The Four Winds

She heard the door open behind her. The aroma of stewed tomatoes and fried pancetta and cooked garlic wafted her way.

Daddy came out onto the porch, closed the door quietly behind him. Lighting up a cigarette, he sat down on the swing beside her. She smelled the sweetness of wine on his breath. They were supposed to be conserving everything, but Daddy refused to give up on his wine or his hooch. He said drinking was the only thing keeping him sane. He loved to drop a slippery, sweet slice of preserved peach into his after-supper wine.

Loreda leaned into him. He put an arm around her and pulled her close as they glided forward and back. “You’re quiet, Loreda. That ain’t like my girl.”

The farm transitioned around them into a dark world full of sounds: the windmill thumping, bringing up their precious water, chickens scratching, hogs rooting in the dirt.

“This drought,” Loreda said, pronouncing the dreaded word like everyone did around here. Drouth. She fell silent, choosing her words with care. “It’s killing the land.”

“Yep.” He finished the cigarette, stubbed it out into the pot full of dead flowers beside him.

Loreda pulled the flyer out of her pocket, unfolded it with care.

California. Land of milk and honey.

“Mrs. Buslik says there’s jobs in California. Money lying in the streets. Stella said her uncle sent a postcard saying there’s jobs in Oregon.”

“I doubt there’s money lying in the streets, Loreda. This Depression is worse in the cities. Last I read, over thirteen million folks were out of jobs. You’ve seen the tramps that ride the trains. There’s a Hooverville in Oklahoma City that’d make you cry. Families living in apple carts. Come winter, they’ll be dying of cold on park benches.”

“They aren’t dying of cold in California. You could get a job. Maybe work on the railroad.”

Daddy sighed, and in that exhalation of his breath, she knew what he was thinking. That was how in tune she was with him. “My parents—and your mom—will never leave this land.”

“But—”

“It’ll rain,” Daddy said, but there was something sorrowful about the way he said it, almost as if he didn’t want rain to save them.

“Do you have to be a farmer?”

He turned. She saw the frown that bunched his thick black brows. “I was born one.”

“You always tell me this is America. A person can be anything.”

“Yeah, well. I made a bad choice a few years back, and … well … sometimes your life is chosen for you.” After that, he was quiet for a long time.

“What bad choice?”

He didn’t look at her. His body was sitting beside her, but his mind was somewhere else.

“I don’t want to dry up here and die,” Loreda said.

At last he said, “It’ll rain.”

SEVEN

Another scorcher of a day, and not even ten in the morning. So far, September had offered no respite from the heat.

Elsa knelt on the linoleum kitchen floor, scrubbing hard. She had already been up for hours. It was best to do chores in the relative cool of dawn and dusk.

A scuffling sound caught her attention. She saw a tarantula, body as big as an apple, scurrying out from its hiding place in the corner. She got to her feet and used the mop to chase it outside. It was crueler to send the spider back out into the heat than to crush it with her shoe. Besides, she barely had the energy to stomp on the spider, let alone the will strong enough to care. She had trouble lately doing anything that didn’t result in food or water.

The key to life in this dry heat was conservation of everything: water, food, emotion. That last one was the biggest challenge.

She knew how unhappy Rafe and Loreda were. The two of them, as alike as grains of sand, had more trouble these days than the rest of them. Not

that anyone on the farm was happy. How could they be? But Tony and Rose and Elsa were the kind of people who expected life to be hard and had become tougher to survive. Her in-laws had worked for years—him on the railroad, her in a shirtwaist factory—to earn the money to buy their land. Their first dwelling here had been a dugout made of sod bricks that they’d built themselves. They might have come off the boat as Anthony and Rosalba, but hard work and the land had turned them into Tony and Rose. Americans. They would die of thirst and hunger before they’d give that up. And although Elsa hadn’t been born a farmer, she’d become one.

In the past thirteen years, she’d learned to love this land and this farm more than she would have imagined possible. In the good years, spring had been a time of joy for her, watching her garden grow, and autumn had been a time of pride; she’d loved seeing her labor on the shelves of the root cellar: jars filled with vegetables and fruits—red tomatoes, glistening peaches, and cinnamon-scented apples. Rolls of spiced pancetta made from pork belly and cured hams hanging from hooks overhead. Boxes overflowing with potatoes and onions and garlic from the garden.