The Four Winds(87)

Elsa snatched the gloves and ran back to the truck.

“They won’t help us,” she said through gritted teeth as she climbed in. “The good, God-fearing folk of California don’t care about a baby’s life, I guess.”

Elsa drove as fast as she could back to camp, rage trapped inside of her, tightening her breathing.

“Hurry, Elsa.”

At the Deweys’ tent, Elsa helped Jean into the dank interior.

“Loreda!” Elsa shouted.

Loreda ran into the tent, banged into Elsa. “Why are you back?”

“They turned us away.”

“You mean—”

“Go get water. Boil a lot of it.” When Loreda didn’t move, Elsa snapped, “Now!” and Loreda ran out.

Elsa lit a kerosene lamp and helped Jean to the mattress on the floor.

Jean convulsed in pain, gritted her teeth to keep from crying out.

Elsa knelt beside her, stroking her hair. “Go ahead and scream.”

“It’s coming,” Jean said between pants. “Keep . . . the kids . . . away. Scissors in that . . . box. And there’s some string.”

Another contraction.

Elsa stared at Jean’s writhing belly and knew she only had a few moments. Elsa ran back to her tent, ignoring the children, who looked at her with frightened eyes. There wasn’t time to comfort them now.

She grabbed a stack of saved newspapers and ran back to Jean’s tent, where she laid the newspapers down on the dirt floor, grateful that they were relatively clean.

Headlines flashed out at her: “Typhoid Outbreak in Migrant Camps.”

Elsa helped Jean roll onto the newspapers. Elsa then put on the gloves.

Jean screamed.

“Go ahead,” Elsa said, kneeling beside her. She stroked Jean’s wet hair.

“It’s . . . now,” Jean cried out.

Elsa moved quickly, positioned herself between Jean’s open legs. The top of the baby’s head appeared, slimed and blue. “I see the head,” Elsa said. “Push, Jean.”

“I’m too . . .”

“I know you’re tired. Push.”

Jean shook her head.

“Push,” Elsa said. She looked up, saw the fear in her friend’s eyes. “I know,” Elsa said, understanding Jean’s deep fear of this moment. Babies died in the best of circumstances, and these were the worst. They also lived in spite of all odds. “Push,” she said, meeting Jean’s fear with a quiet hopefulness.

The baby whooshed out in a stream of blood into Elsa’s gloved hands. Too tiny, spindly almost. Smaller than a man’s shoe.

Blue.

Elsa felt a roar of anger move through her. No. She wiped the blood from the tiny face, cleaned out her mouth, begged the infant, “Breathe, baby girl.”

Jean pushed up to her elbows. She looked too tired to breathe herself. “She ain’t breathin’,” she said softly.

Elsa tried to help the baby breathe. Mouth-to-mouth.

Nothing.

She smacked the tiny blue bum, said, “Breathe.”

Nothing.

Nothing.

Jean pointed to a straw basket. In it was the soft lavender blanket.

Elsa tied off the umbilical cord and cut it, then got slowly to her feet. Weak. Shaky. She wrapped up the tiny, still baby.

As she offered the baby to Jean, tears blurred her vision. “A girl,” she said to Jean, who took her with a gentleness that broke Elsa’s heart.

Jean kissed the blue forehead. “I’m namin’ her Clea, after my mom,” Jean said.

A name.

The very essence of hope. The beginning of an identity, handed down in love. Elsa backed away from the heartbreak of watching Jean whisper into the baby’s blue ear.

Outside, Elsa found Loreda pacing.

Elsa looked at her daughter, saw the question, and shook her head.

“Oh, no,” Loreda said, slumping her shoulders.

Before Elsa could offer comfort, Loreda turned and disappeared into their tent.

Elsa stood there, unmoving. That terrible, terrible image of a baby coming into the world on a crumpled newspaper over a dirt floor wouldn’t go away.

I’ll name her Clea.

How had Jean even been able to speak?

Elsa felt tears rise up, overtake her. She cried as she hadn’t cried since Rafe left her, cried until there was no moisture left inside of her, until she was as dry as the land they’d left behind.



AT A LITTLE PAST ten o’clock that night, Loreda finished digging the small hole and dropped her shovel.

They were far from camp, in an area surrounded by trees; a place as dark as the mood of the two women and one girl standing beneath them.

Anger suffused Loreda, overwhelmed her; she felt it poisoning her from the inside out. She’d never felt its like before, not even when Daddy left them. She had to hold it inside her one breath at a time; if she let it go, she’d scream.

And look at her mother. Standing there, holding a dead baby in a clean lavender blanket, looking sad.

Sad.

The sight of it doubled Loreda’s rage. This was no time to be sad.

She fisted her hands at her side, but who was there to hit? Mrs. Dewey looked dazed and unsteady. Ghostly.

Mom knelt down and carefully placed the dead baby in the small grave and began to pray. “Our Father—”