The Last Ballad(21)

I want to tell you about her, Edwin, and I’ll tell you everything I know, which isn’t much, but maybe it’ll be enough for you to understand something about who she was, about who your father was, about who we are now.





Chapter Three

Verchel Park





Monday, June 3, 1918



Perhaps a friend would have said, “Verchel, what’s a woman like that want with a man like you?” But Verchel didn’t have any friends, didn’t hardly speak to a soul aside from the younger brother with whom he lived once he’d lost the use of his right hand after getting it caught up in a machine at the Cowpens Manufacturing Company. Since the accident he’d spent his time convalescing in his brother’s front room and using his good hand to spoon corn bread and buttermilk into the mouths of his twin niece and nephew. Besides, if a friend had sought to warn Verchel about Miss Myra Stebbins née Olyphant, what would that friend have said? That a forty-four-year-old widow wanted Verchel’s money? He didn’t have a cent. His land? His fancy house? He didn’t own a thing. The only thing she could have wanted of value was his soul, and Verchel had already given that to God after Miss Myra’s father, Pastor Olyphant, had called him into the baptismal waters of the muddy creek that ran behind Spartan Baptist where it sat alongside the highway to Greenville.

So what did a woman like her want with a man like him? There were whispers that Miss Myra had considered all three options available to women of her age and station—spinsterhood, widowhood, and matrimony—and decided that the latter suited her best, but after a year of marriage there still remained many mysterious things Verchel Park did not know about his wife. But he figured he knew her well enough to know that she’d be interested in the case of a young girl sitting all alone in a mule-drawn wagon at dawn. The only thing that could interest Miss Myra more than a young girl in danger was a fatherless child, so when Verchel discovered that the dirty blanket the girl cradled in her arms held a tiny newborn baby, he felt certain that he had a story worth telling his wife that evening while they sat on the porch after dinner.

The wagon had been left in the alley on the west side of the general store. The early morning sun had not yet found the shaded street where it sat tucked between the store and the Cowpens Community Bank. It was June 1918, the morning air cool in the early South Carolina summer before the real heat arrives. The bony old mule that had pulled the wagon did not look as if it would survive the morning. As Verchel passed the girl in the wagon he felt an awkward, confusing urge to make small talk, almost considered saying, “That old mule could use some oats,” but he did not know anything about mules or what they ate, and he did not like small talk. The girl did not appear to be interested in small talk anyway. Her face was pale, her cheeks dirty and sunken. Her dark hair had come loose and fell in strands around her face. Verchel didn’t realize that she held a baby in her arms until he heard it let out a cry. And he didn’t realize that someone aside from the baby accompanied her until he turned left at the corner of the alley and followed the sidewalk to the front of the store.

A man sat on the front steps as if he’d been sitting out there all night. The sun hadn’t risen quite high enough for Verchel to make out the man’s face, and Verchel didn’t get a good look at him as he passed him on his way up the steps. All Verchel could think to do was to say a kind “Good morning” to the stranger without staring at him too long before getting out his key and unlocking the door as if it were any other morning, which it was, of course, until he got home that afternoon and told Miss Myra about the stranger and the girl with the baby out in the wagon.

“What did he buy?” she asked.

“Nothing but some powdered milk,” Verchel said. “Two boxes of it.”

“That must mean that girl’s milk hasn’t come in good yet, or the baby won’t nurse, one.”

And then, at Miss Myra’s prodding, Verchel rehashed the full scene: the half hour the stranger had spent on the front porch steps after Verchel turned the sign from closed to open; the way he’d stalked up and down the aisles, picking things up and setting them down; the way he’d stood at the counter, his dark hair covered by a wide-brimmed hat and his face just as dirty as the girl’s out in the wagon, his eyes looking over Verchel’s shoulder at the tins of tobacco; the dirty hands that tossed the boxes of milk on the counter; the question he’d asked Verchel about whether or not the store took paper money.

“That’s how I knew he was a stranger for sure,” Verchel said. “Anybody from town would’ve knowed Mr. Haney’ll take paper money if you don’t work at the mill. Anybody from town would’ve knowed that.”

Verchel told Myra that after the subject of the mill had come up, the stranger inquired about work in town, and Verchel told him that folks who didn’t own their own business all worked for the mill in one capacity or another.

“Do you think he’s looking for work?” Miss Myra asked.

“I can’t say,” Verchel said. “He just asked me what folks did.”

“Well, I hope he can find some work if he needs it, especially with a wife and that little one to care for,” Miss Myra said. “It won’t do to have a girl with a baby that young and him not being able to find work.” Her eyes narrowed and her thin lips pressed themselves together and all but disappeared. “I’m correct in saying they were married?”