Another scorcher of a day, and not even ten in the morning. So far, September had offered no respite from the heat.
Elsa knelt on the linoleum kitchen floor, scrubbing hard. She had already been up for hours. It was best to do chores in the relative cool of dawn and dusk.
A scuffling sound caught her attention. She saw a tarantula, body as big as an apple, scurrying out from its hiding place in the corner. She got to her feet and used the mop to chase it outside. It was crueler to send the spider back out into the heat than to crush it with her shoe. Besides, she barely had the energy to stomp on the spider, let alone the will strong enough to care. She had trouble lately doing anything that didn’t result in food or water.
The key to life in this dry heat was conservation of everything: water, food, emotion. That last one was the biggest challenge.
She knew how unhappy Rafe and Loreda were. The two of them, as alike as grains of sand, had more trouble these days than the rest of them. Not that anyone on the farm was happy. How could they be? But Tony and Rose and Elsa were the kind of people who expected life to be hard and had become tougher to survive. Her in-laws had worked for years—him on the railroad, her in a shirtwaist factory—to earn the money to buy their land. Their first dwelling here had been a dugout made of sod bricks that they’d built themselves. They might have come off the boat as Anthony and Rosalba, but hard work and the land had turned them into Tony and Rose.
Americans. They would die of thirst and hunger before they’d give that up. And although Elsa hadn’t been born a farmer, she’d become one.
In the past thirteen years, she’d learned to love this land and this farm more than she would have imagined possible. In the good years, spring had been a time of joy for her, watching her garden grow, and autumn had been a time of pride; she’d loved seeing her labor on the shelves of the root cellar: jars filled with vegetables and fruits—red tomatoes, glistening peaches, and cinnamon-scented apples. Rolls of spiced pancetta made from pork belly and cured hams hanging from hooks overhead. Boxes overflowing with potatoes and onions and garlic from the garden.
The Martinellis had welcomed Elsa in and she repaid that unexpected kindness with a deep devotion, a fierce love for them and their ways, but even as Elsa had merged deeper into the family, Rafe had veered away. He was unhappy, had been for years, and now Loreda was following her father’s path. Of course she was. It was impossible not to be captivated by Rafe’s charm and caught up in his impossible dreams. His smile could light up the room. He’d fed his impressionable, mercurial daughter a steady diet of dreams when she was young; now he passed along his dissatisfaction. Elsa knew he said things to Loreda, complained of things that he wouldn’t say to his parents or his wife. Loreda had the greatest part of Rafe’s heart, and had from her first breath.
Elsa went back to scrubbing the kitchen floor, and then went on to scrub the floors in all eight rooms, washing dust off the woodwork and windowsills. When she finished that chore, she gathered up the rugs and took them outside and hung them, beating the dirt out of them with a stick.
The wind picked up, ruffled her dress. She paused in beating the rug, sweat running down her face, between her breasts, and tented a hand over her eyes. Past the outhouse, a murky, urine-yellow haze burnished the sky.
Elsa tilted her sun hat back, stared out at the sickly yellow horizon.
Dust storm. The newest scourge of the Great Plains. The sky changed color, turned red-brown.
Wind picked up, barreled across the farm from the south.
A Russian thistle hit her in the face, tore the skin from her cheek. A tumbleweed spiraled past. A board flew off the chicken coop and cracked into the side of the house.
Rafe and Tony came running out of the barn.
Elsa pulled her bandanna up over her mouth and nose.
The cows mooed angrily and pushed into each other, pointing their bony butts into the dust storm. Static electricity made their tails stand out. A flotilla of birds flew past them, flapping hard, cawing and squawking, outrunning the dust.
Rafe’s Stetson flew off his head and tumbled toward the barbed-wire fence and was caught on a spike. “Get inside,” he yelled. “I’ll take care of the animals.”
“The kids!”
“Mrs. Buslik knows what to do. Go inside.” Her kids. Out in this.
The wind was howling now, slamming into them, shoving them sideways. Elsa bent into it and fought her way to the house against the wind-driven dust.
She inched up the uneven stairs and across the gritty porch and grabbed the metal doorknob. A current of static electricity knocked her off her feet. She lay there a second, dazed, coughing, trying to breathe.
The door opened.
Rose yanked her to her feet, pulled her into the rattling, howling house.
Elsa and Rose ran from window to window, securing the newspaper and rag coverings over the glass and sills. Dust rained down from the ceilings, wafted from infinitesimal cracks in the window frames and walls. The candles on the makeshift altar blew out. Centipedes crawled out from the walls, hundreds of them, and slithered across the floor, looking for somewhere to hide.
A blast of wind hit the house, so hard it seemed the roof would be torn off.
And the noise.
It was like a locomotive bearing down on them, engines grinding. The house shuddered as if breathing too hard; a banshee wind howled, mad as hell.
The door opened and her husband and Tony staggered in. Tony slammed the door shut behind them and threw the bolt. A crucifix fell to the floor.
Elsa leaned back against the shuddering wall.
Elsa could hear her mother-in-law’s breathy, scratchy voice as she prayed.
Elsa reached sideways, took her hand.
Rafe moved in beside Elsa. She could tell that they were both thinking the same thing: What if the children had been out on the playground? This storm had come up fast. With everything dying these days, there were no strong roots to anchor the soil to the earth. A wind like this could blow whole farms away. At least that was how it felt.
“They’ll be okay,” he said, hacking through the dust.
“How do you know?” she yelled above the sound of the storm. The despair in her husband’s eyes was all the answer he had.
 |
LOREDA SAT ON THE floor of the quaking schoolhouse, her brother tucked in close beside her, both wearing bandannas drawn over their mouths and noses bandit-style. Ant was trying to be brave, but he flinched every time a particularly fierce gust of wind hit the building and rattled the glass.
Dust rained down from the ceiling. Loreda felt it collecting in her hair, on her shoulders. Wind battered the wooden walls, wailed in a high, almost human scream. Panicked birds kept hitting the glass.
When the storm first struck, Mrs. Buslik had called them all in and made them sit together in the corner farthest from the windows. She’d tried reading a story, but no one could concentrate, and in time no one could hear her voice, so she gave up and closed the book.
There had been at least ten of these dust storms in the past year. One day this spring, the wind and dirt had blown for twelve straight hours, so long that they’d had to cook and eat and do chores in the raging dust.
Grandma and Mom said they should pray.
Pray.
As if lighting candles and kneeling could stop all of this. Clearly, if God was watching the people of the Great Plains, He wanted them to either leave or die.
When the storm finally ended and silence swept into the schoolhouse, the children sat there, traumatized and big-eyed and covered in dirt.
Mrs. Buslik slowly unfolded from her seat on the floor. As she stood, dirt rained down from her lap. The sand outline of her body on the floor
remained behind, a dirt design. She went to the door, opened it to reveal a beautiful blue sky.
Loreda saw Mrs. Buslik sigh with relief. The exhalation made her cough. “Okay, kids,” she said in a scratchy voice. “It’s over.”
Ant looked at Loreda. His freckled face was brown with dirt above the bandanna that covered his mouth and nose. By rubbing his eyes, he’d given himself a raccoon look. Tears hung stubbornly onto his lashes, looking like beads of mud.
She pulled down her bandanna. “Come on, Ant,” she said. Her voice was thin and scratchy.
Loreda and Stella and Ant retrieved their book bags and empty lunch pails and left the schoolhouse. Sophia shuffled along behind them, her head hung.
Loreda held Ant’s hand firmly in hers as she stepped from the building.
Town was catastrophe-quiet. The carbide arc streetlamps—such a source of community pride four years ago when they had been installed—were lit because people and cars and animals needed light to find safety in the storm.
They walked up Main Street. Tumbleweeds were caught in the boardwalk. Windows were boarded up, from both the Depression and the dust storms.
When they neared the train depot, Stella said, “It’s gettin’ bad, Lolo,” quietly, as if she were afraid her voice would carry all the way to her parents’ house.
Loreda had no answer to that. In the Martinelli house it had been bad for years. She watched Stella walk away, shoulders hunched as if to protect her from whatever hardship was waiting; she climbed over a new dune of sand that had been swept into the street and turned the corner on her way home. Sophia followed her sister.
Loreda and Ant kept walking. It felt as if they were the only two people left in the world.
They passed several FOR SALE signs on fence posts, and then there was nothing. No houses, no fences, no animals, no windmills. Just endless brown-gold dirt molded into hills and dunes. Sand piled up at the base of the telephone poles. One pole was down.
Loreda was the first to hear the slow, dull clip-clop of hooves.
“Mommy!” Ant yelled. Loreda looked up.
Mom drove the wagon toward them; she sat strained forward, as if she wanted Milo to move faster, faster, but the poor old gelding was as exhausted and thirsty as the rest of them.
Ant pulled free and started to run.
Mom brought the horse to a halt and jumped down from the wagon. She ran toward them, her face brown with dirt, her dress shredded into fraying strips from the waist down, apron flapping, her pale blond hair brown with dust.
Mom swept Ant into a hug, pulled him off his feet, twirled him around, as if she’d thought she’d never see him again, and covered his dirty face with kisses.
Loreda remembered those kisses; Mom had smelled of lavender soap and talcum powder in the good years.
Not anymore. Loreda couldn’t remember the last time she’d let Mom kiss her. Loreda didn’t want the kind of love that trapped. She wanted to be told she could fly high, be anything and go anywhere—she wanted the things her father wanted. Someday she would smoke cigarettes and go to jazz clubs and get a job. Be modern.
Her mother’s idea of a woman’s place was too sad for Loreda to bear.
Mom helped Ant up into the wagon’s front seat, then came to stand in front of Loreda. “You okay?” Mom asked, tucking the hair behind Loreda’s ear, her touch lingering there.
“Yeah. Great,” Loreda said, hearing the sharpness in her voice. She knew it was wrong to be angry with her mother now—the weather wasn’t her fault—but Loreda couldn’t help herself. She was mad at the world, and somehow that meant she was mad at her mom most of all.
“Ant looks like he’s been crying.” “He was scared.”
“I’m glad his big sister was with him.”
How could Mom smile at a time like this? It was irritating. “You know your teeth are brown with dirt?” Loreda said. Her mother flinched and instantly stopped smiling.
Loreda had hurt Mom’s feelings. Again.
Loreda suddenly felt like crying. Before her mom could see the emotion, Loreda headed for the back of the wagon.
“You can sit up here with us,” Mom said.
“Seeing where we’re going ain’t any better than seeing where we’ve been. The view never changes.”
“Isn’t,” Mom corrected automatically.
“Oh, right,” Loreda said. “Education is everything.”
As they headed home, Loreda stared out at the flat, flat land.
All the trees that lined their driveway were dying. The hot, dry years had turned them a sick gray-brown; their leaves had turned into crunchy, blackened confetti and been swept away by the wind. Only three of them were even still standing. The dusty soil lay in heaps and dunes at the base of every fence post. Nothing grew or thrived in the fields. There was not a blade of green grass anywhere. Russian thistles—tumbleweed—and yucca were the only living plants to be seen. The rotting body of something—a jackrabbit, maybe—lay in a heap of sand; crows picked at it.
Mom pulled the wagon to a stop in the yard. Milo pawed at the hard earth beneath his hooves. “Loreda, you put Milo away. I’ll get the preserved lemons and make lemonade,” Mom said.
“Fine,” Loreda said glumly. She climbed out of the wagon and took hold of the reins and led the horse and wagon toward the barn.
Poor Milo moved so slowly Loreda couldn’t help feeling sorry for this bay gelding that had once been her best friend in the whole world. “It’s okay, boy. We all feel like that.”
She petted his velvet-soft muzzle, remembering the day her daddy had taught her to ride. It had been a bluebird day, with wheat a sea of gold all around. She’d been scared. So scared, to climb all the way up onto that grown-up-sized saddle.
Daddy helped her up, whispered, “Don’t worry,” and moved back beside Mom, who looked as nervous as Loreda felt.
Loreda hadn’t fallen off once. Daddy told her she was a natural and told the family at supper that Loreda was the best little horsewoman he’d ever seen.
Loreda had soaked up his praise, grown to fit it. And after that, for years, she and Milo had been inseparable. She did her homework in his stall
whenever she could, both of them munching on carrots she pulled from the garden.
“I miss you, boy,” Loreda said, stroking the side of his head.
The gelding snorted, blew wet, sandy mucus on Loreda’s bare arm. “Ick.”
Loreda opened the double doors of the barn that was her grandfather’s pride and joy. The large barn had a wide center aisle where the tractor and truck were parked, and two stalls on either side, both of which opened onto corrals. Two for the horses and two for the cows. A loft that had once been stacked with fragrant green bales of hay was emptying fast. Everyone knew it was her daddy’s favorite hiding spot, that loft; he loved to sit up there and smoke cigarettes and drink hooch and dream big dreams. He stayed up there more and more these days.
As Loreda unharnessed the gelding, she smelled the rubber on the tires and the metallic taint of the engine along with the comforting aromas of sweet hay and manure. In the side-by-side stalls at the end, their other gelding, Bruno, snorted softly in greeting, banged his nose into the stall door.
“I’ll get you boys some water,” Loreda said, easing the slimy bit out of Milo’s mouth. She turned him into his stall, the back of which opened out to the corral.
As she closed the stall door, clicked it shut, she heard something. What?
She left the barn, stepped outside, and looked around.
There it was again. A deep rumbling. Not thunder. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
The ground trembled beneath her feet, made a loud, crunching, splintering sound.
A crack opened up in the earth, a giant snaking zigzag.
Boom.
Dust geysered into the air, dirt crashed into the new crevasse, the sides crumbled away. A part of the barbed-wire fence fell into the opening. New cracks crawled off from the main one, like branches on a tree limb.
A fifty-foot zigzagging crevasse opened in the yard. Dead roots stuck out from the crumbling dirt sides like skeletal hands.
Loreda stared at it in horror. She had heard stories of this, the land breaking open from dryness, but she’d thought it was a myth …
Now, it wasn’t just the animals and the people who were drying up. The land itself was dying.
|
LOREDA AND HER DADDY were in their favorite place, sitting side by side on the platform beneath the giant blades of the windmill. As the sky turned red in the last few moments before darkfall, she could see to the very end of the world she knew and imagine what lay beyond.
“I want to see the ocean,” Loreda said. It was a game they played, imagining other lives they would someday live. She couldn’t remember now when they’d begun; she just knew that it felt more important these days because of the new sadness in her father. At least it felt new. She sometimes wondered if his sadness had always been there and she’d just finally grown up enough to see it.
“You will, Lolo.” Usually he said, We will.
He slumped forward, rested his forearms on his thighs. Thick black hair fell in unruly waves over his broad forehead; it was cut close to the sides of his head but Mom didn’t have time to tend it closely and the edges were ragged.
“You want to see the Brooklyn Bridge, remember?” Loreda said. It scared her to think of her father’s unhappiness. She hardly got to spend any time with him lately and she loved him more than anything in the world, he who made her feel like a special girl with a big future. He’d taught her to dream. He was the opposite of her dour, workhorse mom, who just plodded forward, doing chores, never having any fun. They even looked alike, she and her daddy. Everyone said so. The same thick black hair and fine-boned faces, the same full lips. The only thing Loreda had inherited from her mother was her blue eyes, but even with her mother’s eyes, Loreda saw things the way her daddy did.
“Sure, Lolo. How could I forget? You and I will see the world someday. We will stand at the top of the Empire State Building or attend a movie premiere on Hollywood Boulevard. Hell, we might even—”
“Rafe!”
Mom stood at the base of the windmill, looking up. In her brown kerchief and flour-sack dress and sagging stockings, she looked practically as old as Grandma. As always, she stood ramrod stiff. She had perfected an unyielding, unforgiving stance: shoulders back, spine straight, chin up. Wisps of corn-silk-fine pale blond hair crept out from beneath her kerchief.
“Hey, Elsa. You found us.” Daddy flashed Loreda a conspiratorial smile. “Your father wants help watering while it’s cool,” Mom said. “And I
know a girl who has chores to finish.”
Daddy bumped his shoulder against Loreda’s and then climbed down the windmill. The boards creaked and swayed at his steps. He jumped down the last few feet, faced Mom.
Loreda crawled down behind him, but she wasn’t fast enough. When she got down, her father was already headed toward the barn.
“How come you can’t let anyone have any fun?” she said to her mother. “I want you and your father to have fun, Loreda, but I’ve had a long day
and I need your help putting the laundry away.” “You’re so mean,” Loreda said.
“I am not mean, Loreda,” Mom said.
Loreda heard the hurt in her mother’s voice but didn’t care. That anger of hers, always so close to the surface, surged up, uncontrollable. “Don’t you care that Daddy is unhappy?”
“Life is tough, Loreda. You need to be tougher or it will turn you inside out, as it has your father.”
“Life isn’t what makes my daddy sad.”
“Oh, really? Tell me, then, with all your worldly experience, what is it that makes your father unhappy?”
“You,” Loreda said.
