The Last Ballad

by Wiley Cash

  “Then we haven’t missed a thing,” Mr. Wright said. He laughed. “I’m not one for dancing, but I’ve never been one to miss a meal.”

  Richard offered Mrs. Wright his hand and helped her up the steps, and then he moved aside and opened the door. Mrs. Wright smiled and congratulated him, and Mr. Wright shook his hand. Richard closed the door behind the couple, then he turned and faced the night again.

  He worried that he’d be unable to hide this jumpy nervousness when he confronted Guyon and asked him to cover the cost of the Lytles’ damaged car. Although Guyon wasn’t a mill operator and owner like Richard was, he had spent the past decade as superintendent at Loray, one of the largest mills in the country and easily the largest in the state.

  He didn’t know Guyon well. The first time he’d met him was in the fall of 1919, when several local mill owners organized a hunting trip to introduce Guyon to the community. Three carloads of men had traveled south from Gastonia through Columbia and on to Savannah before taking a ferry out to Hilton Head Island. The whole operation had been started just a few years earlier by an old man named Silling, who owned a handful of mills over in Kings Mountain. He’d rallied a group of investors from Tennessee and the Carolinas to fund the Hilton Head Agricultural Company, which sounded grand at the time, but after Richard and his group arrived on a Saturday afternoon in mid-November, all he’d found was a clapboard clubhouse; a Sears, Roebuck kit cabin where the men would bunk for the night; two old colored guides; and a cook in the form of an old colored woman who spoke Gullah and looked upon the newly arrived men as if they were idiots.

  For a reason none of them could remember, perhaps both to keep up appearances and to keep their wives from worrying, it had always been tradition to invite one of the men’s ministers to accompany the group on a hunting trip. They were all conservative Protestants, but when it came to the invited clergy the men tended to lean Episcopalian, since Episcopal clergymen seemed the most willing to have a drink and the least likely to look down on those who had more than one. On the year they included Guyon, someone in the group suggested they invite one of the priests from the monastery at Belmont Abbey. The men had heard that Guyon was Catholic, and it seemed an act of goodwill. They were all surprised, which is to say uncomfortable, when an older, white-headed man in a cassock joined the caravan. Father Gregory rode in the backseat of a car with Guyon. The two men barely spoke during the trip. They were strangers to one another just as they were strangers to everyone else.

  Richard remembered it as a bizarre week of drinking whiskey and firing rifles. He was just back from the war and found that he had little use for either. He spent most of his time sitting on the porch of the clubhouse, staring out at the six-foot alligator a couple of the men had caught in the swamp on the first day and tethered to a palm tree in the center of camp. At night, after dinner, he’d watch the same group of daredevils drink whiskey and stumble out to the flagpole, where they’d place chicken livers in their palms and tempt the gator to eat from their hands. They’d eventually lose interest and toss the livers onto the sand. In the morning the livers would still be there, dry and shriveled, inches from the alligator’s snout.

  Guyon had been quiet and friendly during the trip, somewhat deferential to the men who’d all known each other for years. But after a few days, it appeared to Richard that Guyon had integrated himself better than Richard ever had, despite the fact that Richard had grown up with most of these men. Their fathers’ and grandfathers’ relationships had been marked by rivalries and partnerships in the same ways rivalry and partnership marked their own relationships now.

  On the first night of the trip, after they’d settled into their bunks, the men presented Guyon with a “welcome” gift: a Springfield .30-06. It was a better gun than half the rifles the men had brought with them, far better than Richard’s .22, which he hadn’t cleaned or fired since before the war. They’d even pooled their funds to get Father Gregory a rifle, a Winchester 270. The old man opened the box and stared at it as if it were some kind of relic whose usefulness would have to be divined after careful consultation with specialists. The entire week, no one ever saw Father Gregory load the rifle, much less fire it, but he carried it with him whenever he left his private room for a meal or drinks in the evening.

  Guyon quickly joined in on the lies and teasing that took place during what came to be known as alibi hour, when the men sat around the bunkhouse before bed and ribbed one another about bad marksmanship and the inability to hold one’s liquor. Three cut shirttails had been left pinned to the wall beside the door, each representing a man’s bad aim or a missed opportunity to bring down a deer during the trip.

  At night, the conversations inevitably turned to life in the mills back home. Several of the men refused to hide their pride that Gastonia had come to be known as the “City of Spindles” and would soon be the nation’s combed-yarn capital. A man named Cloninger, whose grandfather had built Highland Shoals Mill on the Catawba River just in time to die in the Civil War, took particular pride in the idea that the South would soon outpace the North in textiles.

  “That’s what we’re doing,” Cloninger said. He looked at Guyon and smiled. “Luring folks like you across the Mason-Dixon just like the good man down in Atlanta suggested we do.” He turned from Guyon and roundly toasted the group with a metal shot glass filled with whiskey. “Out-Yankeeing the Yankee, by God. It’s just like the war never happened.”

  The men had all laughed at the joke, even Guyon, and they’d passed around a jug and refilled their cups. Guyon cleared his throat.

  “It’s true,” Guyon said. “We were lured across the Mason-Dixon. It’s like Bull Run all over again.” The men laughed. “But I can tell you it’s going to be pretty damn hard for you sons of bitches to out-Yankee the Yankee when you’re trying to do it with the Yankee’s dollar.” He shot a look at Cloninger and then raised his glass. The room was silent for a moment, and then a fat man named Duke Jeffords, who’d been drunk for three days and who’d never liked Cloninger anyway, burst into laughter. The room erupted right along with him.

  By Tuesday evening, the men had all turned their taunts toward Richard, who was the only man aside from Father Gregory who had yet to squeeze off a shot. He didn’t have the heart or the will or the patience to explain that he’d done enough shooting and killing in Europe to spend the rest of his life not wanting to do either, and so the next day he separated himself from his party and blasted two rounds into the woods about a mile from camp. That night, Cloninger used a Case knife to cut Richard’s shirttail before pinning it to the wall, where it remained until they caught the ferry back to Savannah on Saturday morning.

  Standing on the bottom deck of the Clivedon where it had docked at the Jenkins Island Landing, Richard fished the cut shirt from his bag and looked inside its collar, where Katherine had asked her seamstress to sew a silken tag with his name embroidered on it in fancy cursive letters. He knew she would discover that the shirt had been damaged, and he knew she would ask why. It would be easier just to tell her that he’d left it behind by accident. He tossed it into the black water and watched it sink. He’d left the shirt buttoned, and as it filled with water it took on the shape of a man, its body expanding as if a rib cage bloomed beneath the fabric, its arms reaching up toward the surface like it was afraid of disappearing.

  The club’s front door opened behind him, and Richard turned and saw Katherine crane her long, elegant neck onto the porch. Her eyes found his. She smiled, but Richard knew it to be a smile that showed just how weary she’d grown of him.

  “There you are,” she said.

  “Yes,” Richard said. He dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with the toe of his shoe. “Here I am.”

  “They’re looking for you,” Katherine said.

  “Who?”

  “They,” she said. “The party. Claire and Paul. Our friends. Me. Everyone.” She stepped onto the porch and let the door close quietly behind her. She wore a beautiful gown of p
ale blue sequins that made him perfectly aware that on nights like this, Katherine appeared much younger than him and could easily pass for Claire’s older sister.

  She looked toward the darkness over his shoulder and folded her arms across her chest as if she were cold, then she smiled again. She reached for him, and he let her take his hand.

  “I was just telling Ingle’s girls about the Lytles’ run-in with the strikers down at Loray,” he said. He shivered ironically as if the story induced real fear.

  “Richard!” Katherine said. She let go of his hand and pretended to swat at it as if scolding him. “The Lytles were simply curious, that’s all. They’re fine people.”

  “Perhaps so, but no matter how fine they are, they’re still going back to Wilmington with a very skewed idea of life here in Gaston County.”

  “Well,” Katherine said. She crossed her arms again. “I say, ‘Let them go, Richard.’”

  “It just dawned on me that Claire must have mentioned the strikers in Washington. Paul’s father’s going to think this thing has made it all the way to the halls of Congress, which, apparently, it has.”

  “Let them think what they will, Richard. I don’t understand why it bothers you.”

  “It bothers me because our people do not behave that way, Kate, and the Lytles are going to paint mill people with a very broad brush, and it’s not fair. Keep in mind that we’re mill people too, but we’d never have a problem like this. We have good people. Satisfied people. Let the Bolshevists and communists and socialists come to McAdamville. They’ll all go back to New York disappointed.”

  “Come back to the party, Richard,” she said. She moved toward him, stopped, came closer, and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. “Don’t worry about the Lytles, Richard, not tonight. Please.”

  “I’ll be in in a moment, Kate. I promise. I’ll wait for Guyon for just a few more minutes, but I’ll be in.”

  Katherine sighed. She turned and looked at the closed front door, perhaps thought of the party that was going on inside. She looked at Richard again.

  “Did you talk with Ingle about Grace’s schooling?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I will. I promise.”

  “She’s a fine girl, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She always has been.”

  “They’ve just hit a rough patch.”

  “I know,” he said. “We’ll help however we can.” But he wanted to say, Yes, we’ll help her, just like we help everyone else. Just like I’m about to help Lytle. Just like I’ve helped everyone who’s ever come to me.

  “Okay,” she said. “She’s such a wonderful girl.” She looked toward the shadows on the far end of the porch. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

  “To whom? Guyon?”

  “No,” she said. She furrowed her brow, looked down at her hands, spun her wedding ring on her finger. “Tonight, to the guests. You’re the father of the bride-to-be, Richard. We talked about your saying something.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  “Okay,” she said. She looked up at him, smiled. “Please come inside soon. We all miss you. I miss you.”

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll be in in a moment. I promise.”

  She turned, her gown sweeping across the porch in a small arc. She opened the door and he watched through the windows as she walked through the lobby and disappeared into the ballroom.

  Aside from the conversation with Guyon, Richard was also plagued by the speech he was expected to give. Katherine had been urging him to prepare a few comments about Claire and Paul’s first meeting, their engagement, their new lives together. Richard had spent hours writing down and scratching out phrase after phrase, trite saying after trite saying. He’d arrived at the club that evening with nothing written down, only a head full of vague notions of things he wanted to say, emotions he wanted to convey, ideas he somehow wanted to condense into words.

  But then this debacle with the Lytles on their trip over from the hotel. Now he was rattled and standing outside and smoking what he hoped would be his last cigarette before dinner, his mind turning over the things he could say in front of this audience that would make some kind of lasting impression on the Lytles. He wanted to give them something to think about while they traveled back to the coast, where oak trees and dew-damp magnolias awaited them at the great plantation they’d managed to cling to in the years following the War Between the States. He wanted them to part with a clear idea of who his family was, what his town was, what his role in all of it was.

  He squinted his eyes as if doing so could allow him to look into his own brain for any words that might be floating past the screen of his mind.

  “When one thinks of today’s youth,” he whispered to himself. “When one thinks of today’s youth, it is easy to consider what one sees before him on the streets of a city or hears on the radio or learns of through rumor and assumption. But we must not, we cannot, confuse those youth with our own, these great young men and women who have gathered here tonight to celebrate the greatest young man and the greatest young woman I have ever known. These are the youth that a great state like ours and a great city like ours give rise to.” But he stopped when he considered that Paul was not from Gastonia or Gaston County, and Richard certainly wasn’t willing to invoke the grandeur of Wilmington or New Hanover County on a night like this after what the Lytles had seen.

  He closed his eyes more tightly and blotted out the screen in his mind, the white light that had been thrown upon it slowly burning into a hot rage against Lytle. He opened his mouth and began again.

  “When I think of today’s youth, I do not think of what I see and hear. I’d be a fool to be so blind. No, I think of who and what I know, and I know the wonderful young men and women in this room tonight, so many of you from here in Gaston County, so many of you dear friends of Claire’s since her birth. And it’s such a pleasure for Claire’s future in-laws to have the chance to witness the best of what a city like ours has to offer.”

  He was getting closer to what he wanted to say to the assembled crowd, what he wanted to say directly to George Lytle, a man whom Richard had seen only once before this evening. He’d met Paul a handful of times while he and Claire were courting. He’d found the young man shy, awkward, soft-spoken, and kind, somewhat provincial, but that was to be expected of any landed family from coastal North Carolina, where so much of the state’s power and former glory had once been seated.

  Richard’s first meeting with Mr. Lytle had not come until March, when the Lytles had hosted their own engagement party for Paul and Claire at their home just east of Wilmington, on a wild expanse of land that rested between the city and a thin slip of barrier islands. It had not been a working plantation for more than sixty years, but it was immediately apparent to Richard that the Lytles’ lives were defined by an all-consuming desire to resurrect and reanimate the past.

  The Lytles’ party had been a grand affair comparable only to the many other grand affairs that Richard quickly learned were the hallmark of the family’s wealth and prominence. Although the Lytles had made their fortune in rice on the coast and tobacco farther inland, the current generation now staked the family name on their social standing and willingness to express it. What seemed like hundreds of guests attended the party and floated in droves from one high-ceilinged room to another. In the crush of men in tuxedos and Confederate gray and women in sequined gowns and antebellum dresses, Richard quickly lost track of names and associations. Claire had already slipped away from them and disappeared into the crowd with Paul and the other young people, and Richard clung to Katherine’s hand while she navigated the crowd just as effortlessly as she seemed to navigate everything else in her life.

  He’d always viewed Katherine this way. His earliest memories of her were rose colored with her easy nature, and he often caught himself remembering her as the fifteen-year-old girl who’d helped him and her distraught father load boxes of her dead brother’s bo
oks and clothes and belongings onto the train platform in Raleigh all those years ago. Richard and Katherine’s brother David had been college roommates at Chapel Hill, and Richard could still feel his throat where it had cinched tight with worry and uncertainty about what to say to David’s father, a man who at that time had been no older than Richard was now. Although they’d hardly spoken to one another, Katherine’s soft eyes had peered at him over boxes and stacks of her brother’s books as if to assure him that his sadness at her brother’s death was something that would pass, something that even so young a girl knew would not last forever.

  Richard, on the other hand, had always felt constricted, confined, unsure of which way to step or how to hold his smile or where to look or what to read into the faces of the people before him. He’d been drawn to Katherine because she’d always been the one to lead him through their shared emotional territory. They’d never spoken of it, but both he and Katherine knew that he’d returned from the war even more cautious, guarded, and uncomfortable than he’d been before he left. Claire had only been seven years old at the start of the war, but she was almost eleven by the time he returned, and it had seemed that the two of them found themselves strangers to one another, as if their lives had continued in those four intervening years on separate trajectories that would never realign.

  His difference upon returning wasn’t simply marked by an emotional distance. A physical bulwark had been set in place as well. In bed at night, it wasn’t uncommon for him to leap toward Katherine in his sleep if her toe were to graze his leg. His hands had even once found her neck before he opened his eyes and saw her terrified face in the soft predawn light coming through the curtains. Loud noises—bursts of laughter, a piece of silverware falling to the floor, music—often provoked the same terrified feeling as an invisible body touching his own in the darkness of his bedroom. The only thing he could control was his work at the mill, and his life disappeared into it. He often lost all awareness of time. Days, weeks, and months seemed to pass, their goings only marked by what kind of hat and coat he wore during his walk down the hill to the mill office. He found that the stiller he remained, the quieter the world around him became, and it wasn’t long before he recognized stasis as his favorite posture, no matter whether he were standing in the carding room at the mill or sitting at his desk or lying in bed beside Katherine, willing his eyes to remain closed and his hands to stay by his sides if and when something of her body touched his in the night.