The Last Ballad Read online

  When the group turned right on Fourth Avenue it stumbled upon a crowd of strikers who had gathered in the street in front of a dilapidated shack with broken shutters and a haphazard set of steps that led up to the porch. They stood watching as a dozen or so men in overalls and work clothes moved empty-handed into the house through the flung-open front door and then reappeared carrying beat-up furniture and old, lumpy mattresses. They dropped the items in piles on the lawn, piles that spilled over the edge of the yard and down into the crowded street.

  Ella’s eyes fixed themselves on a woman in a blue gingham dress who stood with a crying, pink-faced baby in her arms. The woman’s hips rocked from side to side as if she were either trying to quiet the child or contemplating whether or not to spring upon the men. Sophia stood whispering to a group of strikers. She led them up the porch steps and inside the house. A few moments later the strikers reappeared, sitting in chairs that were being carried by two men instead of one. Sophia was rolled up inside a mattress. When the men dropped her on the lawn the mattress uncoiled itself; she stood up and ran back inside the house. But it soon became apparent that nothing could stop the men from carrying out the furniture and piling it by the road. Heaps of it were strewn everywhere. A few of the women cried, especially the younger ones, new wives and even newer mothers, but Ella watched as the older women stood back, their arms folded across their chests, their eyes locked on the men’s faces.

  “You proud, boy?” one woman asked a young man who couldn’t have been older than fifteen. “Boss Guyon got your palms greasy enough?”

  The boy lowered his face and brushed past her. He walked back into the house.

  Another old woman lifted the crying baby from the girl’s arms and held it in front of one of the men.

  “Here, Cass,” the woman said. She pushed the baby into the man’s arms as if it were his own. “You got babies at home and food to spare. Take this one home with you. It ain’t got nowhere to live no more, thanks to you.”

  The man took the child into his arms. It was wailing. The man sighed, carried the baby back to its mother. He moved up through the yard and went back inside the house.

  Over the next few hours, the men cleared the houses on one side of Fourth Avenue, and then they crossed and moved down the other. By midmorning, furniture, clothing, and people cluttered the yards in huge piles. But soon, once the shock of homelessness had worn off, the strikers began to celebrate their removal, as if not having a roof over their heads had given them one less thing to worry about. Some of the men who’d spent the morning guarding union headquarters had left their weapons behind and come down to the village to join their families in sorting through their belongings. Even the handful of police officers who were on hand to make certain that heightened tensions didn’t give way to violence seemed relaxed. As Aderholt had promised Beal, the police had kept their distance.

  Ella found Velma in the crowd.

  “Have you seen Sophia?” Velma asked.

  “Last time I saw her she was getting carried out of a house inside a mattress.”

  “She’s something, isn’t she?” Velma said. “Dumb and passionate, and too young to realize both can get her killed.” She smiled. “But she’s something.”

  The mood of the crowd that milled about Fourth Avenue changed as the company men made their way through the yard of a shack whose rotted boards seem held together by some kind of magic. Standing sentinel on the porch was the woman Hetty, with whom Ella had eaten dinner the night before.

  Hetty stood on her steps alone. Ella and a group of strikers watched the company men approach Hetty’s house, Hetty’s arms down by her sides, her body rigid. It was not until the first man’s boot touched the steps that Hetty thrust the upper half of her body inside the shack’s open door. She emerged with an old rocking chair, which she lifted above her head and hurled toward the men. The lead man ducked, and the rest of them scattered in different directions with shouts of “What the hell!” and “Goddamn!”

  Hetty, her arms now empty and her chest heaving, stood and watched the men as they composed themselves. They moved past her and through her home’s open door. She followed them inside as if she’d been hired to do their work.

  For the next few minutes, the crowd watched the men carry belongings out of the house and deposit them on the curb. Inside, Hetty moved from room to room and tossed whatever she could lay a hand to out into the yard. When she finished she took hold of a hammer and busted the glass out of the few windows that weren’t covered over with pine boards. By the time her home had been emptied she was on her knees, the hammer still in her hand, using its claw to pry up the floorboards just inside the door.

  And that was when one of the mill’s men—a slight man in overalls—bent at the waist and laid a hand on Hetty’s shoulder and asked her to stop destroying the mill’s property. He didn’t have the chance to move his hand from her shoulder before Hetty swung the claw end of the hammer toward his leg and pierced his calf muscle through the denim pants.

  Two policemen pushed through the crowd and bounded up through the yard as Hetty pulled the hammer free of the man’s leg and prepared to swing at something, anything, else. The man screamed and fell to his knees and rolled out of the doorway. Blood soaked through his overalls and dotted the steps. One officer hooked Hetty beneath her arms and the other tried to corral her wild, kicking feet.

  “You sons of bitches!” she screamed. “You sons of bitches! Tell Pigface to come down out of that mill and carry me out of this house his damn self. Let him see what I got for him!” She reared her head and spit into the face of the young, scared officer above her. “I know you. I know you, Paul Bradley,” she said. “I know your people. They’re going to be ashamed of you for hurting a old woman!”

  “We’re doing our jobs,” said the policeman who carried her feet. “Don’t listen to her, Paul.” They carried her across the street toward a patrol car.

  “Turn her loose!” a man yelled. Ella looked up to see Hetty’s husband barreling toward the police who were carrying his wife. A rifle was in his hand. When the policeman holding Hetty’s feet turned and saw the old man bearing down upon him, he let go of her and drew his pistol. The shift in weight surprised the man named Paul. Hetty slipped from his grasp and spilled onto the street at his feet. She yelled out when her head hit the road but no one was watching her anymore. They were all watching and waiting to see what her husband would do.

  “Drop that rifle, old-timer!” the policeman with the pistol said, but the old man either did not hear him or was not willing to listen, because he held on to the rifle and kept running toward them, his eyes on Hetty where she lay on the street. “Drop it!” the policeman screamed.

  A loud crack like a tree limb snapping rang out against the morning. Hetty’s husband collapsed in a heap on top of her. The moment she felt the weight of him she screamed and struggled to get to her feet to discover exactly what had made him fall. The policeman leaned over the old man and grabbed his shoulders and turned him so that he stared up at the blue sky. Hetty’s husband lay there beside her, his eyes wide open, a cut that seemed to have collapsed the bridge of his nose forcing blood to pulse in streams down each side of his face.

  “Emmit!” Hetty hollered. Blood shone on her neck and hands. It stained her dress. She spread the blood across Emmit’s torso as she touched his body, searching for a bullet wound that wasn’t there. “Wake up, honey,” she said. “Baby.”

  “He’s dead!” someone screamed over Ella’s shoulder. “You killed him!” Ella turned to see a young woman with her hand held over her mouth as if she could cram the words back inside before the policemen heard them.

  “He ain’t dead,” the policeman said, “but he will be if he moves.” He holstered his pistol and picked up Emmit’s shotgun where he’d dropped it before being cracked across the face with the butt end of the pistol. In what seemed to Ella’s eyes to have been one fluid motion, the man broke the shotgun and saw that both barrels were loaded. H
e snapped it closed, raised it toward the gathered crowd.

  “Somebody run and get Beal!” a man’s voice cried out.

  The policeman pointed the shotgun in the direction from which the voice had come.

  “Nobody move,” he said. “Not one of y’all.” He scanned faces as if expecting someone to step forward to tell him how to handle the situation. The morning had gone silent. “Now, dammit,” the policeman said. “We tried to be fair with y’all. We tried. And this here’s what happened.”

  Ella noticed that the shotgun’s barrel quivered in the policeman’s hands. The young policeman named Paul Bradley stood beside him, staring down at the gun as if his partner might turn it on him at any moment. A man in the crowd took advantage of the stillness, and he turned and took off at a sprint up the road toward headquarters.

  “Hey!” the policeman with the shotgun yelled after him. “Freeze!” But the man kept running.

  The officer named Paul watched the man flee. Paul looked at his partner and then took off up the street in pursuit.

  “Paul!” the officer called. He watched him for a moment before he realized that he was alone. He turned his attention back to the crowd, where two more men fled: one cutting behind Hetty’s house and disappearing into a grove of maples, the other turning and bounding down the hill toward Garrison Boulevard.

  In this manner the situation was defused, the matter settled. The strikers peeled away in hot-footed singles at first, and then the women—who did not fear the law and violence in the same way the men did—drifted off in groups of twos and threes, their children pressed to their chests or held close by their sides.

  Not knowing what else to do, Ella waded through the crowd and turned up Fourth Avenue where it skirted along the mill’s southern edge. She’d go back to the headquarters, find Sophia, and ask about that $9.75 Beal had promised. Then she’d demand a ride home to her children.

  Here, in this part of the village, the company men had already finished clearing the houses. The street was full of people and their personal effects: chairs, mounds of clothes, broken furniture, and piles and piles of cast-iron skillets, washtubs, cookpots, and dolls missing faces or with faces missing eyes or mouths. All told, almost a thousand people had been turned out of their homes. As Ella shouldered through the crowd she wondered how Beal was going to move these people and all their things across Franklin Avenue and into tents that were yet to arrive.

  Perhaps what unsettled her most was the beauty of the day: a clear, warm morning that smelled of gardenia and honeysuckle. The dew-damp mud road sat drying in the sun. This was the weather that Ella would pray for if she were ever to look forward to a day at a fair. How ironic, almost cruel, she thought, that it should come on a day like this one.

  As Ella broke free from the edge of the crowd, a Model T stake-bed truck rounded the corner and lurched down the street toward her, its tires brushing against the mounds of strikers’ belongings that had been left on the curbs.

  In the driver’s seat was an older, mustached man with dark eyes. Beside him sat a heavy, jowly man, a derby pulled low and tight on his head. He smiled at Ella. She saw the soggy, chewed cigar clenched between his teeth. Percy Epps. Pigface. The man the girls at dinner had spoken of the night before. She knew him now without ever having seen him before. Two bird-faced men with sunken eyes and straw-colored hair leaned over the rails surrounding the truck bed and stared down at her.

  Furniture and boxes and crates clogged the street behind Ella, and the crowd was too thick with bodies for her to turn around. Before she realized it had happened Ella found herself penned in the middle of the street by the piles on either side of her, her only choices being to climb one of the banks of mattresses, clothing, and chairs or to turn and force her way through the mass of people.

  Before Ella had the chance to make a decision, the driver leaned on the horn. Its squeal made her flinch, and the driver looked over at Percy Epps. Both men laughed. The truck ground to a halt barely five feet in front of her, its body rumbling and twitching like a leashed animal.

  The driver leaned out of the window. “Clear this street!” he yelled. No one moved. He leaned on the horn again. “Go on!” he said. “Get out of the damn way unless you want to be run down!”

  The truck sat still, its engine vibrating beneath the hood. Ella saw a stream of shiny black oil trickle out from beneath its body, as if it bled. Ella didn’t move, didn’t say a word; neither did the people in the crowd behind her. The driver killed the engine, so that the only sound heard was the noise of the mill where it hummed unseen. Epps opened the truck’s rickety door and took his time climbing down from the cab. He removed the cigar from his mouth, sighed, looked all around him at the row houses as if he’d never seen this street before and couldn’t quite believe how sorry it all looked. He put the cigar back between his teeth and walked around to the front of the truck. He ran his thumbs along the inside of his pants waist as if adjusting his paunch so that it would fall comfortably over his belt. Ella caught the gleam of a silver revolver holstered under his left arm beneath a thin corduroy jacket. He stopped in front of her and pulled the cigar from his mouth again. He smiled, nodded at Ella.

  “Miss,” he said, “is something wrong with your ears? Or your legs?”

  Ella was surprised by his voice, which attempted to hide something like the twang of eastern North Carolina. An image of curing golden leaf tobacco flashed through her mind, something she’d seen in cigarette advertisements, and she imagined that Epps was a long way from home and that something he did back there had caused him to flee west toward Gastonia, to Loray. She knew she was trembling, and she knew he could see it. He stood close enough for her to smell the wet tobacco in his soggy cigar.

  “I think I recognize you,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  In the question Ella heard more than the same simple query that Sophia and Velma had asked her just a day earlier. In Epps’s question she understood the danger of divulging the only thing she possessed: anonymity.

  “My name ain’t important,” she finally said.

  “Your name ain’t important?”

  “Not to you,” she said.

  “No?” Epps asked. His tongue poked around his mouth, moving the cigar along his lips.

  “You think your name’s important to Fred Beal, that dandy Yank who’s down here telling you how to work? When to work. What to do instead of working.”

  He was speaking directly to Ella, but his voice and his words were meant for the crowd behind her. Even as she stared into his eyes Ella could feel Epps looking past her at the strikers around her.

  “But I reckon y’all gave up your names when you became communists,” he said. He looked behind him at the two men leaning over the truck’s rails. “Boys, I guess we got a bunch of nameless nobodies on our hands,” he said. The men smiled at the same time like children responding to a parent’s cue.

  Epps turned back to Ella.

  “Is that who you are?” he asked. “A nameless nobody?”

  Epps stepped closer, as if trying to smell her, and this allowed Ella to smell him: hair grease, sweat, the scent of oiled machinery.

  “I already know your name, Miss Wiggins,” he whispered. “I don’t know where you came from, but I know who you are, and you can rest assured that I will never forget your face.”

  He stepped away from Ella and took in the people behind her.

  “I’m sure you good church folks have heard of the Book of Life,” he said. “God’s got every one of y’all’s names writ down there. Every last one of you, whether you believe in Him or not, whether you fear His wrath or not. Well, I’ve got a Book of Life too. And all y’all are in there.” He stopped speaking and stared at the crowd for a moment. Ella watched his eyes as they moved across the faces behind her. “I got you writ down there, Mamie Stihl. And you, Zachary Goshen. Lydia Roberts and Sadie Grant; Sadie, I got both you and that baby of yours in there.”

  He kept his eyes on the strikers for ano
ther moment, then he pulled the cigar from his mouth and flicked it to his left, where it landed atop a mattress. Suddenly there was the sound of something exploding. Ella saw a cabbage rolling off the truck’s hood. It fell to the street. A smear of rotten leaves coated the truck’s windshield and obscured her view of the driver. Epps turned toward the truck at the sound. The crowd roared with laughter, cheers.

  But every voice fell silent when Epps turned back to face them, the silver revolver clenched in his right hand.

  “Who threw that?” he screamed. He waited, but no one answered.

  He raised the revolver and pointed it at the crowd, swung his arm back and forth so that it passed within inches of Ella’s face. In that moment she wondered if death had found her. Every moment of her life had led to this one, and the only thing she could feel was surprise that death would come for her now, when she was so far from her children, so much farther from East Tennessee, where death had found her mother and father.

  “Clear this damn road!” Epps screamed. “Now!”

  Something whizzed past Ella’s ear. She wondered if it was the sound a bullet would make as it flew by, but she realized the direction was wrong, and then she saw a second cabbage, this one more firm and less ripe, smash into Epps’s face. He dropped the revolver and lifted his hands to his nose. When he pulled his hands away and looked at them, Ella saw that his lips were covered in blood and white flakes of cabbage had spattered across his face. His hat had been knocked to the ground. He wiped at his nose, bent to pick up his gun and hat from the road, but before he could grasp either, a cane chair crashed onto the truck’s hood. Epps fell to his knees and cowered at the sound of it. The crowd laughed.

  Suddenly all manner of things sailed through the air over Ella’s head toward Epps: sticks of furniture, vegetables, bottles, shoes, and rocks. They caromed off the hood, windshield, roof, and the men’s arms as they raised their hands to cover their heads and faces. The sounds echoed through the street.