Кристин Ханна - The Four Winds

“ Elsa? ” Papa said.

“Yes,” was her mother’s barely there answer.

Papa grabbed Elsa by the arm and yanked her close. “Who ruined you?”

“No, Papa—”

“Tell me his name right now, or as God is my witness, I will go door to door and ask every man in this town if he ruined my daughter.”

Elsa imagined that: Papa dragging her from door to door, a modern-day Hester Prynne; him banging on doors, asking men like Mr. Hurst or Mr. McLaney, Have you ruined this woman?

Sooner or later, she and her father would leave town and head out to the farms …

He would do it. She knew he would. There was no stopping her father once he’d made up his mind. “I’ll leave,” she said. “I’ll leave right now. Go out on my own.”

“It must have been … you know … a crime,” Mama said. “No man would—”

“Want me?” Elsa said, spinning to face her mother. “No man could ever want me. You’ve told me that all my life. You’ve all made sure I understood that I was ugly and unlovable, but it isn’t true. Rafe wanted me. He—”

“Martinelli,” Papa said, his voice thick with disgust. “An Eye-talian. His father bought a thresher from me this year. Sweet God. When people hear…” He shoved Elsa away from him. “Go to your room. I need to think.”

Elsa stumbled away. She wanted to say something, but what words could fix this? She walked up the porch steps and into the house.

Maria stood in the archway to the kitchen, holding a silver candlestick and a rag. “Miss Wolcott, are you all right?”

“No, Maria, I’m not.”

Elsa ran upstairs to her room. She felt the start of tears and denied herself the relief they promised.

She touched her flat, nearly concave stomach. She couldn’t imagine a baby in her, growing secretly. Surely a woman would know such a thing.

An hour passed, then another. What were they talking about, her parents? What would they do to her? Beat her, lock her away, call the police and report a fictitious crime?

She paced. She sat. She paced again. Outside her window, she saw evening start to fall.

They would throw her out and she would wander the Great Plains, destitute and ruined, until it was time for her to give birth, which she would do alone, in squalor, and her body would give out on her at last. She would die in childbirth.

So would the baby.

Stop it. Her parents wouldn’t do that to her. They couldn’t. They loved her.

At last, the bedroom door opened. Mama stood there, looking unusually harried and discomfited. “Pack a bag, Elsa.”

“Where am I going? Will it be like Gertrude Renke? She was gone for months after that scandal with Theodore. Then she came home, and no one ever said a thing about it.”

“Pack your bag.”

Elsa knelt beside her bed and pulled out her suitcase. The last time it had been used was when she went to the hospital in Amarillo. Eleven years ago.

She pulled clothes from her closet without thought or design and folded them into her open suitcase.

Elsa stared at her overstuffed bookcase. Books lay on top, were stacked on the floor beside it. More books covered her nightstand. Asking her to choose among them was like having to choose between air and water.

“I haven’t all day to wait,” Mama said.

Elsa picked out The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. She left The Age of Innocence, which in a way had started all of this.

She put the four novels in her suitcase and clasped it shut.

“No Bible, I see. Come,” Mama said. “Let’s go.”

Elsa followed her mother out of the house. They crossed through the garden and approached Papa, who stood by the roadster.

“It can’t come back on us, Eugene,” Mama said. “She’ll have to marry him.”

Elsa stopped. “Marry him?” In all the hours she’d had to imagine her terrible fate, this had not even occurred to her. “You can’t be serious. He’s only eighteen.”

Mama made a sound of disgust.

Papa opened the passenger door and waited impatiently for Elsa to get into the car. As soon as she was seated, he slammed her door, took his place in the driver’s seat, and started the engine.

“Just take me to the train station.”

Papa turned on his headlights. “You afraid your Eye-talian won’t want you? Too late, missy. You won’t simply disappear. Oh, no. You will face the consequences of your sin.”

A few miles out of Dalhart, there was nothing to see but the yellow beams of the twin headlights. Every minute, every mile tightened Elsa’s fear until she felt she might simply break apart.

Lonesome Tree was a nothing little town tucked up toward the Oklahoma border. They blew through it at twenty miles per hour.

Two miles later, the headlights shone on a mailbox that read: MARTINELLI. Papa turned onto a long dirt driveway, which was lined on both sides by cottonwood trees and fenced with barbed wire attached to whatever wood the Martinellis had been able to find in this mostly treeless land.

The car pulled into a well-tended yard and stopped in front of a whitewashed farmhouse with a covered front porch and dormer windows that looked out to the road.

Papa honked his horn. Loudly. One. Two. Three times.

A man came out of the barn, holding an ax casually over one shoulder. As he stepped into the glow of the headlights, Elsa saw that he wore the farmer’s uniform in these parts: patched dungarees and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

A woman walked out of the house and joined the man. She was petite, with black hair woven into a coronet. She wore a green plaid dress and a crisp white apron. She was as beautiful as Rafe was handsome; they shared the same sculpted face, high cheekbones, and full lips, the same olive complexion.

Papa got out of the car, then walked around to the passenger door, opened it, and yanked Elsa to her feet.

“Eugene,” the farmer said. “I’m up-to-date on my thresher payments, aren’t I?”

Papa ignored him, yelled: “Rafe Martinelli!”

Elsa wished the earth would open up and swallow her. She knew what the farmer and his wife saw when they looked at her: a spinster, skinny as a length of twine, tall as most men, hair cut unevenly, her narrow, sharp-chinned face as plain as a dirt field. Her thin lips were chapped, torn, and bloody. She’d been chewing on them nervously. The suitcase in her right hand was small, a testament to the fact that she was a woman who owned almost nothing.

Rafe appeared on the porch.

“What can we do for yah, Eugene?” Mr. Martinelli said.

“Your boy has ruined my daughter, Tony. She’s expecting.”

Elsa saw the way Mrs. Martinelli’s face changed at that, how the look in her eyes went from kind to suspicious. An appraising, judging look in which Elsa was condemned as either a liar or a loose woman or both.

This was how people in town would see Elsa now: the old maid who’d seduced a boy and been ruined. Elsa held herself together with sheer willpower, refusing to give voice to the scream that filled her head.

Shame.

She thought she’d known shame before, would have said it was even the ordinary course of things, but now she saw the difference. In her family she’d felt ashamed for being unattractive, unmarriageable. She’d let that shame become a part of her, let it weave through her body and mind, become the connective tissue that held her together. But in that shame, there had been hope that one day they would see past all of that to the real her, the sister/daughter she was in her mind. A flower closed up tightly, waiting for the sunlight to fall on furled petals, desperate to bloom.

This shame was different. She’d brought it on herself and, worse, she had destroyed this poor young man’s life.