The Four Winds(51)

She saw a wheelbarrow standing upright, half buried in sand.

Could she do it? Push him two miles to town in a wheelbarrow?

Of course. She could take him as far as she needed to.

She walked unsteadily toward it and lay him down in the rusted scoop, his spindly legs hanging over the edge. She positioned his head carefully on the blanket.

“Mo-mmy?” he wheezed. “The light . . . hurts.”

“Close your eyes, baby,” she said. “Go to sleep. We’re going to see Doc Rheinhart.”

Elsa picked up the rough wooden handles and headed for the driveway.

“Elsa!” She heard Rose yelling for her, but didn’t stop, didn’t listen. She was in a panic to go, to get him help. She knew it was crazy, knew she was a little unhinged, but what else could she do?

“Elsa, let us help!”

Elsa plunged forward. The wheelbarrow seemed to fight back. She felt every bump in the driveway, every furrow like a blow to her spine. She made it to the main road.

Desolation. Sand in heaps. Sheds covered by it; fences fallen.

She turned onto the road and kept going, breathing hard.

Heat beat down on her. Sweat blurred her vision, ran between her breasts in itchy streams.

She stubbed her toe on something buried in the sand and stumbled. The wheelbarrow was wrenched out of her hands, clattered forward. Ant hit his head on the ground.

“I’m sorry, baby,” Elsa said. Even she couldn’t hear her words, her throat was so dry. She looked down at her left palm, skin torn away, bloody. Her blood darkened the handles.

She resettled Ant in the wheelbarrow and fought to move forward; before she’d taken a full step, she felt a hand on her shoulders.

Tony stood there, with Rose and Loreda on either side of him. “Are you ready to let us help you now?”

“You don’t have to do it all yourself,” Rose said.

“Yeah, Mom,” Loreda said. “We’ve been yelling for you. Are you deaf?”

Elsa almost burst into tears. Very slowly, she set the wheelbarrow down.

Tony took hold of the handles, lifted the wheelbarrow up, and started off. Loreda moved in beside him, took over one side.

“You made it nearly a mile,” Rose said, tenderly smoothing the damp hair from Elsa’s dirty forehead.

“I’m just—”

“A mother.” Rose reached down for Elsa’s hands, lifted them, looked at the torn, bloody palms.

Elsa steeled herself. Her own mother would have scolded her for her stupidity in not wearing gloves.

Rose slowly lifted one of Elsa’s hands, kissed the bloody skin. “That used to make it all better for my foolish son.”

“It helps,” Elsa said. It was the first time in her life someone had kissed an injury of hers to make it better.

“Come. My husband is not as young as he thinks. It will be my turn soon.”



LONESOME TREE WAS A ghost town.

Tony pushed the wheelbarrow down Main Street, past the boarded-up storefronts. The once-thriving feed store had been taken over by the Red Cross and converted into a hospital.

The plains cottonwood was gone. Someone must have cut it up for firewood after it died of thirst.

At the makeshift hospital, Tony picked up Ant, who groaned and coughed.

Inside, the narrow building was shadowy and dark. The windows had been boarded up to keep out the dust and wind. Red Cross nurses wore uniforms that had once been starched white and were now a wrinkled gray. A doctor hurried from bed to bed, stopping just long enough at each to make an assessment and bark orders to the nurses following along behind him.

Tony carried Ant into the room. “I have a child here who needs help.”

A nurse approached them. She looked as haggard and drawn as everyone else. “How bad is he?”

“Bad.”

The nurse sighed heavily. “A bed came open this morning.”

They all knew that meant someone had died from the dust.

The nurse gave Elsa a sad look. “It’s been bad. Come.”

Elsa followed Tony into the room full of wheezing and coughing patients.

They settled Ant on a cot in back, beneath a ten-foot window covered by wooden boards. Even so, the sill was stuffed with rags. To the left, a cot held an old man who fought for every breath. A mask covered his eyes.

Elsa knelt beside her son.

Heat radiated off of him. She touched his hot forehead. “I’m here, Ant. We all are.”

Loreda sat at the end of the cot. “We’re gonna play checkers. I’ll let you win.”

Ant coughed harder.

Moments later, Rose came back with the doctor. She was holding on to his sleeve in a death grip. No doubt Rose had grabbed the poor man and dragged him over here. Somehow, Rose still had a fire in her. Elsa couldn’t imagine how she kept it lit in all this falling dirt. The doctor leaned down to take Ant’s temperature.

The doctor read the thermometer, then examined Ant and sighed. “Your son is seriously ill, which I’m sure you know. He has a high fever and is suffering from severe silicosis. Dust pneumonia. Prairie dust is full of silica. It builds up in the lungs and tears away the air sacs.”

“Which means?”

“He’s breathing in dirt and swallowing it. Filling up with it. There’s no other way to put it, but you’ve done the right thing to bring him here. This is the best place in town to be in a dust storm. We will take good care of him, I promise.” The doctor glanced down at beds full of wheezing, coughing, sweating, dying patients. “Try not to worry.”