I can’t live without my mom.
* * *
WHITE.
Lights too bright.
Stinging.
Pain.
Elsa opened her eyes again, squinted at the intensity of the light overhead.
She was in bed.
She turned her head slowly. Every breath hurt.
Jack sat in a chair beside her, holding Ant on his lap. Her son’s eyes were red, bloodshot. Tears streaked his freckled cheeks.
“Elsa,” Jack said softly.
“She’s awake,” Ant said.
Loreda rushed in, almost pushed Jack and her brother aside. “Mommy,” she said.
Mommy.
That one word brought everything back: Elsa rocking Loreda to sleep, reading her stories, teaching her to make fettuccine, whispering Be brave, into her ear.
“Where…”
Jack touched her face. “You’re in the hospital.”
“And?”
She saw the answer in her loved ones’ eyes. They were already grieving.
“They couldn’t repair the damage,” Jack said. “Too much internal bleeding, and your heart … they say there’s something wrong with it. Can’t keep up or some damn thing. They’ve given you pain medication … there’s nothing else they can do.”
“But they’re wrong,” Loreda said. “Everyone’s always been wrong about you, Mom. Haven’t they? Like me.” Loreda started to cry. “You’ll be fine. You’re strong.”
Elsa didn’t need them to tell her she was dying. She could feel her body shutting down.
But not her heart. Her heart was so full it couldn’t hold all of the love she felt when she looked at these three who had shown her the world. She’d thought she had a lifetime to show them her love.
Time.
Hers had gone too fast. She’d only just discovered who she was.
She had counted on a lifetime to teach her children what they needed to know, but she didn’t have that gift of grace and time. Still, she had given them what mattered: they were loved and they knew it. Everything else was decoration.
Love remains.
“Ant,” she said, opening her arms.
He climbed like a monkey from Jack’s arms to hers. His weight pressed down on her, caused an agonizing pain. She kissed his wet cheek.
“Don’t die, Mommy.”
That hurt worse than her gunshot. “I’ll … watch over you … all your life. Like … the Shadow. At night … while you sleep.”
“How will I know?”
“You’ll … remember me.”
He cried. “I don’t want you to leave.”
“I know, baby.” She wiped his tears, felt the start of her own.
Jack saw her pain and pulled Ant into his arms. It broke her heart to see him holding her son. Here was a flash … a glimpse of the future that was slowly being lost. The family they could have become.
She stared up at Jack. “God, what a life we could have had.”
He leaned closer, still holding Ant, and kissed her on the lips, stayed there long enough that she tasted his tears.
She lifted a hand, pressed her palm to his cheek so he could feel her touch one last time. “Take them home for me,” she whispered against his lips.
He nodded. “Elsa … God, I love you…”
Loreda slipped in beside Jack, who stepped aside, soothed Ant, stroked his back.
“Hey, Mom,” Loreda said in a thready voice.
Elsa stared up at her brash, beautiful, impetuous daughter. “I wanted to watch you take on the world, baby girl.”
“I can’t do it without you.”
“You can … and you will.”
“It’s not fair,” Loreda said. “No one will ever love me like you do.”
Elsa had trouble breathing. It felt as if she were drowning from the inside out. She reached up slowly, every movement hurting, and untied the necklace at her throat. She took the velvet pouch in shaking hands and placed it in her daughter’s palm. “Keep … believing in … us.” Elsa paused to catch her breath. Every second hurt more than the last.
Loreda took the pouch in her hand, held it as her tears fell. “What do I do without you?”
Elsa tried to smile but couldn’t. She was too tired. Too weak. “You live, Loreda,” she whispered. “And know … every single second … how much I loved you.” Find your voice and use it … take chances … never give up.
Elsa couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. There was so much more to say, a lifetime’s worth of love and advice to bestow on her children, but there was no more time …
Be brave, she might have said, or maybe she only thought it.
THIRTY-SIX
“She wants us to go home,” Loreda said. The unexpected word—home—gave her a bit of steadiness; something to hold on to. Grandma and Grandpa. She needed them now.
“That’s what she said.”
Jack held Ant, who had cried himself to sleep.
“Good. I won’t bury her here,” Loreda said. “And Ant and I can’t stay. Even if they are still having dust storms in Texas. We can’t stay here. I won’t stay here.”
“I’ll drive you back, of course, but…”
“Money,” Loreda said dully. Everything came down to that.
“I’ll talk to the Workers Alliance. Maybe—”
“No,” Loreda said sharply, surprised by the suddenness of her anger, the burning heat of it.
Enough was enough.
Goddamned enough.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. She knew what Mom had done for Jean at a moment like this.
“I know where we can get what we need,” she said. “Can I take your truck?”
“It doesn’t sound like a good idea…”
“It isn’t. Can I have your keys?”
“They’re in the truck. Don’t make me regret this.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Loreda rushed out of the hospital and drove Jack’s truck north. Look, Mom, a driving emergency, she thought, starting to cry again.
In town, she passed vigilantes driving up and down the streets with loudspeakers, telling people to get back to work or be arrested for vagrancy, promising hard labor.
She could do this.
She could.
And if she died or went to hell or went to jail, well, okay. She was, by God, going to get her mother home so she could be buried on the land she loved, and not here, in this place that had broken and betrayed them.
She pulled up in front of the El Centro Hotel and ran up to Mom’s room. There, she grabbed the shotgun, stuffed some clothes in a laundry bag, and went back down to Jack’s truck and drove north.
Not far from the Welty camp, she parked behind an Old Gold cigarettes billboard. She grabbed the shotgun and laundry bag and darted into the camp and past the empty guardhouse.
The camp was quiet; eviction notices fluttered on every cabin door. She snagged some boys’ clothes from a laundry line—a pair of wool pants, a black sweater—and found a floppy black hat in a mud puddle. She pulled the boys’ oversized clothes on over her faded dress and tucked her hair up under the hat, then smeared mud on her cheeks.
Hopefully she looked like a boy going rabbit hunting.
A heavy pall of defeat lay over the place. The vigilantes were gone, but the point had been made. Power reestablished. Loreda had no doubt that even though Mom had given her life for this strike, it would be broken. If not today, then tomorrow or the next day. Starving, desperate people could only fight for so long.
She passed a few women and children standing in lines—for the showers, for the bathrooms, for the laundry—and made eye contact with none. She didn’t recognize many of them anyway; the camp was already filling with new folks, ready to pick for any wage to put food on the table.
The camp store sat off by itself, lights on inside, ready to trap more unwary newcomers into debt.
Loreda opened the door cautiously, peered in.
; No customers.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
She let the door bang shut behind her and did her best to swagger forward in her boy’s disguise. She kept her eyes cast downward.
There was a new man at the register, one she had never seen before.
A lucky break.
Loreda raised the shotgun and aimed it at him.
The man’s eyes widened. “What’re you doin’, son?”
“I’m robbing you. Give me the money in the register.”
“We’re a credit business.”
“Don’t insult me. I know you give cash for credit.” She cocked the gun. “You ready to die for Welty’s money?”
The man wrenched open the cash register and pulled out all the bills, shoved them toward Loreda on the counter.
“Coins, too.”
He jangled up the coins and stuffed all the money in a burlap sack. “There. That’s everything we got. But Welty will find you and—”
She grabbed the bag. “Get down in the corner. If I see you run out after me, I’ll shoot you dead. Believe me, I am mad enough to do it.”
She backed out of the store, kept the gun aimed at his hunched back.
Once outside, she threw the gun in the bushes and ran for the trees at the back of the camp, pulling off the boy’s sweater as she went. She used the sweater to scrub the dirt off her face; she took off the hat and stepped out of the pants, then tossed it all in a trash can and shoved the burlap bag full of money into her laundry sack.
Now she was just a skinny girl in a faded dress.
She was halfway to the guardhouse when she heard a whistle blow.
Men with guns ran into camp, stopped at the store.
Loreda went to the laundry and got in line.
Someone hollered, “Got his gun!”
“Fan out, look everywhere! Welty wants this boy found.”
Sure. They didn’t mind cheating people, these big growers, but they hated being robbed. They would love to put someone away for armed robbery.
Loreda inched forward in line, her heart pounding, her mouth dry, but none of the vigilantes even glanced at the women standing in line to do laundry.
Sometimes it was good to be a woman.
The men ran through the camp, looking for boys, questioning them, snatching anything from their hands, barking out questions.
Then it was over.
When they were finally gone, Loreda stepped out of line and walked along the fence line out of the camp, carrying her laundry bag full of money. No one looked at her twice.
On the main road, she saw red lights flashing. Police going from camp to camp questioning, yanking bystanders aside.
Loreda drove back to the hospital.
There, she parked and counted the money.
One hundred and twenty-two dollars. And ninety-one cents.
A fortune.
* * *
THAT NIGHT THEY MADE an arrowed beeline over the mountains and across the worst part of the Mojave Desert in a darkness devoid of stars, with a pine coffin in the bed of the truck.
There were few other cars on the road. Loreda couldn’t see much beyond what lay in the glow of the headlights. Ant lay sleeping up against her. He hadn’t said a single word since Mom died.
At midnight, just past Barstow, Jack pulled off the road and parked.
Without a tent, they laid blankets and quilts on a flat patch of ground and stretched out, with Ant positioned between Jack and Loreda.
“You want to tell me now?” Jack said quietly, over the sound of Ant’s snoring.
“Tell you what?”
“How you got the money?”
“I did a bad thing for a good reason.”
“How bad?”
“Baseball-bat-in-a-hospital-to-get-aspirin bad.”
“Did you hurt anyone?”
“No.”
“And you won’t do it again and you know it was wrong?”
“Yeah. The world’s topsy-turvy, though.”
“It is.”
Loreda sighed. “I miss her so much I can’t breathe. How will I make it like this for the rest of my life?”
She was grateful he didn’t answer. There was truth in his silence. She already knew this was a grief she would never get over.
“I never said I was proud of her,” Loreda said. “How could I—”
“Close your eyes,” Jack said. “Tell her now. I’ve been talking to my mom that way for years.”
“Do you think she hears?”
“Moms know everything, kid.”
Loreda closed her eyes and thought of all the things she wished she’d said to her mother. I love you. I’m proud of you. I’ve never seen anyone so brave. Why was I so mean for so long? You gave me wings, Mom. Did you know that? I feel you here. Will I always?
When she opened her eyes, there were stars overhead.
EPILOGUE
1940
I AM STANDING BEHIND the farmhouse in a field of blue-green buffalo grass. To my left, a sea of golden wheat waves in the breeze. My grandparents’ farm has been recontoured, as have all the big farms in the county. Newspapers credit the President’s soil conservation plan for rescuing the Great Plains, but my grandmother says it was God who saved us; God and His rain.
I look like any other girl my age, but I am different from most. A survivor. There is no way to forget what we went through in the Great Depression or to unlearn the lessons of hardship. Even though I am only eighteen, I remember my childhood as a time of loss.
Her.
She is what I miss every day, what I cannot replace.
I walk toward the family cemetery behind the house. It has been restored in the past few years: New white fencing surrounds the square of lush grass. One of us waters it every day. Asters bloom along the fence. Every new bud brings a smile. Nothing is ever taken for granted.
I mean to take a seat on the bench my grandfather built, but for some reason I remain standing, staring down at her headstone. She should be here today, beside me. It would mean so much to her … and more to me. I hold tightly to her journal. The few words she wrote will have to last me a lifetime.
I hear the gate open behind me. I know it is my grandmother, following me. She can sense when the sadness rises in me; some days she gives me space with my grief, some days she takes my hand. I don’t know how, but she always knows which I need.
The gate creaks shut.
My grandmother moves in to stand beside me. I can smell the lavender she puts in her soap and the vanilla she has used in today’s baking. Her hair is white now; she calls the color her badge of courage. “This came for you in the mail today. From Jack.”
She hands me a large yellow envelope, with a return address in Hollywood. Jack is on to another fight these days, against fascism, now that there is war in Europe.
I open the package. Inside is a slim book with a marked page. I open the book to that page.
It is a grainy black-and-white photograph of my mother, standing in the back of a truck, with a megaphone to her mouth. The caption reads: Union organizer Elsa Martinelli leads strikers amid a spray of tear-gas bombs and bullets.
I touch the picture, as if I’m blind and my fingers can somehow reveal a deeper image. I close my eyes and remember her standing there, shouting, “No more, no more…”
“The day she found her voice,” I say.
My grandmother nods. It is a thing we have spoken about often in the past few years.
“You should have seen her,” I say. “I was so proud of her.”
“As she would be of you today,” Grandma says.
I open my eyes and see the headstone in front of me.
Elsa Martinelli
1896–1936
Mother. Daughter.
Warrior.
“I wish I’d told her I was proud of her,” I say quietly. Regret reemerges at the oddest moments.
“Ah, cara, she knows.”
“But did I say it? Everything was so terrible, and I
… looked past her. I kept thinking my life was out there, somewhere else, when it was right beside me. She was right beside me.”
“She knew,” Grandma says gently. “And now it is time to go.”
“How can I leave her?”
“You won’t. As she will never leave you.”
In the distance, I hear Ant’s laughter. I turn and see him and our golden retriever running this way, bumping into each other. Grandpa is waiting by the windmill to drive me to the train station so that I can go to college in California, in a city near the sea.
California, Mom. I’m going back.
Unbroken.
“A train does not wait,” my grandmother says. “Do not dawdle.”
I hear her walk away and know that she is giving me a last moment here alone, as if the words I have been unable to find for years will suddenly come to me. “I’m going to college, Mom.”
A breeze moves through the buffalo grass; in it, I swear I hear her voice and remember her long-forgotten words: You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. You taught me love. You, first in the whole world, and my love for you will outlive me.
It is a single perfect memory. A goodbye that gives me peace and courage. Her courage. If I have even a sliver of it, I will be lucky.
Be brave.
It was the last thing she said to me in this world, and I wish I’d told her that her courage would always guide me. In my dreams, I say, I love you, I tell her every day how she shaped me, how she taught me to stand up and find my woman’s voice, even in this man’s world.
This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It’s how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story—which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people—is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again.
Love is what remains.
“Goodbye,” I whisper, although I don’t really give the word away, I hold it close. I look at her headstone, see that word, the one that will forever define her for me: warrior.
Smiling, I turn and look back over the farm that will always be home, where she will await my return.
But for now, I am an explorer again, made bold by hardship and strengthened by loss, going west in search of something that exists only in my imagination. A life different than one I’ve known before.
The Four Winds Page 40
