Elsa was startled by his perceptiveness. “I need to go,” she said. “The kids will be out of school soon.”
“Goodbye, Elsa.”
She was surprised by how sad he looked when he said it. Or maybe disappointed in her. It was probably that. “Goodbye, Jack,” she said, and walked away, left him standing there. Somehow, she knew he was staring after her, but she didn’t look back.
* * *
BY THE END OF March, the ground had dried, the ditch-bank camp had filled again, Loreda had turned fourteen, and the Martinelli family was deeply in debt. Elsa did the math obsessively in her head. So far, she and Loreda would have to pick three thousand pounds of cotton just to pay their debt. But she still had to pay rent and buy food. It was a violent, vicious cycle that would start all over again when winter came. There was no way to get ahead, no way to get out.
Still, she went out each day, looking for work while the kids were in school. On good days, she made forty cents weeding or doing someone’s laundry or cleaning someone’s house. She and the kids made weekly visits to the Salvation Army to pick through the give-away clothing bins.
In April, she counted down the days until she officially became a resident of the state and could qualify for relief. It no longer even crossed her mind to refuse aid from the government.
On the appointed day, she woke early and made flour-and-water pancakes for the kids and poured them each a half glass of the watered-down apple juice they sold by the quart in the company store.
Still sleepy eyed, the kids dressed and put on their shoes and filed out of the small cabin and headed for the bathrooms, where there would be a long line.
When they returned, Elsa served them two pancakes each—doctored with a precious dollop of jam. They sat on their bed, side by side.
“You need to eat something, Mom,” Loreda said.
For a moment Elsa saw her fourteen-year-old daughter in heartbreaking relief: bony face, prominent cheekbones. A gingham dress hung on her thin body; her clavicle stuck up from the hollowed-out skin on either side.
She was supposed to be going to square dances and having her first crush on a boy at this age …
“Mom?” Loreda said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Are you dizzy?”
“No. Not at all. Just thinking.”
Ant laughed. “That’s no good, Ma. You know better.”
Ant stood up. He was all knobs and sticks, this boy who had just turned nine; with elbows and knees and feet that were all too big for his skinny limbs. In the past few months, he’d found friends and begun to act like a boy again; he refused to have his hair cut, hated any sort of games, and called her Ma.
“Guess what today is,” Elsa said.
“What?” Loreda said, not bothering to look up.
“We get state relief,” Elsa said. “Real cash money. I can start paying down our debt.”
“Sure,” Loreda said, plunging her empty plate into the bucket of soapy water.
“We registered with the state a year ago,” Elsa said. “We can get aid as residents now.”
Loreda looked at her. “They’ll find a way to take it back.”
“Come on, Miss Sunshine,” Elsa said, offering Ant his coat.
Elsa didn’t bother with her own coat. She put on her galoshes and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.
They stepped out into the busy camp. Now that the threat of frost had passed, men were busy in the fields. Tractors worked ceaselessly, readying the soil, churning it up, planting seeds.
“It makes me think of Grandpa,” Loreda said.
They all stopped, listened to the sound of the tractors’ motors. The smell of freshly turned soil hung in the air.
“It does,” Elsa said, feeling a wave of homesickness.
They kept walking, three abreast, until they reached the school tents.
“’Bye, Ma. Good luck with relief,” Ant said, running off.
Loreda ducked into her tent.
Elsa stood there a moment, listening to the sounds of children talking and laughing, of teachers telling them to take their seats. If she closed her eyes—which she did, just for a moment—she could imagine a whole different world.
Finally, she turned away. Paths between the tents and cabins had been worn into ruts by hundreds of feet. At the bathrooms, she got in line and waited her turn.
It wasn’t a bad wait at this time of day—less than twenty minutes for the toilets. She wanted to take a shower, but with only two showers, the wait was always an hour or more.
She went into her cabin and washed the breakfast dishes and put them in the salvaged apple crate that was their cupboard. In the past months since the flood, they had become good at scavenging.
She made her bed and put on her coat and left the cabin.
In town, a long line of sad-looking men and women snaked in front of the state relief office. Most didn’t look up from their own clasped hands. They were Midwesterners or Texans or Southerners, most of them. Proud people who weren’t used to being on the dole.
Elsa took her place at the back. People moved in behind her quickly, seemed to come from the four corners of town to get in line.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
She gave herself a little shake, forced a smile. “Forgot to eat, I guess. I’m fine. Thank you.”
The scrawny young man in front of her wore dungarees that must have been bought when he weighed fifty pounds more. He needed a shave but his eyes were kind. “We all forgot that,” he said with a smile. “I ain’t eaten since Thursday. What day is it?”
“Monday.”
He shrugged. “Kids, you know.”
“I know.”
“You got relief before?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t qualify until today.”
“Qualify?”
“You have to be in the state a year to get relief.”
“A year? We could be dead by then.” He sighed and stepped out of the line and walked away.
“Wait!” Elsa called out. “You need to register now!”
The young man didn’t turn around and Elsa couldn’t step out of line to follow him. Losing her place would cost her hours.
She eventually made her way to the front. Once there, she looked down at the bright-faced young woman seated at the desk, with a portable typewriter in front of her. Beside it was a long index-card box. “Name?”
“Elsa Martinelli. I have two children. Anthony and Loreda. I registered last year on this date.”
The woman rifled through the red cards, pulled one out. “Here you are. Address?”
“Welty growers’ camp.”
The woman put the card in the typewriter and added the information. “All right, Mrs. Martinelli. Three people in the family. You’ll get thirteen dollars and fifty cents per month.” She pulled the card out of the typewriter.
“Thank you.” Elsa rolled the bills into as small a cylinder as she could and tightened her fist around them.
As she left the state relief office, she noticed a commotion down the street at the federal relief office. A crowd of people were shouting.
Elsa walked cautiously toward the melee, keenly aware of the money in her hand.
She stopped beside a man at the edge of the crowd. “What’s going on?”
“The feds cut relief. No more commodities.”
Someone in the crowd yelled, “That ain’t right!”
A rock sailed through the relief office window, breaking the glass. The mob surged toward the office, shouting.
Within minutes a siren could be heard. A police car rolled up, lights flashing. Two uniformed men jumped out holding billy clubs. “Who wants to go to jail for vagrancy?”
One of the policemen grabbed a raggedly dressed man, hauled him over to the police car, and shoved him in. “Anyone else want to go to jail?”
Elsa turned to the man beside her. “How can they just end the commodities relief? Don’t they care about us?”
The man
gave her a disbelieving look. “You tryin’ to be funny?”
* * *
AFTER LEAVING THE RELIEF office, Elsa walked to the ditch-bank camp on Sutter Road.
In the months since the flood, more people had moved onto this land. Old-timers pitched their tents and parked their cars and built their shacks on higher ground, if they could find it. Newcomers set up near the ditch. The ground was studded with spring grass and old belongings, some of which poked up here and there in the dirt. A pipe edge, a book, a ruined lantern. Most things of value had been dug up already or were buried too deeply to be found.
She came to the Deweys’ truck. They’d built a shack around it with scavenged wood and tar paper and scrap metal.
She found Jean sitting in a chair beside the truck’s front fender. Mary and Lucy sat in the grass beside her cross-legged, poking sticks into the ground.
“Elsa!” Jean said, starting to rise.
“Don’t get up,” Elsa said, seeing how pale her friend was, how gaunt.
Elsa sat down on the overturned bucket beside Jean.
“I don’t have any coffee to offer you,” Jean said. “I’m drinking hot water.”
“I could use a cup,” Elsa said.
Jean poured Elsa a cup of boiling water and handed it to her.
“The feds cut relief,” Elsa said. “People are rioting in town.”
Jean coughed. “I heard. Don’t know how we’re gonna make it till cotton.”
“We’ll make it.” Elsa opened her hand slowly, looked down at the thirteen dollars and fifty cents she had to feed her family until next month. She peeled off two one-dollar bills and handed them to Jean.
“I can’t take that,” Jean said. “Not money.”
“Of course you can.” They both knew that the twenty-seven dollars the Deweys got from the state wasn’t nearly enough to feed six people. And Elsa could get things on credit from the store. The Deweys couldn’t.
Jean reached for the bills, trying to smile. “Well. I am saving up for our bottle of gin.”
“You bet. We will get rip-roaring drunk real soon. Bad-girl drunk,” Elsa said, smiling at the thought. “I was only a bad girl once in my life, and you know what it got me?”
“What?”
“A bad husband and a beautiful new family. So, I say we be bad.”
“That a promise?”
“You bet. Someday soon, Jean.”
* * *
ELSA WALKED BACK TO Welty Farms and went to the company store. On the way home from the relief office, she had made calculations in her head. If she used half of her relief money to pay down her debt each month, it would be tight, but they’d have a chance.
In the store, she picked out a loaf of bread and one of bologna and a can of chipped beef, some hot dogs, and a bag of potatoes. A jar of peanut butter, a bar of soap, several cans of milk, and some lard. More than anything, she wanted to add a dozen eggs and a Hershey’s candy bar. But that was how people were ruined by credit.
She placed her items on the counter.
Harald smiled at her as he rang up the items. “Relief day, eh, Mrs. Martinelli? I can tell by your smile.”
“It’s a relief for sure.”
The cash register clattered and rang. “That’ll be two dollars and thirty-nine cents.”
“That sure is steep,” Elsa said.
“Yep,” he said, giving her a commiserating look.
She withdrew the cash from her pocket, began counting it out.
“Oh. We don’t take cash, missus. Just credit.”
“But I have money, finally. I wanted to pay on my bill, too.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Credit only. I can even give you a little spending money … on credit. With interest. For gas and such.”
“But … how do I get out from my debt?”
“You pick.”
The reality of the situation sank in. Why hadn’t Elsa figured it out before? Welty wanted her in their debt, wanted her to spend her relief money lavishly and be broke again next winter. Of course they’d give you cash for credit—probably at a high interest rate—because poor folks worked for less, asked for less. All she could do was try to use her relief money to buy goods in town, at lower prices, to offset her accruing debt at the company store, but it wouldn’t make much of a dent. They couldn’t live on thirteen dollars a month. She reached into the basket and removed a can of chipped beef, which she set back on the counter. “I can’t afford this.”
He recalculated her credit total, wrote it down. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Are you? What about going north, to pick peaches? I suppose I’d have to pay for the cabin in advance while I’m gone.”
“Oh, no, ma’am. You’d have to give up the cabin and the sure-thing job of picking cotton.”
“We can’t follow the crops?” Elsa stood there a moment staring at him, wondering how he could stand to be a part of this system. They couldn’t follow the crops and keep the cabin, which meant they had to stay here, without work, waiting for cotton, living on relief and credit. “So, we’re slaves.”
“Workers. The lucky ones, I’d say.”
“Would you?”
“Have you seen the way folks live out by the ditch bank?”
“Yes,” Elsa said. “I’ve seen it.”
Holding her bag of groceries, she walked out of the store.
Outside, people milled about: women hanging laundry, men scavenging for wood, young children looking for any bit of junk to call a toy. A dozen stoop-shouldered women in baggy dresses stood in line for the two women’s toilets. There were more than three hundred people living here now; they’d pitched fifteen new tents on concrete pads.
She looked at the women, really looked. Gray. Slanted shoulders. Kerchiefs on untended hair. Drab dresses mended and re-mended. Fallen stockings. Worn shoes. Thin.
Still, they smiled at one another in line, talked, wrangled their runaway children, those young enough not to be in school. Elsa had stood in that line enough to know that the women talked about ordinary things—gossip, children, health.
Life went on, even in the hardest of times.
TWENTY-NINE
In May, the valley dried out beneath sunny days and everything grew and blossomed. In June, the cotton plants flowered and needed to be trimmed. True to Welty’s word, those who lived at Welty Farms growers’ camp were the first to get these precious jobs; Elsa spent hours working beneath the hot sun. Most of the valley’s ditch-bank residents, including Jeb and the boys, had hitchhiked north for work. Jean stayed back with the girls and the stuck-in-the-ground truck that was all they had left.
Today, just before dawn, a big truck pulled into the Welty camp, chugging smoke. The people standing in line barely waited for it to stop before they climbed aboard. Men and women got into the back and crammed in tightly, hats drawn low, gloves on (gloves they’d had to purchase at the company store for an exorbitant price).
Loreda looked up at Mom, who was pressed close to the wooden slats directly behind the cab. She had been the second person in line when the truck pulled up this morning.
“Make sure Ant does his homework,” Mom said.
“Are you sure I can’t—”
“I’m sure, Loreda. You can pick cotton when it’s ready; that’s it. Now go to school and learn something so you don’t end up like me. I’m forty and most days I feel a hundred. Besides, there’s only a week of school left anyway.”
A man closed the gate at the back of the truck. Within moments the truck was chugging out to the road, heading to the cotton fields. It wasn’t hot yet, but it soon would be.
Loreda went back into the cabin. Already the small interior had begun to grow warm. Though she knew it was a harbinger of summer heat to come, Loreda still appreciated the warmth after the cold of winter. She opened the air vents and went to the hot plate and started the oatmeal she and Ant would have for breakfast.
As light came into the cabin, Ant stumbled out of bed and walked to the door. “I gott
a pee.”
He came back fifteen minutes later, scratching his privates. “Did Mom get work?”
“She did.”
He sat on a wooden crate at the table they’d scavenged. After they finished eating, Loreda walked Ant to school. “I’ll meet you at the cabin after school,” she said. “Don’t dawdle. Today’s laundry.”
“It’ll be hot.” Ant grimaced and went into his classroom.
Loreda headed to her own classroom. As she reached the tent flap, she heard Mrs. Sharpe say, “Today the girls are going to learn to mix cosmetics, and the boys will do a science project.”
Loreda groaned. Making cosmetics.
“We all know how important beauty is in finding a man,” Mrs. Sharpe said.
“No,” Loreda said aloud. “Just … no.”
She put her foot down on making cosmetics. Last week the girls had spent hours learning to sift dry ingredients and knead bread, while the boys had been taught how to “fly” in a replicated plywood airplane cockpit with painted-on instruments.
She didn’t skip school often, because she knew how much her mother cared about education, but honestly, sometimes Loreda just couldn’t stand it. And Lord knew Mrs. Sharpe would give Loreda the evil eye either way. Her questions in class were not appreciated. She ducked into their cabin, found her latest library book, and headed out of camp.
Out on the main road, she felt her spine straightening, her chin lifting. She swung her arms as she walked to town. What could be better than skipping school to visit the library? She’d read The Communist Manifesto this week and she was eager to find something equally enlightening. Mrs. Quisdorf had mentioned something by a man named Hobbes.
Main Street was busy today. Men in suits and women in spring dresses walked toward the movie theater; the marquee read: TOWN MEETING.
Loreda walked into the library and headed straight for the checkout desk.
She handed Mrs. Quisdorf the book.
“And what did we learn from this?” Mrs. Quisdorf asked in a lowered voice, although it didn’t look like anyone else was here. The library was empty most days.
“It’s all about class struggle, isn’t it? Serfs against landlords throughout history. Marx and Engels are right. If there was only one class, where everyone worked for the good of all, it would be a better world. We wouldn’t have people like the big growers making all the money and people like us doing all the work. We starve while the rich get richer.”
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