The Last Ballad

by Wiley Cash

  But shame can work the other way as well. Once, years and years ago, when I first moved to Asheville, I was seeing a man who worked as a pharmacist for one of the drugstores downtown. He was very kind and very successful and the only son of a lovely old family, and I knew for certain that we would be married. And then, one evening, the woman who managed the boardinghouse where I lived knocked on my door and told me that the pharmacist was downstairs. I was surprised because it was a weeknight and I had not been expecting him. I found him on the porch, still in his white smock. It had grown dark out, and I remember thinking how white his smock appeared beneath the porch light.

  I will be quick about things: he told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. He did not give a reason, although I suspect he had met someone else. I had been grading student papers, essays about “What I Will Do Over My Summer Vacation,” and I had tucked my pencil behind my ear. I had hoped he would find it charming, but after his news to me I thought of the pencil and was humiliated because I had put it there on purpose to get his attention. He left, and I never saw him again.

  I was devastated, Edwin, just devastated, and how I cried. He was the first man I had ever really loved, and I believe that at that moment I knew for certain that I would never marry. The funny thing is that I rarely think of the pharmacist now, but throughout that summer I was convinced that my life was over. I was only twenty-nine. Twenty-nine.

  Months passed. Summer ended, and before I knew it I was heading back to work at the elementary school where I was scheduled to teach fourth grade for the second year in a row. One evening, I was in my room organizing my teaching materials, getting ready for school to start, when I came across a photograph the pharmacist and I had taken together at Lake Lure the previous fall. The two of us were sitting on a rock and holding hands, our legs crossed, both of us smiling. I wore sunglasses and he wore a straw derby and white jacket. We made a nice-looking couple. The photograph was in black and white, and you could not tell that the trees behind us were alive with color, but they were. I stared at the photograph, and the same feelings I had felt that night on the porch returned: the deep hurt and sadness, the disappointment, the certainty that so many things I’d expected of my life would not come to pass.

  And then, I do not know how, I seemed to step outside of my body. I looked back at myself where I sat on the single bed in my small room in a boardinghouse in the mountains between the place where my mother was born and the place she had died. How had I come to be here? I wondered. How had I come to have the things I had? The dresses, the shoes, the books, the radio that sat on the shelf across from me that I would turn on in the evenings to hear music or a baseball game or the news while I sipped tea and looked at a magazine. I asked myself these questions on the way to realizing something important: I was twenty-nine years old, and I had outlived my mother by one year. I had outlived a woman who had never slept on a bed this comfortable in a room this warm, who had never worn a dress as nice as the dresses I often gave away after a season, who had lost one child while keeping four alive. It all felt so self-indulgent, this worry over a man, this longing over a photograph in which I wore sunglasses as if I were some kind of Hollywood starlet. In short, I was ashamed not of who my mother was, but of how much stronger she was than the woman I had become.

  I want to tell you about her, Edwin, and I’ll tell you everything I know, which isn’t much, but maybe it’ll be enough for you to understand something about who she was, about who your father was, about who we are now.

  Chapter Three

  Verchel Park

  Monday, June 3, 1918

  Perhaps a friend would have said, “Verchel, what’s a woman like that want with a man like you?” But Verchel didn’t have any friends, didn’t hardly speak to a soul aside from the younger brother with whom he lived once he’d lost the use of his right hand after getting it caught up in a machine at the Cowpens Manufacturing Company. Since the accident he’d spent his time convalescing in his brother’s front room and using his good hand to spoon corn bread and buttermilk into the mouths of his twin niece and nephew. Besides, if a friend had sought to warn Verchel about Miss Myra Stebbins née Olyphant, what would that friend have said? That a forty-four-year-old widow wanted Verchel’s money? He didn’t have a cent. His land? His fancy house? He didn’t own a thing. The only thing she could have wanted of value was his soul, and Verchel had already given that to God after Miss Myra’s father, Pastor Olyphant, had called him into the baptismal waters of the muddy creek that ran behind Spartan Baptist where it sat alongside the highway to Greenville.

  So what did a woman like her want with a man like him? There were whispers that Miss Myra had considered all three options available to women of her age and station—spinsterhood, widowhood, and matrimony—and decided that the latter suited her best, but after a year of marriage there still remained many mysterious things Verchel Park did not know about his wife. But he figured he knew her well enough to know that she’d be interested in the case of a young girl sitting all alone in a mule-drawn wagon at dawn. The only thing that could interest Miss Myra more than a young girl in danger was a fatherless child, so when Verchel discovered that the dirty blanket the girl cradled in her arms held a tiny newborn baby, he felt certain that he had a story worth telling his wife that evening while they sat on the porch after dinner.

  The wagon had been left in the alley on the west side of the general store. The early morning sun had not yet found the shaded street where it sat tucked between the store and the Cowpens Community Bank. It was June 1918, the morning air cool in the early South Carolina summer before the real heat arrives. The bony old mule that had pulled the wagon did not look as if it would survive the morning. As Verchel passed the girl in the wagon he felt an awkward, confusing urge to make small talk, almost considered saying, “That old mule could use some oats,” but he did not know anything about mules or what they ate, and he did not like small talk. The girl did not appear to be interested in small talk anyway. Her face was pale, her cheeks dirty and sunken. Her dark hair had come loose and fell in strands around her face. Verchel didn’t realize that she held a baby in her arms until he heard it let out a cry. And he didn’t realize that someone aside from the baby accompanied her until he turned left at the corner of the alley and followed the sidewalk to the front of the store.

  A man sat on the front steps as if he’d been sitting out there all night. The sun hadn’t risen quite high enough for Verchel to make out the man’s face, and Verchel didn’t get a good look at him as he passed him on his way up the steps. All Verchel could think to do was to say a kind “Good morning” to the stranger without staring at him too long before getting out his key and unlocking the door as if it were any other morning, which it was, of course, until he got home that afternoon and told Miss Myra about the stranger and the girl with the baby out in the wagon.

  “What did he buy?” she asked.

  “Nothing but some powdered milk,” Verchel said. “Two boxes of it.”

  “That must mean that girl’s milk hasn’t come in good yet, or the baby won’t nurse, one.”

  And then, at Miss Myra’s prodding, Verchel rehashed the full scene: the half hour the stranger had spent on the front porch steps after Verchel turned the sign from closed to open; the way he’d stalked up and down the aisles, picking things up and setting them down; the way he’d stood at the counter, his dark hair covered by a wide-brimmed hat and his face just as dirty as the girl’s out in the wagon, his eyes looking over Verchel’s shoulder at the tins of tobacco; the dirty hands that tossed the boxes of milk on the counter; the question he’d asked Verchel about whether or not the store took paper money.

  “That’s how I knew he was a stranger for sure,” Verchel said. “Anybody from town would’ve knowed Mr. Haney’ll take paper money if you don’t work at the mill. Anybody from town would’ve knowed that.”

  Verchel told Myra that after the subject of the mill had come up, the stranger inquired about work in town,
and Verchel told him that folks who didn’t own their own business all worked for the mill in one capacity or another.

  “Do you think he’s looking for work?” Miss Myra asked.

  “I can’t say,” Verchel said. “He just asked me what folks did.”

  “Well, I hope he can find some work if he needs it, especially with a wife and that little one to care for,” Miss Myra said. “It won’t do to have a girl with a baby that young and him not being able to find work.” Her eyes narrowed and her thin lips pressed themselves together and all but disappeared. “I’m correct in saying they were married?”

  Verchel laughed an awkward laugh, but he caught himself and stopped when he saw that she actually expected an answer. “Gosh, Miss Myra,” he said, “I didn’t ask him. It wasn’t none of my business.”

  “The moral health of our community is the business of us all,” she said. “That means you too, Verchel Park.”

  And the moral health of his community as well as his household is exactly what Verchel was considering when he made the decision not to share with Miss Myra the last question the stranger asked him before leaving the store that morning. After paying for his powdered milk, the stranger had stood at the counter for a long time and looked all around the store, and then he’d asked Verchel the question that seemed to be the real reason he’d been waiting on the steps since dawn.

  “Is there any place for a man to get a drink in this town?”

  Verchel had not had a drop of liquor since his accident inside the mill, and until meeting and marrying Miss Myra he’d believed himself just as useless as the lifeless hand that he kept pinned against his chest.

  “You need to march right back to Mr. Haney and reclaim your job at the mill,” Miss Myra had said on their second night as a married couple. He was sitting on the porch steps because they had only the one rocking chair she’d brought over from her father’s house to furnish the porch on their new home, and she sat in it now, her black dress pulled up just enough for the late-afternoon sun to catch a glimpse of her white ankles. She held an open fan in her other hand and used it as if dusting the stifling air around her face.

  Verchel had thought for a minute about what she’d said, and then he sighed and looked down at his hand where it rested limp and lonely in his lap. The gears that had ravaged his hand had crushed his palm like a rock, popping the bones into tiny bits of gravel that had never grown back together. He often thought of it now as a puppet’s hand that he had never learned to use. He and Myra had never spoken of his injured hand or the accident that caused it, but he felt certain that she had noticed it by now, especially because he’d positioned his wrist right by her head while propping himself up during their blink-of-an-eye marriage consummation.

  She’d collapsed the fan with a pop and dropped it onto her lap.

  “You need to shake that thought right out of your head, Verchel Park,” she’d said. “You’re still a young man at forty. There’s not a thing wrong with you.”

  “I’m not saying there is,” Verchel said, although he was really forty-one and couldn’t figure out how Miss Myra had subtracted a year of his life. “It just don’t take a fool to know that I can’t work inside no mill. You need two good hands for that.”

  “Well,” she said, reopening her fan and raising it to her face, “there has to be a job down there for a man with just one good hand, and you need to go down there in the morning and find out what it is.”

  And that’s how Verchel came to just about the only job he could come to in the employ of the Cowpens Manufacturing Company: working as a clerk in the mill’s store. He’d tried his best not to picture himself as a man who goes crawling back to a job he’d basically cast himself from by his poor choices, and he found this an even more difficult prospect because everyone he came into contact with seemed to know the story of the circumstances in which he’d destroyed his hand. Mr. Freen, who’d managed the mill store for as long as Verchel could remember, sure didn’t make things any easier on him.

  “Now, you know Mr. Haney don’t like a drinker,” he said. “I don’t say that to mean nothing against you, because only the good Lord knows what a man does when he ain’t at work. But I mean to tell you that Mr. Haney needs to know what a man does while he’s at work, and he has a right to know. I don’t plan on keeping a thing from him neither.”

  Verchel had just nodded his head as if he agreed, mostly because he did agree. He wanted to tell Mr. Freen that he was a changed man, a married man, and a religious man to boot. But admitting to a change in oneself meant admitting that a change had been needed in the first place, and Verchel just couldn’t bring himself to make that kind of admission to anyone but Miss Myra, and she’d never asked but somehow seemed to know just the same.

  So he’d shown up early and stayed late, worked hard, and kept clear of suspicion. Mr. Freen seemed satisfied with Verchel’s work ethic and his ability to run the till, stock the shelves, keep the store clean and straight, and have the afternoon dope wagon ready to go for the boy Wilfred to push through the mill for the second-shift employees’ afternoon refreshment.

  After a few months it wasn’t an uncommon thing for Verchel to be in the store all by himself. And soon he took over the morning shift, with Mr. Freen coming in to spell him at lunchtime and the two of them working together until 2 p.m., when Verchel went home and left Mr. Freen to close up between the second and third shifts at the mill.

  He was making ten dollars a week now, more money than he’d ever made—much less made consistently—in his entire life. And he was able to save it too, but only because Miss Myra collected it each Friday when he walked in the door, and dispensed it in equal portions each morning when he left so that he might have the funds for a bologna sandwich and pork rinds for lunch each day.

  Once she’d been able to propel Verchel back into the community, she set her sights on the community itself. Along with a few of the farmers’ wives from her father’s church, Miss Myra had formed the Spartanburg County Ladies’ Improvement Society, and she and the women regularly made trips to the local saloons to hand out literature about the evils of alcohol and the effects a drunken father, husband, son, brother, or nephew could have on a household and a community. At each establishment (there were only three in town and one out on the highway toward Greenville) she threatened the proprietor with the possibility of her founding a full-blown antisaloon league if certain conditions weren’t met: they weren’t to sell liquor to mill employees, churchgoers, town officials, or married men, a rule that Verchel suspected of being pointed directly at him. What he also felt pointed at him were the eyes of the men and women in town as he walked to and from work during the week; he imagined that all of them were either cursing him under their breath for his wife’s attempts to influence the tide of public opinion or silently mocking him for, first, being liquored up enough to nearly lose his hand in the mill, and then being repentant enough to marry a woman who was hell-bent on making certain such a thing could never happen again. Either way, Verchel figured that the town viewed him as hamstrung by his own incompetence.

  But aside from those with a taste for liquor, it was the young women and the motherless and fatherless in the community who Miss Myra believed were most in need of her assistance.

  Even if Verchel had wanted to recount the full version of events involving the mysterious stranger to Miss Myra, which Lord knows he didn’t, he couldn’t have done it no matter how hard he tried. That wasn’t because he didn’t remember things: the girl and the baby waiting out there in the wagon; the stranger’s beady, close-together eyes, his sharp nose; the flash of expectancy in his face colored with something like malice as he waited for Verchel’s answer about where to find that drink.

  Verchel could have recounted those things, as well as the slow light coming through the windows and the dusty smell of the store, but those things were always there, so they didn’t bear mentioning or even remembering because they’d be there every day.

  No, what Ve
rchel couldn’t recount was the one thing he couldn’t quite remember, even when he tried to recall it that night in bed where Miss Myra breathed heavily beside him and tossed slowly in her sleep like a great ocean liner beset upon by swells. And the thing he couldn’t remember was this: his response to the stranger’s very simple question.

  There’d been something that had crossed Verchel’s lips about Cowpens being a God-fearing community of sober men and women, a place where hardworking millhands and harder-working farmhands split their time almost equally between their physical toils at the job and their spiritual lives in the church. He’d even mentioned his own wife, Miss Myra Stebbins Park née Olyphant, who along with other women in the county had started an improvement society that was doing awfully good work, don’t you know, the kind of work a once-depraved place like Spartanburg County, South Carolina, desperately needed done so that it could ascend to its rightful register as a sanctified, purified land where a man who’d once craved a drink no longer thought of it, much less needed it.

  But the thing about it was that Verchel’s heart just wasn’t in it; his words were both unconvincing and hollow. And the stranger knew it, and Verchel knew that the stranger knew it as well, and that’s why Verchel told Miss Myra some of what the stranger had to say, but also why he made sure not to tell her all of it.

  But Verchel tried his best to hold his head high and celebrate his own personal victories regardless of whether they were shrouded in half-truths, obscured truths, or complete untruths, and he decided that he would no longer view his life as a struggle not to crave whiskey; instead, he chose to view his life as a life that no longer needed it.

  Verchel had all but forgotten about the stranger and the girl in the wagon with the baby when Miss Myra asked about them one evening after dinner the following April. They sat out on the porch just as they did most evenings, her in the one chair and him on the steps smoking a cigarette, the one thing he looked forward to each day.