The Last Ballad Read online

  Epps holstered his gun, and—still bent at the waist—shuffled toward the passenger’s door and climbed inside. The truck rumbled to life and rolled backward away from Ella as if the world were moving in reverse, as if a tide were receding, and although Ella had never seen the ocean before—would never see it—she pictured the dark tide that had flushed her from the mountains and carried her east here to Gastonia, and she realized that it was possible for a tide to recede, to turn back, to relinquish its pull on your life.

  One last bottle sailed overhead and crashed to the ground, scattering its shards along the road. The voices of the people behind Ella grew louder, and she turned to face them.

  “That’s the singer,” someone said, and “Bessemer City,” another said. “Seen her with Beal this morning,” and “That there’s Ella May.”

  Chapter Five

  Brother

  Friday, April 12, 1929

  He had not known it was Gaston County when he arrived in mid-April, had not even known it was North Carolina through which he’d trudged a day earlier. He’d spent a clear, moonless night sleeping in an open field, and when he woke covered in dew he slung his satchel over his left shoulder and picked his way through the rocky eddies of a shallow run of river. Once on the other side, the sun now cresting the horizon, he kept the river on his right and followed the shoreline north, his clothes drying in the warm morning air.

  Hours later, the sun directly overhead, he’d walked west until he saw a crossroads where a boy stood beneath a persimmon tree, staring down into a ditch that ran through the high grass alongside the road. Although he was some distance away, the boy must have heard his approach, because he turned and looked at him; then he went back to staring at whatever was at the bottom of the ditch.

  “Hello, friend,” he said. He waved, but the boy’s back was turned and he could not see him as he approached.

  The boy turned again and looked at him but did not say anything. He wondered if the boy was mute. He was much closer now, and he could see that the boy was no older than ten, barefoot and in overalls, the legs of which had been rolled to his mid-calves. His face was dirty, his blond hair the color of straw.

  The boy did not look at him again, not even when he stood beside him and peered down at a black-and-white mutt that lay panting, its dry tongue lolling from the side of its mouth. Specks of blood spattered the white fur around its lips. More blood glossed the dry grass around the dog’s anus. The animal appeared calm. One of its eyes, the only one he could see from where he stood, rotated in the orbit of its socket and repeatedly looked at him, the boy, the sky, and then the tall blades of grass that stirred overhead in the breeze.

  “This here your pooch?” he asked the boy.

  The boy nodded his head.

  “What happened to him?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “You just found him here?”

  The boy nodded his head again.

  He looked up from the ditch and touched a branch of the persimmon tree, trailed his fingers through its yellow blossoms. He took in the landscape around him. The river was somewhere behind him, so he did not turn in that direction. Instead he looked toward the bright green trees on the other side of a field, and for a brief moment he wondered what grew in the field and when it would be harvested. The day was clear, but he smelled something in the air. Something damp, clammy, perhaps born of river mud.

  “Where are we?” he asked the boy.

  The boy lifted his eyes from the ditch and looked around as if getting his bearings.

  “Gaston,” the boy finally said.

  “Gaston,” he repeated. He looked down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here.’”

  “You and your mama live close by?” he asked.

  The boy nodded his head, lifted his arm, and pointed down the road that seemed to lead south.

  “Your mama got any work needs doing?” he asked.

  “She’ll shoot you,” the boy said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’ll shoot you,” the boy said again. “She said she’d shoot the next man who come up from the river.” The boy looked at him. “You come up from the river, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Well,” the boy said, turning his gaze back to the dog, “she’ll shoot you sure enough.”

  “Huh,” he said. He looked south, in the direction the boy had pointed, but there was nothing to see.

  “I think some old jalopy come through here and run him over,” the boy said.

  It took a moment for him to realize that the boy was speaking of the dog. The dog hadn’t moved, apart from the one eye that still looked around at all it could see of the world.

  “You think he’s paralyzed?”

  “What’s paralyzed?”

  “Means ‘he can’t move nothing,’” he said.

  “You a doctor?” the boy asked.

  “No,” he said. “I ain’t no doctor.”

  He dropped the satchel at his feet and held his right arm against his chest and reached down into the ditch to stroke the dog’s rear flank with his left hand. The mutt’s pupil widened. Without raising its head, its eye searched for the source of the touch. It growled, but its growl was low, even.

  “I think some old jalopy come through here and run him over,” the boy said again.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” he said to the dog. He rubbed the dog again, stopped, looked up at the boy. “What’s your pooch’s name?”

  “Roscoe,” the boy said.

  “It’s okay, Roscoe,” he said.

  It happened quickly, so he did not see if the mutt’s teeth came anywhere near him, but he felt the dog’s body tense for just a moment before it yelped and sprang toward his hand. He fell back onto the road. The dog resettled itself as if it had never moved.

  “You see that?” he said.

  The boy bent down and stroked the mutt’s head, whispered something into its ear.

  “Guess he ain’t paralyzed,” the boy said.

  “I guess not.” He stood, dusted off the seat of his pants. “There a town close by here?”

  “There’s some castles over there,” the boy said, pointing west.

  “Castles?”

  “Yep,” the boy said. “Castles.”

  The dog closed its eyes, tongued its lips over and over. The boy continued to stroke its head.

  “How far you think them castles are?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said.

  “How long would it take to walk to there?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said again.

  He wondered if the boy was lying about the castles, or if they were something he’d heard of but had never seen. He picked up his satchel, looked west.

  “Which way’s them castles again?” he asked.

  Without taking his eyes from the dog, the boy pointed west again.

  “All right,” he said, slinging his satchel over his shoulder. “I hope your pooch feels better soon.”

  He set off down the road. He’d walked a minute or so when he heard the boy’s voice behind him.

  “Hey!” the boy called.

  He turned and looked at the boy. The boy cradled the dog in his arms. Its body was turned in a way that he could see fresh blood where it soaked the fur around its tail. For a moment he feared that the dog had died in the boy’s arms, but then he saw it move.

  “Why you got that chair around your neck?” the boy asked.

  He looked down at the tiny wooden chair where it hung from the leather strap in the middle of his chest. He lifted his hand and fingered it for a moment before letting it go. He looked up at the boy, considered the difficulty of explaining the story of the chair, where it had come from, what it meant. He decided against it. Instead he raised his hand, waved.

  “Blessings,” he said. “Blessings to you, friend, and Roscoe there too.”

  The boy turne
d, carried the dog south, in the direction he’d said was home.

  He walked west with the satchel’s strap over his left shoulder, the chair bouncing against his chest with each step. Years had passed since he’d threaded this same strip of leather through the chair’s spindles and tied it around his neck, since he’d learned that he could effect great change with a small seed that continued to yield an enormous crop in not only his life, but also the lives of others.

  It had been late summer in 1920, just outside of Augusta, in eastern Georgia, when he saw her for the first and only time. Of all the things he could not or would not remember about his previous life, before he became a wanderer, this was the one memory to which he had fiercely clung. He’d been standing on the sidewalk outside a barbershop. He’d asked the barber if he could sweep the floors and wash the windows for whatever change the barber could spare, but the barber had told him that he smelled awful and was indecently dirty, and that the sheriff would be called if he did not leave the barber and his patrons in peace. He’d been hoping the barber would change his mind, for it was a small town and he’d run out of businesses in front of which to beg, but the longer he stood there, his hands shaking and his throat dry, the more he doubted the barber would budge and the more the threat to call the sheriff seemed certain to be carried out.

  What finally caused him to turn away from the barbershop’s window was the reflection of her black convertible Packard with its top down as it rolled past on the street behind him. A banner stretching along the side of the car read jesus is coming soon—get ready. An older woman sat in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. On the back of the Packard’s folded top perched the most regal young woman he’d ever seen. Her skin was white and fine, and her dark, shiny hair was piled atop her head. She wore a white dress with long sleeves, and she held a megaphone and called out to people on the street. She waved, handed out flyers, said, “Hope to see y’all this evening!” in an accent that sounded distant and strange, but her voice rang true and clear, and he wanted to hear it again.

  He left the shop’s window, walked to the edge of the street, and stood in the Packard’s wake. He watched as it rounded the corner. A half-dozen flyers lay on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He crossed over and stepped up onto the curb and picked up one of them.

  SALVATION AND HEALING ON OFFER THIS EVENING

  Sister Aimee Semple McPherson Brings the Good Word

  Public Fairgrounds 7 o’clock

  “White and Colored Are Equal Before God and Beneath My Tent.”

  Perhaps it was the haunting image of her sitting atop the Packard that took him there that evening. Perhaps it was mere curiosity. He could hear her voice and the shouts of the crowd before he entered the fairgrounds. As a child and as an adult he’d attended tent revivals in fields just like this one, had found himself moved by the spirit on quite a few occasions, had even slipped a coin or two into the offering plate as it made its way through the audience. But even with those experiences he was not prepared for what he found: an open field full of what seemed to be hundreds if not thousands of farmers and businessmen and housewives and children, white and colored alike, all of their arms raised, their hands upturned, many of them dancing or twitching or simply running in place, their eyes closed as if to shut out the world. Beneath the tent, this woman, this Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, stood atop a stage in a silken white dress and long white gloves. If he had not known this was a revival, he would have thought her a sorceress and the crowds before her the victims of a powerful spell.

  Sister, for that was what she’d told the crowd to call her, spoke of her childhood in Canada, how the spirit of God had come upon her as a teenager as a warning against even entertaining the idea of evolution. She told of how she’d met an Irishman named Robert James Semple at a revival just like the one she now led, how his clean mind and pure heart had so impressed her and had so delivered her unto the Lord, and she realized that the Lord had delivered them unto one another.

  She and Semple had traveled as missionaries to China, where he’d died of an illness, but not before giving her a daughter. She’d come home from China, raised her child, given birth to a second child after remarrying a kindhearted, decent man. She did her best to embrace domestic life, did her best to be what a woman should be, but it would not stick. She felt a call to wander the land like John the Baptist, a peripatetic prophet in a black convertible driven by her elderly mother while her children stayed at home with her husband. She’d preach and heal. She’d change the world with her kindness and sense of justice and her cry for the equality of all people.

  Never before had he heard someone tell a story that so closely resembled his own. He too had tried to embrace domestic life, had tried and failed to be a worthy Christian and good husband, had tried to stay clear of whiskey and loose women and the men who peddled both. He had failed. He had hurt innocent people. He had destroyed lives. He no longer gave a damn about being holy. He just wanted to be good, and there, in that field outside Augusta, good is what he decided to be.

  He did not hear Sister speak again until 1921, and by that time he had walked much of Georgia and South Carolina, offering kindness where it could be offered, helping the helpless, preaching the equality of all people regardless of race. In all that time, in that year and a half, he had not touched a drop of liquor, a deck of cards, or the exposed skin of a woman.

  On the day he heard Sister’s voice for the second time he’d found himself with a little money in his pocket, and he’d taken a seat on the porch of a country store near Sumter, South Carolina, where he’d just unwrapped a pork sandwich. The tinny drone of a radio whined from inside the store, and as its operator switched through the few stations it could pick up from over in Columbia, he heard Sister’s voice beckon to him. He leapt from his seat and went inside and begged the store’s owner to leave the dial where it lay. Then he leaned against the counter, his sandwich growing cold, and listened to the voice of the woman who’d changed his life.

  She and her mother had made it all the way to Los Angeles, California, and there she planned to build a grand temple that would save the world. What she needed now were prayers, prayers and donations, to ensure that the power of God could continue to touch lives with even greater speed than she’d been able to achieve these last few years on the back roads of America. For a donation of five dollars, Sister herself would send the faithful patron a personalized letter and a small replica of the hundreds of chairs that would one day fill the Angelus Temple.

  He checked his pockets and found a little over four dollars. He hadn’t held a steady job in years, and money meant nothing to him aside from the ease of buying food, and there was plenty of that in the fields he passed and the woods through which he walked on his travels.

  He asked for a pencil and wrote down the postal address in Los Angeles, then he pondered the uneaten sandwich on the counter beside him and the unopened, sweating glass bottle of Coca-Cola that sat beside it. He calculated what he’d just paid for each. He refolded the wax paper around the sandwich and asked for his money to be returned, but the store owner would only let him return the Coca-Cola, and even that he accepted begrudgingly. He ate the pork sandwich and waited while the store owner opened the till and counted out the money for the Coca-Cola.

  When he finished eating he asked the owner if there was anything a good man could do to earn honest money for a good woman’s cause. For the rest of the afternoon, he unloaded boxes in the storeroom and stocked shelves. That evening he swept out the store and swept the porch and the porch steps. For all of this work, work that had felt both natural and fulfilling, the store owner gave him a dollar, which, combined with his existing funds, was plenty of money to buy an envelope and postage to send five dollars to Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.

  He took the envelope and the stamp from the store owner. After a brief consideration of where he would be a month from that date—he figured he’d shoot for Greenwo
od, South Carolina—he scratched out a note in the best penmanship his left hand could muster.

  Dear Sister,

  I saw you at a revival out side Augusta. I send you these hard earned 5 dollars and hope your dream comes true. I look forward to getting a letter from you. I look forward to getting that little chair too.

  Your friend . . .

  (Here he paused, his pencil hovering above the page. He smiled, decided to sign a new name, a name he’d gone by ever since that day.)

  . . . in peace and justice,

  Brother

  What the boy at the crossroads had thought were castles were actually the buildings of a Catholic monastery. Brother crested a hill and spotted a monk in a cassock hoeing rows of what looked to be cabbages in a small, neatly turned field. He waved to the monk. The monk stopped hoeing and stared at him for a moment. He leaned against the hoe and wiped at his brow. Then he raised a hand to shield the sun from his eyes so that he might see Brother more clearly. He waved back.

  The small order of Benedictine monks at Belmont Abbey were quiet, holy men, benefactors of the small college of the same name that the order had founded in 1876. On the campus, a couple hundred Gaston and Mecklenburg County farm boys in suits and ties wandered from classroom to classroom in search of the mysteries of a proper liberal arts education. Meanwhile, the monks, whose cloistered lives allowed them almost no awareness of the comings and goings of the students, prayed, studied, maintained the life of the monastery, and volunteered their time in the local mill communities. They took Brother in without hesitation or question. They did not ask his name or who he was, and that was fine with him because he did not want to be who he’d been.

  The monk he’d first met in the field that April day was Father Gregory, a gouty, red-faced old man who’d come from Pennsylvania. Brother spent most of his time with Father Gregory, working in the garden, cleaning the monks’ quarters, walking the abbey’s grounds, listening to the gurgle of the small fountain in the courtyard.