The Four Winds

The Martinellis had welcomed Elsa in and she repaid that unexpected kindness with a deep devotion, a fierce love for them and their ways, but even as Elsa had merged deeper into the family, Rafe had veered away. He was unhappy, had been for years, and now Loreda was following her father’s path. Of course she was. It was impossible not to be captivated by Rafe’s charm and caught up in his impossible dreams. His smile could light up the room. He’d fed his impressionable, mercurial daughter a steady diet of dreams when she was young; now he passed along his dissatisfaction. Elsa knew he said things to Loreda, complained of things that he wouldn’t say to his parents or his wife. Loreda had the greatest part of Rafe’s heart, and had from her first breath.

Elsa went back to scrubbing the kitchen floor, and then went on to scrub the floors in all eight rooms, washing dust off the woodwork and windowsills. When she finished that chore, she gathered up the rugs and took them outside and hung them, beating the dirt out of them with a stick.

The wind picked up, ruffled her dress. She paused in beating the rug, sweat running down her face, between her breasts, and tented a hand over her eyes. Past the outhouse, a murky, urine-yellow haze burnished the sky.

Elsa tilted her sun hat back, stared out at the sickly yellow horizon.

Dust storm. The newest scourge of the Great Plains.

The sky changed color, turned red-brown.

Wind picked up, barreled across the farm from the south.

A Russian thistle hit her in the face, tore the skin from her cheek. A tumbleweed spiraled past. A board flew off the chicken coop and cracked into the side of the house.

Rafe and Tony came running out of the barn.

Elsa pulled her bandanna up over her mouth and nose.

The cows mooed angrily and pushed into each other, pointing their bony butts into the dust storm. Static electricity made their tails stand out. A flotilla of birds flew past them, flapping hard, cawing and squawking, outrunning the dust.

Rafe’s Stetson flew off his head and tumbled toward the barbed-wire fence and was caught on a spike. “Get inside,” he yelled. “I’ll take care of the animals.”

“The kids!”

“Mrs. Buslik knows what to do. Go inside.”

Her kids. Out in this.

The wind was howling now, slamming into them, shoving them sideways. Elsa bent into it and fought her way to the house against the wind-driven dust.

She inched up the uneven stairs and across the gritty porch and grabbed the metal doorknob. A current of static electricity knocked her off her feet. She lay there a second, dazed, coughing, trying to breathe.

The door opened.

Rose yanked her to her feet, pulled her into the rattling, howling house.

Elsa and Rose ran from window to window, securing the newspaper and rag coverings over the glass and sills. Dust rained down from the ceilings, wafted from infinitesimal cracks in the window frames and walls. The candles on the makeshift altar blew out. Centipedes crawled out from the walls, hundreds of them, and slithered across the floor, looking for somewhere to hide.

A blast of wind hit the house, so hard it seemed the roof would be torn off.

And the noise.

It was like a locomotive bearing down on them, engines grinding. The house shuddered as if breathing too hard; a banshee wind howled, mad as hell.

The door opened and her husband and Tony staggered in. Tony slammed the door shut behind them and threw the bolt. A crucifix fell to the floor.

Elsa leaned back against the shuddering wall.

Elsa could hear her mother-in-law’s breathy, scratchy voice as she prayed.

Elsa reached sideways, took her hand.

Rafe moved in beside Elsa. She could tell that they were both thinking the same thing: What if the children had been out on the playground? This storm had come up fast. With everything dying these days, there were no strong roots to anchor the soil to the earth. A wind like this could blow whole farms away. At least that was how it felt.

“They’ll be okay,” he said, hacking through the dust.

“How do you know?” she yelled above the sound of the storm.