1940
I AM STANDING BEHIND the farmhouse in a field of blue-green buffalo grass. To my left, a sea of golden wheat waves in the breeze. My grandparents’ farm has been recontoured, as have all the big farms in the county. Newspapers credit the President’s soil conservation plan for rescuing the Great Plains, but my grandmother says it was God who saved us; God and His rain.
I look like any other girl my age, but I am different from most. A survivor. There is no way to forget what we went through in the Great Depression or to unlearn the lessons of hardship. Even though I am only eighteen, I remember my childhood as a time of loss.
Her.
She is what I miss every day, what I cannot replace.
I walk toward the family cemetery behind the house. It has been restored in the past few years: New white fencing surrounds the square of lush grass. One of us waters it every day. Asters bloom along the fence. Every new bud brings a smile. Nothing is ever taken for granted.
I mean to take a seat on the bench my grandfather built, but for some reason I remain standing, staring down at her headstone. She should be here today, beside me. It would mean so much to her … and more to me. I hold tightly to her journal. The few words she wrote will have to last me a lifetime.
I hear the gate open behind me. I know it is my grandmother, following me. She can sense when the sadness rises in me; some days she gives me space with my grief, some days she takes my hand. I don’t know how, but she always knows which I need.
The gate creaks shut.
My grandmother moves in to stand beside me. I can smell the lavender she puts in her soap and the vanilla she has used in today’s baking. Her hair is white now; she calls the color her badge of courage. “This came for you in the mail today. From Jack.”
She hands me a large yellow envelope, with a return address in Hollywood. Jack is on to another fight these days, against fascism, now that there is war in Europe.
I open the package. Inside is a slim book with a marked page. I open the book to that page.
It is a grainy black-and-white photograph of my mother, standing in the back of a truck, with a megaphone to her mouth. The caption reads: Union organizer Elsa Martinelli leads strikers amid a spray of tear-gas bombs and bullets.
I touch the picture, as if I’m blind and my fingers can somehow reveal a deeper image. I close my eyes and remember her standing there, shouting, “No more, no more…”
“The day she found her voice,” I say.
My grandmother nods. It is a thing we have spoken about often in the past few years.
“You should have seen her,” I say. “I was so proud of her.” “As she would be of you today,” Grandma says.
I open my eyes and see the headstone in front of me.
Elsa Martinelli
1896–1936
Mother. Daughter.
Warrior.
“I wish I’d told her I was proud of her,” I say quietly. Regret reemerges at the oddest moments.
“Ah, cara, she knows.”
“But did I say it? Everything was so terrible, and I … looked past her. I kept thinking my life was out there, somewhere else, when it was right beside me. She was right beside me.”
“She knew,” Grandma says gently. “And now it is time to go.” “How can I leave her?”
“You won’t. As she will never leave you.”
In the distance, I hear Ant’s laughter. I turn and see him and our golden retriever running this way, bumping into each other. Grandpa is waiting by the windmill to drive me to the train station so that I can go to college in California, in a city near the sea.
California, Mom. I’m going back. Unbroken.
“A train does not wait,” my grandmother says. “Do not dawdle.”
I hear her walk away and know that she is giving me a last moment here alone, as if the words I have been unable to find for years will suddenly come to me. “I’m going to college, Mom.”
A breeze moves through the buffalo grass; in it, I swear I hear her voice and remember her long-forgotten words: You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. You taught me love. You, first in the whole world, and my love for you will outlive me.
It is a single perfect memory. A goodbye that gives me peace and courage. Her courage. If I have even a sliver of it, I will be lucky.
Be brave.
It was the last thing she said to me in this world, and I wish I’d told her that her courage would always guide me. In my dreams, I say, I love you, I tell her every day how she shaped me, how she taught me to stand up and find my woman’s voice, even in this man’s world.
This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It’s how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story
—which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people
—is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again.
Love is what remains.
“Goodbye,” I whisper, although I don’t really give the word away, I hold it close. I look at her headstone, see that word, the one that will forever define her for me: warrior.
Smiling, I turn and look back over the farm that will always be home, where she will await my return.
But for now, I am an explorer again, made bold by hardship and strengthened by loss, going west in search of something that exists only in
my imagination. A life different than one I’ve known before.
Hope is a coin I carry, given to me by a woman I will always love, and I hold it now as I journey west, part of a new generation of seekers.
The first Martinelli to go to college. A girl.
