The Last Ballad(31)

“Don’t bother me,” Ella said. She allowed her shoulders to relax, her spine to resettle itself. She released the breath she’d been holding. “You go ahead.”

The girl took the length of pipe from Ella’s hand and tossed it off the back of the truck. It bounced on the road. She struck a match, drew on the cigarette, and then stared at it. “Yep,” she said. “Nasty all right.” The fingers of her free hand traced along the floor. She picked up a piece of broken bottle and looked at Ella through it, her eye suddenly large and grotesque behind the glass. “Got a little hairy back there, didn’t it?”

“You could say.”

“I saw that man take a tumble,” the girl said. She tossed the piece of glass onto the road. They had picked up speed. Trees and fields rolled away from them. “You must know how to handle yourself.”

“I ain’t trying to get killed,” Ella said. “Didn’t sign up for that.” She caught herself. “I ain’t signed up for nothing yet.”

The girl smoked and stared out the back of the truck. They passed an old car that was headed north. They watched it until they could no longer see it. The girl finished her cigarette and tossed it the same way she’d tossed the glass. “Shoot,” she said. “Ain’t nobody getting killed.”

Her name was Sophia Blevin. She was nineteen. She’d grown up in Pittsburgh, but she’d been born in a country somewhere called Ukraine, which, to Ella, explained her strange accent. Her father was a history professor at one of the universities in Pittsburgh. Her mother was a Unitarian minister.

“She ain’t what you think of when people down here think minister,” Sophia said. “She ain’t holy rolling. She’s in it for the people.”

Sophia had been raised on a commune in New England before moving to the smoky steel town where her parents found a growing movement of intellectuals, organizers, and anarchists. She’d joined her parents in strikes in Passaic, New Bedford, and Johnstown. The strike at Loray was the first she’d worked without them, but she hoped to make them proud.

“They sent me because Pop got hit in the head with a bottle at New Bedford and Mother’s running a mission for pregnant girls. They stayed put for this one, which is too bad because this here’s going to go down as the most famous strike in American history.”

The truck sped east down the highway toward Gastonia now, the wind moving overhead like a jet stream, the sun beginning to slip from the sky. Ella watched explosions of sparks as Sophia burned through a book of matches trying to light another cigarette.

“Might be a sign I should quit,” she said. Her last match sputtered, went out. She looked up at Ella. “You believe in signs?”

“My mother did,” Ella said.

“You?”

“Maybe,” Ella said, suddenly afraid of sounding ignorant, seeming “country” to the ear of this girl whose parents were intellectuals, who’d traveled all over the country organizing people just like Ella. “But I probably don’t.”

“Well, I believe in signs,” Sophia said. “At least I do today, anyway.”

She tossed the tin of tobacco from the truck, flipped open the pack of rolling papers, and, one by one, released them to the wind.

Ella watched the papers fly, recalled an image long buried: her mother kneeling at the fireplace, holding scraps of paper to the fire on a New Year’s Eve. Ella and her mother would write wishes for the following year: a new dress, a doll, a Bible. Wesley and her father never joined them, even gently teased them about this superstition. The ritual had always been something Ella cherished, that burst of mystery when the paper caught fire, the wish burning itself from possibility into hope as it escaped up the chimney.

The year before they moved to the lumber camps, their last New Year’s Eve as tenant farmers in East Tennessee, Ella’s father finally joined her and her mother in their yearly tradition. He’d never learned to read, but Ella watched as he and her mother whispered back and forth before he scrawled out his New Year’s wish and folded the paper over what seemed a dozen times, as if it could keep his wish safe. He tossed it onto the flames. As the fire consumed the paper, Ella knew that she would never forget the only word she’d ever seen her father write aside from his name: Work.

Ella imagined her handwriting printed across Sophia’s rolling papers as they took flight. She saw words like Rose, rest, happiness, food. She closed her eyes, imagined the warmth of her parents’ fireplace, imagined just one of her potential wishes coming true.

“What about you, Ella May?” Sophia asked.

“What about me?”

“That’s what I’m asking,” Sophia said. “What about you? All I know is that I met you at the crossroads and that you’ll stand up to a bully when push comes to shove.”

“There ain’t a whole lot about me.”

“Hell,” Sophia said. “There’s a whole lot about everybody.”

Ella stared west. She imagined the great mountains foggy and rain-damp in the distance, the blue ridges rolling away in great swells. She opened her mouth, paused for a moment, gathered the story of her life around her as she would lift the hem of a long dress before stepping across a stream. She did not think, did not stop to look at Sophia. She simply began to speak.

She imagined her brief life unfolding there in the back of the truck like a story written across a great scroll of paper. The scroll unfurled itself and rolled out the open tailgate, across the mountains toward Tennessee, all the way to the tiny schoolhouse outside Sevierville. There Mr. Musical bent to the rough pine floor, took up the scroll, held it to the weak light coming through the dirty windows, sniffed and nodded to himself, then set about recording the great equation of Ella’s life at the front of the empty room, his pendulous wooden leg swinging as he shuffled along the length of the blackboard.