The Four Winds(25)

“I want to see the ocean,” Loreda said. It was a game they played, imagining other lives they would someday live. She couldn’t remember now when they’d begun; she just knew that it felt more important these days because of the new sadness in her father. At least it felt new. She sometimes wondered if his sadness had always been there and she’d just finally grown up enough to see it.

“You will, Lolo.”

Usually he said, We will.

He slumped forward, rested his forearms on his thighs. Thick black hair fell in unruly waves over his broad forehead; it was cut close to the sides of his head but Mom didn’t have time to tend it closely and the edges were ragged.

“You want to see the Brooklyn Bridge, remember?” Loreda said. It scared her to think of her father’s unhappiness. She hardly got to spend any time with him lately and she loved him more than anything in the world, he who made her feel like a special girl with a big future. He’d taught her to dream. He was the opposite of her dour, workhorse mom, who just plodded forward, doing chores, never having any fun. They even looked alike, she and her daddy. Everyone said so. The same thick black hair and fine-boned faces, the same full lips. The only thing Loreda had inherited from her mother was her blue eyes, but even with her mother’s eyes, Loreda saw things the way her daddy did.

“Sure, Lolo. How could I forget? You and I will see the world someday. We will stand at the top of the Empire State Building or attend a movie premiere on Hollywood Boulevard. Hell, we might even—”

“Rafe!”

Mom stood at the base of the windmill, looking up. In her brown kerchief and flour-sack dress and sagging stockings, she looked practically as old as Grandma. As always, she stood ramrod stiff. She had perfected an unyielding, unforgiving stance: shoulders back, spine straight, chin up. Wisps of corn-silk-fine pale blond hair crept out from beneath her kerchief.

“Hey, Elsa. You found us.” Daddy flashed Loreda a conspiratorial smile.

“Your father wants help watering while it’s cool,” Mom said. “And I know a girl who has chores to finish.”

Daddy bumped his shoulder against Loreda’s and then climbed down the windmill. The boards creaked and swayed at his steps. He jumped down the last few feet, faced Mom.

Loreda crawled down behind him, but she wasn’t fast enough. When she got down, her father was already headed toward the barn.

“How come you can’t let anyone have any fun?” she said to her mother.

“I want you and your father to have fun, Loreda, but I’ve had a long day and I need your help putting the laundry away.”

“You’re so mean,” Loreda said.

“I am not mean, Loreda,” Mom said.

Loreda heard the hurt in her mother’s voice but didn’t care. That anger of hers, always so close to the surface, surged up, uncontrollable. “Don’t you care that Daddy is unhappy?”

“Life is tough, Loreda. You need to be tougher or it will turn you inside out, as it has your father.”

“Life isn’t what makes my daddy sad.”

“Oh, really? Tell me, then, with all your worldly experience, what is it that makes your father unhappy?”

“You,” Loreda said.





EIGHT





One hundred and four degrees in the shade, and the well was drying up. The water in the tank had to be carefully conserved, carried by the bucketful to the house. At night, they gave the animals what water they could.

The vegetables that Elsa and Rose had tended with such loving care were dead. Between yesterday’s wind and dust and the relentless sun, every plant had either been torn out by the roots or lay wilted and dead.

She heard Rose come up beside her.

“There’s no point watering,” Elsa said.

“No.”

She heard the heartbreak in her mother-in-law’s voice and wished she could say something to help.

“You’ve been awfully quiet today,” Rose said.

“Unlike my usual chatty self,” Elsa said to deflect a conversation she didn’t want to have.

Rose bumped her shoulder against Elsa’s arm. “Tell me what is wrong. Besides the obvious, of course.”

“Loreda is angry at me. All of the time. I swear, before I even speak, she gets mad at whatever it is I’m about to say.”

“She is at that age.”

“It’s more than that, I think.”

Rose stared out at the devastated fields. “My son,” she said. “Stupido. He is filling her head with dreams.”

“He’s unhappy.”

“Pssht,” Rose said impatiently. “Who isn’t? Look at what is happening.”

“My parents, my family,” Elsa said quietly. This was something she rarely talked about, a pain too deep for words, especially when words wouldn’t change anything; Loreda’s opinion of Elsa lately had brought all that heartache of youth back. Elsa remembered the day she’d taken Loreda, swaddled in pink, to her parents’ house, hoping her marriage would allow them to accept her again. Elsa had worked for weeks on a lovely pink dress for the baby, trimmed it in lace. She knit a matching cap. Finally, she borrowed the truck and drove to Dalhart alone, pulling up at the back gate. She remembered every moment in detail: Walking up the path; the smell of roses. Everything in bloom. A clear blue sky. Bees buzzing around the roses.