“Watch out for Mr. Eldridge. He might come atcha when he drinks. He ain’t been right since his wife and boy died o’ dysentery,” Jean said.
“There must be some work,” Elsa said, leaning forward on the bucket.
Jeb shrugged. “We go out every mornin’ to look. They’re pickin’ in Salinas right now if ya wanna go north. We pick fruit up north in the early summer. You gotta figgur on gas prices before you start movin’. But it’s cotton that gets us along.”
“I don’t know anything about cotton,” Elsa said.
Jean smiled. “It hurts like the dickens to pick, but it’ll save you. The kids’ll do good, too.”
“The kids? What about school?”
“Oh.” Jean sighed. “There’s a school. Down the road a mile or so. But … last fall it took all of us, even the little ones, to pick enough to keep from starvin’. Not that the girls picked much, but I couldn’t leave ’em behind all day, neither.”
Elsa looked at the two little girls. What were they, four and five—in the cotton fields all day? She rushed to change the subject. “Can we get mail anywhere?”
“General delivery in Welty. They hold mail for us.”
“Well.” Jean stood, smoothing her dress. In the gesture, Elsa got a hint of who she had been before California—the quiet, respected wife of a small-town farmer. She’d probably cared about things like Fourth of July parades and wedding quilts and box socials. “Well. I should get supper on the stove. Best be takin’ our leave.”
“It ain’t so bad as it looks,” Jeb said. “You’ll see. Just go to the relief office in Welty as soon as you can. It’s up the road about two miles. You’ve got to register with the state for relief. Tell ’em you’re here. We didn’t register for a couple o’ months and it cost us. Not that it’ll help much now, since—”
“I don’t want money from the government,” Elsa said. She didn’t want them to think she’d come all this way for government handouts. “I want a job.”
“Yeah,” Jeb said. “None of us want to live on the dole. FDR and his New Deals programs done good things to help the workin’ man, but us small farmers and farmworkers sorta got forgot. The big growers got all the power in this state.”
Jean said, “Don’t worry. Y’all can learn to live with anything if you’re together.”
Elsa hoped she managed a smile, but she wasn’t sure. She got to her feet, shook their hands, and watched the entire family walk over to that small, dirty tent.
“Mom?” Loreda said, coming up beside her.
Don’t cry.
Don’t you dare cry in front of your daughter.
“It’s terrible,” Loreda said.
“Yes.”
And that awful smell pervaded everything. Died o’ dysentery. No wonder, if people drank the water that ran in that irrigation ditch and lived … this way.
“I’ll find work tomorrow,” Elsa said.
“I know you will,” Loreda said.
Elsa had to believe it. “This is not our life,” she said. “I won’t let it be.”
* * *
ELSA WOKE TO THE sounds of a new day: fires igniting, tent flaps being unzipped, cast-iron pans hitting cookstoves, children whining, babies crying, mothers chiding.
Life.
As if this were a normal community instead of the last stop for desperate people.
Careful not to disturb her children, she exited the tent and started a campfire and made coffee with the last of the water from their canteens.
Dozens of men, women, and children ambled across the field, toward the road. In the rising sun, they looked like stick people. At the same time, women walked toward the ditch and bent down for water, squatted on wooden planks that lay along the muddy shore.
“Elsa!”
Jean sat in front of her own tent, in a chair by a cookstove. She waved Elsa over.
Elsa poured two cups of coffee and carried them next door, offering Jean one.
“Thank you,” Jean said, wrapping her fingers around the cup. “I was just thinkin’ I should get up and pour myself a cup, but once I set down, I just stuck.”
“Did you sleep poorly?”
“Since 1931. You?”
Elsa smiled. “The same.”
People walked past them in a steady stream.
“They all heading out to look for work?” Elsa asked, checking her watch. It was a little past six.
“Yep. Newcomers. Jeb and the boys left at four and ain’t likely they’ll find anything. It’ll be better when they start weedin’ and thinnin’ the cotton. They’re plantin’ it now.”
“Oh.”
Jean pushed an apple crate toward Elsa. “Set a spell.”
“Where are they looking for work? I didn’t see many farmhouses…”
“It ain’t like back home. Around here the farms are big business, thousands and thousands of acres. The owners hardly step onto their land, let alone work it. They got the coppers and the government on their side, too. The state cares more about linin’ the growers’ pockets than takin’ care of the farmworkers.” She paused. “Where’s your husband?”
“He left us in Texas.”
“That’s happenin’ all over.”
“I can’t believe people live this way,” Elsa said, and immediately regretted her words when Jean looked away.
“Where can we go that’s better? Okies, they call us. Don’t matter where we’re from. Nobody’ll rent to us, but who can afford rent anyway? Maybe after cotton season you’ll have enough money to head out. We didn’t, though, not with four kids.”
“Maybe in Los Angeles—”
“We say that all the time, but who knows if it’s better there? At least here there’s pickin’ jobs.” She looked up. “You got enough money to waste it on gas going somewheres else?”
No.
Elsa couldn’t listen anymore. “I’d best go look for work. Will you keep an eye out on my children?”
“Course. And don’t forget to register with the state. Tonight I’ll introduce you around to the other women. Good luck to you, Elsa.”
“Thank you.”
After leaving Jean, Elsa carried two buckets full of fetid water from the ditch and boiled it in batches, then strained it through cloth.
She scrubbed her face and upper body as well as she could in the shadowy tent and washed her hair and put on a relatively clean cotton dress. She coiled her wet hair into a coronet and covered it with a kerchief.
This was the best she could do. Her cotton stockings were sagging but clean and the holes in her shoes couldn’t be helped. She was grateful not to have a mirror. Oh, there was one somewhere, buried in one of the boxes in the back of the truck, but it wasn’t worth rummaging around for.
She left a glass full of clean water inside the tent for the children and checked that they were still sleeping.
She left Loreda a note—Looking for work/stay here/water in glass is safe to drink—and headed out to the truck.
She drove out to the main road.
Every farm she came to had a line of people out front, waiting for work. More people walked single file along the road, looking. Tractors churned up the soil in brown fields; here and there, she saw a horse-drawn plow working the land.
After at least half an hour, she came to a HELP WANTED sign tacked to a four-rail fence.
She pulled off the road and onto a long dirt driveway lined with flowering white trees. Hundreds of acres of a low-growing green crop spread out on either side of the driveway. Potatoes, maybe.
She pulled up in front of a big farmhouse with a large screened-in porch and a pretty flower garden.
At her arrival, a man walked out of the house, let the screen door bang shut behind him. He was smoking a pipe and was well dressed, in flannel pants and a crisp white shirt and a fedora that must have cost a fortune. His hair was precisely trimmed, sideburns shorn, as was his pencil-thin mustache.
He came around to the driver’s side of the truck. “A truck, huh? You must
be new.”
“Arrived yesterday, from Texas.”
He gave Elsa an appraising look, then cocked his head. “Head that way. The missus needs help.”
“Thank you!” Elsa hurried out of the truck before he could change his mind. A job!
She rushed toward the large house. Passing through an open picket gate and a rose garden that enveloped her in a scent that recalled her childhood, she climbed the few steps to the front door and knocked.
She heard the clip of high heels on hardwood floors.
The door opened to reveal a short, plump woman in a fashionable slit skirt dress with a flounced silken cravat at the high neckline. Carefully controlled platinum curls swept back from a center part and framed her face in a jaw-length bob.
The woman looked at Elsa and took a step back. She sniffed daintily, pressed a lace handkerchief to her nose. “Our farmhand deals with the vagrants.”
“Your … the man in the fedora said you needed help with some household chores.”
“Oh.”
Elsa was acutely aware of how ragged she looked. All that effort to present herself for work meant nothing to this woman.
“Follow me.”
Inside, the house was grand: oaken doors, crystal fixtures, mullioned windows that captured the green fields outside and turned them into a kaleidoscope of color. Thick oriental carpets, carved mahogany side tables.
A little girl came into the room, her Shirley Temple curls bouncing pertly. She wore a dress of pink polka dots and black patent leather shoes. “Mommy, what does the dirty lady want?”
“Don’t get too close, dear. They carry disease.”
The girl’s eyes widened. She backed away.
Elsa couldn’t believe what she’d heard. “Ma’am—”
“Don’t speak to me unless I ask a direct question,” the woman said. “You may scrub the floors. But mind you, I don’t want to catch you shirking and I’ll check your pockets before you leave. And don’t touch anything but the water, bucket, and brush.”
TWENTY
Loreda woke to the smell. It reminded her with every indrawn breath that they had spent the night in the last place on earth she wanted to be.
Loreda stayed in bed as long as she could, knowing that the clarity of day would reveal images she didn’t want to see, but finally, the aroma of coffee urged her up. She eased away from Ant, who grumbled, and put a holey sweater on over her dress.
She stepped into her shoes and opened the tent flap, expecting to find her mother sitting on an overturned bucket by the campfire, drinking coffee. But neither Mom nor the truck were here. Instead, she found a glass of water and her mother’s note.
Loreda looked out toward the road, across the flat, brown field rutted by foot and tire tracks and a cluster of tents and vehicles. The field—probably fifty acres altogether—held a hundred tents and dozens of trucks that had become homes. She saw hovels that had been cobbled together of scrap metal and wooden boards. Women moved through the camp herding ragged children, while mangy dogs ran through, barking for food or attention. Folks had lived here a long time, long enough to string laundry lines and create yards full of junk. No one would want to live this way, and yet here they were. The Great Depression.
For the first time, she understood. It wasn’t just banksters running off with people’s money or a movie theater closing its doors or people standing in line for free soup.
Hard times meant poverty. No jobs. Nowhere else to go.
Jean stepped out of her tent and waved at Loreda.
Loreda walked toward her, strangely glad for an adult nearby. “Hey, Miz Dewey,” Loreda said.
“Your mama left about an hour ago, lookin’ for work.”
“My mom has never had a real job.”
Jean smiled. “Spoken like a teenager. It don’t matter, though. Experience, I mean. The jobs out here are field jobs, mostly. They won’t hire us in diners and stores and such. They want them jobs for themselves.”
“It’s just wrong.”
Jean shrugged, as if to say, What difference does that make? “When times is tough and jobs is scarce, folks blame the outsider. It’s human nature. And raht now, that’s us. In California it used to be the Mexicans, and the Chinese before that, I think.”
Loreda stared out at the debris-strewn camp. “My mom never gives up,” she said. “But maybe this time she should. We could go to Hollywood. Or San Francisco.” Loreda hated how her voice broke on that. Suddenly she was thinking of her dad and Stella and her grandparents and the farm. More than anything right now, she wanted to be home, to have Grandma give her one of her no-nonsense hugs and slip her a bite of something.
“Come here, honey,” Jean said, opening her arms.
Loreda walked into the woman’s embrace, surprised by how much it helped, even from a stranger. “You’ll have to grow up, I reckon,” Jean said. “Your mom probably wants you to be young, but them days are gone.”
Loreda held back tears. She didn’t want to grow up, certainly not in a place like this.
She looked up at Jean’s kind, sad face. “So, what should I do?”
“First, go to the ditch and carry lots o’ water back. You got to boil and strain it before you drink it, mind. I’ll give you some cheesecloth. Doin’ laundry would help your mom out.”
Loreda left Jean standing outside the tent and picked up a pair of buckets and walked to the ditch. A line of women was already squatted along the banks, or on wooden planks in the brown water, washing clothes. Children played at the edges of the dirty water.
Loreda filled both buckets with the ugly water and carried them back to the tent. She passed a family of six living in a shack made of tin and wood scraps.
By the time she got back to the tent, Ant was up and sitting in the dirt. He’d obviously been crying. “Everybody left me,” he whined. “I thought—”
“I’m sorry,” Loreda said, putting her buckets down.
Ant shot to his feet and tackled her. Loreda held him tightly.
“I was scared.”
“Me, too, Antsy,” Loreda said, as comforted by the feel of him as he was by her. When he drew back, his tears were gone and his smile was back. “Wanna play catch? I got my baseball somewhere.”
“Nope. I got to boil this water and make breakfast. Then we’re gonna wash clothes.”
“Mom didn’t tell us to do that,” Ant whined.
“We’ve got to help.”
Ant looked up suddenly. “She’s comin’ back, ain’t she?”
“She’s coming back. She’s looking for work so we can move.”
“Phew. You reckon she’ll find it?”
“I hope so.”
After a breakfast of tasteless wheat cereal, Loreda washed the dishes and put everything back into boxes, which were ready for packing up when the truck returned. That way they could leave this stinking place the second Mom got back.
* * *
BY NOON, ELSA’S FINGERS ached and her hands were burned pink from bleach and lye. She had scrubbed the kitchen, dining, and sitting room floors, and then rubbed lemon-scented oil into the wood until the planks shone. She’d pulled dozens of leather-bound books out of bookshelves and dusted behind them, unable to stop herself from smelling the leather, the paper, even reading a sentence or two.
Her life as a reader felt far away.
When her cleaning was done, she scalded two plump chickens in boiling water and plucked them, her mouth watering at the idea of roasted chicken. An hour later, she hauled wet laundry outside and fed it through the metal wringer’s presses, turning the crank until her shoulders screamed at the motion. All of this she did under the watchful eye of the woman of the house, who never offered Elsa a lunch break, a glass of water, or an introduction.
“That’s it, then,” the woman said at just past five o’clock, as Elsa was in the kitchen again, ironing a man’s shirt. “You are done.”
Elsa slowly released her hold on the iron and sighed in relief. She was parched and s
tarving. “I noticed the pantry could use some organizing, ma’am, I—”
“Touching our food? Of course not. Crime around here is sky-high since your kind moved in. Our schools are full of your dirty children.”
“Ma’am, certainly, as a Christian, you must—”
“How dare you question my faith? Out!” she said, flinging a pointed finger toward the door. “And don’t you come back. The Mexicans are better workers than you dirty Okies. They don’t sass and they don’t stay in town after the crops are done. We never should have deported them.”
Elsa was too tired and dispirited to argue. At least she’d found work. Today’s money was a start. She had to think of it like that. She said, “Fine, ma’am,” and waited to be paid.
“What?” the woman said, crossing her arms.
“My pay.”
“Oh. Right.” The woman dug into her pocket and pulled out some coins and dropped them in Elsa’s outstretched palm.
Four dimes.
“Forty cents?” Elsa said. “For ten hours?”
“Shall I take it back? I could tell my husband how insubordinate you’ve been.”
Forty cents.
Elsa walked away, pushed through the door, let it bang shut behind her. She got in the truck and drove down the driveway, trying not to panic.
Forty cents for a day’s work.
Now she knew why the folks in the camp walked to find work. Gas was already a luxury she couldn’t afford.
Tomorrow she’d join the people leaving the ditch-bank camp before dawn in the hopes of finding work in the fields. The pay had to be better than this.
But she’d be damned if her children would work in the fields. They would go to school and get an education.
Out on the main road, she saw a slim man walking along the roadside, his shoulders hunched in defeat, carrying a tattered knapsack. Black hair hung in dirty strands from a holey hat. One foot was bare.
Rafe.
It couldn’t be, but still …
She slowed the truck to a stop and rolled down the window. It was not her husband, of course.
The Four Winds Page 21
