The Last Ballad

by Wiley Cash

  The trucks were all loaded. Ella and the woman were the only ones left standing in the road.

  “Good night,” Ella said.

  She walked to the back of the truck. It began to rain harder. The people in the truck had huddled together. A few men opened small umbrellas and held them overhead. Others crowded beneath. Ella sighed, grasped the tailgate, put her foot on the step up. Her toes squished together inside her wet shoe.

  “Wait, Ella,” the woman said. “I can drive you. I have a car.” She took a step forward. Dropped her hands at her sides. “It’s no trouble.”

  Ella kept her hand on the tailgate and her foot on the step. She looked up at the faces inside the truck, most of them downcast or darkened by shadow. There suddenly didn’t seem to be room enough for her, and she pictured the long, wet ride squeezed up against her fellow passengers, all of them smelling of mud and rain and damp clothes. Someone would have a flask, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep the drive from being miserable.

  Ella looked over at the woman again and reacquainted herself with the nice jacket, the perfectly perched hat, and the woman’s made-up face, and she imagined the dry, comfortable interior of an expensive automobile. She dropped her hand and lowered her foot to the road. She walked alongside the truck to Sophia’s window. Sophia was watching the woman where she stood out in the road.

  “She wants to drive me,” Ella said.

  “I heard,” Sophia said. She stared at the woman. Rain fell into Ella’s eyes. She wiped it away. “Do you think she wants to be president of your fan club? Do you think Gastonia’s ready for a female president?”

  “She said she wanted to meet me,” Ella said. “I don’t know why.”

  “You’re famous now, you know,” Sophia said. She smiled. “I guess Beal was right in wanting there to be music, wanting you to sing it.”

  “You think it’s safe?” Ella asked.

  “No woman dressed like that on a night like this is up to any devilment,” Sophia said.

  “You’d go?” Ella asked. “If you were me?”

  “Sure,” Sophia said. She dropped the truck into gear. “Why not? It could be interesting.”

  Sophia turned her truck around in the road so that it could head back down South Loray Street to Franklin. Chesley’s truck followed. When Sophia passed Ella and the woman, she called out, “You girls have fun!”

  The sounds of the trucks on the wet road faded away, and then it was just Ella and the woman alone on the dark street.

  “Well,” the woman said. Her breathy voice sounded nervous, uncertain. Even through the heavy rain Ella could see the hesitation on her face. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ella said. Then, “Thank you for the offer.”

  “Please,” the woman said. She reached out her hand. Ella took it. “Please call me Kate.”

  “Okay,” Ella said.

  “Okay,” Kate said.

  They walked east down South Loray Street in the opposite direction. Ahead of them, a large green sedan sat parked along the road. As they drew closer, Kate reached into the pocket of her jacket for a set of keys.

  “Is this your car?” Ella asked. She stood on the driver’s side, her eyes taking in the length of the automobile. Its shiny chassis gleamed in the rain.

  “Yes, well, kind of,” Kate said. “It’s my husband’s car.”

  Once inside, Kate inserted the keys and popped the clutch. She turned the ignition. The engine fired immediately. Ella felt the automobile hum beneath her, and she thought of the way the floor vibrated with the power of the machines in the spinning room at the mill.

  Rain beaded the windshield. Kate stared down at the knobs and buttons on the dash. She lifted her hand, her finger hovering for a moment, and then she pushed one of the buttons. Wipers came up from beneath the windshield and cleared the rain from the glass. Kate pulled the car onto the road.

  “What kind of car is this?” Ella asked.

  “An Essex,” Kate said. “My husband says it’s more properly called the Super Six, but it’s an Essex.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Ella said.

  “Thank you,” Kate said.

  “I don’t know a whole lot of husbands who’ll let their wives drive.”

  “Right now, my husband’s in no position to have an opinion of what I do,” Kate said.

  “Well, it’s a nice car, anyway,” Ella said.

  “Where am I going?” Kate asked.

  “Head back out to Franklin,” Ella said. “Then take a right. Just keep driving west until we get to Bessemer City.”

  They were on the open road outside Gastonia within a few minutes, the lights of the city behind them. The Essex cruised along, its headlights shining on the wet road. Another automobile appeared in the distance, and Ella saw that it was the back of Chesley’s truck. Kate veered around it without slowing, without showing any sign that she’d noticed it. As she flew past Chesley’s truck and then Sophia’s, Ella turned her face away from the window so that she wouldn’t be seen.

  “My husband always had an opinion about what I was doing,” Ella said.

  “What makes you say that?” Kate asked.

  “Because of what you said earlier,” Ella said. “You said your husband didn’t have no opinion about you right now.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. She laughed. “I don’t think that’s true. I’m sure he has opinions about me. I just don’t care to hear them.”

  Ella looked around the inside of the car. It was the nicest automobile she’d ever seen. She fingered the leather seats, closed her hand around the metal crank that would lower the window if she were to turn it.

  “What kind of work does your husband do?”

  “He runs a family business,” Kate said. “Nothing interesting.”

  “In town?”

  “No,” Kate said. “Not in Gastonia, but close by over in McAdamville. Do you know it?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Ella said. “Is it nice there?”

  Kate grew quiet, and Ella wondered if she’d done something wrong by asking the question.

  “It should be nice,” Kate finally said. “But, no, I don’t find it that way. Others do. My husband does.”

  “Husbands,” Ella said.

  Kate smiled.

  “It sounds like you understand,” Kate said.

  “I do,” Ella said, “but my husband’s gone, so I don’t have to understand him as much as I used to.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said.

  “Oh, he’s not dead,” Ella said. “He’s just gone. I don’t know where to. He’s better off wherever he is. So am I.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Since I turned sixteen,” Ella said. “My mother and father both passed away real close together. I got married because I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “It must have been awful to lose your parents so young,” Kate said.

  “It was,” Ella said. “My older brother ran off as soon as he was old enough.”

  “Where to?”

  “Detroit,” Ella said. “I’ve never seen him since. I was little when he left, probably ten or twelve. I think he went up there to build cars.” She wrapped her knuckles on her window. “He could’ve built this one here.” She looked over at Kate. “Wouldn’t that be something? Me just sitting here riding along in a fine automobile that my brother Wesley built, not having any idea that he’s the one that built it. It’s a nice thing to think, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “It is nice.”

  “After my daddy died, the lumber camp doled out my widow’s pay. I had nowhere to go. All I could think to do was find one of them old letters that Wesley had wrote us from up north, and then go down to the train station and buy a ticket to wherever he was.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  Ella thought about not saying another word about herself, about not telling Kate, this stranger she’d never met before, any more of her story. But something about the silence of the car and the fe
el of the night made her want to keep talking.

  “It’s what I would’ve done,” Ella said. “It’s what I would’ve done if John Wiggins hadn’t been sitting on a bench in that train station waiting for a girl just like me.

  “He was good-looking too, dressed in a fine suit of clothes, probably the only thing he owned at the time. He asked me where I was heading, and when I didn’t have my answer ready I figure he probably knew I was the one he’d been waiting for.

  “We spent our first night in a boardinghouse right there in Bryson City. That night I laid in bed in a strange room beside a strange man and listened to the train whistle out there in the mountains. And each time I heard it whistle I wondered if that was the train that was supposed to be taking me to Detroit. But instead, here I was laid up in bed with a fine-talking stranger, our bellies full of steak and champagne. A whole lot of my money already gone. It was just about the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  She’d said too much, revealed too many things about herself, about who she’d been. Ella could almost feel Kate tossing around images of her in her mind: the sight of her in bed with John, the feeling of champagne slipping past her lips, the echo of the train whistle in the night. She wanted to open her mouth and suck the words back into it, but instead she kept talking, kept throwing words after the ones she’d already said as if they could reconstruct instead of underpin the idea Kate already had of her.

  “I’d never done anything like that before, you know, spent the night with a man, and I said to him, I said, ‘You reckon we better get married now?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. We don’t got time for that kind of thing.’ Well, I couldn’t figure out what time had to do with it, but looking back on it now, I know he said that because he was planning to cut out just as soon as we ran dry of my widow’s pay. And then a few weeks later I told him I thought I was pregnant, which I was. And I asked about us getting married then, and he said, ‘Well, I reckon we ought to now,’ and that’s about as romantic as he ever got. ‘I reckon we ought to.’”

  “How long ago did he leave?”

  “About two years ago,” Ella said. “Right after I got pregnant with my youngest. I reckon it took John Wiggins that many years to do what he’d wanted to do the first morning he woke up beside me.” Ella looked over at Kate. Her face grew hot. She’d said too much again. She turned toward Kate, nearly felt herself throw the onus of speaking into Kate’s lap. “Where’d you meet your husband?”

  “In Chapel Hill, at the university,” Kate said.

  “You went to college?” Ella asked.

  “No,” Kate said. “I wish I’d gone. I begged my daughter to go to college because I didn’t, and I grew up wishing I had. But, no, my older brother went to college in Chapel Hill. My husband was his roommate until my brother passed away. He died young. He was eighteen.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ella said.

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “It don’t get no easier to lose somebody you love,” Ella said. “No matter how long it’s been.”

  “That’s true,” Kate said.

  Silence hung between them for a few minutes after that. The quiet nearly blotted out the sound of the air as they cut through it and the noise of the car’s tires on the wet road.

  “This is a fine car,” Ella said, certain that she’d already said something to that effect earlier. Then, “Nobody’d think to follow a fine car like this one.”

  “What do you mean follow?” Kate asked.

  “The mill’s people have been following us when we head home after meetings,” Ella said. “They’ll run you off the road. Come up on you and hit your bumper, try to crash you. They’ll shoot at you too, least that’s what I’ve heard. I hadn’t ever been shot at though.”

  “Who are the ‘mill’s people’?” Kate asked. “Employees?”

  “I don’t know,” Ella said. “Nobody knows. I reckon you’ve seen the ads in the newspaper run by the Council. We figure that’s who it is. Each time it happens we say, ‘Well, the Council was out last night.’ Back in April, a mob tore down the first headquarters and broke into the commissary. People said it was the Council that did that too.”

  “It sounds terrifying,” Kate said.

  “Aw, we’re fine in a nice car like this one,” Ella said. She ran her hand along the dash. “This is the nicest car I’ve ever rode in.”

  Kate smiled, looked over at Ella, looked back at the road.

  “Would you like to drive it?” Kate asked.

  Ella laughed.

  “I can’t drive a car like this,” she said.

  Kate laughed too.

  “Believe me,” she said. “If I can, you can.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Let’s find out,” Kate said. She looked over her right shoulder, then she slowed and pulled to the side of the road. She parked the car, put on the brake.

  “What are you doing?” Ella asked.

  “Let’s switch,” Kate said. “You drive.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on,” Kate said. “You’ll never know unless you try. Tonight’s the first time I’ve driven the damn thing.”

  Ella looked from Kate to the road in front of them. It had stopped raining, but the wipers were squeaking across the glass. Kate turned them off. It was quiet.

  “Let’s switch,” she said again. She raised her eyebrows.

  Ella smiled, nodded her head. The women laughed awkwardly as they climbed around one another in the front seat. Ella caught scents of powder and faint perfume as Kate moved over and around her. She found herself sitting in the driver’s seat, the powder and perfume floating in the air. She lifted her hands, closed her fingers around the steering wheel.

  “All right,” Kate said. She pointed to the floorboard at Ella’s feet. “Put your left foot there. That’s the clutch. And your right foot goes there for the gas and right there for the brake. Go ahead, press the clutch.”

  Ella did. Kate moved Ella’s hand from the steering wheel to a lever beside it.

  “This is the gearshift,” she said. “Let’s put it in first, and then lift your foot off the clutch and give it some gas.”

  Ella did as she was told. The car rolled forward.

  “That’s it,” Kate said. “Give it more gas. Ease it back onto the road.”

  Soon Ella had the car cruising along. Darkness and intermittent flashes of light flew past her window and streaked across her eyes, but Ella didn’t see anything aside from the road directly in front of her.

  “You’re moving at a good clip now,” Kate said. “I can’t believe you didn’t think you could drive this car.”

  “That’s just because I ain’t driven one before,” Ella said.

  “What?!” Kate said, laughing. “Never?”

  “Never,” Ella said. “Never until now.”

  She pressed her foot more firmly on the gas pedal. The car picked up speed. With each second that passed, Ella felt as if another layer of time, another layer of herself were peeling away. It thrilled her. She thought of a book she’d read when she was a girl, The Time Machine, one of the few books her mother had had in the stringhouse at the lumber camp. She remembered how the machine had allowed the Time Traveler to go back millions of years, and she imagined herself doing that now as she rocketed through space in what felt like the middle of the night. She did not know about fuel or mileage or any of the particulars of automobile travel, but she felt that if she could just keep driving in the straight line in which she was driving now, she could pass Bessemer City by, go through Shelby and Forest City, past Hendersonville and Asheville and into the Smoky Mountains. She didn’t want to go back millions of years. She just wanted to go back far enough to find herself as the young girl who’d never left home, whose mother and father were both still alive, whose children somehow existed in the world as well and would be waiting for her on the porch at the lumber camp.

  Ella wanted to drive past American Mill N
o. 2. She wanted to slow down, pull into the gravel lot in front of it, lean her elbows on the horn until the night shift came outside. She wanted to stand up on the hood and organize them all right there. Mostly, though she didn’t want to admit it, she wanted them to see her inside this fancy car with a woman dressed as fine as Kate. She wanted Goldberg’s brother and Dobbins to come out and get an eyeful of Ella May behind the wheel of an Essex Super Six.

  But instead, she kept driving as she drew closer to the mill, and then she drove past the turn she would have taken that led right to it. She reached the crossroads, the same crossroads where she’d been standing and waiting when Sophia and Velma appeared on the horizon. She turned left on the Kings Mountain Highway and headed for Stumptown. Her foot found the brake, and she slowed when they got closer to the road that would take them down into the cluster of cabins and trees.

  “I don’t think I should drive down in there,” Ella said. “We might get stuck. Water runs off the highway and swamps the road.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “Of course. Maybe pull off here. We can leave the car and walk.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Ella said. “I’m fine to go on my own. It’s what I’m used to.”

  “I want to see you home,” Kate said, “and I want to see where you live.”

  “You don’t want to see it,” Ella said. “There’s nothing to see. You probably live in a big, fine home. I’d be embarrassed for you to see mine.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Kate said. “I’m sure it’s lovely.”

  Ella parked the car and took the keys from the ignition. She closed her hand around them for just a moment before giving them to Kate. The two women crossed the road and walked down into Stumptown. It had stopped raining, but it was cloudy, and there wasn’t much light.

  “Watch where you walk now,” Ella said. “There’s holes that’ll get your shoes good and wet. Just walk along behind me. I could do this with my eyes closed.”

  A few lights burned in the cabins they passed, and a few people recognized Ella’s shape as she moved down the road toward home. They called out to her, and she said hello, said, “I’ve got a friend here with me,” and they said, “Okay, well, y’all have a good night,” and Ella said, “You too.”