by Wiley Cash
He never knew for certain what terrified him so. In the beginning he explained his outbursts in terminology she might understand: “Bombs,” he’d say when she’d ask him what he was dreaming of when he screamed himself awake. But as the war receded into the distance and time lurched forward he found it more difficult to think of the war, much less talk of it, even in the smallest and shortest of terms, so he found other ways to explain his terrors. “I was dreaming that someone was in the house,” he’d say. “Someone was trying to hurt you and the baby.” And other times he would shrug his shoulders beneath the cloak of darkness and roll to his side and pretend to fall back asleep.
At the Lytles’ party, Richard had felt hemmed in by the number of people, especially the colored help: young, dark-skinned waiters who carried trays of champagne and wore neckcloths and long blue coats festooned with brass buttons; middle-aged mammies in frocks and headscarves who served food from great silver bowls; an old, shoeless bald man Mr. Lytle had introduced as “Uncle Peter,” who wore only a muslin shirt and tattered breeches stood in the parlor, a squeaky violin hoisted to his shoulder.
George Lytle had spent most of the evening with a drink in one hand, his other resting on the mantel, above which an oil portrait of his aged grandfather loomed. To anyone who would listen, Lytle told story after story of his grandfather’s bravery on the battlefield, his family’s stake in the history of the South, the duality of war that awards both honor and ruin to the survivors. Lytle spoke as one who’d been to war himself, but Richard had known better. The only war Lytle had ever known was the one he’d heard about and read about and talked about during dozens of parties just like this one.
Although Richard had been prepared not to like Lytle even before meeting him, he’d absolutely hated him after that evening at their plantation. Since then his heart had recoiled at the idea of handing over Claire and his future grandchildren to the family. He and Katherine had no illusions that the couple would do anything other than settle in Wilmington after the wedding in October. But “to lose a daughter is to gain a son,” they always say, and, after all, wasn’t a son what he had always wanted? Of course, he’d been proud to have a healthy child after what had happened earlier in their marriage, especially a child as wonderfully bright and kind as Claire had been from the moment she was born; however, memories of his own father and grandfather pulled at him, arriving with the realization that he lacked a son to carry on the family name and the family business, a business he was certain Paul would have little to no interest in inheriting and certainly no interest in managing. Even Richard’s grandfather, Yancey McAdam, hadn’t had that much interest in managing the very mill he’d founded. It was almost something he’d come by in the course of laying railroads across the state, beginning in Charlotte, where he’d opened a bank with local investors in 1867. He arrived in Gaston County a few years later and followed the branches of the Catawba River west, where he discovered that the river was making men rich by powering their whiskey stills and cotton mills. Yancey decided that the cotton mill had the best chance of running itself and creating passive income once he’d moved on, which he did in 1881 after the McAdam Mill was up and operating. Yancey continued to lay railroad tracks through the piedmont toward Asheville and beyond, where he literally tore down ridges and blew holes in stone to cut passages through the Blue Ridge Mountains, for Tennessee and the open country of the West waited on the other side. Richard had always pictured his grandfather as a man who only had to touch the earth for it to spring to life under the warmth of his open palm. In Richard’s imagining, railroad lines poured from the old man’s fingertips and snaked across the landscape. Eleven children sprang from his flesh with ease. One cotton mill and then another rose like mushrooms from the damp woods along the South Fork of the Catawba River. McAdamville grew into a fiefdom where Yancey McAdam was the too-often-absent king.
At the end of the war, the old man followed his railroads farther west, but not before handing off the mill to his son, Richard’s father, who at only eighteen years old embraced both his role as the mill’s president and his role as its employee. The mill only had a few dozen workers, but Richard’s father designed, paid for, and assisted in the construction of small brick homes for his workers. What Richard’s father lacked in his own father’s frontier spirit he made up for in a nature that embraced both technology and social progress. Over time he equipped each home in the mill village with toilets and bathtubs. In 1884 he stood alongside Thomas Edison as the famous inventor installed Dynamo #31 and ushered in a new wave of production. McAdamville’s two mills were the first in the state to run all night beneath bright, hot bulbs of electric light. That very dynamo was still churning out power.
This was the place and the legacy Richard had inherited when he’d assumed the presidency of the mill after graduating from Chapel Hill, and it was this past and present of fine industrialization that Richard wanted the Lytles to understand marked him and his family as being one of the most progressive and upstanding families in the state, if not one of its most wealthy and famous. While the Lytles’ ancestors had sipped juleps on the veranda and overseen the work of enslaved black bodies in brackish water, Richard’s father and grandfather had moved mountains, electrified production, cared for the poor, and changed the state forever.
And now Richard had inherited the mantle they’d left behind. And he’d gone to college at the state university. And he’d gotten married. And he’d had a child and served in the Great War. And he’d executed his life in a manner befitting both his talents and his station. So let the Lytles think what they would think after seeing what they’d seen at Loray that afternoon.
If George Lytle asked, Richard would tell him that there could not be two places more different than McAdamville, with its brick houses, indoor plumbing, and well-kept yards, and the Loray Mill, with its village of rotting shacks, muddy roads, and transient workers. In some ways, Richard thought, Loray deserved exactly what it was getting. He’d never admit it to anyone, including Katherine, but something about it allowed some semblance of pride to bloom inside him.
The rain had moved east toward Charlotte and the clouds had parted, revealing a quarter moon that stared down upon the pine trees and clubhouse like an eye only partly open. In its light, Richard was able to spy something moving toward him down the lane from Franklin Avenue. It was a black Packard 633, and as it drew closer he knew Hugo Guyon sat in its backseat, gazing out on the dark night, his head probably full of concerns about the strike.
Instead of parking, the Packard roared into the roundabout in front of the clubhouse, its huge engine vibrating under the rain-slicked hood. The driver left the motor running and stepped out and came around to the side of the car facing Richard, then opened the back door. Hugo Guyon swung both feet out and unfolded himself from the seat. In his early fifties, he was a large man, easily over six feet tall, with hair so short and fair as to make him appear bald. When Guyon saw Richard standing atop the porch, he nodded his head gravely as if he’d just returned from the front and there was nothing but bad news to report.
Although Richard had never met Guyon’s wife and couldn’t even remember if he was married or had ever been married, he was surprised when the door opened on the other side of the car and a man’s face appeared. He was much shorter than Guyon, round-faced and jowly. He wore a simple black suit and a derby pushed back off his forehead. A short, damp cigar clung to his lower lip.
Guyon said something to the driver that Richard couldn’t hear, and the driver got back inside the car and revved the engine before pulling the Packard out of the roundabout and disappearing around the corner, where the other automobiles were parked. The two men—Guyon and the stranger—stood in the road before the club and spoke quietly to one another, and then Guyon turned toward Richard and smiled.
“Mrs. Guyon isn’t well this evening,” he said, his fading Yankee accent still marking his words with precision and sharpness. “I hope it’s okay that I used my and guest o
n this ugly son of a bitch.” He clapped the other man on the shoulder. The stranger smiled and looked up at Richard, and even though it was dark and the men were more than twenty feet away, Richard could see that the man’s eyes were crystal blue and vaguely unsettling.
The two men walked up the steps toward Richard, the portico momentarily tossing them into shadow until the lights from the club’s windows behind Richard illuminated their faces. Guyon introduced the stranger as Percy Epps, Loray’s attorney and head of security.
Guyon looked at Richard, and then he looked at the club over Richard’s shoulder as if he were expecting someone else to open the door and walk outside.
“Are we that late?” he asked. “Party over?”
The question embarrassed Richard. It was a strange thing, wasn’t it, to be standing out on the porch alone on the night of his daughter’s engagement party, waiting for Hugo Guyon, a man he didn’t know that well to ask him to quell a situation of which he wasn’t part. All this so that another man he didn’t know that well would think well of him and his family.
“No,” Richard said, “there’s still plenty of the evening left. I was just getting some air before dinner.”
“You’re not having second thoughts about giving your daughter away, are you?” Guyon asked. Epps smiled.
“No,” Richard said. “No more tonight than I have for months.” He cleared his throat and fought the urge to reach into his jacket for another cigarette. Instead he put his sweaty hands in his pockets. “I was also waiting for you,” he said. “I wanted to speak with you about what’s going on down at Loray. About the situation there.”
Guyon sighed as if it were the last thing he wanted to think about. He raised his head and looked up at the porch’s ceiling, where a single hanging lamp shone down upon them.
“Out with it,” Guyon said. “I’m waiting.”
“Can we have a word, just for a moment?” Richard asked. Guyon lowered his gaze, and Richard’s eyes darted toward Epps and back to Guyon.
“There’s nothing you’ll say that I won’t tell him later,” Guyon said.
Richard nodded his head as if he understood; then he looked behind him, where he could see the empty foyer through the windows. They were alone out here on the porch, and there was no one inside who could see them, but the need for privacy still provoked him. He gestured for the men to follow him to the end of the porch, out of reach of the front door and the light from the lobby.
Richard stopped when they reached the far side of the porch, where three small windows looked into the hallway. He watched waiters, trays held aloft, scurry in and out of the kitchen. Unable to resist the urge any longer, he reached into his pocket for a cigarette, and when he lifted it to his lips he saw that Epps held a flame out before him. Richard leaned forward and lighted his cigarette. Epps then lifted the flame to a fresh cigar and puffed until its tip glowed orange in the semidark.
“What about the strike, Mr. McAdam?” Guyon asked.
Richard pulled on his cigarette and took a moment to ponder the best way to broach the subject about what the Lytles had seen.
“My future in-laws are from the coast,” he said, hoping that by mentioning their geography it would be clear that their understanding of the world and its diverse economies was not the same as the understanding that men like he and Guyon and possibly Epps shared. “The family is from Wilmington. Has been for generations.”
“I know them,” Epps said. “Known the Lytles for years.”
Richard was surprised, and he knew his face portrayed it.
“How do you know them?”
“Tobacco,” Epps said. He puffed on the cigar and blew a plume of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Business. Land. The ways people know each other on the coast. The way they know each other everywhere else too.” He put the cigar back into his mouth and narrowed his eyes as he took another puff.
“I see,” Richard said. He stared at Epps for another moment, then turned to Guyon again.
“This afternoon, the Lytles left their rooms at the Armington to join us here at the club, and for some reason, perhaps being a curious sort and perhaps a little too cavalier, Mr. Lytle asked the driver to take them by Loray so he could see the strike firsthand.” He stopped and took another drag on his cigarette. “Their car was attacked by some of your strikers, and needless to say, we’re all very upset by this.”
“The attack on the car or their desire to see the strike?” Guyon asked.
“Both, but for different reasons,” Richard said. “I don’t know why in the hell Mr. Lytle wanted to see it, but I couldn’t care less about his reasons. I am concerned, however, about having to pay for the damage to the car—”
“We’ll cover it,” Epps said.
Richard stopped speaking and looked at Epps. Epps stared back at him without blinking. Guyon seemed either not to have heard him or was indifferent to his claim.
“Very well,” Richard said. “I appreciate that, but it’s not the real matter.”
“What’s the real matter?” Guyon asked.
“Well, it’s going on two months now since the strike began,” Richard said, “and—”
“We’re not even at eight weeks,” Epps said. “And the strike has already failed. We’re operating at full power. Production is back to normal.”
“That may be,” Richard said, “but it looks like things haven’t changed.”
Epps sighed and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Guyon turned toward him and put his hand on Epps’s shoulder as if calming him. It was clear that the conversation had provoked Epps, and Richard realized that he might have crossed a line he hadn’t been aware of. His mind cycled back through all the things he’d said since meeting Guyon and Epps after they’d stepped out of the Packard and stood before the club.
“What your in-laws saw was the bad element of outside agitation,” Guyon said. “It’s the work of the NTW. New York City communists, all of them. There’s still a handful of them that we’re rounding up so our workers’ lives can get back to normal. Chief Aderholt has worked very closely with us to see that it’s done as peacefully and quickly as possible.”
“And I appreciate that,” Richard said. “Believe me, I appreciate the difficulty you’ve faced with these communists. But when we have guests from out of town who travel to Gaston County, we want to make certain they leave us with a clear idea of who we are and what we stand for.”
“Mr. McAdam,” Guyon said, “I’m sorry that you’ve been embarrassed, I am. But I can’t apologize on behalf of the NTW or the Communist Party, and, believe me, you won’t hear an apology from them either.”
“But surely something more can be done,” Richard said. “Just last week my daughter was in Washington with her classmates from the women’s college in Greensboro, and they were accosted by a gang of Gastonia strikers.” He pointed to the club, where he knew Claire was somewhere inside. “She was devastated. She came home in tears. It ruined her trip, seeing some poor woman beg Senator Overman for help.”
“We know about the D.C. trip,” Guyon said. “And we know about this ‘poor’ woman. Her name’s Wiggins. She’s not one of ours, but we’ve kept an eye on her. Overman’s office has been in contact. He’s very interested in our situation here. He’s sent a representative down to get to the bottom of things.”
“He’s very interested,” Epps said. “Interested enough to send the best.”
“Pinkertons?” Richard asked.
“Let’s just say he’s sent the best,” Epps said.
The men were quiet for a moment, as if they stood on the edge of a great secret that they all knew but did not want to share.
“Again,” Richard said, “I understand, but when we have guests from out of town, they’re not privy to the same information you’re giving me. Their impression is that Gastonia is a wild, lawless place.”
“Everything is being done that can be done,” Guyon said. “I assure you.” He leaned against the porch rail and put h
is hands in his pockets. Richard heard something jingle inside Guyon’s pocket. Keys, perhaps a few coins. Guyon cleared his throat. He began to speak, but then he hesitated. He looked at Epps. Epps nodded.
“But there is an opportunity to do more,” Guyon said. He furrowed his brow and looked at Richard through narrowed eyes.
Richard had the vague sense that he was about to hear something he might later regret hearing. A palpable darkness swept over him and he felt a desperate urge to return to the party and forget the Lytles and the mess they saw at Loray. But he feared he’d insulted Guyon earlier, and he didn’t want to leave him with the impression that he was soft or a worrier or a man who was afraid of hard times.
“What is it?” Richard asked. “What else can be done?”
“We’re not being public about it,” Guyon said. “So I apologize for bringing you into something that may make you uncomfortable.”
“Go ahead,” Richard said. “I’m willing to help if I can.”
Guyon took his hands from his pockets and ran his open palms along the wet porch rails. He shook the rain from his hands and put them back in his pockets. Behind him, the wet pine boughs glistened under the moon as if trying to catch Richard’s eye.
“It’s just a small committee,” Guyon said. “A small committee dedicated to ridding this county of the Bolshevists and getting our lives and the lives of our people back in order.”