The Last Ballad(46)

“I think I recognize you,” he said. “What’s your name?”

In the question Ella heard more than the same simple query that Sophia and Velma had asked her just a day earlier. In Epps’s question she understood the danger of divulging the only thing she possessed: anonymity.

“My name ain’t important,” she finally said.

“Your name ain’t important?”

“Not to you,” she said.

“No?” Epps asked. His tongue poked around his mouth, moving the cigar along his lips.

“You think your name’s important to Fred Beal, that dandy Yank who’s down here telling you how to work? When to work. What to do instead of working.”

He was speaking directly to Ella, but his voice and his words were meant for the crowd behind her. Even as she stared into his eyes Ella could feel Epps looking past her at the strikers around her.

“But I reckon y’all gave up your names when you became communists,” he said. He looked behind him at the two men leaning over the truck’s rails. “Boys, I guess we got a bunch of nameless nobodies on our hands,” he said. The men smiled at the same time like children responding to a parent’s cue.

Epps turned back to Ella.

“Is that who you are?” he asked. “A nameless nobody?”

Epps stepped closer, as if trying to smell her, and this allowed Ella to smell him: hair grease, sweat, the scent of oiled machinery.

“I already know your name, Miss Wiggins,” he whispered. “I don’t know where you came from, but I know who you are, and you can rest assured that I will never forget your face.”

He stepped away from Ella and took in the people behind her.

“I’m sure you good church folks have heard of the Book of Life,” he said. “God’s got every one of y’all’s names writ down there. Every last one of you, whether you believe in Him or not, whether you fear His wrath or not. Well, I’ve got a Book of Life too. And all y’all are in there.” He stopped speaking and stared at the crowd for a moment. Ella watched his eyes as they moved across the faces behind her. “I got you writ down there, Mamie Stihl. And you, Zachary Goshen. Lydia Roberts and Sadie Grant; Sadie, I got both you and that baby of yours in there.”

He kept his eyes on the strikers for another moment, then he pulled the cigar from his mouth and flicked it to his left, where it landed atop a mattress. Suddenly there was the sound of something exploding. Ella saw a cabbage rolling off the truck’s hood. It fell to the street. A smear of rotten leaves coated the truck’s windshield and obscured her view of the driver. Epps turned toward the truck at the sound. The crowd roared with laughter, cheers.

But every voice fell silent when Epps turned back to face them, the silver revolver clenched in his right hand.

“Who threw that?” he screamed. He waited, but no one answered.

He raised the revolver and pointed it at the crowd, swung his arm back and forth so that it passed within inches of Ella’s face. In that moment she wondered if death had found her. Every moment of her life had led to this one, and the only thing she could feel was surprise that death would come for her now, when she was so far from her children, so much farther from East Tennessee, where death had found her mother and father.

“Clear this damn road!” Epps screamed. “Now!”

Something whizzed past Ella’s ear. She wondered if it was the sound a bullet would make as it flew by, but she realized the direction was wrong, and then she saw a second cabbage, this one more firm and less ripe, smash into Epps’s face. He dropped the revolver and lifted his hands to his nose. When he pulled his hands away and looked at them, Ella saw that his lips were covered in blood and white flakes of cabbage had spattered across his face. His hat had been knocked to the ground. He wiped at his nose, bent to pick up his gun and hat from the road, but before he could grasp either, a cane chair crashed onto the truck’s hood. Epps fell to his knees and cowered at the sound of it. The crowd laughed.

Suddenly all manner of things sailed through the air over Ella’s head toward Epps: sticks of furniture, vegetables, bottles, shoes, and rocks. They caromed off the hood, windshield, roof, and the men’s arms as they raised their hands to cover their heads and faces. The sounds echoed through the street.

Epps holstered his gun, and—still bent at the waist—shuffled toward the passenger’s door and climbed inside. The truck rumbled to life and rolled backward away from Ella as if the world were moving in reverse, as if a tide were receding, and although Ella had never seen the ocean before—would never see it—she pictured the dark tide that had flushed her from the mountains and carried her east here to Gastonia, and she realized that it was possible for a tide to recede, to turn back, to relinquish its pull on your life.

One last bottle sailed overhead and crashed to the ground, scattering its shards along the road. The voices of the people behind Ella grew louder, and she turned to face them.

“That’s the singer,” someone said, and “Bessemer City,” another said. “Seen her with Beal this morning,” and “That there’s Ella May.”





Chapter Five

Brother





Friday, April 12, 1929



He had not known it was Gaston County when he arrived in mid-April, had not even known it was North Carolina through which he’d trudged a day earlier. He’d spent a clear, moonless night sleeping in an open field, and when he woke covered in dew he slung his satchel over his left shoulder and picked his way through the rocky eddies of a shallow run of river. Once on the other side, the sun now cresting the horizon, he kept the river on his right and followed the shoreline north, his clothes drying in the warm morning air.