The Prince of Frogtown (17 page)

Jack had never seen my father afraid.

He wished they would talk about something else.

“Well,” my father said after a while, “I was just thinking.”

I asked him if he knew when my father took his first drink, when he let that demon into his mouth. But it was impossible to tell, in a house where whiskey sat on a table like salt. He stole sips whenever he wanted, but he did not hunger for it at fifteen, Jack said. “Funny,” he said, “that I don’t remember us drinking that much. I mean, now and then there’d be something, like this man I knew who called us over one time and let us have a drink of white whiskey flavored in peppermint. There was whiskey all around, but we was just boys, then.” He looks a little wistful when he talks about it, the way old, reformed drinkers do, like a married man thinking about majorettes.

T
HEY DECIDED,
finally, to be entrepreneurs, instead of just dreaming about it. They picked something they knew—whiskey—and decided to get rich being bootleggers. It was their first business venture together, a tub whiskey operation in a five-gallon can in a holler outside town. “Take five pounds of sugar, two yeast cakes, and one can of Blue Ribbon malt syrup. Put it in warm water, and set it someplace warm, where the sun can hit it. We hid it in the honeysuckle,” Jack said. “About seventy-two hours later, you’ve got yourself some home brew.” It was not quality whiskey. “You had to be careful not to get the sediment stirred up, or you’d get a terrible headache.” They made it, but wouldn’t drink it on a bet.

They filled Dr Pepper, Nehi and RC bottles with the stuff, and sold it behind the pool hall.

“Twenty-five cents a bottle,” Jack said, “and they’d drink it up fast.”

He supposed there was some risk of poisoning.

“But it was better than stealing,” Jack said.

One day he and my father walked up to their primitive still—really just a bucket full of mess allowed to sour in the heat—and saw that a possum had fallen in the swill.

“Is it dead?” my father asked.

“Yep,” Jack said.

The possum seemed to be grinning at them.

“What we gonna do?” Jack said.

“Well,” my father said, “we ain’t gonna pour it out.”

They filled their bottles and sacked them up. They were not even driving yet, and already bootlegging. They made their sales in their usual places, and watched as the boys poured it down, as usual. If their customers noticed any unusual flavor, they did not complain. A hog could have drowned in it, and not greatly affected the taste.

Walking home, my father started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” said Jack, who had just been happy no one had keeled over dead.

“I was just wondering,” my father said, “if any of them boys got any hair in their teeth.”

There was nothing to do but win, win over and over again, with so little to lose.

Once, they did odd jobs for a family that had a hundred cats.

“Let’s kidnap one of them cats,” my father said.

They would write a ransom note, and demand whatever a good cat was worth.

But the plan fell through, when they figured what that was.

“For the record, I never killed no cat,” Jack said.

But he wonders, did anyone ever do a better job than they did, of squeezing the last little bit out of being a boy?

“I remember this time, up in Rich Bundrum’s barn loft, we found this case of dynamite,” Jack said, and then he paused and shook his head, as if realizing now what he should have then: that there are no good endings to stories that begin with
we found this case of dynamite.
“Well, we found the blasting caps and wire, and got this ol’ flashlight battery, and went to Big Creek. But first, we took a knife, and, real, real careful, we cut that dynamite into little pieces. We had this ol’homemade boat, and we floated down to this place where the water pooled…and, since the water was real deep in that place, we thought it would be safe…” Jack fixed the cap to the dynamite and the wire to the cap, then leaned out over the boat, to drop it in the pool. A rusty steel cable ran across the stream there, and Jack held on to that with one hand, for balance. He let the dynamite nubbin go and watched it swirl down as my father touched one end of the split wire to the old battery negative post, then touched the other end to positi—

BLAM!

Jack was blown off his feet, would have been blown into the air, but he kept his grip on the wire, his toes pointed to heaven, till he crumpled, eyeballs bulging, ears ringing. “You all right?” my father mouthed at him, but Jack really didn’t know.

He can still see my father laughing, laughing, but with no sound.

“That might be what’s wrong with me now,” Jack said.

O
NE DAY,
after they turned sixteen, they were tapping down the sidewalk side by side,
clickety-clack,
and saw their buddies on the square, “and ever’ one of ’em was all dressed up,” Jack said. “A. J. Bragg was up there, and all the Stricklands. I said, ‘Where y’all goin’ all dressed up?’ ‘We goin’ to church,’ they said. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘ ’Cause we done found a whole church full of pretty women,’ they said. So we all went. Me and your daddy walked in and, oh Lord, I never seen at the pretty women. I don’t know where all them women came from. I never will forget it, us in the pews with our hair slicked back, singing hymns. The preacher preached it fire and brimstone, I mean he preached it like it
was,
and me and your daddy sat and nodded our heads.” They would look left at big-eyed brunettes and right at dime-store blondes, and if the girls looked back Jack and my father would nod, mouth a discreet “amen,” and turn back to the Word. “You know, a lot of the boys got their wives there,” Jack said. “I mean they
married
’ em.”

But Jack and my father still had too much running around to do, so they watched some of the boys forfeit their sins at the altar call, then backslid home to Jacksonville. My father did not go to church again, but Jack did. “It’s where I learned to pick the guitar,” he said, and I like to believe there was God’s hand in that.

“Your daddy,” Jack said, “loved to hear me bend them strings.”

Jack learned from every half-drunk picker who would teach him a chord. “But gospel was the first music I played,” he said. He learned at the knee of J. D. Hulsey in the heat of Emmanuel Holiness. “Watch, young ’un,” J.D. would say, and Jack would follow his fingers along the frets. Every church picker in the South had to know Ferlin Husky’s “On the Wings of a Dove” in 1950, and J.D. could play it just like they did on the radio.

On the wings of a snow-white dove

He sends his pure sweet love

A sign from above

On the wings of a dove

It was always the three of them you saw, my father, Jack, and Jack’s guitar.

He didn’t even believe in the faith Jack sang of, but he loved the songs.

“I don’t know, it’s like it put him to rest,” said Jack.

On Sunday mornings, with church music drifting from every block, my father and Jack would find a clean, green, shady place to lie down. “Pick us somethin’ purty, Jack,” he would say, and Jack would pick till sunset, then pick in the dark.

On Saturday nights, the two boys gathered around a radio for the Grand Ole Opry, live from the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. Ernest Tubb sang “I’m Walkin’ the Floor Over You.” Through a hiss of static, they heard the place go wild over Hank.

I’m gonna find me a river, one that’s cold as ice

And when I find me that river, Lord I’m gonna pay the price, Oh Lord I’m going down in it three times, but Lord

I’m only comin’ up twice

They would walk miles to see a front-porch picker drink and play. James Couch tore it up on lead guitar, and Charles Hardy, of course, played flawless rhythm, and they sang with that tortured voice you cannot fake, that you can only get in a cotton mill, or a red-dirt field, or if your children call another man “Daddy.” The music itself was flavored by corn whiskey that made Jim Beam taste like soda pop, and culminated in a sound as different from modern-day country music as a rattler is from a garter snake. One of the best front-porch pickers in town was in the family, my uncle Bartow Wall. His friends shortened his name to Bato, then shortened that to Bat, which we pronounced Bot, and if you ask me why I would just have to make something up. He married my aunt Clara, and if you can’t marry a dentist, the next best thing would have to be a guitar man. It was like going to the Opry or the Louisiana Hayride when you walked up on their porch. Bot bootlegged a little, but there wasn’t a hillbilly song on this earth that he couldn’t play.

My father didn’t have that rhythm in him that Jack did, so he got some spoons, so he could keep time, and beat them on his leg as Jack and the grownups picked. “He was just happy,” Jack said. “As long as music was playing, your daddy was happy.” The girls loved it, too, Jack said. “That guitar was a master key, for me and your dad,” Jack said. “The women loved that guitar.”

He got a brand-new guitar as soon as he thought he could afford it. “I didn’t play but one kind…maybe two, if you count a Martin,” he said. “I got me a Gibson.” It cost $260, which was a fortune. He bought it on credit for $17 a month. “I touched the strings, and it was like they knew where to go,” he said. He lived part of his dream with that guitar. Next to the John Wayne poster is a faded photograph of a genuine country and western band. All the men in it are young and straight and whole. There’s young Charles Hardy, Vernon Copeland, Jimmy Roberts, Frankie Snyder, and Jack, young and handsome with a mop of jet-black hair. “We’uz playin’ the convention hall in Gadsden,” Jack said, and the people used to holler at them like they were true stars, like they were Hank Williams’ hat. He played a big talent show in Gadsden, the parking lot swimming with tail fins and shining with baby moon hubcaps, and a whole contingent of fans—my mother and her sisters were there—came over from Jacksonville and hollered like crazy. “He done good,” said my mother, who knew Jack when they were both teenagers. “He liked to have won.”

My father was always there to clap for Jack, but he didn’t see her, and she didn’t see him. They would have remembered if they had. He would have noticed the prettiest girls, and she would have noticed he was pretty well drunk. By seventeen, he was drinking hard on weekends, fighting for fun. “I could calm him down with that guitar, but just a little bit,” Jack said.

My father was still underage when he signed up for the Marines, as the war in Korea ground to a bloody tie. Velma signed a paper and cried, because he was underage, and he was gone.

Jack wound up in Korea, too, just a little later, in the army.

They never saw each other there. Jack dreamed a lot about home, since it was more real than anything there. He dreamed about music running through the streets like clear water, and the sound of spoons.
“Pick it again, Jack.”

He was afraid he would lose his buddy there.

It might have been easier if he had.

The Boy