“Because your daddy hates the rain,” Emaline said. “I suppose we have to go where he goes.”

“But why?”

“Because he’s your father. He’s the one who puts food on the table.”

“Goddamned right I do,” Jake said. “That’s why we go where I say we go.”

When Red asked one too many times, Jake aimed a kick that just missed his behind. “Not another damned word out of you, either one of you! I said we’re goin back, so we’re goin back. That’s an end to it.”

Jake had even packed up their bed and Red’s little cot, so they had to spend the night in sleeping bags on the floor. Emaline tried to point out that if they traveled at this time of year they would not be able to camp and they would end up paying for hotel rooms, wasting what she had been able to save with him working at the mill. If they waited until spring, they could stay in campgrounds for two bits a night. Jake wouldn’t listen. Nothing was going to change his mind. Red cried himself to sleep. Emaline lay awake in the almost empty house, listening to the rain. She felt a penetrating weariness, an exhaustion with living so complete that, for an awful moment, she wanted to find a butcher knife and slit her wrists. Anything was better than going back to Nebraska with Jake.

Red was sleeping nestled tightly against her back. He threw a slender arm around her, and she patted his hand. Where the boy went, she would have to go.

The trip was like a funeral procession, an endless, bumpy ride devoid of hope, purpose, or even a clear destination. Emaline was grim and silent, so angry with Jake she didn’t trust herself to speak. With every mile, she could feel a terrible fate settling around her. They would find another poor farm and try to scrape by, making enough to live on or not making enough, doing endless labor simply to put food on the table. They had no money for a down payment on a farm of their own, so their only choice would be to rent, to become virtual sharecroppers paying a landlord out of whatever they were able to grow. It was hard enough working a farm for yourself, considerably worse when you had to work it for someone else. It was just like Jake to drag them all the way to Oregon, stay six months, decide he didn’t like it because of the rain. He never took her feelings into account. He didn’t even worry about the boy. All that mattered was that Jake McCloskey didn’t like the rain. That was enough to persuade him to pull up stakes overnight.