The Last Ballad(78)

“Yes,” Kate said. “It is nice.”

“After my daddy died, the lumber camp doled out my widow’s pay. I had nowhere to go. All I could think to do was find one of them old letters that Wesley had wrote us from up north, and then go down to the train station and buy a ticket to wherever he was.”

“Is that what you did?”

Ella thought about not saying another word about herself, about not telling Kate, this stranger she’d never met before, any more of her story. But something about the silence of the car and the feel of the night made her want to keep talking.

“It’s what I would’ve done,” Ella said. “It’s what I would’ve done if John Wiggins hadn’t been sitting on a bench in that train station waiting for a girl just like me.

“He was good-looking too, dressed in a fine suit of clothes, probably the only thing he owned at the time. He asked me where I was heading, and when I didn’t have my answer ready I figure he probably knew I was the one he’d been waiting for.

“We spent our first night in a boardinghouse right there in Bryson City. That night I laid in bed in a strange room beside a strange man and listened to the train whistle out there in the mountains. And each time I heard it whistle I wondered if that was the train that was supposed to be taking me to Detroit. But instead, here I was laid up in bed with a fine-talking stranger, our bellies full of steak and champagne. A whole lot of my money already gone. It was just about the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life.”

She’d said too much, revealed too many things about herself, about who she’d been. Ella could almost feel Kate tossing around images of her in her mind: the sight of her in bed with John, the feeling of champagne slipping past her lips, the echo of the train whistle in the night. She wanted to open her mouth and suck the words back into it, but instead she kept talking, kept throwing words after the ones she’d already said as if they could reconstruct instead of underpin the idea Kate already had of her.

“I’d never done anything like that before, you know, spent the night with a man, and I said to him, I said, ‘You reckon we better get married now?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. We don’t got time for that kind of thing.’ Well, I couldn’t figure out what time had to do with it, but looking back on it now, I know he said that because he was planning to cut out just as soon as we ran dry of my widow’s pay. And then a few weeks later I told him I thought I was pregnant, which I was. And I asked about us getting married then, and he said, ‘Well, I reckon we ought to now,’ and that’s about as romantic as he ever got. ‘I reckon we ought to.’”

“How long ago did he leave?”

“About two years ago,” Ella said. “Right after I got pregnant with my youngest. I reckon it took John Wiggins that many years to do what he’d wanted to do the first morning he woke up beside me.” Ella looked over at Kate. Her face grew hot. She’d said too much again. She turned toward Kate, nearly felt herself throw the onus of speaking into Kate’s lap. “Where’d you meet your husband?”

“In Chapel Hill, at the university,” Kate said.

“You went to college?” Ella asked.

“No,” Kate said. “I wish I’d gone. I begged my daughter to go to college because I didn’t, and I grew up wishing I had. But, no, my older brother went to college in Chapel Hill. My husband was his roommate until my brother passed away. He died young. He was eighteen.”

“I’m sorry,” Ella said.

“Thank you,” Kate said. “It was a long time ago.”

“It don’t get no easier to lose somebody you love,” Ella said. “No matter how long it’s been.”

“That’s true,” Kate said.

Silence hung between them for a few minutes after that. The quiet nearly blotted out the sound of the air as they cut through it and the noise of the car’s tires on the wet road.

“This is a fine car,” Ella said, certain that she’d already said something to that effect earlier. Then, “Nobody’d think to follow a fine car like this one.”

“What do you mean follow?” Kate asked.

“The mill’s people have been following us when we head home after meetings,” Ella said. “They’ll run you off the road. Come up on you and hit your bumper, try to crash you. They’ll shoot at you too, least that’s what I’ve heard. I hadn’t ever been shot at though.”

“Who are the ‘mill’s people’?” Kate asked. “Employees?”

“I don’t know,” Ella said. “Nobody knows. I reckon you’ve seen the ads in the newspaper run by the Council. We figure that’s who it is. Each time it happens we say, ‘Well, the Council was out last night.’ Back in April, a mob tore down the first headquarters and broke into the commissary. People said it was the Council that did that too.”

“It sounds terrifying,” Kate said.

“Aw, we’re fine in a nice car like this one,” Ella said. She ran her hand along the dash. “This is the nicest car I’ve ever rode in.”

Kate smiled, looked over at Ella, looked back at the road.

“Would you like to drive it?” Kate asked.

Ella laughed.

“I can’t drive a car like this,” she said.