The Four Winds(79)

“Is it worth the gas money?” Elsa asked.

Jeb shrugged. “It’s work, Elsa. We take it where we can, when we can.”

Up ahead, Elsa saw women cooking in front of whatever dwellings they had. She heard the strains of a fiddle rising up and it made her smile.

Outside their tent, Loreda and Ant sat on the buckets on the ground. Beside them, a pot of beans simmered on the stove.

“Mom?” Loreda said. “I need to talk to you.”

That couldn’t be good. Lately, Loreda’s anger had grown exponentially. She didn’t complain much, or roll her eyes and storm off, but somehow that made it worse. Elsa knew her daughter was eating a steady diet of outrage and sooner or later she would explode. “Sure.”

“Stay here, Ant,” Loreda said, rising to her feet.

Elsa followed Loreda toward the ditch they pathetically called a river.

Beneath a spindly tree in full bloom, Loreda stopped and turned to face Elsa. “School ended two days ago.”

“I’m aware of that, Loreda.”

“Are you also aware that I’m the only thirteen-year-old in camp during the day?”

Elsa knew where this was going. She’d been expecting it. Dreading it. “Yes.”

“Seven-year-olds are working in the fields, Mom.”

“I know, Loreda, but . . .”

Loreda moved closer. “I’m not deaf, Mom. I hear what people say. Winter in California is bad. There’s no work. We can’t get state relief until next April. So the only money we have is what we make working in the fields. It will have to get us through four months with no work and no relief money.”

“I know.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to work with you.”

Elsa wanted to say—to scream—NO.

But Loreda was right. They needed to save money for the winter.

“Just for the summer. Then you go back to school,” Elsa said. “Jean can watch Ant.”

“You know he’ll want to work, too, Mom,” Loreda said. “Ant’s strong.”

Elsa walked away, pretending she hadn’t heard.



BY JULY, THE WORK in the cotton fields had ended again; there would be no more until it was time to pick the crop. Still, each day, new migrants walked or rode into the San Joaquin Valley. More workers, less work. The newspapers were full of outrage and despair on the part of the citizens, who worried that their tax dollars were being spent to help nonresidents. The schools and hospitals were overrun, they said, unable to survive the demands of so many outsiders. They worried about bankruptcy and losing their way of life and being made unsafe by the wave of crime and disease they blamed on migrants.

Elsa called an Explorers Club meeting and asked her children if they wanted to stay in the ditch-bank camp or follow the Deweys—and many of the camp’s inhabitants—north to the Central Valley to find work picking fruit. As always, it was a difficult choice in which each of them was aware how precarious their survival was. Spend money or save it.

In the end, they made the choice that most of the migrants made: they packed their belongings in boxes and tore down the tent and repacked the truck for travel. They headed north behind the Deweys; in Yolo County, they moved into another field full of tents and set up camp. There, they learned to pick peaches. Elsa hated to bring Ant into the fields with her, but there was no choice. She was a single mother and her son was too young to stay alone all day, every day. With all of them picking, they made just enough to feed themselves and stay clothed. Certainly there were no savings.

When peach season ended, they picked up stakes again. For the rest of the summer, they joined the horde of migrants who moved from field to field, crop to crop, and learned to pick whatever was in season and be unseen by the good folks who needed their crops picked but didn’t want to see the people who did the picking and expected them to move on when the season ended. They didn’t go to town or see movies or even go into the libraries. They stayed in their camps, surviving together. Jean taught Elsa how to make hush puppies from ground corn and Elsa showed Jean how the cornmeal could be made into polenta cakes, which were delicious beneath a ladleful of soup or stew. They ate casseroles made of canned tomato soup and macaroni and chopped-up hot dogs. Through all of that long, hot summer, they waited for two words.



COTTON’S READY.

The news swept the Central Valley in September. Elsa and the kids packed up in the middle of the night and drove back to the San Joaquin Valley and the ditch-bank camp that had been their first stop in California.

They turned onto the deep, dry ruts in the weedy field after a long, hot day of driving. Jeb’s jalopy was in front of them, churning up dust.

“Jeepers,” Ant said, peering through the dirty, bug-splattered windshield. “Look at that.”

In the time they’d been gone, the population of the ditch-bank camp had increased dramatically. There had to be two hundred tents in the field now, filled with more desperate Americans looking for nonexistent jobs. The place looked like the aftermath from a tornado, all broken-down cars and junk spread out.

Jeb drove off to the right, away from the clot of tents and cardboard shacks. He found a nice spot, fairly level, with room for their tents to be side by side, but also each have a little privacy.

Elsa pulled up alongside him and parked.

“Long walk to the river,” Loreda said, and then shook her head, muttering, “I can’t believe I just called it a river.”