The Last Ballad Read online

  “But you don’t care about Russia, do you? We’re not in Russia, are we? We’re in the United States of America!”

  The audience cheered, and Reed took a moment before he raised his hands to quiet them.

  “What does Russia have to do with Gastonia?” he asked. “With this strike? I’d say nothing. I’d say nothing at all. But you wouldn’t know it if you read the Gaston Transom-Times.” He laughed. “They’ve even got a few men here tonight, taking notes about what we’re doing out here in this field where we’re talking about equality and workers’ rights. Look around you now,” he said. “You’ll know them right off. They’re the ones in the fine suits.”

  “That’s a fine suit you’ve got on, Reed!” a voice from the audience yelled. The crowd gasped and turned toward the voice as if ready to pounce on the man to whom it belonged, but both the voice and the man seemed to have been swallowed by the night.

  “Distraction,” Reed said. “That’s the practice of the Gaston Transom-Times and its moneymen-bosses over at Loray. They’re just throwing around accusations and rumors in the hopes of distracting you from two things: your empty bellies and your empty wallets.”

  The audience around Ella erupted into laughter and cheers. She found herself clapping along with them. She knew she belonged here in the midst of this shared experience, not just the rally but her whole life and all the poor men and women and children who had passed through it.

  “You hungry?” Sophia whispered. Ella turned, looked at her new friend. “Dinner’s going to be served when this is over, but we could go on up and get in line.”

  Ella was starving, and she pictured the cold stove and empty skillet back home in Stumptown, pictured her children relieved and smiling to be at Violet’s mother’s house, their bellies probably fuller than they’d been in days. Her heart swelled at the thought of their happiness.

  “I need to get on home,” Ella said. “Back to my babies.”

  The night had grown cool. Dew settled over the grass. Sophia took a deep breath, raised her face to the clear, dark sky, and forced the warm air from her lungs. It lifted like smoke. “There’s them stars again,” she said.

  “I need to get on home,” Ella said.

  Sophia lowered her face. “The roads ain’t safe at night,” she said. “Loray’s got people. They’re likely to follow us, run us down once we get outside town.”

  “I can’t stay here tonight,” Ella said. “I got nowhere to go.”

  “There’s plenty of room,” Sophia said. “We’ll get you settled, and I’ll carry you home to those babies tomorrow.”

  “My shift starts at six p.m.,” Ella said. “I got to be home before that.”

  “Shift?” Sophia said. She laughed. “Girl, you ain’t going back inside that mill. You’re union now.”

  The crowd around them exploded in applause. Ella turned, saw the redheaded man with the shaking hands stride across the stage. He shook hands with Carlton Reed, clapped him on the back, waved at the audience.

  “Who’s that?” Ella asked.

  “That’s him,” Sophia said. “That’s Fred Beal.”

  Dinner was served inside the headquarters. Cold bologna sandwiches. Cold coffee. Stale Moon Pies. Ella waited in line behind Sophia. Exposed electric bulbs hung from the ceiling and cast soft yellow light on the uncovered heads of the men in overalls and women in dresses. The room was warm, the people’s voices loud and excited.

  “It’s not always going to be like this,” Sophia said over the noise. “Better food’s on the way. Things just got hung up, that’s all.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Ella said. She didn’t tell Sophia that it didn’t matter to her what they served or how much or how little they offered her. She was starving, and any amount of anything was more than she’d hoped for before she left Bessemer City. “It’s kind of the union to offer it.”

  “Oh, it’s not us,” Sophia said. “It’s the Catholics. Monks from over in Belmont.”

  “Catholics,” Ella said. She’d never met a Catholic, did not know if she’d ever even seen one.

  “Yeah,” Sophia said. “The Protestants won’t touch us. The churches around the village and most of them downtown are on Loray’s dole. They’d rather see us dead.” Sophia stopped and looked around. Ella did the same. She realized that people were staring at her. “You’re famous now,” Sophia said. “I’m standing beside a celebrity.”

  The line of strikers shuffled forward, and Ella and Sophia drew closer to the table where the food was being served. Two monks wore cassocks, something she’d never seen before. The first, the younger of the two, was balding. He wore tiny spectacles on the end of his nose and stared through them at the sandwiches he carefully wrapped in wax paper. The monk offered a sandwich to Sophia.

  “Thank you, Father,” she said.

  Ella waited, watched the monk wrap a sandwich for her. She received it, bowed slightly, thanked him as Sophia had. The older of the two monks, his hands trembling, poured black coffee into tin cups. He handed one to Ella. He was short with a round, red face and a full head of gray hair. He smiled. Ella could not help but smile back at him.

  “Thank you, Father,” she said.

  “Bless you, child,” the old monk said.

  Beside him stood a man handing out packages of Moon Pies from a crate stashed beneath the table. He held one hand behind his back as if he were a mannered attendant. Unlike the two monks, this man didn’t wear a cassock. Instead he wore denim pants and a white collared shirt, the collar of which was nearly hidden by a long dark beard. Beneath the beard a tiny straight-back chair, something fit for a doll house, hung from a leather strap around his neck. Ella looked at the man’s face. His eyes were dark, shiny, his skin red with sunburn. Although the man’s eyes did not rise to meet hers, something about his face stirred a memory in Ella’s mind. He held out a Moon Pie and she reached for it, closed her fingers around it, felt that it was old and stale. She knew that she would eat it without hesitation.

  The man’s fingers grazed Ella’s, and he pulled his hand to his chest and touched the chair where it hung from his neck. He bent to the floor, rummaged through the crate of Moon Pies as if waiting for Ella to continue on.

  Ella saw Sophia at the end of the line, saw her nod toward the bearded man and touch her own chest as if the chair hung there instead of around the man’s neck. “He’s a strange one, isn’t he,” she whispered once Ella was close enough to hear her.

  They searched the cramped, poorly lit room for a place to sit. The few chairs and even fewer tables were already taken. Sophia made her way across the room and sat on the floor where a group of women had gathered by the door. Ella followed. They settled themselves and nodded at the women around them by way of hello. The women nodded back, gave no sign that they recognized either Sophia or Ella as having been onstage earlier in the evening.

  A jar of yellow mustard was being passed around. When it came to Sophia, Ella watched her roll her sandwich as if she were rolling a cigarette, and she dipped each end in the jar, coating it in mustard. She passed the jar to Ella, who’d already opened her sandwich and had the two pieces of bread and the slice of bologna sitting separately on her lap; she used her finger to spoon out a dollop of mustard on each, then used the same finger to spread it. She ate slowly, first the individual slices of bread and then the bologna, pausing after each swallow. Ella noticed that Sophia had moved on to her Moon Pie by the time she’d finished the first slice of bread.

  “I got a colored friend up in New York City,” Sophia said. “He’ll come down and help us organize your friends over in Bessemer City. We’ll keep it quiet, at first. Ol’ Fred ain’t going to like it one bit, but he’ll like it fine when we’re done.”

  Ella knew it was all happening too fast. A different variation of the same wave that had swept her down from the mountains to the mills had now swept her into the union. She felt herself clamoring to stand against its surge, her feet struggling to touch the bottom, her lungs gasping
for breath.

  “I got to work,” Ella said. “I’ve got babies. I can’t lay out of work to organize.”

  “Don’t you understand what you did tonight?” Sophia asked. “Getting onstage, saying your name, where you work, where you live. There ain’t going to be no job for you to go back to, Ella May.” She ate the last bit of her Moon Pie, took a drink of coffee, made a face as she swallowed it. “The union is all you’ve got now. And we’ll support you. There’s relief funds on the way. You and your babies are going to be taken care of, I promise you.”

  Ella remembered what Velma had said before that evening’s rally about supplies arriving late, if ever. Her face grew hot, and the food she’d just eaten turned sour in her stomach. She’d been a fool to come here, to be so easily swayed, to write the song she’d written and to sing it in front of people she did not know. Her life had been altered, and now it could never be repaired. Charlie had been right.

  Light passed across Ella’s face, and she looked to see that the door to the office in the back of the building had opened. Carlton Reed and Velma stepped out, followed by Fred Beal, who held on to the door as if preparing to close it again. Sophia got to her feet.

  “I’m going to go talk to Beal about you right now, Ella May,” she said. “You don’t worry about a thing except signing your name to a union card.”

  As soon as Sophia left for Beal’s office, Ella felt the enormity of what she’d done that evening. The weight of it was a physical thing, and again her mind turned toward her children. Her palm passed across her stomach. She picked up the wax paper that had covered her sandwich and opened it across her lap. She set the Moon Pie in the middle of it, wrapped it tightly and neatly as if it were a Christmas present. She would quarter it and give it to the children when she returned home.

  She had not yet touched the small tin of cold coffee. Ella drank it now, and it settled in her stomach like something that would not stay there long.

  She looked at the people around her, most of them women. Her eyes fell on a young girl a few feet away in a dark blue calico dress, her long brown hair pinned up in a thick braid. Although her cheeks were sunken, the soft light cast her face in sharp, beautiful angles.

  “Oh, he asked me everything he could think of, you know,” the girl was saying. “He wanted to know where I was from, if I was married, if I had me a sweetheart back home. Who my daddy was. All that.”

  “That’s just because he wanted to be your daddy,” said a woman with sallow skin and thin white-blond hair. She laughed, and her smile revealed a row of discolored teeth.

  “I can’t say he didn’t try,” the girl said. “I can’t say he ain’t still trying.”

  “That’s old Pigface for you,” the woman said.

  At the mention of the name, several of the women broke into laughter and covered their mouths with their hands and looked around at one another with knowing glances. An older woman sat beside the sallow-faced girl. She swallowed the last of her sandwich and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her thin fingers smoothed back wisps of her gray hair. She looked around at the younger women, stopping for a moment on Ella’s face as if she already knew her to be a stranger.

  “I know Percy Epps did right more than try with the whole lot of you,” the old woman said. She narrowed her eyes as the others lowered their gazes. “And that ain’t right. It ain’t right for a woman to have to give herself away just so she can get a job that don’t hardly pay enough to live on.” She sat up straighter so that she could better take in the great number of people packed into the small building, the dinner line still snaking out through the door. “That’s what this here’s all about. We’re all striking so girls don’t have to live that-a way.”

  The other women remained quiet. The sound of wax paper being crumbled replaced the old woman’s voice. Something had come over the group that hadn’t been there before she spoke.

  “Pigface is the devil all right,” the pretty girl in the calico dress said. Her eyes and face had darkened as if a shadow hung there.

  The gray-haired woman sighed, and then she placed a hand on another girl’s shoulder to steady herself as she got to her feet. “If he’s the devil that would mean we’re all in hell,” she said. She dusted off the back of her dress. “And I don’t think we’re there quite yet.”

  The pretty girl raised her eyes to the old woman, who now stood above her.

  “Hetty, you really think it’ll happen?” she asked. “You really think they’ll turn us out tomorrow?”

  Hetty looked down at the girl with a look that seemed to carry both surprise and pity.

  “Why, yes, girl,” Hetty said. “That’s exactly what’s going to happen.”

  “What’ll we do?” asked the sallow-faced girl.

  “What can we do?” Hetty said. “Walk out? We done that. Organize ourselves? Start a union? We done that too.” She sighed. “The way I see it, we got two things left to try: we can feel bad for ourselves, or we can fight.” She reached down and opened her hand, and the girl reached up and placed hers inside it. Hetty squeezed the girl’s fingers, gave her hand a little shake. “I plan to fight,” Hetty said. “I hope you do too. I hope you all do.”

  Ella slept on the floor inside the headquarters that night, her back to the wall, her head resting on her hands, her mind returning to Stumptown and the faces of her sleeping children. Sophia had found an old blanket—a wiry, woolen thing that was so stiff it seemed never to have been unfolded—and Ella had used it to cover herself.

  A handful of people had remained outside the headquarters all night, passing around thermoses of coffee and flasks of whiskey. Ella had fallen asleep listening as they recounted stories of the Loray strike and the other strikes they’d heard of: Lawrence, Passaic, Pineville. They’d talked about the threats they’d received since joining the union, the violence they saw when the National Guard arrived, the potential of what was to come.

  She woke in the night to what she thought was the scratch of Rose’s breathing, but when she opened her eyes she saw a mouse dragging a piece of mustard-coated wax paper across the rough plank floor just a few feet from where she slept.

  The next time she woke it was to the sound of laughter on the street. Ella raised herself to her elbows, felt the bones in her back and shoulders shift into place, looked around the dark room at the shapes of sleeping bodies where people had arranged pallets on the floor. She searched for the forms of Velma and Sophia, but it was too dark to see them and too quiet to search them out. Instead she stood quietly and opened the door.

  Outside, night felt closer than morning, although morning was near. Several groups of men stood in silhouette on the road in front of the headquarters. None of them seemed to take note of her.

  She tuned her ear to the dark field across the street. The chirping of crickets rose from the grass. She heard the sound of faraway water where it ran over rocks in a shallow, muddy gulch that cut along the field’s far edge. For a moment, in this cool almost-night with the rolling water and the crickets in her ears, Ella felt transported back to the mountains. She closed her eyes and imagined that if she were to open them she would see dawn creeping through the low clouds enshrouding the lumber camp.

  A burst of laughter rang out in the quiet street. Ella opened her eyes. Instead of the lumber camp’s denuded hills she saw the same dark figures of strikers clustered in groups of twos and threes. Out on the road, the glowing, orange tips of cigarettes. The shapes of shotguns propped on shoulders. The men’s whispered voices.

  Ella crossed the gravel road, stood on the edge of the field. The stage remained, but someone had removed the skirt from beneath it and taken down the lanterns.

  She looked at the building behind her. Beal had instructed them to meet at the headquarters at 7 a.m. to march down to the village, where they’d wait for the evictions to begin. Ella did not know what time it was, but the sun had just risen, and she knew there was plenty of time for her to be alone before the crowds gathered again.
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  She walked south in the direction from which she’d seen Loray workers coming the night before. She crossed the railroad tracks, studied the yards of the boardinghouses and small shacks as she passed them. She reached Franklin Avenue, where Loray rose before her. The morning was still dark enough to see the lights burning behind the windows, the downtown streets quiet enough to hear the incessant thrum of the great machines at work inside.

  Ella stepped onto the curb, walked west. How long would it take her to reach Stumptown? Three hours? Four? She’d been gone almost twenty-four hours, which was the longest she’d ever been away from her children. If she left now she could easily make it home before noon, have a few hours with her babies before her shift started. Her body ticked with desperation to see them, to touch them and hear their voices.

  They were used to spending their nights alone, but she’d told them she’d be back. Violet would have made sure they had something to eat for dinner. Lilly would have gotten them ready for bed. The children would be waking now: Lilly searching the cabin for something to eat; Otis stoking a fire in the oven in expectation of breakfast; Rose coughing the damp night air from her lungs; Wink swaddled in thin blankets, his fingers closing around anything he could reach.

  Morning in downtown Gastonia was different from morning in Stumptown: Across the street, a boy unloaded bound newspapers from the back of a running truck and stacked them neatly on the sidewalk. Cars and trucks rolled past. A man pushed a covered vegetable wagon down the center of the street. Lights winked on behind glass windows inside businesses that were preparing for the day’s work. Ella drew closer to Greasy Corner, where the smells of frying eggs and bacon, toast, and coffee filled her nose and stirred her hunger.

  Ella had walked far enough that she could see an end to the downtown streets and sidewalks as they gave way to countryside. She stopped, looked back toward Loray, where smoke rose from cookstoves down in the village.