The Last Ballad(22)

Verchel laughed an awkward laugh, but he caught himself and stopped when he saw that she actually expected an answer. “Gosh, Miss Myra,” he said, “I didn’t ask him. It wasn’t none of my business.”

“The moral health of our community is the business of us all,” she said. “That means you too, Verchel Park.”

And the moral health of his community as well as his household is exactly what Verchel was considering when he made the decision not to share with Miss Myra the last question the stranger asked him before leaving the store that morning. After paying for his powdered milk, the stranger had stood at the counter for a long time and looked all around the store, and then he’d asked Verchel the question that seemed to be the real reason he’d been waiting on the steps since dawn.

“Is there any place for a man to get a drink in this town?”



Verchel had not had a drop of liquor since his accident inside the mill, and until meeting and marrying Miss Myra he’d believed himself just as useless as the lifeless hand that he kept pinned against his chest.

“You need to march right back to Mr. Haney and reclaim your job at the mill,” Miss Myra had said on their second night as a married couple. He was sitting on the porch steps because they had only the one rocking chair she’d brought over from her father’s house to furnish the porch on their new home, and she sat in it now, her black dress pulled up just enough for the late-afternoon sun to catch a glimpse of her white ankles. She held an open fan in her other hand and used it as if dusting the stifling air around her face.

Verchel had thought for a minute about what she’d said, and then he sighed and looked down at his hand where it rested limp and lonely in his lap. The gears that had ravaged his hand had crushed his palm like a rock, popping the bones into tiny bits of gravel that had never grown back together. He often thought of it now as a puppet’s hand that he had never learned to use. He and Myra had never spoken of his injured hand or the accident that caused it, but he felt certain that she had noticed it by now, especially because he’d positioned his wrist right by her head while propping himself up during their blink-of-an-eye marriage consummation.

She’d collapsed the fan with a pop and dropped it onto her lap.

“You need to shake that thought right out of your head, Verchel Park,” she’d said. “You’re still a young man at forty. There’s not a thing wrong with you.”

“I’m not saying there is,” Verchel said, although he was really forty-one and couldn’t figure out how Miss Myra had subtracted a year of his life. “It just don’t take a fool to know that I can’t work inside no mill. You need two good hands for that.”

“Well,” she said, reopening her fan and raising it to her face, “there has to be a job down there for a man with just one good hand, and you need to go down there in the morning and find out what it is.”

And that’s how Verchel came to just about the only job he could come to in the employ of the Cowpens Manufacturing Company: working as a clerk in the mill’s store. He’d tried his best not to picture himself as a man who goes crawling back to a job he’d basically cast himself from by his poor choices, and he found this an even more difficult prospect because everyone he came into contact with seemed to know the story of the circumstances in which he’d destroyed his hand. Mr. Freen, who’d managed the mill store for as long as Verchel could remember, sure didn’t make things any easier on him.

“Now, you know Mr. Haney don’t like a drinker,” he said. “I don’t say that to mean nothing against you, because only the good Lord knows what a man does when he ain’t at work. But I mean to tell you that Mr. Haney needs to know what a man does while he’s at work, and he has a right to know. I don’t plan on keeping a thing from him neither.”

Verchel had just nodded his head as if he agreed, mostly because he did agree. He wanted to tell Mr. Freen that he was a changed man, a married man, and a religious man to boot. But admitting to a change in oneself meant admitting that a change had been needed in the first place, and Verchel just couldn’t bring himself to make that kind of admission to anyone but Miss Myra, and she’d never asked but somehow seemed to know just the same.

So he’d shown up early and stayed late, worked hard, and kept clear of suspicion. Mr. Freen seemed satisfied with Verchel’s work ethic and his ability to run the till, stock the shelves, keep the store clean and straight, and have the afternoon dope wagon ready to go for the boy Wilfred to push through the mill for the second-shift employees’ afternoon refreshment.

After a few months it wasn’t an uncommon thing for Verchel to be in the store all by himself. And soon he took over the morning shift, with Mr. Freen coming in to spell him at lunchtime and the two of them working together until 2 p.m., when Verchel went home and left Mr. Freen to close up between the second and third shifts at the mill.

He was making ten dollars a week now, more money than he’d ever made—much less made consistently—in his entire life. And he was able to save it too, but only because Miss Myra collected it each Friday when he walked in the door, and dispensed it in equal portions each morning when he left so that he might have the funds for a bologna sandwich and pork rinds for lunch each day.

Once she’d been able to propel Verchel back into the community, she set her sights on the community itself. Along with a few of the farmers’ wives from her father’s church, Miss Myra had formed the Spartanburg County Ladies’ Improvement Society, and she and the women regularly made trips to the local saloons to hand out literature about the evils of alcohol and the effects a drunken father, husband, son, brother, or nephew could have on a household and a community. At each establishment (there were only three in town and one out on the highway toward Greenville) she threatened the proprietor with the possibility of her founding a full-blown antisaloon league if certain conditions weren’t met: they weren’t to sell liquor to mill employees, churchgoers, town officials, or married men, a rule that Verchel suspected of being pointed directly at him. What he also felt pointed at him were the eyes of the men and women in town as he walked to and from work during the week; he imagined that all of them were either cursing him under their breath for his wife’s attempts to influence the tide of public opinion or silently mocking him for, first, being liquored up enough to nearly lose his hand in the mill, and then being repentant enough to marry a woman who was hell-bent on making certain such a thing could never happen again. Either way, Verchel figured that the town viewed him as hamstrung by his own incompetence.