The Four Winds(67)

Ignoring the buckets, Loreda and Ant sat cross-legged in the grassy dirt, playing cards.

When Elsa looked at her daughter, she felt an abiding sadness creep in. It was strange how you could stop seeing people who were right beside you, how images stuck in your head. Loreda was painfully thin, arms like matchsticks, knobby elbows and knees. One sunburn after another had left her cheeks full of freckles and peeling skin.

Loreda was thirteen; she should be filling out, not wasting away. A new worry. Or an old one, grown more vivid in the past hour.

As night fell, the camp livened up. Elsa heard distant conversations, dishes being filled and emptied, and fires crackling. Orange dots—open fires—sprouted here and there. Smoke drifted from tent to tent, carrying food aromas with it. A steady stream of people walked up from the road toward the tents.

Elsa heard footsteps and looked up. A family approached their campsite—a man, a woman, and four children—two teenaged boys and two young girls. The man, tall and whippet lean, wore stained overalls and a ripped shirt. Beside him stood a woman with shaggy, shoulder-length brown hair that was going gray in streaks. She wore a baggy cotton dress with an apron over it. There seemed to be nothing over her bones but a thin layer of skin; no muscle, no fat. The two skinny little girls wore burlap sacks that had cutouts for their arms and necks; their feet were dirty and bare.

“Howdy, neighbor,” the man said. “Thought we’d come by to welcome y’all.” He held out a single red potato. “We brung yah this. Ain’t much, I know. But we ain’t too heeled, as y’all can tell.”

Elsa was touched by the generosity of the gesture. “Thank you.” She reached for one of their buckets, turned it over, and placed her sweater on it. “Sit, please,” she said to the woman, who smiled tiredly and sat on the bucket, adjusting her housedress to cover her bare, dirty knees.

“I’m Elsa. These are my children, Loreda and Anthony.” She reached sideways, withdrew two precious slices of bread from their loaf. “Please, take these.”

The man took the bread in his callused hands. “I’m Jeb Dewey. This here’s my missus, Jean, and our youngsters, Mary and Buster, Elroy and Lucy.”

The kids moved over to a patch of weedy grass and sat down. Loreda started a new shuffling of the cards.

“How long have you been here?” Elsa asked the adults when the kids were out of earshot. She sat down on an overturned bucket near Jean.

“Almost nine months,” Jean answered. “We picked cotton last fall, but winter here is hard. You got to make enough in cotton to tide you through four months of no pickin’. And don’t let anyone tell you that California is warm in the winter.”

Elsa glanced over at the Deweys’ tent, which was about fifteen feet away. It was at least ten by ten; just like the Martinelli’s. But . . . how could six people live in such tight quarters for nine months?

Jean saw Elsa’s look. “It can be a mite hard to manage. Sweeping seems like a full-time job.” She smiled, and Elsa saw how pretty she must have been before hunger had whittled her down. “It ain’t like Alabama, I can tell you. We were better off there.”

“I was a farmer,” Jeb said. “Not a big place, but enough for us. It’s the bank’s farm now.”

“Are most of the people here farmers?” Elsa asked.

“Some. Old Milt—he lives in the blue jalopy with the broke axle over yonder—he was a darn lawyer. Hank was a postman. Sanderson made fancy hats. You can’t tell nothin’ by lookin’ at a fella these days.”

“Watch out for Mr. Eldridge. He might come atcha when he drinks. He ain’t been right since his wife and boy died o’ dysentery,” Jean said.

“There must be some work,” Elsa said, leaning forward on the bucket.

Jeb shrugged. “We go out every mornin’ to look. They’re pickin’ in Salinas right now if ya wanna go north. We pick fruit up north in the early summer. You gotta figgur on gas prices before you start movin’. But it’s cotton that gets us along.”

“I don’t know anything about cotton,” Elsa said.

Jean smiled. “It hurts like the dickens to pick, but it’ll save you. The kids’ll do good, too.”

“The kids? What about school?”

“Oh.” Jean sighed. “There’s a school. Down the road a mile or so. But . . . last fall it took all of us, even the little ones, to pick enough to keep from starvin’. Not that the girls picked much, but I couldn’t leave ’em behind all day, neither.”

Elsa looked at the two little girls. What were they, four and five—in the cotton fields all day? She rushed to change the subject. “Can we get mail anywhere?”

“General delivery in Welty. They hold mail for us.”

“Well.” Jean stood, smoothing her dress. In the gesture, Elsa got a hint of who she had been before California—the quiet, respected wife of a small-town farmer. She’d probably cared about things like Fourth of July parades and wedding quilts and box socials. “Well. I should get supper on the stove. Best be takin’ our leave.”

“It ain’t so bad as it looks,” Jeb said. “You’ll see. Just go to the relief office in Welty as soon as you can. It’s up the road about two miles. You’ve got to register with the state for relief. Tell ’em you’re here. We didn’t register for a couple o’ months and it cost us. Not that it’ll help much now, since—”