The Last Ballad Read online

  Usually Verchel and Johnny would nod to one another by way of hello, and then Verchel would fork over a couple of coins into Johnny’s dirty palm. Then they’d each take to a straight-back chair and sit in silence for a few minutes, passing a jar of clear liquor back and forth between them, the baby girl either playing on the floor or sleeping on a makeshift pallet. She had Johnny’s light eyes and hair, but something about her stillness and quiet nature marked her as being Ella’s girl.

  Sometimes Johnny would be entertaining a couple of women by the time Verchel arrived at the house—women Johnny called friends—and sometimes Johnny and his friends would have a few drinks and leave the room and go across to the other side of the shack and stay gone for long minutes at a time, nothing but giggles and the occasional stifled sigh making their way across the dogtrot to let Verchel know that someone else was at home aside from himself and the baby girl, the odors of the women’s soft powder and sweet perspiration hovering about them both.

  In many ways it was those two women—or at least two women like them, as Verchel could hardly differentiate between such women—that caused the first and what would be final rift between him and Johnny Wiggins. It was a Friday afternoon in the spring of 1920, the air sharp and crisp, although the late day had turned somewhat warm after the cool morning. Johnny had gone across the dogtrot with two women, and Verchel, as usual, had stayed behind with little Lilly, who by now knew his face and his voice and almost seemed to recognize the little songs he’d sing between sips of shine. The newborn baby boy named Otis slept on a spread of quilts by Lilly’s pallet. Verchel hadn’t even known Ella had given birth, and when he’d remarked on the presence of the little baby, all Johnny had said was “That’s my son.”

  Verchel watched Lilly now from where he sat in his chair as she stood on her own two skinny legs and reached up toward the table where a shiny red apple—the last of a bushel they’d spent the past few afternoons eating—sat just out of reach. Verchel suddenly found himself making his own wobbly attempt to stand on his own two skinny legs, his pocketknife swinging open in his hand, its blade stabbing at the apple. He returned to his seat, and with his bad hand he held the apple up close to his body and then cut as nice a slice as he could manage.

  When Verchel held the small wedge of apple out toward her, Lilly ambled over to Verchel’s chair. She closed her tiny fingers around the apple slice and lifted it to a mouth that had slowly grown full of pearly-colored teeth in the short time Verchel had known her. He watched as she sucked the juice from the apple slice, the fruit turning soft and pulpy in her hand, the peel lifting away like a ribbon before she shoved the slice into her mouth. She didn’t swallow it, but turned away from Verchel and walked over to the mess of quilts where her brother slept. Verchel watched as she used her finger to spoon the apple mush from her mouth and spread it across her brother’s lips. The baby startled when she touched him, opened his eyes, licked at the sugary pulp. When Lilly returned, Verchel cut another piece of apple for her, watched as she fed it to her brother like she’d fed him the first piece. Verchel picked up his cup and knocked back what was left in it.

  As his knife cut another slice of the apple, something of Verchel’s past life flashed before his eyes: he recalled what a pleasure it had been to spoon corn bread and buttermilk into the open mouths of his twin niece and nephew all that time ago while his mind, body, and spirit healed at his brother’s house, and he thought of how he had hardly laid eyes on them in the time he’d been married to Miss Myra. The more he turned it over in his mind, the more he understood that leaving work early and spending the late afternoons in a dogtrot shack with a no-good, philandering moonshiner had less to do with the liquor he craved and more to do with the life he actually wanted. He wanted Wiggins’s life: the rosy-faced toddler who stood before him now, drool and apple juice streaming from her mouth; the sleeping newborn baby boy; their small, tough mother Ella, who toiled like a mule six days a week at the mill.

  All of this culminated with a clear conception of the pleasures Miss Myra’s love had taken from him: the joy in the company of small children; the bite and flushed feel of a good, stiff drink.

  So perhaps that’s why he said what he said when Johnny opened the door and stumbled inside the room, one of the two women close behind him, both of them drunk and giggling as if they’d never be sober or somber again. Verchel waited until Johnny collapsed into the other straight-back chair and pulled the woman down onto his lap.

  “You ought not do them that way,” Verchel said.

  “Who’re you talking about?” Wiggins asked.

  “Your wife,” Verchel said. “These babies here.”

  “What ‘way’ you got in mind?” Wiggins asked.

  “You know,” Verchel said. He folded his knife and slipped it back into the front pocket of his trousers. “I’ve watched you.”

  “And what would you recommend I do? What ‘way’ would you have me follow?” Wiggins asked. “Yours?”

  “There’s worse ways than mine,” Verchel said.

  “Maybe so,” Wiggins said, “but it’d be hard to find them. What’s worse than a man who prays to the Lord on Sunday morning with liquor in his veins?”

  “I’m a sinner,” Verchel said. “I got no qualm saying it.”

  “You’re worse than a sinner,” Wiggins said. “You’re a coward.”

  “Now hold on,” Verchel said, his heartbeat picking up, his mind flashing forward to the prospect of him and Wiggins coming to blows.

  “You’re a henpecked coward,” Wiggins said, his teeth clenched on the other side of a dangerous smile. The woman in Wiggins’s lap moved as if attempting to stand in order to get away from whatever it was that was about to happen, but Wiggins held on to her hips so that she couldn’t scramble free.

  “You watch your mouth. My wife’s a fine woman,” Verchel said. “A great one.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because,” Verchel said, “because she does the Lord’s work. Uplifts this community. That’s why I come looking for you. She wants to uplift this family, just like she uplifted me.”

  “Well, I sure as hell don’t need no help getting uplifted,” Wiggins said. He popped the woman’s backside with the palm of his hand, and an exhalation shot from her mouth as if something had burst inside her chest.

  “We all need grace,” Verchel said.

  “Your wife can’t give you that. All she can do is fool you into believing you don’t want the things you actually want. That ain’t grace,” Wiggins said. “That’s trickery.

  “But that one over there,” Wiggins said, his head nodding toward the door that led across the dogtrot, “she’s the kind of gal you need, all the grace you can handle. And I’ll tell you this: she likes you. She told Sarah here that she thinks you’re cute.”

  At that, Wiggins snaked his hand up Sarah’s back and, closing his fingers around the nape of her neck, jostled her a little as if trying to wake her.

  “It’s true,” Sarah said. “I heard her say it. Just now, when we were all over there—”

  “See?” Johnny said. “I told you.” With his free hand he reached out and clapped Verchel’s shoulder, and then he reached beneath his seat where a milk crate housed a collection of Mason jars. He unscrewed the lid on one of them and took a long drink, and then he passed it to Verchel, who did the same. “Now go on over there and ask her yourself what she thinks about you.”

  As Verchel swallowed down what would be his last bit of liquor for the day, he discovered that his head felt empty. The feeling was a good one: the warm liquor threading through his blood; the sweet scent of the woman named Sarah encircling his head; the knowledge of the other woman waiting for him in the other room; his new understanding that grace wasn’t something Miss Myra could give, but was instead something he must go out and claim for himself. He felt a hand in the small of his back push him forward, and although he knew the hand belonged to Johnny Wiggins, Verchel also knew the hand was unseen and therefore unkn
own, and he decided to go where it led him, and where it led him was across the way and into darkness.

  As Verchel passed across the dogtrot the momentary explosion of blinding sunlight carried his mind back to the time he’d had his picture taken—the only time he’d had it taken—the summer after he and Miss Myra were married. They’d come into Cowpens, where a traveling photographer had set up shop inside the post office, and the two of them—dressed in the wedding clothes they’d worn that fateful Sunday morning—had taken their places before a dark swath of fabric that hung from the wall. While the photographer readied his equipment, Verchel felt Miss Myra’s hand come to rest heavily upon his shoulder, her whispered voice falling just as heavily upon his ear.

  “Now, sit up straight, dear,” she’d said just before the brilliant flash of the bulb cemented their images as husband and wife for time immemorial.

  Well, that’s that, Verchel had thought.

  And now this was this: before him a blond-haired woman bent at the waist in the dark room, her left leg atop the low mattress skid, her long fingers either rolling up or rolling down a white stocking worn thin enough to show her pale white toes through its tip. He’d seen this woman an hour ago in the other room, but seeing her now—in a state of either undressing or redressing—was to see her in a manner he had not seen a woman before.

  When she raised her eyes to Verchel where he stood in the open doorway—the light playing across her face and flickering through her eyes—Verchel saw something of a performance in the way she stood there letting his eyes take her in, and he thought of the actress Betty Compson, whom he’d beheld at a movie house in Spartanburg the previous summer. The woman before him carried the same bright yellow curls that tumbled over Compson’s shoulders and draped across her chest and the same wide eyes that had looked out from the screen and found Verchel where he sat alone in the dark, dusty theater.

  But he’d never heard Betty Compson’s voice, which he imagined as high-pitched and sweet, so it was a surprise when this woman’s raspy tone shattered the stillness of the scene.

  “You need something?” she asked.

  “Johnny told me to come over here,” Verchel said.

  “You got any money?”

  “You ought not be living this way.”

  “You got any money or not?”

  “I done give it all to Johnny,” Verchel said.

  “Well,” the woman said, sliding her foot off the skid, standing up straight and running her hands down the front of her dress, “if that’s how he wants to work it.”

  Verchel swallowed hard.

  “They said you like me,” he said.

  “Okay,” the woman said. She lifted her dress and slid her undergarments to the floor and kicked them aside. Verchel watched her, his mind not quite registering what occurred right before him.

  “They told me you said that: that you like me.”

  “Okay,” the woman said again.

  “And I like you, and I want to share the good news of salvation.”

  “Share it,” the woman said. She lay back against the skid, her legs parted enough for Verchel to see the shadow between them. He didn’t move. She sighed and scooted to the edge of the skid and stood and walked toward him. “Are you too drunk?” she asked. She took his hand. “My God,” she said, “you’re ice-cold.” She led him over to the skid and undid his trousers. “My God,” she said again, “you’re shaking.”

  When she pushed him toward the bed, Verchel felt his body falling as if it might never stop, and even after his back came to rest atop the skid he felt his fall continue through the bed and into the floor beneath it, down through the earth, where he tumbled toward its hot, fiery belly. He fell with such velocity that he didn’t notice when she climbed atop him, didn’t notice as the skid and his body gave with her weight, her movement.

  He lay there staring at the darkened rafters without seeing the ceiling, without seeing the wisps of blond curls that swung in and out of his line of vision, without hearing the dull scrape of the bed skid against the wood floor, without registering the encouraging, almost demanding, words of the woman atop him, who clearly wanted this thing to be done.

  But what he did hear was the approaching hoofbeats that bore down upon his skull and trampled their way into his brain. At first he thought it might be the pale rider, commonly and better known as Death, but he couldn’t figure out what could’ve killed him so quickly: the whiskey or the woman or the way his body felt as both things coursed through his veins.

  But it wasn’t Death that Verchel heard because Death doesn’t sing like an angel, doesn’t announce his coming with song. No, what Verchel heard above the hoofbeats were the voices of angels as they sang strains of “Glory, Hallelujah.”

  What he heard next were the shouts of voices in the room across the way: Johnny Wiggins screaming something aloud that Verchel couldn’t decipher over the scrape of the skid across the floor and the words of the woman above him and the sound of something wild coming from his own throat. And then there was silence around him so that the noises in the other room were suddenly louder: along with Wiggins’s voice came the screams of the woman Sarah, who’d been seated on Johnny’s lap, and along with her cries came the cries of little Lilly and her baby brother.

  Without a word, the woman climbed off Verchel and picked up her undergarments and walked toward the door and opened it. Verchel raised his head and peered across the dogtrot into the dark, gaping maw of the other room. He stared for a moment, his eyes adjusting to the spinning of this room and the bright light of the sun and the blackness of the room into which he gazed.

  From deep in the dark void a pale face appeared and floated toward Verchel so that he believed himself to be hallucinating, because even in his state he knew faces could not float, could not detach themselves from bodies and hover above the earth. And then the darkness took shape and walked from the room and became whole and separate in the sunlight: the pale face and the black shape were those of Miss Myra. In her arms she carried the screaming baby boy. Miss Myra and the baby were followed by several other black figures, and Verchel had a vision not of angels that had come to save his soul, but of crows that had come to pick his body apart.

  Miss Myra stopped in the open doorway, her eyes never once leaving Verchel’s. The woman Verchel had been with now slowly backed away from the door as if she could disappear into the shadows of the darkened room. She bent at the waist and stepped into her undergarments one leg at a time and pulled them up under her dress.

  The baby continued to cry, and Miss Myra looked at the screaming, red-faced infant in her arms, tears streaming down his cheeks, his tiny fingers opening into and closing around the nothingness before him. Miss Myra looked back at Verchel. He sat up slowly and propped himself on his elbows. He wanted to stand, but his trousers were still gathered around his feet and he was afraid he might fall. Miss Myra whispered into the baby’s ear in an attempt to soothe him. She patted his back. She bounced him in her arms. She stared at her husband.

  “Oh, Verchel,” Miss Myra finally said. “What are we going to do with them? With you?”

  Chapter Four

  Ella May

  Sunday, May 5, 1929

  The truck, piloted by the young girl with the strange accent, left Bessemer City and headed north. In the town of Cherryville a handful of crumbling brick buildings housed a few mills just outside of the small downtown. The truck came to a stop, and Ella stood and looked over the railing and gazed at the collection of buildings. The streets were still and quiet, the lone strip of sidewalk empty and dusty. Ella wondered if everyone had fled in advance of the strike organizers’ arrival, and she recalled her first sight of the truck just an hour earlier, how it had terrified her, how it had elicited only fear when the one thing she’d needed was hope. Doubt flared in her mind.

  She remained peering over the rails when the truck reached Lincolnton, a larger city ten miles to the northeast. Unlike Cherryville, Lincolnton’s downtown streets t
eemed with people, and Ella wondered if it was court day, and she recalled the times as a young girl back in Tennessee, back before her family moved to the lumber camps, when her father would load her and Wesley into the wagon and take them into Sevierville to watch the farmers and the businessmen and county men converge on the square for court day. Her father would park the wagon and find a seat on one of the benches near the courthouse. He’d drop a few pennies apiece into her and Wesley’s upturned hands, and then he’d light his pipe and talk with other farmers while she and Wesley ducked in and out of the general store and the confectionery, conspiring on how best to spend their pennies.

  But today was Sunday, and court did not meet on Sundays in the Sevierville, Tennessee, of her childhood, nor did it do so here in Lincolnton, North Carolina. No, the crowd before her had gathered only to confront the truck in which she rode, and by the time Ella had embraced this realization—the realization that the crowd was composed entirely of men, no women or children in sight—the girl behind the wheel had already decided that no one in Lincolnton would be traveling with them to the rally in Gastonia.

  The dozens of men—dressed in suits and overalls and shirtsleeves and trousers—waited in the middle of the street as if forming a barrier to the truck’s passage. Their numbers spilled over to the sidewalks. Others watched from inside buildings and leaned from windows. The truck picked up speed as the first projectiles struck its sides and crashed onto its bed: bottles, bricks, lengths of pipe that clattered like blasts of thunder when they landed beside Ella. Impulse told her to gather these missiles, stand, hurl them back toward the men who’d thrown them, but as things continued to fall like hailstones around her she could do nothing but cower in the driver’s-side corner of the truck bed.