The Last Ballad(123)

I got braver and braver, wandered farther and farther away from the home, stayed gone longer than I should have. Sometimes I’d be sweating and out of breath when the time came to get out of bed in the morning. Oh, I thought I was slick, thought I was getting something over on all the other girls and my teachers too.

I was never scared to be out there alone at night, until I heard the cry for the first time. It sounded like the scream of a woman who feared for her life, and I hate to use a cliché, Edwin, but it made my blood run cold. I thought for certain that some poor girl was out there in the woods being murdered. I would not hear it for a few nights, and then I would hear it every night for a week.

You may already know what it was, Edwin, especially because we heard it tonight when we were standing outside your house. It was the roar of a panther, but I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know what it was, not until the home’s new pastor told me.

He was an old man, and I can’t remember his name. I was drawn to him because he sounded “mountain” when he spoke the same way Mother sounded “mountain” when she spoke. He was from Cullowhee, and when I found it on a map I saw that it was close to Bryson City, and I knew Mother had spent time there as a little girl.

I never told the pastor that I snuck out at night. I’ve never told a soul except for you, so I hope you can keep my secret. I did tell the old pastor about the screams I heard at night that came from the woods behind the home, how I’d hear them every night for a while and then go weeks without hearing a thing at all. I asked him what he thought it could be.

He told me a story about growing up in the mountains, about how his grandfather would take him bear hunting at night, and sometimes they’d hear the scream of a panther up in the hills, and his grandfather would say, “That’s the sound of a heartbroken woman calling for her lost babies to come home.”

I asked him if it could really be a panther that I’d been hearing, but he told me he didn’t think so. He told me they lived up in the mountains and that there were fewer and fewer of them now, and perhaps soon there wouldn’t be any at all. But then he stopped, and thought about it for a second. He said, “Well, with all the logging and the waste and the mudslides, I reckon we could’ve forced her down the mountain to visit us all the way out here.”

I’ve hung on to that after all these years, this idea that the lumber companies forced the panther from the mountains just as they forced Mother into that wagon bound for Cowpens. I’ve hung on to the idea that the sound of that woman calling her lost babies home was the sound of Mother looking for us. After that, when I heard it at night out in the woods, I’d close my eyes and chant over and over, “I am alone, and you are alone. I am alone, and you are alone.” I know it’s silly, but I still feel that way, and I found myself saying the same thing over and over on the drive home tonight after hearing that panther’s cry from down at the zoo.

But here’s what I wanted to tell you, Edwin. This is the reason I wrote you this letter tonight.

We’d been at the home for three years or so when that old pastor came to my class one day and told me that I had a visitor. I was fourteen years old, and I’d never had a visitor before. Not a single one. All of the things of my life were housed in those buildings there at Barium Springs. It felt as if the world outside were a place that no longer existed. I had no ties to it, so the idea of the world coming to visit me was exhilarating.

The visiting room was a high-ceilinged, drafty room just off the main foyer. I can picture the sunlight streaming in through the tall windows, the ceiling fans stirring the air far above. When I arrived there was no one in the room except for a black man who sat at one of the small tables. He wore the uniform of a Pullman porter, if you can picture it, and he looked familiar, like someone I had met before. I looked up at the pastor, unsure of what I was supposed to do with this stranger.

“I’ll be out here in the foyer should you need me,” the pastor said.

The porter looked up and smiled at me, and not knowing what else to do, I walked to the table and pulled out a chair and sat down across from him. We stared at one another like we were waiting for the other to start speaking, to explain exactly why we were sitting across from one another in the visiting room while my class learned algebra without me.

“You’ve grown up,” he said. He smiled. “And you look like her.”

“Who?”

“Your mother,” he said.

“You knew her?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old envelope. “Do you remember your mother’s friend Sophia?”

Of course I remembered Sophia. She was one of the strike organizers from up north somewhere. She was a beautiful girl, and anyone who had ever met or had even seen her would never forget her. But she was trouble, and I have always felt that she brought trouble with her.

“This is from her,” he said. He slid the envelope across the table. “She wanted me to give this to you. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to make it here. I’ve thought of coming to see you many times when I passed through Statesville, but I never found the courage to get off the train.”

I picked up the envelope and looked at it, and then I looked at him.

“Why are you afraid to get off the train in Statesville?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Bad memories, I guess.”