The Four Winds(24)

Her mother’s idea of a woman’s place was too sad for Loreda to bear.

Mom helped Ant up into the wagon’s front seat, then came to stand in front of Loreda. “You okay?” Mom asked, tucking the hair behind Loreda’s ear, her touch lingering there.

“Yeah. Great,” Loreda said, hearing the sharpness in her voice. She knew it was wrong to be angry with her mother now—the weather wasn’t her fault—but Loreda couldn’t help herself. She was mad at the world, and somehow that meant she was mad at her mom most of all.

“Ant looks like he’s been crying.”

“He was scared.”

“I’m glad his big sister was with him.”

How could Mom smile at a time like this? It was irritating.

“You know your teeth are brown with dirt?” Loreda said.

Her mother flinched and instantly stopped smiling.

Loreda had hurt Mom’s feelings. Again.

Loreda suddenly felt like crying. Before her mom could see the emotion, Loreda headed for the back of the wagon.

“You can sit up here with us,” Mom said.

“Seeing where we’re going ain’t any better than seeing where we’ve been. The view never changes.”

“Isn’t,” Mom corrected automatically.

“Oh, right,” Loreda said. “Education is everything.”

As they headed home, Loreda stared out at the flat, flat land.

All the trees that lined their driveway were dying. The hot, dry years had turned them a sick gray-brown; their leaves had turned into crunchy, blackened confetti and been swept away by the wind. Only three of them were even still standing. The dusty soil lay in heaps and dunes at the base of every fence post. Nothing grew or thrived in the fields. There was not a blade of green grass anywhere. Russian thistles—tumbleweed—and yucca were the only living plants to be seen. The rotting body of something—a jackrabbit, maybe—lay in a heap of sand; crows picked at it.

Mom pulled the wagon to a stop in the yard. Milo pawed at the hard earth beneath his hooves. “Loreda, you put Milo away. I’ll get the preserved lemons and make lemonade,” Mom said.

“Fine,” Loreda said glumly. She climbed out of the wagon and took hold of the reins and led the horse and wagon toward the barn.

Poor Milo moved so slowly Loreda couldn’t help feeling sorry for this bay gelding that had once been her best friend in the whole world. “It’s okay, boy. We all feel like that.”

She petted his velvet-soft muzzle, remembering the day her daddy had taught her to ride. It had been a bluebird day, with wheat a sea of gold all around. She’d been scared. So scared, to climb all the way up onto that grown-up-sized saddle.

Daddy helped her up, whispered, “Don’t worry,” and moved back beside Mom, who looked as nervous as Loreda felt.

Loreda hadn’t fallen off once. Daddy told her she was a natural and told the family at supper that Loreda was the best little horsewoman he’d ever seen.

Loreda had soaked up his praise, grown to fit it. And after that, for years, she and Milo had been inseparable. She did her homework in his stall whenever she could, both of them munching on carrots she pulled from the garden.

“I miss you, boy,” Loreda said, stroking the side of his head.

The gelding snorted, blew wet, sandy mucus on Loreda’s bare arm. “Ick.”

Loreda opened the double doors of the barn that was her grandfather’s pride and joy. The large barn had a wide center aisle where the tractor and truck were parked, and two stalls on either side, both of which opened onto corrals. Two for the horses and two for the cows. A loft that had once been stacked with fragrant green bales of hay was emptying fast. Everyone knew it was her daddy’s favorite hiding spot, that loft; he loved to sit up there and smoke cigarettes and drink hooch and dream big dreams. He stayed up there more and more these days.

As Loreda unharnessed the gelding, she smelled the rubber on the tires and the metallic taint of the engine along with the comforting aromas of sweet hay and manure. In the side-by-side stalls at the end, their other gelding, Bruno, snorted softly in greeting, banged his nose into the stall door.

“I’ll get you boys some water,” Loreda said, easing the slimy bit out of Milo’s mouth. She turned him into his stall, the back of which opened out to the corral.

As she closed the stall door, clicked it shut, she heard something.

What?

She left the barn, stepped outside, and looked around.

There it was again. A deep rumbling. Not thunder. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

The ground trembled beneath her feet, made a loud, crunching, splintering sound.

A crack opened up in the earth, a giant snaking zigzag.

Boom.

Dust geysered into the air, dirt crashed into the new crevasse, the sides crumbled away. A part of the barbed-wire fence fell into the opening. New cracks crawled off from the main one, like branches on a tree limb.

A fifty-foot zigzagging crevasse opened in the yard. Dead roots stuck out from the crumbling dirt sides like skeletal hands.

Loreda stared at it in horror. She had heard stories of this, the land breaking open from dryness, but she’d thought it was a myth . . .

Now, it wasn’t just the animals and the people who were drying up. The land itself was dying.



LOREDA AND HER DADDY were in their favorite place, sitting side by side on the platform beneath the giant blades of the windmill. As the sky turned red in the last few moments before darkfall, she could see to the very end of the world she knew and imagine what lay beyond.