The Last Ballad

by Wiley Cash

  “Have you seen that girl?” Miss Myra asked.

  Verchel took a drag from his cigarette.

  “What girl?”

  “The one that showed up in the wagon with that baby last summer,” Miss Myra said.

  “No,” Verchel said. “Not that I can recollect.”

  “What about her husband? Have you seen him?”

  “Not that I can recollect.”

  Miss Myra rocked in silence for a moment, her eyes taking in the empty gravel road that ran along the edge of their yard.

  “I bet he took a job at the mill,” she finally said. “It’s a wonder you haven’t seen him come in the store.”

  “I reckon so,” Verchel said.

  “You should go on down to the mill and look for him,” Miss Myra said. “Check up on that girl and that baby. Maybe see if there’s anything the ladies and I can help with while they get settled.”

  “It’s almost been a year. I reckon they’re settled by now,” Verchel said.

  “Well, you go and see about them,” she said. “It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

  But it is too much to ask, thought Verchel. He didn’t have a reason to step foot inside the Cowpens Manufacturing Company, and even when he tried to think of a reason, his mind wouldn’t let him do it. The last thing he wanted to do was find himself inside the mill’s noisy walls, walking along the rows of machines, staring through the combed cotton for the face of a man he’d seen only one time. It wasn’t just the stranger’s face that he’d be forced to behold; it would also be the faces of his former coworkers, many of whom had been the ones to help him gather himself after the accident, the same ones he knew had been questioned after they’d carried him out and taken him to the doctor: How had he been acting before it happened? Had anything seemed strange about him? Had anyone been close enough to smell his breath?

  But Miss Myra’s request ended up taking care of itself. On Thursday of that next week, Verchel heard the sound of the store’s front door opening, and he looked up and saw Mr. Freen coming through instead of the boy Wilfred.

  “Go on ahead and count the drawer,” Mr. Freen said. “Wilfred’s done come down with this danged flu, and I need you to take the dope wagon down to the mill today. Maybe tomorrow too.”

  It wasn’t until then that Verchel realized that something could actually be more humiliating than showing his face inside the mill; this higher level of humiliation would be accomplished by him showing his face behind the dope wagon while he served chilled pop, cold sandwiches, and hot coffee to his former coworkers.

  By the time Verchel had entered the mill behind the dope wagon and seen the same girl he’d first seen holding a baby at dawn from atop a wagon seat, he’d sold two Nehi drinks (a peach and a grape), two Coca-Colas, four bags of pork rinds, and two Moon Pies, answered three questions about his now-useless hand and one question about his married life, and told two different women how his wife, Miss Myra, was doing. After all that, he was actually relieved to see the girl, especially to see her instead of her husband, because it meant he could spend a moment speaking with someone who knew nothing about him or his time at the mill or what he’d been doing since leaving it.

  Verchel saw that they’d put her to work as a doffer, changing out the full spools for empty ones, work usually reserved for the very young, the very small, or both. From looking at her, Verchel had no idea how old she was—maybe seventeen, maybe younger—but he knew for certain that she was small. Her brown hair was braided and pinned up behind her head, and her thin dress could hardly hide her narrow shoulders and thin waist. It seemed impossible that a body so small could have given birth to another. But there was something about her that made him fear getting too close, something that told him she would just as soon spit in his eye as say hello.

  When he saw the girl she was in the middle of a bank of spinners, yanking off the full spindles and sliding the empty ones into place. She pushed past the women on the line, not looking a single one of them in the eye. Verchel stopped the dope wagon and watched her, then he looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He waited for her to reach the end of the line.

  “Hello,” he hollered, trying to raise his voice above the crush of machinery, waving his good hand and keeping the other tucked up close to his body for fear that something would grab ahold of it and not give back what was left. The girl looked up at him as if she were surprised that someone might be addressing her. Then she nodded and gathered the full spindles in her arms and set them on a little cart. She turned her back to Verchel and pushed the cart toward another line of spinners.

  Verchel, not knowing what else to do and not knowing enough about the girl to chase after her or to ask after her once she was gone, called out the only question that came to his mind.

  “How’s your baby?”

  The girl stopped pushing the cart and turned to face him. Where her brown eyes once seemed to look past him, Verchel now felt as if they penetrated him.

  “Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was clear and strong, deeper than he assumed it would be.

  “I’m Verchel Park,” he said. “I work at the store. My wife wants to know how your baby is.”

  “What business is it of yours?” she asked.

  “It ain’t my business,” Verchel said. “It ain’t me who’s wanting to know. It’s my wife.”

  “That’s not what you said first,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You asked me how my baby is. You didn’t mention nothing about your wife.”

  “Well, I’m mentioning her now,” Verchel said.

  “What business is it of hers, then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She just wanted me to ask you.”

  The girl looked at him for another moment, then she spun around toward the cart and lifted two full spindles and replaced them with two empty ones. She pushed the cart on ahead of her.

  He didn’t know what else to do, so he left the dope wagon and hurried to catch up with her, looking around all the while to make sure no one he knew had spotted him talking to the girl across the banks of spinners that separated them.

  “I saw y’all when you first got to town last year,” Verchel said. “I was at the store, and I saw you out in the wagon with your baby and that mule.”

  “We ain’t got no mule,” she said.

  “You had one then.”

  “We ain’t got no mule.”

  “Well, you must’ve sold it,” he said.

  “Nope. Died.”

  “Well, it was living when I seen you,” Verchel said. “And I told my wife when I got home, and she thought I should ask after you, ask after your little one.”

  “And what is it your wife wants to know?” she asked.

  “Well, how y’all are getting along, one,” Verchel said.

  The girl looked up the row where the dope wagon sat waiting for Verchel’s return.

  “Give me one of them Coca-Colas and I’ll tell you,” she said.

  “Okay,” Verchel said. He smiled, acknowledging that the girl had gotten one over on him. “Okay.”

  He left her and returned with an ice-cold, sweaty Coca-Cola in his good hand. The girl eyed the bottle. He offered it to her across the top of her cart, and she closed her fingers around it and tipped it back, emptying it in just a couple of swallows, the fizz of it causing her chest to jump. She handed the empty bottle to Verchel.

  “We’re getting along fine,” she said.

  “And your husband?”

  “We’re getting along fine,” she said again.

  “Whereabouts y’all living?”

  The girl looked at Verchel, a slight smile playing across her mouth. She nodded toward the dope wagon again.

  “How about one of them Moon Pies,” she said.

  With the girl’s directions, Verchel found the cabin easily enough later that afternoon after he’d returned the dope wagon to the store and left for the day. The family lived in an old shack on the edge o
f a piece of property still owned by the McGarrity family, a people who once made their lives from the land but now made their lives somewhere other than Spartanburg County after leaving this particular soil behind. The girl had described the place perfectly: a dogtrot shack with bleached boards and a metal roof burnished brown by the sun.

  The trees along the road were mad with crows. The birds ruffled the leaves like a heavy wind, and their cries seemed to bore into Verchel’s ears. He could almost smell the creek water from where he stood at the top of the road, hidden behind a clump of wild blue and purple hydrangea, sweat running from under the brim of his hat and catching in his eyebrows before he brushed it away. From this vantage point he could see the house perfectly, see that its two windows were covered from the inside by dark curtains, that its front steps leaned away from him toward the slope where the land rolled down into a green holler.

  After dinner he told Miss Myra about seeing the girl, how good she looked, how happy she seemed to be working such a good job in such a nice little town as Cowpens clearly was.

  Miss Myra had all kinds of questions: “What kind of work does her husband do?” and “Where do they live?” While he knew the answer to the second question, it took him a few days to know the answer to the first with anything approaching certainty, although the final question the stranger had asked Verchel on the morning they first met was certainty enough.

  The shack where the girl and stranger lived formed a kind of triangle between Verchel’s house and the store, and so it was only a matter of minutes by which Verchel was late on his way home each evening, minutes of tardiness that could be and were always explained by his having to push the dope wagon back to the store, unload it, count the money, and organize things for the next morning’s shift. The boy Wilfred hadn’t yet returned to work, and the way this flu was spreading there was a very good chance Verchel’s tenure behind the dope wagon would be long, if not permanent.

  He took to spying on the shack each afternoon on his way home, assuming his perch by the road behind the wild hydrangea, and watching the doors on either side of the dogtrot to see if they ever opened. That’s where he was on the third day, what happened to be a Wednesday, when he saw the stranger come out of the door on the left side and stand on the porch steps in the bright sunlight and take in great gulps of air as if the shack’s interior were filled with water rather than darkness.

  The stranger stood for a moment, hatless and shoeless, blinking his eyes in the bright, hot sun like he’d just woken from a long sleep and didn’t know the day or season. Verchel was close enough to see the stranger’s eyes, but far enough away not to worry about being seen himself. He watched as the man nearly skipped down the porch steps and into the knee-high, weedy grass before turning right and disappearing down into the holler where a creek gurgled out of sight.

  If one were to have asked Verchel if he held his breath until the stranger reappeared from his trip to the creek he would’ve said no, but anyone passing by would’ve disagreed, for Verchel stood still long enough to have a succession of things land on him without him or them noticing his or their presence: ladybugs, dragonflies, a dollop of robin droppings, and a single leaf from a maple that drifted nearly twenty-five feet before coming to rest on his right shoulder like an angel or a devil that might or might not soon whisper advice into his ear.

  But one thing is for certain, and that is that Verchel did eventually exhale and then inhale a breath large enough to fill his lungs twice after seeing the stranger crest the hill on his way back to the cabin. The man hopped up the porch steps with the same gaiety with which he’d descended them, and he’d disappeared inside the same black hole of an open doorway. Verchel’s eyes saw these things without their being registered by his mind because his mind’s eye was too busy beholding and later re-beholding a particular image: the two large, heavy jugs the stranger had grasped in either hand.

  The following afternoon Verchel did not return to his perch by the wild hydrangea in order to look down at the old shack and wait for the stranger to reappear, because now he knew all he needed to know. That evening, when he returned home an hour or so earlier than usual, he explained it by the slow day at the store and the slower day behind the dope wagon. And then he sat on the porch steps and brooded over his lone cigarette while Miss Myra went on and on about the good, county-wide work the Ladies’ Improvement Society was doing.

  “We’ve started calling on the homes of the ill and the ill-bred,” she said, explaining how one of the wives in her group had convinced her husband to let them commandeer an old wagon and two even older mules for the purposes of gallivanting around the county to pay visits upon unsuspecting wanton souls. “It’s amazing how many people need the assistance of a group like ours. It’s amazing how many dark souls need the light of Christ to shine upon them.”

  Verchel sat and listened, concentrating only on his cigarette and the palpable darkness that clouded both his lungs and heart.

  It was behind the counter at the store on Friday that Verchel made the kind of decision he’d never made before: the decision to take action instead of waiting for action to take him. The man who stumbled into both machinery and marriage with his eyes closed would no longer stumble blindly, but would instead move with calm conviction toward wherever his heart led him, and it was back to the dogtrot where he was led that afternoon on his way home.

  Once he assumed his familiar post by the hydrangea, there were a number of decisions that needed to be made: Which door to knock on? How to go about discussing what he’d come to discuss? How to broach a subject that a stranger might be too suspicious to broach? How to remind a man of who you were when he might not remember having ever laid eyes on you?

  These questions were answered—or more clearly put, these problems were solved—when Verchel did not see the stranger appear but instead felt something of the stranger’s presence: the cold steel tip of a rifle’s barrel pushed up against his spine.

  “So,” the stranger said, his voice sounding both familiar and foreign, containing something of the mountains that rose toward North Carolina on the northern edge of the county, “you a revenuer or a snoop?”

  “Neither,” Verchel said. “Neither. I’m a friend.”

  “I don’t got no friends,” the stranger said.

  “Me neither,” Verchel said.

  After that introduction Verchel knew he’d finally stumbled upon a spirit that would elucidate his own. That day he made the first of what would become regular visits to the stranger’s house on his way home. The time he’d once spent hiding behind the hydrangea was now spent sitting in the cool, dark recesses of one of the two rooms that comprised the dogtrot shack. Sometimes Johnny Wiggins would let Verchel hold the baby girl named Lilly in his lap, and the little babe would turn her head toward the ceiling and stare backward at Verchel as if she were looking into his past and didn’t know quite what to make of who he’d been or who he’d become.

  Often, the two men would talk: Verchel telling Johnny about how his hand had come to be the tiny, shriveled thing resting on his lap after one wrong step at the mill; about how his life had been changed, brightened, and saved by Pastor Olyphant and specifically by the man’s daughter—Miss Myra—the greatest woman and human being he’d ever known. Johnny’s side of the conversation was always less romantic. He complained to Verchel that he’d grown tired of humping his product out to the highway thrice a week in the middle of the night to meet his distributor, and he wanted to know if Verchel knew anyone who had a car. Johnny nodded at little Lilly where she sat on the floor, playing with a pinecone, and told Verchel that another baby figured to be on the way and that times were about to get tough and money tight.

  Verchel was doing his part to assuage Wiggins’s fears of financial ruin: the few dollars a week that Miss Myra gave him for lunch at the store now found their way into Johnny’s upturned and expectant hand, and instead of crunching on pork rinds and using his tongue to scrape white bread and bologna from the roof
of his mouth, Verchel now knocked back and nearly coughed up the crystal-clear rotgut that Wiggins had been cooking creekside at the bottom of the holler.

  As the weeks passed and the spring turned into summer before waning toward autumn, Verchel opened his pocketknife twice to notch new holes in his belt so his pants could be cinched tighter around his shrinking waist.

  “Are you feeling all right, dear?” Miss Myra asked on more than one occasion, doing her best to look into Verchel’s eyes for any kind of sickness. For it was late 1919 and the Spanish flu had proven more powerful than the war.

  “Aw,” Verchel would answer, “I’m as healthy as a man can be.”

  “Your clothes fairly hang on you,” Miss Myra would say.

  “I’m feeling fine,” Verchel would promise. “Mighty fine. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt finer.”

  And, aside from stomachaches brewed by the wild mint and sassafras he ate by the roadside on the way home from Wiggins’s house in order extinguish his liquor breath, Verchel did feel fine. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t think of a time when his mind seemed clearer, freer, more all-seeing than it did these days, especially on the long weekday afternoons he spent inside Johnny Wiggins’s shack. For Verchel’s waist wasn’t the only thing shrinking; the dope wagon profits were getting smaller as well. Verchel now zipped through the mill at near-breakneck speed. The only thing that would stop him or slow him down were the few brave souls who’d leap in front of the cart in order to enjoy an ice-cold soda or reach out their hands in an attempt to grasp the cart as it passed by so they could fork over a few cents for some sweet or savory treat.

  As he always had, Verchel did his best not to make eye contact with any mill employees, and the one employee he’d first sought out was now the one he least wanted to see. The girl, whose name he’d learned was Ella May Wiggins, would often appear on the other side of a loom or deep in the recesses of the card room. She’d risen rapidly in responsibility and rank, but she’d gotten stuck in the second shift, going in at 2 p.m. and knocking off around midnight every day except Sunday. Whenever he saw her, Verchel averted his eyes, pushed the dope wagon without stopping, and found himself wondering if she knew that he’d spent so much time inside her home, sat beside her husband, bounced her baby girl on the sharp cap of his knee.