The Last Ballad(50)
The monk he’d first met in the field that April day was Father Gregory, a gouty, red-faced old man who’d come from Pennsylvania. Brother spent most of his time with Father Gregory, working in the garden, cleaning the monks’ quarters, walking the abbey’s grounds, listening to the gurgle of the small fountain in the courtyard.
Brother slept on a cot in a closetlike room in the monastery’s basement. Here, while listening to water pass through the pipes and the sounds of the forest outside the basement door through which he was allowed to come and go as he pleased, he would lie awake until sleep found him, the tips of his fingers touching each angle of the tiny wooden chair that sat upright on his chest. He pondered the promise he’d made to himself to be good, to know good, to do good.
And then he saw Ella May Wiggins, and his memory of beholding Sister coupled with the dark guilt of his past life caught up with him there in a crowded field in Gastonia. Like Sister, this woman Ella stood atop a stage with a vast audience spread out before her. It was a cool evening in early May, not long after dark. Brother stood with Father Gregory and Father Elian on the edge of the crowd, shoulder-to-shoulder with gaunt-faced millworkers, policemen, and newspaper reporters. He and the two monks had traveled the few miles to Gastonia to help feed the strikers who they had learned would be evicted from their homes the following morning. He had expected to help them, but he had not expected to see Ella or to feel her story uncoil itself in his heart.
And then she sang, and Brother was struck dumb by the beauty of it.
Chapter Six
Claire McAdam
Friday, May 10, 1929
The train had departed Washington, D.C., at 10:35 p.m. By the time Claire and her friend Donna had settled themselves in their bunks it was near midnight and they were drawing close to Manassas. Claire’s body still pulsed with anger and hurt, and she’d been unable to fall asleep after the argument she’d had with Donna. Claire slipped her hand from under the blanket and felt around for the train schedule she’d tucked beneath her mattress. She unfolded it and held it to the faint moonlight that trickled through the curtained window by her bunk. On the schedule she saw the name of the great battlefield that her fiancé Paul’s father had spoken of, the place where Paul’s great-grandfather had fought the first real battle of the Civil War, when it seemed the whole campaign would be short and certain.
Claire recalled the face of Paul’s great-grandfather, a man whom she’d never met and had only seen in the huge oil portrait that hung in the Lytles’ keeping room in the family’s old plantation on the North Carolina coast. She’d imagined the gray-bearded man in the portrait sitting atop a powerful white horse on a muddy battlefield strewn with the bodies of young southern boys.
Claire rested her head on the stiff pillow and lifted her left hand so that the diamond on her engagement ring caught the light. She tried to ignore the heavy breathing coming from the bunk below her, but the sound of Donna’s peaceful sleep annoyed her.
Donna’s father’s connections had been what allowed the young students from the North Carolina College for Women to travel to Washington, and it had been his personal friendship with Senator Lee Overman that had secured them a tour of the city by one of the nation’s most powerful congressmen.
“I grew up in Salisbury believing that Lee Overman was the greatest man alive,” Donna had told Claire on the train ride to Washington the day before. They’d been sitting beside one another in the dining car. Claire had been writing a letter to Paul. She’d promised him that she’d send him a piece of mail with D.C. postage.
“My daddy always told me that Senator Overman was the only man in Washington willing to protect my ‘southern womanhood,’” Donna had said. She’d gathered her thick red hair into a ponytail and fastened it. Claire envied Donna’s beauty, the ease with which she moved and spoke and acted. Claire was twenty-one, but she still perceived herself as a quiet, passive child with mousy brown hair, who lived with an acute fear that someone might be judging her. It made her feel very small. She’d sensed Donna’s eyes on her, and she’d scribbled a sloppy heart at the bottom of Paul’s letter before signing her name.
She had batted her eyes at Donna and dropped her voice into a low-country drawl. “And how can the senator expect to protect the womanhood of a saucy number like you, my lady?”
Donna had looked at her without smiling; then she’d turned toward the train’s window.
“My daddy used to say, ‘Donna baby, Lee Overman would lynch every damn nigger in this country if he had to.’ And as I got older I knew what that meant, and it scared me to hear my father talk that way. It still does.”
It was clear that Donna did not think much of Senator Overman or her father or the men’s connection, but it had not kept Claire from feeling proud that morning before their tour when Donna had introduced her to the senator as “the daughter of Richard McAdam, owner of the McAdam Mill in Belmont.” The senator had smiled at the mention of Claire’s family name.
“I know things are rocky down in Gaston County with the strike,” the senator had said. “Give your father my best, and tell him we’re doing everything we can to put an end to this trouble.”
“I will,” Claire had said. “I’ll let him know.” She had nodded and smiled, but she’d had no idea what the senator had meant.