The Four Winds(130)

Elsa turned, saw a hay truck full of workers pull up behind the strikers. The driver honked the horn to be let through.

“Strikebreakers. They’re here to take your jobs,” Jack said. “Don’t let them in.”

The crowd spread out, blocked the truck’s path to the gates with their bodies.

“No work! Fair pay!” Jack shouted.

Welty walked around to the side of Jack’s truck and faced the strikers. “I’m paying seventy-five cents today,” he said. “Who wants to feed their family and move into one of my cabins? Who wants credit at the company store come winter and a mattress to sleep on?”

“Hell, no!” Jack yelled.

A roar of agreement rose up from the crowd.

A truck appeared on the road behind Welty, drove toward the strikers. A man exited the truck, carrying a rifle casually over one shoulder. He walked to the field and opened the gate.

“They aren’t gonna shoot. We ain’t done nothin’ wrong,” Ike called out. “Stay strong!”

The man with the rifle went to the top of the guard tower and aimed his gun at the strikers.

“He can’t shoot us for nothin’,” Ike yelled. “This is still America.”

More trucks full of migrant workers willing to pick for seventy-five cents pulled up behind the strikers, honked to be let through.

“Don’t let ’em through,” Jack yelled.

Sirens.

Police cruisers and cars and trucks barreled down the distant road, creating a cloud of dust. One by one they turned onto this road, and parked in a straight line that created a blockade in front of Jack’s truck.

The doors opened. Masked men stepped out of the vehicles, holding clubs and bats and guns.

Vigilantes. Ten of them.

Policemen stepped out of their cruisers, guns drawn.

The vigilantes walked slowly forward.

The crowd of strikers backed away; the chanting quieted.

“Men wear masks because they’re ashamed of what they’re doing,” Jack said through the megaphone. “They know this is wrong.”

Elsa stared at the masked men coming toward her and the children. She held her children close, began to back away.

“Mom, no!” Loreda cried.

“Hush,” Elsa said, pulling Loreda closer.

“Stand your ground,” Jack said. He looked directly at Elsa, said, “Don’t be afraid.”

Three vigilantes jumped up into the back of Jack’s truck. One cracked Jack in the back with his bat. Jack dropped the megaphone and staggered forward. The vigilantes grabbed Jack by the hair and dragged him out of the truck; one of them cracked Jack in the head with the butt of his rifle. Jack dropped to his knees.

“Get to work,” Welty yelled. “This strike is over.”

The vigilantes circled Jack, began beating and kicking him.

The workers backed away; some edged toward the cotton field. The strikebreaker trucks honked to be let through.

“Elsa!” Jack yelled, and was kicked hard for it.

She knew what he wanted. They’ll listen to you.

Elsa climbed up into the back of the truck and took up Jack’s megaphone and faced the strikers. Her hands were shaking. “Stop!” she cried out.

The workers stopped backing away, looked up at her.

She was breathing hard. Now what?

Think.

She knew these people, knew them. They were her people. Her kind, the Californians said derisively, but it was a compliment.

They were like her. Today, they were part of a new group: people who stood up, used their voices to say No more. They’d woken in the middle of the night, hungry, to stand up for their rights, and now it was Elsa’s time to show her children what her grandfather had taught her long ago. She wrapped her fingers around the soft velvet pouch at her throat. Saint Jude, patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes, help me.

“What?” someone yelled.

“Hope,” Elsa said. The megaphone turned her whispered word into a roar that quieted the crowd. “Hope is a coin I carry. An American penny, given to me by a man I came to love. There were times . . . in my journey, when it felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going. I came west . . . in search of a better life . . . but my American dream has been turned inside out by hardship and poverty.” She looked at Welty. “And greed. These years have been a time of things lost: Jobs. Homes. Food. The land we loved turned on us, broke us all, even the stubborn old men who used to talk about the weather and congratulate each other on the season’s bumper wheat crop. ‘A man’s got to fight out here to make a living,’ they’d say to each other.”

Elsa looked out at the crowd, saw all the women and children who were here, looking up at her. She saw her life in their eyes, her pain in the slant of their shoulders.

“A man. It was always about the men. They seem to think it meant nothing to cook and clean and bear children and tend gardens. But we women of the Great Plains worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I swear I can still taste the dust.”

Elsa paused, surprised by how loud and forceful her voice had become. She stared out at the workers, saw for the first time that their ragged clothes and hungry faces were badges of courage, of survival. They were good people who didn’t give up. “We came to find a better life, to feed our children. We aren’t lazy or shiftless. We don’t want to live the way we do. It’s time,” she said. “Time to say, No more. No more company store cheating us and keeping us poor. No more lowering wages. No more using us up and spitting us out and pitting us against each other. We deserve better. No more.”