Without a word, the woman climbed off Verchel and picked up her undergarments and walked toward the door and opened it. Verchel raised his head and peered across the dogtrot into the dark, gaping maw of the other room. He stared for a moment, his eyes adjusting to the spinning of this room and the bright light of the sun and the blackness of the room into which he gazed.
From deep in the dark void a pale face appeared and floated toward Verchel so that he believed himself to be hallucinating, because even in his state he knew faces could not float, could not detach themselves from bodies and hover above the earth. And then the darkness took shape and walked from the room and became whole and separate in the sunlight: the pale face and the black shape were those of Miss Myra. In her arms she carried the screaming baby boy. Miss Myra and the baby were followed by several other black figures, and Verchel had a vision not of angels that had come to save his soul, but of crows that had come to pick his body apart.
Miss Myra stopped in the open doorway, her eyes never once leaving Verchel’s. The woman Verchel had been with now slowly backed away from the door as if she could disappear into the shadows of the darkened room. She bent at the waist and stepped into her undergarments one leg at a time and pulled them up under her dress.
The baby continued to cry, and Miss Myra looked at the screaming, red-faced infant in her arms, tears streaming down his cheeks, his tiny fingers opening into and closing around the nothingness before him. Miss Myra looked back at Verchel. He sat up slowly and propped himself on his elbows. He wanted to stand, but his trousers were still gathered around his feet and he was afraid he might fall. Miss Myra whispered into the baby’s ear in an attempt to soothe him. She patted his back. She bounced him in her arms. She stared at her husband.
“Oh, Verchel,” Miss Myra finally said. “What are we going to do with them? With you?”
Chapter Four
Ella May
Sunday, May 5, 1929
The truck, piloted by the young girl with the strange accent, left Bessemer City and headed north. In the town of Cherryville a handful of crumbling brick buildings housed a few mills just outside of the small downtown. The truck came to a stop, and Ella stood and looked over the railing and gazed at the collection of buildings. The streets were still and quiet, the lone strip of sidewalk empty and dusty. Ella wondered if everyone had fled in advance of the strike organizers’ arrival, and she recalled her first sight of the truck just an hour earlier, how it had terrified her, how it had elicited only fear when the one thing she’d needed was hope. Doubt flared in her mind.
She remained peering over the rails when the truck reached Lincolnton, a larger city ten miles to the northeast. Unlike Cherryville, Lincolnton’s downtown streets teemed with people, and Ella wondered if it was court day, and she recalled the times as a young girl back in Tennessee, back before her family moved to the lumber camps, when her father would load her and Wesley into the wagon and take them into Sevierville to watch the farmers and the businessmen and county men converge on the square for court day. Her father would park the wagon and find a seat on one of the benches near the courthouse. He’d drop a few pennies apiece into her and Wesley’s upturned hands, and then he’d light his pipe and talk with other farmers while she and Wesley ducked in and out of the general store and the confectionery, conspiring on how best to spend their pennies.
But today was Sunday, and court did not meet on Sundays in the Sevierville, Tennessee, of her childhood, nor did it do so here in Lincolnton, North Carolina. No, the crowd before her had gathered only to confront the truck in which she rode, and by the time Ella had embraced this realization—the realization that the crowd was composed entirely of men, no women or children in sight—the girl behind the wheel had already decided that no one in Lincolnton would be traveling with them to the rally in Gastonia.
The dozens of men—dressed in suits and overalls and shirtsleeves and trousers—waited in the middle of the street as if forming a barrier to the truck’s passage. Their numbers spilled over to the sidewalks. Others watched from inside buildings and leaned from windows. The truck picked up speed as the first projectiles struck its sides and crashed onto its bed: bottles, bricks, lengths of pipe that clattered like blasts of thunder when they landed beside Ella. Impulse told her to gather these missiles, stand, hurl them back toward the men who’d thrown them, but as things continued to fall like hailstones around her she could do nothing but cower in the driver’s-side corner of the truck bed.
She did not remove her hands from her head or open her eyes or raise her face until she felt certain that the last of the launched weapons had landed in the truck or somewhere outside it. When she looked toward the open tailgate she found a man struggling to climb inside. His face, handsome if not for its anger, was red with exertion, his blond hair ringed damp where his bowler hat had blown from his head during the chase. Behind him swarms of men ran after the truck screaming all manner of curses about Russia and communism and whores and Reds. The man who clung to the back of the truck kept his eyes on Ella. He grasped the railing and tried to climb inside, but his foot slipped off the bumper. He spat at Ella.
“You damn union bitch,” he said. “You damn commie bitch.”
He tried to climb inside again, but by the time the sole of his shoe met the tailgate, Ella already held a brick above her head. She first smashed the fingers of the man’s left hand where they had wrapped themselves around the railing. He screamed, unclenched his fingers. His foot slipped from the tailgate again and for a moment it looked as if he would fall, but he managed to cling to the truck, his ruined left hand flailing for a hold. Ella brought the brick down on the back of his right hand where he’d kept it flattened against the bed. The bones crunched like a pinecone crushed underfoot, and in the brief moment before he tumbled from the truck and cut somersaults in the road Ella saw the fear of death touch the man’s eyes.
She sat down, surrounded by shattered glass and dusty crumbles of red brick and rusted pipes that rolled around the bed as the truck bounced along. She watched the horde of men surround the fallen man where he lay prone in the road and help him to his feet. She felt no relief in seeing that he had survived. She felt nothing for him, nothing for the other men. Not fear or intimidation and certainly not pity.