The truck slowed again when they reached the town of High Shoals. Ella allowed her body to shift, to let her right shoulder come to a rest against the railing as the truck turned onto a shadowed lane. Bottles and other things the men had thrown still rolled around the truck bed. The brakes squealed, then hissed as the truck came to a stop. The engine vibrated so that Ella’s hands appeared to tremble of their own accord. She looked down, watched her hands for a moment, made her hands into fists to stop their shaking.
Ella heard the sound of one of the truck’s doors opening and slamming shut. She couldn’t tell which one. Then the sound of the other door doing the same. She imagined the two women being yanked from the truck and pulled into the trees by men who’d been waiting for them. She wanted to stand, to look over the railing, to leap to the road and break off at a sprint and put as much distance between her and the truck as she could. But the same survival instinct that had fueled her to act in Lincolnton now forced her to remain silent and still. She picked up a length of pipe that had rolled to a stop at her feet. She waited, tried to hear over the engine, the truck trembling beneath her with its own impatience.
The appearance of a face at the tailgate startled her, and Ella raised the pipe as if she might hurl it at the person she saw. It took a moment for her to recognize the face as belonging to the girl who’d been driving the truck.
The girl smirked at Ella. “I come in peace,” she said. She looked down the lane behind her, where the late-day sun found the road through the heavy trees. She turned back to Ella. Her eyes searched the otherwise empty truck. She spoke over the noise of the engine. “Seems like plenty room,” she said. “I thought I’d let Velma take a turn behind the wheel.”
The girl climbed up into the bed just as the truck lurched forward. She fell to her knees, pivoted, and kicked at the back of the cab, barely missing Ella’s left shoulder. “Goddammit, Velma!” she screamed. She looked at Ella. “Sorry,” she said, “but goddammit, Velma!” She kicked the back of the cab again. A knock came from the other side. “She can’t drive for shit,” the girl said. She turned so that she and Ella sat side by side facing the open tailgate. They watched the view before them shift while the driver attempted a series of maneuvers to return the truck to the main road.
The girl removed a tin of tobacco from her dress and rolled a cigarette. She gestured toward Ella, but Ella shook her head.
“Don’t smoke?” the girl asked. Ella shook her head again. “Nasty, ain’t it?”
“Don’t bother me,” Ella said. She allowed her shoulders to relax, her spine to resettle itself. She released the breath she’d been holding. “You go ahead.”
The girl took the length of pipe from Ella’s hand and tossed it off the back of the truck. It bounced on the road. She struck a match, drew on the cigarette, and then stared at it. “Yep,” she said. “Nasty all right.” The fingers of her free hand traced along the floor. She picked up a piece of broken bottle and looked at Ella through it, her eye suddenly large and grotesque behind the glass. “Got a little hairy back there, didn’t it?”
“You could say.”
“I saw that man take a tumble,” the girl said. She tossed the piece of glass onto the road. They had picked up speed. Trees and fields rolled away from them. “You must know how to handle yourself.”
“I ain’t trying to get killed,” Ella said. “Didn’t sign up for that.” She caught herself. “I ain’t signed up for nothing yet.”
The girl smoked and stared out the back of the truck. They passed an old car that was headed north. They watched it until they could no longer see it. The girl finished her cigarette and tossed it the same way she’d tossed the glass. “Shoot,” she said. “Ain’t nobody getting killed.”
Her name was Sophia Blevin. She was nineteen. She’d grown up in Pittsburgh, but she’d been born in a country somewhere called Ukraine, which, to Ella, explained her strange accent. Her father was a history professor at one of the universities in Pittsburgh. Her mother was a Unitarian minister.
“She ain’t what you think of when people down here think minister,” Sophia said. “She ain’t holy rolling. She’s in it for the people.”
Sophia had been raised on a commune in New England before moving to the smoky steel town where her parents found a growing movement of intellectuals, organizers, and anarchists. She’d joined her parents in strikes in Passaic, New Bedford, and Johnstown. The strike at Loray was the first she’d worked without them, but she hoped to make them proud.
“They sent me because Pop got hit in the head with a bottle at New Bedford and Mother’s running a mission for pregnant girls. They stayed put for this one, which is too bad because this here’s going to go down as the most famous strike in American history.”
The truck sped east down the highway toward Gastonia now, the wind moving overhead like a jet stream, the sun beginning to slip from the sky. Ella watched explosions of sparks as Sophia burned through a book of matches trying to light another cigarette.
“Might be a sign I should quit,” she said. Her last match sputtered, went out. She looked up at Ella. “You believe in signs?”
“My mother did,” Ella said.
“You?”
“Maybe,” Ella said, suddenly afraid of sounding ignorant, seeming “country” to the ear of this girl whose parents were intellectuals, who’d traveled all over the country organizing people just like Ella. “But I probably don’t.”
“Well, I believe in signs,” Sophia said. “At least I do today, anyway.”
She tossed the tin of tobacco from the truck, flipped open the pack of rolling papers, and, one by one, released them to the wind.
Ella watched the papers fly, recalled an image long buried: her mother kneeling at the fireplace, holding scraps of paper to the fire on a New Year’s Eve. Ella and her mother would write wishes for the following year: a new dress, a doll, a Bible. Wesley and her father never joined them, even gently teased them about this superstition. The ritual had always been something Ella cherished, that burst of mystery when the paper caught fire, the wish burning itself from possibility into hope as it escaped up the chimney.
The year before they moved to the lumber camps, their last New Year’s Eve as tenant farmers in East Tennessee, Ella’s father finally joined her and her mother in their yearly tradition. He’d never learned to read, but Ella watched as he and her mother whispered back and forth before he scrawled out his New Year’s wish and folded the paper over what seemed a dozen times, as if it could keep his wish safe. He tossed it onto the flames. As the fire consumed the paper, Ella knew that she would never forget the only word she’d ever seen her father write aside from his name: Work.
Ella imagined her handwriting printed across Sophia’s rolling papers as they took flight. She saw words like Rose, rest, happiness, food. She closed her eyes, imagined the warmth of her parents’ fireplace, imagined just one of her potential wishes coming true.
“What about you, Ella May?” Sophia asked.
“What about me?”
“That’s what I’m asking,” Sophia said. “What about you? All I know is that I met you at the crossroads and that you’ll stand up to a bully when push comes to shove.”
“There ain’t a whole lot about me.”