The Four Winds(135)

“Ah, cara, she knows.”

“But did I say it? Everything was so terrible, and I . . . looked past her. I kept thinking my life was out there, somewhere else, when it was right beside me. She was right beside me.”

“She knew,” Grandma says gently. “And now it is time to go.”

“How can I leave her?”

“You won’t. As she will never leave you.”

In the distance, I hear Ant’s laughter. I turn and see him and our golden retriever running this way, bumping into each other. Grandpa is waiting by the windmill to drive me to the train station so that I can go to college in California, in a city near the sea.

California, Mom. I’m going back.

Unbroken.

“A train does not wait,” my grandmother says. “Do not dawdle.”

I hear her walk away and know that she is giving me a last moment here alone, as if the words I have been unable to find for years will suddenly come to me. “I’m going to college, Mom.”

A breeze moves through the buffalo grass; in it, I swear I hear her voice and remember her long-forgotten words: You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. You taught me love. You, first in the whole world, and my love for you will outlive me.

It is a single perfect memory. A goodbye that gives me peace and courage. Her courage. If I have even a sliver of it, I will be lucky.

Be brave.

It was the last thing she said to me in this world, and I wish I’d told her that her courage would always guide me. In my dreams, I say, I love you, I tell her every day how she shaped me, how she taught me to stand up and find my woman’s voice, even in this man’s world.

This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It’s how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story—which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people—is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again.

Love is what remains.

“Goodbye,” I whisper, although I don’t really give the word away, I hold it close. I look at her headstone, see that word, the one that will forever define her for me: warrior.

Smiling, I turn and look back over the farm that will always be home, where she will await my return.

But for now, I am an explorer again, made bold by hardship and strengthened by loss, going west in search of something that exists only in my imagination. A life different than one I’ve known before.

Hope is a coin I carry, given to me by a woman I will always love, and I hold it now as I journey west, part of a new generation of seekers.

The first Martinelli to go to college.

A girl.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


On September 6, 1936, in his fireside chat to the nation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said,

I shall never forget the fields of wheat so blasted by heat that they cannot be harvested. I shall never forget field after field of corn stunted, earless and stripped of leaves, for what the sun left the grasshoppers took. I saw brown pastures which would not keep a cow on fifty acres.

Yet I would not have you think for a single minute that there is permanent disaster in these drought regions, or that the picture I saw meant depopulating these areas. No cracked earth, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers are a permanent match for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and children who have carried on through desperate days, and inspire us with their self-reliance, their tenacity, and their courage. It was their fathers’ task to make homes; it is their task to keep those homes; it is our task to help them with their fight.



Their tenacity and courage. Their self-reliance. Words that describe the Greatest Generation. Words that stay with me and have deep meaning.

Especially now.

As I write this note, it is May 2020, and the world is battling the coronavirus pandemic. My husband’s best friend, Tom, who was one of the earliest of our friends to encourage my writing and who was our son’s godfather, caught the virus last week and has just passed away. We cannot be with his widow, Lori, and his family to mourn.

Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future.

As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced by others.

We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit. In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another—what we have in common—that will save us. Now, in these dark days, we can look to history, to the legacy of the Greatest Generation and the story of our own past, and take strength from it.

Although my novel focuses on fictional characters, Elsa Martinelli is representative of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who went west in the 1930s in search of a better life. Many of them, like the pioneers who went west one hundred years before them, brought nothing more than a will to survive and a hope for a better future. Their strength and courage were remarkable.