Elsa was awakened by a kiss. She opened her eyes slowly. Last night was the best night’s sleep of her life, which seemed almost obscene, given the circumstances.
Jack leaned over her. “My comrades should be downstairs by now.”
Elsa sat up, pushed the tangled hair from her eyes. “How many of you are there?”
“Across the state, thousands. But we are fighting on many fronts. We have organizers at every field we can from here to Fresno.” He kissed her again. “See you downstairs.”
Elsa got out of bed and walked—naked—over to one of the boxes that held their belongings. Burrowing through, she found her journal and the latest pencil nub Ant had found in the school’s trash can.
Settling back in bed, she opened the journal to the first blank page and began to write.
Love is what remains when everything else is gone. This is what I should have told my children when we left Texas. What I will tell them tonight. Not that they will understand yet. How could they? I am forty years old, and I only just learned this fundamental truth myself.
Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation.
I am in love. There it is. I’ve written it down. Soon I will say it out loud. To him.
I am in love. As crazy and ridiculous and implausible as it sounds, I am in love. And I am loved in return.
And this—love—gives me the courage I need for today.
The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very edge of this great land, and now, at last, we make our stand, fight for what we know to be right. We fight for our American dream, that it will be possible again.
Jack says that I am a warrior and, while I don’t believe it, I know this: A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself.
It sounds like motherhood to me.
Elsa closed the journal and dressed quickly, then went to the room next door.
Ant was bouncing on the bed, saying, “Lookit me, Loreda. I’m flying.” Loreda ignored her brother, paced, chewing on her thumbnail.
At Elsa’s entrance, they both stilled.
“Is it time?” Loreda asked, bright-eyed. She looked excited, ready to go. Elsa felt a clutch of worry. “Today will be—”
“Dangerous,” Loreda said. “We know. Is everyone downstairs?” “I thought we should—”
“Talk more?” Loreda said impatiently. “We’ve talked plenty.”
Ant jumped off the bed, landed on bare feet beside his sister. “I’m the Shadow! No one can scare me.”
“Okay,” Elsa said. “Just stay close today. I want to see you two every second.”
Loreda pushed Elsa toward the door while Ant tugged on his boots, yelled, “Wait for the Shadow!”
The lobby was empty when the three of them got downstairs, but within minutes there was a crowd. Members of the Workers Alliance gathered in pods; they stacked leaflets on the table and leaned picket signs against the walls. Workers from the ditch-bank camp and Welty Farms and the newly constructed Resettlement Administration camp in Arvin stood silently by, looking anxious.
Elsa saw Jeb and his children in the back corner and Ike with some of the Welty camp workers.
Loreda picked up a sign that read FAIR PAY and stood by Natalia, whose sign read WORKERS UNITE.
Jack stood at the front of the room. “Friends and comrades, it is time. Remember our plan: Peaceable strike. We go to the fields and sit down. That is all. We hope it happens all across the state on this morning, as we hope that more workers join us. Let’s go.”
They filed out of the hotel and gathered in the street. There were fewer than fifty of them altogether. Natalia got into the driver’s seat of Jack’s truck and started the engine. Jack stood in the wooden-slatted bed of the truck and faced the small gathering. “The world can be changed by a handful of courageous people. Today we fight on behalf of those who are afraid. We fight for a living wage.” He yelled out, “Fair pay! Fair pay!”
Loreda held her sign in the air and chanted with him. “Fair pay! Fair pay!”
The truck rolled forward; the strikers followed. Jack reached down for a megaphone and amplified his chant. “Fair pay! Fair pay!”
Elsa and her children and the strikers walked behind the truck, listening to Jack.
They passed a Lucky Strike billboard. Several of the people living beneath it stood up, ambled across the brown field, and joined the strikers.
A quarter of a mile later, a group of clergymen joined them, holding up signs that read MINIMUM WAGE FOR WORKERS!
At every new road or camp, more people joined. Their voices rose up.
Fair pay! Fair wages!
More people merged in.
Elsa turned at one point, saw the crowd. There had to be six hundred people here now, all coming together to fight for a decent wage.
She elbowed Loreda, cocked her head so Loreda would look back and see the people behind them.
Loreda grinned and chanted louder. “Fair pay! Fair pay!”
Jack and the Workers Alliance were right. The growers would have to treat the workers fairly if they wanted their cotton picked before the weather changed and frost ruined the crop. This wasn’t about being a
Communist or a rabble-rouser. This was about fighting for the rights of every American.
A mile later, they turned a corner, nearly a thousand of them now, marching and chanting, signs held high, and neared the entrance to Welty Farms. The road stretched out in front of them, a straight line, bordered on each side by fenced cotton fields. A single man waited for them, stood in the middle of the road.
Welty.
Natalia stopped the truck directly in front of him.
Still standing in the back of the truck, Jack spoke to the huge crowd through the megaphone. “This is your day, workers. Your moment. The owners will hear you. They can’t ignore so many of you saying, No more.”
Loreda responded loudly, shouting, “No more! No more!” The crowd joined in, waving their signs for emphasis.
“We will be peaceful, but we will stand our ground,” Jack said through the megaphone. “No more being pushed around and starved. You deserve a fair day’s wage for a day’s work.”
Elsa heard the rumble of engines. She knew the rest of them heard it, too. The chanting faded.
“Go into the field,” Jack said. “Sit down. Break down the gate if you must.”
Elsa turned, saw a hay truck full of workers pull up behind the strikers.
The driver honked the horn to be let through.
“Strikebreakers. They’re here to take your jobs,” Jack said. “Don’t let them in.”
The crowd spread out, blocked the truck’s path to the gates with their bodies.
“No work! Fair pay!” Jack shouted.
Welty walked around to the side of Jack’s truck and faced the strikers. “I’m paying seventy-five cents today,” he said. “Who wants to feed their family and move into one of my cabins? Who wants credit at the company store come winter and a mattress to sleep on?”
“Hell, no!” Jack yelled.
A roar of agreement rose up from the crowd.
A truck appeared on the road behind Welty, drove toward the strikers. A man exited the truck, carrying a rifle casually over one shoulder. He walked
to the field and opened the gate.
“They aren’t gonna shoot. We ain’t done nothin’ wrong,” Ike called out. “Stay strong!”
The man with the rifle went to the top of the guard tower and aimed his gun at the strikers.
“He can’t shoot us for nothin’,” Ike yelled. “This is still America.”
More trucks full of migrant workers willing to pick for seventy-five cents pulled up behind the strikers, honked to be let through.
“Don’t let ’em through,” Jack yelled.
Sirens.
Police cruisers and cars and trucks barreled down the distant road, creating a cloud of dust. One by one they turned onto this road, and parked in a straight line that created a blockade in front of Jack’s truck.
The doors opened. Masked men stepped out of the vehicles, holding clubs and bats and guns.
Vigilantes. Ten of them.
Policemen stepped out of their cruisers, guns drawn. The vigilantes walked slowly forward.
The crowd of strikers backed away; the chanting quieted.
“Men wear masks because they’re ashamed of what they’re doing,” Jack said through the megaphone. “They know this is wrong.”
Elsa stared at the masked men coming toward her and the children. She held her children close, began to back away.
“Mom, no!” Loreda cried.
“Hush,” Elsa said, pulling Loreda closer.
“Stand your ground,” Jack said. He looked directly at Elsa, said, “Don’t be afraid.”
Three vigilantes jumped up into the back of Jack’s truck. One cracked Jack in the back with his bat. Jack dropped the megaphone and staggered forward. The vigilantes grabbed Jack by the hair and dragged him out of the truck; one of them cracked Jack in the head with the butt of his rifle. Jack dropped to his knees.
“Get to work,” Welty yelled. “This strike is over.”
The vigilantes circled Jack, began beating and kicking him.
The workers backed away; some edged toward the cotton field. The strikebreaker trucks honked to be let through.
“Elsa!” Jack yelled, and was kicked hard for it. She knew what he wanted. They’ll listen to you.
Elsa climbed up into the back of the truck and took up Jack’s megaphone and faced the strikers. Her hands were shaking. “Stop!” she cried out.
The workers stopped backing away, looked up at her. She was breathing hard. Now what?
Think.
She knew these people, knew them. They were her people. Her kind, the Californians said derisively, but it was a compliment.
They were like her. Today, they were part of a new group: people who stood up, used their voices to say No more. They’d woken in the middle of the night, hungry, to stand up for their rights, and now it was Elsa’s time to show her children what her grandfather had taught her long ago. She wrapped her fingers around the soft velvet pouch at her throat. Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes, help me.
“What?” someone yelled.
“Hope,” Elsa said. The megaphone turned her whispered word into a roar that quieted the crowd. “Hope is a coin I carry. An American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times … in my journey, when it felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going. I came west … in search of a better life … but my American dream has been turned inside out by hardship and poverty.” She looked at Welty. “And greed. These years have been a time of things lost: Jobs. Homes. Food. The land we loved turned on us, broke us all, even the stubborn old men who used to talk about the weather and congratulate each other on the season’s bumper wheat crop. ‘A man’s got to fight out here to make a living,’ they’d say to each other.”
Elsa looked out at the crowd, saw all the women and children who were here, looking up at her. She saw her life in their eyes, her pain in the slant of their shoulders.
“A man. It was always about the men. They seem to think it meant nothing to cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens. But we women of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I swear I can still taste the dust.”
Elsa paused, surprised by how loud and forceful her voice had become. She stared out at the workers, saw for the first time that their ragged clothes and hungry faces were badges of courage, of survival. They were good people who didn’t give up. “We came to find a better life, to feed our children. We aren’t lazy or shiftless. We don’t want to live the way we do. It’s time,” she said. “Time to say, No more. No more company store cheating us and keeping us poor. No more lowering wages. No more using us up and spitting us out and pitting us against each other. We deserve better. No more.”
“No more!” Ike yelled. Loreda shouted, “No more!”
There was a moment’s pause, and then the crowd rallied, blocked the strikebreakers, and chanted back at Elsa in unison.
“No more. No more. No more!”
The crowd raised their voices and their signs, ignoring the gunman in the tower and the policemen and masked vigilantes.
Their courage stunned and invigorated Elsa, who chanted with them. “Fair wages!” the pickers chanted, lifting their picket signs into the air.
Elsa heard a high whistling sound, then a thunk of something metal landing at her feet. A second later, smoke erupted, blanketing everything, obscuring the world.
Elsa’s eyes stung. She saw the strikers run blindly into each other, panicked. They backed away from the truck.
Someone shouted, “They’re throwing tear-gas bombs!”
More whistling, metal tear-gas canisters landed among the crowd; smoke billowed up.
Elsa lifted the megaphone. “Run into the fields, not away,” she cried out, coughing hard. She wiped her eyes but it didn’t help. “Don’t give up!”
The workers panicked, ran in every direction, bumped into each other.
No one could see much through the stinging tear gas.
A shot rang out, loud even in the pandemonium.
Elsa felt something hit her so hard she staggered, clutched her side. Warm, wet, sticky.
I’m bleeding.
She heard Loreda scream, “Mom!” and Elsa wanted to answer, to say,
I’m fine, but the pain.
The pain.
She dropped the megaphone, heard it thunk to the back of the truck. Through the burning, stinging haze of smoke, she saw Loreda pushing through the crowd, screaming, and Ant stumbling along beside her.
All Elsa wanted was to let them get to her, stay awake, tell them how much she loved them, but pain was overtaking her, squeezing until she couldn’t breathe … My babies, she thought, reaching out for them.
 |
IT SEEMED TO HAPPEN in slow motion: the sound of a gunshot, Mom staggering forward, blood turning her dress red. Jack throwing men off of him.
Loreda screamed and grabbed Ant’s hand, fighting her way toward the truck, through the panicking crowd. She saw Jack hit one of the vigilantes with his own bat and fell another with a punch.
“They shot her!” someone yelled. The vigilantes backed away from the truck.
Jack jumped into the back of the truck, took Mom in his arms. “Is she alive?” Loreda screamed.
Mom opened her red, teary eyes and looked at Jack. “We failed.” Jack lifted Mom into his arms and carried her out of the truck.
He stood in front of the strikers, holding Elsa. Her blood dripped through his fingers and onto the ground. Tear gas drifted past them.
“Strike … lead them,” Mom whispered, and Loreda understood.
“Arrest them!” Welty shouted to his henchmen, but the policemen backed away from the woman covered in blood. The vigilantes froze. Some dropped their weapons. The strikebreakers fell silent.
Loreda saw a rifle on the ground at her feet. She picked it up, walked over to Welty, who blocked the entrance to the field, and aimed the gun at his chest.
Welty raised his hands into the air. “You wouldn’t dare—”
“Wouldn’t I? If you don’t get out of our way, I’ll kill you. As sure as I stand here.”
“It won’t do any good. I’ll break your damn strike.” Loreda cocked the gun. “Not today.”
Welty stepped aside, moving slowly.
Ike stepped forward, pushed his way through the crowd. He walked past Jack and headed into the field. Then Jeb and his children followed … and Bobby Rand and his father.
The workers filed silently, solemnly into the field, taking up space in the rows, making sure no one could pick this cotton today.
In Jack’s arms, Mom lifted her head, looked out at the strikers gathered in front of her. She smiled and whispered, “No more.”
As scared and shaken as Loreda was, she’d never been prouder of anyone in her life.
|
JACK HELD MOM IN his arms and kicked the hospital door open. “My wife needs help.”
The woman at the front desk looked horrified as she raised up out of her cushy chair. “You can’t—”
“I’m a goddamn California resident,” Jack said. “Get a doctor.” “But—”
“Now,” Jack said in a voice so dangerous even Loreda felt a flash of fear. The woman called for a doctor.
While they waited, blood dripped onto the clean floor. Ant saw it and started to cry. Loreda pulled him close.
A man in white bustled toward them, flanked by a nurse in a starched uniform.
“Gunshot in the abdomen,” Jack said. His voice broke halfway through the sentence and Loreda saw his fear. It heightened her own.
The doctor called for help and within moments Mom was on a gurney, being rushed away from them.
Jack pulled Ant close, held him. Loreda moved in to be with them.
Jack’s arm circled her.
All Loreda could think about was how mean she’d been to her mom. For years. There was so much to say now, to undo. She wanted to tell her mother how much she loved and admired her, how she wanted to be just like her when she grew up. Why hadn’t she said it all before?
Loreda wiped her tears, but more kept falling. She couldn’t even be strong for Ant. She prayed for the first time in years. Please, God, save her.
I can’t live without my mom.
|
White.
Lights too bright.
Stinging.
Pain.
Elsa opened her eyes again, squinted at the intensity of the light overhead.
She was in bed.
She turned her head slowly. Every breath hurt.
Jack sat in a chair beside her, holding Ant on his lap. Her son’s eyes were red, bloodshot. Tears streaked his freckled cheeks.
“Elsa,” Jack said softly. “She’s awake,” Ant said.
Loreda rushed in, almost pushed Jack and her brother aside. “Mommy,” she said.
Mommy.
That one word brought everything back: Elsa rocking Loreda to sleep, reading her stories, teaching her to make fettuccine, whispering Be brave, into her ear.
“Where…”
Jack touched her face. “You’re in the hospital.” “And?”
She saw the answer in her loved ones’ eyes. They were already grieving. “They couldn’t repair the damage,” Jack said. “Too much internal bleeding, and your heart … they say there’s something wrong with it. Can’t keep up or some damn thing. They’ve given you pain medication … there’s
nothing else they can do.”
“But they’re wrong,” Loreda said. “Everyone’s always been wrong about you, Mom. Haven’t they? Like me.” Loreda started to cry. “You’ll be fine. You’re strong.”
Elsa didn’t need them to tell her she was dying. She could feel her body shutting down.
But not her heart. Her heart was so full it couldn’t hold all of the love she felt when she looked at these three who had shown her the world. She’d thought she had a lifetime to show them her love.
Time.
Hers had gone too fast. She’d only just discovered who she was.
She had counted on a lifetime to teach her children what they needed to know, but she didn’t have that gift of grace and time. Still, she had given them what mattered: they were loved and they knew it. Everything else was decoration.
Love remains.
“Ant,” she said, opening her arms.
He climbed like a monkey from Jack’s arms to hers. His weight pressed down on her, caused an agonizing pain. She kissed his wet cheek.
“Don’t die, Mommy.”
That hurt worse than her gunshot. “I’ll … watch over you … all your life. Like … the Shadow. At night … while you sleep.”
“How will I know?” “You’ll … remember me.”
He cried. “I don’t want you to leave.”
“I know, baby.” She wiped his tears, felt the start of her own.
Jack saw her pain and pulled Ant into his arms. It broke her heart to see him holding her son. Here was a flash … a glimpse of the future that was slowly being lost. The family they could have become.
She stared up at Jack. “God, what a life we could have had.”
He leaned closer, still holding Ant, and kissed her on the lips, stayed there long enough that she tasted his tears.
She lifted a hand, pressed her palm to his cheek so he could feel her touch one last time. “Take them home for me,” she whispered against his lips.
He nodded. “Elsa … God, I love you…”
Loreda slipped in beside Jack, who stepped aside, soothed Ant, stroked his back.
“Hey, Mom,” Loreda said in a thready voice.
Elsa stared up at her brash, beautiful, impetuous daughter. “I wanted to watch you take on the world, baby girl.”
“I can’t do it without you.” “You can … and you will.”
“It’s not fair,” Loreda said. “No one will ever love me like you do.”
Elsa had trouble breathing. It felt as if she were drowning from the inside out. She reached up slowly, every movement hurting, and untied the necklace at her throat. She took the velvet pouch in shaking hands and placed it in her daughter’s palm. “Keep … believing in … us.” Elsa paused to catch her breath. Every second hurt more than the last.
Loreda took the pouch in her hand, held it as her tears fell. “What do I do without you?”
Elsa tried to smile but couldn’t. She was too tired. Too weak. “You live, Loreda,” she whispered. “And know … every single second … how much I loved you.” Find your voice and use it … take chances … never give up.
Elsa couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. There was so much more to say, a lifetime’s worth of love and advice to bestow on her children, but there was no more time …
Be brave, she might have said, or maybe she only thought it.
