No, what Verchel couldn’t recount was the one thing he couldn’t quite remember, even when he tried to recall it that night in bed where Miss Myra breathed heavily beside him and tossed slowly in her sleep like a great ocean liner beset upon by swells. And the thing he couldn’t remember was this: his response to the stranger’s very simple question.
There’d been something that had crossed Verchel’s lips about Cowpens being a God-fearing community of sober men and women, a place where hardworking millhands and harder-working farmhands split their time almost equally between their physical toils at the job and their spiritual lives in the church. He’d even mentioned his own wife, Miss Myra Stebbins Park née Olyphant, who along with other women in the county had started an improvement society that was doing awfully good work, don’t you know, the kind of work a once-depraved place like Spartanburg County, South Carolina, desperately needed done so that it could ascend to its rightful register as a sanctified, purified land where a man who’d once craved a drink no longer thought of it, much less needed it.
But the thing about it was that Verchel’s heart just wasn’t in it; his words were both unconvincing and hollow. And the stranger knew it, and Verchel knew that the stranger knew it as well, and that’s why Verchel told Miss Myra some of what the stranger had to say, but also why he made sure not to tell her all of it.
But Verchel tried his best to hold his head high and celebrate his own personal victories regardless of whether they were shrouded in half-truths, obscured truths, or complete untruths, and he decided that he would no longer view his life as a struggle not to crave whiskey; instead, he chose to view his life as a life that no longer needed it.
Verchel had all but forgotten about the stranger and the girl in the wagon with the baby when Miss Myra asked about them one evening after dinner the following April. They sat out on the porch just as they did most evenings, her in the one chair and him on the steps smoking a cigarette, the one thing he looked forward to each day.
“Have you seen that girl?” Miss Myra asked.
Verchel took a drag from his cigarette.
“What girl?”
“The one that showed up in the wagon with that baby last summer,” Miss Myra said.
“No,” Verchel said. “Not that I can recollect.”
“What about her husband? Have you seen him?”
“Not that I can recollect.”
Miss Myra rocked in silence for a moment, her eyes taking in the empty gravel road that ran along the edge of their yard.
“I bet he took a job at the mill,” she finally said. “It’s a wonder you haven’t seen him come in the store.”
“I reckon so,” Verchel said.
“You should go on down to the mill and look for him,” Miss Myra said. “Check up on that girl and that baby. Maybe see if there’s anything the ladies and I can help with while they get settled.”
“It’s almost been a year. I reckon they’re settled by now,” Verchel said.
“Well, you go and see about them,” she said. “It’s not too much to ask, is it?”
But it is too much to ask, thought Verchel. He didn’t have a reason to step foot inside the Cowpens Manufacturing Company, and even when he tried to think of a reason, his mind wouldn’t let him do it. The last thing he wanted to do was find himself inside the mill’s noisy walls, walking along the rows of machines, staring through the combed cotton for the face of a man he’d seen only one time. It wasn’t just the stranger’s face that he’d be forced to behold; it would also be the faces of his former coworkers, many of whom had been the ones to help him gather himself after the accident, the same ones he knew had been questioned after they’d carried him out and taken him to the doctor: How had he been acting before it happened? Had anything seemed strange about him? Had anyone been close enough to smell his breath?
But Miss Myra’s request ended up taking care of itself. On Thursday of that next week, Verchel heard the sound of the store’s front door opening, and he looked up and saw Mr. Freen coming through instead of the boy Wilfred.
“Go on ahead and count the drawer,” Mr. Freen said. “Wilfred’s done come down with this danged flu, and I need you to take the dope wagon down to the mill today. Maybe tomorrow too.”
It wasn’t until then that Verchel realized that something could actually be more humiliating than showing his face inside the mill; this higher level of humiliation would be accomplished by him showing his face behind the dope wagon while he served chilled pop, cold sandwiches, and hot coffee to his former coworkers.
By the time Verchel had entered the mill behind the dope wagon and seen the same girl he’d first seen holding a baby at dawn from atop a wagon seat, he’d sold two Nehi drinks (a peach and a grape), two Coca-Colas, four bags of pork rinds, and two Moon Pies, answered three questions about his now-useless hand and one question about his married life, and told two different women how his wife, Miss Myra, was doing. After all that, he was actually relieved to see the girl, especially to see her instead of her husband, because it meant he could spend a moment speaking with someone who knew nothing about him or his time at the mill or what he’d been doing since leaving it.
Verchel saw that they’d put her to work as a doffer, changing out the full spools for empty ones, work usually reserved for the very young, the very small, or both. From looking at her, Verchel had no idea how old she was—maybe seventeen, maybe younger—but he knew for certain that she was small. Her brown hair was braided and pinned up behind her head, and her thin dress could hardly hide her narrow shoulders and thin waist. It seemed impossible that a body so small could have given birth to another. But there was something about her that made him fear getting too close, something that told him she would just as soon spit in his eye as say hello.
When he saw the girl she was in the middle of a bank of spinners, yanking off the full spindles and sliding the empty ones into place. She pushed past the women on the line, not looking a single one of them in the eye. Verchel stopped the dope wagon and watched her, then he looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He waited for her to reach the end of the line.
“Hello,” he hollered, trying to raise his voice above the crush of machinery, waving his good hand and keeping the other tucked up close to his body for fear that something would grab ahold of it and not give back what was left. The girl looked up at him as if she were surprised that someone might be addressing her. Then she nodded and gathered the full spindles in her arms and set them on a little cart. She turned her back to Verchel and pushed the cart toward another line of spinners.
Verchel, not knowing what else to do and not knowing enough about the girl to chase after her or to ask after her once she was gone, called out the only question that came to his mind.
“How’s your baby?”
The girl stopped pushing the cart and turned to face him. Where her brown eyes once seemed to look past him, Verchel now felt as if they penetrated him.
“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was clear and strong, deeper than he assumed it would be.