For the next few minutes, the crowd watched the men carry belongings out of the house and deposit them on the curb. Inside, Hetty moved from room to room and tossed whatever she could lay a hand to out into the yard. When she finished she took hold of a hammer and busted the glass out of the few windows that weren’t covered over with pine boards. By the time her home had been emptied she was on her knees, the hammer still in her hand, using its claw to pry up the floorboards just inside the door.
And that was when one of the mill’s men—a slight man in overalls—bent at the waist and laid a hand on Hetty’s shoulder and asked her to stop destroying the mill’s property. He didn’t have the chance to move his hand from her shoulder before Hetty swung the claw end of the hammer toward his leg and pierced his calf muscle through the denim pants.
Two policemen pushed through the crowd and bounded up through the yard as Hetty pulled the hammer free of the man’s leg and prepared to swing at something, anything, else. The man screamed and fell to his knees and rolled out of the doorway. Blood soaked through his overalls and dotted the steps. One officer hooked Hetty beneath her arms and the other tried to corral her wild, kicking feet.
“You sons of bitches!” she screamed. “You sons of bitches! Tell Pigface to come down out of that mill and carry me out of this house his damn self. Let him see what I got for him!” She reared her head and spit into the face of the young, scared officer above her. “I know you. I know you, Paul Bradley,” she said. “I know your people. They’re going to be ashamed of you for hurting a old woman!”
“We’re doing our jobs,” said the policeman who carried her feet. “Don’t listen to her, Paul.” They carried her across the street toward a patrol car.
“Turn her loose!” a man yelled. Ella looked up to see Hetty’s husband barreling toward the police who were carrying his wife. A rifle was in his hand. When the policeman holding Hetty’s feet turned and saw the old man bearing down upon him, he let go of her and drew his pistol. The shift in weight surprised the man named Paul. Hetty slipped from his grasp and spilled onto the street at his feet. She yelled out when her head hit the road but no one was watching her anymore. They were all watching and waiting to see what her husband would do.
“Drop that rifle, old-timer!” the policeman with the pistol said, but the old man either did not hear him or was not willing to listen, because he held on to the rifle and kept running toward them, his eyes on Hetty where she lay on the street. “Drop it!” the policeman screamed.
A loud crack like a tree limb snapping rang out against the morning. Hetty’s husband collapsed in a heap on top of her. The moment she felt the weight of him she screamed and struggled to get to her feet to discover exactly what had made him fall. The policeman leaned over the old man and grabbed his shoulders and turned him so that he stared up at the blue sky. Hetty’s husband lay there beside her, his eyes wide open, a cut that seemed to have collapsed the bridge of his nose forcing blood to pulse in streams down each side of his face.
“Emmit!” Hetty hollered. Blood shone on her neck and hands. It stained her dress. She spread the blood across Emmit’s torso as she touched his body, searching for a bullet wound that wasn’t there. “Wake up, honey,” she said. “Baby.”
“He’s dead!” someone screamed over Ella’s shoulder. “You killed him!” Ella turned to see a young woman with her hand held over her mouth as if she could cram the words back inside before the policemen heard them.
“He ain’t dead,” the policeman said, “but he will be if he moves.” He holstered his pistol and picked up Emmit’s shotgun where he’d dropped it before being cracked across the face with the butt end of the pistol. In what seemed to Ella’s eyes to have been one fluid motion, the man broke the shotgun and saw that both barrels were loaded. He snapped it closed, raised it toward the gathered crowd.
“Somebody run and get Beal!” a man’s voice cried out.
The policeman pointed the shotgun in the direction from which the voice had come.
“Nobody move,” he said. “Not one of y’all.” He scanned faces as if expecting someone to step forward to tell him how to handle the situation. The morning had gone silent. “Now, dammit,” the policeman said. “We tried to be fair with y’all. We tried. And this here’s what happened.”
Ella noticed that the shotgun’s barrel quivered in the policeman’s hands. The young policeman named Paul Bradley stood beside him, staring down at the gun as if his partner might turn it on him at any moment. A man in the crowd took advantage of the stillness, and he turned and took off at a sprint up the road toward headquarters.
“Hey!” the policeman with the shotgun yelled after him. “Freeze!” But the man kept running.
The officer named Paul watched the man flee. Paul looked at his partner and then took off up the street in pursuit.
“Paul!” the officer called. He watched him for a moment before he realized that he was alone. He turned his attention back to the crowd, where two more men fled: one cutting behind Hetty’s house and disappearing into a grove of maples, the other turning and bounding down the hill toward Garrison Boulevard.
In this manner the situation was defused, the matter settled. The strikers peeled away in hot-footed singles at first, and then the women—who did not fear the law and violence in the same way the men did—drifted off in groups of twos and threes, their children pressed to their chests or held close by their sides.
Not knowing what else to do, Ella waded through the crowd and turned up Fourth Avenue where it skirted along the mill’s southern edge. She’d go back to the headquarters, find Sophia, and ask about that $9.75 Beal had promised. Then she’d demand a ride home to her children.
Here, in this part of the village, the company men had already finished clearing the houses. The street was full of people and their personal effects: chairs, mounds of clothes, broken furniture, and piles and piles of cast-iron skillets, washtubs, cookpots, and dolls missing faces or with faces missing eyes or mouths. All told, almost a thousand people had been turned out of their homes. As Ella shouldered through the crowd she wondered how Beal was going to move these people and all their things across Franklin Avenue and into tents that were yet to arrive.
Perhaps what unsettled her most was the beauty of the day: a clear, warm morning that smelled of gardenia and honeysuckle. The dew-damp mud road sat drying in the sun. This was the weather that Ella would pray for if she were ever to look forward to a day at a fair. How ironic, almost cruel, she thought, that it should come on a day like this one.
As Ella broke free from the edge of the crowd, a Model T stake-bed truck rounded the corner and lurched down the street toward her, its tires brushing against the mounds of strikers’ belongings that had been left on the curbs.