The Four Winds

by Kristin Hannah

  Mr. Gerald pulled a pink slip of paper out of his shirt pocket. “This is a formal foreclosure on your back one hundred sixty acres. Unless you repay your debt in full in the time stated, we will auction off that section of land on April sixteenth to the highest bidder.”

  * * *

  ELSA’S SHOES SANK INTO the deep sand every now and then, upsetting her balance as she and Tony walked to town. On either side of the road, abandoned farmhouses and automobiles were buried in drifts of dirt; sometimes all she could see of a shed was the roof’s peak, sticking up from a dune. Telephone poles had fallen down. Not a bird called out.

  In town, an otherworldly quiet reigned. No automobiles rumbled up the street, no horses clopped in a steady rhythm. The school bell had been ripped away in the eleven-day storm and still hadn’t been found. No doubt it was buried and would be revealed when the wind returned and shifted the landscape yet again.

  At the makeshift hospital, Elsa came to a stop. “I’ll meet you in thirty minutes?”

  Tony nodded. He pulled the patched gray hat down over his eyes and headed toward the schoolhouse for the town meeting, his shoulders already slumped in defeat. No one expected much from the government man’s return.

  When Elsa entered the shadowy hospital, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the hazy gloom. People hacked and coughed; babies cried. Tired nurses moved from bed to bed.

  Elsa smiled at masked patients as she passed them. Most were either very young or very old.

  Ant sat up in his narrow cot, pretending swordplay with a fork and a spoon. “Take that, matey,” he said, clanging the fork into the spoon. His voice was still rough and the gas mask sat in readiness on the small table beside him. “You’re no match for the Shadow!”

  “Hey there,” Elsa said, sitting down on the edge of his bed. He looked so much better today. For the past ten days, Ant had been lethargic and had remained listless even when someone came to visit. Here though, finally, was her boy. He’s back. Elsa’s relief was so sudden and staggering she felt tears sting her eyes.

  “Mommy!” He launched himself at her, hugged her so fiercely she almost fell off the bed. She had difficulty letting him go.

  “I’m playing pirates,” he said, grinning at her.

  “You lost a tooth.”

  “I did! And I really lost it. Nurse Sally thinks I swallowed it.”

  Elsa lifted the basket she’d brought with her. Inside was a bottle of orzata, the sweet syrupy drink they made each year from almonds purchased at the general store. This was the last precious bottle they had, made years ago and hoarded for special occasions. Elsa added a splash of it to a bottle she’d filled with canned milk and shook it to make bubbles, then handed it to Ant.

  “Jeepers,” he said, savoring his first sip. She knew he would try to drink it slowly and make it last, but he wouldn’t be able to.

  “And this,” Elsa said, producing a single sugar cookie glazed with sweet icing.

  Ant nibbled the cookie like a mouse, starting around the edges, working his way in to the chewy center.

  “It looks like one lucky little boy has a mom who loves him,” said the doctor, stopping by the bed.

  Elsa stood. “He looks better today, Doctor.”

  “He must be improving; the nurses tell me he’s becoming a handful,” Dr. Rheinhart said, ruffling Ant’s hair. “His fever finally broke last night and his breathing is much improved. He is absolutely on the mend. I want to keep an eye on him for a few days, but that’s just to be safe.”

  Elsa offered the doctor a cookie. “It’s not much, I know.”

  The doctor took the cookie and smiled, taking a bite. “So, Ant, would you like to go home soon?”

  “Boy, would I, Doc. My toy soldiers miss me.”

  “How about Tuesday?”

  “Yippee!” Ant said. A little cough accompanied his enthusiastic cry. Elsa’s heart clutched at the sound. Would she feel a rush of fear at every cough from now on? “Thank you, Doctor,” she said.

  He gave her a tired smile. “See you Tuesday.”

  Elsa sat back down beside her son. His favorite book lay waiting for them. The Tale of Little Pig Robinson by Beatrix Potter. He could listen over and over to the story of Little Pig’s escape on a rowboat to the land where the Bong-Tree grows, loving it anew each time. Or maybe it was the familiarity he loved, the idea that every time it ended in the same way.

  He snuggled into the crook of her arm, eating the cookie while she read to him. Finally, she closed the book.

  “Yah gotta go?” he said, looking forlorn.

  “The doc wants to keep you here for a few days, just to make sure you’re well, but in no time at all, we will be off on our adventure.”

  “To California,” he said.

  “To California.” Elsa pulled him into her arms and held him tightly, then kissed his forehead and whispered, “’Bye, baby boy.”

  Leaving him was always hard, but finally, there was hope. Ant would be coming home soon.

  Outside, she glanced down the street and saw people coming out of the school. A glum, quiet gathering. She saw Tony exchange a few words with Mr. Carrio, then shake his hand.

  Elsa waited for Tony on the boardwalk. He moved slowly toward her, looking beaten.

  “How’s our boy?” Tony asked.

  “Doc says he can leave on Tuesday. Any news from the government man?” Elsa asked

  Tony gave her a look so steeped in despair it took her breath away. “No good news,” he said.

  Elsa nodded.

  They started the long, solemn walk home.

  * * *

  IN TWO DAYS, THEY were leaving this godforsaken land. And Elsa didn’t say that lightly.

  God forsaken.

  How else could one describe it? God had turned His back on the Great Plains.

  She’d spent the last few days packing for the trip. On this Palm Sunday, instead of going to church, Elsa had canned the jackrabbits Tony and Loreda shot yesterday; when that laborious chore was done, she’d moved on to the laundry.

  Now at the end of the blue-skied day, Elsa knelt in front of her little aster plant, pouring a few precious cupfuls of water into the thirsty ground.

  This flower, which she’d covered and protected and watered and talked to for so long, stood alone, defiantly green against all this brown.

  She would have to leave it behind to die.

  She dug up the small, tender plant. Carrying it in a bowl made from her gloved hands, she crossed the yard.

  At the family’s cemetery, the white picket fence lay in pieces; the headstones were half covered in dirt. Four gray, store-bought headstones with Rose’s and Elsa’s babies’ names inscribed on them. Three girls and a boy.

  How long would these markers last in the wind? And when the Martinellis were gone, who would tend to their children, buried all alone in the middle of nowhere?

  Elsa knelt in the sand. “Maria, Angelina, Juliana, Lorenzo. This is all I can leave with you. I will pray it rains this spring so it flowers.” She planted the flower in the powdery dirt in front of Lorenzo’s half-buried headstone.

  The aster sagged immediately, slumped to one side.

  Elsa would not cry over this one little flower.

  She closed her eyes in prayer. Too soon, she wiped her eyes and got slowly to her feet. As she straightened, she saw a black shadow rising in the distance; the blackest thing she’d ever seen, it lifted into the dark-blue early-evening sky, spread enormous black wings outward. Static electricity tingled the back of her neck, lifted her hair.

  A black storm?

  Whatever it was, it was moving this way. Fast.

  She ran for the house, met Rose in the yard.

  “Madonna mia,” Rose said. They stared at the blackness billowing toward them; it had to be a mile high. Birds flew overhead, hundreds of them, flying at their greatest speed.

  Tony ran out of the barn and stood with them, watching.

  It was eerily silent. Calm. There was no wind. />
  A burning smell filled Elsa’s nostrils. The air felt sticky.

  Static electricity arced in little bursts of blue fire through the air, dancing on bits of barbed wire and the windmill’s metal blades. Birds fell from the sky.

  All at once: complete darkness. Dust clogged their eyes and noses.

  Elsa clamped a hand over her mouth and held on to her mother-in-law. The three of them made it to the house, stumbled up the stairs. Tony opened the door and shoved the women inside.

  “Mom!” Loreda screamed. “What’s happening?”

  Elsa couldn’t see her daughter; that was how dark it was. She couldn’t see her own hands.

  Tony slammed the door shut behind them. “Rose, help me with the windows.”

  “Loreda,” Elsa yelled. “Put on your gas mask. Get to the kitchen. Sit under the table.”

  “But—”

  “Go,” Elsa said to the daughter she couldn’t see.

  Elsa and Rose felt their way from room to room, closing the windows and covering them and pressing newspapers and oilcloth in every crack and crevice.

  They kept their supplies—Vaseline, sponges, bandannas—in a basket in the kitchen. Elsa carried it through the inky dark and found a flashlight, clicked it on.

  Nothing. Just a click.

  “Is it on?” Rose asked, coughing.

  “Who knows?” Elsa said.

  “We need to get under the table, drape it with wet sheets,” Rose said.

  Something hit the house hard, a terrible thwack. Window glass shattered in a series of loud cracks and clattered to the floor.

  The front door was ripped open. The swirling, biting black monster of a storm whooshed inside, hitting so hard Rose stumbled sideways. Tony raced over to shut the door again, and threw the bolt shut.

  They found the buckets they kept filled with water in the kitchen and soaked some sheets to drape over the table and then dampened sponges and pressed them to their faces, breathing hard through them.

  Elsa heard Loreda breathing heavily through the gas mask. She crawled forward, found the kitchen table. Pushing chairs aside, she crawled underneath it.

  “I’m here, Loreda,” she said, reaching out.

  Elsa felt Loreda take her hand. They were sitting together, side by side, but couldn’t see each other. Thank God Ant wasn’t here.

  Rose and Tony squeezed in under the table, past the draping of wet sheets.

  Elsa held her daughter close as boards were ripped away and windows broke.

  The walls shook so hard it seemed the house would shatter.

  Suddenly it was freezing.

  * * *

  ELSA WOKE TO SILENCE; in it, she heard the wheezing cant of Loreda’s labored breathing through the gas mask. Then, a scuttling sound—a mouse, probably—coming out of hiding, scurrying over the floor.

  She pulled down her crusty, dirt-filled bandanna and peeled away the muddy sponge she’d been breathing through. Her first unprotected breath hurt all the way down her throat and into the pit of her gnawing, empty stomach.

  She opened her eyes. Grit scraped her eyeballs.

  Dirt blurred her vision, but she could see the dirty sheets draped around them, and her family, tucked in close to one another. Whatever it was, it was over.

  She coughed and spat out a blob of blackish-gray dirt that was as thick and as long as a pencil nub. “Loreda? Rose? Tony? Is everyone okay?”

  Loreda opened her eyes. “Yeah.” The gas mask turned her voice raspy and monstrous.

  Tony slowly lowered his bandanna.

  Rose crawled out from under the table and staggered to her feet. She took Elsa by the hand, led her into the sitting room. Bright morning sunlight shone through the broken window. Impossibly, they’d slept through the night and outlasted the storm.

  There was black dirt everywhere, a deep layer of it on the floor, gathered in dunes at every chair leg, falling down the walls like a mass of centipedes.

  The front door wouldn’t open; they’d been buried in.

  Tony climbed out the broken window and dropped onto the porch. Elsa heard the scuffing thwack of the metal shovel on the porch boards as he dug sand away.

  Finally, the door opened.

  Elsa stepped outside.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  The world had been reshaped and blanketed by the storm. Black dirt and dust, as fine as talcum powder, covered everything. There was nothing to see for miles except swelling dunes of inky sand. The chicken coop was completely buried; only the very peak of it poked up. The water pump rose up like a relic from a lost civilization. They could have walked right up to the top of the barn on one side.

  Dead birds lay in heaps on the sand dunes, their wings still outstretched as if they’d died midflight.

  “Madonna mia,” Rose said.

  “That’s it,” Elsa said. “We are not waiting until tomorrow. We are going to get Ant and leave right now. This instant. Before this goddamned land kills my children.”

  She turned and strode back into the house. Every indrawn breath felt like swallowing fire. Her eyes burned. Grit lodged in her eyes, her throat, her nose, in the creases in her skin. It kept falling out of her hair.

  Loreda stood by a broken window, her face blackened by dirt, looking dazed.

  “We are leaving for California. Now. Go get the suitcases. I’m going to fill a tub with water for bathing in the yard.”

  “Outside?” Loreda said.

  “No one will see you,” Elsa said grimly.

  For the next few hours, no one spoke. Elsa would have watered her aster, but the cemetery was gone, markers and picket fence and all, gone.

  Tony shoveled the driveway so they could leave. They had strapped what they could to the truck—a few pots and pans, two lanterns, a broom and a washboard and a copper bathing tub. Inside the truck bed was their rolled-up camp mattress, a barrel full of food and towels and bedding, bundles of kindling and wood, and the black stove, strapped against the back of the cab. They packed as much as they could for their new life, but most of what they owned was still in the house and barn. The kitchen cabinets were nearly full, as were most of the closets. There was no way they could take it all. The furniture they would leave behind, like the pioneers who’d unloaded their covered wagons when the going got tough, leaving pianos and rocking chairs alongside their buried dead on the plains.

  When they were completely packed, Elsa walked back to the house, over the dunes and troughs of sand.

  Elsa looked around the house. They were leaving it full of furniture, with pictures still on the walls. Everything was covered in fine black dirt.

  The front door opened. Tony walked in, holding hands with Rose. “Loreda is in the truck. She’s impatient to go,” Tony said.

  “I’ll make one last pass through the house,” Elsa said. She walked through the powdery black dirt in the sitting room, over hills and across scrape marks. The kitchen window was gone; through it, the beautiful blue sky looked like an oil painting hung on a black wall.

  Elsa walked into her bedroom and stood there, one last time. Books lined the dresser and the nightstands, each one draped in black dirt. Just like when she’d left her parents’ home, she could only take a few of her treasured novels with her. Once again, she was starting over.

  She quietly closed the bedroom door on this life and walked out of the house for the last time.

  Rose and Tony stood on the porch, holding hands.

  “I’m ready,” she said, stepping onto the first riser of the porch steps.

  “Elsinore?” Tony said.

  It was the first time he’d ever used her given name and it surprised her. Elsa turned.

  “We aren’t going with you,” Rose said.

  Elsa frowned. “I know we planned to leave later, but—”

  “No,” Tony said. “That’s not what we mean. We aren’t going to California.”

  “I don’t … understand. I said we needed to leave and you agreed.”

  “
And you do need to go,” Tony said. “The government has offered to pay us not to grow anything. They have forgiven mortgage payments for a while. So we don’t have to worry about losing any more of the land. For now, at least.”

  “You said there was no good news after the meeting,” Elsa said, feeling a rush of panic. “You lied to me?”

  “This is not good news,” he said softly. “Not when I know you must go for Ant’s sake.”

  “They want us to plow differently,” Rose said. “Who understands it? But they need the farmers to work together. How can we not try to save our land?”

  “Ant … can’t stay,” Elsa said.

  “We know that. And we can’t go,” Tony said. “Go. Save my grandchildren.” His voice broke on that.

  Tony curled his hand around the back of her neck, pulled her gently toward him, touched his forehead to hers; this was a man of the old world, a man who shut up and moved on and never stopped working. He poured all of his passion and love into the land. For his family. This touch was how he said, I love you.

  And goodbye.

  “Rosalba,” Tony said. “The penny.”

  Rose took off the thin, black-ribboned necklace that held a velvet pouch.

  Solemnly, she handed the pouch to Tony. He opened it, withdrew the American penny.

  “You are our hope now,” he said to Elsa, and then put the penny back in the pouch and pressed the necklace into the palm of her hand, forced her fingers to curl around it. He turned and walked back into the house, scuffling through the ankle-deep sand.

  Elsa felt as if she were breaking apart. “You know I can’t do this alone, Rose. Please…”

  Rose laid a callused hand on Elsa’s cheek. “You are everything those children need, Elsa Martinelli. You always have been.”

  “I’m not brave enough to do this.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “But you’ll need money. We took all the food—”

  “We kept some for ourselves. And our land will provide.”

  Elsa couldn’t speak. The last thing in the world she wanted was to drive across the country—over mountains and across vast deserts—with too little money and hungry children and no one to help her.