“Can we drive to relief this week, Ma?” Ant said at the end of another long, hot, demoralizing day picking cotton.
Elsa had to admit that the idea of walking to town and back after a day in the fields was hardly appealing.
But these were the kinds of decisions that came back to haunt a woman when winter came.
“Just this once. In fact, Ant, if you want to, you can stay in the camp and play with your friends if you’d like.”
“Really? That’d be swell.”
“I’ll stay and watch him,” Loreda said.
Elsa gave her daughter a pointed look. “You, I’m not letting out of my sight.”
They left Ant at the cabin and got into the truck.
“Can I practice driving? Grandpa said I should keep practicing,” Loreda said. “What if there’s an emergency?”
“An emergency that requires you to drive?” “It’s possible.”
“Fine.”
Loreda got behind the wheel.
Elsa climbed into the passenger seat. Lord, but it was hot. Loreda started the engine.
“You remember how to work the pedals? Do it slowly, carefully. Find the
—”
The truck lurched forward and died. “Sorry,” Loreda said.
“Try again. Take your time.”
Loreda worked the pedals, put the truck in first gear. They moved slowly forward.
The engine revved.
“Second gear, Loreda,” Elsa said.
Loreda tried again and finally got it into second.
They drove in fits and starts down the road to the state relief office, where there was already a crowd of people waiting. The line snaked out the door and through the parking lot and down the block.
Elsa and Loreda got in line.
As they stood there, the sun began to set slowly, gilding the valley for a few beautiful moments before the sky darkened.
They were almost to the head of the line when a pair of police cars drove into the parking lot. Four uniformed policemen exited the vehicles. Moments later a Welty truck drove up and Mr. Welty stepped out.
People in line turned to look, but no one said anything.
Two of the policemen and Mr. Welty cut to the head of the line and strode into the relief office. They didn’t come back out.
Elsa clung to Loreda’s hand. In normal times, the folks in line might have turned to one another, asked what was going on, but these weren’t ordinary times. There were spies everywhere; people wanted to take a place at Welty, wanted a job.
Elsa finally stepped into the small, hot office, where a pretty young woman sat at the desk with the file box full of residents’ names in front of her.
Welty stood beside the woman, appeared almost to be looming over the poor girl. Two policemen stood beside him, hands rested on their gun belts.
Elsa eased Loreda away and walked up to the desk alone. Her throat was so dry she had to clear it twice to speak. “Elsa Martinelli. April 1935.”
Welty pointed at Elsa’s red card. “Address Welty Farms. She’s on the list.”
The woman looked at Elsa with compassion. “I’m sorry, ma’am. No state relief for anyone who is capable of picking cotton.”
“But…”
“If you can pick, you have to,” she said. “It’s the new policy. But don’t worry, as soon as cotton season is over, you’ll be put back on the relief rolls.”
“Wait a minute. Now, the state is cutting my relief? But I’m a resident, and I am picking cotton.”
“We want to make sure you keep picking it,” Welty said. “Mr. Welty,” she said. “Please. We need—”
“Next,” Welty said loudly.
Elsa couldn’t believe this new cruelty. People needed this relief to feed their children, even if they did pick cotton. “Have you no shame?”
“Next,” he said again. A policeman came up to physically move Elsa out of the line.
She stumbled away, felt Loreda steady her.
Elsa stepped out of the relief office (what a joke that title was) and stared at the long line of people, many of whom didn’t yet know their relief had been cut. So, the state was helping the growers avoid a strike by cutting relief to people who were already barely surviving.
She heard a shout and turned.
Two policemen slammed a man against the building wall, said, “Where’s tonight’s meeting? Where is it?” They shoved the man into the wall again. “How are you going to feed your family from San Quentin?”
“Elsa!”
She saw Jeb Dewey rushing toward her. He looked frantic. “Jeb. What’s wrong?”
“It’s Jean. She’s sick. Can you help?”
“I’ll drive,” Elsa said, already running toward the truck.
Elsa drove out to the old squatters’ camp and parked near the Deweys’ truck. She and Jeb and Loreda got out. A wood and metal roof had been built over the bed. Another roof extended out to the side, created a covered cooking area where the children now sat. Jean lay on a mattress in the back of the truck.
“Tell us what to do,” Jeb said.
Elsa climbed up into the truck bed and knelt beside Jean. “Hey, you.” “Elsa,” Jean said, her voice almost too soft to be heard. Her eyes had a
glassy, unfocused look. “I told Jeb you’d be at relief today.”
Elsa placed a hand on Jean’s forehead. “You’re burning up.” She yelled to Jeb: “Get me some water.”
Moments later, Loreda handed Elsa a cup of warm water. “Here, Mom.”
Elsa took the cup. Cradling Jean’s neck, she helped her sip water. “Come on, Jean, take a drink.”
Jean tried to push her away.
“Come on, Jean.” Elsa forced the water down Jean’s throat. Jean looked up at her. “It’s bad this time.”
Elsa looked down at Jeb. “You got any aspirin?” “Nope.”
“Loreda,” Elsa said. “Take the truck to the company store. Buy us some aspirin. And a thermometer. The keys are in the ignition.”
Loreda ran off.
Elsa settled herself in closer to Jean, held her in her arms, and stroked her hot brow.
“It’s the typhoid, I reckon,” Jean said. “You should probably stay away.” “I’m not that easy to get rid of. Just ask my husband. He had to run off in
the middle of the night.”
Jean smiled weakly. “He was a fool.”
“Jack said the same thing. So did Rafe’s mom, come to think of it.” “I sure could use me some of that gin we been talkin’ about.”
Elsa ran her fingers through Jean’s damp hair. Heat radiated from Jean’s body to Elsa’s. “I could sing…”
“Please don’t.”
The women smiled at each other, but Elsa saw Jean’s fear. “It’ll be okay.
You’re strong.”
Jean closed her eyes and fell asleep in Elsa’s arms.
Elsa held Jean, stroked her hot brow, and whispered quiet words of encouragement until she heard the rumbling sound of the truck returning.
Thank God.
Loreda drove up and parked. She opened the truck’s door and got out, banging the door shut behind her. “Mom!” she yelled. “The store wasn’t open.”
Elsa craned her neck to see Loreda. “Why not?”
“Probably because of the strike talk. They want to remind us how much we need them. Pigs.”
Jean’s body suddenly arched and stiffened. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Her body began to shake violently.
Elsa held her friend until she stilled. “There’s no aspirin, Jean,” Elsa said.
Jean’s eyes fluttered open. “Don’t fret none, Elsa. Just let me—”
“No,” Elsa said sharply. “I’ll be right back. Don’t you dare go anywhere.”
Jean’s breathing slowed. “I might go dancin’.”
Elsa eased Jean’s head back and got out of the truck. “You stay here,” she said to Loreda. “Try to get Jean to drink more water. Keep a wet rag on her forehead. Don’t let her kick the covers away.” She turned to Jeb. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where yah going?” Jeb asked. “I’m getting her aspirin.”
“Where? You got any money to buy some?”
“No,” Elsa said tightly. “They make sure we never have money. Stay here.”
She ran to the truck and started it up, drove out to the main road.
At the hospital, she walked across the parking lot and pushed through the doors, leaving dirty brown footprints across the clean floor as she walked to the front desk, where a woman sat alone, playing solitaire.
“I need help,” Elsa said. “Please. I know you won’t let us come to the hospital, but if you could just give me some asprin, it would be such a help. My friend has a fever. Really high. It could be typhoid. Help us. Please. Please.”
The woman straightened in her chair, craned her neck to look up and down the hall. “You know that’s contagious, right? There’s a nurse at the new government tent camp in Arvin. Ask her for help. She treats your kind.”
Your kind.
Enough is goddamned enough.
Elsa walked out of the hospital, went back to the truck, and grabbed Ant’s baseball bat from out of the bed. Carrying it, she walked across the parking lot, trying to stay calm.
This time she banged through the doors, took one look at the woman sneering up at her, and slammed the baseball bat down on the front desk
hard enough to dent the wood.
The woman screamed.
“Ah, good. I have your attention. I need some aspirin,” Elsa said calmly. The woman spun around, yanked open a cabinet. With shaking hands,
she started pawing through medicine. “Darn Okies,” the woman muttered.
Elsa smashed a lamp. Then the phone.
The woman grasped a pair of bottles and thrust them at Elsa. “You people are animals.”
“So are you, ma’am. So are you.” Elsa took the aspirin.
She was almost to the front door when a big man came lumbering down the hallway toward her.
“Stop her, Fred! She’s a criminal!” the woman at the desk yelled. He blocked the door.
Elsa stepped closer to the man in the brown security uniform, holding the bat down at her side. Her heart was thundering, but strangely, she felt calm. In control, even. She had the medicine and no one was going to stop her from getting it to Jean. “How badly do you want to stop me, Fred?”
The man’s gaze softened. “The missus and I came here from Indiana about five years ago. It was a helluva lot easier then. I’m sorry for the way you’re treated.” He pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Will this help?”
Elsa almost cried at the small kindness. “Thank you.” “Now go. Alice is probably calling the coppers already.”
Elsa sprinted out of the hospital, threw the baseball bat into the truck bed, then started the engine and stomped on the gas. The old truck fishtailed in the gravel and slowly straightened out on the dark road.
She turned onto the road to the squatters’ camp and pulled up in front of the Deweys’ truck.
She found Jeb in the bed of the truck with Jean, cradling his wife in his arms; the children stood with Loreda beneath the wooden overhang close to the side of the truck. The boys held the little girls’ hands.
“She keeps askin’ for gin,” Jeb said, looking bereft and confused. “She don’t drink.”
Elsa climbed up into the bed of the truck, settled in on Jean’s other side. “Hey, you, bad girl. I’ve got some aspirin.”
Jean’s eyes fluttered open.
“I hear you’re making trouble, demanding gin,” Elsa said. “One martini before I die. Don’t seem too much to ask.”
Elsa helped Jean swallow two aspirin and drink a glass of water, and then stroked her friend’s hot forehead. “Don’t you give up, Jean…”
Jean stared up at Elsa, breathing heavily, sweating. “You dance, Elsa,” she said, almost too quietly to be heard. “For both of us.” Jean squeezed Elsa’s hand. “I loved you, girlfriend.”
Not past tense. Please.
She heard Jeb start to cry.
“I love you, too, Jean,” Elsa whispered.
Jean slowly turned her head to look at her husband. “Now … where … are my babies, Jeb?”
Elsa had to force herself to move away, get out of the truck. The four Dewey children climbed up and gathered around Jean.
Elsa heard whispering. Elroy said, “I will, Ma,” as the girls cried. And then Jean’s broken voice: “I had so much more to say to y’all…” Loreda touched Elsa’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Elsa’s answer was a primal scream. Once she started, she couldn’t stop.
Loreda pulled Elsa into her arms and held her while she cried for all of it
—the way they lived, the dreams they’d lost, the future they’d so blindly believed in. For the children who would grow up not knowing Jean. Her humor, her gentleness, her steel, her hopes for them.
Elsa cried until she felt emptied inside.
She pulled away from Loreda, who looked frightened. “I’m sorry,” Elsa said, wiping her eyes.
“Sometimes it just … breaks you,” Loreda said. “It helps to get mad.” “You’re right,” Elsa said. Enough. “If I wanted to find Mr. Valen and his
Communist friends, would you know where to look?” “I think so.”
“Where?”
“There’s a barn where they make flyers and stuff. Out at the end of Willow Road.”
“Okay.” Elsa drew in a deep breath and released it slowly. “Okay, then.”
 |
LATER, WHEN NIGHT FELL across the valley and stars came out to blanket the sky, Elsa quietly herded her children out of the cabin and toward the truck. None of them spoke as they climbed into the vehicle and drove away. Each understood the danger of what they’d decided to do tonight.
“Turn here,” Loreda said.
Elsa turned onto a dirt road that cut through brown, uncultivated fields. At the end of the road, a gray-brown barn stood next to an old ranch house with broken windows and boarded-up doors. There were six or seven automobiles parked out front.
Elsa parked beside a dusty Packard, and she, Loreda, and Ant climbed out of the truck, heading toward the barn. Loreda pushed open the half-broken door.
Inside, lanterns cast a warm glow over the space. Several tables were set up on the straw-covered dirt floor, with chairs scattered along the walls. At least a dozen people were hard at work—some at typewriters, others at mimeograph machines. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, mingling with the sweet scent of hay.
As Elsa and the children walked among the Communists, they went unnoticed. Elsa spotted a paper emerging from a mimeograph machine, the bold headline reading, “WORKERS UNITE!” The distinct smell of ink and metal filled the air.
They passed a small, dark-haired woman in glasses, pacing as she dictated to another woman at a typewriter. “We cannot allow the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. How can we call ourselves the land of the free when people are living on the streets and dying of hunger? Radical change requires radical methods…”
Loreda nudged Elsa, and she looked up to see Jack approaching.
“Hello, ladies,” he said, his gaze fixed intently on Elsa. “Loreda,” he continued, “Natalia is at the mimeograph machine. She could use some help.”
“You too, Ant,” Elsa added. “Stay with your sister.”
Jack led Elsa outside to a fire pit surrounded by mismatched furniture. Ashtrays overflowed with crumpled cigarette butts. “So, Communists gather around a fire and smoke like everyone else,” Elsa remarked.
“We are almost human that way.” He moved closer. “What happened?”
“Jean died. There was no way for us to save her. The company store was closed to teach us a lesson and the hospital wouldn’t help. I even used a … baseball bat to get their attention. All I got was some aspirin.Oh, and they culled our names from the relief rolls today. If you can pick cotton, you have to. No state relief.”
“We heard. The growers bullied the state into it. They’re calling it the No Work, No Eat policy. They’re afraid that relief will allow you to feed your children while you strike for better wages.”
Elsa crossed her arms. “All my life I’ve been told to make no noise, don’t want too much, be grateful for any scrap that came my way. And I’ve done that. I thought if I just did what women are supposed to do and played by the rules, it would … I don’t know … change. But the way we’re treated…”
“It’s unfair,” he said.
“It’s wrong,” she said. “This isn’t who we are in America.” “No.”
“A strike.” She said the frightening word quietly. “Can it work?” “Maybe.”
She was grateful for his honesty. “They’ll hurt us for trying.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But life is more than what happens to us, Elsa. We have choices to make.”
“I’m not a brave woman.”
“And yet here you are, standing at the edge of battle.”
His words touched a chord in her. “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He used to tell me that courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.” She looked at him. “Well, I’m scared.”
“We’re all scared,” he said.
“I have children to worry about, children I have to feed and clothe and keep safe. I can’t risk their lives.”
He said nothing, and she knew why. He was letting her say it.
“They’re already at risk,” she said. “They can’t be taught that this is what we deserve, that this is America. I have to teach them to stand up for themselves.”
Elsa felt both a stunning sense of relief, almost of coming home, finding herself … and a deep, abiding fear. Courage is fear you ignore. But how did one do that, really? In practical terms.
“The rifle tower they built in the field … that’s to scare us, right? What we’re doing—a strike—it’s legal.”
“It’s legal. Hell, it’s the very essence of America. We were built on the right to protest, but laws are enforced by the government. By the police. You’ve seen how they support big business.”
Elsa nodded. “What do we do?”
“First we need to get out the word. We’ve set a strike meeting for Friday. But it’s dangerous even to tell people, let alone to show up for the meeting.”
“Everything is dangerous,” she said. “So what?” He laid a hand along her cheek.
She leaned into his touch, taking strength and comfort from it.
