“I don’t know,” the policeman said. He smiled. “Just they.”
He headed west out of Gastonia for the open highway that led to Bessemer City. As soon as he crossed the bridge he saw dozens of cars and trucks parked on the side of the road. A truck had tipped over and come to rest on its side in the field below. Men stood along the road and stared down at the truck. Most of the men were armed. In the field, black and white strikers sat bloodied and shaken. A few of them dared to walk back toward the road, the bravest of them screamed taunts at the armed men.
Brother parked the truck and took up the rifle, chambered a round, and stuffed more into his pockets. He felt and heard the ammunition clink against the Mason jar, and he pulled the jar loose and tossed it onto the floorboard. He climbed out of the truck and shimmied down the bank toward the field, where people stood in groups, some attending others who appeared injured. He searched each face for Ella’s, but he did not see her. He reached a creek that cut through the field. He stumbled, and fell on the mossy rocks. The rifle slipped from his hands, and he got to his knees and felt around in the water until his fingers found it. He stood, then raced toward the high cotton on the other side of the creek.
He found her lying in the dirt between rows of cotton, the front of her dress soaked in blood. Her open eyes stared toward the sky. Brother knelt beside her, searched her throat for a pulse, placed his ear against her chest in the hope of hearing a heartbeat or feeling her lungs expand with breath. He stayed there, his head to her chest, the tiny chair coming to rest upright above her heart. Brother watched the chair, waiting for it to be disturbed by anything but the wind, but it did not move. He sat up, looked down at Ella’s face, tried to picture her as the girl he’d met all those years ago in Cowpens, the girl who’d swindled him for pork rinds and Coca-Cola to satisfy Miss Myra’s curiosity about the young woman in the wagon with the newborn baby.
Now, sitting by Ella’s body in a cotton field miles away from the place he’d first seen her outside the general store, he recalled Miss Myra’s questions to him where she’d stood in the doorway to the bedroom of John Wiggins’s dogtrot. “Oh, Verchel, what are we going to do with them? With you?”
While he did not have an answer then, he had one now. He knew what he had done with himself, what all of his drunken hours with John Wiggins back in Cowpens had done to Ella and her children once Miss Myra had discovered how he spent his afternoons. The family had been forced out of town in the middle of the night. Miss Myra had forced him out as well. All he had wanted was to marry a good woman and be a good man, and he had tried, but he had failed. Seeing Ella again after all these years had given him another chance, and he’d failed at that as well. He slipped the necklace over his head and removed the tiny chair from the leather strap. He tucked it into Ella’s pocket.
He heard the rustling of footsteps. A young colored woman appeared in the next row, her chest heaving from running. She looked at him for a moment, and then she looked down at Ella’s body, covered her mouth with both hands, and screamed.
Chapter Seventeen
Lilly Wiggins
Monday, December 26, 2005
I begged her not to go, Edwin. I was so young, and it was so long ago that it seems like I shouldn’t remember, but I do. I can remember feeling like it was all over after the policeman had been killed and so many of them had been arrested. I just remember thinking that it was unnecessary for her to go because it had all ended.
We were standing out there in the road, watching the people load up into these big trucks. Well, they seemed like big trucks at the time. I remember telling Mother, “I don’t want you to go.” And she said, “Well, I have to, and I will.” And she did. If someone had come along at that moment and told me that I’d never see my mother again, I think I would have believed them. I’ve always believed that so much about my life was decided right at that moment.
Mother sent me home, Iva and me both. Iva was sore because she thought it was my fault that she didn’t get to go with them. But I didn’t care what she was sore about. I was too afraid.
Iva had gone home to her house, so, an hour or so later, when I saw her coming down the road screaming as loud as she could, I knew something had gone wrong. She was screaming, “Hey, Lilly! Hey, Lilly!” and I remember standing on the front porch and wondering what she was going to tell me once she arrived. But as she got closer I was able to hear her more clearly. She’d been screaming, “They killed her. They killed her.” And of course I knew exactly who they’d killed.
The two trucks in which she rode were attacked by an armed mob. Dozens of people witnessed it, but no one claimed to know for certain who had shot her. The police ended up arresting a few men, but Loray bailed them out and paid for their legal defense. They were all found innocent. I doubt it surprised anyone. It didn’t surprise me.
The day after her funeral, the preacher who’d been hired by someone in town to preach her service came to pay us a visit. Mother hadn’t stepped foot in a church in years, and I suspect they were afraid that someone from the union would want to lead the service. They’d all had enough of the union by then, so someone paid the Presbyterian preacher to do it.
The preacher wasn’t done with us yet. He showed up with his wife, and they made us pack up the few things we owned and told us we were going on a trip. What they didn’t say was that we were going to Barium Springs, the Presbyterian children’s home outside Statesville. And what they definitely didn’t tell us was that the preacher’s wife had planned on keeping Wink. We didn’t know that until they dropped us off that evening. It was like another death, Edwin. We didn’t see him for years and years, and by the time I finally found him he had no memory of me or Mother or Rose or your father. He was a stranger by then, and I was a stranger to him.
The orphanage was nice, and we should have appreciated it more than we did because we had no other option. For the first time in our lives we had everything we’d ever wanted— school, clothes, shoes, food—but we’d lost something of ourselves. We were used to living outside, used to coming and going whenever we pleased. We’d never had anyone “in charge” of us, and it took us a long, long time to get used to it.