The Four Winds(55)

Leaving him was always hard, but finally, there was hope. Ant would be coming home soon.

Outside, she glanced down the street and saw people coming out of the school. A glum, quiet gathering. She saw Tony exchange a few words with Mr. Carrio, then shake his hand.

Elsa waited for Tony on the boardwalk. He moved slowly toward her, looking beaten.

“How’s our boy?” Tony asked.

“Doc says he can leave on Tuesday. Any news from the government man?” Elsa asked

Tony gave her a look so steeped in despair it took her breath away. “No good news,” he said.

Elsa nodded.

They started the long, solemn walk home.



IN TWO DAYS, THEY were leaving this godforsaken land. And Elsa didn’t say that lightly.

God forsaken.

How else could one describe it? God had turned His back on the Great Plains.

She’d spent the last few days packing for the trip. On this Palm Sunday, instead of going to church, Elsa had canned the jackrabbits Tony and Loreda shot yesterday; when that laborious chore was done, she’d moved on to the laundry.

Now at the end of the blue-skied day, Elsa knelt in front of her little aster plant, pouring a few precious cupfuls of water into the thirsty ground.

This flower, which she’d covered and protected and watered and talked to for so long, stood alone, defiantly green against all this brown.

She would have to leave it behind to die.

She dug up the small, tender plant. Carrying it in a bowl made from her gloved hands, she crossed the yard.

At the family’s cemetery, the white picket fence lay in pieces; the headstones were half covered in dirt. Four gray, store-bought headstones with Rose’s and Elsa’s babies’ names inscribed on them. Three girls and a boy.

How long would these markers last in the wind? And when the Martinellis were gone, who would tend to their children, buried all alone in the middle of nowhere?

Elsa knelt in the sand. “Maria, Angelina, Juliana, Lorenzo. This is all I can leave with you. I will pray it rains this spring so it flowers.” She planted the flower in the powdery dirt in front of Lorenzo’s half-buried headstone.

The aster sagged immediately, slumped to one side.

Elsa would not cry over this one little flower.

She closed her eyes in prayer. Too soon, she wiped her eyes and got slowly to her feet. As she straightened, she saw a black shadow rising in the distance; the blackest thing she’d ever seen, it lifted into the dark-blue early-evening sky, spread enormous black wings outward. Static electricity tingled the back of her neck, lifted her hair.

A black storm?

Whatever it was, it was moving this way. Fast.

She ran for the house, met Rose in the yard.

“Madonna mia,” Rose said. They stared at the blackness billowing toward them; it had to be a mile high. Birds flew overhead, hundreds of them, flying at their greatest speed.

Tony ran out of the barn and stood with them, watching.

It was eerily silent. Calm. There was no wind.

A burning smell filled Elsa’s nostrils. The air felt sticky.

Static electricity arced in little bursts of blue fire through the air, dancing on bits of barbed wire and the windmill’s metal blades. Birds fell from the sky.

All at once: complete darkness. Dust clogged their eyes and noses.

Elsa clamped a hand over her mouth and held on to her mother-in-law. The three of them made it to the house, stumbled up the stairs. Tony opened the door and shoved the women inside.

“Mom!” Loreda screamed. “What’s happening?”

Elsa couldn’t see her daughter; that was how dark it was. She couldn’t see her own hands.

Tony slammed the door shut behind them. “Rose, help me with the windows.”

“Loreda,” Elsa yelled. “Put on your gas mask. Get to the kitchen. Sit under the table.”

“But—”

“Go,” Elsa said to the daughter she couldn’t see.

Elsa and Rose felt their way from room to room, closing the windows and covering them and pressing newspapers and oilcloth in every crack and crevice.

They kept their supplies—Vaseline, sponges, bandannas—in a basket in the kitchen. Elsa carried it through the inky dark and found a flashlight, clicked it on.

Nothing. Just a click.

“Is it on?” Rose asked, coughing.

“Who knows?” Elsa said.

“We need to get under the table, drape it with wet sheets,” Rose said.

Something hit the house hard, a terrible thwack. Window glass shattered in a series of loud cracks and clattered to the floor.

The front door was ripped open. The swirling, biting black monster of a storm whooshed inside, hitting so hard Rose stumbled sideways. Tony raced over to shut the door again, and threw the bolt shut.

They found the buckets they kept filled with water in the kitchen and soaked some sheets to drape over the table and then dampened sponges and pressed them to their faces, breathing hard through them.

Elsa heard Loreda breathing heavily through the gas mask. She crawled forward, found the kitchen table. Pushing chairs aside, she crawled underneath it.

“I’m here, Loreda,” she said, reaching out.

Elsa felt Loreda take her hand. They were sitting together, side by side, but couldn’t see each other. Thank God Ant wasn’t here.

Rose and Tony squeezed in under the table, past the draping of wet sheets.