The Four Winds(113)

A truck rattled up the dirt road, dust clouding up around it. The sides were painted with a white cotton boll and read WELTY FARMS.

The truck came to a rattling stop. Mr. Welty climbed out. He was a big man, powerful-looking, with a shock of white hair that looked like cotton tufts beneath his felt fedora. Behind him, in the bed of the truck, were coils of barbed wire.

Everyone stopped working, turned.

The owner, was heard being passed in whispers among the workers. It’s him.

He climbed up on to the platform that held the scales. He looked out over his fields and his workers, then glanced pointedly at the hundreds of people waiting for work. “Thanks to the feds, I had to plant less cotton this year. There is less cotton to pick and more people to pick it. So, I’m cutting what we pay by ten percent.”

“Ten percent?” Loreda shouted. “We can’t make a—”

Elsa clamped a hand over her daughter’s mouth.

Welty looked directly at Elsa and Loreda. “Anyone want to quit? Take the cut in pay or walk away. I’ve got ten men wanting to work for each person here. Doesn’t matter to me who picks my cotton.” He paused. “Or who lives in my camp.”

Silence.

“I thought not,” he said. “Back to work.”

A bell rang.

Elsa slowly lowered her hand from Loreda’s mouth. “You want to be one of them?” she said, cocking her head toward the line of people waiting for work.

“We are them!” Loreda cried. “This is wrong. You heard Jack and his friends—”

“Hush,” Elsa hissed. “That’s dangerous talk, and you know it.”

“I don’t care. This is wrong.”

“Loreda—”

Loreda yanked free. “I won’t be like you, Mom. I won’t just take it and pretend it’s okay as long as they don’t actually kill us. Why aren’t you furious?”

“Loreda—”

“Sure, Mom. Tell me to be a nice girl and be quiet and keep working while we go into debt every month at the company store.”

Loreda dragged her bag up to the scale and said loudly. “Yes, sir. Pay me less. I’m happy for the job.”

The man at the scales handed her a green chit for the cotton. Ninety cents for one hundred pounds, and the company store would charge her another ten percent.



“YOU’RE AWFUL QUIET,” MOM said as they walked back to their cabin.

“Consider it a blessing,” Loreda said. “You wouldn’t like what I have to say.”

“Really, Ma,” Ant said. “Don’t ask her.”

Loreda stopped, turned to her mother. “How is it you aren’t as mad as I am?”

“What good does it do to be mad?”

“At least it’s something.”

“No, Loreda. It’s nothing. You’ve seen the people pouring into the valley every day. Fewer crops, more workers. Even I understand basic economics.”

Loreda threw her empty cotton bag down and ran, dodging this way and that among the cabins and tents. She wanted to keep running until California was only a memory.

She was at the farthest reaches of the camp, in a thicket of trees, when she heard a man say: “Help? When did this durn state ever do anything to help us?”

“They cut wages again today, across the valley.”

“Now, Ike. Be careful. We got jobs. And a place here. That’s something.”

Loreda hid behind a tree to listen to the men gathered in the shadows.

“You remember the squatters’ camp. We’re living better now.”

Ike stepped forward. He was a tall, skinny pike of a man with a pale ring of gray hair beneath a pointed bald spot. “You call this living? This is my second cotton season and I can tell you already that I’ll work my ass off, as will my wife and children, and we will end up with about four cents left over after our debt is paid. Four cents. And you know I’m not being sarcastic. Everything we make goes to the store for our cabins and tents, our mattresses, our overpriced food.”

“You know they’re cheatin’ us with their bookkeepin’.”

“They charge ten cents per dollar for converting our chits into cash but we can’t cash ’em anywhere else. Every penny we make picking cotton goes to pay our debt at the company store. Ain’t no way to get ahead. They make sure we don’t ever have money.”

“I got seven mouths to feed, Ike,” said a tall man in patched overalls and a straw hat. “Most of us have family depending on us.”

“We can’t do anything. I don’t care what this Valen says. It’s dangerous to listen to him.”

Jack.

She should have known he’d somehow be a part of this. He was a doer.

Loreda stepped out from behind the tree. “Ike’s right. Valen’s right. We have to stand up for ourselves. These rich farmers have no right to treat us this way. What would they do if we stopped picking?”

The men looked nervously at each other. “Don’t talk about a strike . . .”

“You’re just a girl,” one man said.

“A girl who picked two hundred pounds of cotton today,” Loreda said. She held out her hands, which were red and torn. “I say no more. Mr. Valen’s right. We need to rise up and—”