Elsa nodded.
They stared out at the blinding yellow sun.
* * *
EIGHT STRAIGHT DAYS OF hundred-degree heat. In mid-March.
They renewed their efforts to conserve: energy, water, food, kerosene. They darkened the windows and carried water by the bucketful, poured it sparingly on the garden and on the grapes and in the animal troughs, but it wasn’t enough; the new growth began to wilt in the inexorable heat. By the fourth day, the wheat was dead. Not a hint of green for hundreds of acres. Elsa watched her father-in-law’s steady decline in spirit. He still woke early and drank a cup of bitter, black coffee and read the newspaper. It wasn’t until he opened the door that his shoulders slumped. Each day, he was destroyed anew at the sight of his land. Some days he spent hours at the edges of his dead wheat field, just staring out. He would come home, smelling of sweat and despair, and sit in the sitting room, saying nothing. Rose tried everything she could to revive his spirit, but none of them had much optimism left.
Still, even as the crops died and the fields dried up and their skin burned, life went on.
Today, Elsa and Rose had to do laundry. In this blinding, headache-inducing heat.
Elsa wanted to simply let her children wear dirty clothes, and say, Who cares? Everyone was dirty these days, but what would that say about the kind of mother she was or the lessons she was teaching them? What if one of the few remaining neighbors stopped by and saw her children in unwashed clothes?
So she washed out the tubs and filled them with water, and spent more sweaty, exhausting hours washing towels and bedding and clothes. First, of course, every item had to be carried outside and shaken. The cistern had gone dry in this unseasonable heat, so all the water she needed had to be hauled up from the well and carried into the house in buckets. Thankfully, Loreda was good at hauling water and lately she was too tired and dispirited to complain.
By the time Elsa finished the laundry, it was well past noon and over 105 degrees. The sheets were pinned onto the lines and flapping in the breeze; she could barely lift her head, and every joint in her body ached. And all of it was a waste because dust would rise or fall or puff up from nowhere and leave a film on everything she’d just washed.
She returned to the dark, stuffy kitchen and started bread by mixing together last night’s leftover potato water, a boiled potato, sugar, yeast, and flour. At two o’clock, Loreda walked into the kitchen.
“Good,” Elsa said, covering the bread mixture with a dish towel. “You’re just in time to help me bring in the laundry.”
“Joy,” Loreda said, following Elsa outside.
* * *
ON THE FIRST DAY OF spring—yet another sweltering day—Mom decided it was time to make soap. Soap. Loreda was too tired to complain—and it wouldn’t do any good anyway. Mom and Grandma were warrior women. Nothing stopped them when they’d made up their minds.
Loreda followed her mother out to the barn.
Working together, they rolled a big black cauldron across the hard dirt yard and set it up. Mom knelt beside the three-legged pot and built a fire.
As flames took hold and licked upward, Mom said, “Start hauling water.”
Loreda said nothing, just grabbed a pair of buckets and headed off. When she got back, Grandma was with Mom, watching the fire.
“We should have laid pipe,” Grandma said. “Back when times were good.”
“You know what they say about hindsight,” was Mom’s reply.
“Instead, we bought more land, a new truck, and a thresher. No wonder God is smiting us. Fools,” Grandma said.
“Keep jawing,” Loreda said. “I can handle all the water myself.”
Grandma smacked her lightly in the back of the head. “Basta. Go.”
By the time the cauldron had enough water in it, Loreda’s neck ached, her knees hurt, and the dang heat was giving her a headache. She tugged the bandanna at her throat free and used it to blot her cheeks.
When the water began to boil, Grandma scraped lard into the pot and then carefully poured in the lye. The hot, humid air instantly turned toxic. Mom coughed and covered her mouth and nose.
The heat headache intensified behind Loreda’s eyes. The blue of the horizon became hard to look at without blinking. She stared instead at the field of dead potatoes; the empty windmill platform made her miss her daddy, an emotion she clamped down quickly. She was done missing her dad. Good riddance, she thought (or tried to).
Mom stood at the pot, stirring the mixture of lye, grease, and water with a long, pointed stick until it was the right consistency.
Making soap to sell. As if soap would save them, as if it would make them enough money to feed them all this winter.
Mom ladled the soap into wooden molds while Grandma kicked sand on the fire to extinguish it.