The Four Winds(34)

His drawer.

One blue chambray shirt was all that was left.





TEN





She couldn’t believe he’d left in the middle of the night without a word.

She’d spent thirteen years living with him, sharing his bed at night, bearing his children. She’d known he’d never been in love with her, but this?

She walked out of her room, saw the family—her family, their family—seated at the table, talking. Ant was retelling his grape-finding story.

Rose looked up, saw Elsa, and frowned. “Elsa?”

Elsa wanted to tell Rose this terrible thing and be held, but she couldn’t say anything until she was sure. Maybe he had walked to town for . . . something.

With all of his belongings.

“I have . . . errands,” Elsa said, seeing Rose’s disbelief.

Elsa hurried out of the house and grabbed Loreda’s bicycle. Climbing aboard, she pedaled through the thick dirt that layered the driveway, her legs working hard. More than once she had to zigzag around the dead branches of the fallen trees, which had been exposed in the last dust storm. She stopped at the mailbox, looked in. Nothing.

On the way to town, she didn’t see a single automobile or wagon out on the road in this heat. Birds congregated on the telephone wires overhead, chattered down at her. Several cows and horses roamed free, plaintively moaning for food and water. Unable to butcher or care for their animals, farmers had let them go to fend for themselves.

By the time she reached Lonesome Tree, her hair had worked itself free from the pins she’d used to hold it back from her face, and her kerchief was damp.

On Main Street, she stopped. A tumbleweed rolled past her, scraped her bare calf. Lonesome Tree lay anesthetized before her, shops boarded up, nothing green, the town’s namesake cottonwood half dead; up and down the street boards had been ripped away by the wind.

She pedaled toward the train depot and got off the bike.

Maybe he was still here.

Inside was a room full of empty benches. A dirty floor. A whites-only water fountain.

She walked to the ticket window. Behind a small, arched opening sat a man in a dusty white shirt with black elbow guards.

“Hello, Mr. McElvaine.”

“Heya, Miz Martinelli,” the man said.

“Was my husband here recently? Did he buy a ticket?”

He looked down at the papers on his desk.

“Please, sir. Do not make me interrogate you. This is humiliating enough for me, wouldn’t you agree?”

“He didn’t have any money.”

“Did he say where he wanted to go?”

“You don’t want me to say.”

“I do.”

He sighed and looked up at her. “He said, ‘Anywhere but here.’”

“He said that?”

“If it helps, he pret’ near looked ready to cry.”

The man pulled out a crumpled, stained envelope and pushed it through the iron bars of the ticket window. “He said to give you this.”

“He knew I’d come?”

“Wives always do.”

She drew in a steadying breath. “So, if he had no money, maybe—”

“He done what they all do.”

“All?”

“Men all over the county been leavin’ their families. Families been abandonin’ their kids and kin. I never seen nothing like it. A man over in Cimarron County kilt his whole family ’fore he left.”

“Where do they go with no money?”

“West, ma’am. Most of ’em. They jump on the first train that comes through town.”

“Maybe he’ll come back.”

The man sighed. “I ain’t seen one of ’em come back yet.”



ELSA STOOD IN FRONT of the depot. Slowly, as if it were combustible, she opened Rafe’s letter. The paper was wrinkled and dusty and appeared blotched by moisture. His tears?

Elsa,

I’m sorry. I know the words don’t matter, may be worse than nothing.

I’m dying here, that’s all I know. One more day on this farm and I might put a gun to my head. I’m weak. You are strong. You love this land and this life in a way I never could.

Tell my parents and my children I love them. You are all better off without me. Please, don’t look for me. I don’t want to be found. I don’t know where I’m going anyway.

R



Elsa couldn’t even cry.

Heartache had been a part of her life so long it had become as familiar as the color of her hair or the slight curve in her spine. Sometimes it was the lens through which she viewed her world and sometimes it was the blindfold she wore so she didn’t see. But it was always there. She knew it was her own fault, somehow, her doing, even though in all her desperate musings for the foundation of it, she’d never been able to see the flaw in herself that had proven to be so defining. Her parents had seen it. Her father, certainly. And her younger, more beautiful sisters, too. They had all sensed the lack in Elsa. Loreda certainly saw it.

Everyone—including Elsa—had assumed she would live an apologetic life, hidden among the needs of other, more vibrant people. The caretaker, the tender, the woman left behind to keep the home fires burning.

And then she had met Rafe.