The Four Winds(107)

“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.





TWENTY-NINE





In May, the valley dried out beneath sunny days and everything grew and blossomed. In June, the cotton plants flowered and needed to be trimmed. True to Welty’s word, those who lived at Welty Farms growers’ camp were the first to get these precious jobs; Elsa spent hours working beneath the hot sun. Most of the valley’s ditch-bank residents, including Jeb and the boys, had hitchhiked north for work. Jean stayed back with the girls and the stuck-in-the-ground truck that was all they had left.

Today, just before dawn, a big truck pulled into the Welty camp, chugging smoke. The people standing in line barely waited for it to stop before they climbed aboard. Men and women got into the back and crammed in tightly, hats drawn low, gloves on (gloves they’d had to purchase at the company store for an exorbitant price).

Loreda looked up at Mom, who was pressed close to the wooden slats directly behind the cab. She had been the second person in line when the truck pulled up this morning.

“Make sure Ant does his homework,” Mom said.

“Are you sure I can’t—”

“I’m sure, Loreda. You can pick cotton when it’s ready; that’s it. Now go to school and learn something so you don’t end up like me. I’m forty and most days I feel a hundred. Besides, there’s only a week of school left anyway.”

A man closed the gate at the back of the truck. Within moments the truck was chugging out to the road, heading to the cotton fields. It wasn’t hot yet, but it soon would be.

Loreda went back into the cabin. Already the small interior had begun to grow warm. Though she knew it was a harbinger of summer heat to come, Loreda still appreciated the warmth after the cold of winter. She opened the air vents and went to the hot plate and started the oatmeal she and Ant would have for breakfast.

As light came into the cabin, Ant stumbled out of bed and walked to the door. “I gotta pee.”

He came back fifteen minutes later, scratching his privates. “Did Mom get work?”

“She did.”

He sat on a wooden crate at the table they’d scavenged. After they finished eating, Loreda walked Ant to school. “I’ll meet you at the cabin after school,” she said. “Don’t dawdle. Today’s laundry.”

“It’ll be hot.” Ant grimaced and went into his classroom.

Loreda headed to her own classroom. As she reached the tent flap, she heard Mrs. Sharpe say, “Today the girls are going to learn to mix cosmetics, and the boys will do a science project.”

Loreda groaned. Making cosmetics.

“We all know how important beauty is in finding a man,” Mrs. Sharpe said.

“No,” Loreda said aloud. “Just . . . no.”

She put her foot down on making cosmetics. Last week the girls had spent hours learning to sift dry ingredients and knead bread, while the boys had been taught how to “fly” in a replicated plywood airplane cockpit with painted-on instruments.