The Four Winds

by Kristin Hannah

This farm had been reconfigured by wind and drought, sculpted into a land of tumbleweeds and starving mesquite. Years of drought, combined with the economic ravages of the Great Depression, had brought the Great Plains to its knees.

The rains had begun to slow in ’31, and in the last three years there had been almost none at all. This year, so far, they had had less than five inches. Not enough to fill a pitcher for tea, let alone water thousands of acres of wheat.

Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.

She did love her husband as deeply as she loved her children, Loreda and Anthony, and as deeply as she’d come to love the Martinellis and the land. Elsa had discovered within herself a nearly bottomless capacity for love.

As long as he was beside her, it was okay. She would always forgive him. As little as he gave her, as frayed as his affection for her sometimes was, she lived in fear of losing it. Losing him.

Elsa felt a deeply rooted shame in her daughter’s rejection. In her hurt, she did what she’d always done: she disappeared. But all the while, she waited, prayed, that both her husband and her daughter would someday see how much she loved them and they would love her in return. Until then, she dared not push too hard or demand too much. The price could be too high.

There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.

They were supposed to be conserving everything, but Daddy refused to give up on his wine or his hooch. He said drinking was the only thing keeping him sane. He loved to drop a slippery, sweet slice of preserved peach into his after-supper wine.

“Do you have to be a farmer?” He turned. She saw the frown that bunched his thick black brows. “I was born one.” “You always tell me this is America. A person can be anything.”