“I don’t know, Mrs. May. People often don’t tell the truth when they lay out of work. Sick means drunk. Sick means gambling. Sick means lazy. I don’t know what a sick little girl means.”
She felt blood rush to her face, knew that her cheeks were flush with color. Her guilt, or whatever it was she had just felt, faded. She imagined throwing herself across the desk, reaching for his neck, his eyes. “Sick means my little girl’s sick,” she said. “That’s what it means.”
He stared at her for a moment, then lifted a wastebasket from beneath his desk and swept the sandwich and apple into it. He returned the wastebasket to the floor.
“What if all my employees had sick children, Mrs. May? What about me? What if I had a sick child at home and decided that I couldn’t come to work? Who’d run this mill?”
Ella had never seen Goldberg’s brother’s family, knew nothing about them aside from their existence and the existence of the older brother. She had never been inside the Goldberg’s large brick home and she had never met anyone who’d been inside it either. She envisioned electric lights and running water and warm blankets and bedsheets and a pantry full of food and a cooler full of ice, a pair of soft, warm slippers tucked beneath a neatly made bed. A baby might cry out somewhere upstairs, and a nurse or a maid or a young cousin would ascend a grand, curved staircase and open a nursery door and whisper something kind and reassuring to the child inside.
“Yes, sir,” Ella said.
“Who’d run this mill?” Goldberg’s brother asked again.
“Nobody.”
“That’s correct: nobody. And you know who runs your spinners when you decide to lay out on a shift? Nobody.” He leaned forward again. “But I can assure you of this, Mrs. Wiggins: it’ll be much easier to find someone to operate your spinners than it will be to find someone to run this mill. I expect you’ll keep that in mind next time you find yourself with the desire to stay home.”
Ella thought that no one should ever have to look upon a sad place like Stumptown, but she knew that if someone were ever forced to look upon it, then the quiet, silvery moments before dawn would be the best time to do it. That’s what she thought of now as she and Violet stumbled down the muddy road that branched off the Kings Mountain Highway and rolled toward the settlement like an artery forgotten by its heart. The sky directly above them was dark, the sky behind them pink with the stirrings of dawn. There were no shadows yet because there was not enough light to cast them. The tarpaper shacks that huddled close to the road with their crooked porches and lopsided doors and low, tin roofs were nothing but dark forms looming beneath cottonwoods and willow trees. The scrubby patches of garden could not be seen at this early hour in this weak almost-light, nor could the clumps of geraniums that lined the walks that led toward porch steps or the clotheslines strung across the porches themselves. At this hour, at this time of morning, Stumptown could be anything one could imagine it to be.
Ella heard the tinny scratch of “Carolina Moon” floating from the phonograph inside Fox Denton’s house on the other side of a dark stand of trees. She hummed along.
“You going to stop in, say hello to Fox?” Violet asked. Ella smiled, quit her humming. “Ain’t you interested in making a friend?”
“I got enough friends,” Ella said. “Too many, maybe.”
Fox Denton, an old man who lived alone, was the only white resident of Stumptown aside from Ella and her four children. He worked as a machinist at Margrace Mill in Kings Mountain and never said a word to anyone, white or colored, but that didn’t keep Violet from teasing Ella every time they passed his house, which they did twelve times a week on their two-mile walk to and from the night shift at American Mill No. 2.
“Just seems like you’d want to meet him after all this time,” Violet said.
“I got enough friends,” Ella said again.
“Ain’t none of them white.”
“All of them poor though,” Ella said. “We got that in common.”
“That’s true,” Violet said.
They kept walking. The birds began to move through the trees on either side of the lane. Fox Denton’s music came from behind them now. Ella cocked her ear to listen, found that she could no longer hear the song although she still felt it. She closed her eyes, opened them slowly, sang:
Carolina moon keep shining,
Shining on the one who waits for me.
Carolina moon I’m pining,
Pining for the place I long to be.
She stopped singing. The women kept walking. Neither of them spoke.
“Ain’t nobody waiting for me,” Violet finally said. “Nobody but the bill collector.”
“I know that’s right,” Ella said.
“You write any new songs?” Violet asked.
“I been working on one.”
“What’s it about?”
Ella smiled, said, “It’s about this shit life we’re living.”
Violet laughed. “Sounds pretty,” she said. Then she said, “You could make a few dollars.”
“Come on.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “I’ve told you, you can sing, girl. You know they got people over in Charlotte that’ll pay twenty dollars for a hillbilly record.”
“I ain’t no hillbilly,” Ella said. “Not no more.”
“Millbilly then,” Violet said. “Call yourself whatever you want. Just get over there and get yourself paid.”
“We’ll see,” Ella said.
They stopped in front of the cabin where Violet lived with her mother and her younger sister Iva.
“Wait here,” Violet said. “I’ll be right back.”
“You think it’ll help her?”
“I wouldn’t give it to you if I didn’t,” Violet said. “And you better hope something helps. You can’t miss no more work.”
“I can’t lose another baby either,” Ella said. “I asked Dobbins to put me on days so I could take care of Rose at night, but he won’t do it. I told Goldberg’s brother too. Something’s got to change.”
“I’ll be right back,” Violet said. “I got to be quiet. They’re still asleep.”
Ella watched Violet walk up the porch steps and disappear inside the tiny cabin. A weak light came from inside.
Violet was twenty-five, unmarried, and without children. Her sister Iva was twelve years old and as close to a daughter as Violet would have unless she had one of her own, but Ella knew that a sister was no substitute for a being who was born of your own body. Violet was Ella’s best friend, but that didn’t mean Violet could understand what it was to lose a child and then fear that you might lose another.