Last night, they’d eaten a meal that almost filled their bellies and which had been cooked on an electric hot plate inside a cabin with four walls and a roof overhead and a floor to stand upon. After supper, they’d climbed into real beds on real mattresses that weren’t on the floor. Loreda had slept deeply, with her little brother tucked in close, and awakened the next morning refreshed.
After breakfast, they each dressed in the new garments and shoes they’d gotten from the Salvation Army and stepped outside into a bright sunlit day. The Welty camp was situated on a few acres tucked in between cotton fields. Although the camp hadn’t flooded, evidence of too much rain was everywhere. The grass had been stomped into mud, but Loreda could see it would be a green pasture under better conditions. Now many of the trees, scattered randomly throughout the camp, were broken-limbed by the storm. Ditches full of muddy water ran here and there. Ten cabins and about fifty tents created a makeshift town in the center of the camp. Between the cabins and the first of the tents, Loreda saw a long building that was the laundry, and four restrooms—two for women and two for men—each of which had long lines of people waiting their turn. Most important, there were two faucets at each entrance. Clean water. No more hauling water
from the ditch, boiling and straining it before each use.
At the company store, more people waited in line, mostly women, standing with their arms crossed, children close by. A hand-painted sign pointed the way to the school.
“What if I said we’d start tomorrow?” Loreda said glumly.
“I’d say you were just bumping gums,” Mom said. “I’m going to do laundry and get some food and you’re going to school. End of story. Start walking.”
Ant giggled. “Mom wins.”
Mom led the way toward a pair of tents positioned at the far end of the camp in a grove of spindly trees. She paused beside the largest of the tents, which had a wooden sign posted out front: LITTLE KIDS SCHOOL.
The tent next door read: BIG KIDS SCHOOL. “I reckon I’m big,” Ant said.
Mom said, “I don’t think so,” and eased Ant toward the Little Kids tent. Loreda moved fast.
The last thing she wanted was to be walked into her classroom by her mother. She went to the Big Kids tent and peered inside.
There were about five desks. Two were empty. A woman wearing a drab gray cotton dress and rubber boots stood at the front of the room. Beside her was an easel that held a chalkboard. On it, she’d written: American history.
Loreda ducked inside and sat at the empty desk in the back.
The teacher looked up. “I’m Mrs. Sharpe. And who is our newest pupil?”
The other kids turned to look at Loreda. “Loreda Martinelli.”
The boy in the next desk scooted so close his desk edge banged into hers. He was tall, she could tell. Lanky. With a dirty cap pulled down so low she couldn’t see his eyes. His blond hair was too long. He wore faded overalls over a denim shirt; one bib strap was untied and the corner flapped over like a dog’s ear. A winter coat hung on him, too big and missing most of the buttons. He pulled off his cap. “Lor-ay-da. I ain’t heard that name before. It’s pretty.”
“Hi,” she said. “Thanks. And you are?”
“Bobby Rand. You moved into Cabin Ten? The Pennipakers left just before the flood. The old man died. Dysentery.” He smiled. “Glad to have someone my age here. My pa makes me go to school if there’s no pickin’.”
“Yeah. My mom wants me to go to college.”
He laughed, showing off a missing tooth. “That’s rich.”
Loreda glared at him. “Girls can go to college, I’ll have you know.”
“Oh. I thought you were jokin’.”
“Well, I’m not. Where are you from, the Stone Age?” “New Mexico. We had a grocery store that went bust.”
“Students,” the teacher said, rapping a ruler on the top of the easel. “You are not here to jaw. Open your American history books to page one- twelve.”
Bobby opened a book. “We can share. Not that we’re gonna learn anything that matters.”
Loreda leaned toward him, looked at the open book. The chapter heading was “The Founding Fathers and the First Continental Congress.”
Loreda raised her hand. “Yes … Loretta, is it?”
Loreda didn’t correct the pronunciation of her name. Mrs. Sharpe didn’t look like much of a listener. “I’m interested in more recent history, ma’am. The farmworkers here in California. The anti-immigration policies that deported the Mexicans. And what about workers’ unions? I’d like to understand—”
The teacher rapped her ruler down so hard it cracked. “We do not talk about unionism here. That’s un-American. We are lucky to have jobs that put food on our tables.”
“But we don’t really have jobs, do we? I mean—”
“Out! Now. Don’t come back until you’re ready to be grateful. And quiet, as young women should always be.”
“What is wrong with everyone in this state?” Loreda said, slamming the book shut on Bobby’s finger. He yelped in pain.
“We don’t need to learn about what old rich men did more than one hundred years ago. The world is falling apart now.” She strode out of the tent.
What now?
Loreda marched through the grassy mud toward … what?
Where was she going? If she went back to the cabin, Mom would put her to work doing laundry.
The library. It was the only thing she could think of.
She walked out of camp and turned onto the paved road and walked to town.
In Welty, which was less than a mile away, she turned onto Main Street, where a series of awninged shops had obviously once offered everything a person could need if you had money. Tailors, druggists, grocers, butchers, dress shops. Now most of them were closed. A movie theater stood in the center of town, its marquee unlit, its windows boarded up.
She passed a boarded-up hat shop; a man sat on the stoop, one leg stretched out, the other bent. He draped an arm over the bent knee, a brown hand-rolled cigarette dangled between his fingers.
He peered up at her from beneath the brim of his tired-looking fedora. A look of understanding passed between them.
Loreda paused for a moment outside the library. She hadn’t been here since the day of her haircut. It already felt like a lifetime ago.
Today she looked bedraggled, unkempt, skinny. At least she was wearing the relatively new hand-me-down dress, but the mud splattered lace-up shoes and socks were not a good look on anyone.
Loreda forced herself to open the door. Once inside, she stepped out of her muddy shoes, left them by the door.
The librarian looked Loreda up and down, from her dirty stockinged feet to the ratty lace of her hand-me-down collar.
Remember me, please. Don’t call me an Okie.
“Miss Martinelli,” she said. “I hoped you’d return. Your mother was so pleased to pick up your library card.”
“It was my Christmas present.” “A fine gift.”
“I … lost the Nancy Drew books in the flood. I’m so sorry.”
Mrs. Quisdorf gave her a sad smile. “Nothing to fret about. I’m just glad to see you looking well. What can I find on the shelves for you?”
“I’m interested in … workers’ rights.”
“Ah. Politics.” She walked away. “Give me a moment.”
Loreda glanced at the newspapers spread out on the table beside her. One from the Los Angeles Herald-Express had the headline: “Stay Away from California: Warning to Transient Hordes.”
Nothing new there.
“Relief for Migrants to Bankrupt State.”
Loreda flipped through the pages, saw article after article that claimed the migrants were bankrupting the state by demanding aid. Called them
shiftless and lazy and criminal, reported that they lived like dogs “because they don’t know any better.”
She heard footsteps again. Mrs. Quisdorf came up beside her and laid a slim book on the table beside the newspapers. Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed.
“John Reed,” Loreda said. The name struck a chord, but she couldn’t remember where she’d heard it. “Thank you.”
“A warning, though,” Mrs. Quisdorf said quietly. “Words and ideas can be deadly. You be careful what you say and to whom, especially in this town.”
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THE CAMP’S LAUNDRY WAS housed in a long wooden building and had six large metal tubs and three hand-cranked wringers. And—miracle of miracles—clean, running water at the turn of a handle. Elsa spent her first morning in camp washing the sheets they had gotten from the Salvation Army and the clothes they’d worn in the flood, putting it all through a wringer instead of twisting the water out of each item by hand. When everything was clean, she carried the damp bundle back to her cabin and set up a makeshift laundry line and hung it all to dry.
Then she retrieved the letter she’d written last night and dropped it off at the post office. Just that—the fact that she could walk fifty feet and mail a letter—was a staggering bit of good fortune.
And now, shopping. Right here. In camp. What a convenience.
The company store was in a narrow green clapboard building, with a peaked roof and slim windows positioned on either side of a white door. She had to walk through mud to get there—mud everywhere, of course, since the flood and the rain—and climb two mud-streaked steps.
As Elsa opened the door, a bell tinkled overhead, sounding surprisingly gay.
Inside, she saw rows and rows of food. Cans of beans and peas and tomato soup. Bags of rice and flour and sugar. Smoked meats. Locally made cheeses. Fresh vegetables. Eggs. Milk.
One whole wall was clothing. Bolts of fabric, everything from cotton to wool. There were boxes of buttons and ribbons and spools of thread. Shoes
in every size. Galoshes and raincoats and hats. There were cotton- and potato-picking sacks and canteens and gloves.
Everything was priced high, she noticed. Some things—like eggs—were more than twice the price they were in town. The cotton-picking sacks that hung from hooks on the wall were priced three times what Elsa had paid in town.
She picked up an empty basket.
In the back of the store, a long counter ran nearly from end to end; behind it stood a man with muttonchop sideburns and bushy eyebrows. He wore a dark brown hat, a black sweater, and pants with suspenders. “Hullo there,” he said, pushing the wire-rimmed spectacles higher on his nose. “You must be the new resident of Cabin Ten.”
“I am,” Elsa said. “We are, actually, my children and me. And my husband,” she remembered to add.
“Welcome. You look like a fine new member of our little community.” “We were … flooded out of our … home.”
“As so many were.”
“Our money was lost. All of it.”
He nodded. “Indeed. Again, a common tale.” “I have children to feed.”
“And rent to pay now.”
Elsa swallowed hard. “Yes. Your prices … they’re very high…”
Behind her, the bell tinkled again. She turned and saw a big man walk in. A toothy smile dominated his florid, fleshy face. He hooked his thumbs into the suspenders that held up his brown woolen pants and ambled casually forward, eyeing the goods on either side of him as he walked.
“Mr. Welty,” the store clerk said. “A good morning to you.” Welty. The owner.
“It’ll be better when the damn ground dries, Harald. And who have we here?” He came to a stop beside Elsa. Up close, she saw the quality of his clothing, the cut of his coat. It was how her father had dressed for work—a man choosing clothes to make a statement.
“Elsa Martinelli,” she said. “We are new here.”
“The poor family lost everything in the flood,” Harald said.
“Ah,” Mr. Welty said. “Then you’re in the right place. Stock up on food to feed your family. Get whatever suits your fancy. Come cotton season,
you will make plenty. Do you have children?” “Two, sir.”
“Fine, fine. We love our children pickers.” He slapped a hand down on the counter hard enough to rattle the jar of candy by the register. “Give her some candy for her children, by God.”
Elsa thanked him, although she was pretty sure he didn’t hear, or wasn’t listening. Already he was turning away, walking out of the store.
The bell jangled.
“So,” Harald said, opening a book. “Cabin Ten. I will put you down for six dollars this month on credit. That’s for rent. Now, what else do you need?”
Elsa looked longingly at the smoked meat. “Just take what you need,” Harald said gently.
Elsa couldn’t do that. If she did, she’d take it all, and run like a thief. She couldn’t let herself be seduced by the idea of credit. Nothing in this life was free, for migrants most of all.
Still.
She walked the aisles slowly, adding up every price in her head. She placed items in her basket with great care, as if they might detonate on impact: cans of milk, smoked ham, a bag of potatoes, a bag of flour, a bag of rice, two tins of chipped beef, a small amount of sugar. A bag of beans. Coffee. Some laundry and hand soap. Toothpaste and toothbrushes. A blanket. Two envelopes.
She carried the basket to the counter and withdrew the items one by one. As she did so, a terrible sinking feeling filled her, a sense of impending doom. She had never bought anything she couldn’t pay for. Sure, the Wolcott family had bought things in town on credit, but that had been a convenience. Her father paid his tab promptly, from savings in the bank.
The idea of asking for credit when there were no savings to draw upon felt to Elsa like begging.
“Eleven dollars and twenty cents,” Harald said, writing the total down in the book below the heading of Cabin 10.
At this rate, Elsa would accrue a lot of debt between now and April 26, when—hopefully—state relief would give her some help.
“You know,” she said quietly, “I only need one can of chipped beef.”
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ELSA HAD NO SHELVING in the cabin, so she stacked the food carefully in the one box they had and tucked it under the bed. She’d withheld two cans of milk, a pound of coffee, and a bar of soap. Those items she put back in the bag she’d gotten at the store and carried it out of the cabin.
She got into her truck and drove south, past the town of Welty, to the ditch-bank camp, and parked on the side of the road. The field was a sea of standing water and mud, studded with debris. Goods, tree limbs, sheets of metal lay scattered and floating. With nowhere else to go, people had begun to move back onto the land and set up camp.
Elsa saw the Deweys’ big farm truck off to the right, half buried in mud.
A group of people stood around it.
She carried the groceries across the field, her boots pressing down into the squishy mud, standing water lapping across her ankles now and then.
Jeb and the boys were busy hammering nails into salvaged sheets of plywood. The two girls sat in the back of the truck, playing with ruined dolls in muddy dresses. A broken chair leaned against the mud-clogged stove they had hauled all the way from Alabama, thinking it would go into a house.
They were living in the truck, all six of them.
Elsa saw Jeb and waved. He gave her an ashamed look. “Jean’s at the ditch.”
Elsa’s throat was too tight to allow for words, so she nodded and set the groceries down on the broken chair. Saying nothing, she picked her way through the muddy, debris-strewn field to the ditch.
Jean was at the bank, trying to draw water into a bucket. Elsa came up quietly behind her, feeling guilty that she’d gotten out of this place and ashamed at how grateful she was for it. “Jean,” she said.
Jean turned. In the split second before she smiled, Elsa saw the depth of her friend’s despair. “Elsa,” Jean said. “As you can see, the neighborhood has gone to hell without you.”
Elsa didn’t feel much like joking. “Nadine? Midge?”
“Nadine and them moved on. Jest started walkin’. Ain’t seen Midge since the flood.”
Jean got slowly to her feet, set the bucket of dirty water down beside her.
Elsa approached cautiously, afraid that she might cry. She understood at last what her grandfather had meant when he said, Pretend to be brave if you have to. She did that now, managed a smile even as she felt the sting of tears. “I hate you being here.”
“I hate it, too.” Jean coughed into a dirty handkerchief. “But Jeb is going to rig some kind of structure on the back of the truck. Maybe even make us a covered porch. It won’t be so bad soon. The land’ll dry.” She smiled. “Maybe you’ll come back for tea.”
“Tea? I think we should start drinking gin.” “You’ll visit, though?”
Elsa glimpsed Jean’s fear, and it matched her own. “Of course. And you’ll let me know if you need me. Whenever. Day or night. We’re in Cabin Ten at Welty’s growers’ camp. Just up the road. I … brought you food.” Not enough.
“Aw, Elsa … how can I thank you?”
“You don’t need to thank me. You know that.”
Jean picked up her bucket. The two women walked back to the broken- down truck. How would the Deweys follow the crops in the coming months?
Elsa didn’t know how to leave them here, but there was nothing she could do. She knew that others were even worse off, without even a car to live in.
“It will get better,” Jean said. “Of course it will.”
A look passed between them, a knowledge of their shared lie.
“We’ll drink gin and dance the Charleston, like them society girls,” Jean said. “I always wanted dance lessons. Did I tell you that? As a girl in Montgomery. I begged my mama for lessons. I’ve still got two left feet. You shoulda seen me at my weddin’. Jeb and me dancing was a terrible thing to see.”
Elsa smiled. “It couldn’t be worse than Rafe and me. Someday soon we will teach each other to dance, Jean. You and me, with music. And we won’t care who is watching or what they think,” she said. She pulled Jean into a tight hug and found it difficult to let go.
“Go on,” Jean said. “We’re fine here.”
With a crisp little nod and a wave to the rest of the family, she headed back across the soggy field. She saw her own stove, half buried in mud, lying on its side, the pipe gone. With each breath, she almost cried; each moment she held it back was a triumph. She found a bucket sticking up from the mud and picked it up and kept walking. Then she found a coffee cup and she picked that up, too.
In Welty, she walked to the gas station and washed out the bucket at the faucet by the pumps. She held her muddy boots under the water, cleaning them, too, and then she put them back on. All the while she was thinking about her friend, living in a truck in the middle of a sea of mud in the winter.
“Elsa?”
She shut off the water and turned.
Jack stood there, holding a sheath of papers. Flyers, no doubt, urging people to rise up in anger about the way they were treated.
She shouldn’t move toward him, not right out here in public, but she couldn’t help herself. She felt fragile and alone.
So alone.
“Are you okay?” he asked, meeting her more than halfway.
“I’ve been out … to the ditch-bank camp. Jean … and the children … are living…” On that, her voice broke.
Jack opened his arms and she walked into his embrace. He held her close, said nothing while she cried. Even so, his arms comforted her, his shirt soaked up her tears.
Finally, she drew back, looked at him. He let her go and wiped the tears from her face with the pad of his thumb.
“That’s no way to live,” she said, clearing her throat. Already the moment of intimacy between them was dissolving. She felt embarrassed for letting him hold her. No doubt he thought her needy and pathetic.
“No, it isn’t. Let me drive you home?” “Back to Texas?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Jack, what I want doesn’t matter one whit. Not even to me.” She wiped her eyes, ashamed by the weakness she’d revealed.
“It’s not weak, you know. To feel things deeply, to want things. To need.”
Elsa was startled by his perceptiveness. “I need to go,” she said. “The kids will be out of school soon.”
“Goodbye, Elsa.”
She was surprised by how sad he looked when he said it. Or maybe disappointed in her. It was probably that. “Goodbye, Jack,” she said, and walked away, left him standing there. Somehow, she knew he was staring after her, but she didn’t look back.
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BY THE END OF March, the ground had dried, the ditch-bank camp had filled again, Loreda had turned fourteen, and the Martinelli family was deeply in debt. Elsa did the math obsessively in her head. So far, she and Loreda would have to pick three thousand pounds of cotton just to pay their debt. But she still had to pay rent and buy food. It was a violent, vicious cycle that would start all over again when winter came. There was no way to get ahead, no way to get out.
Still, she went out each day, looking for work while the kids were in school. On good days, she made forty cents weeding or doing someone’s laundry or cleaning someone’s house. She and the kids made weekly visits to the Salvation Army to pick through the give-away clothing bins.
In April, she counted down the days until she officially became a resident of the state and could qualify for relief. It no longer even crossed her mind to refuse aid from the government.
On the appointed day, she woke early and made flour-and-water pancakes for the kids and poured them each a half glass of the watered- down apple juice they sold by the quart in the company store.
Still sleepy eyed, the kids dressed and put on their shoes and filed out of the small cabin and headed for the bathrooms, where there would be a long line.
When they returned, Elsa served them two pancakes each—doctored with a precious dollop of jam. They sat on their bed, side by side.
“You need to eat something, Mom,” Loreda said.
For a moment Elsa saw her fourteen-year-old daughter in heartbreaking relief: bony face, prominent cheekbones. A gingham dress hung on her thin body; her clavicle stuck up from the hollowed-out skin on either side.
She was supposed to be going to square dances and having her first crush on a boy at this age …
“Mom?” Loreda said. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Are you dizzy?”
“No. Not at all. Just thinking.”
Ant laughed. “That’s no good, Ma. You know better.”
Ant stood up. He was all knobs and sticks, this boy who had just turned nine; with elbows and knees and feet that were all too big for his skinny limbs. In the past few months, he’d found friends and begun to act like a boy again; he refused to have his hair cut, hated any sort of games, and called her Ma.
“Guess what today is,” Elsa said.
“What?” Loreda said, not bothering to look up.
“We get state relief,” Elsa said. “Real cash money. I can start paying down our debt.”
“Sure,” Loreda said, plunging her empty plate into the bucket of soapy water.
“We registered with the state a year ago,” Elsa said. “We can get aid as residents now.”
Loreda looked at her. “They’ll find a way to take it back.” “Come on, Miss Sunshine,” Elsa said, offering Ant his coat.
Elsa didn’t bother with her own coat. She put on her galoshes and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.
They stepped out into the busy camp. Now that the threat of frost had passed, men were busy in the fields. Tractors worked ceaselessly, readying the soil, churning it up, planting seeds.
“It makes me think of Grandpa,” Loreda said.
They all stopped, listened to the sound of the tractors’ motors. The smell of freshly turned soil hung in the air.
“It does,” Elsa said, feeling a wave of homesickness.
They kept walking, three abreast, until they reached the school tents. “’Bye, Ma. Good luck with relief,” Ant said, running off.
Loreda ducked into her tent.
Elsa stood there a moment, listening to the sounds of children talking and laughing, of teachers telling them to take their seats. If she closed her
eyes—which she did, just for a moment—she could imagine a whole different world.
Finally, she turned away. Paths between the tents and cabins had been worn into ruts by hundreds of feet. At the bathrooms, she got in line and waited her turn.
It wasn’t a bad wait at this time of day—less than twenty minutes for the toilets. She wanted to take a shower, but with only two showers, the wait was always an hour or more.
She went into her cabin and washed the breakfast dishes and put them in the salvaged apple crate that was their cupboard. In the past months since the flood, they had become good at scavenging.
She made her bed and put on her coat and left the cabin.
In town, a long line of sad-looking men and women snaked in front of the state relief office. Most didn’t look up from their own clasped hands. They were Midwesterners or Texans or Southerners, most of them. Proud people who weren’t used to being on the dole.
Elsa took her place at the back. People moved in behind her quickly, seemed to come from the four corners of town to get in line.
“Are you okay, ma’am?”
She gave herself a little shake, forced a smile. “Forgot to eat, I guess.
I’m fine. Thank you.”
The scrawny young man in front of her wore dungarees that must have been bought when he weighed fifty pounds more. He needed a shave but his eyes were kind. “We all forgot that,” he said with a smile. “I ain’t eaten since Thursday. What day is it?”
“Monday.”
He shrugged. “Kids, you know.” “I know.”
“You got relief before?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t qualify until today.” “Qualify?”
“You have to be in the state a year to get relief.”
“A year? We could be dead by then.” He sighed and stepped out of the line and walked away.
“Wait!” Elsa called out. “You need to register now!”
The young man didn’t turn around and Elsa couldn’t step out of line to follow him. Losing her place would cost her hours.
She eventually made her way to the front. Once there, she looked down at the bright-faced young woman seated at the desk, with a portable typewriter in front of her. Beside it was a long index-card box. “Name?”
“Elsa Martinelli. I have two children. Anthony and Loreda. I registered last year on this date.”
The woman rifled through the red cards, pulled one out. “Here you are.
Address?”
“Welty growers’ camp.”
The woman put the card in the typewriter and added the information. “All right, Mrs. Martinelli. Three people in the family. You’ll get thirteen dollars and fifty cents per month.” She pulled the card out of the typewriter. “Thank you.” Elsa rolled the bills into as small a cylinder as she could
and tightened her fist around them.
As she left the state relief office, she noticed a commotion down the street at the federal relief office. A crowd of people were shouting.
Elsa walked cautiously toward the melee, keenly aware of the money in her hand.
She stopped beside a man at the edge of the crowd. “What’s going on?” “The feds cut relief. No more commodities.”
Someone in the crowd yelled, “That ain’t right!”
A rock sailed through the relief office window, breaking the glass. The mob surged toward the office, shouting.
Within minutes a siren could be heard. A police car rolled up, lights flashing. Two uniformed men jumped out holding billy clubs. “Who wants to go to jail for vagrancy?”
One of the policemen grabbed a raggedly dressed man, hauled him over to the police car, and shoved him in. “Anyone else want to go to jail?”
Elsa turned to the man beside her. “How can they just end the commodities relief? Don’t they care about us?”
The man gave her a disbelieving look. “You tryin’ to be funny?”
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AFTER LEAVING THE RELIEF office, Elsa walked to the ditch-bank camp on Sutter Road.
In the months since the flood, more people had moved onto this land. Old-timers pitched their tents and parked their cars and built their shacks on higher ground, if they could find it. Newcomers set up near the ditch. The ground was studded with spring grass and old belongings, some of which poked up here and there in the dirt. A pipe edge, a book, a ruined lantern. Most things of value had been dug up already or were buried too deeply to be found.
She came to the Deweys’ truck. They’d built a shack around it with scavenged wood and tar paper and scrap metal.
She found Jean sitting in a chair beside the truck’s front fender. Mary and Lucy sat in the grass beside her cross-legged, poking sticks into the ground.
“Elsa!” Jean said, starting to rise.
“Don’t get up,” Elsa said, seeing how pale her friend was, how gaunt. Elsa sat down on the overturned bucket beside Jean.
“I don’t have any coffee to offer you,” Jean said. “I’m drinking hot water.”
“I could use a cup,” Elsa said.
Jean poured Elsa a cup of boiling water and handed it to her. “The feds cut relief,” Elsa said. “People are rioting in town.”
Jean coughed. “I heard. Don’t know how we’re gonna make it till cotton.”
“We’ll make it.” Elsa opened her hand slowly, looked down at the thirteen dollars and fifty cents she had to feed her family until next month. She peeled off two one-dollar bills and handed them to Jean.
“I can’t take that,” Jean said. “Not money.”
“Of course you can.” They both knew that the twenty-seven dollars the Deweys got from the state wasn’t nearly enough to feed six people. And Elsa could get things on credit from the store. The Deweys couldn’t.
Jean reached for the bills, trying to smile. “Well. I am saving up for our bottle of gin.”
“You bet. We will get rip-roaring drunk real soon. Bad-girl drunk,” Elsa said, smiling at the thought. “I was only a bad girl once in my life, and you know what it got me?”
“What?”
“A bad husband and a beautiful new family. So, I say we be bad.” “That a promise?”
“You bet. Someday soon, Jean.”
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ELSA WALKED BACK TO Welty Farms and went to the company store. On the way home from the relief office, she had made calculations in her head. If she used half of her relief money to pay down her debt each month, it would be tight, but they’d have a chance.
In the store, she picked out a loaf of bread and one of bologna and a can of chipped beef, some hot dogs, and a bag of potatoes. A jar of peanut butter, a bar of soap, several cans of milk, and some lard. More than anything, she wanted to add a dozen eggs and a Hershey’s candy bar. But that was how people were ruined by credit.
She placed her items on the counter.
Harald smiled at her as he rang up the items. “Relief day, eh, Mrs.
Martinelli? I can tell by your smile.” “It’s a relief for sure.”
The cash register clattered and rang. “That’ll be two dollars and thirty- nine cents.”
“That sure is steep,” Elsa said.
“Yep,” he said, giving her a commiserating look.
She withdrew the cash from her pocket, began counting it out. “Oh. We don’t take cash, missus. Just credit.”
“But I have money, finally. I wanted to pay on my bill, too.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Credit only. I can even give you a little spending money … on credit. With interest. For gas and such.”
“But … how do I get out from my debt?” “You pick.”
The reality of the situation sank in. Why hadn’t Elsa figured it out before? Welty wanted her in their debt, wanted her to spend her relief money lavishly and be broke again next winter. Of course they’d give you cash for credit—probably at a high interest rate—because poor folks worked for less, asked for less. All she could do was try to use her relief
money to buy goods in town, at lower prices, to offset her accruing debt at the company store, but it wouldn’t make much of a dent. They couldn’t live on thirteen dollars a month. She reached into the basket and removed a can of chipped beef, which she set back on the counter. “I can’t afford this.”
He recalculated her credit total, wrote it down. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Are you? What about going north, to pick peaches? I suppose I’d have to pay for the cabin in advance while I’m gone.”
“Oh, no, ma’am. You’d have to give up the cabin and the sure-thing job of picking cotton.”
“We can’t follow the crops?” Elsa stood there a moment staring at him, wondering how he could stand to be a part of this system. They couldn’t follow the crops and keep the cabin, which meant they had to stay here, without work, waiting for cotton, living on relief and credit. “So, we’re slaves.”
“Workers. The lucky ones, I’d say.” “Would you?”
“Have you seen the way folks live out by the ditch bank?” “Yes,” Elsa said. “I’ve seen it.”
Holding her bag of groceries, she walked out of the store.
Outside, people milled about: women hanging laundry, men scavenging for wood, young children looking for any bit of junk to call a toy. A dozen stoop-shouldered women in baggy dresses stood in line for the two women’s toilets. There were more than three hundred people living here now; they’d pitched fifteen new tents on concrete pads.
She looked at the women, really looked. Gray. Slanted shoulders. Kerchiefs on untended hair. Drab dresses mended and re-mended. Fallen stockings. Worn shoes. Thin.
Still, they smiled at one another in line, talked, wrangled their runaway children, those young enough not to be in school. Elsa had stood in that line enough to know that the women talked about ordinary things—gossip, children, health.
Life went on, even in the hardest of times.
