Кристин Ханна - The Four Winds

“Aw, Elsa … how can I thank you?”

“You don’t need to thank me. You know that.”

Jean picked up her bucket. The two women walked back to the broken-down truck. How would the Deweys follow the crops in the coming months?

Elsa didn’t know how to leave them here, but there was nothing she could do. She knew that others were even worse off, without even a car to live in.

“It will get better,” Jean said.

“Of course it will.”

A look passed between them, a knowledge of their shared lie.

“We’ll drink gin and dance the Charleston, like them society girls,” Jean said. “I always wanted dance lessons. Did I tell you that? As a girl in Montgomery. I begged my mama for lessons. I’ve still got two left feet. You shoulda seen me at my weddin’. Jeb and me dancing was a terrible thing to see.”

Elsa smiled. “It couldn’t be worse than Rafe and me. Someday soon we will teach each other to dance, Jean. You and me, with music. And we won’t care who is watching or what they think,” she said. She pulled Jean into a tight hug and found it difficult to let go.

“Go on,” Jean said. “We’re fine here.”

With a crisp little nod and a wave to the rest of the family, she headed back across the soggy field. She saw her own stove, half buried in mud, lying on its side, the pipe gone. With each breath, she almost cried; each moment she held it back was a triumph. She found a bucket sticking up from the mud and picked it up and kept walking. Then she found a coffee cup and she picked that up, too.

In Welty, she walked to the gas station and washed out the bucket at the faucet by the pumps. She held her muddy boots under the water, cleaning them, too, and then she put them back on. All the while she was thinking about her friend, living in a truck in the middle of a sea of mud in the winter.

“Elsa?”

She shut off the water and turned.

Jack stood there, holding a sheath of papers. Flyers, no doubt, urging people to rise up in anger about the way they were treated.

She shouldn’t move toward him, not right out here in public, but she couldn’t help herself. She felt fragile and alone.

So alone.

“Are you okay?” he asked, meeting her more than halfway.

“I’ve been out … to the ditch-bank camp. Jean … and the children … are living…” On that, her voice broke.

Jack opened his arms and she walked into his embrace. He held her close, said nothing while she cried. Even so, his arms comforted her, his shirt soaked up her tears.

Finally, she drew back, looked at him. He let her go and wiped the tears from her face with the pad of his thumb.

“That’s no way to live,” she said, clearing her throat. Already the moment of intimacy between them was dissolving. She felt embarrassed for letting him hold her. No doubt he thought her needy and pathetic.

“No, it isn’t. Let me drive you home?”

“Back to Texas?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Jack, what I want doesn’t matter one whit. Not even to me.” She wiped her eyes, ashamed by the weakness she’d revealed.

“It’s not weak, you know. To feel things deeply, to want things. To need.”

Elsa was startled by his perceptiveness. “I need to go,” she said. “The kids will be out of school soon.”

“Goodbye, Elsa.”

She was surprised by how sad he looked when he said it. Or maybe disappointed in her. It was probably that. “Goodbye, Jack,” she said, and walked away, left him standing there. Somehow, she knew he was staring after her, but she didn’t look back.

BY THE END OF March, the ground had dried, the ditch-bank camp had filled again, Loreda had turned fourteen, and the Martinelli family was deeply in debt. Elsa did the math obsessively in her head. So far, she and Loreda would have to pick three thousand pounds of cotton just to pay their debt. But she still had to pay rent and buy food. It was a violent, vicious cycle that would start all over again when winter came. There was no way to get ahead, no way to get out.

Still, she went out each day, looking for work while the kids were in school. On good days, she made forty cents weeding or doing someone’s laundry or cleaning someone’s house. She and the kids made weekly visits to the Salvation Army to pick through the give-away clothing bins.

In April, she counted down the days until she officially became a resident of the state and could qualify for relief. It no longer even crossed her mind to refuse aid from the government.

On the appointed day, she woke early and made flour-and-water pancakes for the kids and poured them each a half glass of the watered-down apple juice they sold by the quart in the company store.

Still sleepy eyed, the kids dressed and put on their shoes and filed out of the small cabin and headed for the bathrooms, where there would be a long line.

When they returned, Elsa served them two pancakes each—doctored with a precious dollop of jam. They sat on their bed, side by side.

“You need to eat something, Mom,” Loreda said.

For a moment Elsa saw her fourteen-year-old daughter in heartbreaking relief: bony face, prominent cheekbones. A gingham dress hung on her thin body; her clavicle stuck up from the hollowed-out skin on either side.

She was supposed to be going to square dances and having her first crush on a boy at this age …

“Mom?” Loreda said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Are you dizzy?”

“No. Not at all. Just thinking.”

Ant laughed. “That’s no good, Ma. You know better.”

Ant stood up. He was all knobs and sticks, this boy who had just turned nine; with elbows and knees and feet that were all too big for his skinny limbs. In the past few months, he’d found friends and begun to act like a boy again; he refused to have his hair cut, hated any sort of games, and called her Ma.

“Guess what today is,” Elsa said.

“What?” Loreda said, not bothering to look up.

“We get state relief,” Elsa said. “Real cash money. I can start paying down our debt.”

“Sure,” Loreda said, plunging her empty plate into the bucket of soapy water.

“We registered with the state a year ago,” Elsa said. “We can get aid as residents now.”

Loreda looked at her. “They’ll find a way to take it back.”

“Come on, Miss Sunshine,” Elsa said, offering Ant his coat.

Elsa didn’t bother with her own coat. She put on her galoshes and wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.

They stepped out into the busy camp. Now that the threat of frost had passed, men were busy in the fields. Tractors worked ceaselessly, readying the soil, churning it up, planting seeds.

“It makes me think of Grandpa,” Loreda said.

They all stopped, listened to the sound of the tractors’ motors. The smell of freshly turned soil hung in the air.

“It does,” Elsa said, feeling a wave of homesickness.

They kept walking, three abreast, until they reached the school tents.

“’Bye, Ma. Good luck with relief,” Ant said, running off.

Loreda ducked into her tent.

Elsa stood there a moment, listening to the sounds of children talking and laughing, of teachers telling them to take their seats. If she closed her eyes—which she did, just for a moment—she could imagine a whole different world.

Finally, she turned away. Paths between the tents and cabins had been worn into ruts by hundreds of feet. At the bathrooms, she got in line and waited her turn.

It wasn’t a bad wait at this time of day—less than twenty minutes for the toilets. She wanted to take a shower, but with only two showers, the wait was always an hour or more.

She went into her cabin and washed the breakfast dishes and put them in the salvaged apple crate that was their cupboard. In the past months since the flood, they had become good at scavenging.