The Four Winds

Elsa’s firstborn, Loreda, shares her father’s airy aspirations and wanderlust, dreaming of traveling the world as a journalist. Elsa once had those same dreams only to see them crushed by bad choices. She wants to protect her daughter from the same disappointment, but Loreda sees her mother’s actions as stern and soul-crushing, blaming her for Rafe’s departure. Loreda’s fierce independence, initially triggered by her resentment of her mother, creates an emotional chasm between her and Elsa, although that independence serves her well when she disobeys Elsa and attends union meetings. Loreda transitions from a sullen teenager, angry about nearly everything—the smell of the ditch-bank camp, her own physical appearance, her mother’s docility—to a social justice warrior whose courage and resilience inspire her mother to fight for the cause as well.

Loreda’s love for her mother has deep roots, although she doesn’t understand how deep until circumstances become so dire that her mother must choose between living under the yoke of a repressive economic system and risking everything for justice. When Elsa lays dying in the hospital, Loreda laments that she will be adrift without her—ironically, the same fear Elsa felt when Rafe left— but Elsa is right about her daughter. All the defiance and anger she vented on her mother in years past will be a productive and essential inner fire, pushing her forward when despair seems too great. Just as Elsa found her strength precisely when she needed it, Loreda will do the same. Even at 13, she displays the necessary grit to survive; from saving her mother from a violent drifter to sneaking out to union meetings to robbing the company store at gunpoint, Loreda, while she does not always make the most sensible choices, shows she has the decisiveness to at least commit fully to a choice.

Elsa’s youngest, Anthony, is in many ways the most resilient member of the family, a resilience born of youth and naivete. For Anthony, ignorance is indeed bliss as the life-and-death stakes of the drought and the devastation of the land are lost on him. Like most young children, Anthony cannot conceive of life changing substantially, and when it does, it’s simply another adventure to play out. Even his near-death experience with “dust pneumonia” doesn’t dampen his spirits. When Elsa must leave him alone in the hospital, she finds him a week later not lonely or depressed but playing pirate games. The journey to California, Elsa knows, will be difficult, but by framing it as an adventure, Anthony is eager to leave. Anthony finally grasps the reality of their plight when Elsa is near death. Sobbing, he beseeches her, “Don’t die, Mommy” (437). Maturity is often born of tragedy, and Anthony will be forced to grow up quickly just like his big sister.

Rafe, the son of a neighboring farmer, is full of big dreams and raging hormones when he meets Elsa. A shy and withdrawn young woman unused to flattery and attention, she is the perfect target of Rafe’s charming advances. Like so many young couples swept away by sexual impulses, the result is all too predictable; however, while Elsa sees her pregnancy as the beginning of something foundational, something she’s always wanted, Rafe sees it as an obstacle to his dreams. He most certainly loves Loreda and Anthony—their memories of their father are joyful—but over time, he feels his life slipping away. Imagining a future of planting and harvesting wheat plunges him into a depression that, in his mind, only running away can heal. Literature is full of examples of this type of wandering seeker, from Huck Finn to Frodo Baggins, characters who leave home and embark on great adventures, some willingly, others out of necessity. Ironically, while Elsa has spent her youth buried in books, her feet are planted firmly on the ground, while Rafe succumbs to the pull of some vague, romantic notion that he cannot define.

A stalwart woman who immigrated to the United States from Sicily, Rose is the archetypal frontierswoman, that hardy breed of adventurer who stakes out a claim on a scrap of wilderness and builds a life with no more than her wits and bare hands. Rose and Tony are a strong team, equal partners in the land they care for and the home they’ve built. Rose also dispenses plenty of no-nonsense frontier wisdom, displaying a resignation born of a life that has seen its share of hard times, including the deaths of three children. When Elsa despairs, remembering her parents’ rejection, Rose responds, “So you go on…What choice is there for us?” (90). A deeply religious woman, Rose must overcome her initial aversion to Elsa for bearing a child out of wedlock, but she soon comes to love her as her own daughter. She admires Elsa’s strength in adapting to farm life and her willingness to do the hard work of nurturing both the land and a family through good times and bad. Rose becomes more of a mother to Elsa than her own mother ever was.

An “old world” immigrant who only wants the chance to be American, Tony serves as a robust complement to his wife. He is the other half of the Martinelli team, tilling the soil and sowing the seeds, laboring in the heat of the Texas sun to coax a living from the land. Tony is more jovial and less judgmental than Rose, welcoming Elsa into the family immediately even while his wife is skeptical. He expresses his joy—and sometimes searches for it—by playing his fiddle for the family and at social gatherings. While the land has always provided for them in the past, the drought pushes his optimism to the limit. When Tony despairs, the situation is bleak indeed, yet he has so much invested in the land that, even when Elsa and his grandchildren must abandon it, he cannot. He will live and die by it. Tony symbolizes every immigrant who comes to America with little else but a desire to work and build a new life. While people like the Wolcotts look down on immigrants like Tony and Rose, the Martinellis are just happy to farm their land, earn a living, and share their prosperity with their family.

Elsa’s parents are stern scions of Dalhart with deep roots in the town’s history. As a successful businessman, Eugene has an image to uphold, and that image doesn’t include a socially awkward, unmarried daughter with dreams of world travel or flapper aspirations. While they tell themselves their overprotective parenting methods are only for Elsa’s good—following a childhood bout with rheumatic fever—those methods are really a convenient excuse for them to keep Elsa hidden away. When they relegate her to spinster status, they convince themselves they’re only being realistic, but in fact their overbearing behavior smothers her, creating not a compliant, submissive daughter but a restless, defiant one. The irony is that, by keeping their daughter sheltered, they have provided sweet-talking Rafe with the perfect target, someone unable to distinguish charm from real love and who pays the price of one fateful night for the rest of her life.

Jack enters the story late, but his impact is substantial. He is the mature version of Rafe—a dreamer, but not an idle one. He is a man who knows that dreams must be fought for. They require hard work and perseverance, something Rafe never understood, and it is a more mature Elsa who falls in love with him. While fearful at first—the label communist is a dirty word even two decades before the McCarthy hearings—Elsa soon discovers that the man behind the label is fierce, devoted, and compassionate. When the squatters’ camp floods, Jack and his colleagues are the only ones who offer help. Despite his antipathy for Welty, he pulls strings to find Elsa a cottage in the workers’ camp. Perhaps most importantly, he gives Elsa the one thing she’s never had: self-confidence. He nurtures her courage when it falters; he calls her a warrior even though she doesn’t feel like one. He places his faith in her and fights by her side, taking beating after beating for the sake of thousands of workers just like Elsa, workers he may not know personally but who represent something precious: the backbone of the American dream. While his presence can be intense and intimidating, it is the result of years of hard-fought battles against a foe with greater resources and deeper connections. He is the tenacious David standing up to a capitalist Goliath. Like so much of The Four Winds, Jack’s love for Elsa is bittersweet. She gets only a brief taste of what true love is. As she lay dying in the hospital, she looks at Jack, Loreda, and Anthony and sees only what might have been.