The Four Winds

When peach season ended, they picked up stakes again. For the rest of the summer, they joined the horde of migrants who moved from field to field, crop to crop, and learned to pick whatever was in season and be unseen by the good folks who needed their crops picked but didn’t want to see the people who did the picking and expected them to move on when the season ended. They didn’t go to town or see movies or even go into the libraries. They stayed in their camps, surviving together. Jean taught Elsa how to make hush puppies from ground corn and Elsa showed Jean how the cornmeal could be made into polenta cakes, which were delicious beneath a ladleful of soup or stew. They ate casseroles made of canned tomato soup and macaroni and chopped-up hot dogs. Through all of that long, hot summer, they waited for two words.

* * *

COTTON’S READY.

The news swept the Central Valley in September. Elsa and the kids packed up in the middle of the night and drove back to the San Joaquin Valley and the ditch-bank camp that had been their first stop in California.

They turned onto the deep, dry ruts in the weedy field after a long, hot day of driving. Jeb’s jalopy was in front of them, churning up dust.

“Jeepers,” Ant said, peering through the dirty, bug-splattered windshield. “Look at that.”

In the time they’d been gone, the population of the ditch-bank camp had increased dramatically. There had to be two hundred tents in the field now, filled with more desperate Americans looking for nonexistent jobs. The place looked like the aftermath from a tornado, all broken-down cars and junk spread out.

Jeb drove off to the right, away from the clot of tents and cardboard shacks. He found a nice spot, fairly level, with room for their tents to be side by side, but also each have a little privacy.

Elsa pulled up alongside him and parked.

“Long walk to the river,” Loreda said, and then shook her head, muttering, “I can’t believe I just called it a river.”

Elsa pretended not to hear. “Let’s go, explorers. Time to set up camp.”

They got to work. They set up the tent and hauled out the stove and beat the lumpy, dirty camp mattress to redistribute the feathers. They stacked the buckets inside the copper tub and set them in front of the tent, alongside their washboard and broom.

“Great,” Loreda said, returning with two buckets of water. “We’re back where we started. Home, sweet home.”

Elsa balled up a newspaper, saw the headline: “Relief Crippling the State Financially,” and started a fire in the stove.

Loreda stood beside her. “You know school already started, right?”

“Yes.”

“You know I’m not going back, right?” Loreda said.

Elsa sighed. All she wanted—all she’d ever wanted, really—was to be a good mother. How could she accomplish that if Loreda wasn’t educated? And yet. They’d been in California for less than five months and they’d worked as hard as was possible, and Elsa still had less than twenty dollars to her name. With the gas it took to follow the crops north and the paltry wages and the cost of goods, there was no way to get ahead. And winter was coming. Their survival depended on cotton money and Loreda could pick as much as Elsa could. Double the wages.

“Yes,” Elsa said. “I know you have to pick cotton, but Ant goes to school. Period.” She looked at her daughter. “And the minute the cotton is done, you are back in school.”

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING, LOREDA wakened before sunrise and listened for footsteps. At four A.M., she heard what she’d been waiting for: Jeb’s voice at the tent flaps. “It’s time.”

Loreda and Elsa lurched out of bed already dressed, gathered up the rolled, twelve-foot-long canvas sacks they’d each paid fifty cents for, and went out of the tent.

Jeb and the boys, Elroy and Buster, were there.

The five of them walked out to the main road and turned right and kept walking until they came to the first Welty field.

There were already forty people or so in line, some of whom had probably slept on the roadside to ensure their place. Men, women, children as young as six. Mexicans, Negroes, Okies. Mostly Okies. Small particles of fluffy white cotton floated in the air, landed on Loreda’s face, caught in her hair.

A row of trucks stood ready to be filled with cotton, their trailers lined with chicken wire.

At sunrise, a bell rang out. The crowd of pickers grew anxious. Not all of them would be chosen to pick. By now, there were hundreds of them in line.

The gates to the cotton field opened and a tall, ruddy-faced man wearing a ten-gallon hat walked out, surveying the crowd, moving along it, picking workers. “You,” he said, pointing to Jeb.

Jeb rushed toward the gate.

“You,” he said to Elsa, and then to Loreda, “And you…”