The Four Winds(56)

Elsa held her daughter close as boards were ripped away and windows broke.

The walls shook so hard it seemed the house would shatter.

Suddenly it was freezing.



ELSA WOKE TO SILENCE; in it, she heard the wheezing cant of Loreda’s labored breathing through the gas mask. Then, a scuttling sound—a mouse, probably—coming out of hiding, scurrying over the floor.

She pulled down her crusty, dirt-filled bandanna and peeled away the muddy sponge she’d been breathing through. Her first unprotected breath hurt all the way down her throat and into the pit of her gnawing, empty stomach.

She opened her eyes. Grit scraped her eyeballs.

Dirt blurred her vision, but she could see the dirty sheets draped around them, and her family, tucked in close to one another. Whatever it was, it was over.

She coughed and spat out a blob of blackish-gray dirt that was as thick and as long as a pencil nub. “Loreda? Rose? Tony? Is everyone okay?”

Loreda opened her eyes. “Yeah.” The gas mask turned her voice raspy and monstrous.

Tony slowly lowered his bandanna.

Rose crawled out from under the table and staggered to her feet. She took Elsa by the hand, led her into the sitting room. Bright morning sunlight shone through the broken window. Impossibly, they’d slept through the night and outlasted the storm.

There was black dirt everywhere, a deep layer of it on the floor, gathered in dunes at every chair leg, falling down the walls like a mass of centipedes.

The front door wouldn’t open; they’d been buried in.

Tony climbed out the broken window and dropped onto the porch. Elsa heard the scuffing thwack of the metal shovel on the porch boards as he dug sand away.

Finally, the door opened.

Elsa stepped outside.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered.

The world had been reshaped and blanketed by the storm. Black dirt and dust, as fine as talcum powder, covered everything. There was nothing to see for miles except swelling dunes of inky sand. The chicken coop was completely buried; only the very peak of it poked up. The water pump rose up like a relic from a lost civilization. They could have walked right up to the top of the barn on one side.

Dead birds lay in heaps on the sand dunes, their wings still outstretched as if they’d died midflight.

“Madonna mia,” Rose said.

“That’s it,” Elsa said. “We are not waiting until tomorrow. We are going to get Ant and leave right now. This instant. Before this goddamned land kills my children.”

She turned and strode back into the house. Every indrawn breath felt like swallowing fire. Her eyes burned. Grit lodged in her eyes, her throat, her nose, in the creases in her skin. It kept falling out of her hair.

Loreda stood by a broken window, her face blackened by dirt, looking dazed.

“We are leaving for California. Now. Go get the suitcases. I’m going to fill a tub with water for bathing in the yard.”

“Outside?” Loreda said.

“No one will see you,” Elsa said grimly.

For the next few hours, no one spoke. Elsa would have watered her aster, but the cemetery was gone, markers and picket fence and all, gone.

Tony shoveled the driveway so they could leave. They had strapped what they could to the truck—a few pots and pans, two lanterns, a broom and a washboard and a copper bathing tub. Inside the truck bed was their rolled-up camp mattress, a barrel full of food and towels and bedding, bundles of kindling and wood, and the black stove, strapped against the back of the cab. They packed as much as they could for their new life, but most of what they owned was still in the house and barn. The kitchen cabinets were nearly full, as were most of the closets. There was no way they could take it all. The furniture they would leave behind, like the pioneers who’d unloaded their covered wagons when the going got tough, leaving pianos and rocking chairs alongside their buried dead on the plains.

When they were completely packed, Elsa walked back to the house, over the dunes and troughs of sand.

Elsa looked around the house. They were leaving it full of furniture, with pictures still on the walls. Everything was covered in fine black dirt.

The front door opened. Tony walked in, holding hands with Rose. “Loreda is in the truck. She’s impatient to go,” Tony said.

“I’ll make one last pass through the house,” Elsa said. She walked through the powdery black dirt in the sitting room, over hills and across scrape marks. The kitchen window was gone; through it, the beautiful blue sky looked like an oil painting hung on a black wall.

Elsa walked into her bedroom and stood there, one last time. Books lined the dresser and the nightstands, each one draped in black dirt. Just like when she’d left her parents’ home, she could only take a few of her treasured novels with her. Once again, she was starting over.

She quietly closed the bedroom door on this life and walked out of the house for the last time.

Rose and Tony stood on the porch, holding hands.

“I’m ready,” she said, stepping onto the first riser of the porch steps.

“Elsinore?” Tony said.

It was the first time he’d ever used her given name and it surprised her. Elsa turned.

“We aren’t going with you,” Rose said.

Elsa frowned. “I know we planned to leave later, but—”

“No,” Tony said. “That’s not what we mean. We aren’t going to California.”