“It’s unfair,” he said.
“It’s wrong,” she said. “This isn’t who we are in America.”
“No.”
“A strike.” She said the frightening word quietly. “Can it work?”
“Maybe.”
She was grateful for his honesty. “They’ll hurt us for trying.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But life is more than what happens to us, Elsa. We have choices to make.”
“I’m not a brave woman.”
“And yet here you are, standing at the edge of battle.”
His words touched a chord in her. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He used to tell me that courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.” She looked at him. “Well, I’m scared.”
“We’re all scared,” he said.
“I have children to worry about, children I have to feed and clothe and keep safe. I can’t risk their lives.”
He said nothing, and she knew why. He was letting her say it.
“They’re already at risk,” she said. “They can’t be taught that this is what we deserve, that this is America. I have to teach them to stand up for themselves.”
Elsa felt both a stunning sense of relief, almost of coming home, finding herself … and a deep, abiding fear. Courage is fear you ignore. But how did one do that, really? In practical terms.
“The rifle tower they built in the field … that’s to scare us, right? What we’re doing—a strike—it’s legal.”
“It’s legal. Hell, it’s the very essence of America. We were built on the right to protest, but laws are enforced by the government. By the police. You’ve seen how they support big business.”
Elsa nodded. “What do we do?”
“First we need to get out the word. We’ve set a strike meeting for Friday. But it’s dangerous even to tell people, let alone to show up for the meeting.”
“Everything is dangerous,” she said. “So what?”
He laid a hand along her cheek.
She leaned into his touch, taking strength and comfort from it.
THIRTY-THREE
In the dark just before the dawn, Loreda opened the cabin door and stepped outside. Last night’s gathering of the Workers Alliance had energized her, galvanized her. The Communists were working hard to bring about a strike, but they needed people like Loreda to spread the word through the camps. The Communists couldn’t do it on their own.
It’s dangerous, though, Natalia had said to Loreda last night. Don’t forget this. When I was a girl, I saw revolution up close. Blood runs in the streets. Don’t forget for one moment that the state has all the power—money and weapons and manpower.
We have heart and desperation, had been Loreda’s answer.
“Yeah,” Natalia had said, exhaling smoke. “And brains. So, use yours.”
Loreda closed the door behind her and walked out into the camp. She could hear people readying for the day, serving food, packing lunches. There was a long line at the toilets.
But the quiet was new and unnerving. No one laughed or even talked. Fear had moved into the camp. Everyone knew they were being watched by people whose loyalty was to the grower, not to the workers. Unfortunately, you never knew who the traitor was until you said the wrong thing to the wrong person and a knock at your door came in the middle of the night. They had heard the cries of families being hauled out of camp.
The first colors of sunrise cast light on the coiled barbed wire that topped the new fencing. She walked toward the line for the toilets and waited her turn. Afterward, she saw Ike filling his canteen at the waterspout outside the laundry. Loreda tried to look completely casual as she moved toward him, but she may have failed. She was filled with adrenaline, scared and exhilarated and excited.
She stepped in close to him, said, “Friday,” without stopping. “The barn on Willow Road. Eight o’clock. Pass the word.”
She kept going, didn’t even look back to see if he heard. She walked back to the cabin, very slowly, expecting every minute to be stopped.
She closed the door behind her.
Mom and Ant looked at her.
“Well?” Mom said quietly.
Loreda nodded. “I told Ike.”
“Good,” Mom said. “Let’s go pick cotton.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, AFTER ANOTHER long, hot day in the fields, there was a letter from Tony and Rose to cheer them all. After supper, the children climbed into bed with Elsa and she opened the envelope and withdrew that letter. It had been written on the back side of Elsa’s last letter to them. No reason to waste paper.
Dearest ones,
It has been a hot, dry summer. The good news is that the wind and dust have given us a respite. No dust storms for ten days. Not enough to call an end to them, but an answer to prayers anyway. August and the first half of September were entirely unpleasant. All we did, it seems, was sweep, but these last few days have so far been kinder. Also, the government has finally realized that the help we most need is water and it is being delivered by the truckload. We pray there will be a crop of winter wheat. At least enough to feed our two new cows and the horse. But hope is hard to come by.
Sending you all much love. Miss you terribly.
Love, Rose and Tony
“Do you think we will ever see them again, Mom?” Loreda asked in the silence that followed Elsa’s reading of the letter.
Elsa leaned back against the rusted metal bed frame. Ant resettled himself, laid his head on her lap. She stroked his hair.
Loreda sat opposite Elsa, against the narrow foot of the bed.
“Remember that house I stopped at in Dalhart, on the day we left for California?”
“The big one with the broken window?”
Elsa nodded. “It was big, all right. I grew up there … in a house that had no heart. My family … rejected me, is I guess the best way to put it. Looks mattered to my family, and my unattractiveness was a fatal flaw.”
“You’re—”
“I am not fishing for compliments, Loreda. And God knows I’m too old for lies. I’m answering your question. This one, and one you haven’t asked in a while. About me and your grandparents and your father. Anyway, my point is that as a girl, I was lonely. I could never understand what I’d done to deserve my isolation. I tried so hard to be lovable.” Elsa drew in a deep breath, released it. “I thought everything had changed when I met your father. And it did. For me. But not for him. He always wanted more than life on the farm. Always. As you know.”
Loreda nodded.
“I loved your dad. I did. But it wasn’t enough for him, and now I realize it wasn’t enough for me, either. He deserved better and so did I.” As she said the unexpected words, Elsa felt them reshape her somehow. “But you know how my life really changed? It wasn’t marriage. It was the farm. Rose and Tony. I found a place to belong, people who loved me, and they became the home I’d dreamed about as a girl. And then you came along and taught me how big love could be.”
“I treated you like you had the plague.”
Elsa smiled. “For a few years. But before all of that, you … You couldn’t stand to be apart. You cried for me at naptime, said you couldn’t sleep without me.”
“I’m sorry,” Loreda said. “For—”
“No sorries. We fought, we struggled, we hurt each other, so what? That’s what love is, I think. It’s all of it. Tears, anger, joy, struggle. Mostly, it’s durable. It lasts. Never once in all of it—the dust, the drought, the fights with you—never once did I stop loving you or Ant or the farm.” Elsa laughed. “So, my long-winded answer to your question is this: Rose and Tony and the farm are home. We will see them all again. Someday.”
“They were crazy,” Loreda said. “Your other family, I mean. And they missed out.”
“On what?”
“You. They never saw how special you are.”
Elsa smiled. “That’s maybe the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Loreda.”
* * *
ON FRIDAY EVENING, AFTER another long day of picking cotton, Elsa and her children snuck out of camp and drove to the end of Willow Road for the strike meeting.
Inside the barn, typewriters clattered; people talked loudly and moved about. Communists, mostly. Not many of the workers were here.
Jack saw them in the doorway and came over. “The growers are getting nervous,” he said. “I heard Welty is fit to be tied.”
“The camp was full of men with guns last night. They didn’t threaten us, but we got the message,” Loreda said.
“We can hardly blame people for staying away,” Jack said.
“The Brennans ain’t comin’,” Ant said. “They said we’re crazy to come.”
“We’re not on grower land. There’s no law saying we can’t talk,” Loreda said.
“Sometimes legal rights don’t matter as much as they should,” Jack said.
Natalia walked up to Jack. As usual she was impeccably dressed, in black pants and a fitted tan blazer with a white silk blouse buttoned to the throat. It was little wonder Loreda idolized the woman. In the midst of a dangerous meeting, she managed to look glamorous and calm. How did a woman become so steady?
“Come,” she said, taking Jack by the arm. “All of you.”
Natalia led them to the barn door.
In the field between the barn and the road, Elsa saw a steady line of vehicles driving toward the barn. One after another, cars parked out front; doors opened. People stepped out, gathered uncertainly; more arrived. More people came on foot across the bare grass pasture.
Elsa saw the way folks moved as they congregated—nervously, eyes darting back to the road and out across the empty fields.
By eight o’clock, Elsa estimated the crowd at over five hundred. More people walked up the road, merged into the audience gathered in front of the barn. They talked among themselves, but quietly. Everyone was afraid to be there, afraid of the consequences of just listening to talk of a strike.
“You should talk to them,” Jack said to Elsa.
She laughed. “Me? Why would anyone listen to me?”
“You know these people. They’d listen to you.”
“Go on,” she said, giving him a shove. “Convince them the way you convinced me.”
Jack hauled a table out from the barn and set it in front of the big double doors, then jumped up on it.
The crowd stilled. Elsa looked out at the familiar faces: folks who’d come from the Midwest or the South, Texas and the Great Plains; folks who’d worked hard all of their lives and still wanted that, who had fallen on such inexplicably hard times that they were confused, undone. All of them thought, or had thought, as Elsa had, that if they could just get an even break, a chance, they could right the ship of their lives.
“Eight years ago, Mexicans picked almost all of the crops in this great valley,” Jack said. “They came across the border, moved into these fields, and picked the crops and moved on. February for peas in Nipomo. June for apricots in Santa Clara. Grapes in August in Fresno, and September here for cotton. They came, they picked, and they returned home for the winter. Invisible to the locals at every stage. Until the Crash of ’29 broke the system and made Californians afraid for their jobs. They feared who Americans always fear: the outsider. So the state cracked down on illegal immigrants and called the Mexicans criminals and deported them. By ’31, the majority of them were gone or in hiding. It would have been a catastrophe for the agriculture business, but then…”—Jack held out his arms—“the Dust Bowl. The drought. The Great Depression. Millions lost their jobs and their homes. You came west, needing jobs, just wanting to put food on your tables and feed your families. You took the Mexicans’ places in the fields. Now, your people make up ninety percent of the pickers. But you don’t want to be unseen, do you? You came to live here, to put down roots, to be Californians.”
“We’re Americans!” someone yelled from the crowd.
“We got every right to be here!”
“Rights,” Jack said, looking out at them. “They matter in America, don’t they?”
“Yes!”
“Here you have the right to be paid for your labor, and fairly. You have the right to a living wage, but you have to fight for it. They won’t just give it to you. They care more about their wallets than your survival. We have to join together. Men, women, and children who pick their crops. We have to band together and rise up and say NO MORE. We won’t be treated as worthless. We are going to make a stand on the sixth of October. Pass the word. We will be peaceful. That’s critical. This is a protest, not a brawl. You will go into the cotton fields and sit down. Simply that. If we can slow the means of production, even for a day, we will get their attention.”
“Their attention is dangerous,” someone yelled. “They’ll want to hurt us.”
“They hurt you every day. We have to remember what we’re fighting for,” Jack said. “On the sixth, my comrades are leading strikes at every field and farm we can throughout the valley. If we can strike everywhere at once, we can—”
Sirens cut him off.
Police. Barreling up the road in cruisers, lights flashing.
“Coppers!” someone yelled.
“Strike on the sixth,” Jack said. “Spread the word. All of us on one day. Every field.”
Behind the police cars were trucks filled with men standing in back holding bats and shovels and clubs.
A man on a loudspeaker, standing in the back of one of the trucks, said, “Please disperse. You are engaged in illegal activity.”
The vehicles pulled up and parked. Men jumped down, carrying their weapons.
The crowd broke apart. People screamed and pushed one another aside.
“Loreda!” Elsa couldn’t see her children in the pandemonium. “Ant!”
People ran in all directions. Those who had driven jumped in their cars and drove away. The others ran for their lives across the fields.
Elsa saw Loreda and Ant, clinging to each other, being carried forward by the tide of people.
She started to run for them, but something hit her in the head, hard, and she fell to the ground unconscious.
* * *
ELSA CAME AWAKE IN stages. Her mouth was dry. She was thirsty.
The last thing she remembered was—
“Loreda! Ant!” She sat up so fast she felt dizzy.
Jack was beside her. “I’m here, Elsa,” he said.
She was in bed. But not in a room she’d ever seen before. There was an empty chair beside the bed.
Jack handed her a glass of water and sat down in the chair.
“Where are my children?”
“Natalia got them to your cabin. She drove your truck back.”
“How do you know this?”
“I told her to. Natalia never fails. She will be in the cabin, with the door locked. She will shoot anyone who tries to harm them.”
“Will they know I’m safe?”
“Natalia knows you are with me, so yes. She trusts me as I trust her.”
“Quite a relationship you two have.”
“We’ve been through a lot together.”
Elsa downed the water and slumped back. There was a ringing in her ears and a painful throbbing in the back of her head. She touched it gingerly. Her fingertips came back bloodied. “What happened?”
“One of their thugs hit you.”
Elsa saw the bloody, scraped ridge of Jack’s knuckles. “You punched him?”
“And then some.” He put a washrag in a basin of water, wrung it out, and placed it on her forehead.
The coolness soothed. “How long ago?”
“An hour, maybe. They got what they wanted: people are scared to strike.”
“They were scared before, Jack, but they showed up. Was anyone besides me hurt?”
“Several. A few were arrested. They burned down the barn. Took all our mimeograph machines and typewriters.”
Elsa glanced around the small room, saw the spartan décor: an old dresse
r, a nightstand with a brass lamp on it, a rag rug. Stacks of papers and books and magazines and newspapers lined every wall, covered most surfaces. No mirror. No closet. Just a few men’s clothes hanging from hooks on the wall. It all had a very temporary look. Or maybe this was how men lived without women in their lives. “Where are we?” she asked, but she knew.
“I sleep here when I’m in town.” He paused.
“Interesting you don’t say you live here.”
“My life. It’s … more of an idea. A cause. Or it has been.”
“What do you mean?”
“For years, I’ve been fighting to make the rich pay their workers a living wage. I hate the inequity between the haves and the have-nots. I’ve been beaten and gone to prison for it. I’ve seen my comrades beaten, but tonight … when I saw you get hit…”
“What?”
“I thought … it’s not worth that.” He looked at her. “You’ve unbalanced me, Elsa.”
Elsa felt a sense of connection but didn’t know what to do with it, how to reach for him without humiliating herself. “I’m not myself around you, either,” was all she could think of to say.
He reached for her hand, held it.
The silence became awkward. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, but what?
“There’s blood on your face and in your hair. Maybe you’d like to bathe before I take you back to your cabin. So the kids don’t see you like this.”
He helped her out of bed and steadied her as they walked into the small bathroom. Jack turned on the water in the porcelain bathtub, and then left her alone.
She undressed and stepped into the bath. With a sigh, she slid down into the hot water.
It relaxed her as nothing had in a long time. She washed her hair and body and felt rejuvenated.
But all the while, she was thinking of Jack.
Do you know how beautiful you are? She had never forgotten him saying those remarkable words, and now, he’d claimed to be unbalanced by her. Certainly, she was equally undone by him.
She stepped out of the tub and dried off, then wrapped the towel around her naked body and reached down for her ragged dress.
The Four Winds Page 37