The Four Winds

Rose rushed into the house, her arms full of laundry to be washed.

“It’s…” Elsa’s water broke, splashed down her stockinged legs, and puddled on the floor. The sight plunged Elsa into panic. For the past months, she’d felt herself getting stronger, but now, as pain upended her, she couldn’t think of anything except the doctor telling her so long ago not to get overexcited, not to put strain on her heart.

What if he’d been right? She looked up in terror. “I’m not ready, Rose.”

Rose put down the laundry. “No one is ever ready.”

Elsa couldn’t catch her breath. Another pain hit, wrenched through her stomach.

“Look at me,” Rose said. She took Elsa’s face in her hands, although she had to get on her tiptoes to do so. “This is normal.” She took Elsa by the hand and led her to the bedroom, where she stripped the bed and threw the quilts and sheets on the floor.

She undressed Elsa, who should have been ashamed to be seen that way, with her swollen belly and shapeless limbs, but the pain was so great she didn’t care.

Such teeth in this pain. Gnawing at her, then spitting her out to breathe for a moment and then biting again.

“Go ahead and scream,” Rose said, helping Elsa to the bed.

Elsa lost her hold on time, on everything but the pain. She screamed out when she needed to and panted like a dog in between.

Rose positioned Elsa as if she were a doll, spread her bare legs wide open. “I see the head, Elsa. You can push now.”

Elsa pushed and strained and screamed. “My … heart’s going to stop,” she said, panting. She should have told them she was sick, that she wasn’t supposed to have children, that she could die. “If it does—”

“It’s bad luck to speak of such things, Elsa. Push.”

Elsa gave one last desperate push, felt a great whooshing relief, and sagged back into the pillows, exhausted.

A baby’s cry filled the room.

“A beautiful little girl with a good set of lungs.” Rose cut and tied off the umbilical cord, then wrapped the baby up in one of the many blankets they’d knitted over the long winter and handed the bundle to Elsa.

Elsa took her daughter in her arms and stared down at her in awe. Love filled her to the brim and spilled over in tears. She’d never felt anything like it before, a heady, exhilarating combination of joy and fear. “Hello, baby girl.”

The baby quieted, blinked up at her.

Rose reached into the velvet pouch she wore as a necklace around her throat. Inside the pouch was an American penny. Rose kissed the penny and held it out for Elsa to see. The coin had two wheat shafts imprinted on the back. “Tony found this on the street outside my parents’ home on the day we were to leave on the boat for America. Can you imagine such good fortune? The wheat revealed our destiny. A sign, we said to each other, and it has been true. This coin will watch over another generation now,” Rose said, looking at Elsa. “My beautiful granddaughter.”

“I want to call her Loreda,” Elsa said. “For my grandfather, who was born in Laredo.”

Rose sounded out the unfamiliar name. “Lor-ay-da. Beautiful. Most American, I think,” she said, placing the penny in Elsa’s hand. “Believe me, Elsa, this little girl will love you as no one ever has … and make you crazy and try your soul. Often all at the same time.”

In Rose’s dark, tear-brightened eyes, Elsa saw a perfect reflection of her own emotions and a soul-deep understanding of this bond—motherhood—shared by women for millennia.

She also saw more affection than she’d ever seen in her own mother’s eyes. “Welcome to the family,” Rose said in an uneven voice, and Elsa knew she was talking to her as well as to Loreda.

1934

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.… The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

r /> —FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

SIX

It was so hot that every now and then a bird fell from the sky, landing with a little thump on the hard-packed dirt. The chickens sat in dusty heaps on the ground, their heads lolled forward, and the last two cows stood together, too hot and tired to move. A listless breeze moved through the farm, plucking at the empty clothesline.

The driveway that led to the farmhouse was still hemmed in on either side by makeshift posts and barbed wire, but in several places the posts had fallen down. The trees on either side were skeletal, barely alive. This farm had been reconfigured by wind and drought, sculpted into a land of tumbleweeds and starving mesquite.

Years of drought, combined with the economic ravages of the Great Depression, had brought the Great Plains to its knees.