George Lytle had spent most of the evening with a drink in one hand, his other resting on the mantel, above which an oil portrait of his aged grandfather loomed. To anyone who would listen, Lytle told story after story of his grandfather’s bravery on the battlefield, his family’s stake in the history of the South, the duality of war that awards both honor and ruin to the survivors. Lytle spoke as one who’d been to war himself, but Richard had known better. The only war Lytle had ever known was the one he’d heard about and read about and talked about during dozens of parties just like this one.
Although Richard had been prepared not to like Lytle even before meeting him, he’d absolutely hated him after that evening at their plantation. Since then his heart had recoiled at the idea of handing over Claire and his future grandchildren to the family. He and Katherine had no illusions that the couple would do anything other than settle in Wilmington after the wedding in October. But “to lose a daughter is to gain a son,” they always say, and, after all, wasn’t a son what he had always wanted? Of course, he’d been proud to have a healthy child after what had happened earlier in their marriage, especially a child as wonderfully bright and kind as Claire had been from the moment she was born; however, memories of his own father and grandfather pulled at him, arriving with the realization that he lacked a son to carry on the family name and the family business, a business he was certain Paul would have little to no interest in inheriting and certainly no interest in managing. Even Richard’s grandfather, Yancey McAdam, hadn’t had that much interest in managing the very mill he’d founded. It was almost something he’d come by in the course of laying railroads across the state, beginning in Charlotte, where he’d opened a bank with local investors in 1867. He arrived in Gaston County a few years later and followed the branches of the Catawba River west, where he discovered that the river was making men rich by powering their whiskey stills and cotton mills. Yancey decided that the cotton mill had the best chance of running itself and creating passive income once he’d moved on, which he did in 1881 after the McAdam Mill was up and operating. Yancey continued to lay railroad tracks through the piedmont toward Asheville and beyond, where he literally tore down ridges and blew holes in stone to cut passages through the Blue Ridge Mountains, for Tennessee and the open country of the West waited on the other side. Richard had always pictured his grandfather as a man who only had to touch the earth for it to spring to life under the warmth of his open palm. In Richard’s imagining, railroad lines poured from the old man’s fingertips and snaked across the landscape. Eleven children sprang from his flesh with ease. One cotton mill and then another rose like mushrooms from the damp woods along the South Fork of the Catawba River. McAdamville grew into a fiefdom where Yancey McAdam was the too-often-absent king.
At the end of the war, the old man followed his railroads farther west, but not before handing off the mill to his son, Richard’s father, who at only eighteen years old embraced both his role as the mill’s president and his role as its employee. The mill only had a few dozen workers, but Richard’s father designed, paid for, and assisted in the construction of small brick homes for his workers. What Richard’s father lacked in his own father’s frontier spirit he made up for in a nature that embraced both technology and social progress. Over time he equipped each home in the mill village with toilets and bathtubs. In 1884 he stood alongside Thomas Edison as the famous inventor installed Dynamo #31 and ushered in a new wave of production. McAdamville’s two mills were the first in the state to run all night beneath bright, hot bulbs of electric light. That very dynamo was still churning out power.
This was the place and the legacy Richard had inherited when he’d assumed the presidency of the mill after graduating from Chapel Hill, and it was this past and present of fine industrialization that Richard wanted the Lytles to understand marked him and his family as being one of the most progressive and upstanding families in the state, if not one of its most wealthy and famous. While the Lytles’ ancestors had sipped juleps on the veranda and overseen the work of enslaved black bodies in brackish water, Richard’s father and grandfather had moved mountains, electrified production, cared for the poor, and changed the state forever.
And now Richard had inherited the mantle they’d left behind. And he’d gone to college at the state university. And he’d gotten married. And he’d had a child and served in the Great War. And he’d executed his life in a manner befitting both his talents and his station. So let the Lytles think what they would think after seeing what they’d seen at Loray that afternoon.
If George Lytle asked, Richard would tell him that there could not be two places more different than McAdamville, with its brick houses, indoor plumbing, and well-kept yards, and the Loray Mill, with its village of rotting shacks, muddy roads, and transient workers. In some ways, Richard thought, Loray deserved exactly what it was getting. He’d never admit it to anyone, including Katherine, but something about it allowed some semblance of pride to bloom inside him.
The rain had moved east toward Charlotte and the clouds had parted, revealing a quarter moon that stared down upon the pine trees and clubhouse like an eye only partly open. In its light, Richard was able to spy something moving toward him down the lane from Franklin Avenue. It was a black Packard 633, and as it drew closer he knew Hugo Guyon sat in its backseat, gazing out on the dark night, his head probably full of concerns about the strike.
Instead of parking, the Packard roared into the roundabout in front of the clubhouse, its huge engine vibrating under the rain-slicked hood. The driver left the motor running and stepped out and came around to the side of the car facing Richard, then opened the back door. Hugo Guyon swung both feet out and unfolded himself from the seat. In his early fifties, he was a large man, easily over six feet tall, with hair so short and fair as to make him appear bald. When Guyon saw Richard standing atop the porch, he nodded his head gravely as if he’d just returned from the front and there was nothing but bad news to report.
Although Richard had never met Guyon’s wife and couldn’t even remember if he was married or had ever been married, he was surprised when the door opened on the other side of the car and a man’s face appeared. He was much shorter than Guyon, round-faced and jowly. He wore a simple black suit and a derby pushed back off his forehead. A short, damp cigar clung to his lower lip.