The Four Winds

When Rafe abandons his family, he leaves behind a single item, a blue chambray shirt. In despair, Elsa clings to the shirt, smelling Rafe’s scent, seeing it on his body, and even wearing it around her neck like a scarf. She holds the shirt close, something she couldn’t do with her husband. Loreda, too, sees the shirt as a surrogate for her absent father. The shirt represents not only Rafe but also all the memories Elsa shared with him: his charming flirtations, their first night of sexual intimacy, even his drinking and digressions and her forgiveness of them. In time, Elsa’s grief turns to resignation and acceptance, and the shirt loses its emotional power. Elsa must survive on her own, despite her self-doubt, and that means discarding the final remnant of her marriage and her dependency on its emotional hold.

As Elsa and her family languish in the squatters’ camp, praying for work and a way out, Loreda walks into town one day and discovers the library. She enters cautiously, expecting the same rejection she’s gotten all over town. Instead, the librarian greets her warmly, offering to process a library card for her even though she has no permanent address. She even loans her a book on good faith. The librarian’s trust and decency are a godsend to Loreda, who has been snubbed at every turn since arriving in California. She soon becomes a regular at the library, at first checking out young adult fiction but soon moving on to works about labor relations and the Communist Manifesto. When Elsa was a young girl, books were her escape from the stern judgment of her parents, and for Loreda, books have a similar purpose, at least at first. As she graduates to more complex texts, they serve a different objective: They broaden her horizons, teaching her about the world outside of cotton picking and squatters’ camps. In the end, books become Loreda’s salvation, pushing her to attend college, fulfilling her mother’s lifelong wish for her.