“I’m Verchel Park,” he said. “I work at the store. My wife wants to know how your baby is.”
“What business is it of yours?” she asked.
“It ain’t my business,” Verchel said. “It ain’t me who’s wanting to know. It’s my wife.”
“That’s not what you said first,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You asked me how my baby is. You didn’t mention nothing about your wife.”
“Well, I’m mentioning her now,” Verchel said.
“What business is it of hers, then?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She just wanted me to ask you.”
The girl looked at him for another moment, then she spun around toward the cart and lifted two full spindles and replaced them with two empty ones. She pushed the cart on ahead of her.
He didn’t know what else to do, so he left the dope wagon and hurried to catch up with her, looking around all the while to make sure no one he knew had spotted him talking to the girl across the banks of spinners that separated them.
“I saw y’all when you first got to town last year,” Verchel said. “I was at the store, and I saw you out in the wagon with your baby and that mule.”
“We ain’t got no mule,” she said.
“You had one then.”
“We ain’t got no mule.”
“Well, you must’ve sold it,” he said.
“Nope. Died.”
“Well, it was living when I seen you,” Verchel said. “And I told my wife when I got home, and she thought I should ask after you, ask after your little one.”
“And what is it your wife wants to know?” she asked.
“Well, how y’all are getting along, one,” Verchel said.
The girl looked up the row where the dope wagon sat waiting for Verchel’s return.
“Give me one of them Coca-Colas and I’ll tell you,” she said.
“Okay,” Verchel said. He smiled, acknowledging that the girl had gotten one over on him. “Okay.”
He left her and returned with an ice-cold, sweaty Coca-Cola in his good hand. The girl eyed the bottle. He offered it to her across the top of her cart, and she closed her fingers around it and tipped it back, emptying it in just a couple of swallows, the fizz of it causing her chest to jump. She handed the empty bottle to Verchel.
“We’re getting along fine,” she said.
“And your husband?”
“We’re getting along fine,” she said again.
“Whereabouts y’all living?”
The girl looked at Verchel, a slight smile playing across her mouth. She nodded toward the dope wagon again.
“How about one of them Moon Pies,” she said.
With the girl’s directions, Verchel found the cabin easily enough later that afternoon after he’d returned the dope wagon to the store and left for the day. The family lived in an old shack on the edge of a piece of property still owned by the McGarrity family, a people who once made their lives from the land but now made their lives somewhere other than Spartanburg County after leaving this particular soil behind. The girl had described the place perfectly: a dogtrot shack with bleached boards and a metal roof burnished brown by the sun.
The trees along the road were mad with crows. The birds ruffled the leaves like a heavy wind, and their cries seemed to bore into Verchel’s ears. He could almost smell the creek water from where he stood at the top of the road, hidden behind a clump of wild blue and purple hydrangea, sweat running from under the brim of his hat and catching in his eyebrows before he brushed it away. From this vantage point he could see the house perfectly, see that its two windows were covered from the inside by dark curtains, that its front steps leaned away from him toward the slope where the land rolled down into a green holler.
After dinner he told Miss Myra about seeing the girl, how good she looked, how happy she seemed to be working such a good job in such a nice little town as Cowpens clearly was.
Miss Myra had all kinds of questions: “What kind of work does her husband do?” and “Where do they live?” While he knew the answer to the second question, it took him a few days to know the answer to the first with anything approaching certainty, although the final question the stranger had asked Verchel on the morning they first met was certainty enough.
The shack where the girl and stranger lived formed a kind of triangle between Verchel’s house and the store, and so it was only a matter of minutes by which Verchel was late on his way home each evening, minutes of tardiness that could be and were always explained by his having to push the dope wagon back to the store, unload it, count the money, and organize things for the next morning’s shift. The boy Wilfred hadn’t yet returned to work, and the way this flu was spreading there was a very good chance Verchel’s tenure behind the dope wagon would be long, if not permanent.
He took to spying on the shack each afternoon on his way home, assuming his perch by the road behind the wild hydrangea, and watching the doors on either side of the dogtrot to see if they ever opened. That’s where he was on the third day, what happened to be a Wednesday, when he saw the stranger come out of the door on the left side and stand on the porch steps in the bright sunlight and take in great gulps of air as if the shack’s interior were filled with water rather than darkness.
The stranger stood for a moment, hatless and shoeless, blinking his eyes in the bright, hot sun like he’d just woken from a long sleep and didn’t know the day or season. Verchel was close enough to see the stranger’s eyes, but far enough away not to worry about being seen himself. He watched as the man nearly skipped down the porch steps and into the knee-high, weedy grass before turning right and disappearing down into the holler where a creek gurgled out of sight.
If one were to have asked Verchel if he held his breath until the stranger reappeared from his trip to the creek he would’ve said no, but anyone passing by would’ve disagreed, for Verchel stood still long enough to have a succession of things land on him without him or them noticing his or their presence: ladybugs, dragonflies, a dollop of robin droppings, and a single leaf from a maple that drifted nearly twenty-five feet before coming to rest on his right shoulder like an angel or a devil that might or might not soon whisper advice into his ear.
But one thing is for certain, and that is that Verchel did eventually exhale and then inhale a breath large enough to fill his lungs twice after seeing the stranger crest the hill on his way back to the cabin. The man hopped up the porch steps with the same gaiety with which he’d descended them, and he’d disappeared inside the same black hole of an open doorway. Verchel’s eyes saw these things without their being registered by his mind because his mind’s eye was too busy beholding and later re-beholding a particular image: the two large, heavy jugs the stranger had grasped in either hand.