The Prince of Frogtown (12 page)

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.

I
N 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

I
T 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 packs,” 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.

“Can I have a quarter?” was all he said.

A few arcade games stood in a corner. I fished out a handful of change and put in our order at the counter. The woman and I sat at one of the hard plastic tables, not saying all that much. A large family sat just a few tables over, sheltering as we were from the storm.

I knew them, not their names but their lives, or thought I did. They were working people, mill or day laborers, a woman in dollar-store clothes, a man with grease embedded in his hands, pants pocked by battery acid, cheap boots, vinyl maybe, cracked and run-down. Women know shoes. Men see boots. They had five or six small children, and even in McDonald’s that can put a dent in a poor man’s paycheck, at suppertime. A little blonde girl, smaller than my boy, was asking for money, too, but the woman shook her head and the man didn’t acknowledge her at all, not being mean, just unwilling to pay good money for a few seconds of bright, blipping lights. The little girl did not cry or whine, just walked over to stand in front of one of those games, the kind where you pay your quarter and then try to snatch a stuffed animal with a dangling claw. It was full of bears, cats, dogs, cartoon characters. She just stood there, looking inside.

My boy stepped in front of her as if she was invisible.

I went cold.

I didn’t yell or put my hands on him. I never felt it was my right. I just called to him, and for the life of me I can’t recall what I said. But I can still see his cheeks go red, like I had slapped them. If he had been a man, I would have. I would have knocked him to the floor.

He didn’t say anything, just walked away. Then, as if it was his way of telling me to go to hell, he circled around to the game and dropped in his quarter.

So it was true, I thought.