The Four Winds(19)

There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.



ON THIS FIRST DAY of school, the town’s only remaining teacher, Nicole Buslik, stood at the chalkboard, chalk in hand. Her auburn hair had worked free from its constraints and become a fuzzy nimbus around her heat-flushed face. Sweat turned the lace at her throat a shade darker and Loreda was pretty sure Mrs. Buslik was afraid to lift her arms and show sweat stains.

Twelve-year-old Loreda sat at her desk, slumped forward, not paying attention to today’s lesson. It was just more blather about what had gone wrong. The Great Depression, the drought, blah, blah, blah.

It had been “hard times” for as long as Loreda could remember. Oh, in the early years, the time before memory, she knew rains had fallen, season after season, nourishing the land. Pretty much all Loreda remembered of the green years was the sight of her grandfather’s wheat, golden stalks dancing beneath an enormous blue sky. The sound of rustling. The image of tractors rolling over the ground twenty-four hours a day, plowing the earth, churning up more and more fields. A horde of mechanical insects chewing up the ground.

When had the bad years begun, exactly? It was hard to pinpoint. There were so many choices. The stock market crash of 1929, some would say, but not the folks around here. Loreda had been seven years old then, and she remembered some of that time. Folks lined up outside the savings and loan. Grandpa complaining about bad wheat prices. Grandma lighting candles and keeping them lit, whispering prayers with her rosary.

That had been bad, the crash, but most of the hardship landed in cities Loreda had never been to. Nineteen twenty-nine had been a good rain year, which meant a good crop year, which meant times had been good enough for the Martinellis.

Grandpa kept riding his tractor, kept planting wheat, even as the prices plummeted because of the Depression. He’d even bought a brand-new Ford Model AA stake-bed farm truck. Daddy had smiled often then and told her stories of faraway lands while Mom did chores.

The last good crop had been 1930, the year Loreda turned eight. She remembered her birthday. A beautiful spring day. Presents. Grandma’s tiramisu with candles poking up from the cocoa-powder topping. Her best friend, Stella, had been allowed to spend the night for the first time. Daddy had taught them how to dance the Charleston while Grandpa accompanied them on the fiddle.

And then the rains slowed and never started up again. Drought.

These days, green fields were a distant memory, a mirage of her youth. The adults looked as parched as the ground. Grandpa spent hours standing in his dead wheat fields, scooping the dry earth into his callused hands, watching it fall away through his fingers. He grieved for his dying grapes and told anyone who would listen that he’d brought the first vines from Italy, stuffed in his pockets. Grandma had built altars everywhere, doubled the number of crucifixes on the walls, and made them all pray for rain each Sunday. Sometimes the whole town came together in the schoolhouse to pray for rain. All different religions begging God for moisture: the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Irish and the Italian Catholics, each in their own rows. The Mexicans had their own church built hundreds of years ago.

Everyone talked about the drought constantly and missed the good old days. Except her mother.

Loreda sighed heavily.

Had there ever been any fun in her mother? If so, it was another of Loreda’s lost memories. Sometimes, when she lay in bed, drifting toward sleep, she thought she remembered the sound of her mother’s laughter, the feel of her touch, even a whispered, Be brave, just before a good-night kiss.

More and more, though, those memories felt manufactured, false. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother laughed about anything.

All Mom did was work.

Work, work, work. As if that would save them.

Loreda couldn’t remember when exactly she’d begun to be angered by her mother’s . . . disappearance. There was no other word for it. Her mother rose well before the sun and worked. Day after day. Hour after hour. She harped constantly about saving food and not dirtying clothes and not wasting water.

Loreda couldn’t imagine how her handsome, charming, funny father had ever fallen in love with Mom. Loreda had once told her father that Mom seemed afraid of laughter. He had said, “Now, Lolo,” in that way of his, with his head cocked and a smile that meant he wouldn’t talk of it. He never complained about his wife, but Loreda knew how he felt, so she complained for him. It brought them closer, proved how alike they were, she and Daddy.

As alike as peas in a pod. Everyone said so.

Like Daddy, Loreda saw how limited life was on a wheat farm in the Texas Panhandle, and she had no intention of becoming like her mother. She was not going to sit on this dying wheat farm for her whole life, withering and wrinkling beneath a sun so hot it melted rubber. She was not going to waste her every prayer on rain. Not a chance.

She was going to travel the world and write about her adventures. Someday she would be as famous as Nellie Bly.

Someday.

She watched a brown field mouse creep along the baseboard under the window. It stopped at the teacher’s desk, sipped at a blot of fallen ink. When it looked up, blue painted its tiny nose.

Loreda elbowed Stella Devereaux, who sat at the desk next to Loreda.

Stella looked up, bleary-eyed from the heat.

Loreda indicated the mouse.