In the driver’s seat was an older, mustached man with dark eyes. Beside him sat a heavy, jowly man, a derby pulled low and tight on his head. He smiled at Ella. She saw the soggy, chewed cigar clenched between his teeth. Percy Epps. Pigface. The man the girls at dinner had spoken of the night before. She knew him now without ever having seen him before. Two bird-faced men with sunken eyes and straw-colored hair leaned over the rails surrounding the truck bed and stared down at her.
Furniture and boxes and crates clogged the street behind Ella, and the crowd was too thick with bodies for her to turn around. Before she realized it had happened Ella found herself penned in the middle of the street by the piles on either side of her, her only choices being to climb one of the banks of mattresses, clothing, and chairs or to turn and force her way through the mass of people.
Before Ella had the chance to make a decision, the driver leaned on the horn. Its squeal made her flinch, and the driver looked over at Percy Epps. Both men laughed. The truck ground to a halt barely five feet in front of her, its body rumbling and twitching like a leashed animal.
The driver leaned out of the window. “Clear this street!” he yelled. No one moved. He leaned on the horn again. “Go on!” he said. “Get out of the damn way unless you want to be run down!”
The truck sat still, its engine vibrating beneath the hood. Ella saw a stream of shiny black oil trickle out from beneath its body, as if it bled. Ella didn’t move, didn’t say a word; neither did the people in the crowd behind her. The driver killed the engine, so that the only sound heard was the noise of the mill where it hummed unseen. Epps opened the truck’s rickety door and took his time climbing down from the cab. He removed the cigar from his mouth, sighed, looked all around him at the row houses as if he’d never seen this street before and couldn’t quite believe how sorry it all looked. He put the cigar back between his teeth and walked around to the front of the truck. He ran his thumbs along the inside of his pants waist as if adjusting his paunch so that it would fall comfortably over his belt. Ella caught the gleam of a silver revolver holstered under his left arm beneath a thin corduroy jacket. He stopped in front of her and pulled the cigar from his mouth again. He smiled, nodded at Ella.
“Miss,” he said, “is something wrong with your ears? Or your legs?”
Ella was surprised by his voice, which attempted to hide something like the twang of eastern North Carolina. An image of curing golden leaf tobacco flashed through her mind, something she’d seen in cigarette advertisements, and she imagined that Epps was a long way from home and that something he did back there had caused him to flee west toward Gastonia, to Loray. She knew she was trembling, and she knew he could see it. He stood close enough for her to smell the wet tobacco in his soggy cigar.
“I think I recognize you,” he said. “What’s your name?”
In the question Ella heard more than the same simple query that Sophia and Velma had asked her just a day earlier. In Epps’s question she understood the danger of divulging the only thing she possessed: anonymity.
“My name ain’t important,” she finally said.
“Your name ain’t important?”
“Not to you,” she said.
“No?” Epps asked. His tongue poked around his mouth, moving the cigar along his lips.
“You think your name’s important to Fred Beal, that dandy Yank who’s down here telling you how to work? When to work. What to do instead of working.”
He was speaking directly to Ella, but his voice and his words were meant for the crowd behind her. Even as she stared into his eyes Ella could feel Epps looking past her at the strikers around her.
“But I reckon y’all gave up your names when you became communists,” he said. He looked behind him at the two men leaning over the truck’s rails. “Boys, I guess we got a bunch of nameless nobodies on our hands,” he said. The men smiled at the same time like children responding to a parent’s cue.
Epps turned back to Ella.
“Is that who you are?” he asked. “A nameless nobody?”
Epps stepped closer, as if trying to smell her, and this allowed Ella to smell him: hair grease, sweat, the scent of oiled machinery.
“I already know your name, Miss Wiggins,” he whispered. “I don’t know where you came from, but I know who you are, and you can rest assured that I will never forget your face.”
He stepped away from Ella and took in the people behind her.
“I’m sure you good church folks have heard of the Book of Life,” he said. “God’s got every one of y’all’s names writ down there. Every last one of you, whether you believe in Him or not, whether you fear His wrath or not. Well, I’ve got a Book of Life too. And all y’all are in there.” He stopped speaking and stared at the crowd for a moment. Ella watched his eyes as they moved across the faces behind her. “I got you writ down there, Mamie Stihl. And you, Zachary Goshen. Lydia Roberts and Sadie Grant; Sadie, I got both you and that baby of yours in there.”
He kept his eyes on the strikers for another moment, then he pulled the cigar from his mouth and flicked it to his left, where it landed atop a mattress. Suddenly there was the sound of something exploding. Ella saw a cabbage rolling off the truck’s hood. It fell to the street. A smear of rotten leaves coated the truck’s windshield and obscured her view of the driver. Epps turned toward the truck at the sound. The crowd roared with laughter, cheers.
But every voice fell silent when Epps turned back to face them, the silver revolver clenched in his right hand.
“Who threw that?” he screamed. He waited, but no one answered.
He raised the revolver and pointed it at the crowd, swung his arm back and forth so that it passed within inches of Ella’s face. In that moment she wondered if death had found her. Every moment of her life had led to this one, and the only thing she could feel was surprise that death would come for her now, when she was so far from her children, so much farther from East Tennessee, where death had found her mother and father.
“Clear this damn road!” Epps screamed. “Now!”
Something whizzed past Ella’s ear. She wondered if it was the sound a bullet would make as it flew by, but she realized the direction was wrong, and then she saw a second cabbage, this one more firm and less ripe, smash into Epps’s face. He dropped the revolver and lifted his hands to his nose. When he pulled his hands away and looked at them, Ella saw that his lips were covered in blood and white flakes of cabbage had spattered across his face. His hat had been knocked to the ground. He wiped at his nose, bent to pick up his gun and hat from the road, but before he could grasp either, a cane chair crashed onto the truck’s hood. Epps fell to his knees and cowered at the sound of it. The crowd laughed.