“I seen him before,” Ella said.
“I spent all week saving up a quarter dollar for him to go outside for a smoke and a nip with the boys.”
Ella laughed, said, “Takes a disciplined man to save that much money.”
“You can tease,” he said, “but at ten p.m. the clock’ll start ticking on that quarter.”
A few minutes after 10 p.m. she found him in a dark corner of the opening room, hunkered down between huge mounds of raw cotton. He stood when he saw her, and then he smiled and let his body fall backward and disappear into the white fluff.
“You’ve never experienced such comfort,” he said. Ella could barely see him in the near dark. Just a shadowed space with eyes and teeth sunk into all that whiteness. She laughed when he coughed, picked a stem from his mouth, flicked it toward the floor. He reached up for her and she took his hand, allowed herself to be pulled toward him, allowed him to kiss her, to run his hands up and down her back, through her hair, but she laughed and pushed his fingers away each time they fondled the buttons on her dress.
Afterward he climbed out of the cotton and lit a cigarette. He drew on it and then held it out to her. She stood and dusted the cotton from her dress and smoothed back her hair, pinned it into a bob at the nape of her neck.
“You ain’t supposed to smoke in here,” Ella said.
Charlie laughed, took another drag. “You ain’t supposed to kiss on strangers in here either.”
“I suspected you for a rule breaker first time I seen you,” she said.
“See,” he said. “I knew you’d seen me.”
“I just remember some hobo whistling like a fool from the back of a truck.”
He reached out and brushed the cotton lint from her dark hair.
“You’re pretty,” he said.
“And you’re a damn liar.”
He laughed. “You’re sweet too.”
“And you’re a damn liar,” she’d said again.
Ella woke to the sounds of her children’s feet moving across the floor in the other room. She’d dozed a little after climbing into bed beside Charlie, but her body had not released itself into sleep. She heard Lilly at the stove, heard her hush the children while serving the fatback and biscuits. She heard Rose cough, heard Lilly say, “Take this,” followed by Rose’s whimper and the sound of the spoon scraping honey from the glass.
She slipped out of the bed and opened the door and stepped into the front room in her bare feet. The children all sat on their pallets eating biscuits and gnawing on the tough strips of fatback. They looked up at her.
“Hey, babies,” she said.
Wink cooed and waved both hands at her, a stream of drool spinning from his lip like the beginnings of a spider web. He reached for Otis’s shoulder and tried to pull himself up, but he fell and rolled backward onto the quilts. They all laughed. Ella sat down beside Otis and picked up Wink, set him in her lap. She rubbed her nose against his head, felt the soft fuzz of his hair on her lips, looked down at his grasping baby hands. She touched Rose’s face, felt the fatback grease on the little girl’s lips, used her thumb to wipe it away. Rose leaned away from her.
“How you feeling?” Ella asked.
“Happy,” Rose said, which was what she always said unless she felt sad.
“I’m happy that you’re happy,” Ella said. She touched Rose’s face again, and the girl allowed herself to be touched. Ella cupped her cheek.
“When you leaving?” Lilly asked. She used biscuit crumbs and sopped up the little bit of grease on her plate that was left behind by the small piece of fatback she’d allowed herself.
Ella sighed, let her lips brush Wink’s hair again. She inhaled, breathed in the scent of his babyness. “Here soon,” she said.
“Where you going?” Otis asked.
“Gastonia,” Ella said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Different reasons,” she said. “Work. Money. Different reasons.”
“Can I go?”
“No,” she said. “You stay here. Help your sister with these babies.”
“No baby,” Rose said.
“That’s right,” Ella said. “You’re a big girl.” She lifted Wink into the air and bounced him up and down. He laughed. “I’ve only got one baby left. The rest of y’all are grown.”
She helped the children get dressed in the nicest, cleanest clothes they could find. Otis sensed the reason why.
“We going to church?” he asked.
“Violet’s going to take you with them,” Ella said. “And then you’re having lunch at their house. Probably a ham or a chicken. Something better than this old fatback.”
“They don’t do nothing but sing in that church,” Otis said.
“If singing’s all I had to do to have myself some ham and chicken I’d consider myself a lucky boy,” Ella said.
Lilly picked up Wink. Ella kissed them all, pulled them to her. She watched as they went out the door, and she listened to the sound of their feet going down the steps.
She went back into the other room and sat down on the edge of the bed. She closed her eyes. Exhaustion crept over her body like a fog. Charlie stirred beside her as soon as she lay down. Her back was to him, but she knew he was awake and staring at the back of her head.
“You ain’t still thinking about going to that rally today?” he asked, his question more of a statement than a query. His warm breath was in her hair, on the back of her neck.
“Sunday’s my day off,” she said. “I reckon I can go where I want.”
He sighed.
“What do you want with a bunch of communists?” he asked. “Governor already called in the National Guard. Beat up a whole bunch of people. That strike won’t get you nothing but killed.”
She pictured Rose’s tiny feet and skinny ankles sticking out from beneath the blanket that morning. She thought of how Wink had cried when her milk dried up when he was just three months old. She thought of the biscuit crumbs sitting in the empty pan atop the stove, the fatback’s grease the only thing left behind in the skillet, the apple and half sandwich Goldberg’s brother had thrown away before her eyes. Her nine-dollar pay wasn’t coming until Friday, and most of it already gone to rent and store credit.
“Well, I reckon me and these babies are going to die if we keep living this way,” she said. “So what’s it matter?”
“It matters to me,” he said.
She kicked off the sheet, sat on the side of the bed, turned toward him. “What should I do, Charlie? Wait on you to bring it home? You can’t even keep a damn job.”
“You know millwork ain’t my thing.”
She laughed, looked toward the window, put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. “It ain’t my thing either, Charlie. If you got something else in mind for me to do, then tell me, and I’ll do it. Otherwise, this union’s my last chance.”
“I don’t want a girl of mine out there running around with a bunch of Yankee reds.”