As soon as Ella stepped through the door of the tiny shack, she knew that the old man had long been a tenant of the tiny shack and would no doubt die inside its walls. It was heated to stifling and reeked of sweat, urine, and some kind of liniment. A metal cot sat in front of a sooty stove, where a fire licked at the grate. Rotting books and newspapers and circulars were stacked waist-high against the walls. Ella followed the old man past the stove into a tiny storeroom full of tools and equipment. Wooden shelves hemmed them in on either side and housed all manner of things: crucifixes, dolls, placards, faded artificial flowers. Ella was hardly inside the storeroom when she knew for certain that Willie’s poinsettia and baseball were not among these things, but she looked anyway, took her time and pored over each article as if it might morph into a thing she recognized.
She finally selected a red, water-damaged paper carnation that looked nothing like the felt poinsettia that had cost her a day’s pay, but still she closed her hand around it and slipped it into the side pocket of John’s old coat. The man’s eyes followed her as if he knew that the flower she’d taken was not the one she’d described, but neither of them said a word by way of explanation or conjecture.
Ella left the storeroom, was halfway across the old man’s living quarters when she heard him call to her. She turned and saw that he was on his knees, his hands feeling around for something tucked into the filth beneath his cot. She watched him until he found what he’d been looking for. He stood and held something out to her: an old baseball, oil-stained and swollen, riddled with what appeared to be teeth marks from a dog.
“I imagine it ain’t as nice as the one you’re looking for, but it’s yours if you want it,” the old man said. “I’m awful sorry.”
Ella nodded, took the baseball, surprised by how heavy and large it felt in her hand after the memory of the fresh, unused ball she’d purchased for Willie.
Once she was outside she did not look back toward Willie’s grave. She went left instead and followed the path out of the cemetery’s gates. There were no cars on the road, everyone either at church or at home because of the snow. Ella had walked only a mile when she found herself standing beneath the snow-dusted boughs of a pine tree, her chest heaving in sobs. She held her hands over her eyes, caught the reek of the old man’s shack where it had infused itself into the baseball he’d just given her. She sniffed, wiped at her nose, blinked warm tears from her eyes.
She hadn’t told her children about the poinsettia or the new baseball, and she decided that she’d give the old man’s ball to Otis as soon as she arrived home. It was as nice or nicer than any baseball Otis had ever owned, and she found herself thinking, Something, something will come of this. It was not the waste that it now seems. But even as her mind said this, she found herself pulling back her arm and pausing for just a moment before throwing the baseball as far into the woods as she could. She removed the paper carnation from her pocket, tore it apart in her hands, the paper disintegrating like a dead leaf. She opened her palms and watched the tiny scraps of red paper fall onto the snow. She didn’t want charity or kindness or relief or pity. All she wanted was what she’d worked for.
She stared down at what was left of the carnation, her body registering the anger and humiliation and pain as they left her as slowly as an extinguished fire leaves a room so it may be reclaimed by the cold. Her breathing slowed, lifted like steam in the frigid air.
This is fitting, she’d thought. This is what happens. The cemetery is where you leave things behind. You aren’t supposed to go home with anyone in your arms or anything in your pockets.
The light inside Violet’s cabin winked off, and Violet opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. The morning had brightened in the short time Ella had been waiting, and she could see Violet clearly as she walked toward her across the neatly kept yard, the dirt walk swept smooth and clean, the clumps of flowers that lined it damp with dew and glimmering against the morning. Violet’s body seemed to hum in the soft light. She held a Mason jar in each hand. She stopped where the grassy yard turned to muddy gravel and offered Ella one of the jars.
“This one’s honey,” she said. She offered the other. “And this one’s whiskey and a little something else.”
“What else?” Ella asked.
Violet smiled. “An old Stumptown secret.”
“Mother used to give my brother and me ginger and moonshine,” Ella said. “Horehound candy if she could find it.”
“Well, you ain’t no hillbilly no more, remember?”
“Yes,” Ella said. She smiled. “I remember.”
“You still thinking about going to that rally in Gastonia today?” Violet asked.
“Only if Rose is better when I get home,” Ella said. “I can’t leave her here sick on my only day off.”
“I can look after them,” Violet said.
“I was hoping you’d go with me,” Ella said. “Could use the company.”
“Girl, you trying to get me killed? Ain’t no way that many white folks going to welcome a colored girl from Stumptown.”
Ella considered removing the crumpled union leaflet from her pocket and holding it before Violet’s eyes, jabbing her finger at its demand of “Equal Work for Equal Pay.” Instead, she said, “I heard the union says white and colored are the same.”
Violet snorted. “So? So what? Saying it and meaning it are different things.”
“It’s still something to say it,” Ella said. “No white folks around here say it but me.”
“What’s Dobbins going to think about you missing last night’s shift and then joining the union?”
“I didn’t have no choice about missing that shift,” Ella said. “I might not have a choice about the union either.”
“What’s Charlie going to think?”
“You know Charlie,” Ella said.
“Everybody knows a man like Charlie,” Violet said. She shook her head, gestured toward Ella’s belly. “You ain’t told him yet, have you?”
Although she held the Mason jars, Ella’s hands instinctively moved toward her flat stomach. The whiskey splashed inside the glass. “No,” she said, “I ain’t told him. I don’t know for sure yet.”
“You’re pregnant, girl,” Violet said. “Any fool can look at you and tell that, but I guess Charlie ain’t just any kind of fool. He’s a special kind.”
“I’ll tell him when the time’s right.” She turned away from Violet, stepped onto the road.
Violet called after her. “Better tell him soon. Time ain’t never right for a man like Charlie.”
Ella walked on. The sky lightened above her while the air around her cooled. She descended the road toward the end of the lane where her cabin sat. Sleep clung to her bones like a heavy coat that pulled her toward the earth. Behind the cabin, willow trees hid a spring-fed pond, and Ella could always feel and smell the water before taking the last bend in the road and seeing the clapboard shack where she and her children lived. She took the steps as quietly as she could and opened the cabin’s door, stepped over the pallets where her children lay sleeping in the front room.
Ella bent at the knees, lowered herself to the floor. She covered Rose’s foot, tucked the blanket around it. Outside, birds stirred in the trees as morning broke over Stumptown. The only sound inside the cabin was Rose’s raspy, labored breathing. Ella brushed the girl’s hair from her forehead, gently placed her hand over it. The fever had passed. Ella closed her eyes, allowed herself a quiet sigh.
When she opened her eyes she saw that Lilly had been watching her. Ella smiled. Lilly smiled back.
“Hey,” Ella whispered.
“Hey,” Lilly whispered back.
“How was she last night?”
“She coughed a lot, but she didn’t have no fever.”
“Not now either,” Ella said.
“Good.”