The Four Winds(38)

“He wanted to go west, didn’t he?” Loreda said.

The walls of the depot clattered and shook; the world felt as if it were falling apart.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you just say yes?”

Elsa sighed. “Your brother has no shoes. There’s no money for gas. There’s no money for anything. Your grandparents won’t leave. All I saw were reasons not to go.”

“I got here, and I didn’t know where to go. He didn’t want me to know.”

“I know.”

Elsa touched her daughter’s back.

Loreda yanked sideways and scuttled away from the touch.

Elsa brought her hand back and sat there, knowing there was nothing she could say to fix this breach with her daughter. Rafe had abandoned them both, walked out on his children and his responsibilities, and it was still Elsa whom Loreda blamed.



THAT NIGHT, AFTER THE storm quieted, Elsa drove back to the farmhouse with Loreda. Somehow, Elsa found the strength to get herself and the children fed, and finally she tucked them into bed. All without crying in front of anyone. It felt like a major triumph. In the hours after Rafe’s abandonment, Rose’s pain had turned to seething anger that showed itself in outbursts in Italian. Loreda’s despair had left her mute during their evening meal, and Ant’s confusion was painful to see. Tony made eye contact with no one.

It occurred to Elsa as she walked into her bedroom—finally—that she hadn’t spoken in a long time, hadn’t bothered to even respond when spoken to. The pain of him leaving kept expanding inside of her, taking up more and more space.

There was no wind outside now, no forces of nature trying to break down the walls. Only silence. An occasional coyote howl, an every-now-and-then scurrying of some insect across their floor, but nothing else.

Elsa walked to the chest of drawers beneath the window. She opened Rafe’s drawer to look at the only shirt he’d left behind. All she had of him now.

She picked it up, a pale blue chambray with brass snaps. She’d made it for him one Christmas. There was still a small brownish-red mark of her blood on one cuff, where she’d poked herself in the sewing.

She wrapped the shirt around her neck as if it were a scarf and walked aimlessly out into the starlit night, going nowhere. Maybe she would start walking and never stop . . . or never take this scarf off until one day, when she was old and gray, some child would ask about the crazy woman who wore a shirt for a scarf and she would say she couldn’t recall how it had begun or whose shirt it was.

As she neared the mailbox, she saw Bruno, their gelding, dead, caught in the dried branches of the fallen trees, dirt caked in his open mouth. Tomorrow, they would have to dig into the hard, dry earth to bury him. Another terrible chore, another goodbye.

With a sigh, she walked back to the house, got into bed. The mattress felt too large for her alone, even if she spread her arms and legs wide. She folded her arms over her chest as if she were a corpse being washed and readied for burial, and stared up at the dusty ceiling.

All those years, all those prayers, all her hope that at last, someday, she would be loved, that her husband would turn to her and see her and love what he saw . . . gone.

Her parents had been right about her all along.





ELEVEN





Loreda knew she couldn’t blame her mother for Daddy abandoning them, or not entirely. That was the sad, sorry truth she’d come to after a long and sleepless night.

Daddy had left them all. Once she’d seen that fact, she couldn’t unsee it. Daddy had filled Loreda’s head with dreams and told her he loved her, but in the end, he’d left her and walked away.

It made her feel hopeless for the first time in her life.

When she got up the next morning and saw the blue sky outside her window, she dressed in the same dirty clothes she’d run away in and didn’t bother to brush her hair or teeth. What was the point? She was never going to get off this farm and if she didn’t, who cared what she looked like?

She found Grandma Rose in the kitchen, with a breakfast of creamed wheat cereal bubbling on the stove. Grandma looked . . . clenched. There was no other word for it. She kept talking to herself in Italian, a language she refused to teach her grandchildren because she wanted them to be Americans.

Ant shuffled into the kitchen, kicking through the inch of dirt that covered the floor, and Loreda pulled out a chair for him at the oilcloth-draped table, where the bowls sat upside down at their places, covered in more dirt.

Loreda turned the bowls over and wiped them out, then sat down beside her brother, whose hunched shoulders made him look even younger as he ate cereal so tasteless that even cream and butter couldn’t make it palatable.

Grandpa walked into the kitchen, buckling his tattered, patched overalls. “Coffee smells good, Rose.” He tousled Ant’s dirty hair.

Ant started to cry. It ended in a hacking cough. Loreda reached out to hold his hand. She felt like crying, too.

“How could he leave them?” Grandpa said to Grandma, who looked stricken.

“Silenzio,” she hissed. “What good are words?”

Grandpa released a heavy breath; the exhalation ended in a cough. He pressed a hand to his chest, as if the dirt from yesterday’s storm had collected there.

Grandma Rose reached for the broom and dustpan. Loreda groaned out loud. They’d spend a whole day digging out from yesterday’s storm—beating rugs, scooping dirt from windowsills, washing everything in the cupboards and putting it away again, upside down. And still more sweeping.