The Four Winds(88)

“Who the hell are you praying to?” Loreda snapped.

She heard her mother sigh and slowly get to her feet. “God has—”

“If you tell me He has a plan for us, I’ll scream. I swear I will.” Loreda’s voice broke. She felt herself start to cry, but she wasn’t sad; she was furious. “He lets us live like this. Worse than stray dogs.”

Mom touched Loreda’s face. “Babies die, Loreda. I lost your brother. Grandma Rose lost—”

“THIS ISN’T LIKE THAT!” Loreda screamed. “You’re a coward, staying here, making us stay here. Why?”

“Oh, Loreda . . .”

Loreda knew she’d gone too far, had said too cruel a thing, but there was no stopping this rage, no slowing it. “If Daddy were here—”

“What?” Mom said. “What would he do?”

“He wouldn’t let us live like this. Burying dead babies in the dark, working our fingers to the bone, standing in line for two hours to get a can of milk from the government, watching people get sick around us.”

“He left us.”

“He left you. I should do the same, get out of here before we’re all dead.”

“Go, then,” Mom said. “Run away. Be like him.”

“I might,” Loreda said.

“Good. Go.” Mom bent down, picked up the shovel, began filling the grave with dirt.

Scrape, thunk.

In minutes there would be nothing to show that a baby had been buried here.

Loreda marched back through the squalid camp, past tents overfilled with people, past mangy dogs begging for scraps from folks who lived on scraps. She heard babies crying and people coughing.

The Dewey tent was closed up, but Loreda knew the little girls were in there, waiting for their mother to comfort and reassure them.

Words. Lies. Nothing would get better.

She was done living like this.

At her tent, she flung the flaps open, found Ant curled up on the mattress, his body as small as he could make it. They’d all learned how to sleep together on the too-small bed.

Her heart gave a hard ping at the sight of him.

Loreda knelt beside the bed, ruffled his hair. He mumbled in his sleep. “I love you,” she whispered, kissing the hard bone of his cheek. “But I can’t stay another second.”

Ant nodded in his sleep, murmured something.

Loreda went to the small suitcase that held all of her ragged clothes and her beloved library card. From the food crate, she took three potatoes and two slices of bread, and then opened the metal box that held their money. All they had in the world. Loreda felt a twinge of guilt.

No.

She’d wouldn’t take much. Just two dollars. It was her money as much as Mom’s. God knew Loreda had worked for it. She carefully counted out the money and then scrounged for a piece of paper. She found a bit of crumpled newsprint. Smoothing it as best she could, she used one of Ant’s pencil stubs to write a note to her mother and Ant, leaving it beneath the coffeepot.

She carried her suitcase to the tent flaps, looked back one last time, and walked away.

She passed the truck, full of things they should have left behind. Ant’s baseball bat lay cocked against a mantel clock, neither of which they needed, but neither Loreda nor her mother had the heart to tell Ant his baseball days were over before they’d begun. God knew if they’d ever need a mantel clock again. They would have packed differently if they’d known. Or maybe if they’d known what waited for them in California, they’d have stayed in Texas.

They shouldn’t have left.

Or maybe they should have gone farther.

It was Mom’s fault. She’d chosen to stop here, said, We have to. Everything had gone wrong from then.

From that first fatal lie: one night.

Well, it had been a lot of nights, and Loreda was getting the hell out.



ELSA AND JEAN STOOD together in the darkness, staring down, holding hands. Time fell away, passed in long swaths of silence between women who knew there were no words at a time like this.

There was no marker here to commemorate the baby, nor markers to commemorate the others buried in this section of the camp.

“We’d best get back,” Elsa said at last, buttoning up her ill-fitting wool coat. “You’re shivering.”

“I’ll be along,” Jean said.

Elsa squeezed her friend’s hand. With a sigh that felt drawn from deep in her tired bones, she carried the shovel back to camp and threw it in the back of the truck, where it landed with a clang.

Thoughts of Loreda pushed their way in. Elsa should have comforted Loreda at the grave site. What kind of mother snapped at a grieving thirteen-year-old? Loreda had seen too much loss. Elsa knew that. There must be words Elsa could find that would help.

Elsa just had nothing left right now. She felt emptied by the baby’s death. The last thing she could do was face her daughter’s fury.

Better to let a little time smooth over the edges. A night, at least. Tomorrow the sun would shine and Elsa would take Loreda aside and offer what comfort she could.

Coward.

“No,” Elsa said out loud to reinforce the decision. She would not look away from this. She would hit it head-on, try to comfort Loreda as best as she could.

She lifted the tent flap and went inside.