The Four Winds(69)
After at least half an hour, she came to a HELP WANTED sign tacked to a four-rail fence.
She pulled off the road and onto a long dirt driveway lined with flowering white trees. Hundreds of acres of a low-growing green crop spread out on either side of the driveway. Potatoes, maybe.
She pulled up in front of a big farmhouse with a large screened-in porch and a pretty flower garden.
At her arrival, a man walked out of the house, let the screen door bang shut behind him. He was smoking a pipe and was well dressed, in flannel pants and a crisp white shirt and a fedora that must have cost a fortune. His hair was precisely trimmed, sideburns shorn, as was his pencil-thin mustache.
He came around to the driver’s side of the truck. “A truck, huh? You must be new.”
“Arrived yesterday, from Texas.”
He gave Elsa an appraising look, then cocked his head. “Head that way. The missus needs help.”
“Thank you!” Elsa hurried out of the truck before he could change his mind. A job!
She rushed toward the large house. Passing through an open picket gate and a rose garden that enveloped her in a scent that recalled her childhood, she climbed the few steps to the front door and knocked.
She heard the clip of high heels on hardwood floors.
The door opened to reveal a short, plump woman in a fashionable slit skirt dress with a flounced silken cravat at the high neckline. Carefully controlled platinum curls swept back from a center part and framed her face in a jaw-length bob.
The woman looked at Elsa and took a step back. She sniffed daintily, pressed a lace handkerchief to her nose. “Our farmhand deals with the vagrants.”
“Your . . . the man in the fedora said you needed help with some household chores.”
“Oh.”
Elsa was acutely aware of how ragged she looked. All that effort to present herself for work meant nothing to this woman.
“Follow me.”
Inside, the house was grand: oaken doors, crystal fixtures, mullioned windows that captured the green fields outside and turned them into a kaleidoscope of color. Thick oriental carpets, carved mahogany side tables.
A little girl came into the room, her Shirley Temple curls bouncing pertly. She wore a dress of pink polka dots and black patent leather shoes. “Mommy, what does the dirty lady want?”
“Don’t get too close, dear. They carry disease.”
The girl’s eyes widened. She backed away.
Elsa couldn’t believe what she’d heard. “Ma’am—”
“Don’t speak to me unless I ask a direct question,” the woman said. “You may scrub the floors. But mind you, I don’t want to catch you shirking and I’ll check your pockets before you leave. And don’t touch anything but the water, bucket, and brush.”
TWENTY
Loreda woke to the smell. It reminded her with every indrawn breath that they had spent the night in the last place on earth she wanted to be.
Loreda stayed in bed as long as she could, knowing that the clarity of day would reveal images she didn’t want to see, but finally, the aroma of coffee urged her up. She eased away from Ant, who grumbled, and put a holey sweater on over her dress.
She stepped into her shoes and opened the tent flap, expecting to find her mother sitting on an overturned bucket by the campfire, drinking coffee. But neither Mom nor the truck were here. Instead, she found a glass of water and her mother’s note.
Loreda looked out toward the road, across the flat, brown field rutted by foot and tire tracks and a cluster of tents and vehicles. The field—probably fifty acres altogether—held a hundred tents and dozens of trucks that had become homes. She saw hovels that had been cobbled together of scrap metal and wooden boards. Women moved through the camp herding ragged children, while mangy dogs ran through, barking for food or attention. Folks had lived here a long time, long enough to string laundry lines and create yards full of junk. No one would want to live this way, and yet here they were. The Great Depression.
For the first time, she understood. It wasn’t just banksters running off with people’s money or a movie theater closing its doors or people standing in line for free soup.
Hard times meant poverty. No jobs. Nowhere else to go.
Jean stepped out of her tent and waved at Loreda.
Loreda walked toward her, strangely glad for an adult nearby. “Hey, Miz Dewey,” Loreda said.
“Your mama left about an hour ago, lookin’ for work.”
“My mom has never had a real job.”
Jean smiled. “Spoken like a teenager. It don’t matter, though. Experience, I mean. The jobs out here are field jobs, mostly. They won’t hire us in diners and stores and such. They want them jobs for themselves.”
“It’s just wrong.”
Jean shrugged, as if to say, What difference does that make? “When times is tough and jobs is scarce, folks blame the outsider. It’s human nature. And raht now, that’s us. In California it used to be the Mexicans, and the Chinese before that, I think.”
Loreda stared out at the debris-strewn camp. “My mom never gives up,” she said. “But maybe this time she should. We could go to Hollywood. Or San Francisco.” Loreda hated how her voice broke on that. Suddenly she was thinking of her dad and Stella and her grandparents and the farm. More than anything right now, she wanted to be home, to have Grandma give her one of her no-nonsense hugs and slip her a bite of something.