The Four Winds

by Kristin Hannah

  “Welty, huh? We’ve been trying to unionize the migrant camps. We’ve met with resistance. The Okies are stubborn and proud.”

  “Don’t call us that,” she said. “We’re people who just want jobs. My grandparents and my mom … they don’t believe in government handouts. They want to make it on their own, but…”

  “But what?”

  “It’s not going to work, is it? Us coming here for a better life and actually getting it?”

  “Not without a fight.”

  “I want to fight,” Loreda said, realizing as she said it that she’d been itching for this fight for a long time. This was what she’d run away to find, not her lily-livered father. This was the passion she’d lost. She felt the heat of it.

  “How old are you, really?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “And your old man ran out on the family when he lost his job in … St. Louis.”

  “Texas,” Loreda said.

  “Kid, men like that aren’t worth shit. And you’re too young to be walking around on your own. How’d you get to California?”

  “My mom brought us.”

  “All by herself? She must be tough.”

  “I called her a coward tonight.”

  He gave her a knowing look. “Is she going to be worried?”

  Loreda nodded. “Unless they went looking for me. What if they’re gone?” At that, homesickness gripped her; not the kind for a place, but for people. Her people. Mom and Ant. Grandma and Grandpa. The people who loved her.

  “Kid, the people who love you stay. You’ve already learned that. Go find your mom and tell her you’ve been as dumb as a box of marbles. And let her hold you tight.”

  Loreda felt the sting of tears.

  A police siren wailed outside.

  “Shit,” Jack said, taking her by the arm, dragging her across the barn, through the panicking crowd.

  He shoved her up the ladder in front of him and pushed her into the loft. “There’s fire in you, kid. Don’t let the bastards put it out. Stay here till morning or you might end up in the hoosegow.”

  He dropped down the loft ladder to the barn floor.

  The door cracked open. Cops appeared in the opening, holding guns and billy clubs. Behind them, red lights flashed. Cops streamed into the barn, scooped up the papers and the typewriters and the mimeograph machines.

  Loreda saw a cop hit Jack in the head with his club. Jack staggered but didn’t fall. Weaving a little, he grinned at the copper. “That’s all you got?”

  The cop’s face tightened. “You’re a dead man, Valen. Sooner or later.” He hit Jack again, harder.

  “Round ’em up, fellas,” the policeman said, as blood splattered his uniform. “We don’t want Reds in our town.”

  Reds.

  Communists.

  * * *

  ELSA WALKED BENEATH AN anemic moon into the town of Welty. At this hour, the streets were deserted.

  There it was: the police station, tucked on a side street, not far from the library.

  She didn’t believe that anyone in authority would actually help her, or even listen to her, but her daughter was missing. This was all she could think of to do.

  The parking lot was empty but for a few cruisers and an old-fashioned truck. In the light cast downward from a streetlamp, she saw a bindle stiff standing beside the truck smoking a cigarette. She didn’t make eye contact but felt him watching her.

  Elsa straightened to her full height, unaware that she’d become hunched on her walk here.

  She moved past the vagrant and entered the station. Inside, the lobby was austere; one row of chairs against a wall, each one empty. Light shone down from the ceiling onto a man in uniform, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, at a desk with a black phone.

  She tried to look confident. Clutching her fraying handbag strap, she crossed the tile floor, made her way to the officer at the desk.

  He was tall and thin, with slicked-back hair and a thin mustache. He wrinkled his nose at her disheveled appearance.

  She cleared her throat. “Uh. Sir. I’m here to report a missing girl.” She tensed, waited for it: We don’t care about your kind.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “My daughter. She’s thirteen. Do you have children?”

  He was silent so long she almost turned away.

  “I do. A twelve-year-old, in fact. She’s the reason I’m losing my hair.”

  Elsa would have smiled any other time. “We had a fight. I said … Anyway, she ran away.”

  “Do you have any idea where she’d go? What direction?”

  Elsa shook her head. “Her … father left us a while ago. She misses him, blames me, but we have no idea where he is.”

  “Folks are doing that these days. Last week we had a fella kill his whole family before he killed himself. Hard times.”

  Elsa waited for more.

  The man stared at her.

  “You won’t find her,” Elsa said dully. “How could you?”

  “I’ll keep my eye out. Mostly, they come back.”

  Elsa tried to compose herself, but his kindness unraveled her more than cruelty could. “She has black hair and blue eyes. Well, almost violet, really, but she says only I see that. Her name is Loreda Martinelli.”

  “Beautiful name.” He wrote it down.

  Elsa nodded, stood there a moment longer.

  “My recommendation is to go home, ma’am. Wait. I bet she’ll come back. It’s obvious you love her. Sometimes our kids don’t see what’s right in front of them.”

  Elsa backed away, unable to even thank him for his kindness.

  Outside, she stared across the empty parking lot and thought: Where is she?

  Elsa’s legs started to give out on her. She stumbled, nearly fell.

  Someone steadied her. “You okay?”

  She wrenched sideways, pulled away.

  He backed off, lifted his hands in the air. “Hey, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “I—I’m fine,” she said.

  “I’d say you’re further from fine than anyone I’ve ever met.”

  It was the bindle stiff she’d seen by the truck on her way into the station. An ugly bruise discolored one of his cheekbones. Dried blood flecked his collar. His black hair was too long, raggedly cut, threaded with gray at the temples.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look exhausted. Let me drive you home.”

  “You must think I’m stupid.”

  “I’m not dangerous.”

  “Says the bloodied-up man at the police station at one in the morning.”

  He smiled. “A good beating makes them feel better.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Do? You think you need to commit a crime to get beaten up by the coppers? I’m just unpopular these days. Radical ideas,” he said, still smiling. “Let me drive you home. You will be safe with me.” He put a hand to his chest. “Jailbird’s honor.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Elsa didn’t like the way he was staring at her. He reminded her of the hungry men who lurked in shadows to steal what they wanted. Deep-set black eyes peered out from his craggy face; he had a jutting nose and pushed-out chin. And he needed a shave. “What are you looking at?”

  “You remind me of someone, that’s all. A warrior.”

  “Yeah. I’m a warrior, all right.”

  Elsa walked away. Out on the main road, she turned left, toward the camp. It was the only thing she could think of to do. Go home. Ant was there.

  Wait and hope.

  TWENTY-SIX

  After a long, sleepless night in the barn, Loreda climbed down from the loft as dawn turned the sky lavender and then pink and then golden.

  She walked down the road, carrying her suitcase.

  At Sutter Road, she looked out at the spray of tents and broken-down automobiles and cobbled-together shacks clustered in the winter-dead field.

  Please still be here.

  Loreda stayed away from the muddy ruts and kept to
the grassy high ground as she headed for their tent. She passed a hovel built of metal scraps; inside, a man and woman huddled around a nub of a candle. The woman held a very still baby in her arms.

  Up ahead, Loreda saw their truck parked by the tent. Her knees almost buckled in relief. Thank God. They were still here.

  Loreda rounded the truck and saw the Deweys’ tent. Mrs. Dewey sat in a chair out front, hunched over, hands curled around a cup of coffee. Mom sat on an overturned apple crate beside her, writing in her journal.

  Loreda slowed her step, moved quietly forward. In the silence that should have held a baby breathing, Loreda saw how broken both women looked.

  Jean looked up first, smiled at Loreda, and touched Elsa’s arm. “It’s your girl. I told you she’d come back.”

  Mom looked up.

  Loreda felt a breathtaking rush of love for her mother. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Mom closed her journal and stood up. She tried to smile, and in the failure, Loreda glimpsed the pain she’d caused by running away. Mom stood still, didn’t move toward Loreda.

  Loreda knew this distance between them was hers to cross. “I’ve been as dumb as a box of marbles, Mom,” Loreda said, moving toward her.

  A little laugh erupted from her mother; it sounded like joy.

  “Really. I’ve been a real crumb to you, Mom. And…”

  “Loreda—”

  “I know you love me, and … I’m sorry, Mom. I love you. So much.”

  Mom pulled Loreda into her arms, held her tightly.

  Loreda clung fiercely to her mother, afraid to let her go. “I was afraid you’d leave when I was gone…”

  When Mom drew back, her eyes were bright and she was smiling. “You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. Not by words or anger or actions or time. I love you. I will always love you.” She tightened her hold on Loreda’s shoulders. “You taught me love. You, first in the whole world, and my love for you will outlive me. If you had not come back…”

  “I’m here, Mom,” Loreda said. “But I learned something last night. And I think it’s important.”

  * * *

  ELSA GRASPED LOREDA’S HAND, unable to let go, and let her daughter lead her back to the tent and pull her inside.

  “I can’t wait to tell you where I was,” Loreda said as she unbuttoned her coat.

  The reunion was over, apparently. Loreda was on to new business. Elsa couldn’t help smiling at the quick change in her daughter’s demeanor.

  Elsa sat down on the mattress beside Ant, who was still sleeping. “Where did you go?”

  “To a Communist meeting. In a barn.”

  “Oh. That is hardly what I would have guessed.”

  “I met a man.”

  Elsa frowned. She started to get up. “A man? A grown man? Did he—”

  “A Communist!” Loreda sat down beside Elsa. “A whole group of them, really. They were meeting in a barn north of here. They want to help us, Mom.”

  “A Communist,” Elsa said slowly, trying to process this new and dangerous information.

  “They want to help us fight the growers.”

  “Fight the growers? You mean the people who employ us? The people who pay us to pick their crops?”

  “You call that pay?”

  “It is pay, Loreda. It buys us the food we eat.”

  “I want you to come to a meeting with me.”

  “A meeting?”

  “Yes. Just listen to them. You’ll like what—”

  “No, Loreda,” Elsa said. “Absolutely not. I am not going and I forbid you to go. The people you met are dangerous.”

  “But—”

  “Believe me, Loreda, whatever the question is, communism is not the answer. We’re Americans. And we can’t get on the wrong side of the growers. We’re close enough to starvation as it is. So, no.”

  “But it’s the right thing.”

  “Look at this tent, Loreda. Do you think we have the luxury of fighting our employers? Do you think we have the luxury of waging a philosophical war? No. Just no. And I don’t want to hear about it again. Now, come, let’s get a little sleep. I’m exhausted.”

  * * *

  RAIN FELL FOR DAYS. The land along the ditch bank became a pond. People started getting sick: typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery.

  The burying ground doubled in size. Because the county hospital refused to treat most of the migrants, they had to help themselves as best they could.

  Everyone was hungry and lethargic. Elsa spent as little as she possibly could on food, and still she watched their savings dwindle.

  On this stormy winter night, Loreda and Ant were in bed, trying to sleep, burrowed beneath a pile of quilts.

  Rain hammered the canvas, rippled the grayed fabric, and sluiced down the sides.

  Elsa sat on an apple crate, writing in her journal by the meager light of a single candle.

  For most of my life, weather was a thing remarked upon by the old men in their dusty hats who stopped to jaw with each other outside Wolcott Tractor Supply. A topic of conversation. Farmers studied the sky the way a priest read the word of God, looking for clues and signs and warnings. But all of it from a friendly distance, all of it with a faith in the essential kindness of our planet. But in this terrible decade, the weather has proven itself to be cruel. An adversary that we underestimated at our peril. Wind, dust, drought, and now this demoralizing rain, I fear—

  Thunder exploded in a deafening craaaaack.

  “That was a bad one,” Loreda said. Ant looked scared.

  Elsa closed her journal and got up. She was halfway to the flaps when the tent collapsed around them. Water rushed in, sucked at Elsa’s legs. She shoved her journal in the bodice of her dress and reached out blindly for her children. “Kids! Come to me.”

  She heard them clawing at the wet canvas, trying to find their way.

  “I’m here,” Elsa said.

  Loreda reached her, held her hand, kept one arm around her brother.

  “We have to get out,” Elsa said, fighting to find the tent flaps.

  Ant was crying beside her, clinging to her.

  “Hang on to me,” Elsa shouted to him. She found the split in the fabric, wrenched the flaps open, stumbled out with the children. The tent whooshed past them, taking their belongings with it.

  The money.

  A gush of water hit Elsa so hard she almost fell.

  Lightning flashed; in the light, she saw utter destruction. Garbage and leaves and wooden crates floated past, riding the torrent, there and gone in a second.

  Holding tightly to her children’s hands, she slogged against the rising tide of water and made her way to the Deweys’ tent. “Jean! Jeb!”

  The tent collapsed just as the Deweys crawled out.

  The sound of people screaming rose above the howl of the storm.

  Elsa saw headlights out on the road, turning. Coming their way.

  She spat rain, pushed the wet hair out of her eyes, and yelled, “We need to go that way, toward the road.”

  The two families stayed close together, all holding hands. Elsa’s boots filled with muddy water. She knew her children were barefoot in this cold, wet water.

  Together they fought their way toward the headlights. There was a row of cars parked on the main road, headlights pointed at the camp. Halfway there, Elsa saw a line of people with flashlights. A tall man stepped forward, wearing a brown canvas duster and a hat that sagged in the rain. “This way, ma’am,” he yelled. “We’re here to help you.”

  The Deweys made it to the row of volunteers. Elsa saw someone hand Jean a raincoat.

  Elsa looked back. Their tent was gone now, washed away, but the truck was still there. If she didn’t get it now, she would lose it.

  She pushed her children forward. “Go,” she said. “I have to get the truck.”

  “No, Mom, you can’t,” Loreda shouted.

  Rushing water tried to push Elsa over. She pulled Ant’s wet hand out of hers and shove
d him at Loreda. “Get yourselves to safety.”

  “No, Mom—”

  Elsa saw the tall volunteer heading their way again. She pushed her children toward the man, said, “Save them,” and turned back.

  “Ma’am, you can’t—”

  Elsa fought her way to the truck, which was running-board deep in water. A plastic doll in a muddy pink dress floated by, blue marble eyes staring upward. Mud and water had swept their campsite away; everything was gone. The stove had been knocked over; water swirled over it. She thought about the box that held their money and knew she’d never find it.

  She climbed into the truck, grateful for once that she kept the keys in the glove box. Auto theft was low on anyone’s mind when gas was unaffordable.

  Please start.

  Elsa turned the key in the ignition.

  It took five tries and five prayers before the truck grumbled and groaned and came to life.

  She turned on the headlights and put the truck in gear.

  The truck jostled from side to side, fighting its way out of the mud. Elsa kept her hands tight on the wheel; her feet worked the pedals. The vehicle rolled and bucked and sometimes the engine whined, but finally the tires found purchase.

  Elsa drove slowly out to the road, where a string of volunteers helped people into cars. She saw Loreda step out of an old-fashioned, wooden-cabbed truck into the pouring rain and wave her hands in the air. “Follow us, Mom!”

  * * *

  ELSA FOLLOWED THE OLD truck into Welty. On a small, deserted street by the railroad tracks, it pulled up in front of a boarded-up hotel. On either side of the hotel were businesses that had been shut down. A Mexican restaurant and a laundry and a bakery. The streetlights were off. A shuttered gas station boasted a hand-lettered sign that read: THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY. DON’T LET THE BIG MEN TAKE IT AWAY FROM YOU!

  Elsa had never seen this street. It was several blocks from the main section of Welty. The few houses she could see looked dilapidated and deserted. She pulled up alongside the other truck and parked.