Loreda leaned out her bedroom window and screamed in frustration. Below her, the chickens squawked in response. “Fly away, you idiot birds. Can’t you tell we’re dying here?”
Stella was leaving.
Loreda’s best—and only—friend in Lonesome Tree was leaving.
The room seemed to close in on her, becoming so small she couldn’t breathe. She went downstairs. The house was still, no wind poking at the cracks, no wood settling onto its foundations.
She moved easily in the dark. In the past month they’d turned off the party-line phone—no money to pay for it—and now they were really out here all alone. She found the front door and went outside. A bright moon shone out, glazing the barn’s roof with silvered light.
She smelled the sunbaked dirt and a hint of chicken manure and … cigarette smoke? Following the smell of it, she walked around the side of the farmhouse.
Beneath the windmill, she saw the red glow of a cigarette tip rise and fall and rise again. Daddy. So he couldn’t sleep, either.
As she approached him, she saw his red eyes and the tear streaks on his cheeks. He’d been out here in the dark, all alone, smoking and crying. “Daddy?”
“Hey, doll. You caught me.”
He tried to sound casual, but the obvious pretense made her feel even worse. If there was one person she trusted to tell her the truth, it was her
father. But now it was so bad he was crying. “You heard the Devereauxs are leaving?” “I’m sorry, Lolo.”
“I’m tired of I’m sorrys,” Loreda said. “We could leave, too. Like the Devereauxs and the Moungers and the Mulls. Just go.”
“They were all talking about leaving at the shindig tonight. Most folks are like your grandparents. They’d rather die here than leave.”
“Do they know we might actually die here?”
“Oh. They know, believe me. Tonight, your grandfather said—and I quote: Bury me here, boys. I ain’t leaving.” He exhaled smoke. “They say they’re doing it for our future. As if this patch of dirt is all we could ever want.”
“Maybe we could convince them to leave.”
Her father laughed. “And maybe Milo will sprout wings and fly away.” “Could we leave without them? Lots of folks are leaving. You always
say this is America, where anything is possible. We could go to California. Or you could get a railroad job in Oregon.”
Loreda heard footsteps. Moments later, Mom appeared, dressed in her ratty old robe and work boots, her fine hair all whichaway.
“Rafe,” Mom said, sounding relieved, as if she thought he might have run off. It was pathetic how close an eye Mom kept on Daddy. On all of them. She was more of a cop than a parent, and she took the fun out of everything. “I missed you when I woke. I thought…”
“I’m here,” he said.
Mom’s smile was as thin as everything else about her. “Come inside.
Both of you. It’s late.” “Sure, Els,” Daddy said.
Loreda hated how beaten her father sounded, how his fire went out around her mother. She sucked the life out of everyone with her sad, long- suffering looks. “This is all your fault.”
Mom said, “What am I to blame for now, Loreda? The weather? The Depression?”
Daddy touched Loreda, shook his head. Don’t.
Mom waited a moment for Loreda to speak, then turned away and headed for the house.
Daddy followed.
“We could leave,” Loreda said to her father, who kept walking as if he hadn’t heard. “Anything is possible.”
 |
THE NEXT MORNING, ELSA woke well before dawn and found Rafe’s side of the bed empty. He’d slept in the barn again. Lately he preferred it to being with her. With a sigh, she got dressed and left her room.
In the dark kitchen, Rose stood at the dry sink, her hands deep in water that she’d hauled from the well and poured into the sink. A large cracked mixing bowl lay drying on towels on the counter beside her. Towels Elsa had embroidered by hand, at night, by candlelight, in Rafe’s favorite colors. She had thought that making a perfect home was the answer to making a marriage happy. Clean sheets scented with lavender, embroidered pillowcases, hand-knit scarves. She’d filled hours with such tasks, poured her heart and soul into them, using thread to say the words she could not utter.
A pot of coffee sat on the woodstove, pumping a comforting aroma into the room. A tray of rectangular chickpea panelle was on the table and a tablespoon of olive oil popped in a cast-iron pan on the stove. Beside it, oatmeal bubbled in a pot.
“Morning,” Elsa said. She removed a spatula from the drawer and lowered two of the panelle into the hot oil. These would be the midday meal, eaten like a sandwich, squeezed with precious drops of preserved lemon.
“You look tired,” Rose said, not unkindly. “Rafe isn’t sleeping well.”
“If he’d stop drinking in the barn at night it might help.”
Elsa poured herself a cup of coffee and leaned against the cabbage-rose- papered wall. She noticed the corner of the flooring where the linoleum was coming up. Then she went to turn the panelle over, seeing a nice brown crust on them.
Rose moved in beside her, took over the cooking.
Elsa began to take apart the butter churn. The parts needed to be washed and scalded and put back together in a precise, numbered order and then
stacked for the next use. It was the perfect chore to keep one’s mind occupied.
A centipede crawled out of its hiding place and plopped onto the counter. Elsa took out a pair of knives and chopped it into pieces. Sharing the house with centipedes and spiders and other insects had become commonplace. Every living thing on the Great Plains sought safety from the dust storms.
The two women worked in companionable silence until the sun came up and the children stumbled out of their bedrooms.
“I’ll feed them,” Rose said. “Why don’t you take Rafe some coffee?” Elsa was grateful for her mother-in-law’s insight. Smiling, Elsa said,
“Thank you,” poured her husband a cup of coffee, and went outside.
The sun was a bright yellow glow in a cloudless cornflower-blue sky. Instead of noticing the latest destruction to the land—broken fence posts, damage to the windmill, dirt piles growing in size—she focused instead on the good news. If she hurried, she would be able to do laundry today, bleach everything into whiteness. There was something about fresh sheets hanging on the line that lifted her spirits. Perhaps it was simply a vision of having accomplished a thing that improved her family’s life, even if no one noticed.
Tony was up on the windmill repairing a blade. The bang-bang-bang of his hammer echoed across the endless brown plain.
Rafe was in the last place in the world she expected him to be: the family cemetery. A small brown plot of land delineated by a sagging picket fence. Once, it had included a beautiful garden, with pink morning glories crawling up and over the white picket fence and a carpet of blue-green buffalo grass on the ground. Elsa used to spend an hour here every Sunday, rain, heat, or snow, but she hadn’t been out here as often lately. As always, the headstones reminded her of her lost son, of the dreams she’d spun for him while he was in her womb and the pain that had softened over time but never gone away.
She unclicked the gate, which hung askew on a broken hinge. Dozens of white pickets lay on the ground; some had broken, others had been yanked out of the ground by the savage wind.
Four gray headstones stood from the dirt. Three of Rose and Tony’s children—all daughters—and Lorenzo …
Rafe was kneeling in front of their son’s headstone. Lorenzo Walter Martinelli, b. 1931, d. 1931.
Elsa knelt beside him, laid a hand on his shoulder.
He turned to her. She had never seen such pain in his eyes, not even when they’d buried their newborn son. Rafe had been only twenty- eight when he’d held his tiny, unbreathing child in his arms and cried for their loss. He had, to the best of her knowledge, never come out here, never knelt at this grave.
“I miss him, too,” Elsa said, stumbling a little over the words.
“Old Man Orloff butchered his last steer this week. The poor thing was full of dirt.”
“Yes.” Elsa frowned at the odd change in topic.
“Ant asked me why his stomach hurt all the time. How could I tell him that the land is killing him?” He stood, took her by the hand, and pulled her up to stand with him. “Let’s go.”
“Go?”
“West. To California. People are leaving every day. I hear there are railroad jobs to be had. And maybe I’ll qualify for that program of FDR’s. The Conservation Corps.”
“We don’t have money for gas.”
“We could walk. Jump on trains. Folks will give us rides. We will get there. The kids are tough.”
“Tough?” She pulled free of his hold, took a step back. “They don’t have shoes that fit. We have no money. No food. You’ve seen the Hooverville photos, what it’s like out there. Anthony is seven. How far do you think he can walk? You want him to jump on a moving train?”
“California is different,” he said stubbornly. “There are jobs there.” “Your parents won’t leave. You know that.”
“We could go without them?” He made it a question, not a statement, and she could see how ashamed he was to even ask it.
“Go without them?”
Rafe ran a hand through his hair and looked out over the dead wheat fields and the graves already on this land. “This damnable wind and drought will kill them. And us. I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t.”
“Rafe … you can’t mean this.”
This land was his heritage, their future, their children’s future. The kids would grow up on this land, always knowing their history, knowing who they were and who they’d come from. They’d learn the pride that came with a good day’s work. They would belong somewhere. Rafe didn’t know how it felt not to belong, the pain of it, but Elsa did, and she would never inflict that heartache on her children. This was home. He had to know that hard times ended. Land endured. Family endured. How could he think they could just leave Tony and Rose here alone? It was unconscionable, unthinkable. “When it rains—”
“Christ, I hate that sentence,” he said, sounding more bitter than she’d ever heard him.
She saw the agony in his eyes, the disappointment, the anger.
Elsa wanted to reach out and touch him but didn’t dare. I love you
burned in her dry throat. “I just think—” “I know what you think.”
He walked away and didn’t look back.
|
LEAVE. JUST GIVE UP on this land and walk away with nothing.
Actually walk away. She was still thinking about it hours later, well after night had fallen.
She couldn’t imagine joining the horde of jobless, homeless hobos and migrants who were headed west. She’d heard it was dangerous to jump onto those trains, that legs and feet could be cut off, bodies severed in half by the giant metal wheels. And there was crime out there, bad men who’d left their consciences along with their families. Elsa was not a brave woman.
Still.
She loved her husband. She’d vowed to love, honor, and obey him.
Surely “follow him” was understood.
Should she have told him they’d go to California? At least talked about it? Maybe in the spring, if they’d had rain and a crop, there would be money for gas.
And God knew he was unhappy here. So was Loreda.
Perhaps they could leave—all of them—and come back when the drought ended.
Why not?
This land would wait for them.
She could at least discuss it with him properly, make him see that she was his wife and they were a team and if he wanted this enough, she would do it. She would leave this land she had come to love, the only home she’d ever had.
For him.
She threw a shawl over her worn lawn nightgown, then stepped into the rubber boots by the front door and went outside.
Where was he? Out on the windmill, alone, chewing on his disappointment? Or had he hitched up the wagon and gone to the Silo so he could sit at the bar and drink whiskey?
It was nearly nine o’clock and the farm was quiet.
The only light on in the house shone in Loreda’s upstairs window. Her daughter was in bed reading, just as Elsa had done at her age. She walked out into the yard. The chickens roused themselves lethargically as she passed by and quieted quickly. She heard music coming from her in-laws’ bedroom. Tony was playing music on his fiddle. Elsa knew that music was how he spoke to Rose in these hard times, how he reminded them of their past and their future, how he said, I love you.
She saw Rafe in the darkness by the corral, an upright slash of black against the black slats of the corral, all of it sheened silver by the light of a waxing moon. The bright orange tip of his cigarette.
He heard her footsteps, she could tell.
Rafe pulled away from the corral, stubbed out his cigarette, and dropped the unsmoked portion into his shirt pocket. Tony’s love song wafted toward them.
Elsa stopped in front of Rafe. All it would take was the smallest movement and she could rest her hand on his shoulder. She knew the faded blue chambray of his work shirt would feel warm after this long, hot day. She’d hemmed and washed and stitched and folded every garment he owned and knew each one by touch.
How was it possible that Elsa was close enough to her husband that she could feel the heat coming off him and smell the whiskey and cigarettes on his breath and still feel as if an ocean sloshed between them?
He surprised her by taking her hand and pulling her into his arms.
“You remember that first night of ours, out in the truck in front of Steward’s barn?”
Elsa nodded uncertainly. These were things they didn’t speak of.
“You said you wanted to be brave. I just wanted … to be somewhere else.”
Elsa stared up at him, saw his pain, and it hurt her, too. “Oh, Rafe—”
He kissed her on the lips, long and slow and deep, letting his tongue taste hers. “You were my first kiss,” he whispered, drawing back just enough to look at her. “Remember me then?”
It was the most romantic thing he’d ever said to her, and it filled her with hope. “Always,” she whispered.
Tony’s music stopped, leaving a heavy silence behind. Insects sang their staccato songs. The geldings moved listlessly in the corral, bumping the fencing with their noses, reminding them that they were hungry.
The night around them was black, the huge sky bright with stars. Maybe those were other universes she saw up there.
It felt beautiful and romantic, and just now, the two of them could be alone on the planet, attended to only by the sounds of the night.
“You’re thinking about California,” she began, trying to find the right words to begin a new conversation.
“Yeah. Ant walking one thousand miles on bad shoes. Us in a breadline somewhere. You were right. We can’t go.”
“Maybe in the spring—”
Rafe silenced her with a kiss. “Go to bed,” he murmured. “I’ll be there soon.”
Elsa felt him pulling away, releasing her. “Rafe, I think we should talk about—”
“Don’t fret, Els,” he said. “I’ll come to bed shortly. We can talk then. I just need to water the animals.”
Elsa wanted to stop him and make him listen, but such boldness was beyond her. Deep down, she was always afraid of how flimsy her hold on him was. She couldn’t test it.
But she would reach for him tonight, touch him with the kind of intimacy she dreamed of. She would overcome whatever was wrong with her and finally please him.
She would. And when they were finished making love, she would talk to him about leaving, talk seriously. More important, she would listen.
She returned to their room and paced. Finally, she went to the window and peeled away the dirt-crusted rags and newspaper that covered the sill and pane.
She could see the windmill, a slash of black lines, a flower almost, silhouetted against the bejeweled night sky.
Rafe was there, leaning against the frame, almost indistinguishable from the windmill. He was smoking.
She climbed into bed and pulled the quilt up around her and waited for her husband.
|
THE NEXT THING ELSA knew, it was daylight and she smelled coffee. The rich, bitter aroma drew her out of the comfort of her bed. She finger- combed her hair and slipped into a housedress, trying not to be hurt that Rafe hadn’t come to their bed again last night.
She rebraided her hair and wrapped it in a coil at the back of her head, pinning it in place and then covering it with the kerchief.
She checked on her children—letting them sleep in on this Saturday morning—and headed to the kitchen, where a pot full of last night’s potato water had been saved to make bread.
All they had for breakfast was wheat cereal, so she got it started. Thank God they had one cow that was still producing milk.
Loreda was the first to stumble out of her small second-floor bedroom. Her black bob was a rat’s nest of tangles and curls. A sunburn peeled in patches across her cheeks. “Wheat cereal. Yum,” she said, heading to the icebox. Opening it, she took out the yellow crockery pitcher that held a bit of precious cream and carried it over to the oilcloth-draped table, where the speckled bowls and plates were already in place, upside down to protect from dust. She turned over three bowls.
Ant came out next, climbed up into the chair beside his sister. “I want pancakes,” he grumbled.
“I’ll put some corn syrup in your cereal,” Elsa said.
Elsa served up the cereal, doctored it with cream and added a little corn syrup to each bowl, and then set down two glasses of cold buttermilk.
As the children ate—silently—Elsa headed for the barn. Wind and shifting sand had changed the landscape overnight again, filled in much of the giant crack that had cut through their property.
As she passed the hog pen, she saw their only remaining hog kneeling lethargically on the hard-packed earth, and the John Deere one-horse seed drill, unused now, half buried in sand. Beyond that, she saw Rose in the orchard, looking for apples on the cracked ground.
In the pen, their two cows stood side by side, heads down, mooing pathetically. Their ribs stood out, their bellies shrunken, their hides blistered with sores. Elsa couldn’t help but remember a few years ago, when the younger of the two cows, Bella, had been born. Elsa had fed her by bottle because the cow’s mother hadn’t survived the birth. Rose had taught Elsa how to make the bottle and get the unsteady calf to take it. Sometimes Bella still followed Elsa around the yard like a pet.
“Hey, Bella,” Elsa said, stroking the cow’s sunken side.
Bella looked up, her big brown eyes blinded by dirt, and mooed plaintively.
“I know,” Elsa said, taking a bucket from the fence post.
Elsa led Bella into the relative coolness of the barn, tied her to the center post, and pulled out the milking stool. She couldn’t help glancing up into the hayloft—nearly empty now of hay. She was pretty sure Rafe had slept there last night. Again.
Elsa had always loved this chore. It had taken her a long time to catch on in the beginning; she had heard a hundred tsks from Rose as Elsa tried to master the technique, but master it she had, and now it was one of her favorite chores. She loved being with Bella, loved the sweet smell of fresh milk, the hollow clanking as the first stream hit the metal bucket. She even loved what came next: carrying the bucket of fresh, warm milk to the house, pouring it into the separator, cranking the machine by hand, skimming off the rich yellow cream, saving the whole milk to feed her family and using skim milk for the animals.
Elsa reached out for the cow’s barely swollen udder, touched the wind- chapped teats gently.
The cow bellowed in pain.
“I’m sorry, Bella,” Elsa said. She tried again, squeezing as gently as she could, pulling down slowly.
A stream of dirt-brown milk squirted out, smelling fecund. Each day, it seemed, milking took longer to reach white, usable milk. The first streams were always dirty like this. Elsa dumped out the brown milk, cleaned the bucket, and tried again. She never gave up, no matter how sad Bella’s moans made her or how long it took to get clean milk.
When she finished, getting less than they needed, she turned the poor cow out into the paddock.
As she passed the horse stalls, Milo and Bruno both snorted heavily and bit at the door, trying to eat the wood.
As she locked the barn door behind her, she heard a gunshot. What now?
She turned, saw her father-in-law at the hog pen. He lowered his rifle as their last hog staggered sideways and collapsed.
“Thank God,” Elsa murmured to herself. Meat for the children.
She waved at him as he hefted the dead hog into a wheelbarrow and headed to the barn to hang it for slaughter.
A tumbleweed rolled lazily past her, pushed along by a gentle breeze. Her gaze followed it to the fence line, where the Russian thistles survived against all odds, growing stubbornly even in the drought, against the wind. The cows ate them when there was nothing else. So did the horses.
She took the milk into the house and then went outside again, crossing the expanse of dirt that lay between the barn and the fence. The wind plucked at her kerchief, as if trying to stop her.
The Russian thistles were a tangle of prickles and stems, barely green.
Wiry. Tough. Spikes as sharp as pins.
She pulled her gloves from her apron pocket and put them on. Making a bowl of her apron, she eased her hand past the sharp prickly ends and plucked off a green shoot.
She tasted it.
Not bad. Maybe they could be cooked gently in olive oil, wine, garlic, and herbs. Would they taste like artichokes? Tony loved his artichokes. Or maybe pickling them was the answer …
Tomorrow she’d get everyone picking them and find a way to preserve them.
At noon, when she’d picked as many as her apron could hold, she went back to the house.
Inside, Elsa found the children and Tony already seated at the table for the midday meal.
“I found some grapes,” Ant said, bouncing in his seat, beaming at his contribution.
Elsa tousled his hair, felt its texture. “Bath tonight for a little boy I know.”
“Do I hafta?”
Elsa smiled. “I can smell you from here. Yep.”
Tony pulled off his hat, revealing a strip of white skin across his brow, and sat down. He downed an entire glass of tea in two gulps, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
Rose came into the kitchen and poured her husband a glass of red wine.
Tony dug into his plate of arancini. It was a family favorite: rice balls filled with creamy cheese, swimming in a pancetta-and-garlic-flavored tomato sauce.
Elsa put her pile of thistles into a bowl and set it by the dry sink. “What’s that?” Rose asked, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Thistles. I think I can figure out a way to make them palatable. They almost taste like artichokes.”
Rose sighed. “It’s come to that. Italians eating horse food. Madonna mia.”
“Where’s Rafe?” Elsa asked, looking around. “I need to talk to him.” “Ain’t seen him all day,” Ant said. “I looked, too.”
Elsa walked out to the porch, rang the bell for the midday meal, and waited, looking out over the farm.
The horses and wagon were here, so he hadn’t gone to town. Maybe he was in their room.
She headed back into the house and went into their bedroom. Sunlight made the pale white walls look golden. A large framed portrait of Jesus stared at her.
The room was empty—just the bed and the chest of drawers she shared with her husband and the washstand with its oval mirror that captured her image. Everything was as it should be, except …
There were marks on the floor, coming out from beneath her bed, as if something had been put under the bed or taken out from underneath it.
She lifted the quilt and looked underneath the bed. She saw her suitcase, the one she’d brought into her marriage, and the box of baby clothes she’d saved just in case.
Something was missing. What?
She dropped to her knees for a better look. What was missing?
Rafe’s suitcase. The one he’d packed all those years ago to go off to college. The one he’d unpacked when her father left Elsa here.
She glanced sideways. His clothes were gone from the hooks by the door, as was his hat.
She got up slowly and went to the dresser, opened the top drawer. His drawer.
One blue chambray shirt was all that was left.
