Instead, she thought again of Mr. Musical and the week she and her brother Wesley had spent sitting side by side on a weathered wooden bench in the small, hot schoolhouse, the schoolmaster scrawling numbers and figures on a dusty chalkboard. Ella’s own life had been a series of additions and subtractions, and she wondered how Mr. Musical would condense it all into some kind of equation that would make sense to her six-year-old self: her childhood minus her father’s failure as a tenant farmer equaled the family’s move to the smoky lumber camps deep in the Blue Ridge. More minuses: Wesley’s leaving for Detroit; the flu that killed her mother, followed so quickly by her father’s death from a falling tree. Those minuses equaled her all alone at sixteen standing in the train station in Bryson City, where she somehow added John Wiggins when she was supposed to have added a ticket north to a life with Wesley and his wife like he had promised in his letters.
In her mind, the equation of her life spread across the chalkboard, more minuses than pluses, more losses than gains. Her and John’s move from the mountains to the tiny town of Cowpens, South Carolina, and her first job in a textile mill coupled with the plus of Lilly’s birth, another plus almost two years later when Otis arrived just as they had to move again, this time to the scarred, ruddy soil and lint-heavy air of Gaston County, where her losses had racked up so quickly and so painfully in so few years. All this time and all this traveling made Ella feel as if years and years had somehow slipped by without her having the chance to count them or even mark them as they passed. She’d been swept along in a current that she could not control, and all of it had brought her here to Charlie, to the American Mill, to the union leaflet in her pocket, to this new life growing inside her. She thought about what Charlie had said that morning, about how the strike might get her nothing but killed. He might have been right, but she might have been right too. She would die if she carried on this way, and then where would her children be? She’d already lost Willie, and she knew that her unborn baby wouldn’t have any better chance than the others had had.
She heard the sound of an automobile and stepped toward the road. An old truck passed. Three colored boys wearing nothing but overalls sat in the back, the oldest one holding a fishing pole. The youngest boy waved. Ella waved back. The other two boys did the same. She watched the truck until it rounded the bend in the road that led toward Stumptown.
If she left now and returned home, she’d catch her children right as the church doors opened. Maybe they’d go down to Violet’s house for something to eat. Or maybe Charlie would come over and sit on her porch and strum his guitar and they would sing something together. Lilly and Iva and Rose would trade the stuffed dolls they’d made from old stockings. Otis would disappear into the dark woods and come back an hour later with wet clothes. Wink would sit right there on Ella’s lap and take it all in.
She turned to her right and looked down the road that led to Gastonia and the uncertainty of the strike. She could go or not go. Those were her only two choices, but, in that moment, neither of them seemed any good.
That’s when she saw it: the specter of the huge black truck belching smoke above the eastern horizon. Once she’d seen it she couldn’t look away. She feared it might be a nightmare vision that her sleeping self had sent to her by way of warning.
As it drew closer, Ella saw the faces of two women peer at her from behind the dirty windshield. The truck creaked to a stop at the crossroads, lurched forward, and stopped again. Its engine shook the ground. The driver, a girl who didn’t appear a day older than fifteen, opened the door and looked out at Ella where she stood on the side of the road.
“You waiting for a ride?” the girl asked. She had olive skin and dark eyes, thick, wavy, brown hair, and an accent Ella had never heard before. She wondered if the girl came from another country.
“I’m heading to Gastonia,” Ella said.
“For the rally?” the girl asked.
Ella nodded. A woman in the passenger’s seat leaned across the driver and looked down at Ella. Her pale face was thin and pinched, her hair tucked up under a bell-shaped hat. She could’ve been thirty or sixty.
“At which mill do you work?” the woman asked. She was from the North.
“American,” Ella said.
“Which one?” the northerner asked.
“Number Two.”
The two women in the truck looked at one another. The younger one said something to the northerner that Ella couldn’t hear, and then she looked down the road in both directions as if hoping more people would materialize. She looked at Ella.
“Where’s everybody at?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Ella said. “Church, maybe. Home. I don’t know.”
“You ain’t got friends?” the girl asked.
“I got a couple,” Ella said.
“You couldn’t bring none of them?”
“I tried,” Ella said. “None of them were interested.”
“You want to join the union?” the woman from the North asked.
“I don’t know,” Ella said. “I figure on learning something about it first.”
“You a capitalist?” the girl asked.
Ella looked down at the clothes she wore: the same white dress she’d worn the day before, one of two she owned that didn’t embarrass her; the soles of her dusty black shoes caked in mud; her loose stockings, the hole in the left knee that the women couldn’t see. She looked up at the girl.
“No,” she said. “I don’t have the cash money to be capital about nothing.”
The girl smiled. She turned and looked at the passenger.
“There’s room in the back,” the older woman said.
“We’ve got a few more stops to make,” the girl said. “Pick up a few more interested parties. I just hope they got more friends than you.”
Ella walked alongside the truck. High, wooden rails lined its bed. It gave the impression that a dog pen had been set down atop it.
The truck was so tall, it wasn’t until Ella reached the open tailgate that she discovered that the truck’s bed was empty. She stood there a moment, the smoke and heat of the exhaust gathering about her. She considered whether or not to climb in, whether or not to go around to the driver and ask to ride in the cab with the two women. But the gears grinded and shifted, and the truck jolted forward. Ella reached up and grabbed the railing and pulled herself inside on her belly.
The truck lurched through the crossroads, and Ella raised her eyes and looked up as she passed beneath the twining wisteria. She felt speed gather around her, knew that they were following the Kings Mountain Highway west in the direction from which she’d come. If she had stood and looked to the south, she could have seen the red mud road that led down into Stumptown, could have marked Fox Denton’s crumbling shack as the truck passed by it. But she did not stand, and she did not look. Instead she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the rails.
She waited until the truck had slowed and made a right turn that carried them north. Once she knew for certain that Bessemer City was behind her, she opened her eyes and stood and looked out over the roof of the truck at the road before her. The wind blew her hair back and made her eyes water. Tears streaked her cheeks. The wind wanted her to sit down, but she refused.
Chapter Two
Lilly Wiggins
Sunday, December 25, 2005