The Last Ballad(28)

“You watch your mouth. My wife’s a fine woman,” Verchel said. “A great one.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because,” Verchel said, “because she does the Lord’s work. Uplifts this community. That’s why I come looking for you. She wants to uplift this family, just like she uplifted me.”

“Well, I sure as hell don’t need no help getting uplifted,” Wiggins said. He popped the woman’s backside with the palm of his hand, and an exhalation shot from her mouth as if something had burst inside her chest.

“We all need grace,” Verchel said.

“Your wife can’t give you that. All she can do is fool you into believing you don’t want the things you actually want. That ain’t grace,” Wiggins said. “That’s trickery.

“But that one over there,” Wiggins said, his head nodding toward the door that led across the dogtrot, “she’s the kind of gal you need, all the grace you can handle. And I’ll tell you this: she likes you. She told Sarah here that she thinks you’re cute.”

At that, Wiggins snaked his hand up Sarah’s back and, closing his fingers around the nape of her neck, jostled her a little as if trying to wake her.

“It’s true,” Sarah said. “I heard her say it. Just now, when we were all over there—”

“See?” Johnny said. “I told you.” With his free hand he reached out and clapped Verchel’s shoulder, and then he reached beneath his seat where a milk crate housed a collection of Mason jars. He unscrewed the lid on one of them and took a long drink, and then he passed it to Verchel, who did the same. “Now go on over there and ask her yourself what she thinks about you.”

As Verchel swallowed down what would be his last bit of liquor for the day, he discovered that his head felt empty. The feeling was a good one: the warm liquor threading through his blood; the sweet scent of the woman named Sarah encircling his head; the knowledge of the other woman waiting for him in the other room; his new understanding that grace wasn’t something Miss Myra could give, but was instead something he must go out and claim for himself. He felt a hand in the small of his back push him forward, and although he knew the hand belonged to Johnny Wiggins, Verchel also knew the hand was unseen and therefore unknown, and he decided to go where it led him, and where it led him was across the way and into darkness.

As Verchel passed across the dogtrot the momentary explosion of blinding sunlight carried his mind back to the time he’d had his picture taken—the only time he’d had it taken—the summer after he and Miss Myra were married. They’d come into Cowpens, where a traveling photographer had set up shop inside the post office, and the two of them—dressed in the wedding clothes they’d worn that fateful Sunday morning—had taken their places before a dark swath of fabric that hung from the wall. While the photographer readied his equipment, Verchel felt Miss Myra’s hand come to rest heavily upon his shoulder, her whispered voice falling just as heavily upon his ear.

“Now, sit up straight, dear,” she’d said just before the brilliant flash of the bulb cemented their images as husband and wife for time immemorial.

Well, that’s that, Verchel had thought.

And now this was this: before him a blond-haired woman bent at the waist in the dark room, her left leg atop the low mattress skid, her long fingers either rolling up or rolling down a white stocking worn thin enough to show her pale white toes through its tip. He’d seen this woman an hour ago in the other room, but seeing her now—in a state of either undressing or redressing—was to see her in a manner he had not seen a woman before.

When she raised her eyes to Verchel where he stood in the open doorway—the light playing across her face and flickering through her eyes—Verchel saw something of a performance in the way she stood there letting his eyes take her in, and he thought of the actress Betty Compson, whom he’d beheld at a movie house in Spartanburg the previous summer. The woman before him carried the same bright yellow curls that tumbled over Compson’s shoulders and draped across her chest and the same wide eyes that had looked out from the screen and found Verchel where he sat alone in the dark, dusty theater.

But he’d never heard Betty Compson’s voice, which he imagined as high-pitched and sweet, so it was a surprise when this woman’s raspy tone shattered the stillness of the scene.

“You need something?” she asked.

“Johnny told me to come over here,” Verchel said.

“You got any money?”

“You ought not be living this way.”

“You got any money or not?”

“I done give it all to Johnny,” Verchel said.

“Well,” the woman said, sliding her foot off the skid, standing up straight and running her hands down the front of her dress, “if that’s how he wants to work it.”

Verchel swallowed hard.

“They said you like me,” he said.

“Okay,” the woman said. She lifted her dress and slid her undergarments to the floor and kicked them aside. Verchel watched her, his mind not quite registering what occurred right before him.

“They told me you said that: that you like me.”

“Okay,” the woman said again.

“And I like you, and I want to share the good news of salvation.”