The Last Ballad(76)



“There’s just too many strangers,” Chesley said. He cranked the engine. It sputtered, caught, then fired. Sparks shot from somewhere beneath the truck. The woman in the road jumped at the sound. A few of the workers laughed.

The woman turned, looked at Ella. Her face was pretty, her cheeks brushed lightly with rouge, her mouth red with lipstick. Ella figured her for an out-of-town reporter who’d suddenly found herself surrounded by a rough bunch of millhands.

“You’re Ella May,” the woman said, her voice lilting in a way that made clear that she was asking a question but was afraid to do so outright.

For Ella to hear her name in the mouth of a stranger was akin to someone standing on her chest and forcing the air from her lungs. It had been happening more and more often, ever since the first night she’d spoken at the rally, but she had yet to grow used to it, and each time it happened it was accompanied by the dizzying realization that people she did not know somehow knew her. Ella looked over at Sophia, who didn’t seem bothered by the woman’s presence. She must have figured her for a reporter as well, and Ella knew how much reporters and newspapers excited Sophia. Sophia nodded at Ella and flicked her eyes toward the stranger, clearly encouraging her to answer.

“Yes,” Ella said. “I’m Ella.”

“Are you a reporter?” Sophia asked.

“No,” the woman said. “I’m not a reporter. I’m . . . I . . . I don’t know what I am, actually.”

Sophia smiled, nodded toward Ella. “You a fan?” she asked the woman.

“I . . . I don’t know,” she said. She looked at Ella. “I just wanted to meet you.”

Sophia whistled as if in disbelief. She shook her head, turned away from the woman, and walked back toward the truck.

“Why?” Ella asked. “Why’d you want to meet me?”

The woman took a step toward Ella, stopped, took another. She interlaced her fingers, held her gloved hands before her as if they offered something either invisible or too small to be seen.

“I’ve heard about you,” the woman said, “and I heard you sing tonight. It was just lovely, wonderful. I wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?” Ella asked.

“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I just—”

She opened her mouth to say something else, but instead she looked past Ella to the two trucks that sat on the side of the road behind her. The woman’s gaze moved from one truck to the other. Ella turned and saw that the workers had all been watching and listening.

It began to rain. The woman coughed, put her hands in her pockets. Ella wondered if the woman would leave now. The woman shifted her feet, coughed again. Otherwise, she didn’t move.

Sophia opened the driver’s-side door of her truck and climbed inside. An older woman named Maize Creedmore was already sitting on the passenger’s side. Sophia cranked the engine. It was too dark and rainy to witness the black smoke that Ella knew belched from the tailpipe.

The trucks were all loaded. Ella and the woman were the only ones left standing in the road.

“Good night,” Ella said.

She walked to the back of the truck. It began to rain harder. The people in the truck had huddled together. A few men opened small umbrellas and held them overhead. Others crowded beneath. Ella sighed, grasped the tailgate, put her foot on the step up. Her toes squished together inside her wet shoe.

“Wait, Ella,” the woman said. “I can drive you. I have a car.” She took a step forward. Dropped her hands at her sides. “It’s no trouble.”

Ella kept her hand on the tailgate and her foot on the step. She looked up at the faces inside the truck, most of them downcast or darkened by shadow. There suddenly didn’t seem to be room enough for her, and she pictured the long, wet ride squeezed up against her fellow passengers, all of them smelling of mud and rain and damp clothes. Someone would have a flask, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep the drive from being miserable.

Ella looked over at the woman again and reacquainted herself with the nice jacket, the perfectly perched hat, and the woman’s made-up face, and she imagined the dry, comfortable interior of an expensive automobile. She dropped her hand and lowered her foot to the road. She walked alongside the truck to Sophia’s window. Sophia was watching the woman where she stood out in the road.

“She wants to drive me,” Ella said.

“I heard,” Sophia said. She stared at the woman. Rain fell into Ella’s eyes. She wiped it away. “Do you think she wants to be president of your fan club? Do you think Gastonia’s ready for a female president?”

“She said she wanted to meet me,” Ella said. “I don’t know why.”

“You’re famous now, you know,” Sophia said. She smiled. “I guess Beal was right in wanting there to be music, wanting you to sing it.”

“You think it’s safe?” Ella asked.

“No woman dressed like that on a night like this is up to any devilment,” Sophia said.

“You’d go?” Ella asked. “If you were me?”

“Sure,” Sophia said. She dropped the truck into gear. “Why not? It could be interesting.”

Sophia turned her truck around in the road so that it could head back down South Loray Street to Franklin. Chesley’s truck followed. When Sophia passed Ella and the woman, she called out, “You girls have fun!”

Wiley Cash's Books