The Four Winds

In the yard, a jalopy was stuffed to the gills with people and junk. Tied to the back end were a stack of buckets, a cast-iron frying pan, and a wooden crate full of mason jars and sacks of wheat. The running engine puffed black smoke into the air and rattled the metal frame. Pots and pans had been tied wherever there was something to tie them to. Two children stood on the rusty running boards and a woman with a sad face and lanky hair sat in the passenger seat holding a baby.

The farmer—Will Bunting—stood by the driver’s-side door, dressed in coveralls and a shirt with only one sleeve. A banged-up cowboy hat was pulled low over his dusty face.

“Whoa,” Mom said, drawing the gelding to a halt, tilting back her sun hat.

“Heyya, Rafe,” Will said, spitting tobacco into the dirt at his feet. “Elsa.” He pulled away from the overburdened car, walked slowly toward the wagon. When he got there, he stopped, said nothing, shoved his hands in his pockets.

“Where yah goin’?” Daddy asked.

“We’re licked,” Will said. “You know my boy, Kallson, died this summer?” He glanced back at his wife. “And now there’s the new one. Can’t take it no more. We’re leaving.”

Loreda straightened. They were leaving?

Mom frowned. “But your land—”

“Bank’s land now. Couldn’t make the payments.”

“Where will you go?” Daddy asked.

Will pulled a creased flyer out of his back pocket. “California. Land of milk and honey, they say. Don’t need honey. Just work.”

“How do you know it’s true?” Daddy said, taking the flyer from him. Jobs for everyone! Land of opportunity! Go West to California!

“I don’t.”

“You can’t just leave,” Mom said.

“Too late for us. A family can only bury so much. Tell your folks I said goodbye.”

Will turned and walked back to his dusty car and climbed into the driver’s seat. The metal door clanged shut.

Mom clicked her tongue and snapped the reins and Milo began plodding forward again. Loreda watched the jalopy drive past them in a cloud of dust, unable suddenly to think about anything else. Leaving. They could go to one of the places she and Daddy talked about: San Francisco or Hollywood or New York.

“Glenn and Mary Lynn Mounger left last week,” Daddy said. “They headed for California, just up and left in that old Packard of theirs.”

It was a long moment before Mom said, “You remember the newsreel we saw? Breadlines in Chicago. People living in shacks and cardboard boxes in Central Park. At least here we’ve got eggs and milk.”

Daddy sighed. Loreda felt the pain of that sound, the hurt that came with it. Mom would say no. “Yeah, I reckon.” He dropped the flyer to the floor of the wagon. “My folks would never leave anyhow.”

“Never,” Mom agreed.

* * *

THAT NIGHT, LOREDA SAT out on the porch swing after supper.

Leave.

The sun set slowly on the farm around her, night swallowing the flat, brown, dry land. One of their cows lowed plaintively for water. Soon, in the darkness, her grandfather would start watering the livestock, carrying buckets of water from the well one by one, while Grandma and Mom watered the garden.

The creaking whine of the porch swing chain seemed loud amid the quiet. She heard the jangling of the party-line telephone come from inside the house. These days, a phone call meant nothing fun; all anyone talked about was the drought.

Except her father. He wasn’t anything like the farmers or shopkeepers. Every other man seemed to live or die by land and weather and crops. Like her grandfather.

When Loreda had been young and the rain reliable, when the wheat grew tall and golden, Grandpa Tony smiled all the time and drank rye on the weekends and played his fiddle at town parties. He used to take her by the hand and walk with her through the whispering wheat and tell her that if she listened, there were stories coming from the stalks themselves. He would get a clump of dirt in his big, callused hand and hold it out to her as if it were a diamond and say, “This will all be yours one day, and it will pass to your children, and then to your children’s children.” The land: he said it the way Father Michael said God.

And Grandma and Mom? They were like all the farm wives in Lonesome Tree. They worked their fingers to the bone, rarely laughing and hardly talking. When they did talk, it was never about anything interesting.

Daddy was the only one who talked about ideas or choices or dreams. He talked about travel and adventures and all the lives a person could live. He’d repeatedly told Loreda that there was a big beautiful world beyond this farm.