She climbed into bed and pulled the quilt up around her and waited for her husband.
* * *
THE NEXT THING ELSA knew, it was daylight and she smelled coffee. The rich, bitter aroma drew her out of the comfort of her bed. She finger-combed her hair and slipped into a housedress, trying not to be hurt that Rafe hadn’t come to their bed again last night.
She rebraided her hair and wrapped it in a coil at the back of her head, pinning it in place and then covering it with the kerchief.
She checked on her children—letting them sleep in on this Saturday morning—and headed to the kitchen, where a pot full of last night’s potato water had been saved to make bread.
All they had for breakfast was wheat cereal, so she got it started. Thank God they had one cow that was still producing milk.
Loreda was the first to stumble out of her small second-floor bedroom. Her black bob was a rat’s nest of tangles and curls. A sunburn peeled in patches across her cheeks. “Wheat cereal. Yum,” she said, heading to the icebox. Opening it, she took out the yellow crockery pitcher that held a bit of precious cream and carried it over to the oilcloth-draped table, where the speckled bowls and plates were already in place, upside down to protect from dust. She turned over three bowls.
Ant came out next, climbed up into the chair beside his sister. “I want pancakes,” he grumbled.
“I’ll put some corn syrup in your cereal,” Elsa said.
Elsa served up the cereal, doctored it with cream and added a little corn syrup to each bowl, and then set down two glasses of cold buttermilk.
As the children ate—silently—Elsa headed for the barn. Wind and shifting sand had changed the landscape overnight again, filled in much of the giant crack that had cut through their property.
As she passed the hog pen, she saw their only remaining hog kneeling lethargically on the hard-packed earth, and the John Deere one-horse seed drill, unused now, half buried in sand. Beyond that, she saw Rose in the orchard, looking for apples on the cracked ground.
In the pen, their two cows stood side by side, heads down, mooing pathetically. Their ribs stood out, their bellies shrunken, their hides blistered with sores. Elsa couldn’t help but remember a few years ago, when the younger of the two cows, Bella, had been born. Elsa had fed her by bottle because the cow’s mother hadn’t survived the birth. Rose had taught Elsa how to make the bottle and get the unsteady calf to take it. Sometimes Bella still followed Elsa around the yard like a pet.
“Hey, Bella,” Elsa said, stroking the cow’s sunken side.
Bella looked up, her big brown eyes blinded by dirt, and mooed plaintively.
“I know,” Elsa said, taking a bucket from the fence post.
Elsa led Bella into the relative coolness of the barn, tied her to the center post, and pulled out the milking stool. She couldn’t help glancing up into the hayloft—nearly empty now of hay. She was pretty sure Rafe had slept there last night. Again.
Elsa had always loved this chore. It had taken her a long time to catch on in the beginning; she had heard a hundred tsks from Rose as Elsa tried to master the technique, but master it she had, and now it was one of her favorite chores. She loved being with Bella, loved the sweet smell of fresh milk, the hollow clanking as the first stream hit the metal bucket. She even loved what came next: carrying the bucket of fresh, warm milk to the house, pouring it into the separator, cranking the machine by hand, skimming off the rich yellow cream, saving the whole milk to feed her family and using skim milk for the animals.
Elsa reached out for the cow’s barely swollen udder, touched the wind-chapped teats gently.
The cow bellowed in pain.
“I’m sorry, Bella,” Elsa said. She tried again, squeezing as gently as she could, pulling down slowly.
A stream of dirt-brown milk squirted out, smelling fecund. Each day, it seemed, milking took longer to reach white, usable milk. The first streams were always dirty like this. Elsa dumped out the brown milk, cleaned the bucket, and tried again. She never gave up, no matter how sad Bella’s moans made her or how long it took to get clean milk.
When she finished, getting less than they needed, she turned the poor cow out into the paddock.
As she passed the horse stalls, Milo and Bruno both snorted heavily and bit at the door, trying to eat the wood.
As she locked the barn door behind her, she heard a gunshot.
What now?
She turned, saw her father-in-law at the hog pen. He lowered his rifle as their last hog staggered sideways and collapsed.
“Thank God,” Elsa murmured to herself. Meat for the children.
She waved at him as he hefted the dead hog into a wheelbarrow and headed to the barn to hang it for slaughter.
A tumbleweed rolled lazily past her, pushed along by a gentle breeze. Her gaze followed it to the fence line, where the Russian thistles survived against all odds, growing stubbornly even in the drought, against the wind. The cows ate them when there was nothing else. So did the horses.