The Last Ballad(81)

“You shouldn’t be,” Ella said. “I bet you’ve got a fine singing voice.”

Kate cleared her throat, took a moment as if she were trying to recall the words. Then she began:

Two little blackbirds sitting on a hill.

One named Jack, one named Jill.



Her voice was soft and high, much higher-pitched than Ella knew her own to be. Ella joined in after the first stanza, listened as her deep tone merged with Kate’s.

Fly away, Jack. Fly away, Jill.

Come back, Jack. Come back, Jill.



A few more stanzas and, one by one, the children had all closed their eyes.

Now Ella and Kate sat in silence side by side on the cabin’s steps. They both stared into the darkness of the road that led up out of Stumptown. Ella hadn’t known what to do with her new friend after she’d put the children to bed. But then she’d remembered a near-empty Mason jar of whiskey that Charlie had hidden beneath the house. She’d found the jar and poured what was left of the liquor, which was barely enough to cover the bottoms of two jars, and she’d given one of them to Kate. She suggested they sit on the steps while the children settled themselves into sleep.

“It turned out to be a beautiful night, didn’t it,” Kate said.

It was true. Once the rain stopped for good and the clouds drifted away, a quarter moon had revealed itself. The night was full of night sounds: the chirps of crickets, the occasional frog, the gurgle of the creek off in the woods where it was fed by the spring. Ella could hear a woman’s voice somewhere up the road, but it was too far away to know who it was or what she was saying. The smell of cigarette smoke drifted past Ella’s nose before vanishing. Ella cupped her free hand around her stomach, fixed her mind on the small life that stirred there.

“You said your daughter’s about to get married,” she said. “How old is she?”

“She’s twenty-two,” Kate said. “And she’s home for the summer. It’s nice to have a child in the house again, no matter how old she is.”

The question burst from Ella’s chest before she fully understood that she had spent all night preparing to ask it.

“Why’d you want to meet me?” She looked down at the jar in her hand, turned it back and forth. “Why would somebody like you want to meet somebody like me? Let me drive your car? Follow me home? Meet my children?” She looked over at Kate. “Why?”

Kate tipped her jar up, drank what was left. She set it on the steps beside her.

“Tonight, before you sang, you told the story of how your little boy died. Isn’t it difficult to tell people something so private?”

“It’s hard for me to say why I tell that story,” Ella said. “I didn’t used to talk about it. It used to be that I didn’t want to think about it. But I think about it now. I think about it all the time: his face, how his body felt when I held him, how his breath smelled sweet after he nursed.” Something caught in her throat, and she feared that she might find herself in tears, something that hadn’t happened in a long time.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Kate said. Ella felt Kate’s hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Ella said, “I don’t mind talking about it. I just hadn’t thought of that sweet breath in a while.” She looked at Claire. “You know what I’m talking about? The way a baby’s breath smells sweet and sugary after it nurses, after it’s fallen asleep with your nipple in its mouth, and you take it off and hold its face up against yours, and you can smell its lips, smell its breath when it breathes?”

“Yes,” Kate said. Her eyes glistened. “I know. I remember it.”

Ella turned away from Kate, looked out into the darkness before her.

“I don’t know if you were raised in the church,” she said, “but I was. I was raised Baptist. We always hopped around from church to church depending on where my daddy was working, but my mother was a fiery believer. My daddy wanted to stay on her good side.” She smiled, allowed herself a small laugh that cut through her sadness; with it came a quick memory of her mother and father’s faces, and then they were gone. “So that meant Daddy was a fiery one too.

“In a church like the ones I was raised in, it was normal for folks to get up and talk about how the Lord had moved in their lives. When you’re holy, when you’re filled up with the spirit, you want people to know you’ve earned it, and you want to tell about it. People want to know that you’ve earned it too. Speaking at these rallies is something like that for me. Being poor, losing my baby, fighting for what I’m fighting for: it’s the same thing as getting up in front of that church and telling those people how the Lord’s moved in your life. You’ve earned that story. I’ve earned mine. I’ve earned this being sad, this loss, this being angry. I want to tell it to people so they’ll know what it means to earn it. Plenty of the women who’ve heard me, probably a good bit of the men too, have lived the same kind of life I’ve lived. They need to know they’re not alone.”

She stopped speaking, considered saying nothing else, but she couldn’t help it. She had to know.

“But you didn’t answer what I asked you,” Ella said. “Why’d you want to meet me?”

Kate dropped her hands into her lap, parted her knees, looked down at her feet. “I was seventeen when I married Richard,” she said. “Not much older than you were when you married your husband. After he finished school we were married in my parents’ church in Hickory, and then we moved to McAdamville so he could start working for his father.” She sighed, laughed quietly just once. “I was young. I didn’t know anything about my body, I certainly didn’t know anything about his. I was probably three months pregnant before I realized it.”