And look at her mother. Standing there, holding a dead baby in a clean lavender blanket, looking sad.
Sad.
The sight of it doubled Loreda’s rage. This was no time to be sad.
She fisted her hands at her side, but who was there to hit? Mrs. Dewey looked dazed and unsteady. Ghostly.
Mom knelt down and carefully placed the dead baby in the small grave and began to pray. “Our Father—”
“Who the hell are you praying to?” Loreda snapped.
She heard her mother sigh and slowly get to her feet. “God has—”
“If you tell me He has a plan for us, I’ll scream. I swear I will.” Loreda’s voice broke. She felt herself start to cry, but she wasn’t sad; she was furious. “He lets us live like this. Worse than stray dogs.”
Mom touched Loreda’s face. “Babies die, Loreda. I lost your brother. Grandma Rose lost—”
“THIS ISN’T LIKE THAT!” Loreda screamed. “You’re a coward, staying here, making us stay here. Why?”
“Oh, Loreda…”
Loreda knew she’d gone too far, had said too cruel a thing, but there was no stopping this rage, no slowing it. “If Daddy were here—”
“What?” Mom said. “What would he do?”
“He wouldn’t let us live like this. Burying dead babies in the dark, working our fingers to the bone, standing in line for two hours to get a can of milk from the government, watching people get sick around us.”
“He left us.”
“He left you. I should do the same, get out of here before we’re all dead.”
“Go, then,” Mom said. “Run away. Be like him.”
“I might,” Loreda said.
“Good. Go.” Mom bent down, picked up the shovel, began filling the grave with dirt.
Scrape, thunk.
In minutes there would be nothing to show that a baby had been buried here.
Loreda marched back through the squalid camp, past tents overfilled with people, past mangy dogs begging for scraps from folks who lived on scraps. She heard babies crying and people coughing.
The Dewey tent was closed up, but Loreda knew the little girls were in there, waiting for their mother to comfort and reassure them.
Words. Lies. Nothing would get better.
She was done living like this.
At her tent, she flung the flaps open, found Ant curled up on the mattress, his body as small as he could make it. They’d all learned how to sleep together on the too-small bed.
Her heart gave a hard ping at the sight of him.
Loreda knelt beside the bed, ruffled his hair. He mumbled in his sleep. “I love you,” she whispered, kissing the hard bone of his cheek. “But I can’t stay another second.”
Ant nodded in his sleep, murmured something.
Loreda went to the small suitcase that held all of her ragged clothes and her beloved library card. From the food crate, she took three potatoes and two slices of bread, and then opened the metal box that held their money. All they had in the world. Loreda felt a twinge of guilt.
No.
She’d wouldn’t take much. Just two dollars. It was her money as much as Mom’s. God knew Loreda had worked for it. She carefully counted out the money and then scrounged for a piece of paper. She found a bit of crumpled newsprint. Smoothing it as best she could, she used one of Ant’s pencil stubs to write a note to her mother and Ant, leaving it beneath the coffeepot.
She carried her suitcase to the tent flaps, looked back one last time, and walked away.
She passed the truck, full of things they should have left behind. Ant’s baseball bat lay cocked against a mantel clock, neither of which they needed, but neither Loreda nor her mother had the heart to tell Ant his baseball days were over before they’d begun. God knew if they’d ever need a mantel clock again. They would have packed differently if they’d known. Or maybe if they’d known what waited for them in California, they’d have stayed in Texas.
They shouldn’t have left.
Or maybe they should have gone farther.
It was Mom’s fault. She’d chosen to stop here, said, We have to. Everything had gone wrong from then.
From that first fatal lie: one night.
Well, it had been a lot of nights, and Loreda was getting the hell out.
* * *
ELSA AND JEAN STOOD together in the darkness, staring down, holding hands. Time fell away, passed in long swaths of silence between women who knew there were no words at a time like this.
There was no marker here to commemorate the baby, nor markers to commemorate the others buried in this section of the camp.
“We’d best get back,” Elsa said at last, buttoning up her ill-fitting wool coat. “You’re shivering.”
“I’ll be along,” Jean said.
Elsa squeezed her friend’s hand. With a sigh that felt drawn from deep in her tired bones, she carried the shovel back to camp and threw it in the back of the truck, where it landed with a clang.
Thoughts of Loreda pushed their way in. Elsa should have comforted Loreda at the grave site. What kind of mother snapped at a grieving thirteen-year-old? Loreda had seen too much loss. Elsa knew that. There must be words Elsa could find that would help.
Elsa just had nothing left right now. She felt emptied by the baby’s death. The last thing she could do was face her daughter’s fury.
Better to let a little time smooth over the edges. A night, at least. Tomorrow the sun would shine and Elsa would take Loreda aside and offer what comfort she could.
Coward.
“No,” Elsa said out loud to reinforce the decision. She would not look away from this. She would hit it head-on, try to comfort Loreda as best as she could.
She lifted the tent flap and went inside.
The quilts were tangled, but it was clear that Ant was in bed alone.
Loreda wasn’t in the tent.
Elsa went to the truck, banged on the side of the bed. “Loreda? Are you in there?”
She examined the bed, saw the boxes of goods they’d brought with them, things they’d thought they’d need: candlesticks, porcelain dishes, Ant’s baseball bat and mitt, a mantel clock. “Loreda?” she said again, her voice spiking in worry when she saw that the cab was empty, too.
Elsa stepped back.
He left you. I should do the same … get out of here before we’re all dead.
Go, then. Go. Be like your father. Run away.
Maybe I will.
Good. Go.
A chill moved through Elsa. She ran back into the tent.
Loreda’s suitcase was gone. So was her sweater and the blue wool coat she’d gotten at the salon.
Elsa saw a note peeking out from beneath the coffeepot. Her hand shook as she reached for it.
Mom,
I can’t take it anymore.
I’m sorry.
I love you both.
Elsa ran out of the tent and didn’t stop running until there was a stitch in her side and her breathing was ragged.
The main road stretched north and south. Which way would Loreda go? How could Elsa even guess?
Elsa had told her thirteen-year-old daughter to go, to run away and be like a man who didn’t want to be found. To go out into a world full of bindle stiffs walking the roads and riding the trains, gangs of desperate, angry men with nothing to lose, who lurked like packs of wolves in the shadows.
She screamed her daughter’s name.
The word rang out through the night and faded away.
* * *
LOREDA WALKED SOUTH UNTIL her shoe broke and her back ached, and still the empty road stretched in front of her, bathed in moonlight. How much farther to Los Angeles?
She had always dreamed of finding her father, just bumping into him, but now, standing here alone on the side of the road, she understood what her mother had said to her once.
He doesn’t want to be found.
How many roads were there in California, going how many directions, to how many
destinations? So what if her father dreamed of Hollywood? That didn’t mean he’d gotten there, or that he’d stayed there.
And how far had she walked? Three miles? Four?
She kept walking, determined not to turn around. She was not going to go back and admit she’d made a mistake by leaving. She couldn’t stand this life anymore. Period.
But Ant would wake up and miss her. He’d think he was easy to leave, that there was something wrong with him. Loreda knew that because it was how she’d felt when Daddy had left.
She didn’t want to hurt her brother.
She saw headlights in front of her, coming up the road. A truck rolled up to her and stopped. It was an old-fashioned truck, with a square wooden and glass cab that appeared to have been stuck on the truck’s black chassis. The hinged windshield was open.
The driver reached over and rolled down the passenger window. He was as old as Mom, with a face that was like most men’s these days—sharp and bony. He needed to shave, but Loreda wouldn’t call him bearded. Just scruffy. “What’re you doing out here all by yourself? It’s midnight.”
“Nothing.”
His gaze flicked down to her suitcase. “You look like a girl who is running away.”
“What do you care?”
“Where are your parents? It’s dangerous out here.”
“None of your business. Besides, I’m sixteen. I can go where I want.”
“Yeah, kid. And I’m Errol Flynn. Where are you headed?”
“Anywhere but here.”
He looked up the road. It was at least a minute before he looked at her again. “There’s a bus station in Bakersfield. I’m headed north. I can give you a lift. I just have to make a stop along the way.”
“Thanks, mister!” Loreda tossed her suitcase in the back of the truck and climbed in.
TWENTY-FIVE
“I’m Jack Valen,” the man said.
“Loreda Martinelli.”
He put the truck in gear and they drove north. The suspension on the truck was shot. The leather seat burped up and down at every bump.
Loreda stared out the window. In the brief flash of their headlights or in the glare of billboards lit up by streetlights, she saw people camped on the side of the road, and hobos walking with packs slung over their backs.
They passed the school and the hospital and the squatter’s camp, which lay shrouded in darkness.
And then they were past the places Loreda knew, past the town of Welty. Out here, there was nothing but road.
“Hey, what do you have to do this late at night?” she said. It occurred to her suddenly that she could have put herself in danger.
The man lit a cigarette, exhaled a stream of blue-gray smoke through his open window. “Same as you, I imagine.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned. For the first time she saw his entire face, the tanned roughness of it, the sharp nose and black eyes. “You’re running away from something. Or someone.”
“And you are, too?”
“Kid, if you aren’t running away these days, you aren’t paying attention. But no, I’m not running.” He smiled in a way that made him almost handsome. “I don’t want to get caught out here, either.”
“My dad did that.”
“Did what?”
“Ran out in the middle of the night. Never came back.”
“Well … that’s a hell of a thing,” he said at last. “What about your mom?”
“What about her?”
He turned onto a long dirt road.
Darkness.
Loreda didn’t see lights anywhere, just blackness. No houses, no streetlights, no other cars on the road.
“W-where are we going?”
“I told you I had a stop to make before I dropped you at the bus station.”
“Out here? In the middle of nowhere?”
He let the truck roll to a stop. “I need your word, kid. You won’t talk about this place. Or me. Or anything you see here.”
They were in a huge grassy field. A barn stood alongside a dilapidated ranch house, both bathed in moonlight. A dozen or so cars and trucks were parked in the grass, their headlights off. Thin yellow lines in between the boards of the barn indicated that there was something going on inside. “No one listens to people like me,” Loreda said. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word she meant: Okies.
“If you don’t give me your word, I’ll turn around right now and drop you off on the main road.”
Loreda looked at him. He was impatient with her, she could tell. A tic pulled at the corner of his eyes, but otherwise he appeared calm. He was waiting for her to decide, but he wouldn’t wait long.
She should tell him to turn around right now, take her back to the road. Whatever was going on in that barn this late at night couldn’t be good. And grown-ups didn’t demand this kind of promise from kids.
“Is it bad, what’s going on in there?”
“No,” he said. “It’s good. But these are dangerous times.”
Loreda looked into the man’s dark eyes. He was … intense. A little frightening, perhaps, but alive in a way she hadn’t seen before. Here was a man who wouldn’t live in a dirty tent and eat scraps and be grateful for it. He wasn’t broken like the rest of them. His vitality called out to her, reminded her of better times, of the man she’d thought her father to be. “I promise.”
He drove forward, threading his way through the parked cars. Near the doors, he parked the truck and turned off the engine.
“You stay in the truck,” he said, opening his door.
“How long will you be?”
“As long as I need to be.”
Loreda watched him walk toward the barn and open the door. She saw a flash of light, and what looked like shadow people gathered within. Then he closed the door behind him.
Loreda stared at the dark barn, the streaks of light bleeding through the cracks. What were they doing in there?
An automobile chugged up alongside the truck, parked. Its headlights snapped off.
Loreda saw a couple get out of the car. They were well dressed, all in black, both smoking cigarettes. Definitely not migrants or farmers.
Loreda made a snap decision: she got out of the truck and followed the couple to the barn.
The barn door opened.
Loreda slipped in behind the couple and immediately pressed herself back against the rough boards of the barn.
She couldn’t have said what she was expecting to see—grown-ups drinking hooch and dancing the Lindy Hop maybe—but whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this. Men dressed in suits mingled with women, some of whom were wearing pants. Pants. They seemed to be all talking at once, gesturing with their hands as if arguing. The place felt alive, hive-like with activity. Cigarette smoke created a haze that blurred everyone and stung Loreda’s eyes.
There were about ten tables set up in the barn’s dusty, shadowed interior, with lanterns set on each one, creating pockets of light shot through with dust and smoke. Typewriters and mimeograph machines were positioned on the tables. Women sat in chairs and smoked and typed. There was a strange aroma in the air, mixed in with the smell of smoke. Stacks of papers lined the tabletops. Every once in a while Loreda heard the briiiiing of a carriage return.
When Jack strode forward, people stopped what they were doing and turned toward him. He pulled a newspaper off a table in front of him and climbed up several loft steps, then faced the crowd. He lifted the newspaper up. The headline read: “Los Angeles Declares War on Migrants.”
“Police Chief James ‘Two Guns’ Davis, with the support of the big growers, the railroads, the state relief agencies, and the rest of the state fat cats, just closed the California border to migrants.” Jack threw the paper to the straw-covered floor. “Think of it. Desperate people, good people, Americans, are being stopped at the border at gunpoint and turned away. To go where? Many of them are starving back home or dying of dust pneumonia. If they won’t turn back, the coppers are jaili
ng them for vagrancy and judges are sentencing them to hard labor.”
Loreda was hardly surprised. She knew what it was like to come here looking for better and be treated as worse.
“Bastards,” someone yelled.
“All across the state of California, the big growers are taking advantage of the people who work for them. The migrants coming into the state are so desperate to feed their families, they’ll take any wage. There are more than seventy thousand homeless people between here and Bakersfield. Children are dying in the squatters’ camps at a rate of two a day, from malnutrition or disease. It’s not right. Not in America. I don’t care if there is a Depression. Enough is enough. It’s up to us to help them. We have to get them to join the Workers Alliance and stand up for their rights.”
There was a roar of approval from the crowd.
Loreda nodded. His words struck a nerve with her, made her think for the first time, We don’t have to take this.
“Now is the time, comrades. The government won’t help these people. It is up to us. We have to convince the workers to stand up. Rise up. Use any means at our disposal to stop big business from crushing the workers and taking advantage of them. We must stand together and fight this capitalist injustice. We will fight for the migrant workers here and in the Central Valley, help them organize into unions and battle for better wages. The time … is now!”
“Yes!” Loreda shouted. “Yes!”
Jack jumped down from the riser on the loft ladder, but just before he did, Loreda saw him look directly at her.
He strode toward her, making his way easily through the crowd.
Loreda felt the intensity of his gaze; she felt like a mouse paralyzed by the gaze of a hunting hawk.
“I thought I told you to stay in the truck.”
“I want to join your group. I could help.”
“Oh, really?” He towered over her, was even taller than her mom. She drew in a tight, ragged breath. “Go home, kid. You’re too young for this.”
“I am a migrant worker.”
He lit a cigarette, studied her.
“We live in the ditch-bank camp off Sutter Road. I picked cotton this fall when I should have been in school. If I hadn’t, we would have starved. We live in a tent. We wanted the jobs in the fields so badly that sometimes we slept in ditches at the side of the road to be first in line. The boss—that fat pig, Welty—he doesn’t care if we make enough to eat.”
The Four Winds Page 27
