All Over but the Shoutin' Page 6

  The lifetime of drinking killed Charlie Bundrum in the end just as surely as it did my own father. The doctor called it cirrhosis of the liver. He did not die a little at a time, like most people do. He kept walking, kept working, kept laughing, until one day he just didn’t get out of bed, and died that same day.

  He lived long enough to see most of his family married off, to sit knee-deep in a pool of squirming grandchildren. He saw my mother fall in love with the good-looking, dark-haired, part Cherokee boy, and did not stop them when they drove up to Tennessee to get married by a justice of the peace. She was almost eighteen, and if she was not the most beautiful woman in the county, I do not know who was. The photographs from that time show a tall, slim, blond woman with high cheekbones and a peace about her that comes through even in faded black-and-white. She looks serene. I don’t know. Maybe that is how she stood it.

  My grandfather lived long enough to hold her first child, David Samuel, named from the Bible. He took one look at the long body and nicknamed him Bone. Sambone. And while he loved his grandchildren he seemed to love him most of all, and would hold him in his big hands for hours, or just watch him play in the dirt between his big boots. It was as if he knew his own death was coming, and he wanted to be close to this precious life as much as he could.

  He lived long enough to see the true nature of his son-in-law’s character emerge, saw the cruelty, and his first inclination was to hunt him down and kill him. The second time my momma had to flee my father, my grandfather told her, matter-of-factly, that she could go back to her sorry husband if she felt she had to, but she could not take the boy, Sam.

  When my daddy came to get her my granddaddy met him at the door, and ordered him away like a beggar. My daddy slid his hand in his pocket for his knife but he never pulled it. It probably saved his life, because that tough old man would have come down on him like the strong right hand of God.

  Charlie Bundrum died later that year, in April of 1958. He was fifty-one. “He still had his hair, he still had all his teeth, he didn’t have a gray hair in his head,” said my momma, of when they laid him out. “He was purty.”

  After the funeral, my daddy came for her.

  Her life might have been much different if she had refused to go. She might have found a new man, a decent man, while she still had her youth and her looks. But she had a baby, and the man she loved so much, for a lifetime, was dead and in the ground. There was hope, not much hope, but some, that her husband would change. She dreamed he would stop drinking up his paycheck, stop disappearing for days, for weeks, for months. She dreamed he would stop running around and shaming her, dreamed she would not have to beg him for money for milk for the baby, Sam. She dreamed that this time it might be bearable, it might last.

  She didn’t want much, really, just something decent.

  All she got was me.

  4

  Dreaming that a crooked man will straighten up and fly right

  It was there, sitting in the glow of that gigantic screen, that I saw Alan Ladd call Jack Palance a no-good Yankee liar, send him to his Maker in a haze of gunsmoke and then ride off into the sunset, bleeding, with a little boy frantically chasing him, crying, “Shane! Shane! Come back, Shane!”

  There, I saw Robert Duvall call John Wayne a one-eyed fat man, saw Big John yell out, “Fill yer hand, you sonofabitch!” and charge down across a wide, beautiful valley, reins in his teeth, shooting a Winchester from one hand and a Peacemaker from the other.

  There, I lusted after the unattainable Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, and, years later, lusted after others, oh so attainable. There, I tasted my first orange slush, my first beer, my first kiss, whispered “I will love you forever” to people whose faces and names I can hardly recall. I am sure they cannot remember mine.

  The Midway Drive-In Theater is long gone now, as if, by providence, someone saw fit to remove the scene of so many lovely lies. The Midway, so named because it stood like a beacon midway between Jacksonville and Anniston, is now a lot where they sell mobile homes and prefabricated buildings. The screen is blank, the romance is dead. Sometimes on Friday and Saturday nights I drive past and I forget, and I glance over at the marquee to see what’s playing or glance up into the night sky to catch a fleeting glimpse of some B-movie heroine’s eight-feet-tall lips, and all there is, is dark. It is a shame, really. I have a kinship with the place that goes far beyond simple nostalgia.

  I was almost born there, during the stirring closing moments of The Ten Commandments.

  I am told it was a hot, damp night in late July 1959, one of those nights when the setting of the sun brings no relief. It might have been the heat, or something she ate—an orange slush and a Giant Dill Pickle—but about the time Charlton Heston laid eyes on that golden calf and disowned the Children of Israel as idol worshippers and heathen sons of lewd women, I elected to emerge.

  Some births are marked by a notation in the family Bible, others are acknowledged with the hoisting of glasses. For me, it all began with wandering Hebrews, flying gravel and a dangling speaker.

  The front seat of a 1951 Chevrolet, roomy as it is, is a damned inconvenient place for the miracle of birth, and as the car sped north on Highway 21, my momma gritted her teeth and prayed. It would have been closer to take her to Anniston, but it was cheaper to take her to Piedmont, where most of the country people in our part of the county went to have their babies and kidney stones delivered.

  As it turned out it was hours before her ordeal was over, and during her pains she talked on and on in the emergency room about the parting of the Red Sea and staffs that turned into snakes, so that the doctor began to question his decision to give her painkillers.

  “The main nurse told everybody, ‘Y’all come listen to this woman, she’s gone plumb crazy,’ ” said my momma, laughing.

  Finally, about dawn on Sunday morning, she held her second son in her arms. He was kind of puny looking, actually, with pale blue eyes and hair the same color as her own, and because she had hoped for and believed strongly it would be a girl, she had to dress him in pink, including a pink hat with pink lace on it. She named him Ricky, after Ricky Ricardo. I guess I should be grateful she didn’t name me Lucy.

  All this is the honest to God truth, every word. But for much of my lifetime, I had some of the important details all wrong. I asked her once, a long time ago, if my daddy had paced the waiting room, smoking Camels, worrying about her, about me. That was a father’s duty back then, to worry from a safe distance, protected from the actual birth by a thick sheet of glass and concrete. Men would have no more entered the delivery room to watch the birth than they would have insisted on going to a slaughterhouse to watch their sausage made—the result was what was important, not the process—but it was expected of them to wait outside with the nervous kinfolks. But my momma told me no, he had not been there at the hospital, so I just naturally assumed he had gone off somewhere to get drunk and await word, another acceptable tradition. But that was not true, either.

  I had believed it was Momma and Daddy at the Drive-In that night, believed it was him who calmly steered that sedan along the dark highway to the hospital. But in fact it was my momma, my grandma, my aunt Gracie Juanita, my aunt Jo, my aunt Sue, my brother Sam, and probably a cousin or two they smuggled in inside the trunk. My daddy was nowhere around, had not been seen for months, and had nothing to do with my momma and me making it to the hospital in time. The hero was my aunt Gracie Juanita, and the route to the hospital was anything but a beeline. Because the kinfolks all started hollering at once, giving directions and advice and threatening to ruin her concentration—Aunt Gracie Juanita cannot navigate if she cannot concentrate—she had to make a ten-minute detour past her house to let ’em all out before heading for Piedmont Hospital. She has never been what you call a fast driver, but I understand that, feeling the urgency of the situation, she might have blistered down that highway at forty miles per hour. Looking back, it is a wonder I was not born in transit.

&nbs
p; The first six years of my life followed a ragged pattern. There were brief periods when my mother and father were together, longer ones of separation, her family growing ever larger even as he became less and less a father.

  I was born in one of those many periods in which my father had either abandoned my momma or driven her away, and she was living in my grandmother’s little house, picking cotton, taking in ironing. It was weeks, maybe months before word finally reached him that he had a son, and if he gave a damn he never showed it. My first birthday passed without word from him. On the second birthday, he came bearing gifts. I was walking. I was talking. My brother, Sam, was five, and he had forgotten what his daddy looked like.

  I have little firsthand information about that time, since I was still not trusted with anything more dangerous than a sharp spoon, but I know he eventually talked my momma into coming back home with him, and kept her, this time, just long enough to leave her with another child, my baby brother, Mark. Then he disappeared again, leaving her with a six-year-old, a three-year-old, and the infant, but with no money, no car, not one damn thing. So she just swallowed her pride and went home again, to the fields and the manual labor that slowly turned her from a beautiful young woman into one old before her time, until the next time he snatched us up and moved us to places in and around Piedmont, Possum Trot, Spring Garden, Jacksonville. Once, we followed him to Dallas, but that didn’t last, either.

  I guess it is hard for some people to understand why this was, why she kept going back to him when he treated her so badly. I guess trying to explain it is futile, since it would be like trying to explain starving to someone who thinks hungry is being late for dinner. Her life had slipped into a dull routine of sacrifice and loneliness, and these times with him offered at least a sliver of hope, a promise of what other people had. She kept going back, even after she realized he might never change, not because she loved him in that pitiful way some women love bad men, but because there were whole months at a time when he did pay the electric bill, when he did give her money for groceries. There were long months when he held his children with something very close to love, when he was sober, mostly, and kind. There were nights at the table when he sat with a baby on his lap and spoon-fed him, and laughed when one of us daubed food in his face. It never lasted. It was a dream sandwiched by pain.

  There would always come a night when she put our clothes in paper sacks and buttoned our coats, begging us not to cry, to shush, baby, we’re goin’ to see Grandma. He never bought her presents, never bought her anything, so there was nothing for her to pack of her own, nothing precious. Sometimes we left in the still dark hours of morning, when he was passed out, and walked fast down the dark roads for miles, just getting away. We walked until she could find a phone and call for help, and we would wait for the headlights of an uncle or aunt’s car to appear, and then we knew we were safe.

  She did what she could to support us with her own work, her own sweat, but sometimes it was just too hard. I know it killed her deep inside to go begging, but it would have destroyed her to watch her three sons do without. She stood in line at the welfare office, stood in line for government cheese. She fawned over the church people, year after year, who showed up at Christmas with a turkey or a ham. I saw her follow them back to their big cars, thanking them, a hundred times, and walk back to the house pale and tight-lipped.

  I did not know then, like I know now, that my momma never ate until we were done, or maybe I did know but was too young to understand why. I did not know then that she picked all the meat out of the soup and stew and put it on our plates. I did not hear her scraping pots, pans and skillets to make her own plate, after her three little pigs ate most of what we had. But I can still see her sliding the bones off plates and gnawing them clean, after we were done, saying how she liked that meat close to the bone, that we just didn’t know what we were missing. It is not that we were starving, just that the quality of life for her children inched up a little, if she did without.

  She stood in line at the checkout counter at the Goodwill, ten-cent dresses draped across her sunburned arms. I can remember walking the aisles of that store, remember trying on other people’s clothes. Mostly, as I grew from a toddler into a boy of five or six, I wore Sam’s hand-me-downs, which was fine except I am longer from my shoulders to my belly button than he is, and so spent the first five or six years of my life with my navel showing. His legs are longer than mine, so my momma had to hem my pants, or tried to. She may be a saint but she has no depth perception, and always left one leg shorter than the other. I am easy to find in our old black-and-white photos taken by my aunts and uncles. Just look for the little boy with the shining navel, who, even when he is standing on flat ground, looks like he is walking around the side of a hill.

  I remember we scavenged the city dump at Jacksonville, and I was too little to be ashamed. We picked through the latest leavings, burrowed into mountains of trash, not for food, because it never got that bad, but for treasure. We came home with moldy, flat footballs, melted army men, radios that never made a sound. My momma looked for anything she could sell, copper wires, aluminum, Coke and Orange Crush and RC bottles, worth a penny. And I remember, with a clarity that I wish would fade, the smell of that stuff, that treasure. It is a sickly sweet smell laced with rot and smoke, because they burned trash back then, and often we had to race the flames to claim it. I have no doubt that this is what hell smells like.

  It would be years before I was old enough to realize that the way we lived was somehow less than the way of other people, years before I began to chafe under it, until finally I was ashamed to bring friends into our house. It would be years before I had to duck my head when we went to the dump to burrow, and years before I knew that I was supposed to be ashamed that when a teacher called roll for lunch money, my name was never called. It was stamped “FREE.” Welfare lunches.

  You lose a lot in your memory, over so many years. But I distinctly remember, before I was old enough to cover myself in what my mother called false pride, that there was also some happiness there. While I was often frightened and troubled by the drastic changes in our life, because of our father, I was too damn little and too damn stupid to be miserable.

  The little wood-frame house seemed huge then, a place to run and jump and hide and climb, but now I can stand in the middle of the living room and touch one wall with my right hand and the other with my left. It had an Ashley wood heater, and the sink in the kitchen was the only indoor plumbing it had. There was no hot water unless you heated it in a pan, and the light came from naked bulbs that dangled from the ceiling. There was no basement, no attic, just a little wooden box that sat solid on four legs of concrete block, so that the dogs and children could find sanctuary underneath in the cool dirt. I played for hours under it, digging holes with an old spoon, until the wasps or the snakes or my momma ran me out. I buried treasures, balls of aluminum foil, a button, anything that had a shine, and went back the next day, the next month, the next year, to dig it up again.

  The bathroom was fifty yards away, a plywood outhouse. I know it is a cliché, but it really did have a Sears, Roebuck catalog on the floor, and a sawn-off broom handle, to do in the five-inch centipedes and black widow spiders and the odd snake. A lot of people did have indoor plumbing on our road, of course. For many men it was the first thing they did, when they got a steady paycheck. They put in a bathroom for their family. My momma had to iron forty pounds of clothes to make four dollars, so we were probably the last family on Roy Webb Road to experience the joy of twentieth-century ablution.

  I cannot say I am nostalgic for the outhouse, because anyone who has ever had to visit one at 2 A.M. in January with a flashlight and a rolled-up back issue of the Anniston Star will tell you that the first contact with that cold pine board is damned exhilarating. When I was five, as I was then, I had to get a running start from the willow tree to leap high enough to reach the seat, and then was left with the uncomfortable truth that there was no way to s
hut the door. Sometimes Momma would see me and, understanding, close the door for me, and she would not grin about it. Sam would not only leave the door open but would sneak around the corner of the house and throw rocks at me, once my britches were down, and once he locked a mean tomcat in there with me and just leaned against the door, laughing. It sounds, now, like a cartoon. I damn near died.

  Once, I badly miscalculated my jump to the throne, and instead of landing to the side of the diamond-shaped hole, on solid plank, I jumped clean into the heart of darkness. I skinned my legs and scared myself, and thanked God that the hole was not quite big enough to swallow me. No one would have believed I didn’t do it on purpose, since I was in some ways a peculiar child.

  I caught crawfish in the bright, clear waters of Germania Springs, and dammed streams with my brother until the water was neck deep and freezing cold. We built homemade boats and sailed them a good six or seven feet before they sank like stone and half-drowned us. I was a water baby, and when it rained I would run laughing through the big, hard drops, the red mud squishing between my toes. I would fling myself belly down into mud puddles, scattering tadpoles, squishing some. Yet I kicked and screamed when my momma tried to give me a bath, because there was just no sport in it, and was liable to run naked if she ever sat me down and let go the death grip she had on my skinny arms.