Mom chewed her sandwich, swallowed a bite. “The only thing I know is farming. I don’t want to go to a city. No jobs. So no to Los Angeles. No to San Francisco.”
“The ocean is west of us.”
“I surely would love to see that,” Mom said, “but not yet. What good will the sea do for us? We need work and a place to live.”
“Let’s stay here,” Ant said.
“What did you call it, Loreda? The San Joaquin Valley? It sure is pretty,” Mom said. “Looks like plenty of work here. They’re getting ready to plant something.”
Loreda looked out over the field of wildflowers and the distant mountains. “Y’all are right. There’s no need to waste gas. We just need to find a place to stay.”
After lunch, they climbed back into the truck and drove deeper into the valley on a road as straight as an arrow, toward the distant purple mountains. Green fields lay on either side of the road; in some of them, Loreda saw lines of stooped men and women working the land.
They passed fields of fattening cattle and a slaughterhouse that smelled to high heaven.
As they drove past a billboard for Wonder Bread, Loreda saw a bunch of dark heaps on the ground beneath the sign.
One of the heaps sat up; it was a painfully thin boy, dressed in rags, wearing a hat with no brim on one side.
“Mom—”
Mom slowed the truck. “I see them.”
There were probably twenty of them: kids, young men, most of them dressed in rags. Worn, tattered overalls, dirty hats, shirts with torn collars. The land around them was flat and brown, unirrigated, as dry as lost hope.
“Some folks don’t want to work,” Mom said quietly.
“You think Daddy’s over there?” Ant said.
“No,” Mom said, wondering how long they all would be looking for Rafe. All their lives?
Probably.
They came to a four-way stop, where a grocery store and filling station faced each other across a strip of paved road. All around were cultivated fields. A sign read, BAKERSFIELD: TWENTY-ONE MILES.
Mom said, “We need gas, and since it’s our first day in California, I say licorice whips for all!”
“Yay!” Ant yelled.
Mom pulled off the road and onto the gravel lot, easing to a stop at the pumps. A uniformed station attendant came running out to help.
“Fill it up, please,” Mom said, reaching for her purse.
“You pay over yonder, ma’am. Same man owns the grocery store and the gas station.”
“Thank you,” Mom said to the attendant.
The three of them got out of the truck and stared across a cultivated field. Men and women were stooped over above the tufts of green. People working the fields meant jobs.
“You ever seen anything so pretty, Loreda?”
“Never.”
“Can we go look at the candy, Mom?” Ant said.
“You bet.”
Loreda and Ant ran across the street, toward the store, laughing and pushing each other excitedly. Ant clung to Loreda’s hand. Mom hurried to keep up with them.
An old man sat on a bench out front, smoking a cigarette, wearing a battered cowboy hat drawn low.
Inside, the general store was murky and full of shadows. A fan turned lazily overhead, casting shadows and moving the air around, not creating any real coolness. The store smelled of wooden floors and sawdust and fresh strawberries. Of prosperity.
Loreda’s mouth watered at all of the foodstuffs for sale in here. Bologna, bottles of Coca-Cola, packages of hot dogs, boxes full of oranges, wrapped loaves of Wonder Bread. Ant ran straight to the array of penny candy on the counter. Big glass jars full of licorice whips and hard candies and peppermint sticks.
The cash register was situated on a wooden counter. The clerk was a broad-shouldered man wearing a white shirt and brown pants held in place by blue suspenders. A brown felt hat covered his cropped hair. He stood as stiff as a fence post, watching them.
Loreda realized suddenly what they looked like after more than a week on the road (and years on the dying farm). Wan, thin, with pinched faces. Dresses hung together with dirt and hope. Shoes full of holes, or, in Ant’s case, no shoes at all. Dirty faces, dirty hair.
Loreda self-consciously smoothed the hair back from her face, tucked a few flyaway strands back under her faded red kerchief.
“You’d best control those kids of yours,” the man behind the counter said to Mom. “They can’t touch things with their dirty hands.”
“I’m sorry for our appearance,” Mom said, stepping up to the counter as she unclasped her purse. “We’ve been traveling and—”
“Yeah. I know. Your kind pours into California every day.”
“I got gas,” Mom said, plucking one dollar and ninety cents in coins from her wallet.
“I hope it’s enough to get you out of town,” the man said.
There was a quiet after that, a drawing in of air.
“What did you say?” Mom asked.
The man reached under the counter, pulled up a gun, clanked it on the counter between them. “You best go.”
“Children,” Mom said. “Go back to the truck. We’re leaving now.” She dropped the coins onto the floor and herded the kids out of the store.
The door banged shut behind them.
“Who does he think he is? Just ’cause he hasn’t hit hard times, the crumb thinks he has the right to look down on us?” Loreda said, infuriated and embarrassed. He had made her feel poor for the first time in her life.
Mom opened the truck door. “Get in,” she said in a voice so quiet it was almost frightening.
NINETEEN
Elsa was glad to put that place in her rearview mirror. She didn’t know what she was looking for, what she was driving toward, but she figured she’d know it when she saw it. A diner, maybe. No reason she couldn’t wait tables. She drove to Bakersfield and felt a little disoriented by the size of the city. So many automobiles and stores and people out walking around, so she turned onto a smaller road and kept driving. South, she thought, or maybe east.
She refused to let one man’s prejudice hurt them after all they’d been through to get here. She was angry that Loreda and Ant had experienced such baseless prejudice, but life was full of such injustice. Just look at how her father had talked about the Italians, the Irish, the Negroes, and the Mexicans. Oh, he took their money and smiled to their faces, but his words were ugly the minute the door closed. Look at what her mother had seen when she’d looked at her newborn granddaughter: the wrong skin color.
Sadly, that ugliness was a part of life and not something Elsa could shield her children from entirely. Not even in California, in their new beginning. She simply had to teach them better.
They passed a sign for DiGiorgio Farms, saw people working in the fields.
A few miles later, outside a nice-looking town, Elsa saw a row of cottages set back from the road, all neatly cared for, with trees for shade. The middle one had a FOR RENT sign in the window.
Elsa eased her foot off the gas, let the truck coast to a stop.
“What’s wrong?” Loreda asked.
“Look at those pretty houses,” Elsa said.
“Could we afford that?” Loreda asked.
“We won’t know if we don’t ask,” Elsa said “Maybe, right?”
Loreda did not look convinced.
“We could get a puppy if we lived here,” Ant said. “I surely do want a puppy. I’d name him Rover.”
“Every dog is named Rover,” Loreda said.
“Is not. Henry’s dog was named Spot. And—”
“Stay here,” Elsa said. She got out of the truck and closed the door behind her. In the first few steps, she felt a dream open up and welcome her in. A dog for Ant, friends for Loreda, a school bus that stops out front to pick them up. Flowers blooming. A garden …
As she neared the house, the front door opened. A woman came out, wearing a pretty floral-print dress beneath a frilly red apron, and holding a
broom. Her bobbed hair was carefully curled and a pair of wireless glasses magnified her eyes.
Elsa smiled. “Hello,” she said. “The house is lovely. How much is the rent?”
“Eleven dollars a month.”
“My. That’s steep. But I can manage it, I’m sure. I could pay six dollars now and the rest—”
“When you get a job.”
Elsa was relieved by the woman’s understanding. “Yes.”
“You’d best get in your car and head on down the road. My husband will be home soon.”
“Perhaps eight dollars—”
“We don’t rent to Okies.”
Elsa frowned. “We’re from Texas.”
“Texas. Oklahoma. Arkansas. It’s all the same. You’re all the same. This is a good Christian town.” She pointed down the road. “That’s the direction you want to go. About fourteen miles. That’s where your kind lives.” She went back into her house and shut the door.
A few moments later, she took the FOR RENT sign out of the window and replaced it with a placard that read: NO OKIES.
What was wrong with these people? Elsa knew she wasn’t as clean as she could be and was obviously down on her luck, but still. Most of America was. And she’d offered eight dollars a month. She wasn’t asking for charity or a handout.
Elsa walked back to the truck.
“What’s wrong?” Loreda asked.
“The house didn’t look so nice up close. No room for a dog. That woman said we could find a place up the road about fourteen miles. Must be a campground or auto court for people coming west.”
“What’s an Okie?” Loreda asked.
“Someone they won’t rent to.”
“But—”
“No more questions,” Elsa said. “I need to think.”
Elsa drove past more cultivated fields. There were few farmhouses out here; mostly the landscape was a quilt of new green growth and brown, recently tilled fields. The first sign of civilization was a school, a pretty one, with an American flag flying out front. Not far beyond that was a well-tended-looking county hospital with a single gray ambulance parked by the entrance.
“This is about fourteen miles,” Elsa said, slowing down.
There was nothing here. No stop sign, no farm, no motor court.
“Is that a campground, Mommy?” Ant asked.
Elsa pulled off to the side of the road. Through the passenger window she saw a collection of tents and jalopies and shacks set back from the road in a weedy field. There had to be a hundred of them, clustered here and there in community-like pods, but without any real plan or design. They looked like a flotilla of gray sailboats and abandoned automobiles on a brown sea. There was no road to the campground, just ruts in the field, and no sign welcoming campers.
“This must be the place she was talking about,” Elsa said.
“Yay! A campground,” Ant said. “Maybe there’ll be other kids.”
Elsa turned onto the muddy ruts and followed them. An irrigation ditch full of brown water ran the length of the field to her left.
The first tent they came to had a peaked roof and sloping sides; a stovepipe stuck out from the front like a bent elbow. The area in front of the open flaps was cluttered with belongings: dented metal wash buckets, whiskey barrels, gas cans, a chopping block with an ax stuck in it, an old hubcap. Not far away sat a truck with no tires. Someone had built up slatted sides and draped plastic over it all to create a dry place to live.
“Ewwww,” Loreda said.
There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the placement of the tents and shacks and parked jalopies.
Rail-thin children dressed in rags ran through the tent town, followed by mangy, barking dogs. Women sat hunched on the banks of a ditch, washing clothes in brown water.
One pile of junk turned out to be a dwelling; inside, three children and two adults huddled around a makeshift stove. A family.
A man sat on a rock, wearing only his torn trousers, his feet bare and black soled, his drying shirt and socks spread out in the dirt in front of him. Somewhere, a baby cried.
Okies.
Your kind.
“I don’t like this place,” Ant whined. “It stinks.”
“Turn around, Mom,” Loreda said. “Get us out of here.”
Elsa couldn’t believe people lived this way in California. In America. These folks weren’t bindle stiffs or vagabonds or hobos. These tents and shacks and jalopies housed families. Children. Women. Babies. People who had come here to start over, people looking for work.
“We can’t drive around wasting gas,” Elsa said, feeling sick to her stomach. “We’ll stay here one night, find out what’s going on. Tomorrow I’ll find work and we’ll be on our way. At least there’s a river.”
“River? River?” Loreda said. “That is not a river and this is … I don’t know what this is, but we do not belong here.”
“No one belongs in a place like this, Loreda, but we only have twenty-seven dollars left. How long do you think that will last?”
“Mom, please.”
“We need a plan,” Elsa said. “Getting to California. That was all we thought about. Clearly it wasn’t enough. We need information. Someone here will be able to help us.”
“They don’t look like they can help themselves,” Loreda said.
“One night,” Elsa said. She forced a thin smile. “Come on, explorers. We can handle anything for one night.”
Ant whined again. “But it stinks.”
“One night,” Loreda said, staring at Elsa. “You promise?”
“I promise. One night.”
Elsa looked out at the sea of tents and saw a break in them, an empty space between a ragged tent and a shack made of scrap wood. She drove into the empty area and parked on a wide patch of dirt tufted with weeds and grass.
The nearest tent was about fifteen feet away. In front of it was a collection of junk—buckets and boxes, a spindly wooden chair, and a rusted wood-burning stove with a bent pipe.
Elsa parked the truck. They got to work, set up their large tent, staked it in place, and laid the camp mattress in one corner, right down on the dirt floor, and covered it with sheets and quilts.
They unloaded only the supplies they would need for the night. Their suitcases, the food (all of it would need to be guarded constantly in this place), and buckets both for carrying water and for sitting on. Elsa built a small campfire in front of the tent and placed overturned buckets nearby as chairs.
She couldn’t help thinking that they now looked no different from everyone else here. She dropped a blob of lard into the Dutch oven, and when it started to pop, she added a precious chunk of ham along with a few canned tomatoes, a clove of garlic, and a potato cut into cubes.
Ignoring the buckets, Loreda and Ant sat cross-legged in the grassy dirt, playing cards.
When Elsa looked at her daughter, she felt an abiding sadness creep in. It was strange how you could stop seeing people who were right beside you, how images stuck in your head. Loreda was painfully thin, arms like matchsticks, knobby elbows and knees. One sunburn after another had left her cheeks full of freckles and peeling skin.
Loreda was thirteen; she should be filling out, not wasting away. A new worry. Or an old one, grown more vivid in the past hour.
As night fell, the camp livened up. Elsa heard distant conversations, dishes being filled and emptied, and fires crackling. Orange dots—open fires—sprouted here and there. Smoke drifted from tent to tent, carrying food aromas with it. A steady stream of people walked up from the road toward the tents.
Elsa heard footsteps and looked up. A family approached their campsite—a man, a woman, and four children—two teenaged boys and two young girls. The man, tall and whippet lean, wore stained overalls and a ripped shirt. Beside him stood a woman with shaggy, shoulder-length brown hair that was going gray in streaks. She wore a baggy cotton dress with an apron over it. There seemed to be nothing over her bones but a thin layer of skin; no muscle, no fat. The
two skinny little girls wore burlap sacks that had cutouts for their arms and necks; their feet were dirty and bare.
“Howdy, neighbor,” the man said. “Thought we’d come by to welcome y’all.” He held out a single red potato. “We brung yah this. Ain’t much, I know. But we ain’t too heeled, as y’all can tell.”
Elsa was touched by the generosity of the gesture. “Thank you.” She reached for one of their buckets, turned it over, and placed her sweater on it. “Sit, please,” she said to the woman, who smiled tiredly and sat on the bucket, adjusting her housedress to cover her bare, dirty knees.
“I’m Elsa. These are my children, Loreda and Anthony.” She reached sideways, withdrew two precious slices of bread from their loaf. “Please, take these.”
The man took the bread in his callused hands. “I’m Jeb Dewey. This here’s my missus, Jean, and our youngsters, Mary and Buster, Elroy and Lucy.”
The kids moved over to a patch of weedy grass and sat down. Loreda started a new shuffling of the cards.
“How long have you been here?” Elsa asked the adults when the kids were out of earshot. She sat down on an overturned bucket near Jean.
“Almost nine months,” Jean answered. “We picked cotton last fall, but winter here is hard. You got to make enough in cotton to tide you through four months of no pickin’. And don’t let anyone tell you that California is warm in the winter.”
Elsa glanced over at the Deweys’ tent, which was about fifteen feet away. It was at least ten by ten; just like the Martinelli’s. But … how could six people live in such tight quarters for nine months?
Jean saw Elsa’s look. “It can be a mite hard to manage. Sweeping seems like a full-time job.” She smiled, and Elsa saw how pretty she must have been before hunger had whittled her down. “It ain’t like Alabama, I can tell you. We were better off there.”
“I was a farmer,” Jeb said. “Not a big place, but enough for us. It’s the bank’s farm now.”
“Are most of the people here farmers?” Elsa asked.
“Some. Old Milt—he lives in the blue jalopy with the broke axle over yonder—he was a darn lawyer. Hank was a postman. Sanderson made fancy hats. You can’t tell nothin’ by lookin’ at a fella these days.”
The Four Winds Page 20