The Last Ballad(25)
With the girl’s directions, Verchel found the cabin easily enough later that afternoon after he’d returned the dope wagon to the store and left for the day. The family lived in an old shack on the edge of a piece of property still owned by the McGarrity family, a people who once made their lives from the land but now made their lives somewhere other than Spartanburg County after leaving this particular soil behind. The girl had described the place perfectly: a dogtrot shack with bleached boards and a metal roof burnished brown by the sun.
The trees along the road were mad with crows. The birds ruffled the leaves like a heavy wind, and their cries seemed to bore into Verchel’s ears. He could almost smell the creek water from where he stood at the top of the road, hidden behind a clump of wild blue and purple hydrangea, sweat running from under the brim of his hat and catching in his eyebrows before he brushed it away. From this vantage point he could see the house perfectly, see that its two windows were covered from the inside by dark curtains, that its front steps leaned away from him toward the slope where the land rolled down into a green holler.
After dinner he told Miss Myra about seeing the girl, how good she looked, how happy she seemed to be working such a good job in such a nice little town as Cowpens clearly was.
Miss Myra had all kinds of questions: “What kind of work does her husband do?” and “Where do they live?” While he knew the answer to the second question, it took him a few days to know the answer to the first with anything approaching certainty, although the final question the stranger had asked Verchel on the morning they first met was certainty enough.
The shack where the girl and stranger lived formed a kind of triangle between Verchel’s house and the store, and so it was only a matter of minutes by which Verchel was late on his way home each evening, minutes of tardiness that could be and were always explained by his having to push the dope wagon back to the store, unload it, count the money, and organize things for the next morning’s shift. The boy Wilfred hadn’t yet returned to work, and the way this flu was spreading there was a very good chance Verchel’s tenure behind the dope wagon would be long, if not permanent.
He took to spying on the shack each afternoon on his way home, assuming his perch by the road behind the wild hydrangea, and watching the doors on either side of the dogtrot to see if they ever opened. That’s where he was on the third day, what happened to be a Wednesday, when he saw the stranger come out of the door on the left side and stand on the porch steps in the bright sunlight and take in great gulps of air as if the shack’s interior were filled with water rather than darkness.
The stranger stood for a moment, hatless and shoeless, blinking his eyes in the bright, hot sun like he’d just woken from a long sleep and didn’t know the day or season. Verchel was close enough to see the stranger’s eyes, but far enough away not to worry about being seen himself. He watched as the man nearly skipped down the porch steps and into the knee-high, weedy grass before turning right and disappearing down into the holler where a creek gurgled out of sight.
If one were to have asked Verchel if he held his breath until the stranger reappeared from his trip to the creek he would’ve said no, but anyone passing by would’ve disagreed, for Verchel stood still long enough to have a succession of things land on him without him or them noticing his or their presence: ladybugs, dragonflies, a dollop of robin droppings, and a single leaf from a maple that drifted nearly twenty-five feet before coming to rest on his right shoulder like an angel or a devil that might or might not soon whisper advice into his ear.
But one thing is for certain, and that is that Verchel did eventually exhale and then inhale a breath large enough to fill his lungs twice after seeing the stranger crest the hill on his way back to the cabin. The man hopped up the porch steps with the same gaiety with which he’d descended them, and he’d disappeared inside the same black hole of an open doorway. Verchel’s eyes saw these things without their being registered by his mind because his mind’s eye was too busy beholding and later re-beholding a particular image: the two large, heavy jugs the stranger had grasped in either hand.
The following afternoon Verchel did not return to his perch by the wild hydrangea in order to look down at the old shack and wait for the stranger to reappear, because now he knew all he needed to know. That evening, when he returned home an hour or so earlier than usual, he explained it by the slow day at the store and the slower day behind the dope wagon. And then he sat on the porch steps and brooded over his lone cigarette while Miss Myra went on and on about the good, county-wide work the Ladies’ Improvement Society was doing.
“We’ve started calling on the homes of the ill and the ill-bred,” she said, explaining how one of the wives in her group had convinced her husband to let them commandeer an old wagon and two even older mules for the purposes of gallivanting around the county to pay visits upon unsuspecting wanton souls. “It’s amazing how many people need the assistance of a group like ours. It’s amazing how many dark souls need the light of Christ to shine upon them.”
Verchel sat and listened, concentrating only on his cigarette and the palpable darkness that clouded both his lungs and heart.
It was behind the counter at the store on Friday that Verchel made the kind of decision he’d never made before: the decision to take action instead of waiting for action to take him. The man who stumbled into both machinery and marriage with his eyes closed would no longer stumble blindly, but would instead move with calm conviction toward wherever his heart led him, and it was back to the dogtrot where he was led that afternoon on his way home.