The Last Ballad Read online

  “Just seems like you’d want to meet him after all this time,” Violet said.

  “I got enough friends,” Ella said again.

  “Ain’t none of them white.”

  “All of them poor though,” Ella said. “We got that in common.”

  “That’s true,” Violet said.

  They kept walking. The birds began to move through the trees on either side of the lane. Fox Denton’s music came from behind them now. Ella cocked her ear to listen, found that she could no longer hear the song although she still felt it. She closed her eyes, opened them slowly, sang:

  Carolina moon keep shining,

  Shining on the one who waits for me.

  Carolina moon I’m pining,

  Pining for the place I long to be.

  She stopped singing. The women kept walking. Neither of them spoke.

  “Ain’t nobody waiting for me,” Violet finally said. “Nobody but the bill collector.”

  “I know that’s right,” Ella said.

  “You write any new songs?” Violet asked.

  “I been working on one.”

  “What’s it about?”

  Ella smiled, said, “It’s about this shit life we’re living.”

  Violet laughed. “Sounds pretty,” she said. Then she said, “You could make a few dollars.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I’ve told you, you can sing, girl. You know they got people over in Charlotte that’ll pay twenty dollars for a hillbilly record.”

  “I ain’t no hillbilly,” Ella said. “Not no more.”

  “Millbilly then,” Violet said. “Call yourself whatever you want. Just get over there and get yourself paid.”

  “We’ll see,” Ella said.

  They stopped in front of the cabin where Violet lived with her mother and her younger sister Iva.

  “Wait here,” Violet said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “You think it’ll help her?”

  “I wouldn’t give it to you if I didn’t,” Violet said. “And you better hope something helps. You can’t miss no more work.”

  “I can’t lose another baby either,” Ella said. “I asked Dobbins to put me on days so I could take care of Rose at night, but he won’t do it. I told Goldberg’s brother too. Something’s got to change.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Violet said. “I got to be quiet. They’re still asleep.”

  Ella watched Violet walk up the porch steps and disappear inside the tiny cabin. A weak light came from inside.

  Violet was twenty-five, unmarried, and without children. Her sister Iva was twelve years old and as close to a daughter as Violet would have unless she had one of her own, but Ella knew that a sister was no substitute for a being who was born of your own body. Violet was Ella’s best friend, but that didn’t mean Violet could understand what it was to lose a child and then fear that you might lose another.

  Ella waited for Violet to return, and while she waited she thought about death: her children’s, her own. She assumed and assumed correctly that she had more life behind her than she had ahead, and when she tossed that thought around in her mind she saw the faces of her four living children and imagined their world without her in it. So far, only one child, two-year-old Willie, had died and slipped from her life forever, and it was hard for her to imagine that one day her children would think of the final act of slipping away from life when they thought of her.

  Ella and John had buried Willie ten miles east, in Ranlo, because they’d been living there and working at the Rex Spinning Company when he died. They’d buried him in the municipal cemetery because they had not belonged to a church and no church had offered a piece of earth in which to place the tiny pine coffin.

  It had been five years since Willie’s death, but Ella still traveled to the cemetery at least once a month on her Sundays off. She and John had not been able to afford a tombstone, so John had chiseled the letter W on a field rock and placed it at the head of the grave. Ella had maintained it since, sweeping it clean, dressing it with what she could find, what she could afford.

  That fall she had set aside what little money she could in the hopes of buying one of the felt poinsettias she’d seen in the window at Falls Hardware in downtown Bessemer City. She finally purchased one before her shift on a Saturday afternoon, three days before Christmas. The next morning she walked and hitched to Ranlo with the felt flower wrapped in tissue paper and a shiny new baseball in her coat pocket. Willie had died too young for Ella to know for certain whether he loved baseball, but his older brother Otis loved it more than anything on earth, so Ella figured that Willie would’ve loved it too. She’d done everything she could to keep Otis from finding the baseball after she’d bought it, went so far as to wrap it in oilcloth and hide it up under the cabin’s eaves, where she prayed it wouldn’t get wet or loose itself and fall to the ground.

  The Sunday she’d visited the cemetery had been unseasonably warm, and she’d removed John’s old jacket and left it on a bench while she picked weeds and used her hands to sweep the field rock. After that she spent close to an hour arranging and rearranging the poinsettia and the baseball on a cleared patch of dirt in front of the rock. She’d brought along a small glass jar to house the flower, but the jar just seemed to swallow it instead, and so she decided to curl the poinsettia’s metal stem around the baseball to keep it from rolling away, the felt flower peeking out above the white leather like a red burst of sun.

  The weather had changed by the time she returned to the cemetery a few weeks later in January. The sky had spit snow all night long but had stopped near dawn, and only an inch or so remained when Ella arrived in Ranlo. Her footprints were the first set of tracks in the cemetery, and she looked forward to seeing the red flare of felt against the snow-covered ground. But when she arrived at Willie’s graveside she found that the poinsettia and the baseball were gone. She stood there for a moment, staring down at the hump on the ground where the field rock lay covered in snow. She looked around at the other graves, searching each one for a flash of red, for a glimmer of the baseball’s bright white leather. She turned and saw the tracks she’d left on her way in, retraced them in her mind, came to terms with the fact that the snow had not caused her to lose her way. Although Ella knew that it was Willie’s grave that she stood before, that did not stop her from kneeling and brushing the snow away and using her finger to trace the chiseled W in the cold stone. She ran her hands through the snowy grass, hoping to find what she knew for certain was not there.

  She stood, turned around, walked beside the footprints she’d just made. The caretaker’s tiny shack sat by the cemetery’s entrance, a thin wisp of smoke slipping from its chimney. She knocked on the door and waited, listened for a moment, knocked again. Inside there was the crash of something metal falling to the floor. The sound was followed by mumbled words of frustration that Ella wasn’t able to discern.

  The door swung open, revealed an old man in spectacles and long underwear. He squinted into the sunlight and buttoned a denim coat over his chest, did his best to part his thin, white hair with his long, crooked fingers.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he said.

  Ella looked at the old man, and then she turned and looked back in the direction of Willie’s grave, hoping again that she had made some kind of mistake, that the poinsettia and the baseball hid somewhere out there in the snow, waiting for her to find them. The man straightened his spectacles, folded his arms across his chest, and tucked his hands under his armpits to keep them warm.

  “My son’s grave’s been robbed,” she said.

  “Ma’am?” His eyes went wide, the blue pupils smoky with cataract.

  “Somebody stole things off his grave,” she said. “I need to know what happened to them.”

  The old man turned his head so that his right ear was closer to Ella. She realized that he could not hear well, and she repeated what she’d just said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Scared me. I thought you
meant his grave was dug up.” He smiled as if the fact that such a ghastly violation had not occurred should serve as the end of the matter.

  “A felt poinsettia,” Ella said. “And a baseball. They’ve been stolen.”

  “I clear all the graves after the New Year, ma’am,” he said. “Always have.” He sniffed, scratched at the side of his nose.

  “But they cost me a lot of money,” Ella said.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “That’s the rules.”

  “Nobody told me the rules.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s the rules.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “The rules?”

  “No,” Ella said. “My son’s things. What did you do with them?”

  “I probably threw them away, ma’am.”

  She knew he was lying, knew that he’d probably sold them for much less money than it had taken her months to save. Something broke loose inside Ella’s chest, and she fought the urge to cry out. When she turned and looked back over the graves it seemed as if the world had turned with her, and she feared that she might collapse from the dizziness of it.

  “Everything?” she asked. “You just throw everything away.”

  The old man sighed and peered into the shack behind him. “You can come back here and look,” he said. “See if you can find what you’re looking for. I doubt it’s here, but you can look.”

  As soon as Ella stepped through the door of the tiny shack, she knew that the old man had long been a tenant of the tiny shack and would no doubt die inside its walls. It was heated to stifling and reeked of sweat, urine, and some kind of liniment. A metal cot sat in front of a sooty stove, where a fire licked at the grate. Rotting books and newspapers and circulars were stacked waist-high against the walls. Ella followed the old man past the stove into a tiny storeroom full of tools and equipment. Wooden shelves hemmed them in on either side and housed all manner of things: crucifixes, dolls, placards, faded artificial flowers. Ella was hardly inside the storeroom when she knew for certain that Willie’s poinsettia and baseball were not among these things, but she looked anyway, took her time and pored over each article as if it might morph into a thing she recognized.

  She finally selected a red, water-damaged paper carnation that looked nothing like the felt poinsettia that had cost her a day’s pay, but still she closed her hand around it and slipped it into the side pocket of John’s old coat. The man’s eyes followed her as if he knew that the flower she’d taken was not the one she’d described, but neither of them said a word by way of explanation or conjecture.

  Ella left the storeroom, was halfway across the old man’s living quarters when she heard him call to her. She turned and saw that he was on his knees, his hands feeling around for something tucked into the filth beneath his cot. She watched him until he found what he’d been looking for. He stood and held something out to her: an old baseball, oil-stained and swollen, riddled with what appeared to be teeth marks from a dog.

  “I imagine it ain’t as nice as the one you’re looking for, but it’s yours if you want it,” the old man said. “I’m awful sorry.”

  Ella nodded, took the baseball, surprised by how heavy and large it felt in her hand after the memory of the fresh, unused ball she’d purchased for Willie.

  Once she was outside she did not look back toward Willie’s grave. She went left instead and followed the path out of the cemetery’s gates. There were no cars on the road, everyone either at church or at home because of the snow. Ella had walked only a mile when she found herself standing beneath the snow-dusted boughs of a pine tree, her chest heaving in sobs. She held her hands over her eyes, caught the reek of the old man’s shack where it had infused itself into the baseball he’d just given her. She sniffed, wiped at her nose, blinked warm tears from her eyes.

  She hadn’t told her children about the poinsettia or the new baseball, and she decided that she’d give the old man’s ball to Otis as soon as she arrived home. It was as nice or nicer than any baseball Otis had ever owned, and she found herself thinking, Something, something will come of this. It was not the waste that it now seems. But even as her mind said this, she found herself pulling back her arm and pausing for just a moment before throwing the baseball as far into the woods as she could. She removed the paper carnation from her pocket, tore it apart in her hands, the paper disintegrating like a dead leaf. She opened her palms and watched the tiny scraps of red paper fall onto the snow. She didn’t want charity or kindness or relief or pity. All she wanted was what she’d worked for.

  She stared down at what was left of the carnation, her body registering the anger and humiliation and pain as they left her as slowly as an extinguished fire leaves a room so it may be reclaimed by the cold. Her breathing slowed, lifted like steam in the frigid air.

  This is fitting, she’d thought. This is what happens. The cemetery is where you leave things behind. You aren’t supposed to go home with anyone in your arms or anything in your pockets.

  The light inside Violet’s cabin winked off, and Violet opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. The morning had brightened in the short time Ella had been waiting, and she could see Violet clearly as she walked toward her across the neatly kept yard, the dirt walk swept smooth and clean, the clumps of flowers that lined it damp with dew and glimmering against the morning. Violet’s body seemed to hum in the soft light. She held a Mason jar in each hand. She stopped where the grassy yard turned to muddy gravel and offered Ella one of the jars.

  “This one’s honey,” she said. She offered the other. “And this one’s whiskey and a little something else.”

  “What else?” Ella asked.

  Violet smiled. “An old Stumptown secret.”

  “Mother used to give my brother and me ginger and moonshine,” Ella said. “Horehound candy if she could find it.”

  “Well, you ain’t no hillbilly no more, remember?”

  “Yes,” Ella said. She smiled. “I remember.”

  “You still thinking about going to that rally in Gastonia today?” Violet asked.

  “Only if Rose is better when I get home,” Ella said. “I can’t leave her here sick on my only day off.”

  “I can look after them,” Violet said.

  “I was hoping you’d go with me,” Ella said. “Could use the company.”

  “Girl, you trying to get me killed? Ain’t no way that many white folks going to welcome a colored girl from Stumptown.”

  Ella considered removing the crumpled union leaflet from her pocket and holding it before Violet’s eyes, jabbing her finger at its demand of “Equal Work for Equal Pay.” Instead, she said, “I heard the union says white and colored are the same.”

  Violet snorted. “So? So what? Saying it and meaning it are different things.”

  “It’s still something to say it,” Ella said. “No white folks around here say it but me.”

  “What’s Dobbins going to think about you missing last night’s shift and then joining the union?”

  “I didn’t have no choice about missing that shift,” Ella said. “I might not have a choice about the union either.”

  “What’s Charlie going to think?”

  “You know Charlie,” Ella said.

  “Everybody knows a man like Charlie,” Violet said. She shook her head, gestured toward Ella’s belly. “You ain’t told him yet, have you?”

  Although she held the Mason jars, Ella’s hands instinctively moved toward her flat stomach. The whiskey splashed inside the glass. “No,” she said, “I ain’t told him. I don’t know for sure yet.”

  “You’re pregnant, girl,” Violet said. “Any fool can look at you and tell that, but I guess Charlie ain’t just any kind of fool. He’s a special kind.”

  “I’ll tell him when the time’s right.” She turned away from Violet, stepped onto the road.

  Violet called after her. “Better tell him soon. Time ain’t never right for a man like Charlie.”

  Ella wal
ked on. The sky lightened above her while the air around her cooled. She descended the road toward the end of the lane where her cabin sat. Sleep clung to her bones like a heavy coat that pulled her toward the earth. Behind the cabin, willow trees hid a spring-fed pond, and Ella could always feel and smell the water before taking the last bend in the road and seeing the clapboard shack where she and her children lived. She took the steps as quietly as she could and opened the cabin’s door, stepped over the pallets where her children lay sleeping in the front room.

  Ella bent at the knees, lowered herself to the floor. She covered Rose’s foot, tucked the blanket around it. Outside, birds stirred in the trees as morning broke over Stumptown. The only sound inside the cabin was Rose’s raspy, labored breathing. Ella brushed the girl’s hair from her forehead, gently placed her hand over it. The fever had passed. Ella closed her eyes, allowed herself a quiet sigh.

  When she opened her eyes she saw that Lilly had been watching her. Ella smiled. Lilly smiled back.

  “Hey,” Ella whispered.

  “Hey,” Lilly whispered back.

  “How was she last night?”

  “She coughed a lot, but she didn’t have no fever.”

  “Not now either,” Ella said.

  “Good.”

  “Did you sleep?”

  Lilly nodded her head. Yawned.

  “Good,” Ella said. “See if you can sleep a little longer.” She reached into her pocket and showed Lilly the jars of honey and whiskey. “Got this from Violet. She says it’ll fix a cough. I’ll mix it up and leave it by the stove. Give it to her when she wakes up: just two spoonfuls. She ain’t going to like it, but make sure she takes it. There’ll be something for you to eat too.”

  Lilly nodded her head again, watched Ella as she got to her feet. Ella stared down at her daughter for a moment, saw her ex-husband’s thin nose and light blond hair. The girl was beautiful, sweet, in spite of looking like John.