They’d suffered through these dry years in the Texas Panhandle, but with the whole country devastated by the Crash of ’29 and twelve million people out of work, the big-city newspapers didn’t bother covering the drought. The government offered no assistance, not that the farmers wanted it anyway. They were too proud to live on the dole. All they wanted was for rain to soften the soil and sprout the seeds so the wheat and corn would once again lift their golden arms toward the sky.
The rains had begun to slow in ’31, and in the last three years there had been almost none at all. This year, so far, they had had less than five inches. Not enough to fill a pitcher for tea, let alone water thousands of acres of wheat.
Now, on another record-breaking hot day in late August, Elsa sat in the driver’s seat of the old wagon, her hands sweating and itching inside her suede gloves as she handled the reins. There was no money for gas anymore, so the truck had become a relic stored in the barn, like the tractor and the plow.
A straw hat, once white and now brown with dust, was pulled low on her sunburned forehead, and she’d tied a blue bandanna around her throat. Grit in her eyes made her squint as she made a clicking sound with her teeth and tongue and maneuvered the wagon off the farm and onto the main road. Milo’s plodding, even clip-clop steps rang out on the hard-packed dirt. Birds sat on telephone wires strung between the poles.
It was not quite three o’clock in the afternoon when she pulled into Lonesome Tree. The town was quiet, hunkered down in the heat. There were no townspeople out shopping, no women gathered outside the storefronts. Those days were as gone as green lawns.
The hat shop was boarded up, as was the apothecary, the soda fountain, and the diner. The Rialto Movie Theater was hanging on by a thread; it showed one matinee a week, but few could afford to attend. Raggedly dressed people stood in line for food at the Presbyterian church, metal spoons and cups in hand. The children, freckled and sunburned and as whittled down as their parents, were quiet.
The lone tree on Main Street, a plains cottonwood that was the town’s namesake, was dying. Each time Elsa came to town it looked a little worse.
The wagon rolled forward, wheels clacking, passing the boarded-up county welfare building (there was lots of need, but no funds), and the blank-eyed jail that was busier than ever with drifters and hobos and no-account train tramps. The doctor’s office was still open, but the bakery was out of business. Most of the buildings were single story and made of wood. In the wet years, they’d been repainted yearly. Now they were untended and turning gray.
Elsa said, “Whoa, Milo,” and pulled up on the reins. The horse and wagon clanked to a stop. The gelding shook his head, snorted tiredly. He hated being out in this heat, too.
Elsa stared at the Silo Saloon. The squat, square building, half as wide and twice as long as any other Main Street building, had two windows that faced the street. One had been broken last year in a fight between two drunks and had never been fixed. Rows of dirty tape closed the square. The saloon had been built in the 1880s for the cowboys of the three-million-acre XIT Ranch that ran along the Texas–New Mexico border. The ranch was long gone and most of the cowboys had moved on, but the Silo remained.
In the months since Prohibition had been repealed, places like the Silo had reopened for business, but the Depression had left fewer and fewer men with spare pennies for beer.
Elsa tied the gelding to a hitching post and smoothed the front of her damp cotton dress. She’d made the dress herself, from old flour sacks. Everyone made clothes from grain and flour sacks these days. The manufacturers of the sacks had even begun printing pretty designs on the material. It was a small thing, those floral patterns, but anything that made a woman feel pretty in these hard times was worth its weight in gold. Elsa made sure that the dress, once fitted to her figure and now bagging at her narrowing hips and bust, was buttoned up to her throat. It was a sad fact that she was thirty-eight years old, a grown woman with two children, and she still hated to enter a place like this. Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.
Elsa steeled herself and opened the door. Inside, the long, narrow saloon was as drab and untended as the town itself. The smoky air smelled of spilled hooch and men’s sweat. A mahogany bar had been worn to a satin finish by fifty years of men drinking at it. Faded, shredded barstools were positioned along it; most were empty now in the middle of a hot summer day.
Rafe sat slumped on one of them, elbows on the bar, an empty shot glass in front of him, his head hung forward. Black hair curtained his face from view. He wore faded, patched dungarees and a shirt made of plain beige flour-sack fabric. A brown, hand-rolled cigarette burned between two dirty fingers.
In the back of the saloon, an old man chuckled. “Watch out, Rafe. The sheriff’s in town.” His voice was slurred, his mouth almost lost in the tufts of his gray beard.
The barkeep looked up, a dirty rag slung over his shoulder. “Howdy, Elsa,” he said. “You come to pay his tab?”
Perfect. There was no money to buy the children new shoes or to replace her last pair of stockings, and now her husband was drinking on credit.
She felt awkward and unattractive in her baggy flour-sack dress and thick cotton hose, with the fraying leather of her shoes making her big feet look even bigger.
“Rafe?” she said quietly, coming up behind him, laying a bare hand on his shoulder, hoping to gentle him with touch, as she would a skittish colt.
“I meant to have one drink.” He let out a ragged sigh.
Elsa couldn’t count the number of times her husband’s sentences began with I meant. In the first years of their marriage, he’d tried. She’d seen him trying to love her, to be happy, but the drought had drained her husband, just as it had dried out the land. In the past four years, he’d stopped spinning dreams for the future. Three years ago, they’d buried a son, but even that loss hadn’t broken him the way poverty and the drought had. “Your father was counting on you to help him plant fall potatoes this afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
“The kids need potatoes,” Elsa said.
He cocked his head, just enough so he could see her through the dust black of his hair. “You think I don’t know that?”
I think you’ve been sitting here drinking up what little money we have, so how can I know what you know? Loreda needs new shoes, she thought but didn’t dare say out loud.
“I’m a bad father, Elsa, and a worse husband. Why do you stay with me?”
Because I love you.
The look in his dark eyes broke her heart yet again. She did love her husband as deeply as she loved her children, Loreda and Anthony, and as deeply as she’d come to love the Martinellis and the land. Elsa had discovered within herself a nearly bottomless capacity for love. And, God help her, it was her doomed, unshakable love for Rafe, as much as anything, that repeatedly rendered her mute, made her withdraw so that she wouldn’t seem pathetic. Sometimes, especially on the nights he didn’t come to their bed at all, she felt she deserved better and that maybe if she stood up and demanded more, she would receive it. Then she would remember the things her parents had said about her, the unattractiveness that had never changed, and she would remain silent.
“Come on, Elsa, take me home. I can’t wait to spend the rest of the day rooting through the dirt to plant potatoes that will die without rain.”
She steadied him as he stumbled out of the saloon, and helped him up into the wagon. She took the reins and slapped them across the bay gelding’s butt. Milo snorted tiredly and began the long, plodding journey through town, past the abandoned grange hall where the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs used to meet.