It was so hot that every now and then a bird fell from the sky, landing with a little thump on the hard-packed dirt. The chickens sat in dusty heaps on the ground, their heads lolled forward, and the last two cows stood together, too hot and tired to move. A listless breeze moved through the farm, plucking at the empty clothesline.
The driveway that led to the farmhouse was still hemmed in on either side by makeshift posts and barbed wire, but in several places the posts had fallen down. The trees on either side were skeletal, barely alive. This farm had been reconfigured by wind and drought, sculpted into a land of tumbleweeds and starving mesquite.
Years of drought, combined with the economic ravages of the Great Depression, had brought the Great Plains to its knees.
They’d suffered through these dry years in the Texas Panhandle, but with the whole country devastated by the Crash of ’29 and twelve million people out of work, the big-city newspapers didn’t bother covering the drought. The government offered no assistance, not that the farmers wanted it anyway. They were too proud to live on the dole. All they wanted was for rain to soften the soil and sprout the seeds so the wheat and corn would once again lift their golden arms toward the sky.
The rains had begun to slow in ’31, and in the last three years there had been almost none at all. This year, so far, they had had less than five inches. Not enough to fill a pitcher for tea, let alone water thousands of acres of wheat.
Now, on another record-breaking hot day in late August, Elsa sat in the driver’s seat of the old wagon, her hands sweating and itching inside her suede gloves as she handled the reins. There was no money for gas anymore, so the truck had become a relic stored in the barn, like the tractor and the plow.
A straw hat, once white and now brown with dust, was pulled low on her sunburned forehead, and she’d tied a blue bandanna around her throat. Grit in her eyes made her squint as she made a clicking sound with her teeth and tongue and maneuvered the wagon off the farm and onto the main road. Milo’s plodding, even clip-clop steps rang out on the hard-packed dirt. Birds sat on telephone wires strung between the poles.
It was not quite three o’clock in the afternoon when she pulled into Lonesome Tree. The town was quiet, hunkered down in the heat. There were no townspeople out shopping, no women gathered outside the storefronts. Those days were as gone as green lawns.
The hat shop was boarded up, as was the apothecary, the soda fountain, and the diner. The Rialto Movie Theater was hanging on by a thread; it showed one matinee a week, but few could afford to attend. Raggedly dressed people stood in line for food at the Presbyterian church, metal spoons and cups in hand. The children, freckled and sunburned and as whittled down as their parents, were quiet.
The lone tree on Main Street, a plains cottonwood that was the town’s namesake, was dying. Each time Elsa came to town it looked a little worse.
The wagon rolled forward, wheels clacking, passing the boarded-up county welfare building (there was lots of need, but no funds), and the blank-eyed jail that was busier than ever with drifters and hobos and no- account train tramps. The doctor’s office was still open, but the bakery was out of business. Most of the buildings were single story and made of wood. In the wet years, they’d been repainted yearly. Now they were untended and turning gray.
Elsa said, “Whoa, Milo,” and pulled up on the reins. The horse and wagon clanked to a stop. The gelding shook his head, snorted tiredly. He hated being out in this heat, too.
Elsa stared at the Silo Saloon. The squat, square building, half as wide and twice as long as any other Main Street building, had two windows that faced the street. One had been broken last year in a fight between two
drunks and had never been fixed. Rows of dirty tape closed the square. The saloon had been built in the 1880s for the cowboys of the three-million-acre XIT Ranch that ran along the Texas–New Mexico border. The ranch was long gone and most of the cowboys had moved on, but the Silo remained.
In the months since Prohibition had been repealed, places like the Silo had reopened for business, but the Depression had left fewer and fewer men with spare pennies for beer.
Elsa tied the gelding to a hitching post and smoothed the front of her damp cotton dress. She’d made the dress herself, from old flour sacks. Everyone made clothes from grain and flour sacks these days. The manufacturers of the sacks had even begun printing pretty designs on the material. It was a small thing, those floral patterns, but anything that made a woman feel pretty in these hard times was worth its weight in gold. Elsa made sure that the dress, once fitted to her figure and now bagging at her narrowing hips and bust, was buttoned up to her throat. It was a sad fact that she was thirty-eight years old, a grown woman with two children, and she still hated to enter a place like this. Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.
Elsa steeled herself and opened the door. Inside, the long, narrow saloon was as drab and untended as the town itself. The smoky air smelled of spilled hooch and men’s sweat. A mahogany bar had been worn to a satin finish by fifty years of men drinking at it. Faded, shredded barstools were positioned along it; most were empty now in the middle of a hot summer day.
Rafe sat slumped on one of them, elbows on the bar, an empty shot glass in front of him, his head hung forward. Black hair curtained his face from view. He wore faded, patched dungarees and a shirt made of plain beige flour-sack fabric. A brown, hand-rolled cigarette burned between two dirty fingers.
In the back of the saloon, an old man chuckled. “Watch out, Rafe. The sheriff’s in town.” His voice was slurred, his mouth almost lost in the tufts of his gray beard.
The barkeep looked up, a dirty rag slung over his shoulder. “Howdy, Elsa,” he said. “You come to pay his tab?”
Perfect. There was no money to buy the children new shoes or to replace her last pair of stockings, and now her husband was drinking on credit.
She felt awkward and unattractive in her baggy flour-sack dress and thick cotton hose, with the fraying leather of her shoes making her big feet look even bigger.
“Rafe?” she said quietly, coming up behind him, laying a bare hand on his shoulder, hoping to gentle him with touch, as she would a skittish colt.
“I meant to have one drink.” He let out a ragged sigh.
Elsa couldn’t count the number of times her husband’s sentences began with I meant. In the first years of their marriage, he’d tried. She’d seen him trying to love her, to be happy, but the drought had drained her husband, just as it had dried out the land. In the past four years, he’d stopped spinning dreams for the future. Three years ago, they’d buried a son, but even that loss hadn’t broken him the way poverty and the drought had. “Your father was counting on you to help him plant fall potatoes this afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
“The kids need potatoes,” Elsa said.
He cocked his head, just enough so he could see her through the dust black of his hair. “You think I don’t know that?”
I think you’ve been sitting here drinking up what little money we have, so how can I know what you know? Loreda needs new shoes, she thought but didn’t dare say out loud.
“I’m a bad father, Elsa, and a worse husband. Why do you stay with me?”
Because I love you.
The look in his dark eyes broke her heart yet again. She did love her husband as deeply as she loved her children, Loreda and Anthony, and as deeply as she’d come to love the Martinellis and the land. Elsa had discovered within herself a nearly bottomless capacity for love. And, God help her, it was her doomed, unshakable love for Rafe, as much as anything, that repeatedly rendered her mute, made her withdraw so that she wouldn’t seem pathetic. Sometimes, especially on the nights he didn’t come to their bed at all, she felt she deserved better and that maybe if she stood up and demanded more, she would receive it. Then she would remember the things
her parents had said about her, the unattractiveness that had never changed, and she would remain silent.
“Come on, Elsa, take me home. I can’t wait to spend the rest of the day rooting through the dirt to plant potatoes that will die without rain.”
She steadied him as he stumbled out of the saloon, and helped him up into the wagon. She took the reins and slapped them across the bay gelding’s butt. Milo snorted tiredly and began the long, plodding journey through town, past the abandoned grange hall where the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs used to meet.
Rafe leaned against Elsa, placing a gentle, long-fingered hand on her thigh. “I’m sorry, Els,” he said in his soft-spoken, what-have-I-done voice.
“It’s okay,” she said, meaning it from the bottom of her heart. As long as he was beside her, it was okay. She would always forgive him. As little as he gave her, as frayed as his affection for her sometimes was, she lived in fear of losing it. Losing him. Just as she feared losing her moody, adolescent daughter’s love.
Lately, that fear had grown almost too big to handle.
Loreda had turned twelve and immediately become angry. Gone overnight were the days of mother-daughter gardening and reading hour at night, when they’d discussed Heathcliff’s nature and Jane Eyre’s strength. Loreda had always been a daddy’s girl, but as a child she’d had room in her heart for both of her parents. For everyone, really. Loreda had been the happiest of children, always laughing and clapping and demanding attention. For years, she had only been able to sleep if Elsa was in bed with her, stroking her hair.
Gone, all of it.
Elsa grieved daily for the loss of that closeness with her firstborn. At first she’d tried to scale the walls of her daughter’s adolescent, irrational anger; she’d volleyed back with words of love, but Loreda’s continuing, thriving impatience with Elsa had done worse than grind her down. It had resurrected all the insecurities of childhood. Somewhere along the way, Elsa had begun to withdraw from Loreda, first hoping that her daughter would grow out of her mood swings, and then—worse—believing that Loreda had finally seen the lack in Elsa that her own family had seen.
Elsa felt a deeply rooted shame in her daughter’s rejection. In her hurt, she did what she’d always done: she disappeared. But all the while, she
waited, prayed, that both her husband and her daughter would someday see how much she loved them and they would love her in return. Until then, she dared not push too hard or demand too much. The price could be too high.
There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.
 |
ON THIS FIRST DAY of school, the town’s only remaining teacher, Nicole Buslik, stood at the chalkboard, chalk in hand. Her auburn hair had worked free from its constraints and become a fuzzy nimbus around her heat- flushed face. Sweat turned the lace at her throat a shade darker and Loreda was pretty sure Mrs. Buslik was afraid to lift her arms and show sweat stains.
Twelve-year-old Loreda sat at her desk, slumped forward, not paying attention to today’s lesson. It was just more blather about what had gone wrong. The Great Depression, the drought, blah, blah, blah.
It had been “hard times” for as long as Loreda could remember. Oh, in the early years, the time before memory, she knew rains had fallen, season after season, nourishing the land. Pretty much all Loreda remembered of the green years was the sight of her grandfather’s wheat, golden stalks dancing beneath an enormous blue sky. The sound of rustling. The image of tractors rolling over the ground twenty-four hours a day, plowing the earth, churning up more and more fields. A horde of mechanical insects chewing up the ground.
When had the bad years begun, exactly? It was hard to pinpoint. There were so many choices. The stock market crash of 1929, some would say, but not the folks around here. Loreda had been seven years old then, and she remembered some of that time. Folks lined up outside the savings and loan. Grandpa complaining about bad wheat prices. Grandma lighting candles and keeping them lit, whispering prayers with her rosary.
That had been bad, the crash, but most of the hardship landed in cities Loreda had never been to. Nineteen twenty-nine had been a good rain year, which meant a good crop year, which meant times had been good enough for the Martinellis.
Grandpa kept riding his tractor, kept planting wheat, even as the prices plummeted because of the Depression. He’d even bought a brand-new Ford Model AA stake-bed farm truck. Daddy had smiled often then and told her stories of faraway lands while Mom did chores.
The last good crop had been 1930, the year Loreda turned eight. She remembered her birthday. A beautiful spring day. Presents. Grandma’s tiramisu with candles poking up from the cocoa-powder topping. Her best friend, Stella, had been allowed to spend the night for the first time. Daddy had taught them how to dance the Charleston while Grandpa accompanied them on the fiddle.
And then the rains slowed and never started up again. Drought.
These days, green fields were a distant memory, a mirage of her youth. The adults looked as parched as the ground. Grandpa spent hours standing in his dead wheat fields, scooping the dry earth into his callused hands, watching it fall away through his fingers. He grieved for his dying grapes and told anyone who would listen that he’d brought the first vines from Italy, stuffed in his pockets. Grandma had built altars everywhere, doubled the number of crucifixes on the walls, and made them all pray for rain each Sunday. Sometimes the whole town came together in the schoolhouse to pray for rain. All different religions begging God for moisture: the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Irish and the Italian Catholics, each in their own rows. The Mexicans had their own church built hundreds of years ago.
Everyone talked about the drought constantly and missed the good old days. Except her mother.
Loreda sighed heavily.
Had there ever been any fun in her mother? If so, it was another of Loreda’s lost memories. Sometimes, when she lay in bed, drifting toward sleep, she thought she remembered the sound of her mother’s laughter, the feel of her touch, even a whispered, Be brave, just before a good-night kiss.
More and more, though, those memories felt manufactured, false. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother laughed about anything.
All Mom did was work.
Work, work, work. As if that would save them.
Loreda couldn’t remember when exactly she’d begun to be angered by her mother’s … disappearance. There was no other word for it. Her mother rose well before the sun and worked. Day after day. Hour after hour. She
harped constantly about saving food and not dirtying clothes and not wasting water.
Loreda couldn’t imagine how her handsome, charming, funny father had ever fallen in love with Mom. Loreda had once told her father that Mom seemed afraid of laughter. He had said, “Now, Lolo,” in that way of his, with his head cocked and a smile that meant he wouldn’t talk of it. He never complained about his wife, but Loreda knew how he felt, so she complained for him. It brought them closer, proved how alike they were, she and Daddy.
As alike as peas in a pod. Everyone said so.
Like Daddy, Loreda saw how limited life was on a wheat farm in the Texas Panhandle, and she had no intention of becoming like her mother. She was not going to sit on this dying wheat farm for her whole life, withering and wrinkling beneath a sun so hot it melted rubber. She was not going to waste her every prayer on rain. Not a chance.
She was going to travel the world and write about her adventures.
Someday she would be as famous as Nellie Bly.
Someday.
She watched a brown field mouse creep along the baseboard under the window. It stopped at the teacher’s desk, sipped at a blot of fallen ink. When it looked up, blue painted its tiny nose.
Loreda elbowed Stella Devereaux, who sat at the desk next to Loreda. Stella looked up, bleary-eyed from the heat.
Loreda indicated the mouse. Stella almost smiled.
A bell rang and the mouse ran into the corner and disappeared into its hole.
Loreda got to her feet. Her flour-sack dress felt sticky with sweat. She grabbed her book bag and fell into step with Stella. Usually they’d be talking nonstop on the way out, about boys or books or places they wanted to see or movies coming to the Rialto Theater, but today it was too hot to make the effort.
Loreda’s little brother, Anthony, was the first one to the door, as usual. At seven, Ant ran like an unbroken colt, all bent elbows and loose joints. More spirited than any of the other children, Ant always had a spring in his step. He was dressed in faded, patched dungarees that were inches too short, the ragged hems revealing ankles as skinny as broom handles and shoes
with holes in the toes. His freckled, angular face was tanned to the color of saddle leather, with big red patches of sunburn on his cheeks. A cap hid the fact that his black hair was dirty. Outside, he saw his parents in the wagon and waved broadly and started to run. He had never known anything but drought, not really, and so he played and laughed like an ordinary boy. Stella’s younger sister, Sophia, tried gamely to keep up with him.
“How does your mom always sit up so tall in this heat?” Stella said. She was the only kid in class wearing new shoes and a dress made from real gingham. Times weren’t so bad for the Devereaux family, but Loreda’s grandpa said all the banks were in trouble.
“It doesn’t matter how hot it is, she never complains.”
“My mom doesn’t say much, either, but you should hear my sister. Ever since she got married, she cries like a stuck pig about all the work it takes to be a wife.”
“I ain’t getting married,” Loreda said. “My dad and me are going to go to Hollywood together someday.”
“Your mom won’t mind?”
Loreda shrugged. Who knew what bothered her mom? And who cared?
Stella and Sophia turned left and headed toward their home on the other side of town.
Ant ran up to the wagon.
“Hey, Mommy,” Ant said, his grin showing off a new lost tooth. “Daddy.”
“Howdy, son,” Daddy said. “Climb into the back.”
“D’ya wanna see what I drew in class today? Missus Buslik says—” “Get in the wagon, Anthony,” Daddy said. “I’ll see your artwork at
home, when the sun goes down and we are out of this damnable heat.” Ant’s face fell in disappointment.
Loreda hated how sad and beaten her dad looked. The drought was sucking him dry. He and Loreda were bright stars who needed to shine. He said so all the time. “You wanna go to the movies tomorrow, Daddy?” she said, staring up at him adoringly. “Little Miss Marker is playing again.”
“There’s no money for that, Loreda,” Mom said. “Climb in the back with your brother.”
“How about—”
“Get in the wagon, Loreda,” Mom said.
Loreda tossed her book bag into the back of the wagon and climbed in. She and Ant sat close together on the dusty old quilt that they kept in the back.
Mom snapped the reins and they were off.
Swaying with the motion of the wagon, Loreda stared out at the dry land. The air smelled of dust and heat. They passed the rotting carcass of a steer, its ribs sticking up, its horns reaching out from the sand. Flies buzzed around it. A crow landed on the carcass, cawed proprietarily, and began plucking at the bones. There was an abandoned Model T beside it, doors open, tires buried up to the axle in dry soil.
To their left stood a small farmhouse, unshaded by trees, surrounded by brown earth. A pair of signs—AUCTION and FORECLOSURE—were hammered to the front door.
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.
She heard the door open behind her. The aroma of stewed tomatoes and fried pancetta and cooked garlic wafted her way.
Daddy came out onto the porch, closed the door quietly behind him. Lighting up a cigarette, he sat down on the swing beside her. She smelled the sweetness of wine on his breath. They were supposed to be conserving everything, but Daddy refused to give up on his wine or his hooch. He said drinking was the only thing keeping him sane. He loved to drop a slippery, sweet slice of preserved peach into his after-supper wine.
Loreda leaned into him. He put an arm around her and pulled her close as they glided forward and back. “You’re quiet, Loreda. That ain’t like my girl.”
The farm transitioned around them into a dark world full of sounds: the windmill thumping, bringing up their precious water, chickens scratching,
hogs rooting in the dirt.
“This drought,” Loreda said, pronouncing the dreaded word like everyone did around here. Drouth. She fell silent, choosing her words with care. “It’s killing the land.”
“Yep.” He finished the cigarette, stubbed it out into the pot full of dead flowers beside him.
Loreda pulled the flyer out of her pocket, unfolded it with care.
California. Land of milk and honey.
“Mrs. Buslik says there’s jobs in California. Money lying in the streets.
Stella said her uncle sent a postcard saying there’s jobs in Oregon.”
“I doubt there’s money lying in the streets, Loreda. This Depression is worse in the cities. Last I read, over thirteen million folks were out of jobs. You’ve seen the tramps that ride the trains. There’s a Hooverville in Oklahoma City that’d make you cry. Families living in apple carts. Come winter, they’ll be dying of cold on park benches.”
“They aren’t dying of cold in California. You could get a job. Maybe work on the railroad.”
Daddy sighed, and in that exhalation of his breath, she knew what he was thinking. That was how in tune she was with him. “My parents—and your mom—will never leave this land.”
“But—”
“It’ll rain,” Daddy said, but there was something sorrowful about the way he said it, almost as if he didn’t want rain to save them.
“Do you have to be a farmer?”
He turned. She saw the frown that bunched his thick black brows. “I was born one.”
“You always tell me this is America. A person can be anything.”
“Yeah, well. I made a bad choice a few years back, and … well … sometimes your life is chosen for you.” After that, he was quiet for a long time.
“What bad choice?”
He didn’t look at her. His body was sitting beside her, but his mind was somewhere else.
“I don’t want to dry up here and die,” Loreda said. At last he said, “It’ll rain.”
