It was not quite three o’clock in the afternoon when she pulled into Lonesome Tree. The town was quiet, hunkered down in the heat. There were no townspeople out shopping, no women gathered outside the storefronts. Those days were as gone as green lawns.
The hat shop was boarded up, as was the apothecary, the soda fountain, and the diner. The Rialto Movie Theater was hanging on by a thread; it showed one matinee a week, but few could afford to attend. Raggedly dressed people stood in line for food at the Presbyterian church, metal spoons and cups in hand. The children, freckled and sunburned and as whittled down as their parents, were quiet.
The lone tree on Main Street, a plains cottonwood that was the town’s namesake, was dying. Each time Elsa came to town it looked a little worse.
The wagon rolled forward, wheels clacking, passing the boarded-up county welfare building (there was lots of need, but no funds), and the blank-eyed jail that was busier than ever with drifters and hobos and no-account train tramps. The doctor’s office was still open, but the bakery was out of business. Most of the buildings were single story and made of wood. In the wet years, they’d been repainted yearly. Now they were untended and turning gray.
Elsa said, “Whoa, Milo,” and pulled up on the reins. The horse and wagon clanked to a stop. The gelding shook his head, snorted tiredly. He hated being out in this heat, too.
Elsa stared at the Silo Saloon. The squat, square building, half as wide and twice as long as any other Main Street building, had two windows that faced the street. One had been broken last year in a fight between two drunks and had never been fixed. Rows of dirty tape closed the square. The saloon had been built in the 1880s for the cowboys of the three-million-acre XIT Ranch that ran along the Texas–New Mexico border. The ranch was long gone and most of the cowboys had moved on, but the Silo remained.
In the months since Prohibition had been repealed, places like the Silo had reopened for business, but the Depression had left fewer and fewer men with spare pennies for beer.
Elsa tied the gelding to a hitching post and smoothed the front of her damp cotton dress. She’d made the dress herself, from old flour sacks. Everyone made clothes from grain and flour sacks these days. The manufacturers of the sacks had even begun printing pretty designs on the material. It was a small thing, those floral patterns, but anything that made a woman feel pretty in these hard times was worth its weight in gold. Elsa made sure that the dress, once fitted to her figure and now bagging at her narrowing hips and bust, was buttoned up to her throat. It was a sad fact that she was thirty-eight years old, a grown woman with two children, and she still hated to enter a place like this. Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.
Elsa steeled herself and opened the door. Inside, the long, narrow saloon was as drab and untended as the town itself. The smoky air smelled of spilled hooch and men’s sweat. A mahogany bar had been worn to a satin finish by fifty years of men drinking at it. Faded, shredded barstools were positioned along it; most were empty now in the middle of a hot summer day.
Rafe sat slumped on one of them, elbows on the bar, an empty shot glass in front of him, his head hung forward. Black hair curtained his face from view. He wore faded, patched dungarees and a shirt made of plain beige flour-sack fabric. A brown, hand-rolled cigarette burned between two dirty fingers.
In the back of the saloon, an old man chuckled. “Watch out, Rafe. The sheriff’s in town.” His voice was slurred, his mouth almost lost in the tufts of his gray beard.
The barkeep looked up, a dirty rag slung over his shoulder. “Howdy, Elsa,” he said. “You come to pay his tab?”
Perfect. There was no money to buy the children new shoes or to replace her last pair of stockings, and now her husband was drinking on credit.
She felt awkward and unattractive in her baggy flour-sack dress and thick cotton hose, with the fraying leather of her shoes making her big feet look even bigger.
“Rafe?” she said quietly, coming up behind him, laying a bare hand on his shoulder, hoping to gentle him with touch, as she would a skittish colt.
“I meant to have one drink.” He let out a ragged sigh.
Elsa couldn’t count the number of times her husband’s sentences began with I meant. In the first years of their marriage, he’d tried. She’d seen him trying to love her, to be happy, but the drought had drained her husband, just as it had dried out the land. In the past four years, he’d stopped spinning dreams for the future. Three years ago, they’d buried a son, but even that loss hadn’t broken him the way poverty and the drought had. “Your father was counting on you to help him plant fall potatoes this afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
“The kids need potatoes,” Elsa said.
He cocked his head, just enough so he could see her through the dust black of his hair. “You think I don’t know that?”
I think you’ve been sitting here drinking up what little money we have, so how can I know what you know? Loreda needs new shoes, she thought but didn’t dare say out loud.
“I’m a bad father, Elsa, and a worse husband. Why do you stay with me?”
Because I love you.
The look in his dark eyes broke her heart yet again. She did love her husband as deeply as she loved her children, Loreda and Anthony, and as deeply as she’d come to love the Martinellis and the land. Elsa had discovered within herself a nearly bottomless capacity for love. And, God help her, it was her doomed, unshakable love for Rafe, as much as anything, that repeatedly rendered her mute, made her withdraw so that she wouldn’t seem pathetic. Sometimes, especially on the nights he didn’t come to their bed at all, she felt she deserved better and that maybe if she stood up and demanded more, she would receive it. Then she would remember the things her parents had said about her, the unattractiveness that had never changed, and she would remain silent.
“Come on, Elsa, take me home. I can’t wait to spend the rest of the day rooting through the dirt to plant potatoes that will die without rain.”
She steadied him as he stumbled out of the saloon, and helped him up into the wagon. She took the reins and slapped them across the bay gelding’s butt. Milo snorted tiredly and began the long, plodding journey through town, past the abandoned grange hall where the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs used to meet.
Rafe leaned against Elsa, placing a gentle, long-fingered hand on her thigh. “I’m sorry, Els,” he said in his soft-spoken, what-have-I-done voice.
“It’s okay,” she said, meaning it from the bottom of her heart. As long as he was beside her, it was okay. She would always forgive him. As little as he gave her, as frayed as his affection for her sometimes was, she lived in fear of losing it. Losing him. Just as she feared losing her moody, adolescent daughter’s love.
Lately, that fear had grown almost too big to handle.
Loreda had turned twelve and immediately become angry. Gone overnight were the days of mother-daughter gardening and reading hour at night, when they’d discussed Heathcliff’s nature and Jane Eyre’s strength. Loreda had always been a daddy’s girl, but as a child she’d had room in her heart for both of her parents. For everyone, really. Loreda had been the happiest of children, always laughing and clapping and demanding attention. For years, she had only been able to sleep if Elsa was in bed with her, stroking her hair.
Gone, all of it.
Elsa grieved daily for the loss of that closeness with her firstborn. At first she’d tried to scale the walls of her daughter’s adolescent, irrational anger; she’d volleyed back with words of love, but Loreda’s continuing, thriving impatience with Elsa had done worse than grind her down. It had resurrected all the insecurities of childhood. Somewhere along the way, Elsa had begun to withdraw from Loreda, first hoping that her daughter would grow out of her mood swings, and then—worse—believing that Loreda had finally seen the lack in Elsa that her own family had seen.
Elsa felt
a deeply rooted shame in her daughter’s rejection. In her hurt, she did what she’d always done: she disappeared. But all the while, she waited, prayed, that both her husband and her daughter would someday see how much she loved them and they would love her in return. Until then, she dared not push too hard or demand too much. The price could be too high.
There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.
* * *
ON THIS FIRST DAY of school, the town’s only remaining teacher, Nicole Buslik, stood at the chalkboard, chalk in hand. Her auburn hair had worked free from its constraints and become a fuzzy nimbus around her heat-flushed face. Sweat turned the lace at her throat a shade darker and Loreda was pretty sure Mrs. Buslik was afraid to lift her arms and show sweat stains.
Twelve-year-old Loreda sat at her desk, slumped forward, not paying attention to today’s lesson. It was just more blather about what had gone wrong. The Great Depression, the drought, blah, blah, blah.
It had been “hard times” for as long as Loreda could remember. Oh, in the early years, the time before memory, she knew rains had fallen, season after season, nourishing the land. Pretty much all Loreda remembered of the green years was the sight of her grandfather’s wheat, golden stalks dancing beneath an enormous blue sky. The sound of rustling. The image of tractors rolling over the ground twenty-four hours a day, plowing the earth, churning up more and more fields. A horde of mechanical insects chewing up the ground.
When had the bad years begun, exactly? It was hard to pinpoint. There were so many choices. The stock market crash of 1929, some would say, but not the folks around here. Loreda had been seven years old then, and she remembered some of that time. Folks lined up outside the savings and loan. Grandpa complaining about bad wheat prices. Grandma lighting candles and keeping them lit, whispering prayers with her rosary.
That had been bad, the crash, but most of the hardship landed in cities Loreda had never been to. Nineteen twenty-nine had been a good rain year, which meant a good crop year, which meant times had been good enough for the Martinellis.
Grandpa kept riding his tractor, kept planting wheat, even as the prices plummeted because of the Depression. He’d even bought a brand-new Ford Model AA stake-bed farm truck. Daddy had smiled often then and told her stories of faraway lands while Mom did chores.
The last good crop had been 1930, the year Loreda turned eight. She remembered her birthday. A beautiful spring day. Presents. Grandma’s tiramisu with candles poking up from the cocoa-powder topping. Her best friend, Stella, had been allowed to spend the night for the first time. Daddy had taught them how to dance the Charleston while Grandpa accompanied them on the fiddle.
And then the rains slowed and never started up again. Drought.
These days, green fields were a distant memory, a mirage of her youth. The adults looked as parched as the ground. Grandpa spent hours standing in his dead wheat fields, scooping the dry earth into his callused hands, watching it fall away through his fingers. He grieved for his dying grapes and told anyone who would listen that he’d brought the first vines from Italy, stuffed in his pockets. Grandma had built altars everywhere, doubled the number of crucifixes on the walls, and made them all pray for rain each Sunday. Sometimes the whole town came together in the schoolhouse to pray for rain. All different religions begging God for moisture: the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Irish and the Italian Catholics, each in their own rows. The Mexicans had their own church built hundreds of years ago.
Everyone talked about the drought constantly and missed the good old days. Except her mother.
Loreda sighed heavily.
Had there ever been any fun in her mother? If so, it was another of Loreda’s lost memories. Sometimes, when she lay in bed, drifting toward sleep, she thought she remembered the sound of her mother’s laughter, the feel of her touch, even a whispered, Be brave, just before a good-night kiss.
More and more, though, those memories felt manufactured, false. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother laughed about anything.
All Mom did was work.
Work, work, work. As if that would save them.
Loreda couldn’t remember when exactly she’d begun to be angered by her mother’s … disappearance. There was no other word for it. Her mother rose well before the sun and worked. Day after day. Hour after hour. She harped constantly about saving food and not dirtying clothes and not wasting water.
Loreda couldn’t imagine how her handsome, charming, funny father had ever fallen in love with Mom. Loreda had once told her father that Mom seemed afraid of laughter. He had said, “Now, Lolo,” in that way of his, with his head cocked and a smile that meant he wouldn’t talk of it. He never complained about his wife, but Loreda knew how he felt, so she complained for him. It brought them closer, proved how alike they were, she and Daddy.
As alike as peas in a pod. Everyone said so.
Like Daddy, Loreda saw how limited life was on a wheat farm in the Texas Panhandle, and she had no intention of becoming like her mother. She was not going to sit on this dying wheat farm for her whole life, withering and wrinkling beneath a sun so hot it melted rubber. She was not going to waste her every prayer on rain. Not a chance.
She was going to travel the world and write about her adventures. Someday she would be as famous as Nellie Bly.
Someday.
She watched a brown field mouse creep along the baseboard under the window. It stopped at the teacher’s desk, sipped at a blot of fallen ink. When it looked up, blue painted its tiny nose.
Loreda elbowed Stella Devereaux, who sat at the desk next to Loreda.
Stella looked up, bleary-eyed from the heat.
Loreda indicated the mouse.
Stella almost smiled.
A bell rang and the mouse ran into the corner and disappeared into its hole.
Loreda got to her feet. Her flour-sack dress felt sticky with sweat. She grabbed her book bag and fell into step with Stella. Usually they’d be talking nonstop on the way out, about boys or books or places they wanted to see or movies coming to the Rialto Theater, but today it was too hot to make the effort.
Loreda’s little brother, Anthony, was the first one to the door, as usual. At seven, Ant ran like an unbroken colt, all bent elbows and loose joints. More spirited than any of the other children, Ant always had a spring in his step. He was dressed in faded, patched dungarees that were inches too short, the ragged hems revealing ankles as skinny as broom handles and shoes with holes in the toes. His freckled, angular face was tanned to the color of saddle leather, with big red patches of sunburn on his cheeks. A cap hid the fact that his black hair was dirty. Outside, he saw his parents in the wagon and waved broadly and started to run. He had never known anything but drought, not really, and so he played and laughed like an ordinary boy. Stella’s younger sister, Sophia, tried gamely to keep up with him.
“How does your mom always sit up so tall in this heat?” Stella said. She was the only kid in class wearing new shoes and a dress made from real gingham. Times weren’t so bad for the Devereaux family, but Loreda’s grandpa said all the banks were in trouble.
“It doesn’t matter how hot it is, she never complains.”
“My mom doesn’t say much, either, but you should hear my sister. Ever since she got married, she cries like a stuck pig about all the work it takes to be a wife.”
“I ain’t getting married,” Loreda said. “My dad and me are going to go to Hollywood together someday.”
“Your mom won’t mind?”
Loreda shrugged. Who knew what bothered her mom? And who cared?
Stella and Sophia turned left and headed toward their home on the other side of town.
Ant ran up to the wagon.
“Hey, Mommy,” Ant said, his grin showing off a new lost tooth. “Daddy.”
“Howdy, son,” Daddy said. “Climb into the back.”
/> “D’ya wanna see what I drew in class today? Missus Buslik says—”
“Get in the wagon, Anthony,” Daddy said. “I’ll see your artwork at home, when the sun goes down and we are out of this damnable heat.”
Ant’s face fell in disappointment.
Loreda hated how sad and beaten her dad looked. The drought was sucking him dry. He and Loreda were bright stars who needed to shine. He said so all the time. “You wanna go to the movies tomorrow, Daddy?” she said, staring up at him adoringly. “Little Miss Marker is playing again.”
“There’s no money for that, Loreda,” Mom said. “Climb in the back with your brother.”
“How about—”
“Get in the wagon, Loreda,” Mom said.
Loreda tossed her book bag into the back of the wagon and climbed in. She and Ant sat close together on the dusty old quilt that they kept in the back.
Mom snapped the reins and they were off.
Swaying with the motion of the wagon, Loreda stared out at the dry land. The air smelled of dust and heat. They passed the rotting carcass of a steer, its ribs sticking up, its horns reaching out from the sand. Flies buzzed around it. A crow landed on the carcass, cawed proprietarily, and began plucking at the bones. There was an abandoned Model T beside it, doors open, tires buried up to the axle in dry soil.
To their left stood a small farmhouse, unshaded by trees, surrounded by brown earth. A pair of signs—AUCTION and FORECLOSURE—were hammered to the front door.
In the yard, a jalopy was stuffed to the gills with people and junk. Tied to the back end were a stack of buckets, a cast-iron frying pan, and a wooden crate full of mason jars and sacks of wheat. The running engine puffed black smoke into the air and rattled the metal frame. Pots and pans had been tied wherever there was something to tie them to. Two children stood on the rusty running boards and a woman with a sad face and lanky hair sat in the passenger seat holding a baby.
The Four Winds Page 6
