The Last Ballad(64)
At the end of the war, the old man followed his railroads farther west, but not before handing off the mill to his son, Richard’s father, who at only eighteen years old embraced both his role as the mill’s president and his role as its employee. The mill only had a few dozen workers, but Richard’s father designed, paid for, and assisted in the construction of small brick homes for his workers. What Richard’s father lacked in his own father’s frontier spirit he made up for in a nature that embraced both technology and social progress. Over time he equipped each home in the mill village with toilets and bathtubs. In 1884 he stood alongside Thomas Edison as the famous inventor installed Dynamo #31 and ushered in a new wave of production. McAdamville’s two mills were the first in the state to run all night beneath bright, hot bulbs of electric light. That very dynamo was still churning out power.
This was the place and the legacy Richard had inherited when he’d assumed the presidency of the mill after graduating from Chapel Hill, and it was this past and present of fine industrialization that Richard wanted the Lytles to understand marked him and his family as being one of the most progressive and upstanding families in the state, if not one of its most wealthy and famous. While the Lytles’ ancestors had sipped juleps on the veranda and overseen the work of enslaved black bodies in brackish water, Richard’s father and grandfather had moved mountains, electrified production, cared for the poor, and changed the state forever.
And now Richard had inherited the mantle they’d left behind. And he’d gone to college at the state university. And he’d gotten married. And he’d had a child and served in the Great War. And he’d executed his life in a manner befitting both his talents and his station. So let the Lytles think what they would think after seeing what they’d seen at Loray that afternoon.
If George Lytle asked, Richard would tell him that there could not be two places more different than McAdamville, with its brick houses, indoor plumbing, and well-kept yards, and the Loray Mill, with its village of rotting shacks, muddy roads, and transient workers. In some ways, Richard thought, Loray deserved exactly what it was getting. He’d never admit it to anyone, including Katherine, but something about it allowed some semblance of pride to bloom inside him.
The rain had moved east toward Charlotte and the clouds had parted, revealing a quarter moon that stared down upon the pine trees and clubhouse like an eye only partly open. In its light, Richard was able to spy something moving toward him down the lane from Franklin Avenue. It was a black Packard 633, and as it drew closer he knew Hugo Guyon sat in its backseat, gazing out on the dark night, his head probably full of concerns about the strike.
Instead of parking, the Packard roared into the roundabout in front of the clubhouse, its huge engine vibrating under the rain-slicked hood. The driver left the motor running and stepped out and came around to the side of the car facing Richard, then opened the back door. Hugo Guyon swung both feet out and unfolded himself from the seat. In his early fifties, he was a large man, easily over six feet tall, with hair so short and fair as to make him appear bald. When Guyon saw Richard standing atop the porch, he nodded his head gravely as if he’d just returned from the front and there was nothing but bad news to report.
Although Richard had never met Guyon’s wife and couldn’t even remember if he was married or had ever been married, he was surprised when the door opened on the other side of the car and a man’s face appeared. He was much shorter than Guyon, round-faced and jowly. He wore a simple black suit and a derby pushed back off his forehead. A short, damp cigar clung to his lower lip.
Guyon said something to the driver that Richard couldn’t hear, and the driver got back inside the car and revved the engine before pulling the Packard out of the roundabout and disappearing around the corner, where the other automobiles were parked. The two men—Guyon and the stranger—stood in the road before the club and spoke quietly to one another, and then Guyon turned toward Richard and smiled.
“Mrs. Guyon isn’t well this evening,” he said, his fading Yankee accent still marking his words with precision and sharpness. “I hope it’s okay that I used my and guest on this ugly son of a bitch.” He clapped the other man on the shoulder. The stranger smiled and looked up at Richard, and even though it was dark and the men were more than twenty feet away, Richard could see that the man’s eyes were crystal blue and vaguely unsettling.
The two men walked up the steps toward Richard, the portico momentarily tossing them into shadow until the lights from the club’s windows behind Richard illuminated their faces. Guyon introduced the stranger as Percy Epps, Loray’s attorney and head of security.
Guyon looked at Richard, and then he looked at the club over Richard’s shoulder as if he were expecting someone else to open the door and walk outside.
“Are we that late?” he asked. “Party over?”
The question embarrassed Richard. It was a strange thing, wasn’t it, to be standing out on the porch alone on the night of his daughter’s engagement party, waiting for Hugo Guyon, a man he didn’t know that well to ask him to quell a situation of which he wasn’t part. All this so that another man he didn’t know that well would think well of him and his family.
“No,” Richard said, “there’s still plenty of the evening left. I was just getting some air before dinner.”
“You’re not having second thoughts about giving your daughter away, are you?” Guyon asked. Epps smiled.