The Four Winds(47)

“It’s not the same,” Loreda said.

There was a short, sharp beat of awkward silence. Then Rose said, “You will believe again. And even if you do not, the coin has its power.”

“I’ll take her wish,” Ant said. “Give me the penny.”

Even Loreda laughed and dashed the tears from her eyes.

Tony played “Happy Birthday” on his fiddle and everyone sang.



IN THE DAYS AFTER the beautiful rainstorm, Elsa woke early each morning, fueled by hope, and went outside. She inhaled deeply, smelled the fecund scent of wet land, and knelt in the garden to tend her vegetables. She encouraged them to grow as she did her children: with a careful hand and a quiet voice. The ground looked alive again, not parched and dry; here and there, fragile green tips poked up from the dirt, seeking sunshine.

This morning, she saw Tony standing at the edge of the winter-wheat field. Not bothering with a sun hat—it was warm and kind, this sun, like an old friend—she walked past the chicken coop, heard them clucking. Their old rooster strutted along the wire fence, trying to hurry her past his brood. The windmill thunked in the breeze, bringing up water.

Elsa came to the edge of the field and stopped.

“Look at it,” Tony said in a rough voice.

Green.

Rows of new growth, stretching to the horizon in straight rows.

Here was the essence of hope on a farm. The color of the future. Green now, and delicate, but with sunshine and rain, the wheat would become as sturdy as the family, as strong as the land itself, and turn into a sea of waving gold that would sustain them all.

At the very least, there would be grain for the animals. After four years of drought, that alone would be a blessing.

Elsa left Tony standing at the altar of his land, and headed toward the house. She knelt at her special patch of ground, beneath the kitchen window. Her aster was green. “Hey, you,” she said. “I knew you’d come back.”





FOURTEEN





On the day it happened, Elsa told herself it was nothing. They all did.

She woke early, feeling restless. She’d slept badly and didn’t know why. She got out of bed and splashed water on her face and realized suddenly what was wrong: she was hot.

She braided her hair and covered it with a kerchief and went out into the kitchen, where she found Rose standing at the window.

Elsa knew they were both thinking the same thing: It was already hot. And it wasn’t even seven o’clock in the morning.

“What’s one hot day?” Elsa said, coming to stand by her mother-in-law.

“I used to love hot days,” Rose said.

Elsa nodded.

They stared out at the blinding yellow sun.



EIGHT STRAIGHT DAYS OF hundred-degree heat. In mid-March.

They renewed their efforts to conserve: energy, water, food, kerosene. They darkened the windows and carried water by the bucketful, poured it sparingly on the garden and on the grapes and in the animal troughs, but it wasn’t enough; the new growth began to wilt in the inexorable heat. By the fourth day, the wheat was dead. Not a hint of green for hundreds of acres. Elsa watched her father-in-law’s steady decline in spirit. He still woke early and drank a cup of bitter, black coffee and read the newspaper. It wasn’t until he opened the door that his shoulders slumped. Each day, he was destroyed anew at the sight of his land. Some days he spent hours at the edges of his dead wheat field, just staring out. He would come home, smelling of sweat and despair, and sit in the sitting room, saying nothing. Rose tried everything she could to revive his spirit, but none of them had much optimism left.

Still, even as the crops died and the fields dried up and their skin burned, life went on.

Today, Elsa and Rose had to do laundry. In this blinding, headache-inducing heat.

Elsa wanted to simply let her children wear dirty clothes, and say, Who cares? Everyone was dirty these days, but what would that say about the kind of mother she was or the lessons she was teaching them? What if one of the few remaining neighbors stopped by and saw her children in unwashed clothes?

So she washed out the tubs and filled them with water, and spent more sweaty, exhausting hours washing towels and bedding and clothes. First, of course, every item had to be carried outside and shaken. The cistern had gone dry in this unseasonable heat, so all the water she needed had to be hauled up from the well and carried into the house in buckets. Thankfully, Loreda was good at hauling water and lately she was too tired and dispirited to complain.

By the time Elsa finished the laundry, it was well past noon and over 105 degrees. The sheets were pinned onto the lines and flapping in the breeze; she could barely lift her head, and every joint in her body ached. And all of it was a waste because dust would rise or fall or puff up from nowhere and leave a film on everything she’d just washed.

She returned to the dark, stuffy kitchen and started bread by mixing together last night’s leftover potato water, a boiled potato, sugar, yeast, and flour. At two o’clock, Loreda walked into the kitchen.

“Good,” Elsa said, covering the bread mixture with a dish towel. “You’re just in time to help me bring in the laundry.”

“Joy,” Loreda said, following Elsa outside.



ON THE FIRST DAY OF spring—yet another sweltering day—Mom decided it was time to make soap. Soap. Loreda was too tired to complain—and it wouldn’t do any good anyway. Mom and Grandma were warrior women. Nothing stopped them when they’d made up their minds.