The Four Winds

“I think what you want will cause trouble.” Elsa finished her coffee and handed him her empty cup. As he took it from her, she noticed his ratty wristwatch, which didn’t tell the right time. It surprised her, that small insight. She’d never known a man who didn’t care about time. “I appreciate your help, Jack. Truly. Your people were the first to help us, but…”

“But what?”

“I don’t have time for communism. I need to find a place for us to live.”

“You think I don’t understand, Mrs. Martinelli, but I do. Better than you can imagine.”

The way he said her surname surprised her somehow; he made it sound exotic almost, tinged with an accent she didn’t recognize. “Call me Elsa, please.”

“Will you let me do one thing for you?”

“What?”

“Will you trust me?”

“Why?”

“There’s no why to trust. It either is or isn’t. Will you trust me?”

Elsa stared at him, looked deeply into his dark eyes. There was in him an intensity that unnerved her; maybe she would have found him frightening in her life before all of this. She remembered the day she’d seen him proselytizing in the town square and getting punched by the police, and the bruises she’d seen on his face when she saw him outside the police station. He and his ideas came with violence, there was no doubt about that.

But he’d saved her children and given them a place to stay. And, strangely, beneath the fierceness she saw in him, she sensed pain. Not loneliness, exactly, but an aloneness she recognized.

Elsa stood. “Okay,” she said, her gaze steady.

He led her to the Red Cross tent, where Loreda and Ant were handing out sandwiches.

“Mommy!” Ant cried out at the sight of her.

Elsa couldn’t help smiling. What in the world was more restorative than a child’s love?

“You should see how good I’ve been at food, Mommy,” Ant said, grinning. “And I didn’t eat every donut.”

Elsa ruffled his clean hair. “I’m proud of you. And now Mr. Valen promises to show us something interesting. Explorers Club outing?”

“Yay!”

Loreda said, “Let me get our new stuff.” She ran back to the Communist tent and returned with a box full of clothes and bedding and food.

Jack touched Elsa’s arm gently. When she looked up at him, she saw a surprising understanding in his eyes, as if he knew how it felt to lose everything, or maybe just to have nothing to lose.

“Follow me. I’m in that truck.”

Elsa walked with her children to their own muddy truck and climbed in. The truck bed held the few goods and belongings they’d never unpacked; things they didn’t need in this broken-down version of their life.

As they headed north following Jack, storm damage was evident everywhere; splintered, fallen trees, rocks and rubble in the street, slumps of land that covered roadways. Water in gullies, in puddles, in falls by the street.

People walked in a steady stream along the side of the road, carrying whatever they had left.

They passed another ditch-bank camp that was destroyed. A sea of mud and belongings, but already people were slogging back onto the wet land, digging through the mud and standing water for their belongings.

At a sign that read WELTY FARMS, Jack pulled over to the side of the road and parked. Elsa did the same. He walked over to her side of the truck. She rolled down the window.

“This is Welty’s camp. He houses some pickers here. I heard that a family left yesterday.”

“Why would a family leave?”

“Someone died,” he said. “Tell the man at the guardhouse that Grant sent you.”