end, their other gelding, Bruno, snorted softly in greeting, banged his nose into the stall door.
“I’ll get you boys some water,” Loreda said, easing the slimy bit out of Milo’s mouth. She turned him into his stall, the back of which opened out to the corral.
As she closed the stall door, clicked it shut, she heard something.
What?
She left the barn, stepped outside, and looked around.
There it was again. A deep rumbling. Not thunder. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
The ground trembled beneath her feet, made a loud, crunching, splintering sound.
A crack opened up in the earth, a giant snaking zigzag.
Boom.
Dust geysered into the air, dirt crashed into the new crevasse, the sides crumbled away. A part of the barbed-wire fence fell into the opening. New cracks crawled off from the main one, like branches on a tree limb.
A fifty-foot zigzagging crevasse opened in the yard. Dead roots stuck out from the crumbling dirt sides like skeletal hands.
Loreda stared at it in horror. She had heard stories of this, the land breaking open from dryness, but she’d thought it was a myth …
Now, it wasn’t just the animals and the people who were drying up. The land itself was dying.
* * *
LOREDA AND HER DADDY were in their favorite place, sitting side by side on the platform beneath the giant blades of the windmill. As the sky turned red in the last few moments before darkfall, she could see to the very end of the world she knew and imagine what lay beyond.
“I want to see the ocean,” Loreda said. It was a game they played, imagining other lives they would someday live. She couldn’t remember now when they’d begun; she just knew that it felt more important these days because of the new sadness in her father. At least it felt new. She sometimes wondered if his sadness had always been there and she’d just finally grown up enough to see it.
“You will, Lolo.”
Usually he said, We will.
He slumped forward, rested his forearms on his thighs. Thick black hair fell in unruly waves over his broad forehead; it was cut close to the sides of his head but Mom didn’t have time to tend it closely and the edges were ragged.
“You want to see the Brooklyn Bridge, remember?” Loreda said. It scared her to think of her father’s unhappiness. She hardly got to spend any time with him lately and she loved him more than anything in the world, he who made her feel like a special girl with a big future. He’d taught her to dream. He was the opposite of her dour, workhorse mom, who just plodded forward, doing chores, never having any fun. They even looked alike, she and her daddy. Everyone said so. The same thick black hair and fine-boned faces, the same full lips. The only thing Loreda had inherited from her mother was her blue eyes, but even with her mother’s eyes, Loreda saw things the way her daddy did.
“Sure, Lolo. How could I forget? You and I will see the world someday. We will stand at the top of the Empire State Building or attend a movie premiere on Hollywood Boulevard. Hell, we might even—”
“Rafe!”
Mom stood at the base of the windmill, looking up. In her brown kerchief and flour-sack dress and sagging stockings, she looked practically as old as Grandma. As always, she stood ramrod stiff. She had perfected an unyielding, unforgiving stance: shoulders back, spine straight, chin up. Wisps of corn-silk-fine pale blond hair crept out from beneath her kerchief.
“Hey, Elsa. You found us.” Daddy flashed Loreda a conspiratorial smile.
“Your father wants help watering while it’s cool,” Mom said. “And I know a girl who has chores to finish.”
Daddy bumped his shoulder against Loreda’s and then climbed down the windmill. The boards creaked and swayed at his steps. He jumped down the last few feet, faced Mom.
Loreda crawled down behind him, but she wasn’t fast enough. When she got down, her father was already headed toward the barn.
“How come you can’t let anyone have any fun?” she said to her mother.
“I want yo
u and your father to have fun, Loreda, but I’ve had a long day and I need your help putting the laundry away.”
“You’re so mean,” Loreda said.
“I am not mean, Loreda,” Mom said.
Loreda heard the hurt in her mother’s voice but didn’t care. That anger of hers, always so close to the surface, surged up, uncontrollable. “Don’t you care that Daddy is unhappy?”
“Life is tough, Loreda. You need to be tougher or it will turn you inside out, as it has your father.”
“Life isn’t what makes my daddy sad.”
“Oh, really? Tell me, then, with all your worldly experience, what is it that makes your father unhappy?”
“You,” Loreda said.
EIGHT
One hundred and four degrees in the shade, and the well was drying up. The water in the tank had to be carefully conserved, carried by the bucketful to the house. At night, they gave the animals what water they could.
The vegetables that Elsa and Rose had tended with such loving care were dead. Between yesterday’s wind and dust and the relentless sun, every plant had either been torn out by the roots or lay wilted and dead.
She heard Rose come up beside her.
“There’s no point watering,” Elsa said.
“No.”
She heard the heartbreak in her mother-in-law’s voice and wished she could say something to help.
“You’ve been awfully quiet today,” Rose said.
“Unlike my usual chatty self,” Elsa said to deflect a conversation she didn’t want to have.
Rose bumped her shoulder against Elsa’s arm. “Tell me what is wrong. Besides the obvious, of course.”
“Loreda is angry at me. All of the time. I swear, before I even speak, she gets mad at whatever it is I’m about to say.”
“She is at that age.”
“It’s more than that, I think.”
Rose stared out at the devastated fields. “My son,” she said. “Stupido. He is filling her head with dreams.”
“He’s unhappy.”
“Pssht,” Rose said impatiently. “Who isn’t? Look at what is happening.”
“My parents, my family,” Elsa said quietly. This was something she rarely talked about, a pain too deep for words, especially when words wouldn’t change anything; Loreda’s opinion of Elsa lately had brought all that heartache of youth back. Elsa remembered the day she’d taken Loreda, swaddled in pink, to her parents’ house, hoping her marriage would allow them to accept her again. Elsa had worked for weeks on a lovely pink dress for the baby, trimmed it in lace. She knit a matching cap. Finally, she borrowed the truck and drove to Dalhart alone, pulling up at the back gate. She remembered every moment in detail: Walking up the path; the smell of roses. Everything in bloom. A clear blue sky. Bees buzzing around the roses.
She had felt both nervous and proud. She was a wife now, with a baby girl so beautiful even strangers remarked upon it.
Knocking on the door. The sound of footsteps, heels on hardwood. Mama answering the door, dressed for church, wearing pearls. Papa in a brown suit.
“Look,” Elsa had said, her smile unsteady, her eyes filling with unwanted tears. “My daughter, Loreda.”
Mama, craning her neck, peering down at Loreda’s small, perfect face.
“Look, Eugene, how dark her skin is. Take your disgrace away, Elsinore.”
The door, slamming shut.
Elsa had made a point of never seeing them or speaking to them again, but even so, their absence caused an ache that wouldn’t go away. Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better.
“Yes?” Rose said, looking up at her.
“They didn’t love me. I never knew why. But now Loreda has turned so angry, I wonder if she sees me the same way they did. I could never do anything right in their eyes, either.”
“Do you remember what I told you on the day Loreda was born?”
Elsa almost smiled. “That she would love me as no one else ever would and make me crazy and try my soul?”
“Sì. And you see how right I was?”
“About part of it, I guess. She certainly breaks my heart.”
“Yes. I was a trial to my poor mamma, too. The love, it comes in the beginning of her life and at the end of yours. God is cruel that way. Your heart, is it too broken to love?”
“Of course not.”
“So, you go on.” She shrugged, as if to say, Motherhood. “What choice is there for us?”
“It just … hurts.”
Rose was silent for a while; finally, she said, “Yes.”
In the distant field, Tony and Rafe were hard at work, planting winter wheat in ground that was as powdery as flour at the surface and hard beneath. For three years, they’d planted wheat and prayed for rain and gotten too little and grown no crop at all.
“This season it will be better,” Rose said.
“We still have milk and eggs to sell. And soap.” Small blessings mattered. Elsa and Rose combined their individual optimism into a communal hope, stronger and more durable in the combination.
Rose put an arm around Elsa’s waist, and Elsa leaned into the smaller woman. From the moment of Loreda’s birth, and in all the years since, Rose had become Elsa’s mother in every way that mattered. Even if they didn’t speak of their love, or share their feelings in long, heartfelt conversations, the bond was there. Sturdy. They’d sewn their lives together in the silent way of women unused to conversation. Day after day, they worked together, prayed together, held their growing family together through the hardships of farm life. When Elsa had lost her third child—a son who never drew breath—it was Rose who held Elsa and let her cry, and said, Some lives are not ours to hold on to; God makes His choices without us. Rose, who spoke for the first time about her own lost children, had showed Elsa that grief could be borne one day, one chore, at a time.
“I’ll go water the animals,” Elsa said.
Rose nodded. “I’ll dig up what I can.”
Elsa grabbed a metal bucket from the porch and wiped the grit from its inside. At the pump, she put on gloves to protect her hands from the blazing-hot metal and pumped a bucketful of water.
Carrying the sloshing pail carefully back to the house, not wanting to spill a precious drop, she was nearing the barn when she heard a sound, like a saw blade grinding over metal.
She slowed, listened, heard it again.
She set down the bucket and moved around the corner of the barn and saw Rafe standing by the new crack in the ground, his arms propped on the head of a rake, his hat pulled low on his downcast face.
Crying.
Elsa walked over to him, stood silently by. Words were something she could never pull up easily, not for him. She was always afraid of saying the wrong thing, of pushing him away when she wanted to draw him near. He was like Loreda, full of mercurial moods and given to bouts of passion. It frightened her, those moods she could neither tame nor understand. So she held her tongue.
“I don’t know how long I can stand all of this,” he said.
“It will rain soon. You’ll see.”
“How can you not break?” he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
Elsa didn’t know how to answer that. They were parents. They had to stay strong for the children. Or did he mean something else? “Because the kids need us not to.”
He sighed, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing.
* * *
THAT SEPTEMBER, HEAT ROARED across the Great Plains, day after day, week after week, burning away whatever had survived the summer.
Elsa stopped sleeping well, or at all, really. She was plagued by nightmares of emaciated children and dying crops. The livestock—two horses and two cows, all bones and hollows—were being kept alive by eating the prickly Russian thistles that grew wild. The small amount of hay they’d harvested was nearly gone. The animals stood still for hours at a time, as if afraid that every step could kill them. In the hottest
part of the day, when the temperature rose above 115 degrees, their eyes became glassy and unfocused. When they could, the family carried pails of water to the corral, but it was always too little. Every drop of water that came up from the well had to be carefully conserved. The chickens rarely moved, they were so lethargic; they lay like feathered heaps in the dirt, not even bothering to squawk when they were disturbed. Eggs were still being laid, and each one was like a nugget of gold, although Elsa feared that each one would be their last.
Today, like most mornings, she was awake before the rooster crowed.
She lay in bed, trying not to think about the dead garden or the dried-up ground or the coming winter. When sunlight began to stream through the windows, she sat up and read a chapter of Jane Eyre, letting the familiar words soothe and comfort her. Then she put the novel aside and got out of bed, careful not to waken Rafe. After dressing, she took a moment to stare down at her sleeping husband. He’d been out in the barn until late last night and finally stumbled to bed smelling of whiskey.
She had been restless, too, but neither had turned to the other for solace. They didn’t know how, she supposed; they’d never learned to comfort each other. Or maybe there was no comfort to be found when life was so bad.
What she knew was that the slim hold she’d had on him was loosening. In the past few weeks, she’d noticed how frequently he turned away from her. Was it since the dust storms had ruined their fields and tripled the work? Or since he’d planted the winter wheat with his father?
He stayed up late, reading newspapers as if they were adventure novels, staring out windows, studying maps. When he finally stumbled to bed, he rolled away from her and thumped into a sleep so deep that sometimes she feared he had died during the night.
Last night, as so often, when he finally came to their bed, she lay in the dark, aching for him to turn to her, touch her, but even if he had, they both would have remained unsatisfied. He never spoke while they were intimate, not even whispers about his need, and he rushed through the act as if he regretted it before he began. Sometimes Elsa felt lonelier when their lovemaking ended than she had been before it began. He said he stayed away from her because she conceived so easily, but she knew the truth was darker than that. As always, it came down to her unattractiveness. Of course he had difficulty wanting her. And clearly, she was not good in bed; he rushed through it so.
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