The Last Ballad(45)
The policeman pointed the shotgun in the direction from which the voice had come.
“Nobody move,” he said. “Not one of y’all.” He scanned faces as if expecting someone to step forward to tell him how to handle the situation. The morning had gone silent. “Now, dammit,” the policeman said. “We tried to be fair with y’all. We tried. And this here’s what happened.”
Ella noticed that the shotgun’s barrel quivered in the policeman’s hands. The young policeman named Paul Bradley stood beside him, staring down at the gun as if his partner might turn it on him at any moment. A man in the crowd took advantage of the stillness, and he turned and took off at a sprint up the road toward headquarters.
“Hey!” the policeman with the shotgun yelled after him. “Freeze!” But the man kept running.
The officer named Paul watched the man flee. Paul looked at his partner and then took off up the street in pursuit.
“Paul!” the officer called. He watched him for a moment before he realized that he was alone. He turned his attention back to the crowd, where two more men fled: one cutting behind Hetty’s house and disappearing into a grove of maples, the other turning and bounding down the hill toward Garrison Boulevard.
In this manner the situation was defused, the matter settled. The strikers peeled away in hot-footed singles at first, and then the women—who did not fear the law and violence in the same way the men did—drifted off in groups of twos and threes, their children pressed to their chests or held close by their sides.
Not knowing what else to do, Ella waded through the crowd and turned up Fourth Avenue where it skirted along the mill’s southern edge. She’d go back to the headquarters, find Sophia, and ask about that $9.75 Beal had promised. Then she’d demand a ride home to her children.
Here, in this part of the village, the company men had already finished clearing the houses. The street was full of people and their personal effects: chairs, mounds of clothes, broken furniture, and piles and piles of cast-iron skillets, washtubs, cookpots, and dolls missing faces or with faces missing eyes or mouths. All told, almost a thousand people had been turned out of their homes. As Ella shouldered through the crowd she wondered how Beal was going to move these people and all their things across Franklin Avenue and into tents that were yet to arrive.
Perhaps what unsettled her most was the beauty of the day: a clear, warm morning that smelled of gardenia and honeysuckle. The dew-damp mud road sat drying in the sun. This was the weather that Ella would pray for if she were ever to look forward to a day at a fair. How ironic, almost cruel, she thought, that it should come on a day like this one.
As Ella broke free from the edge of the crowd, a Model T stake-bed truck rounded the corner and lurched down the street toward her, its tires brushing against the mounds of strikers’ belongings that had been left on the curbs.
In the driver’s seat was an older, mustached man with dark eyes. Beside him sat a heavy, jowly man, a derby pulled low and tight on his head. He smiled at Ella. She saw the soggy, chewed cigar clenched between his teeth. Percy Epps. Pigface. The man the girls at dinner had spoken of the night before. She knew him now without ever having seen him before. Two bird-faced men with sunken eyes and straw-colored hair leaned over the rails surrounding the truck bed and stared down at her.
Furniture and boxes and crates clogged the street behind Ella, and the crowd was too thick with bodies for her to turn around. Before she realized it had happened Ella found herself penned in the middle of the street by the piles on either side of her, her only choices being to climb one of the banks of mattresses, clothing, and chairs or to turn and force her way through the mass of people.
Before Ella had the chance to make a decision, the driver leaned on the horn. Its squeal made her flinch, and the driver looked over at Percy Epps. Both men laughed. The truck ground to a halt barely five feet in front of her, its body rumbling and twitching like a leashed animal.
The driver leaned out of the window. “Clear this street!” he yelled. No one moved. He leaned on the horn again. “Go on!” he said. “Get out of the damn way unless you want to be run down!”
The truck sat still, its engine vibrating beneath the hood. Ella saw a stream of shiny black oil trickle out from beneath its body, as if it bled. Ella didn’t move, didn’t say a word; neither did the people in the crowd behind her. The driver killed the engine, so that the only sound heard was the noise of the mill where it hummed unseen. Epps opened the truck’s rickety door and took his time climbing down from the cab. He removed the cigar from his mouth, sighed, looked all around him at the row houses as if he’d never seen this street before and couldn’t quite believe how sorry it all looked. He put the cigar back between his teeth and walked around to the front of the truck. He ran his thumbs along the inside of his pants waist as if adjusting his paunch so that it would fall comfortably over his belt. Ella caught the gleam of a silver revolver holstered under his left arm beneath a thin corduroy jacket. He stopped in front of her and pulled the cigar from his mouth again. He smiled, nodded at Ella.
“Miss,” he said, “is something wrong with your ears? Or your legs?”
Ella was surprised by his voice, which attempted to hide something like the twang of eastern North Carolina. An image of curing golden leaf tobacco flashed through her mind, something she’d seen in cigarette advertisements, and she imagined that Epps was a long way from home and that something he did back there had caused him to flee west toward Gastonia, to Loray. She knew she was trembling, and she knew he could see it. He stood close enough for her to smell the wet tobacco in his soggy cigar.