The Last Ballad Read online

  Dedication

  For my daughters Early Elizabeth and Juniper Rose

  Contents

  Cover

  Endpaper

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: Ella May

  Chapter Two: Lilly Wiggins

  Chapter Three: Verchel Park

  Chapter Four: Ella May

  Chapter Five: Brother

  Chapter Six: Claire McAdam

  Chapter Seven: Richard McAdam

  Chapter Eight: Katherine McAdam

  Chapter Nine: Ella May

  Chapter Ten: Hampton Haywood

  Chapter Eleven: Albert Roach

  Chapter Twelve: Hampton Haywood

  Chapter Thirteen: Katherine McAdam

  Chapter Fourteen: Brother

  Chapter Fifteen: Ella May

  Chapter Sixteen: Brother

  Chapter Seventeen: Lilly Wiggins

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Wiley Cash

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Gaston Transom-Times

  Thursday, April 4, 1929

  Were you there, friends? Were you one of the patriotic, law-abiding AMERICAN CITIZENS who witnessed mob rule at the Loray Mill yesterday? Any man who loves this country and its one-hundred-and-fifty-year history of FREEDOM could easily see the difference between our STARS AND STRIPES and the bloody red flag of Communism, the flag of the Bolshevists who want to destroy our government, the flag of anarchy, the flag of dark Russia where men do not believe in religion or the sanctity of marriage. PEOPLE OF GASTON COUNTY, WILL YOU ALLOW FRED BEAL AND HIS MOSCOW ASSOCIATES TO SPREAD THE DOCTRINES OF BOLSHEVISM ANYWHERE IN AMERICA AND ESPECIALLY HERE IN OUR BELOVED NORTH CAROLINA?

  Before Governor Max Gardener called in the National Guard yesterday the mob at the Loray Mill ran wild in all of its fanged terror, ready to harm, ready to kill, ready to destroy. Chief of Police Orville Aderholt and his officers, who were few in number but loyal in their duty, had spent hours trying to quell the mob. They maintained law and order as best they could, but they were quickly overcome, for Fred Beal and his gang had told the strikers to use violence, to attack the officers, to kill anyone who stood in their way. The troops arrived, men who believe in liberty, freedom, and our Constitutional government, and the mob saw it would be defeated and dispersed.

  WE ASK EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IN GASTON COUNTY TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION: WILL I ALLOW THESE COMMUNISTS TO GAIN CONTROL OF GASTON COUNTY, THESE COMMUNISTS LED BY MEN LIKE FRED BEAL WHO DO NOT BELIEVE IN OUR GOD, OUR CONSTITUTION, OR OUR GOVERNMENT?

  THE LORAY MILL STRIKE IS ABOUT MUCH MORE THAN A FEW MEN ATTEMPTING TO JOIN A UNION FOR BETTER WAGES. IT WAS NOT ORGANIZED FOR THAT REASON. IT WAS STARTED TO MASK THE BOLSHEVISTS’ DESIRE TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT AND DESTROY PROPERTY AND TO KILL, KILL, KILL.

  THE TIME IS AT HAND FOR EVERY AMERICAN TO DO HIS DUTY.

  Advertisement Paid for by the Council of Concerned Citizens of Gaston County

  Chapter One

  Ella May

  Saturday, May 4, 1929

  Ella May knew she wasn’t pretty, had always known it. She didn’t have to come all the way down the mountain from Tennessee to Bessemer City, North Carolina, to find that out. But here she was now, and here she’d been just long enough for no other place in her memory to feel like home, but not quite long enough for Bessemer City to feel like home either.

  She sat on the narrow bench in the office of American Mill No. 2—the wall behind her vibrating with the whir of the carding machines, rollers, and spinners that raged on the other side, with lint hung up in her throat and lungs like tar—reminding herself that she’d already given up any hope of ever feeling rooted again, of ever finding a place that belonged to her and she to it. Instead of thinking thoughts like those, Ella turned and looked at Goldberg’s brother’s young secretary where she sat behind a tidy desk just a few feet away. The soft late-day light that had already turned toward dusk now picked its way through the windows behind the girl. The light lay upon the girl’s dark, shiny hair and caused it to glow like some angel had just lifted a hand away from the crown of her head. The girl was pale and soft, her cheeks brushed with rouge and her lips glossed a healthy pink. She wore a fine powder-blue dress with a spray of artificial, white spring flowers pinned to the lapel. She read a new copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and she laughed to herself and wet her finger on her tongue and turned page after page while Ella watched.

  How old could that girl be? Ella wondered. Twenty? Twenty-five? Ella was only twenty-eight herself, but she felt at least two, three times that age. She stared at the girl’s dainty, manicured hands as they turned the pages, and then she looked down at her own hands where they rested upturned in her lap, her fingers intertwined as if they’d formed a nest. She unlocked her fingers and placed her palms flat against her belly, thought about the new life that had just begun to stir inside her, how its stirring often felt like the flutter of a bird’s wing. She didn’t know whether or not what she felt was real, so she’d decided not to say a word about it to Charlie, not to mention a thing to anyone aside from her friend Violet.

  Charlie had blown into Bessemer City that winter just like he’d blown into other places, and Ella knew that one day he’d eventually blow out the same way he’d come in. He didn’t have children or a family or anything else to tether him to a place where he didn’t want to be.

  “I hadn’t never wanted a child,” he’d said after they’d known each other for a month. “I just never found the right woman to care for a child the way I want it cared for.” He’d come up behind Ella and spread his palm over her taut belly as if trying to keep something from spilling out. She’d felt his hand press against the hollowed-out space between her ribs and her hips. She was always so racked with hunger that she found it hard to believe that her body offered any resistance at all. “But who’s to say I’m always going to feel that way?” he’d said. “I might want a family of my own just yet.” Maybe he’d meant it then, and, if so, she hoped he still meant it now.

  Perhaps it was the soft thrash of wings against the walls of her belly that made Ella think further of birds, and she considered how her thin, gnarled hands reminded her of a bird’s feet. She placed her palms on her knees, watched her knuckles rise like knobby mountains, saw her veins roll beneath her skin like blue worms that had died but never withered away. What was left of her fingernails were thick and broken, and it was laughable to imagine that someone like Ella would ever spend the time it would take to use a tiny brush to color such ugly things.

  She resisted the urge to lift these awful hands to her face and allow those fingers to feel what waited there: the sunken, wide-set, dark eyes; the grim mouth that she imagined as always frowning because she did not believe she had ever smiled at herself when looking into a mirror, and she had only seen one photograph of herself in her lifetime, and she was certain that she was not smiling then. She recalled the photograph of a younger version of herself taken more than ten years ago; she and John and baby Lilly posing for a traveling photographer inside the post office down in Cowpens, South Carolina. John with his arm thrown around Ella’s shoulder, his face and eyes lit with the exaltation of the gloriously drunk, Lilly crying in her arms, what Ella knew to be her own much younger face blurred in movement as it turned toward Lilly’s cries at the exact moment of the camera’s looking. John had purchased the photo, folded it, and kept it in a cigar box that rattled with loose change and the quiet rustle of paper money when and if they had it. Ella had removed the photograph and gazed upon it from time to time over the years, but never to look at her own face. She’d o
nly wanted to see the face of her firstborn, the girl who was now a tough, independent young lady who mothered her little sister and brothers more than Ella had the time or the chance or the energy to. John had left her—left them all, for that matter—over a year ago, and Ella assumed that he’d taken the cigar box with him because Lord knows he’d taken all that money, but the only thing that Ella missed now was the photograph.

  She looked over at the young secretary where she sat reading. No, Ella wasn’t pretty, not like that girl. Pretty took the will to be so and the money to do it and the time to see to it and the sleep to maintain it, and Ella didn’t have any of those things. The woman lowered the book to turn a page. Her eye caught Ella’s. The girl’s gaze shifted toward the closed door of Goldberg’s brother’s office.

  “It won’t be much longer,” the girl said. She didn’t look back at Ella. Instead she returned her eyes to her book, but Ella nodded her head yes anyway. She sat and listened as the girl turned pages and laughed softly, cleared her throat, yawned, laughed again. Ella closed her eyes and tuned her ears to the goings-on behind Goldberg’s brother’s closed door, but she couldn’t hear a thing.

  Her shift had just started, and she’d only been at work for a few minutes when the foreman, whose name was Tommy Dobbins, sent her down to Goldberg’s brother’s office. He’d put his fingers in his mouth and whistled until she looked up and spied him several rows over from the spinners she’d been tending. He’d pointed at her and crooked his finger and mouthed the words “Come here.”

  Ella walked down the line away from Dobbins while she stared at the dozens of white strands of yarn where they coiled around the spools, her eyes searching for a break or a weak spot that would require her to twist the broken ends together before the strand could continue on to the bobbin. From there the doffers would come behind her and remove the full bobbins and replace them with empty spindles. After that, spoolers would combine several strands into yarn. If a strand broke on Ella’s spinners, then the tension failed, which meant the hank clock wouldn’t register any output, which meant Ella’s pay was docked for any amount of time the little dial on the hank refused to tick. She needed to keep the dials moving, and any interruption, even if it was the shift supervisor himself, ran the risk of cutting into her pay. And that was how she spent twelve hours a night, six nights a week: eyeing hundreds of strands of yarn at the same time while worrying about the tiny hands of a clock that dictated whether and how much her children would eat.

  She came around the far end of the line and checked the strands on the other side on her way to where Dobbins leaned against the railing at the top of the rickety wooden stairs. She stopped in front of him and waited for him to explain why he’d called her away from the frenzy of the spinning machines, but Dobbins just rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger, and then he looked down at a pocket watch he wore on a leather strap. He wasn’t tall, but he was broad-shouldered, and although he was only forty years old his red hair had long ago faded almost completely to gray. He closed the watch and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Goldberg’s brother wants to talk to you,” he said.

  Everyone knew there were two brothers, two Goldbergs, but the smaller and slighter of the two was the one who came into work each day, the one who signed their paychecks, the one most likely to call them into his office and chastise them or promote them or fire them altogether. This man had always been known as Goldberg’s brother; the other, more mysterious brother, simply as Goldberg.

  “Can it wait?” Ella asked. “I don’t get a break for another six hours. It’s going to set me back on the hank if I come off the line.”

  Dobbins looked over Ella’s shoulder at the other workers. “Dinah and Molly can tend your spinners.”

  “Dinah and Molly can’t run all them machines,” Ella said. “This stretch-out makes it so we can’t even keep track of our own. It’s going to set all of us back.”

  “Don’t matter,” Dobbins said. “Go on down. He don’t like to stay late on Saturday nights. He’s got a family to go home to.”

  “So do I,” Ella said, “and this is going to set me back.”

  “Don’t matter,” Dobbins said again. “Go on. He’s waiting for you.”

  “I’ll tell him you told me to come off the line,” Ella said. “Wasn’t my idea.”

  “Go on down,” Dobbins said.

  Ella wanted to crane her neck and look toward the far end of the floor, where Violet worked along with the rest of the colored spinners, but she didn’t want Dobbins to ask her any questions about who she was looking at. She wondered if Violet was watching her now.

  She walked down the first flight of stairs to the landing, Dobbins’s footsteps falling hard behind hers. She gained the landing and turned to follow the next flight of stairs, and as she did she looked up toward the second floor and saw Violet’s face peering over the railing. There were other faces too—the rest of them white—but Violet’s was the only face she saw. Dobbins’s eyes must have followed hers to the second floor because all the faces disappeared at the same time.

  She reached the bottom floor where the opening room led toward the loading ramp. The air here was warm and soft, clean. A bird flashed through her line of vision like something that had been thrown from one side of the world to the other. Dobbins stood beside her, removed his watch from his pocket, and looked down at it again. He sighed.

  “Go on back up when you’re done,” Dobbins said. “Unless—” But he didn’t finish.

  Ella walked the length of the mill toward the office at its far end, her eyes locked in front of her instead of grazing the faces of the men and women who worked at machines and the boys and girls who looked no older than her own and who pushed carts full of spindles and swept heavy, lint-choked brooms across the floor.

  Aside from sanctioned breaks and shift changes, Ella had left the line only once in the years she’d worked at the mill, and the thing that had caused that leaving now passed through her mind. A new doffer boy, whose name she later learned was Giles Corley, had tottered on his toes when reaching too far for a full spindle and found his hand caught up and nearly yanked off in one of the operating belts that snaked through the mill and powered the machines through a system of pulleys. By the time Giles and the spinners around him realized what had happened he was holding a bloody appendage to his chest and three of his fingers had dropped to the floor and disappeared.

  Ella didn’t know if he had screamed—it was too loud to hear a boy that size scream anyway—but the recoil of his hand away from the belt and toward his body had caught her attention, and without thinking she lifted the hem of her dress and knelt to the floor and started searching. Others searched too, but it was Ella who found them: three little fingers tucked against the base of the brick wall at the end of a trail of blood that had already begun to turn a deep brown on the dirty floor. She scooped up the fingers and carried them to the boy, who stared at them like creatures from a nightmare. He didn’t seem able to muster any interest in reclaiming his fingers, so Ella held them in her closed hand while she tended the spinners and she and Giles waited for Dobbins. When he arrived she showed him the boy’s fingers.

  “I found them on the floor,” she said. “Over there by the wall.”

  “Goddamn,” Dobbins said. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and opened it, gesturing for Ella to drop the fingers inside, which she did. He closed the handkerchief and twisted it so that it formed a little satchel. Blood bloomed through the cloth. “Goddamn,” he said again.

  The boy never returned to work. At first Ella assumed it was because the mill did not have much use for a one-handed doffer, but other forces had come to bear. A trip to the doctor who’d tamped the bleeding and tossed the three fingers and sewn the hand shut had uncovered the fact that Giles was only twelve years old. The boy, who was clearly in shock, had told the doctor his correct age, to the great disappointment of the mother, who stood beside him and did her best to focus on the loss of h
er son’s blood and fingers instead of what the loss of his three dollars a week was going to mean to her and her husband and their brood of young children.

  Ella had seen the boy twice since the incident. A few days later she passed Giles and his angry mother and father on their way out of the mill’s gate as she and Violet headed inside for the night shift. The dirty, frayed bandages that covered the boy’s hand had come untethered and were spotted with blood. Ella thought she saw blood on the fingers of his good hand too, but when she looked at his face she realized that what she’d mistaken for blood on his fingers was actually chocolate, the same chocolate that smeared his lips and cheek. Word later came through the mill that the boy’s parents had gone to Goldberg’s brother looking for some kind of settlement that would equal the loss of three fingers, but instead they’d been turned away with the offer of a chocolate bar wrapped in foil and a promise “to think on it for a few days.” According to Goldberg’s brother the mill had taken the word of the boy’s parents when they’d vouched for him being fourteen, even though one glance at Giles Corley would have revealed otherwise. The mill had been willing to look the other way, and now they refused to look back, and so it went. Nothing about that surprised Ella.

  She saw Giles Corley again a few months later—much thinner and perhaps a little taller—when she turned a corner in downtown Bessemer City late one afternoon before her shift, and someone ran smack into her chest and knocked her down. She reached for the knife she kept folded in her pocket and lifted her face to confront the offender, but her eyes paused for a moment when they registered the boy’s mangled hand and missing fingers. He looked down at her with desperate, hungry eyes. He stuffed something into his pocket, stepped over her, and ran on down the alley. She turned and watched him go, his feet kicking up dust where the asphalt turned to gravel as he disappeared into one of the settlements that ringed the town.