“I have to.”
Elsa fished the long-unused keys from the junk bucket in the kitchen and went back out into the blasting, gritty dust storm. She pulled her bandanna up around her mouth and nose and squinted to protect her eyes.
Wind swirled in front of her. Static electricity made her hair stand up. Out where the fence used to be, she saw blue fires flare up from the barbed wire.
Feeling her way in the dust storm, she found the line they’d strung between the house and the barn.
She pulled herself along the rough rope toward the barn, flung the doors open. Wind swept through, breaking slats away, terrifying the horses.
Bruno bolted out of his stall, through a broken slat, and stood in the aisle, nostrils quivering in fear, panicked. He snorted at Elsa and ran out into the storm.
Elsa pulled the cover off the truck; the wind yanked the canvas from her grasp and sent it flying like an open sail into the hayloft. Milo whinnied in terror from his stall.
Elsa climbed into the driver’s seat and stabbed the key into the ignition, turned hard. The engine coughed reluctantly to life. Please let there be enough gas to find her.
She drove out of the barn and into the storm, her hands tight on the wheel as the wind tried to push her into the ditch. A chain tied to the axle rattled along behind her, grounding the truck so the vehicle wouldn’t short out.
In front of her, brown dirt blew sideways, her two headlights spearing into the gloom. At the end of the driveway, she thought: Which way?
Town.
Loreda would never turn the other way. There was nothing for miles between here and the Oklahoma border.
Elsa muscled the truck into a turn. The wind was behind her now, pushing her forward. She leaned forward, trying to see. She couldn’t drive more than ten miles an hour.
In town, they’d turned the streetlamps on in the storm. Windows had been boarded up and doors battened down. Dust and sand and dirt and tumbleweeds blew down the street.
Elsa saw Loreda at the train depot, huddled against the closed door, hanging on to a suitcase the storm was trying to yank out of her hand.
Elsa parked the truck and got out. Thin halos of golden light glowed at the streetlamps, pinpricks in the brown murk.
“Loreda!” she screamed, her voice thin and scratchy in the maw.
“Mom!”
Elsa leaned into the storm; it ripped her dress and scraped her cheeks and blinded her. She staggered up the depot steps and pulled Loreda into her arms, holding her so tightly that for a second there was no storm, no wind clawing or sand biting, just them.
Thank you, God.
“We need to get into the depot,” she said.
“The door’s locked.”
A window exploded beside them. Elsa let go of Loreda and clawed her way to the broken window, climbed over the glass teeth in the sill, felt sharp points jab her skin.
Once inside, she unlocked the front door and pulled Loreda inside and slammed the door shut.
The depot rattled around them; another window cracked. Elsa went to the water fountain and scooped up some lukewarm water and carried it back to Loreda, who drank greedily.
Elsa slumped down beside her daughter. Her eyes stung so badly she could hardly see.
“I’m sorry, Loreda.”
“He wanted to go west, didn’t he?” Loreda said.
The walls of the depot clattered and shook; the world felt as if it were falling apart.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you just say yes?”
Elsa sighed. “Your brother has no shoes. There’s no money for gas. There’s no money for anything. Your grandparents won’t leave. All I saw were reasons not to go.”
“I got here, and I didn’t know where to go. He didn’t want me to know.”
“I know.”
Elsa touched her daughter’s back.
Loreda yanked sideways and scuttled away from the touch.
Elsa brought her hand back and sat there, knowing there was nothing she could say to fix this breach with her daughter. Rafe had abandoned them both, walked out on his children and his responsibilities, and it was still Elsa whom Loreda blamed.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, AFTER THE storm quieted, Elsa drove back to the farmhouse with Loreda. Somehow, Elsa found the strength to get herself and the children fed, and finally she tucked them into bed. All without crying in front of anyone. It felt like a major triumph. In the hours after Rafe’s abandonment, Rose’s pain had turned to seething anger that showed itself in outbursts in Italian. Loreda’s despair had left her mute during their evening meal, and Ant’s confusion was painful to see. Tony made eye contact with no one.
It occurred to Elsa as she walked into her bedroom—finally—that she hadn’t spoken in a long time, hadn’t bothered to even respond when spoken to. The pain of him leaving kept expanding inside of her, taking up more and more space.
There was no wind outside now, no forces of nature trying to break down the walls. Only silence. An occasional coyote howl, an every-now-and-then scurrying of some insect across their floor, but nothing else.
Elsa walked to the chest of drawers beneath the window. She opened Rafe’s drawer to look at the only shirt he’d left behind. All she had of him now.
She picked it up, a pale blue chambray with brass snaps. She’d made it for him one Christmas. There was still a small brownish-red mark of her blood on one cuff, where she’d poked herself in the sewing.
She wrapped the shirt around her neck as if it were a scarf and walked aimlessly out into the starlit night, going nowhere. Maybe she would start walking and never stop … or never take this scarf off until one day, when she was old and gray, some child would ask about the crazy woman who wore a shirt for a scarf and she would say she couldn’t recall how it had begun or whose shirt it was.
As she neared the mailbox, she saw Bruno, their gelding, dead, caught in the dried branches of the fallen trees, dirt caked in his open mouth. Tomorrow, they would have to dig into the hard, dry earth to bury him. Another terrible chore, another goodbye.
With a sigh, she walked back to the house, got into bed. The mattress felt too large for her alone, even if she spread her arms and legs wide. She folded her arms over her chest as if she were a corpse being washed and readied for burial, and stared up at the dusty ceiling.
All those years, all those prayers, all her hope that at last, someday, she would be loved, that her husband would turn to her and see her and love what he saw … gone.
Her parents had been right about her all along.
ELEVEN
Loreda knew she couldn’t blame her mother for Daddy abandoning them, or not entirely. That was the sad, sorry truth she’d come to after a long and sleepless night.
Daddy had left them all. Once she’d seen that fact, she couldn’t unsee it. Daddy had filled Loreda’s head with dreams and told her he loved her, but in the end, he’d left her and walked away.
It made her feel hopeless for the first time in her life.
When she got up the next morning and saw the blue sky outside her window, she dressed in the same dirty clothes she’d run away in and didn’t bother to brush her hair or teeth. What was the point? She was never going to get off this farm and if she didn’t, who cared what she looked like?
She found Grandma Rose in the kitchen, with a breakfast of creamed wheat cereal bubbling on the stove. Grandma looked … clenched. There was no other word for it. She kept talking to herself in Italian, a language she refused to teach her grandchildren because she wanted them to be Americans.
Ant shuffled into the kitchen, kicking through the inch of dirt that covered the floor, and Loreda pulled out a chair for him at the oilcloth-draped table, where the bowls sat upside down at their places, covered in more dirt.
Loreda turned the bowls over and wiped them out, then sat down beside her brother, whose hunched shoulders made him look even younger as he ate cereal so tasteless that even cream and butter couldn’t make it
palatable.
Grandpa walked into the kitchen, buckling his tattered, patched overalls. “Coffee smells good, Rose.” He tousled Ant’s dirty hair.
Ant started to cry. It ended in a hacking cough. Loreda reached out to hold his hand. She felt like crying, too.
“How could he leave them?” Grandpa said to Grandma, who looked stricken.
“Silenzio,” she hissed. “What good are words?”
Grandpa released a heavy breath; the exhalation ended in a cough. He pressed a hand to his chest, as if the dirt from yesterday’s storm had collected there.
Grandma Rose reached for the broom and dustpan. Loreda groaned out loud. They’d spend a whole day digging out from yesterday’s storm—beating rugs, scooping dirt from windowsills, washing everything in the cupboards and putting it away again, upside down. And still more sweeping.
There was a knock at the front door.
“Daddy!” Loreda yelled, leaping to her feet.
She ran for the door, jerked it open.
The man standing there was dressed in rags, his face filthy.
He yanked off his tattered newsboy cap, curled it in his dirty hands.
Hungry. Like all the hobos who stopped by here on their way “there.”
This was what her daddy wanted? To be starving and alone, knocking on some stranger’s door for food? That was better than staying?
Grandma moved in beside Loreda.
“I’m hungry, ma’am. If you’ve got any vittles to share, I’d be much obliged.” The hobo’s shirt was so discolored by dirt and sweat that it was impossible to determine its original color. Blue, maybe. Or gray. He wore dungarees with a belt he’d cinched tight at his waist. “I’d be happy to do some chores.”
“We have cereal,” Grandpa said. “And the porch could use sweeping.”
They were used to hobos stopping by at mealtime, begging for food or offering work for a slice of bread. In times this hard, folks did what they could for those less fortunate. Most hobos did a chore or two and then headed off again. One of the tramps had drawn a symbol on their barn. A message to other wanderers. Supposedly it meant, Stop here. Good folks.
Grandpa studied the vagrant. “Where are you from, son?”
“Arkansas, sir.”
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty-two, sir.”
“How long you been on the road?”
“Long enough to get where I was a-goin’, if’n I knew where that was.”
“What makes a man just up and leave? Can you tell me that?” Grandpa asked.
They all looked at the hobo, who seemed to wrestle with the question. “Well, sir. I reckon you leave when you just can’t stand your life where it is.”
“And what about the family you left behind?” Grandma asked sharply. “Doesn’t a man care what happens to his wife and kids?”
“If he did, he’d stay, I reckon,” the hobo said.
“That ain’t true,” Loreda said.
“Let’s get you that cereal, shall we?” Grandma said. “No use talking the day away.”
* * *
“LOREDA.” ANT TUGGED ON Loreda’s sleeve. “Sumpin’s wrong with Mommy.”
Loreda pushed the tangled hair out of her eyes and leaned on the broom. She’d been sweeping long enough and hard enough to work up a sweat. “What do you mean?”
“She won’t wake up.”
“That’s silly. Grandma said to let her sleep.”
Ant’s shoulders slumped. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Fine.”
Loreda followed Ant into their parents’ bedroom. The small room was usually as neat as a pin, but now there was dirt everywhere, even on the bed. It was a sharp reminder that Dad had abandoned them; Mom hadn’t even bothered to sweep before going to bed. And Mom was crazy about clean. “Mom?”
Mom lay in the double bed, her body positioned as far to the right as she could go, so that there was a big blank space to her left. She wore a dirty kerchief and a nightdress so old the cotton showed her skin in places. A blue chambray work shirt—Daddy’s—lay coiled around her neck. Her face was almost as pale as the sheet, with her sharp cheekbones standing out above sunken cheeks.
Mom was always pale. Even out in the summer sun, she burned and peeled. She never tanned. But this …
She pushed Mom’s shoulder gently. “Wake up, Mom.”
Nothing.
“Go get Grandma. She’s milking Bella,” Loreda said to Ant.
Loreda poked her mom’s arm, this time not gently. “Wake up, Mom. This isn’t funny.”
Loreda stared down at the woman who had always seemed indomitable, unyielding, humorless. Now she saw how delicate her mother was, how thin and pale. Lying in bed, wearing Daddy’s shirt as a scarf, she looked fragile.
It was scary.
“Wake up, Mom. Come on.”
Grandma walked into the room, carrying an empty metal bucket. “What’s wrong?” Ant was right behind her, staying close.
“Mom won’t wake up.”
Grandma put down the metal bucket and lifted the cement-sack towel that covered the cracked porcelain pitcher on the nightstand. Silt-fine dust sifted to the floor. She dipped a washrag into water and wrung the excess into the basin, then placed the washrag on Mom’s forehead. “She isn’t feverish,” Grandma said. Then: “Elsa?”
Mom didn’t respond.
Grandma dragged a chair into the room and sat down by the bed. For a long time, she said nothing, just sat there. Then, finally, she sighed. “He left us, too, Elsa. It is not only you. He left all the people he said he loved. I’ll never forgive him for that.”
“Don’t say that!” Loreda said.
“Silenzio,” Grandma said. “A woman can die of a broken heart. Do not make it worse.”
“It’s her fault he left. She wouldn’t go to California.”
“In your vast experience with men and love, you decide this. Thank you for your genius, Loreda. I’m sure it’s a comfort to your mama.”
Grandma dabbed the cool wet washcloth on Mom’s forehead. “I know how much it hurts right now, Elsa. You can’t unlove someone even if you want to, even if he breaks your heart. I understand not wanting to wake up. Lord, with this life of ours, who could blame you. But your daughter needs you, especially now. She is as foolish as her father. Ant worries me, too.” Grandma leaned closer, whispered, “Remember the first time you held Loreda and we both cried? Remember your son’s laugh and how he squeezes so hard when he hugs you. Your children, Elsa. Remember Loreda … Anthony…”
Mom drew in a sharp, ragged breath, and sat up sharply, as if she’d been thrown ashore, and Grandma steadied her, took her in her arms and held her.
Loreda had never heard sobbing like this. She thought Mom might simply break in half at the force of her crying. When she was finally able to breathe without sobbing, Mom drew back, looking ravaged. There was no other word for it.
“Loreda, Ant, please leave us,” Grandma said.
“What’s wrong with her?” Loreda asked.
“Passion has a dark edge. If your father had ever grown up, he would have told you this instead of filling your head with fluff.”
“Passion? What does that have to do with anything?”
“She’s too young to understand, Rose,” Elsa said.
Loreda hated to be told she was too young for anything. “I am not. Passion is good. Great. I long for it.”
Grandma waved a hand impatiently. “Passion is a thunderstorm, there and gone. It nourishes, sì, but it drowns, too. Our land will save and protect you. This is something your father never learned. Be smarter than your selfish, foolish father, cara. Marry a man of the land, one who is reliable and true. One who will keep you steady.”
Marriage again. Her grandmother’s answer to every question. As if marrying well meant a good life. “How about if I just get a dog? It sounds about as exciting as the life you want for me.”
“My son has spoiled you, Loreda, let you read too m
any romantic books. It will be the ruin of you.”
“Reading? I doubt it.”
“Out,” Grandma said, pointing to the door. “Now.”
“I don’t want to be here anyway,” Loreda said. “Come on, Ant.”
“Good,” Grandma said. “It’s laundry day. Go get us water.”
Loreda should have left five minutes ago.
* * *
“HE NEVER LOVED ME,” Elsa said. “Why would he?”
“Ah, cara…” Rose scooted closer, reached out to place her rough, work-reddened hand on Elsa’s. “You know I lost three daughters. Three. Two who never breathed in this world and one who did. But never did we really speak of it.” Rose drew in a deep breath, exhaled it. “Each one I allowed myself to mourn briefly. I made myself believe in God’s plan for me. I went to church and lit candles and prayed. I was never in my life as afraid as when I carried Raffaello in my womb. He was so busy in there. I found I couldn’t think of him as anything but healthy and I grew afraid of my hope. If I saw a black cat, I would burst into tears. Spilled olive oil could send me rushing to church to combat bad luck. I didn’t knit a single pair of booties or make a blanket or sew a christening gown. What I did do, it seems, was imagine him. He became real to me in a way the girls had not. When he finally was born—so hearty and hale and too beautiful to bear—I knew that God had forgiven me for whatever sin I’d committed that cost me my daughters. I loved him so much, I … couldn’t discipline him, couldn’t deny him. Tony told me I was spoiling him, but I thought, how could it hurt? He was a shooting star and he blinded me with his light. I … wanted so much for him. I wanted him to know love and prosperity and to be an American.”
“And I came along.”
Rose was still for a moment. “I remember every bit of that day. He was packed to go to college. College. A Martinelli. I was so proud, I’d told everyone.”
“And then, me.”
“Skinny as a willow switch, you were. Hair that needed tending. You looked like a young woman who didn’t know how to smile. And you were too old for him, I thought.”
The Four Winds Page 12
