The Four Winds(104)

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.



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.