The Last Ballad(60)
“Hello, Richard,” Mr. Wright said, his thin face and gray mustache lit by the light coming from behind Richard. Mrs. Wright looked out at Richard from beneath a plum-colored pillbox hat, a spray of yellow flowers set into its brim. “I’m sorry we’re late,” Mr. Wright said. “Wanted to wait out the rain. Didn’t know we’d be waiting this long.”
“Oh, it’s perfectly all right,” Richard said, smiling, exhaling. Although no one would ever know, it embarrassed him to be so relieved at seeing the couple instead of Guyon. “Dinner hasn’t started yet. It’s just been music and dancing so far.”
“Then we haven’t missed a thing,” Mr. Wright said. He laughed. “I’m not one for dancing, but I’ve never been one to miss a meal.”
Richard offered Mrs. Wright his hand and helped her up the steps, and then he moved aside and opened the door. Mrs. Wright smiled and congratulated him, and Mr. Wright shook his hand. Richard closed the door behind the couple, then he turned and faced the night again.
He worried that he’d be unable to hide this jumpy nervousness when he confronted Guyon and asked him to cover the cost of the Lytles’ damaged car. Although Guyon wasn’t a mill operator and owner like Richard was, he had spent the past decade as superintendent at Loray, one of the largest mills in the country and easily the largest in the state.
He didn’t know Guyon well. The first time he’d met him was in the fall of 1919, when several local mill owners organized a hunting trip to introduce Guyon to the community. Three carloads of men had traveled south from Gastonia through Columbia and on to Savannah before taking a ferry out to Hilton Head Island. The whole operation had been started just a few years earlier by an old man named Silling, who owned a handful of mills over in Kings Mountain. He’d rallied a group of investors from Tennessee and the Carolinas to fund the Hilton Head Agricultural Company, which sounded grand at the time, but after Richard and his group arrived on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November, all he’d found was a clapboard clubhouse; a Sears, Roebuck kit cabin where the men would bunk for the night; two old colored guides; and a cook in the form of an old colored woman who spoke Gullah and looked upon the newly arrived men as if they were idiots.
For a reason none of them could remember, perhaps both to keep up appearances and to keep their wives from worrying, it had always been tradition to invite one of the men’s ministers to accompany the group on a hunting trip. They were all conservative Protestants, but when it came to the invited clergy the men tended to lean Episcopalian, since Episcopal clergymen seemed the most willing to have a drink and the least likely to look down on those who had more than one. On the year they included Guyon, someone in the group suggested they invite one of the priests from the monastery at Belmont Abbey. The men had heard that Guyon was Catholic, and it seemed an act of goodwill. They were all surprised, which is to say uncomfortable, when an older, white-headed man in a cassock joined the caravan. Father Gregory rode in the backseat of a car with Guyon. The two men barely spoke during the trip. They were strangers to one another just as they were strangers to everyone else.
Richard remembered it as a bizarre week of drinking whiskey and firing rifles. He was just back from the war and found that he had little use for either. He spent most of his time sitting on the porch of the clubhouse, staring out at the six-foot alligator a couple of the men had caught in the swamp on the first day and tethered to a palm tree in the center of camp. At night, after dinner, he’d watch the same group of daredevils drink whiskey and stumble out to the flagpole, where they’d place chicken livers in their palms and tempt the gator to eat from their hands. They’d eventually lose interest and toss the livers onto the sand. In the morning the livers would still be there, dry and shriveled, inches from the alligator’s snout.
Guyon had been quiet and friendly during the trip, somewhat deferential to the men who’d all known each other for years. But after a few days, it appeared to Richard that Guyon had integrated himself better than Richard ever had, despite the fact that Richard had grown up with most of these men. Their fathers’ and grandfathers’ relationships had been marked by rivalries and partnerships in the same ways rivalry and partnership marked their own relationships now.
On the first night of the trip, after they’d settled into their bunks, the men presented Guyon with a “welcome” gift: a Springfield .30-06. It was a better gun than half the rifles the men had brought with them, far better than Richard’s .22, which he hadn’t cleaned or fired since before the war. They’d even pooled their funds to get Father Gregory a rifle, a Winchester 270. The old man opened the box and stared at it as if it were some kind of relic whose usefulness would have to be divined after careful consultation with specialists. The entire week, no one ever saw Father Gregory load the rifle, much less fire it, but he carried it with him whenever he left his private room for a meal or drinks in the evening.
Guyon quickly joined in on the lies and teasing that took place during what came to be known as alibi hour, when the men sat around the bunkhouse before bed and ribbed one another about bad marksmanship and the inability to hold one’s liquor. Three cut shirttails had been left pinned to the wall beside the door, each representing a man’s bad aim or a missed opportunity to bring down a deer during the trip.
At night, the conversations inevitably turned to life in the mills back home. Several of the men refused to hide their pride that Gastonia had come to be known as the “City of Spindles” and would soon be the nation’s combed-yarn capital. A man named Cloninger, whose grandfather had built Highland Shoals Mill on the Catawba River just in time to die in the Civil War, took particular pride in the idea that the South would soon outpace the North in textiles.