The Last Ballad(52)
“Was he that tall?” Donna asked. A few of the girls had laughed.
Mrs. Barnes composed herself, then turned slowly, her eyes alighting on Lincoln’s face for just a moment.
“No,” she said, “of course not. Don’t be silly.”
Minutes later the group was making their way down Independence Avenue when they heard someone call the senator’s name from the other side of the street. Claire looked up to see a man in a dark suit darting through the traffic, horns honking and tires squealing to a stop. A dozen gaunt-faced men and women in mismatched secondhand clothes followed behind him, their eyes wide with terror. The oldest of them could have been fifty; the youngest of them, a skinny wisp of a girl, couldn’t have been any older than ten.
The man who’d called out to the senator stood before Senator Overman and the group of young women as if he hoped to block their route to the Capitol. The rest of the ragtag party gathered behind him. All of them were panting, trying to catch their breath. If it had been any colder their breath would’ve steamed before them like horses that had just pulled sleds across fields deep with snow.
“Senator,” he said, “my name is Carlton Reed. I’m with the Labor Defender.”
Claire caught his northern accent, noticed his expensive suit. He talked fast, as if he knew the senator had better things to do and was already planning his escape.
“Sir,” Reed continued, “I have with me here today a few members of the Gastonia, North Carolina, local of the National Textile Workers Union, and we’re in town to—”
“I know who you are, son,” Overman said, “and I know why y’all are here.”
“Sir,” Reed said, removing his hat, “you may be aware of the Montana senator’s inquiry into the southern textile mills. Well, today’s hearing was canceled after our party arrived, but we had the good fortune to meet with Senator Wheeler and Senator La Follette of Wisconsin, and my question to you, sir, is why does it take two northern senators to initiate an investigation into—” But Overman stopped him, went so far as to place his big, open palm on the man’s chest and give him a gentle push so that Claire’s group would have room enough to pass them on the sidewalk.
“I understand, son,” the senator said, “and I applaud your efforts, but if you’ll excuse me I’m engaged with a group of proper ladies from North Carolina.”
“We’re proper ladies from North Carolina too,” a woman in the textile group said. She stepped out from behind Reed and blocked the sidewalk.
“Ella,” Reed said. He touched the woman’s shoulder, but she took another step away from him so he could not reach her without following. She was a small, thin woman in a dingy white dress. She wore a man’s long coat and a black knit cap that was pulled tight enough to nearly cover her eyes.
“We’re all proper,” the woman said. She took her hand from her coat pocket and motioned toward the people behind her. “And we’re hungry and tired and poor too.”
“Ella,” Reed said again.
“I see,” the senator said. He stepped back and looked at the group as if appraising them. “It looks like you strikers are all decked out in your union-issued finery.”
A few of the group, the women especially, looked down at their clothes. One of the men tugged on his lapels and buttoned his suit jacket.
“Senator, are you suggesting that these men and women are in costume?” Reed asked.
“What I’m suggesting is y’all go home to Gastonia and call off this strike and get back to work,” Overman said. “Quit playing these games. Quit allowing the communist to dictate your lives.” He turned to the thin, young striker who’d been standing quietly. “And you, young lady, you need to return to school.”
At that, the woman named Ella flew toward the senator and perhaps would have knocked him down had Reed not grabbed her by her shoulders.
“School!” she shouted. “School?!” She tried to buck free of Reed’s grasp but he was too tall and too strong. She kept yelling at Overman, her voice coming out in a husky scream. “Let me tell you something,” she said. “I can’t even send my own children to school. They ain’t got decent enough clothes to wear and I can’t afford to buy them none. I make nine dollars a week, and I work all night and leave them shut up in the house all by themselves. I had one of them sick this winter and I had to leave her there just coughing and crying.”
Ella’s voice dropped and she was quiet for a moment. She looked from Overman to the faces of the girls from Greensboro. Her eyes met Claire’s, and something cold and wretched shot through Claire’s heart. Ella shrugged Reed’s hands from her shoulders. She looked over at the young girl whom Overman had commanded to return to school. The girl wore a dirty white dress and loose gray stockings. She was shrouded in a long black coat that seemed to have been cut for someone twice her size. Her face was sharp, her eyes sunken, ringed in pink.
“And this one here,” Ella said, putting her arm around the girl and pulling her toward her. “Binnie here’s fourteen years old, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at her, would you? This girl here ain’t been to school in years. She makes five dollars a week, and that’s more than her mother and daddy make. She used to have a brother who worked in the mill too, but tuberculosis ate at him till he died.”