The Four Winds(115)

Loreda wanted to be angry. What had Jack said to her the first day they met? You have fire in you, kid. Don’t let the bastards snuff it out. Something like that.

Loreda didn’t want to be the kind of woman who suffered in silence.

Refused to be.

Tonight was her chance to prove it.

At eleven o’clock, she lay in bed wide awake. Waiting. Counting every minute that passed.

Ant lay beside her, hogging the covers. Usually she wrenched them back and maybe even gave him a kick for good measure. Tonight she didn’t bother.

She eased out of bed and stepped onto the warm concrete floor. For as long as she lived, she would be grateful for flooring. Always.

A quick sideways glance confirmed that her mother was asleep.

Loreda grabbed a blouse and her overalls from the coatrack and dressed quickly, buttoning the bib after she’d stepped into her shoes.

Outside, the world was still. The air smelled of ripe fruit and fecund earth. A hint of woodsmoke from extinguished fires. Nothing ever really left here; things lingered. Scents. Sounds. People.

She closed the door quietly behind her, listening for footsteps. Her heart was pounding; she felt afraid . . . and keenly alive.

She waited, counted to ten, but she didn’t see any foremen out and about.

Moving quietly, she headed into the night.

In town, she walked past the theater and City Hall, and turned onto a back street, where the grass was overgrown and most of the houses and businesses were boarded up. Dodging the streetlights, she stuck to the shadows until she came to the hotel they’d stayed in during the flood.

It was so quiet out here, she hoped they hadn’t canceled the meeting. All day, as she’d sweated and strained in the field, dragging her heavy sack behind her, pocketing the coupon that devalued her labor, she thought about tonight’s meeting.

There were no lights on in the El Centro Hotel, but a few cars were parked out front, and she saw that the heavy chain that locked the doors together hung slack from one of the doorknobs.

Loreda cautiously opened the front door.

A man with a beak of a nose and small round spectacles stood behind the reception desk, staring at her.

“You need a room?” he said in a heavily accented voice.

Loreda paused. Could she be arrested for just showing up? Or was this man an employee of the big farmers, here to identify rabble-rousers? Or was he a friend of Jack’s, here to make sure only the right people made it to the meeting?

“I’m here for the meeting,” she said.

“Downstairs.”

Loreda moved toward the stairs. Nervous, suddenly. Excited. Scared.

She touched the smooth wooden banister as she made her way down the narrow stairs, past a broom closet and laundry room.

She heard voices, followed the sound to a room in the back, its door open to reveal a crowd inside.

People stood shoulder to shoulder. Men, women, and a few kids. Bobby Rand waved at her.

Jack stood in the front of the room, commanded attention. Although he was dressed like many of the migrants around him, in faded, stained overalls and a frayed denim shirt beneath a dusty brown suit coat, there was vibrancy to him, an aliveness that was like no one she’d ever met before. Jack believed in things and fought to make the world a better place. He was the kind of man a girl could count on.

“. . . one hundred and fifty strikers were herded into cages,” he was saying in a passionate voice. “Cages. In America. The big farmers and their corrupt coppers and citizens-turned-vigilantes put your fellow Americans in cages to break a strike of workers who just wanted an even shake. Two years ago, a bunch of Tulare farmers shot into a crowd of people just for listening to strike organizers. Two people were killed.”

“Why are you tellin’ us this?” someone yelled. Loreda recognized him from the squatters’ camp they’d lived in. A man with six kids and a wife who had died of typhoid. “You trying to scare us off?”

“I’m not going to lie to you good people. Striking against the big farmers is dangerous. They’ll oppose us with everything they’ve got. And, folks, as you know, they’ve got it all: money, power, the state government.” He picked up a newspaper, held it out for everyone to see. The headline read: “Workers Alliance Un-American.” “I’ll tell you what’s un-American, and that’s big farmers getting richer while you get poorer,” Jack said.

“Yeah!” Jeb said.

“What’s un-American is cutting pickers’ wages just because the growers are greedy.”

“Yeah!” the crowd yelled back.

“They don’t want you to organize, but if you don’t, you’ll starve, just like the pea pickers did in Nipomo last winter. I was there. Children died in the fields. Starved. In America. The big growers are planting less because cotton prices are down, so they pay less. God forbid their profit diminishes. They aren’t even pretending to give you a living wage.”

Ike yelled out: “They think we ain’t human!”

Jack looked out at the crowd, made eye contact one by one with his audience. Loreda felt an electricity of hope move from him to the crowd. “They need you. That’s your power. Cotton has to be picked while it’s dry and before the first frost. What if no one picks it?”

“A strike!” someone called out. “That’ll show ’em.”