The Four Winds(30)
“I’m here,” he said.
Mom’s smile was as thin as everything else about her. “Come inside. Both of you. It’s late.”
“Sure, Els,” Daddy said.
Loreda hated how beaten her father sounded, how his fire went out around her mother. She sucked the life out of everyone with her sad, long-suffering looks. “This is all your fault.”
Mom said, “What am I to blame for now, Loreda? The weather? The Depression?”
Daddy touched Loreda, shook his head. Don’t.
Mom waited a moment for Loreda to speak, then turned away and headed for the house.
Daddy followed.
“We could leave,” Loreda said to her father, who kept walking as if he hadn’t heard. “Anything is possible.”
THE NEXT MORNING, ELSA woke well before dawn and found Rafe’s side of the bed empty. He’d slept in the barn again. Lately he preferred it to being with her. With a sigh, she got dressed and left her room.
In the dark kitchen, Rose stood at the dry sink, her hands deep in water that she’d hauled from the well and poured into the sink. A large cracked mixing bowl lay drying on towels on the counter beside her. Towels Elsa had embroidered by hand, at night, by candlelight, in Rafe’s favorite colors. She had thought that making a perfect home was the answer to making a marriage happy. Clean sheets scented with lavender, embroidered pillowcases, hand-knit scarves. She’d filled hours with such tasks, poured her heart and soul into them, using thread to say the words she could not utter.
A pot of coffee sat on the woodstove, pumping a comforting aroma into the room. A tray of rectangular chickpea panelle was on the table and a tablespoon of olive oil popped in a cast-iron pan on the stove. Beside it, oatmeal bubbled in a pot.
“Morning,” Elsa said. She removed a spatula from the drawer and lowered two of the panelle into the hot oil. These would be the midday meal, eaten like a sandwich, squeezed with precious drops of preserved lemon.
“You look tired,” Rose said, not unkindly.
“Rafe isn’t sleeping well.”
“If he’d stop drinking in the barn at night it might help.”
Elsa poured herself a cup of coffee and leaned against the cabbage-rose-papered wall. She noticed the corner of the flooring where the linoleum was coming up. Then she went to turn the panelle over, seeing a nice brown crust on them.
Rose moved in beside her, took over the cooking.
Elsa began to take apart the butter churn. The parts needed to be washed and scalded and put back together in a precise, numbered order and then stacked for the next use. It was the perfect chore to keep one’s mind occupied.
A centipede crawled out of its hiding place and plopped onto the counter. Elsa took out a pair of knives and chopped it into pieces. Sharing the house with centipedes and spiders and other insects had become commonplace. Every living thing on the Great Plains sought safety from the dust storms.
The two women worked in companionable silence until the sun came up and the children stumbled out of their bedrooms.
“I’ll feed them,” Rose said. “Why don’t you take Rafe some coffee?”
Elsa was grateful for her mother-in-law’s insight. Smiling, Elsa said, “Thank you,” poured her husband a cup of coffee, and went outside.
The sun was a bright yellow glow in a cloudless cornflower-blue sky. Instead of noticing the latest destruction to the land—broken fence posts, damage to the windmill, dirt piles growing in size—she focused instead on the good news. If she hurried, she would be able to do laundry today, bleach everything into whiteness. There was something about fresh sheets hanging on the line that lifted her spirits. Perhaps it was simply a vision of having accomplished a thing that improved her family’s life, even if no one noticed.
Tony was up on the windmill repairing a blade. The bang-bang-bang of his hammer echoed across the endless brown plain.
Rafe was in the last place in the world she expected him to be: the family cemetery. A small brown plot of land delineated by a sagging picket fence. Once, it had included a beautiful garden, with pink morning glories crawling up and over the white picket fence and a carpet of blue-green buffalo grass on the ground. Elsa used to spend an hour here every Sunday, rain, heat, or snow, but she hadn’t been out here as often lately. As always, the headstones reminded her of her lost son, of the dreams she’d spun for him while he was in her womb and the pain that had softened over time but never gone away.
She unclicked the gate, which hung askew on a broken hinge. Dozens of white pickets lay on the ground; some had broken, others had been yanked out of the ground by the savage wind.
Four gray headstones stood from the dirt. Three of Rose and Tony’s children—all daughters—and Lorenzo . . .
Rafe was kneeling in front of their son’s headstone. Lorenzo Walter Martinelli, b. 1931, d. 1931.
Elsa knelt beside him, laid a hand on his shoulder.
He turned to her. She had never seen such pain in his eyes, not even when they’d buried their newborn son. Rafe had been only twenty-eight when he’d held his tiny, unbreathing child in his arms and cried for their loss. He had, to the best of her knowledge, never come out here, never knelt at this grave.
“I miss him, too,” Elsa said, stumbling a little over the words.
“Old Man Orloff butchered his last steer this week. The poor thing was full of dirt.”