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“Doc says he can leave on Tuesday Any news froovernment man?” Elsa asked

Tony gave her a look so steeped in despair it took her breath away “No good news,” he said

Elsa nodded

They started the long, solemn walk home

IN TWO DAYS, THEY were leaving this godforsaken land And Elsa didn’t say that lightly

God forsaken

How else could one describe it? God had turned His back on the Great Plains

She’d spent the last few days packing for the trip On this Pal to church, Elsa had canned the jackrabbits Tony and Loreda shot yesterday; when that laborious chore was done, she’d moved on to the laundry

Now at the end of the blue-skied day, Elsa knelt in front of her little aster plant, pouring a few precious cupfuls of water into the thirsty ground

This flohich she’d covered and protected and watered and talked to for so long, stood alone, defiantly green against all this brown

She would have to leave it behind to die

She dug up the sloved hands, she crossed the yard

At the family’s cemetery, the white picket fence lay in pieces; the headstones were half covered in dirt Four gray, store-bought headstones with Rose’s and Elsa’s babies’ nairls and a boy

How long would these one, ould tend to their children, buried all alone in the middle of nowhere?

Elsa knelt in the sand “Maria, Angelina, Juliana, Lorenzo This is all I can leave with you I will pray it rains this spring so it flowers” She planted the flower in the powdery dirt in front of Lorenzo’s half-buried headstone