The Four Winds

The man named Ike made a sound. “I don’t know, Jeb. I got a bad feeling. The price of cotton is down, and the damned Ag Adjustment Act is putting the squeeze on the growers again. The government wants less cotton planted to raise prices. You know what that means. Sooner or later, if the growers get squeezed, we get pounded.”

“What about the summer months?” Elsa asked. “Once the cotton is thinned, it will be months before it’s ready to pick. What work is there then?”

“Most of us move north pretty soon to pick fruit. We come back in the fall for cotton.”

“Is it worth the gas money?” Elsa asked.

Jeb shrugged. “It’s work, Elsa. We take it where we can, when we can.”

Up ahead, Elsa saw women cooking in front of whatever dwellings they had. She heard the strains of a fiddle rising up and it made her smile.

Outside their tent, Loreda and Ant sat on the buckets on the ground. Beside them, a pot of beans simmered on the stove.

“Mom?” Loreda said. “I need to talk to you.”

That couldn’t be good. Lately, Loreda’s anger had grown exponentially. She didn’t complain much, or roll her eyes and storm off, but somehow that made it worse. Elsa knew her daughter was eating a steady diet of outrage and sooner or later she would explode. “Sure.”

“Stay here, Ant,” Loreda said, rising to her feet.

Elsa followed Loreda toward the ditch they pathetically called a river.

Beneath a spindly tree in full bloom, Loreda stopped and turned to face Elsa. “School ended two days ago.”

“I’m aware of that, Loreda.”

“Are you also aware that I’m the only thirteen-year-old in camp during the day?”

Elsa knew where this was going. She’d been expecting it. Dreading it. “Yes.”

“Seven-year-olds are working in the fields, Mom.”

“I know, Loreda, but…”

Loreda moved closer. “I’m not deaf, Mom. I hear what people say. Winter in California is bad. There’s no work. We can’t get state relief until next April. So the only money we have is what we make working in the fields. It will have to get us through four months with no work and no relief money.”

“I know.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to work with you.”

Elsa wanted to say—to scream—NO.

But Loreda was right. They needed to save money for the winter.

“Just for the summer. Then you go back to school,” Elsa said. “Jean can watch Ant.?

?

“You know he’ll want to work, too, Mom,” Loreda said. “Ant’s strong.”

Elsa walked away, pretending she hadn’t heard.

* * *

BY JULY, THE WORK in the cotton fields had ended again; there would be no more until it was time to pick the crop. Still, each day, new migrants walked or rode into the San Joaquin Valley. More workers, less work. The newspapers were full of outrage and despair on the part of the citizens, who worried that their tax dollars were being spent to help nonresidents. The schools and hospitals were overrun, they said, unable to survive the demands of so many outsiders. They worried about bankruptcy and losing their way of life and being made unsafe by the wave of crime and disease they blamed on migrants.

Elsa called an Explorers Club meeting and asked her children if they wanted to stay in the ditch-bank camp or follow the Deweys—and many of the camp’s inhabitants—north to the Central Valley to find work picking fruit. As always, it was a difficult choice in which each of them was aware how precarious their survival was. Spend money or save it.

In the end, they made the choice that most of the migrants made: they packed their belongings in boxes and tore down the tent and repacked the truck for travel. They headed north behind the Deweys; in Yolo County, they moved into another field full of tents and set up camp. There, they learned to pick peaches. Elsa hated to bring Ant into the fields with her, but there was no choice. She was a single mother and her son was too young to stay alone all day, every day. With all of them picking, they made just enough to feed themselves and stay clothed. Certainly there were no savings.