The Four Winds

As she neared the mailbox, she saw Bruno, their gelding, dead, caught in the dried branches of the fallen trees, dirt caked in his open mouth. Tomorrow, they would have to dig into the hard, dry earth to bury him. Another terrible chore, another goodbye.

With a sigh, she walked back to the house, got into bed. The mattress felt too large for her alone, even if she spread her arms and legs wide. She folded her arms over her chest as if she were a corpse being washed and readied for burial, and stared up at the dusty ceiling.

All those years, all those prayers, all her hope that at last, someday, she would be loved, that her husband would turn to her and see her and love what he saw … gone.

Her parents had been right about her all along.

ELEVEN

Loreda knew she couldn’t blame her mother for Daddy abandoning them, or not entirely. That was the sad, sorry truth she’d come to after a long and sleepless night.

Daddy had left them all. Once she’d seen that fact, she couldn’t unsee it. Daddy had filled Loreda’s head with dreams and told her he loved her, but in the end, he’d left her and walked away.

It made her feel hopeless for the first time in her life.

When she got up the next morning and saw the blue sky outside her window, she dressed in the same dirty clothes she’d run away in and didn’t bother to brush her hair or teeth. What was the point? She was never going to get off this farm and if she didn’t, who cared what she looked like?

She found Grandma Rose in the kitchen, with a breakfast of creamed wheat cereal bubbling on the stove. Grandma looked … clenched. There was no other word for it. She kept talking to herself in Italian, a language she refused to teach her grandchildren because she wanted them to be Americans.

Ant shuffled into the kitchen, kicking through the inch of dirt that covered the floor, and Loreda pulled out a chair for him at the oilcloth-draped table, where the bowls sat upside down at their places, covered in more dirt.

Loreda turned the bowls over and wiped them out, then sat down beside her brother, whose hunched shoulders made him look even younger as he ate cereal so tasteless that even cream and butter couldn’t make it

palatable.

Grandpa walked into the kitchen, buckling his tattered, patched overalls. “Coffee smells good, Rose.” He tousled Ant’s dirty hair.

Ant started to cry. It ended in a hacking cough. Loreda reached out to hold his hand. She felt like crying, too.

“How could he leave them?” Grandpa said to Grandma, who looked stricken.

“Silenzio,” she hissed. “What good are words?”

Grandpa released a heavy breath; the exhalation ended in a cough. He pressed a hand to his chest, as if the dirt from yesterday’s storm had collected there.

Grandma Rose reached for the broom and dustpan. Loreda groaned out loud. They’d spend a whole day digging out from yesterday’s storm—beating rugs, scooping dirt from windowsills, washing everything in the cupboards and putting it away again, upside down. And still more sweeping.

There was a knock at the front door.

“Daddy!” Loreda yelled, leaping to her feet.

She ran for the door, jerked it open.

The man standing there was dressed in rags, his face filthy.

He yanked off his tattered newsboy cap, curled it in his dirty hands.

Hungry. Like all the hobos who stopped by here on their way “there.”

This was what her daddy wanted? To be starving and alone, knocking on some stranger’s door for food? That was better than staying?

Grandma moved in beside Loreda.

“I’m hungry, ma’am. If you’ve got any vittles to share, I’d be much obliged.” The hobo’s shirt was so discolored by dirt and sweat that it was impossible to determine its original color. Blue, maybe. Or gray. He wore dungarees with a belt he’d cinched tight at his waist. “I’d be happy to do some chores.”

“We have cereal,” Grandpa said. “And the porch could use sweeping.”

They were used to hobos stopping by at mealtime, begging for food or offering work for a slice of bread. In times this hard, folks did what they could for those less fortunate. Most hobos did a chore or two and then headed off again. One of the tramps had drawn a symbol on their barn. A message to other wanderers. Supposedly it meant, Stop here. Good folks.