The Last Ballad(23)

But aside from those with a taste for liquor, it was the young women and the motherless and fatherless in the community who Miss Myra believed were most in need of her assistance.

Even if Verchel had wanted to recount the full version of events involving the mysterious stranger to Miss Myra, which Lord knows he didn’t, he couldn’t have done it no matter how hard he tried. That wasn’t because he didn’t remember things: the girl and the baby waiting out there in the wagon; the stranger’s beady, close-together eyes, his sharp nose; the flash of expectancy in his face colored with something like malice as he waited for Verchel’s answer about where to find that drink.

Verchel could have recounted those things, as well as the slow light coming through the windows and the dusty smell of the store, but those things were always there, so they didn’t bear mentioning or even remembering because they’d be there every day.

No, what Verchel couldn’t recount was the one thing he couldn’t quite remember, even when he tried to recall it that night in bed where Miss Myra breathed heavily beside him and tossed slowly in her sleep like a great ocean liner beset upon by swells. And the thing he couldn’t remember was this: his response to the stranger’s very simple question.

There’d been something that had crossed Verchel’s lips about Cowpens being a God-fearing community of sober men and women, a place where hardworking millhands and harder-working farmhands split their time almost equally between their physical toils at the job and their spiritual lives in the church. He’d even mentioned his own wife, Miss Myra Stebbins Park née Olyphant, who along with other women in the county had started an improvement society that was doing awfully good work, don’t you know, the kind of work a once-depraved place like Spartanburg County, South Carolina, desperately needed done so that it could ascend to its rightful register as a sanctified, purified land where a man who’d once craved a drink no longer thought of it, much less needed it.

But the thing about it was that Verchel’s heart just wasn’t in it; his words were both unconvincing and hollow. And the stranger knew it, and Verchel knew that the stranger knew it as well, and that’s why Verchel told Miss Myra some of what the stranger had to say, but also why he made sure not to tell her all of it.

But Verchel tried his best to hold his head high and celebrate his own personal victories regardless of whether they were shrouded in half-truths, obscured truths, or complete untruths, and he decided that he would no longer view his life as a struggle not to crave whiskey; instead, he chose to view his life as a life that no longer needed it.



Verchel had all but forgotten about the stranger and the girl in the wagon with the baby when Miss Myra asked about them one evening after dinner the following April. They sat out on the porch just as they did most evenings, her in the one chair and him on the steps smoking a cigarette, the one thing he looked forward to each day.

“Have you seen that girl?” Miss Myra asked.

Verchel took a drag from his cigarette.

“What girl?”

“The one that showed up in the wagon with that baby last summer,” Miss Myra said.

“No,” Verchel said. “Not that I can recollect.”

“What about her husband? Have you seen him?”

“Not that I can recollect.”

Miss Myra rocked in silence for a moment, her eyes taking in the empty gravel road that ran along the edge of their yard.

“I bet he took a job at the mill,” she finally said. “It’s a wonder you haven’t seen him come in the store.”

“I reckon so,” Verchel said.

“You should go on down to the mill and look for him,” Miss Myra said. “Check up on that girl and that baby. Maybe see if there’s anything the ladies and I can help with while they get settled.”

“It’s almost been a year. I reckon they’re settled by now,” Verchel said.

“Well, you go and see about them,” she said. “It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

But it is too much to ask, thought Verchel. He didn’t have a reason to step foot inside the Cowpens Manufacturing Company, and even when he tried to think of a reason, his mind wouldn’t let him do it. The last thing he wanted to do was find himself inside the mill’s noisy walls, walking along the rows of machines, staring through the combed cotton for the face of a man he’d seen only one time. It wasn’t just the stranger’s face that he’d be forced to behold; it would also be the faces of his former coworkers, many of whom had been the ones to help him gather himself after the accident, the same ones he knew had been questioned after they’d carried him out and taken him to the doctor: How had he been acting before it happened? Had anything seemed strange about him? Had anyone been close enough to smell his breath?

But Miss Myra’s request ended up taking care of itself. On Thursday of that next week, Verchel heard the sound of the store’s front door opening, and he looked up and saw Mr. Freen coming through instead of the boy Wilfred.

“Go on ahead and count the drawer,” Mr. Freen said. “Wilfred’s done come down with this danged flu, and I need you to take the dope wagon down to the mill today. Maybe tomorrow too.”

It wasn’t until then that Verchel realized that something could actually be more humiliating than showing his face inside the mill; this higher level of humiliation would be accomplished by him showing his face behind the dope wagon while he served chilled pop, cold sandwiches, and hot coffee to his former coworkers.