Wallace

by Marshall Frady

  Also resting in the Pea River cemetery is Wallace's grandfather. He was a sturdy and austere country doctor in rimless glasses who kept one drawer of his office desk brimming with “Hambone's Meditations,” which he clipped out of local newspapers. Most of the pecan trees now flourishing around Clio were planted by his hand. And in a sense, he provided many of the voters necessary to start his grandson's career. “People are sprinkled all over this county who were delivered by my grandfather,” says Wallace's brother Jack. “A lot of them are named for him-Wallace Mozelle, Wallace Tillman, Wallace Carpenter…”

  It was the doctor's hope that George would become a minister. A relentlessly pious man, he rehearsed his grandsons in Bible verses to recite before each meal at his table, and he himself read through the scriptures over and over again, from Genesis to Revelation; his frequent passages through the book are marked with neat rows of dark pencil notches in the margins. His disposition was generally unbudging. In 1928 he was elected probate judge, served out his six-year term, opening every session with a prayer, and then went back to his practice because he had promised when he ran that he would not seek reelection. His passion against alcohol was obsessive. “He was the biggest whiskey-hater in this part of the country,” a Claytonian recalls. “He was all the time totin' around temperance petitions, which to him wasn't for temperance but outright annihilation. We had a candidate for governor once whose name happened to be Boozer, and Dr. Wallace announced one morning to a bunch of us downtown, “The name alone would cause me to be against him.'”

  The doctor's one indulgence was fine horses. Momma Mae, whom he brought back from Kentucky as his second wife not long after the death of his first, remembers, “Dr. Wallace purchased a mare which he had been led to believe by certain interested parties had been bred to a Tennessee Walking Horse. I don't believe I ever saw him so excited in all the time I knew him. It was all he could talk about while he waited for the mare to foal-he was going to have himself a Tennessee Walking Horse. After the mare foaled, Dr. Wallace would go out every evening when he was through with his duties just to look at it for a while, and then come back to the house and talk all through supper about how he couldn't wait for his Tennessee Walking Horse to get grown-he was already riding it, you might say, cantering around the square and all over the countryside. Even after a few people began to remark how the colt's ears seemed to be growing unusually fast, seemed to be awfully long already, he kept on talking like that. In fact, he started talking a little more and a little faster about it. Finally one evening a close friend of his came by to take a look at the thing. They went out back together, and shortly returned to the house. His friend told him, 'Doctor, I don't believe I've ever seen a Tennessee Walking Horse with ears quite like that,' and Dr. Wallace said, real quiet, 'No.' His friend said, 'Doctor, I believe that is actually a mule out there,' and Dr. Wallace said, 'Yes, I suppose it is.' After his friend left, Dr. Wallace didn't say anything all evening. He had finally admitted it, and he was sick for months afterward. It was hard to get him even to eat.”

  It seems that Wallace was closer to his grandfather than to his father. “George was the oldest child,” says Momma Mae, “and when Gerald, the second boy, was born two years after George, George refused to go home. Dr. Wallace tried to take him back, and then an hour or so later returned, driving up the street with George still sitting there beside him. It sort of stayed like that ever after. George stayed with us more than Jack or any of the others. He liked to crawl into bed with his granddaddy in the mornings, and he'd ride around with him on his calls to Baker Hill and everywhere.”

  In 1948, at the age of eighty, Dr. Wallace died. Up to the last, he had continued riding a horse around the square every morning, causing some anxiety among the townfolk. “We just knew that one of these days he was gonna fall off, or a car was gonna hit him. But nobody could bring themselves to say anything to him. He rode well. He was a handsome figure, even as old as he was.” Lurleen remembered that “when we were living in Clayton, we could hear his horse early in the morning coming down the paved street back from town. The children and I would go to the door and watch for him. I told them, 'That is your great-grandfather on that horse.'” George was with him the night he died.

  If young George felt closer to his grandfather than to his own father, it was probably because George Wallace, Sr., was almost totally absorbed in a ceaseless, savage, losing cat-fight with life. He was a frail man outrageously harried by sickness and failure, and it was as if, engaged with his own demons during his precarious existence, he simply couldn't afford to pause long enough to comprehend that he had produced three sons and a daughter, much less the time to pay them attention.

  He was known in the community as “Sag.” One native of Clio remembers, “He was just a little ole runty dried-up feller who was always freezing even in the summertime. He never did get hot-never did sweat. He just seemed to have that cold blood. You'd see him all the time downtown smokin' a cigarette and drinkin' a Coca-Cola. There'd be that Coca-Cola in one hand and that cigarette in the other. I guess he drank the most Cokes of anybody I ever saw in my whole life.” He spent his entire adult life near death, dodging its persistent swoops at him.

  Wallace recalls vividly of his father, “He didn't have but one lung. His other lung had just died on him, and one side of his chest was caved way in. He also had this terrible sinus trouble. They finally had to carry him to Montgomery and cut out a piece of his skull right above his eyes-when they pulled the flap back, you could see his brains. It left a real bad-lookin' place there, a kind of holler. The kind of operation he had could kill you just with shock. He suffered so much from it, it affected his heart. When I was old enough to drive, I'd take him up to Montgomery every time his head swelled up again.”

  The only thing that seemed to sustain him, with his single dogged lung, was a sheer cold impotent rage. “He was not what you'd call an ardent church-worker,” recalls an old acquaintance, “because he was too busy just concentratin' on stayin' alive a little longer. He tended to like his toddy. And he didn't like to leave folks and go home. He just went there to eat and sleep. I guess he was a damn rascal like the rest of us. Jackson's General Store was our hangout, back there around a wood stove, and he spent more time there than any of us. He was a bad one for gettin' in fights. He was a scrapper, just like little George. He'd fight 'em all. There was a fella, Paul Burnham, who was freshman football coach at Alabama for a while, who'd come to town to coach a bunch of country corn-fed boys down here. One day he dropped by the store, and George was layin' up on a counter with one of his headaches, his head on a bolt of cloth and a cigarette hangin' out of his mouth, just sufferin'. Burnham took a look at him and said, 'Why in hell don't you go on home and die?' George was up of fa that bolt of cloth like a flash. Burnham just managed to get back out the door.”

  According to another Barbour County native, “George and a chairman of the Board of Revenue we had once, they didn't get along too well. They had a kind of difficulty once, and George chased him through the courthouse in Clayton with a pocketknife.” A man who had been one of his closest friends in Clio recalls, “When we were about sixteen or seventeen, there was one girl that he was especially fond of. I did her a little favor once-something I don't even remember-but I was just being considerate, I didn't have any interest in the girl atall. But it like to tore up George. He wanted to fight me. I was a lot bigger and stronger than he was, but he didn't leave me any choice. So we went back behind the street into this public privy, and first thing I know he's pulled out a knife. It didn't scare me much, because I knew I was the best man. But he made a pass at me and nicked me here by the left eye and then come down and cut the vein in the crutch of my arm here. I bled like a stuck pig.” Grinning, the old friend points to a scar which, after fifty-two years, is still long and vivid and savage. “That's the way he was. His daddy had to patch me up.”

  He did some amateur acting in playlets and pageants in county schools and churches; it seems h
is style was somewhat grand and swaggering. But most other diversions bored him. “Hell, no, he didn't fish,” says his old friend in Clio. “That was hard work. He wasn't brought up to work. He was a doctor's son. He was the apple of Dr. Wallace's eye, no doubt about it. Dr. Wallace indulged him in anything he wanted.” But whenever he turned his hand to any enterprise, it was like the withering touch of frost. “Dr. Wallace finally sent him up to Methodist Southern College in Greensboro. But he didn't stay long in school; he must not have been up there much more'n a year before he got it into his head to raise him some cows and make some money. He was gonna be a gentleman farmer. So he went to Tennessee and bought a bunch of fine short-horn cattle and brought 'em down here and put 'em all in a broomsage field. He didn't know no more about farmin' than that. Naturally, they were all dead inside of two years. He kept on tryin' to farm a little bit-peanuts, cotton, corn, a few hogs and mules-but he just wasn't practical. He was always losin' money at it. He messed around some as a jackleg veterinarian. But he didn't really make any money until he got that little bit from being on the Board of Revenue, and even that wadn't no more'n about twenty-five dollars a month.”

  They say in Clio, “If there was one thing George, Sr., took to natural, it was politics.” In his only personal venture, he was elected chairman of the county Board of Revenue, but it is also claimed that he was responsible for his father's term on the bench. “Being a good Christian man and a doctor don't get you the votes in politics. It was George, Sr., that did the real dirty-work politicking. Dr. Wallace just sat back while his son put him in.” A veteran Barbour County politician maintains, “ 'Course, all George, Sr., ever dealt in was peanuts, so to speak, while George, Jr., now is in that high-class bracket. But the father had a natural mind for it which was just as good as George, Jr.'s, and maybe even a little better. He was just too puny and sick to move around like George, Jr., does. But was sho nuff shrewd at it. Right before he died, he was planning to run for probate judge, but he had to give it up 'cause he couldn't get together enough money.”

  Wallace stayed up all night with his father once or twice during local elections. “I wasn't but about ten years old, but I was fascinated. Watchin' him count those votes was like watchin' somebody water-ski for the first time.” But his first recollection of his father is still his clearest one: “I don't know how old I was. I couldn't have been more'n four or five. I had gone out in a field with my daddy to watch him plow behind a mule. I was sittin' on the ground in a hot sun, barefooted, and watchin' him walk away from me, followin' that mule, goin' away so far, so far, and I didn't think he was ever comin' back.”

  It was not his heart, his embattled lung, or his sinuses that ultimately betrayed him, but a flank attack, Brill's fever-a mild form of typhus which, according to one member of the family, “was transmitted by fleas offa rats.” Wallace was a freshman in college, and when he got back home, his grandfather was leaning over his father's scrawny unconscious form; he looked up at Wallace and said simply, “I think he's gone this time.” He died the next afternoon. It was November, and the funeral was held on a soft gentle day. “All the nigguhs on our place came by the house,” says Wallace. “Daddy was in the living room in his casket, you know, and they filed by and said, 'Lawd, lawd, what we gonna do now?'”

  He left behind him only his mean, unprofitable, and hopelessly mortgaged farm and the modest house which he had built in Clio, its lumber scavenged from the old unpainted frame house with its blank open corridor straight from front to back door, where Wallace was born. After he was buried in the Pea River churchyard, several members of the community quietly approached Wallace's mother and told her that if she could manage to hold the farm together, they would see that she never lacked for food. She briskly rejected that arrangement. Instead, she quickly disposed of the land-the blasted futile remains of her husband's dream of becoming a gentleman farmer, uselessly scraped and worried and raked now by a few Negro tenants- and took a job with Roosevelt's New Deal as supervisor of the local NYA sewing room. Even now she is careful to explain, “I did it just to keep myself busy. They told me, 'We aren't offering this to you because we think you need it.' I could have done without it-oh, yes. But I felt I might have a chance to help these girls from out in the country.”

  She had come to Clio from a female boarding academy in Mobile. She met her future husband in the waiting room of the Montgomery railroad terminal when he was on his way to college in Greensboro and she was on one of her trips between school in Mobile and her home in Birmingham. How he approached her, what they said to each other, and how long they talked remains obscure. But shortly afterward, she appeared in Clio- a small, tidy, prim girl who began teaching music-Beethoven, Chopin and MacDowell-in the high school and doughtily commandeering her lumpish pupils through seasonal formal piano concerts, but whose purpose there, everyone knew, was eventually to become the wife of the doctor's son. Two years after they had found each other, had struck their quick and probably tacit arrangement in the Montgomery station, they were married.

  “My mother was thrown into a totally different environment when she came to marry my father,” says Gerald, the second son. “There was some dissension between the two of them over drinking. My mother couldn't stand drinking, and my father was known to get his share.” An old friend of the family recalls, “She was smooth. She was real tiny and nice. But George, Sr., he-well, we went over there one day for dinner right after he had his sharecroppers kill some hogs, he was a great pork-eater, and he asked me to return the thanks, and when I finished-he must have been checking the table while I was doing it-he said, 'Bitsy, whur's the meat?' She had laid out the table beautiful with turkey and chicken and everything. 'I'm talkin' about hog meat,' he said. 'What the hell do you think I killed them hogs for?' She was real quiet through the rest of the dinner. She never would show any sign he could get her down, leastwise not while there were other folks around.”

  She persevered, grim and brisk, not resigned but just adapting herself after she realized it was not to be exactly what she thought it was going to be, giving music lessons to her sons now and attending Clio's simple white-frame Methodist church with all her children in tow. “There wasn't any insisting about it,” says Jack Wallace. “We just went. Mother played the piano- she had to be there, and we had to be there.” Her music-teacher's dignity, beleaguered in this ruffian little country village, remained serene and unfaltering and indestructible. A long-time resident of Clio recalls with a chortle, “One Easter morning, a bunch of boys found a puddle of creosote and tar and rosin where they had just finished building a filling station on the corner in the middle of town. Everybody was still in church, and we mixed it all up and went in the privy behind the filling station and painted the seat there, and then we lay down behind a bank to see what would happen. Well, Wallace's father was the first man out of the church, and he lit out straight for that privy, all dressed up in his Easter clothes. He went in and shut the door, and just a second later he came bustin' back out, with that whole seat stuck to him. Yessir. For three whole weeks, Bitsy was scrubbing Sag's behind with kerosene and turpentine. The whole town couldn't stop grinning about the thought of her havin' to work on Sag like that.”

  After the death of her husband, she managed to cling to the house for four years, reduced now from genteel instructions in Mozart and Bach to presiding over a hot, rank-smelling little room full of large, mute, horny-handed farm girls earnestly and monotonously blundering with recipes and needle and thread. “After his father's funeral, George said he wanted to stay home,” she crisply recalls, “but I told him to go on back to school, I could get along without him. I was probably right cruel about it, but I told him I could make out.” Nevertheless, in 1942, when relieved of all three sons by World War II, she promptly left Clio-the house, the community, the years there which she thought of as neither a mistake nor a blessing, because that was pointless now-and took a business course in Montgomery. She has seldom been back. She worked until recently in a va
st whitewashed state office building as secretary to the director of the Bureau of Preventable Diseases. A vigorous and somewhat brittle little lady in dresses of bright tropical colors like the plumage of a parrot, with a surprisingly loud hoarse harsh voice, she is not given to sentimentality. “No,” she says, “my boys and I don't spend much time together. I hardly even talk to them on the telephone. I'm not going to be selfish and make them feel like they have to come and see me ever so often. I moved up here because I knew the boys were grown and there was no reason for them not to have to go into the war, and I wanted to be self-supporting so they wouldn't have to come back and take care of me. When you're independent, which I've tried to be, you have to be really independent. I've always had a-well, I don't want to be a burden on anybody. When I was looking at a house up here just a while ago which I was thinking about buying, I asked them, I said, 'I'd just like for you all to come see what I think I've chosen for my home,' and they said, 'Well, Mother, you know you gonna go ahead and buy it no matter what we say.' And they were right. It was foolish of me to bother them.” On a bright winter morning in 1966, seizing another cigarette from the pack on her metal desk and igniting it with a quick snap of her lighter, she mused, “Of course, somebody's gonna get George sooner or later. I've accepted that. He's gonna get it. My only consolation is, when it happens, he'll be doing the only thing he's ever cared about doing anyway.”

  2

  George was born in the early lamplit hours of an August morning in 1919, in a small crackerbox house just outside Clio. His naps, it is reported, were “short and infrequent.” Almost as soon as he emerged from infancy, as soon as he discovered there was something going on besides eating and sleeping, learned what talking was, and then found out there were other folks around besides his parents and grandparents, and then recognized that all of them seemed occupied with large invisible consequential matters beyond the simple chores and idle trivial games of children, he began interesting himself in those matters. According to those who remember him from those days, “playin' didn't take up much of his time atall-nossuh. George always seemed like he was pretty much satisfied with George.” It was as if he already knew what he was going to do, and was simply waiting-calm, absorbed, self-contained, and alert-until the time arrived for him to begin.