The Prince of Frogtown Page 10

  They listened as the preacher laid down a list of sins so complete it left a person no place to go but down.

  “They preached it hard, so hard a feller couldn’t live it,” said Homer Barnwell, who went there as a boy.

  The people, some gasping from the brown lung, ignored the weakness in their wind and pain in their chests and sang “I’ll Fly Away” and “Kneel at the Cross” and “That Good Ol’ Gospel Ship.” A woman named Cora Lee Garmon, famous for her range, used to hit the high notes so hard “the leaders would stand out in her neck,” Homer said.

  Then, with the unstoppable momentum of a train going down a grade, the service picked up speed. The Reverend evoked a harsh God, who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, and condemned the Children of Israel, who gave their golden earrings to Aaron to fashion Baal, the false god. “I have seen this people,” God told Moses, “and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, so that my wrath may wax hot against them.”

  As children looked with misery on a service without end, the preacher read chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles:

  And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues…

  The congregants’ eyes were shut tight.

  “Do you feel the Spirit?” the Reverend shouted.

  Their hands reached high.

  “Can you feel the Holy Ghost?”

  They answered one by one, in the light of the full Gospel.

  “Yeeeeesssss.”

  Then, as if they had reached for a sizzling clothesline in the middle of an electrical storm, one by one they began to jerk, convulsing in the grip of unseen power. Others threw their arms open wide, and the Holy Ghost touched them soul by soul.

  Some just stood and shivered.

  Some danced, spinning.

  Some leapt high in the air.

  Some wept.

  Some of the women shook their heads so violently that their hair came free and whipped through the air, three feet long. Hairpins flew.

  The Ghost was in them now.

  They began to speak in tongues.

  The older church people interpreted, and the congregation leaned in, to hear the miracle. It sounded like ancient Hebrew, maybe, a little, and other times it sounded like nothing they had heard or imagined. They rushed to the front of the church and knelt in a line, facing the altar, so the preacher could lay his hands on them, and—through the Father, in the presence of the Holy Ghost—make them whole.

  One by one, they were slain in the Spirit, and fell backward, some of them, fainting on the floor. The services could last for hours, till the congregants’ stomachs growled. “If it’s goin’ good,” Homer said, “why switch it off?”

  AS STRONG AS IT WAS, as close, it was as if sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, across that ditch.

  “We could have by God stayed longer if you’d have brought some damn money,” griped Roy, as they meandered toward the house. It is unclear where they had been that weekend, but apparently they had a real good time. Roy, the prettiest of all of them, leaned against the car for balance, and cussed his older brother a little more. Roy’s eyes were just like my father’s, a bright blue, and his hair was black. He was tall for a Bragg, and the meanest when he drank. He was not a dandy and just threw on his clothes, but was one of those men who would have looked elegant standing in a mudhole.

  Troy cussed him back, but cheerfully. He always wore snow-white T-shirts, black pants and black penny loafer shoes, and as he blithely dog-cussed his brother he bent over, took off one loafer and dumped several neatly folded bills into his hand. Then, hopping around on one foot, he waved the bills in his brother’s face.

  “You lying son of a bitch,” Roy said.

  Troy, his shoe still in his hand, just hopped and grinned, trying not to get his white sock dirty.

  He sniffed the money, like it was flowers.

  “I’ll kill you,” Roy said.

  But they were always threatening to kill somebody.

  Troy, in a wobbly pirouette, laughed out loud.

  In seconds, they were in the dirt, tearing at clothes and screaming curses, and rolled clear into the middle of D Street, in a whirl of blood and cinders.

  The commotion drew first Velma and then Bobby from inside the house. Velma, unheard and ignored, pleaded for them to stop. Bobby, on a binge and still dressed only in his long-handles, cackled, hopped, and did a do-si-do.

  My father banged through the door and into the yard, and, like a pair of long underwear sucked off a clothesline by a tornado, was carried away by the melee.

  In the rising dust, they clubbed each other about the head with their fists, split lips and blacked eyes and bruised ribs. My father, smaller than his brothers, was knocked down and almost out. Velma bent over my father, to make sure he was breathing, and yelled at the older two: “I’ll call the law.” Then she left walking, to find a telephone.

  How many times did Velma make that walk to a borrowed telephone, having to choose between her sons’ freedom and their safety? My Aunt Juanita, driving through the village, remembers seeing her walking fast down the street. “Her heels was just a’clickin’ on the road,” she said.

  She stopped and, through the window, asked Velma if she was all right.

  “The boys is killing each other,” she said.

  In the yard, the boys were staggering now, about used-up. The neighbors watched from their porches, but no one got in the way. The distant scream of a police siren drifted into the yard. Velma had found a telephone.

  By the time the police came, the street was empty and quiet in front of 117, the brothers inside, ruining Velma’s washrags with their blood. Bobby had enjoyed himself immensely, and gone a half day without pants of any kind. Velma walked back, her flat shoes clicking slowly now. But her boys were safe, and nothing mattered next to that.

  In the aftermath, she cooked a five-pound block of meat loaf, a mountain of fried potatoes, a cauldron of pinto beans, and dishpans of squash and okra—nothing special, just the usual supper for the kin that, every Sunday, trickled in to eat.

  It was nothing special, either, that fight, nothing to get all worked up about. The brothers regularly fought in the middle of D Street. “I watched ’em fight,” said Charles Parker, who lived next door.

  Or, as Carlos put it: “You didn’t never ask about that big fight Roy and Troy had, you asked about which one. It happened regular.” It was just part of the rhythm of the week, the rhythm of their lives.

  Most lives move to one kind or another. On the coast, they move to tides, and in a factory town they move to an assembly line. For Carlos, a body and fender man and wrecker driver, life moved to the rhythms of the highway, to the voice of the dispatcher on the radio. In the week he cruised slow and easy, but on Friday nights, when drinkers hit the roads, the dispatcher’s voice crackled with possibility. He stomped the accelerator and raced from ditch to ditch, his winch cable whining, yellow lights spinning, mommas crying, ambulances screaming away or, if it was a bad one, not screaming at all.

  For his cousins on D Street, it was the bootlegger’s rhythm. “The boys and Uncle Bobby all worked, and only dranked on weekends. They’d get goin’ real good on Friday and still be goin’on a Sunday. Of course, sometimes they could still be going on a Tuesday, depending on how much liquor they had. They were the best people in the world, gentle people, when they were all right. But all your daddy’s life, on a weekend, there was liquor there in that house.”

  In the calm of a Monday, the nights had a warmth and peace in Velma’s house. After work, her extended family gathered in her kitchen, eating, talking, babies riding on their knees. But mostly, in that quiet, she cooked. “Oh my,” said Carlos,
“did she cook.” She cooked showpiece meals, meals most people only got on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, and Carlos loved to go see his Aunt Velma in the calm. “It didn’t matter what time of night or day it was, or even if she had to get out of bed, when you went to Aunt Velma’s house the first thing she did was ask you, ‘Y’all boys had something to eat?’ It didn’t matter if you’d done eat, ’cause Velma was gonna feed you anyway.”

  The iron stove had a cast-iron warmer on the top, and in that warmer would be pork roasts and pork chops and fried chicken, two-gallon pots of butter beans with salt pork, navy beans with ham bone, rattlesnake beans glistening with bacon fat, pans of chicken and dressing, macaroni and cheese, cornbread and cathead biscuits, mounds of mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes, skillets of fried green tomatoes. She made meat loaf in a washtub, working loaf bread into the meat, onions and spices with her hands. There would be fried pies, apple and peach, in the warmer, and a banana puddin’ in the icebox. She cooked her pies in a pan the size of a Western Flyer, and she did not cut you a piece but scooped out a mound, a solid pound of pie.

  It was not just food. There was a richness in it, of cream and butter and bacon fat. Her dishes were chipped and her forks were worn, pitted steel, but when people were done the utensils looked like they had been licked clean, and sometimes they were. She taught generations of women to cook, including my own mother, who thinks of her with every shaker of salt. Generations of men, like Carlos, get teary-eyed when they think of her supper table on a random Monday, because they know it will never be that good again.

  In the calm of a Tuesday, the mercurial Roy lay on the couch in the living room with a baby asleep on his chest. He would fight an army when he was drinking, fight laughing, bleeding, but sober he was a gentle man. “Whose baby are you?” he always asked, as the infants opened their eyes. “Roy rocked the babies in the rocking chairs, when he was all right,” my mother said. “He would sing, and hum to them, and he would even diaper them—I guarantee you that your daddy never got nowhere near a diaper.” Roy was not married then, and had no children of his own. He just loved babies, and would rock Troy’s children and sing, and hum the part where the bough breaks, and the baby falls.

  He was a mechanic, a good one, with a set of paid-for tools. Women chased him. He had everything to live for, on a Tuesday, and no reason to dull his life with liquor, no reason to hide in a whiskey haze.

  In the quiet of a Wednesday, Troy walked home from his job at the mill, to tend his birds. In that time and place, it was as noble a job as being a horse breeder. He opened the coop and stuck his hand in toward the fierce creature inside, eyes yellow, beak sharp as a cat’s claw, trilling a warning so low it was almost a growl. But it did not draw blood as he reached in and lifted it out.

  He would sit on the porch, a cup of Red Diamond coffee on the rail, and stroke its beak, cooing to it, as if he wanted it to understand the awful sacrifice he was asking it to make. He had one bird that had won seven fights, a remarkable feat in a death sport, and he would run his fingers through its feathers, looking for parasites. He would treat it with Mercurochrome, like a child with a skinned knee, and let it peck corn from his palm. He fed them a mix of vitamins and racing pigeon feed, to make them strong and fast, and spiked their diet with pickling lime, to stanch the bleeding when they were cut.

  He had to get drunk to fight them, to drop them in that pit on the weekends, had to be good and drunk to watch them die. But on a Wednesday he just loved on them, then went into the house to help his mother snap beans, like any good son.

  On a Thursday, Bob helped his wife sweep the floors, helped her wash the dishes. They would stand side by side, her washing, him drying. He would pick her a gallon of blackberries, just to see her smile. He raised a perfectly matched pair of redbone hounds, and would chase them for hours and hours through the mountains, listening to them sing. He knew the mountains and never got lost, when he was all right. Some evenings he would saddle his riding horse, pull up a child or two, and walk them gently through the streets. The mothers who handed their babies up to my grandfather never fretted about it, because it was just a Thursday.

  IN THE MOUNTAINS, they cooked, too.

  Joe Godwin made liquor in Muscadine. Moe Shealey made it in Mineral Springs. Junior McMahan had a still in Ragland. Fred and Alton Dryden made liquor in Tallapoosa, and Eulis Parker made it on Terrapin Creek. Wayne Glass knew their faces because he drove it, and made more money hauling liquor than he ever made at the cotton mill. He loaded the gallon cans into his car in the deep woods and dodged sheriffs and federal men to get it to men like Robert Kilgore, the bootlegger who sold whiskey from a house in Weaver, about ten minutes south of Jacksonville. “I could haul a hundred and fifty gallons in a Flathead Ford, at thirty-five dollars a load,” he said. Wayne lost the end of one finger in the mill, but he was bulletproof when he was running liquor, and only did time once, for conspiracy. “They couldn’t catch me haulin’ liquor,” he said, “so they got me for thinkin’ about it.”

  It was business, not art. He remembers driving for an old man who calmly told him: “Now, boy, if you steal my liquor, I’ll blow your heart out.” He did not race around like a Hollywood fool, but rode with the traffic, to blend in. He was coming through the county with a carload of liquor when he saw Sheriff Roy Snead blocking the road. “I jumped through the hog lot, jumped a five-strand barbed-wire fence, him shootin’ at me.”

  He lost that load, but liquor always got through somehow.

  “I remember one time, around Christmas, there wadn’t no liquor,” said Wayne. “Got some in Ragland, finally. Liquor had a blue color.”

  On Friday, Bob would give one of the boys some cash and say: “Go get us some liquor,” and the calm drowned in the squeal of a metal lid. The men, Bob, Troy, Roy, others, gathered at the table and drank. Their belligerence was a weed that grew in the stuff, and they argued chickens, dogs, horses, the words to a song, the meaning of a look, the heart of women, the soul of man.

  This was my father’s boyhood.

  Sober, Bob bought pigs from Roy.

  Drunk, Roy came in the night and stole them back.

  Sober, Bob could walk the mountains with an unerring sense of direction.

  Drunk, he went off with other drunk men, cussed them out, got put out of the car and wandered lost in the woods of Whites Gap for two days.

  Sober, her boys treated Velma with respect, love.

  Drunk, she would vanish, cease to matter, except as a medic or bondsman.

  But it all faded, that chaotic rhythm, on a Sunday night. “Everybody was always all right after a few days,” Carlos said. Bob or one of the older boys would thump the can and it would boom, hollow, and it was over. In a few hours they were begging Velma for coffee. Their stomachs, which could not hold food and liquor, would gradually rumble in a more natural way. “Cook us somethin’, Momma,” they would say.

  I don’t know, truthfully, when my father took his first drink. I don’t know what he thought about growing up that way, if he wanted to be just like them, or if he even had a choice, trapped the way a bug is trapped inside the windows of a speeding car. The only thing I know for sure is something he told my mother when they were together. He said that when he was small, and the drinking and fighting and yelling started and grew and grew, he would go sit in the outhouse, and hide.

  * * *

  The Boy

  IT WAS ALMOST SCIENCE FICTION, the way he could change. One minute he was a brat, who pretended to be ill when we were out at supper so he could go immediately home to watch cartoons. Then, as if he changed in a phone booth, he could transform into a sweet, noble boy.

  I saw it the first time in a thunderstorm.

  He loved to go to Alabama to visit my mother—or maybe he just loved biscuits—but even if it was an overnight trip he packed five bags, all jammed with toys, electronics, movies, his blanket, pillows and, for God’s sake, fuzzy slippers. He took slippers, for the car ride. “That’s not how a boy pac
ks,” I said, but I guess boys have changed.

  I didn’t care if he rode bulls or danced ballet, and that’s the truth. But what made me crazy was the idea that he was the kind of boy I used to despise, the kind who looked down his nose on the boy I was. That was it, I realized, as I drove the silver car alone on a windswept highway between Birmingham and Memphis. That was what needled me. My mother cleaned their houses, cooked for them, diapered them. I would not have a boy like that.

  The woman and boy followed behind me, the truck loaded with things we ferried from her Memphis home to the University of Alabama, where I was Professor of Writing. I guess one of these days I’ll get a title fancy enough to cover up everything else. The boy loved to ride with me but I was mad at him for whining, and exiled him to the Chevrolet. Besides, with his accoutrements, I would not have had room to shift gears.

  I rarely listened to the radio as I drove—the flat, six-cylinder engine, more like a jet plane than a car, made its own music—and I was feeling guilty but free as I roared ahead, then sank back, till the storm hit. Lightning ran sideways across the sky in electric pink, as other jags stabbed the ground. Ahead of me, burning even in that rain, a roadside store or barn blazed up yellow and red, a casualty of the storm. Behind me, the rain wiped out everything beyond a few feet. My family disappeared behind that curtain of rain, as if the headlights just winked out, and I panicked a little. I jabbed the phone, useless, over and over, till I finally found her.

  We pulled off at the first exit, a combination McDonald’s and convenience store, crowded with old pickups and ragged work cars, the kind of cars that flood out in a storm like that. I slid in between them, and walked over to the woman and boy.

  The boy was sullen, pouty. The excitement of the storm had not erased the fact that he had not had his way about something neither one of us, now, can even recall.