The Last Ballad(27)

Sometimes Johnny would be entertaining a couple of women by the time Verchel arrived at the house—women Johnny called friends—and sometimes Johnny and his friends would have a few drinks and leave the room and go across to the other side of the shack and stay gone for long minutes at a time, nothing but giggles and the occasional stifled sigh making their way across the dogtrot to let Verchel know that someone else was at home aside from himself and the baby girl, the odors of the women’s soft powder and sweet perspiration hovering about them both.

In many ways it was those two women—or at least two women like them, as Verchel could hardly differentiate between such women—that caused the first and what would be final rift between him and Johnny Wiggins. It was a Friday afternoon in the spring of 1920, the air sharp and crisp, although the late day had turned somewhat warm after the cool morning. Johnny had gone across the dogtrot with two women, and Verchel, as usual, had stayed behind with little Lilly, who by now knew his face and his voice and almost seemed to recognize the little songs he’d sing between sips of shine. The newborn baby boy named Otis slept on a spread of quilts by Lilly’s pallet. Verchel hadn’t even known Ella had given birth, and when he’d remarked on the presence of the little baby, all Johnny had said was “That’s my son.”

Verchel watched Lilly now from where he sat in his chair as she stood on her own two skinny legs and reached up toward the table where a shiny red apple—the last of a bushel they’d spent the past few afternoons eating—sat just out of reach. Verchel suddenly found himself making his own wobbly attempt to stand on his own two skinny legs, his pocketknife swinging open in his hand, its blade stabbing at the apple. He returned to his seat, and with his bad hand he held the apple up close to his body and then cut as nice a slice as he could manage.

When Verchel held the small wedge of apple out toward her, Lilly ambled over to Verchel’s chair. She closed her tiny fingers around the apple slice and lifted it to a mouth that had slowly grown full of pearly-colored teeth in the short time Verchel had known her. He watched as she sucked the juice from the apple slice, the fruit turning soft and pulpy in her hand, the peel lifting away like a ribbon before she shoved the slice into her mouth. She didn’t swallow it, but turned away from Verchel and walked over to the mess of quilts where her brother slept. Verchel watched as she used her finger to spoon the apple mush from her mouth and spread it across her brother’s lips. The baby startled when she touched him, opened his eyes, licked at the sugary pulp. When Lilly returned, Verchel cut another piece of apple for her, watched as she fed it to her brother like she’d fed him the first piece. Verchel picked up his cup and knocked back what was left in it.

As his knife cut another slice of the apple, something of Verchel’s past life flashed before his eyes: he recalled what a pleasure it had been to spoon corn bread and buttermilk into the open mouths of his twin niece and nephew all that time ago while his mind, body, and spirit healed at his brother’s house, and he thought of how he had hardly laid eyes on them in the time he’d been married to Miss Myra. The more he turned it over in his mind, the more he understood that leaving work early and spending the late afternoons in a dogtrot shack with a no-good, philandering moonshiner had less to do with the liquor he craved and more to do with the life he actually wanted. He wanted Wiggins’s life: the rosy-faced toddler who stood before him now, drool and apple juice streaming from her mouth; the sleeping newborn baby boy; their small, tough mother Ella, who toiled like a mule six days a week at the mill.

All of this culminated with a clear conception of the pleasures Miss Myra’s love had taken from him: the joy in the company of small children; the bite and flushed feel of a good, stiff drink.

So perhaps that’s why he said what he said when Johnny opened the door and stumbled inside the room, one of the two women close behind him, both of them drunk and giggling as if they’d never be sober or somber again. Verchel waited until Johnny collapsed into the other straight-back chair and pulled the woman down onto his lap.

“You ought not do them that way,” Verchel said.

“Who’re you talking about?” Wiggins asked.

“Your wife,” Verchel said. “These babies here.”

“What ‘way’ you got in mind?” Wiggins asked.

“You know,” Verchel said. He folded his knife and slipped it back into the front pocket of his trousers. “I’ve watched you.”

“And what would you recommend I do? What ‘way’ would you have me follow?” Wiggins asked. “Yours?”

“There’s worse ways than mine,” Verchel said.

“Maybe so,” Wiggins said, “but it’d be hard to find them. What’s worse than a man who prays to the Lord on Sunday morning with liquor in his veins?”

“I’m a sinner,” Verchel said. “I got no qualm saying it.”

“You’re worse than a sinner,” Wiggins said. “You’re a coward.”

“Now hold on,” Verchel said, his heartbeat picking up, his mind flashing forward to the prospect of him and Wiggins coming to blows.

“You’re a henpecked coward,” Wiggins said, his teeth clenched on the other side of a dangerous smile. The woman in Wiggins’s lap moved as if attempting to stand in order to get away from whatever it was that was about to happen, but Wiggins held on to her hips so that she couldn’t scramble free.