The Last Ballad Read online

  She did not remove her hands from her head or open her eyes or raise her face until she felt certain that the last of the launched weapons had landed in the truck or somewhere outside it. When she looked toward the open tailgate she found a man struggling to climb inside. His face, handsome if not for its anger, was red with exertion, his blond hair ringed damp where his bowler hat had blown from his head during the chase. Behind him swarms of men ran after the truck screaming all manner of curses about Russia and communism and whores and Reds. The man who clung to the back of the truck kept his eyes on Ella. He grasped the railing and tried to climb inside, but his foot slipped off the bumper. He spat at Ella.

  “You damn union bitch,” he said. “You damn commie bitch.”

  He tried to climb inside again, but by the time the sole of his shoe met the tailgate, Ella already held a brick above her head. She first smashed the fingers of the man’s left hand where they had wrapped themselves around the railing. He screamed, unclenched his fingers. His foot slipped from the tailgate again and for a moment it looked as if he would fall, but he managed to cling to the truck, his ruined left hand flailing for a hold. Ella brought the brick down on the back of his right hand where he’d kept it flattened against the bed. The bones crunched like a pinecone crushed underfoot, and in the brief moment before he tumbled from the truck and cut somersaults in the road Ella saw the fear of death touch the man’s eyes.

  She sat down, surrounded by shattered glass and dusty crumbles of red brick and rusted pipes that rolled around the bed as the truck bounced along. She watched the horde of men surround the fallen man where he lay prone in the road and help him to his feet. She felt no relief in seeing that he had survived. She felt nothing for him, nothing for the other men. Not fear or intimidation and certainly not pity.

  The truck slowed again when they reached the town of High Shoals. Ella allowed her body to shift, to let her right shoulder come to a rest against the railing as the truck turned onto a shadowed lane. Bottles and other things the men had thrown still rolled around the truck bed. The brakes squealed, then hissed as the truck came to a stop. The engine vibrated so that Ella’s hands appeared to tremble of their own accord. She looked down, watched her hands for a moment, made her hands into fists to stop their shaking.

  Ella heard the sound of one of the truck’s doors opening and slamming shut. She couldn’t tell which one. Then the sound of the other door doing the same. She imagined the two women being yanked from the truck and pulled into the trees by men who’d been waiting for them. She wanted to stand, to look over the railing, to leap to the road and break off at a sprint and put as much distance between her and the truck as she could. But the same survival instinct that had fueled her to act in Lincolnton now forced her to remain silent and still. She picked up a length of pipe that had rolled to a stop at her feet. She waited, tried to hear over the engine, the truck trembling beneath her with its own impatience.

  The appearance of a face at the tailgate startled her, and Ella raised the pipe as if she might hurl it at the person she saw. It took a moment for her to recognize the face as belonging to the girl who’d been driving the truck.

  The girl smirked at Ella. “I come in peace,” she said. She looked down the lane behind her, where the late-day sun found the road through the heavy trees. She turned back to Ella. Her eyes searched the otherwise empty truck. She spoke over the noise of the engine. “Seems like plenty room,” she said. “I thought I’d let Velma take a turn behind the wheel.”

  The girl climbed up into the bed just as the truck lurched forward. She fell to her knees, pivoted, and kicked at the back of the cab, barely missing Ella’s left shoulder. “Goddammit, Velma!” she screamed. She looked at Ella. “Sorry,” she said, “but goddammit, Velma!” She kicked the back of the cab again. A knock came from the other side. “She can’t drive for shit,” the girl said. She turned so that she and Ella sat side by side facing the open tailgate. They watched the view before them shift while the driver attempted a series of maneuvers to return the truck to the main road.

  The girl removed a tin of tobacco from her dress and rolled a cigarette. She gestured toward Ella, but Ella shook her head.

  “Don’t smoke?” the girl asked. Ella shook her head again. “Nasty, ain’t it?”

  “Don’t bother me,” Ella said. She allowed her shoulders to relax, her spine to resettle itself. She released the breath she’d been holding. “You go ahead.”

  The girl took the length of pipe from Ella’s hand and tossed it off the back of the truck. It bounced on the road. She struck a match, drew on the cigarette, and then stared at it. “Yep,” she said. “Nasty all right.” The fingers of her free hand traced along the floor. She picked up a piece of broken bottle and looked at Ella through it, her eye suddenly large and grotesque behind the glass. “Got a little hairy back there, didn’t it?”

  “You could say.”

  “I saw that man take a tumble,” the girl said. She tossed the piece of glass onto the road. They had picked up speed. Trees and fields rolled away from them. “You must know how to handle yourself.”

  “I ain’t trying to get killed,” Ella said. “Didn’t sign up for that.” She caught herself. “I ain’t signed up for nothing yet.”

  The girl smoked and stared out the back of the truck. They passed an old car that was headed north. They watched it until they could no longer see it. The girl finished her cigarette and tossed it the same way she’d tossed the glass. “Shoot,” she said. “Ain’t nobody getting killed.”

  Her name was Sophia Blevin. She was nineteen. She’d grown up in Pittsburgh, but she’d been born in a country somewhere called Ukraine, which, to Ella, explained her strange accent. Her father was a history professor at one of the universities in Pittsburgh. Her mother was a Unitarian minister.

  “She ain’t what you think of when people down here think minister,” Sophia said. “She ain’t holy rolling. She’s in it for the people.”

  Sophia had been raised on a commune in New England before moving to the smoky steel town where her parents found a growing movement of intellectuals, organizers, and anarchists. She’d joined her parents in strikes in Passaic, New Bedford, and Johnstown. The strike at Loray was the first she’d worked without them, but she hoped to make them proud.

  “They sent me because Pop got hit in the head with a bottle at New Bedford and Mother’s running a mission for pregnant girls. They stayed put for this one, which is too bad because this here’s going to go down as the most famous strike in American history.”

  The truck sped east down the highway toward Gastonia now, the wind moving overhead like a jet stream, the sun beginning to slip from the sky. Ella watched explosions of sparks as Sophia burned through a book of matches trying to light another cigarette.

  “Might be a sign I should quit,” she said. Her last match sputtered, went out. She looked up at Ella. “You believe in signs?”

  “My mother did,” Ella said.

  “You?”

  “Maybe,” Ella said, suddenly afraid of sounding ignorant, seeming “country” to the ear of this girl whose parents were intellectuals, who’d traveled all over the country organizing people just like Ella. “But I probably don’t.”

  “Well, I believe in signs,” Sophia said. “At least I do today, anyway.”

  She tossed the tin of tobacco from the truck, flipped open the pack of rolling papers, and, one by one, released them to the wind.

  Ella watched the papers fly, recalled an image long buried: her mother kneeling at the fireplace, holding scraps of paper to the fire on a New Year’s Eve. Ella and her mother would write wishes for the following year: a new dress, a doll, a Bible. Wesley and her father never joined them, even gently teased them about this superstition. The ritual had always been something Ella cherished, that burst of mystery when the paper caught fire, the wish burning itself from possibility into hope as it escaped up the chimney.

  The year before they moved to the lumber camps, their
last New Year’s Eve as tenant farmers in East Tennessee, Ella’s father finally joined her and her mother in their yearly tradition. He’d never learned to read, but Ella watched as he and her mother whispered back and forth before he scrawled out his New Year’s wish and folded the paper over what seemed a dozen times, as if it could keep his wish safe. He tossed it onto the flames. As the fire consumed the paper, Ella knew that she would never forget the only word she’d ever seen her father write aside from his name: Work.

  Ella imagined her handwriting printed across Sophia’s rolling papers as they took flight. She saw words like Rose, rest, happiness, food. She closed her eyes, imagined the warmth of her parents’ fireplace, imagined just one of her potential wishes coming true.

  “What about you, Ella May?” Sophia asked.

  “What about me?”

  “That’s what I’m asking,” Sophia said. “What about you? All I know is that I met you at the crossroads and that you’ll stand up to a bully when push comes to shove.”

  “There ain’t a whole lot about me.”

  “Hell,” Sophia said. “There’s a whole lot about everybody.”

  Ella stared west. She imagined the great mountains foggy and rain-damp in the distance, the blue ridges rolling away in great swells. She opened her mouth, paused for a moment, gathered the story of her life around her as she would lift the hem of a long dress before stepping across a stream. She did not think, did not stop to look at Sophia. She simply began to speak.

  She imagined her brief life unfolding there in the back of the truck like a story written across a great scroll of paper. The scroll unfurled itself and rolled out the open tailgate, across the mountains toward Tennessee, all the way to the tiny schoolhouse outside Sevierville. There Mr. Musical bent to the rough pine floor, took up the scroll, held it to the weak light coming through the dirty windows, sniffed and nodded to himself, then set about recording the great equation of Ella’s life at the front of the empty room, his pendulous wooden leg swinging as he shuffled along the length of the blackboard.

  She told Sophia about her family’s life on the tenant farms, then the lumber camps. The music of her mother’s voice around the campfire, the great steaming cauldron of clothes, the smell of pine tar and sap and the reek of the sawyers’ sweat. The deaths: her mother’s, her father’s, Willie’s. John’s sudden appearance in her life and the many disappearances that followed. The countless mills in both Carolinas. Life as the only white family in Stumptown. Losing Willie, her fear of losing Rose: the weight of her children and their lives upon her heart. The jangle of Charlie’s guitar, the sensation of her voice filling her chest and lifting from her throat to meet his music. She told Sophia about waiting at the crossroads, her nervous hand fingering the union leaflet she’d been carrying in her pocket, the many moments that led to the one they now shared in the back of this truck.

  Sophia smiled, looked to the road as if still pondering the stories she’d just heard. She looked back at Ella. “Hot damn,” she said. “And you sing too?” She laughed, slapped her knee. “Hell, girl, we hit the jackpot with you. You might be the one we’ve been looking for.”

  The early evening sky was dark enough for stars to be seen.

  “Look at them stars,” Sophia said, her neck craned, her face turned directly toward the sky. “We don’t got those in Pittsburgh.”

  Ella noted Sophia’s smooth neck, her olive skin. It was obvious to Ella, obvious to anyone who might see Sophia, that she had never worked in a cotton mill. She was too healthy, too happy, too at ease in the world and too in love with being alive in it.

  Ella had passed through Gastonia—by far the largest city in the county, at almost twenty thousand people—on only a handful of occasions, but she knew it ran on textiles. Everyone across North Carolina, perhaps everyone in the South, knew this about the place that had come to be known as “the City of Spindles.”

  Centuries earlier, the area had been settled by Native Americans because of its proximity to a meandering river they called Catawba. The river’s south branch and countless creeks that flowed west toward the Blue Ridge foothills proved especially valuable to the enterprising white settlers who were overrunning the land by the eighteenth century. Whiskey comprised the first wave of industry, bootleggers using waterpower to run their stills and the dense forests to keep them hidden. But it was soon discovered that the swift current was enough to power machinery, and it wasn’t long before the men who once used water to grind corn for whiskey decided that the same power could fuel a revolution in the area’s other primary product: cotton.

  The county’s first textile enterprise, the Mountain Island Mill, began operation on the Catawba in 1848, when the county was two years old. Other mills followed. Between the Civil War and the end of World War I, Gastonia’s population tripled and the number of textile mills jumped from four to just under one hundred. Tenant farmers laid down their shovels and escaped the parched land that had never been and never would be theirs. Mountaineers from southern Appalachia left the lumber camps once there were no more trees to be felled, no more ridges to be cleared, no more logs to be floated downstream. Millhands in the South Carolina upstate believed and believed incorrectly that life might be a little better, a little easier, just a few miles north. Ella and John had followed that migration from the North Carolina mountains to the South Carolina mills, had caught the tail end of the snake as it coiled around itself and led them back across the border into Gaston County. Ella had believed that an easy life would eventually be theirs because John had said it would be so, but this was back when she believed the things he told her.

  The piedmont mill barkers who stood atop stumps in the lumber camps and in knee-deep mud on the tenant farms had promised safe, sanitary housing in mill villages. Children would be educated at mill-sponsored schools. Souls saved at mill-sponsored churches. Paychecks cashed for scrip at mill-owned stores. It soon became apparent that the circularity of life in these villages differed little from what these former loggers and farmers knew about a life lived close to the land: you were forever in debt, forever hoping for the windfall that never came, forever thinking of ways to move on to another place as soon as you could save the money to do it.

  Things were no different at the Loray Mill, the crown jewel of North Carolina’s textile industry. Loray had been built in 1900 and touted as the largest textile mill in the world, and although local investors had funded it, northern interests took note of the abundance of cheap labor, the proximity to raw cotton, the railroads that now crisscrossed the South like lashings. Of particular interest was the looming threat of war and the incredible ways in which it fueled the country’s need for cloth.

  Loray’s profits exploded. Demand rose. The barkers went farther into the mountains. More men and women and children tumbled down the hills, swathed in expectations of riches and lush living. The war passed, demand fell, work was hard to come by, although people like Ella chased it from mill to mill, from small town to small town. All they found was filth and disease and the kind of poverty they couldn’t get away from once it took hold of them. American Mill No. 2 in Bessemer City, Rex over in Ranlo, the Cowpens Manufacturing Company down in South Carolina, Loray here in Gastonia: it didn’t matter where you looked, Ella thought, it was the same overwhelming force bearing its weight upon the same powerless group of people; people just like her. The Loray Mill was in Gastonia, but it could have been anywhere in the South. It was all the same.

  The truck in which the three women rode left the fields and the trees of the darkened countryside behind, and now the open highway had turned into Franklin Avenue. Streetlamps glowed with a dull light. Brick storefronts with glass windows lined the boulevard on either side. They passed people on foot. The sparse automobile traffic grew heavier. The air smelled of gasoline and exhaust and the myriad scents of cooking food as they passed a section of Franklin known to locals as Greasy Corner. Sophia stood and looked over the truck’s railing. She whistled, pointed south. “There sh
e is.”

  Ella stood, faced the direction in which Sophia stared. The colossus of the Loray Mill rose before them, its six stories of red brick illuminated by what seemed to be hundreds of enormous windows that cast an otherworldly pall over the night. The mill stretched across several city blocks, its central tower looming like a giant eye that stood sentinel above the surrounding village and its muddy streets, weed-choked lawns, and clapboard houses. From what Ella understood, life in the Loray village wasn’t much different from life in the dilapidated cabins of Stumptown, except that the Loray village, like the mill itself, was nearly all white.

  “Ella, it’d mean a lot if you could speak at the rally tonight,” Sophia said. She looked at Ella. “People here need to know that our message is getting out. You coming from another mill in another town is a big deal. People need to see a stranger who’s on their side.”

  Sophia’s request hit Ella like one of the bricks or bottles that the men had thrown at them back in Lincolnton. Her head swam, and she gripped the truck’s railing to keep from stumbling. She forced a laugh that gave her cover to catch her breath. “I don’t know what I’d say,” Ella said. “I can’t imagine.” But as soon as she said it she regretted it; she’d come this far and she needed this girl’s help, needed the promises outlined on the leaflet she still carried in her pocket like a talisman.

  “Hell, tell some of the story you just told me. You could sing something too.”

  Ella thought of the song she’d been writing. She slipped a trembling hand into her pocket and felt the folded leaflet. “I might could say something, might could sing too,” she said. “I’ve been working on a song about the mill, but it ain’t finished yet.” She reached for the pencil she’d kept behind her ear, but it was gone. It must have come loose during the fight back in Lincolnton. “You got something I can write with. I might could finish it real quick.”