The Last Ballad(9)

“I probably threw them away, ma’am.”

She knew he was lying, knew that he’d probably sold them for much less money than it had taken her months to save. Something broke loose inside Ella’s chest, and she fought the urge to cry out. When she turned and looked back over the graves it seemed as if the world had turned with her, and she feared that she might collapse from the dizziness of it.

“Everything?” she asked. “You just throw everything away.”

The old man sighed and peered into the shack behind him. “You can come back here and look,” he said. “See if you can find what you’re looking for. I doubt it’s here, but you can look.”

As soon as Ella stepped through the door of the tiny shack, she knew that the old man had long been a tenant of the tiny shack and would no doubt die inside its walls. It was heated to stifling and reeked of sweat, urine, and some kind of liniment. A metal cot sat in front of a sooty stove, where a fire licked at the grate. Rotting books and newspapers and circulars were stacked waist-high against the walls. Ella followed the old man past the stove into a tiny storeroom full of tools and equipment. Wooden shelves hemmed them in on either side and housed all manner of things: crucifixes, dolls, placards, faded artificial flowers. Ella was hardly inside the storeroom when she knew for certain that Willie’s poinsettia and baseball were not among these things, but she looked anyway, took her time and pored over each article as if it might morph into a thing she recognized.

She finally selected a red, water-damaged paper carnation that looked nothing like the felt poinsettia that had cost her a day’s pay, but still she closed her hand around it and slipped it into the side pocket of John’s old coat. The man’s eyes followed her as if he knew that the flower she’d taken was not the one she’d described, but neither of them said a word by way of explanation or conjecture.

Ella left the storeroom, was halfway across the old man’s living quarters when she heard him call to her. She turned and saw that he was on his knees, his hands feeling around for something tucked into the filth beneath his cot. She watched him until he found what he’d been looking for. He stood and held something out to her: an old baseball, oil-stained and swollen, riddled with what appeared to be teeth marks from a dog.

“I imagine it ain’t as nice as the one you’re looking for, but it’s yours if you want it,” the old man said. “I’m awful sorry.”

Ella nodded, took the baseball, surprised by how heavy and large it felt in her hand after the memory of the fresh, unused ball she’d purchased for Willie.

Once she was outside she did not look back toward Willie’s grave. She went left instead and followed the path out of the cemetery’s gates. There were no cars on the road, everyone either at church or at home because of the snow. Ella had walked only a mile when she found herself standing beneath the snow-dusted boughs of a pine tree, her chest heaving in sobs. She held her hands over her eyes, caught the reek of the old man’s shack where it had infused itself into the baseball he’d just given her. She sniffed, wiped at her nose, blinked warm tears from her eyes.

She hadn’t told her children about the poinsettia or the new baseball, and she decided that she’d give the old man’s ball to Otis as soon as she arrived home. It was as nice or nicer than any baseball Otis had ever owned, and she found herself thinking, Something, something will come of this. It was not the waste that it now seems. But even as her mind said this, she found herself pulling back her arm and pausing for just a moment before throwing the baseball as far into the woods as she could. She removed the paper carnation from her pocket, tore it apart in her hands, the paper disintegrating like a dead leaf. She opened her palms and watched the tiny scraps of red paper fall onto the snow. She didn’t want charity or kindness or relief or pity. All she wanted was what she’d worked for.

She stared down at what was left of the carnation, her body registering the anger and humiliation and pain as they left her as slowly as an extinguished fire leaves a room so it may be reclaimed by the cold. Her breathing slowed, lifted like steam in the frigid air.

This is fitting, she’d thought. This is what happens. The cemetery is where you leave things behind. You aren’t supposed to go home with anyone in your arms or anything in your pockets.



The light inside Violet’s cabin winked off, and Violet opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. The morning had brightened in the short time Ella had been waiting, and she could see Violet clearly as she walked toward her across the neatly kept yard, the dirt walk swept smooth and clean, the clumps of flowers that lined it damp with dew and glimmering against the morning. Violet’s body seemed to hum in the soft light. She held a Mason jar in each hand. She stopped where the grassy yard turned to muddy gravel and offered Ella one of the jars.

“This one’s honey,” she said. She offered the other. “And this one’s whiskey and a little something else.”

“What else?” Ella asked.

Violet smiled. “An old Stumptown secret.”

“Mother used to give my brother and me ginger and moonshine,” Ella said. “Horehound candy if she could find it.”

“Well, you ain’t no hillbilly no more, remember?”

“Yes,” Ella said. She smiled. “I remember.”

“You still thinking about going to that rally in Gastonia today?” Violet asked.