The Four Winds(26)

She had felt both nervous and proud. She was a wife now, with a baby girl so beautiful even strangers remarked upon it.

Knocking on the door. The sound of footsteps, heels on hardwood. Mama answering the door, dressed for church, wearing pearls. Papa in a brown suit.

“Look,” Elsa had said, her smile unsteady, her eyes filling with unwanted tears. “My daughter, Loreda.”

Mama, craning her neck, peering down at Loreda’s small, perfect face.

“Look, Eugene, how dark her skin is. Take your disgrace away, Elsinore.”

The door, slamming shut.

Elsa had made a point of never seeing them or speaking to them again, but even so, their absence caused an ache that wouldn’t go away. Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better.

“Yes?” Rose said, looking up at her.

“They didn’t love me. I never knew why. But now Loreda has turned so angry, I wonder if she sees me the same way they did. I could never do anything right in their eyes, either.”

“Do you remember what I told you on the day Loreda was born?”

Elsa almost smiled. “That she would love me as no one else ever would and make me crazy and try my soul?”

“Sì. And you see how right I was?”

“About part of it, I guess. She certainly breaks my heart.”

“Yes. I was a trial to my poor mamma, too. The love, it comes in the beginning of her life and at the end of yours. God is cruel that way. Your heart, is it too broken to love?”

“Of course not.”

“So, you go on.” She shrugged, as if to say, Motherhood. “What choice is there for us?”

“It just . . . hurts.”

Rose was silent for a while; finally, she said, “Yes.”

In the distant field, Tony and Rafe were hard at work, planting winter wheat in ground that was as powdery as flour at the surface and hard beneath. For three years, they’d planted wheat and prayed for rain and gotten too little and grown no crop at all.

“This season it will be better,” Rose said.

“We still have milk and eggs to sell. And soap.” Small blessings mattered. Elsa and Rose combined their individual optimism into a communal hope, stronger and more durable in the combination.

Rose put an arm around Elsa’s waist, and Elsa leaned into the smaller woman. From the moment of Loreda’s birth, and in all the years since, Rose had become Elsa’s mother in every way that mattered. Even if they didn’t speak of their love, or share their feelings in long, heartfelt conversations, the bond was there. Sturdy. They’d sewn their lives together in the silent way of women unused to conversation. Day after day, they worked together, prayed together, held their growing family together through the hardships of farm life. When Elsa had lost her third child—a son who never drew breath—it was Rose who held Elsa and let her cry, and said, Some lives are not ours to hold on to; God makes His choices without us. Rose, who spoke for the first time about her own lost children, had showed Elsa that grief could be borne one day, one chore, at a time.

“I’ll go water the animals,” Elsa said.

Rose nodded. “I’ll dig up what I can.”

Elsa grabbed a metal bucket from the porch and wiped the grit from its inside. At the pump, she put on gloves to protect her hands from the blazing-hot metal and pumped a bucketful of water.

Carrying the sloshing pail carefully back to the house, not wanting to spill a precious drop, she was nearing the barn when she heard a sound, like a saw blade grinding over metal.

She slowed, listened, heard it again.

She set down the bucket and moved around the corner of the barn and saw Rafe standing by the new crack in the ground, his arms propped on the head of a rake, his hat pulled low on his downcast face.

Crying.

Elsa walked over to him, stood silently by. Words were something she could never pull up easily, not for him. She was always afraid of saying the wrong thing, of pushing him away when she wanted to draw him near. He was like Loreda, full of mercurial moods and given to bouts of passion. It frightened her, those moods she could neither tame nor understand. So she held her tongue.

“I don’t know how long I can stand all of this,” he said.

“It will rain soon. You’ll see.”

“How can you not break?” he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

Elsa didn’t know how to answer that. They were parents. They had to stay strong for the children. Or did he mean something else? “Because the kids need us not to.”

He sighed, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing.



THAT SEPTEMBER, HEAT ROARED across the Great Plains, day after day, week after week, burning away whatever had survived the summer.

Elsa stopped sleeping well, or at all, really. She was plagued by nightmares of emaciated children and dying crops. The livestock—two horses and two cows, all bones and hollows—were being kept alive by eating the prickly Russian thistles that grew wild. The small amount of hay they’d harvested was nearly gone. The animals stood still for hours at a time, as if afraid that every step could kill them. In the hottest part of the day, when the temperature rose above 115 degrees, their eyes became glassy and unfocused. When they could, the family carried pails of water to the corral, but it was always too little. Every drop of water that came up from the well had to be carefully conserved. The chickens rarely moved, they were so lethargic; they lay like feathered heaps in the dirt, not even bothering to squawk when they were disturbed. Eggs were still being laid, and each one was like a nugget of gold, although Elsa feared that each one would be their last.