The Last Ballad(14)
“St. Louis then,” he said. “Hell, anywhere but Bessemer City, North Carolina.”
She pulled her dress over her head and stepped into her shoes and cinched the buckles. He watched her until she picked up his overalls from the floor and tossed them at him where he lay. He dodged her throw, and his overalls sailed over his head and fell to the floor on the other side of the bed. He pointed to his guitar where it rested against the wall in the corner of the room.
“Let’s play something,” he said.
She picked up the guitar by its neck and raised the window. Charlie watched her from the bed. She leaned out the window and lowered the guitar until she felt it touch the earth. She dropped it with a hollow thud.
“That’s just being ugly,” he said. “Ain’t no reason to be ugly.”
A few hours later, Ella stood alone at the crossroads of West Virginia Avenue on the edge of downtown Bessemer City. The sun shone directly overhead. There were no clouds. The American Mill sat just one block over, and she couldn’t help but wonder what Goldberg’s brother would think if he happened to drive by and see her standing in the sun on the side of the road waiting for a group of strikers to take her to Gastonia. She doubted that he’d even recognize her, although he’d just seen her the day before. On the other hand, Dobbins would know her for sure. She’d be fired for even thinking of attending a union meeting.
She stepped away from the road and stood in the shaded, high grass beneath the trees. It was spring, and it felt like spring. The limbs above her were thick with bright green leaves. Ribbons of wisteria twined through the branches, the heavy fragrance mingling with the damp, musky scent of the wet earth. Across the street, clumps of azaleas lined the road into downtown, the pink and purple flowers already beginning to wilt. The sight of the withering blooms and the scents of wisteria and mud laid a delicate finger upon Ella’s memory. Something stirred inside her as if attempting to fire a childhood recollection, perhaps something she’d promised herself she would never forget. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, took in the scents, but all she could think of was what might happen next, and she could not uncover the shadow of nostalgia that lurked in the corner of her mind.
Instead, she thought again of Mr. Musical and the week she and her brother Wesley had spent sitting side by side on a weathered wooden bench in the small, hot schoolhouse, the schoolmaster scrawling numbers and figures on a dusty chalkboard. Ella’s own life had been a series of additions and subtractions, and she wondered how Mr. Musical would condense it all into some kind of equation that would make sense to her six-year-old self: her childhood minus her father’s failure as a tenant farmer equaled the family’s move to the smoky lumber camps deep in the Blue Ridge. More minuses: Wesley’s leaving for Detroit; the flu that killed her mother, followed so quickly by her father’s death from a falling tree. Those minuses equaled her all alone at sixteen standing in the train station in Bryson City, where she somehow added John Wiggins when she was supposed to have added a ticket north to a life with Wesley and his wife like he had promised in his letters.
In her mind, the equation of her life spread across the chalkboard, more minuses than pluses, more losses than gains. Her and John’s move from the mountains to the tiny town of Cowpens, South Carolina, and her first job in a textile mill coupled with the plus of Lilly’s birth, another plus almost two years later when Otis arrived just as they had to move again, this time to the scarred, ruddy soil and lint-heavy air of Gaston County, where her losses had racked up so quickly and so painfully in so few years. All this time and all this traveling made Ella feel as if years and years had somehow slipped by without her having the chance to count them or even mark them as they passed. She’d been swept along in a current that she could not control, and all of it had brought her here to Charlie, to the American Mill, to the union leaflet in her pocket, to this new life growing inside her. She thought about what Charlie had said that morning, about how the strike might get her nothing but killed. He might have been right, but she might have been right too. She would die if she carried on this way, and then where would her children be? She’d already lost Willie, and she knew that her unborn baby wouldn’t have any better chance than the others had had.
She heard the sound of an automobile and stepped toward the road. An old truck passed. Three colored boys wearing nothing but overalls sat in the back, the oldest one holding a fishing pole. The youngest boy waved. Ella waved back. The other two boys did the same. She watched the truck until it rounded the bend in the road that led toward Stumptown.
If she left now and returned home, she’d catch her children right as the church doors opened. Maybe they’d go down to Violet’s house for something to eat. Or maybe Charlie would come over and sit on her porch and strum his guitar and they would sing something together. Lilly and Iva and Rose would trade the stuffed dolls they’d made from old stockings. Otis would disappear into the dark woods and come back an hour later with wet clothes. Wink would sit right there on Ella’s lap and take it all in.
She turned to her right and looked down the road that led to Gastonia and the uncertainty of the strike. She could go or not go. Those were her only two choices, but, in that moment, neither of them seemed any good.
That’s when she saw it: the specter of the huge black truck belching smoke above the eastern horizon. Once she’d seen it she couldn’t look away. She feared it might be a nightmare vision that her sleeping self had sent to her by way of warning.