The Four Winds

“Dalhart was a town—fast becoming a city—of box suppers and square dances and Sunday morning services. Hard work and like-minded people creating good lives from the soil.” 

Dalhart, Texas, thrives with the prosperity of its farmers, but that economic success breeds conformity and a strict adherence to rituals: church on Sunday, participation in social events, unquestioning patriotism. While virtues like hard work benefit both the town and its residents, this conformity doesn’t tolerate any deviation, such as a gangly, unwed woman who dares to dream of an education or her olive-skinned baby fathered by an Italian Catholic. Obsessive devotion to rituals creates in the town’s residents an irrational fear of abandoning those rituals. The slender thread by which Dalhart’s prosperity—or the Wolcotts’ social standing—hangs elicits enough anxiety for the Wolcotts to disown their own flesh and blood.

“She knew now what she hadn’t known before, hadn’t even suspected: she would do anything, suffer anything, to be loved, even if it was just for a night.” 

After Elsa’s brief sexual encounter with Rafe, she returns home to a furious father who slaps her, lamenting the shame she’s brought upon the family. In that moment, however, Elsa realizes the depths of her loneliness, vowing to tolerate any beating or humiliation so long as she and Rafe can be together. Starved for the love she’s been denied all her life, even Rafe’s clumsy, selfish lovemaking is an epiphany that is the first step in a long journey toward independence.

“On the few instances when she dared to look up from a beloved book and stare out the window, she saw the emptiness of a spinster’s future stretching out to the flat horizon and beyond.” 

Banished to her room after her dalliance with Rafe, Elsa loses hope that things will ever change. Neglected and tossed aside like an old newspaper, she responds in the only way she knows—by retreating into her books and occupying her time with those minor tasks deemed appropriate for a spinster. While some might gaze out to the horizon and see possibilities—like Mrs. Mallard, the repressed wife in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour—Elsa sees only constancy, living the same dull life for decades to come.

“Here, she sometimes thought, standing on land she cared for, here her child would flourish, would run and play and learn the stories told by the ground and the grapes and the wheat.” 

As Elsa acclimates to farm life, she begins to understand Tony’s reverence for the land, a profound, shared bond in which both parties reap the benefits. Elsa hopes her child will grow into the same love and understanding and that the blood, sweat, and toil—the “stories”—that they pour into the land will become her legacy.

“Believe me, Elsa, this little girl will love you as no one ever has…and make you crazy and try your soul. Often all at the same time.” 

As Elsa cradles her newborn in her arms, Rose offers some of her patented, matriarchal wisdom. During the worst trials of her life—Rafe’s abandonment, life in the squatters’ camp, Loreda’s venting her anger on her—Elsa keeps the advice close to her heart, and in the end, Rose’s words are prophetic indeed. Weathering the ordeal of loss, poverty, and indignity, Loreda comes to love her mother for who she is rather than blame her for who she is not.

“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.” 

As Elsa tries to cope with Loreda’s anger and resentment, her memories of the good times—lying in bed with her, stroking her hair—make the current conflict that much more painful. Even worse, Loreda’s bitter reproaches evoke Elsa’s old insecurities about her own self-worth. The contrast between past and present is reflected not only in Elsa’s relationship with Loreda but in the land itself, once fertile and profitable, now parched and dead.

“The key to life in this dry heat was conservation of everything: water, food, emotion. That last one was the biggest challenge.” 

The long drought, now in its third year, has taken a toll not only on the land but on Elsa’s soul. Her family goes hungry, but even worse, she feels Rafe and Loreda slipping away, becoming emotionally distant, and to avoid the pain of rejection, she withdraws as well. In times of hardship, when family becomes crucial for survival, Elsa’s family retreats, each into their own tormented psyches. Elsa knows this practice is not sustainable, but she can’t muster the will to take action.

“Loreda didn’t want the kind of love that trapped. She wanted to be told she could fly high, be anything and go anywhere—she wanted the things her father wanted.” 

Loreda views her mother as a stern, joyless woman, someone too broken by life to pursue her dreams, or, worse, to allow Loreda to pursue hers. The irony is that the two women are more similar than Loreda knows. Elsa once dreamed big, too, only to have those dreams crushed by uncaring parents and an unforgiving Earth. By trying to protect her daughter from the kind of heartbreak she herself suffered, Elsa unwittingly pushes her daughter away and is guilty of the same kind of overprotection of her own parents. She doesn’t understand that Loreda needs to try—and potentially fail—for herself. She can’t protect her daughter from life, desperately though she may try.

“She had thought that making a perfect home was the answer to making a marriage happy.” 

As Rafe drifts further away from Elsa, feeling suffocated by farm life, Elsa reflects on how things might have been different. She’s spent so much time tending to the external trappings of her marriage that she’s failed to recognize the depth her husband’s depression. Elsa thinks that giving endlessly of herself will cure Rafe’s wanderlust, but no amount of homecooked meals can settle his restless spirit.

“She knew it was her own fault, somehow, her doing, even though in all her desperate musings for the foundation of it, she’d never been able to see the flaw in herself that had proven to be so defining.”

Elsa’s default reaction is to blame herself for her own misfortune, but those self-incriminations also create a kind of cognitive dissonance. She believes—she knows—Rafe’s departure must be her fault because all of her life she’s been told—by her parents, her sisters, and now by her daughter—that she couldn’t keep a man. At the same time, she knows she’s capable of love, of giving herself to another human being. The two truths don’t add up, and the only future she can see is one of heartache.

“Maybe she would start walking and never stop…or never take this scarf off until one day, when she was old and gray, some child would ask about the crazy woman who wore a shirt for a scarf and she would say she couldn’t recall how it had begun or whose shirt it was.”

Lost in her grief over Rafe, Elsa wraps his blue chambray shirt around her neck, keeping at least a small part of him, the only part she has left, close to her. The guilt and shame overwhelm her until she imagines herself losing her mind, wandering aimlessly, obsessed over her one lost love until time takes away the memory altogether. Elsa’s dark musings push her into a deep, emotional funk, although when she finally comes through it, she is stronger for it. Surviving the pain of Rafe’s departure scars her, but without those scars, she may not have the mettle to survive her future ordeals.

“The government man said we did it to ourselves with greed and bad farming. If I’m a bad farmer, I got nothing, Elsa.” 

When a representative of the Roosevelt administration tells the farmers of Lonesome Tree that they have to change their methods to survive, he is met with resistance. In a not-too-tactful manner, he blames them for the conditions that have wreaked havoc on their crops. Angry and prideful at first, Tony begins to ponder the possible truth of the man’s words, but farming is all he knows. It’s his identity. Without that, without his land and his ability to nurture it, he feels lost. Fortunately, he is able to regroup and alter his farming methods, and in the end, the land is restored.

“Dust pneumonia. That was what they called it, but it was really loss and poverty and man’s mistakes.” 

With Anthony near death, the official medical diagnosis seems to Elsa utterly inadequate. While literally true, it doesn’t begin to address the systemic causes of the illness: poor health care, shoddy housing, lack of institutional support. Anthony is young and strong, and he survives, but many of the older residents of Lonesome Tree do not.

“Rose laid a callused hand on Elsa’s cheek. ‘You are everything those children need, Elsa Martinelli. You always have been.’” 

As Elsa prepares to leave for California, Tony and Rose inform her they are staying behind to try to save the farm. Elsa is distraught; she had been counting on her in-laws to bear some of the burden, and now her old insecurities resurface. Rose, however, gives Elsa a shot of self-confidence. All along, Elsa has felt she was a bad mother, but Rose tells her, on the contrary, she has always been more than good enough.

“She closed her eyes for a moment, remembered another time when she’d been scared and felt alone, back when she’d been sick. That was the first time her grandfather had leaned down and whispered, Be brave, into her ear. And then, Or pretend to be. It’s all the same.” 

Much of Elsa’s character development consists of her learning to face her fears. Driving into the unknown with two children, Elsa draws strength from her grandfather’s advice, a lesson she takes with her all the way to the cotton fields of Welty and the civil disobedience that costs her her life. Sometimes courage, she realizes, is simply the art of faking it, of putting on a brave face and hoping that will be enough.

“It felt, strangely, as if the world had just tilted somehow, slid sideways, taking them and everything they knew with it.”

After Loreda uses a shotgun to ward off an attack on her mother, Elsa realizes that so much has changed: their situation, unexpected dangers, and, perhaps most unsettling of all, the degree to which her children will have to adapt. While Elsa is grateful to her daughter for saving her life, it’s unnerving to see the ease with which Loreda threatens to shoot another human being. Desperation has pushed her to it, but the thought of Loreda with blood on her hands moves the very earth beneath Elsa’s feet.

“For the first time, she understood. It wasn’t just banksters running off with people’s money or a movie theater closing its doors or people standing in line for free soup.”

As Loreda looks around the squatters’ camp, she sees signs of permanence—tin sheets for walls, laundry lines strung up, attempts to makes homes out of squalor—and the reality hits hard. The Great Depression isn’t an abstract economic concept debated in the halls of academia or political statehouses. It is people dying of typhoid because no one cares enough to provide clean drinking water. It is seeing malnourished children and the constant fear of no food. This realization fires Loreda’s passion for social justice and propels her into the communist movement.

“Now, the only help women had was each other. ‘I’ll be here for you,’ Elsa said, then added, ‘Maybe that’s how God provides. He put me in your path and you in mine.’” 

When Elsa learns that Jean is pregnant, she resolves to do everything she can to help. Her time in the squatters’ camp has taught her that community is everything. Without it, they would be hundreds of starving, isolated individuals, but together, resources pooled, they can help each other through illness, depression, and even childbirth. Elsa evinces a fatalism born of desperation, not looking for a miracle but content with the possibility that God helps by simply placing kindred souls within striking distance of each other.

“The newspapers were full of outrage and despair on the part of the citizens, who worried that their tax dollars were being spent to help nonresidents.” 

Elsa faces numerous obstacles in California, not the least of which is the resentment of the natives and the institutional roadblocks they erect. As tens of thousands of migrants flood the central valley, the residents see them not as desperate fellow humans but as a pestilence to be eradicated. Their anger echoes current political rhetoric about undocumented immigrants, migrants seeking asylum, and even unaccompanied minors who some fear will overtax the welfare system and take benefits away from citizens.

“They both knew better. It was something to be ashamed of. Americans weren’t supposed to take handouts from the government. They were supposed to work hard and succeed on their own.” 

Despite abject poverty, malnutrition, and low wages, Elsa still cannot accept government assistance without shame. The ethos of self-reliance and individualism is so pervasive that people like Elsa and Jean, who find themselves homeless and desperate through no fault of their own, are conditioned to believe their situation is somehow a moral failing on their part. This is individualism run amok, a condition under which growers like Welty thrive while keeping workers groveling for scraps.

“You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. Not by words or anger or actions or time. I love you. I will always love you.”

When Loreda returns to the squatters’ camp after a night with the communists and union organizers, she sees the pain she’s caused her mother and regrets all the anger, defiance, and unfair blame she’s placed on Elsa all these years. Elsa, however, responds with only love, the love every parent feels for their child, a love that tolerates and forgives no matter the transgression. 

“‘A man can’t feed his family on one cent for every pound of cotton he picks. You know it and you’re scared. You should be scared. You kick a dog long enough he’s going to bite,’ Jack said.” 

When Jack interrupts a meeting of growers who are complaining about the possibility of a strike, he confronts Welty with his own inhumanity. Jack’s words resonate even today, and while unions have been besmirched and degraded over the past 40 years, Hannah suggests that, without the right to organize and demand fair wages, workers will continue to be crushed under the boot heel of unregulated capitalism.

“‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘This isn’t who we are in America.’”

After Jean dies, Elsa finally comes around to the idea of a strike. More than once, she expresses shock and disbelief at the treatment of the migrants. How, she wonders, can people live in these conditions “in America?” She is so deeply invested in the American story of fairness and equality of opportunity that she can’t process the reality she sees.