“That’s happenin’ all over.”
“I can’t believe people live this way,” Elsa said, and immediately regretted her words when Jean looked away.
“Where can we go that’s better? Okies, they call us. Don’t matter where we’re from. Nobody’ll rent to us, but who can afford rent anyway? Maybe after cotton season you’ll have enough money to head out. We didn’t, though, not with four kids.”
“Maybe in Los Angeles—”
“We say that all the time, but who knows if it’s better there? At least here there’s pickin’ jobs.” She looked up. “You got enough money to waste it on gas going somewheres else?”
No.
Elsa couldn’t listen anymore. “I’d best go look for work. Will you keep an eye out on my children?”
“Course. And don’t forget to register with the state. Tonight I’ll introduce you around to the other women. Good luck to you, Elsa.”
“Thank you.”
After leaving Jean, Elsa carried two buckets full of fetid water from the ditch and boiled it in batches, then strained it through cloth.
She scrubbed her face and upper body as well as she could in the shadowy tent and washed her hair and put on a relatively clean cotton dress. She coiled her wet hair into a coronet and covered it with a kerchief.
This was the best she could do. Her cotton stockings were sagging but clean and the holes in her shoes couldn’t be helped. She was grateful not to have a mirror. Oh, there was one somewhere, buried in one of the boxes in the back of the truck, but it wasn’t worth rummaging around for.
She left a glass full of clean water inside the tent for the children and checked that they were still sleeping.
She left Loreda a note—Looking for work/stay here/water in glass is safe to drink—and headed out to the truck.
She drove out to the main road.
Every farm she came to had a line of people out front, waiting for work. More people walked single file along the road, looking. Tractors churned up the soil in brown fields; here and there, she saw a horse-drawn plow working the land.
After at least half an hour, she came to a HELP WANTED sign tacked to a four-rail fence.
She pulled off the road and onto a long dirt driveway lined with flowering white trees. Hundreds of acres of a low-growing green crop spread out on either side of the driveway. Potatoes, maybe.
She pulled up in front of a big farmhouse with a large screened-in porch and a pretty flower garden.
At her arrival, a man walked out of the house, let the screen door bang shut behind him. He was smoking a pipe and was well dressed, in flannel pants and a crisp white shirt and a fedora that must have cost a fortune. His hair was precisely trimmed, sideburns shorn, as was his pencil-thin mustache.
He came around to the driver’s side of the truck. “A truck, huh? You must
be new.”
“Arrived yesterday, from Texas.”
He gave Elsa an appraising look, then cocked his head. “Head that way. The missus needs help.”
“Thank you!” Elsa hurried out of the truck before he could change his mind. A job!
She rushed toward the large house. Passing through an open picket gate and a rose garden that enveloped her in a scent that recalled her childhood, she climbed the few steps to the front door and knocked.
She heard the clip of high heels on hardwood floors.
The door opened to reveal a short, plump woman in a fashionable slit skirt dress with a flounced silken cravat at the high neckline. Carefully controlled platinum curls swept back from a center part and framed her face in a jaw-length bob.
The woman looked at Elsa and took a step back. She sniffed daintily, pressed a lace handkerchief to her nose. “Our farmhand deals with the vagrants.”
“Your … the man in the fedora said you needed help with some household chores.”