All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  The managing editor of the Anniston Star let me move to the state desk when I was still in my early twenties, into a newsroom dominated by Harvard, Yale, Columbia and assorted other pointy heads who came South for the invaluable experience they would glean from writing about people that some of them held largely in contempt. The Star drew them down here because of its reputation as a great place to learn. The paper’s owner and editor, H. Brandt Ayers, got some good stories out of them before they moved on, because while some of them treated the South as if they were on safari, some of them did great work. They caught people doing bad things. When some grinning crook on the county commission tried to abuse his power and line his pockets, they wrote about it. They did about two years on their tour of duty in the heart of darkness, living in the pool houses and basement apartments of the well-off people on the East Side, and then moved on to the bigger but not always better newspapers. People like me, without any academic credentials on us, would stay behind. It was the system, or at least it always had been, and I did not even try not to be bitter. I had long talks with the sage senior editor, Cody Hall, who made it plain that I should be proud of who I was. “Life is too short to dance with an ugly woman,” and my ugly woman was my own envy.

  But the fact is, on hindsight, the Yankees were mostly okay. I ate barbecue and coconut pie with them, and beneath their Yankeeness, I found genuine concern for people who were poorer and weaker. The Star’s founder, Colonel Ayers, had believed it was a newspaper’s responsibility to be an attorney for the least influential, the weakest, of its readership, and there were many, many people who passed through the doors of that place who read those words on the editorial page and took them to heart. I worked for the state editor, a young man named Randy Henderson who had the patience not to fire me, a smart and decent man with ethics you couldn’t dent with a wrecking ball. But mostly, like I said, he was patient. It is a great virtue, where I am concerned.

  The first story I wrote as a news reporter, I wrote about deer hunters who were killing themselves in the woods by accident, at a record rate. I described a man’s attempt to drag his friend out of the woods, bleeding to death, after he shot him. It was hard, harder than anything I had ever done. The managing editor, Chris Waddle, told me it was a fine newspaper story, and I had my first taste of that odd mixed emotion, of pride in the work, of seeing your story at the top of the page, and of that terrible sadness that the words contained.

  Because I was a working reporter, I did a lot of other, less dramatic stories. I covered the county commission in Cleburne County, and city council meetings at Anniston, where my favorite politician of all time, Pink Junior Wood, a barber by trade, sat on the dais. It was one of the grand things, of being a newspaperman in the South: just being able to write at least once a week the words “Pink Junior Wood.” I wrote about speed trap towns and cockfighting rings and accidents on the lonely, twisting roads. I interviewed the mayor of Montgomery, Emory Folmar, who was so conservative that he compelled black people to vote in droves for George Wallace.

  I continued to swap notions and stories and make friends with the Yankee reporters, and made fun of them even as they made fun of me. The experience of working shoulder to shoulder with so many educated and privileged young people was good for me, I am sure, but the chip I had carried on my shoulder for a lifetime grew in those years to about the size of a concrete block. To me, they had everything, and I am sure I resented it, foolishly, childishly. I could only write, a little bit.

  After the Birmingham News hired Randy Henderson away, I worked for a metro editor who didn’t think a lot of me. I am sure he had his reasons. But one meeting still sears me whenever I think about it. The managing editor had offered me the city reporter’s job, about the best job on staff, because he thought I was good and because he did not care that I had never been to Princeton. The metro editor had another reporter in mind, a talented young woman who was better at straight news than me. The metro editor took me for a drink after work, and told me, to my face, that I was not sophisticated enough to be the city reporter. I should have cussed him, but instead I just sat there and let it pass, hating myself for it. The next morning I walked into the managing editor’s office and told him that, yes, I would like to be the city reporter, thank you very much.

  The fact is that, in some ways, the metro editor was probably right. I had no business being a reporter. I had six months of college and four years sitting in press boxes trying to get the quarterback’s name right. All I knew how to do was tell stories on paper, and didn’t have even one dollop of what one respected editor, Basil Penny, called “jelly.” Basil explained “jelly” as a concoction of a lot of things, but the main ingredient was pretension. Me and him, we were just plain biscuit.

  But the main reason I took the other editor’s insult was because I had no choice. I needed the job. By then I had a house payment, responsibilities. I had a $250 electric bill.

  I had, by then, a wife.

  18

  White tuxedoes

  She was as pretty as sunshine on roses. She was small, delicate, and her hair was almost black. She had huge brown eyes, and a big red Pontiac Le Mans she used to drive me around in when my rolling junk, third-hand muscle cars were dead on the side of the road. My girl cousins said she looked like a porcelain doll, that she was perfect. She was smart—made all A’s in high school and college—and nice, too. I’m pretty sure she still is.

  Her daddy read Rex Stout novels and her momma made the best macaroni and cheese casserole I’ve ever had. They raised their only child in a middle-class neighborhood of brick houses and well-fed cats. The dogs all had collars, and didn’t bite.

  We met in Jacksonville, when I was working for the Jacksonville News. She was a sophomore at Jacksonville State, training to be a social worker and working part-time at the Weaver City Hall, answering phones. Her daddy kind of liked me, I thought. Her momma kind of didn’t, but that is often the way of it, cliché or not.

  Not long after I got my first good full-time job, at the Anniston Star, I proposed. I got the ring at Service Merchandise, on credit. When I gave it to her, she cried.

  I proposed standing up. I would have gotten down on my knees, but they were tore up on the inside so bad from playing ball, I knew that if I ever got down there, one or the other of my knees would lock and she would have to help me up. She didn’t mind.

  I was not afraid of getting married. Getting married was what you did if you were any damn good, at least in that culture I grew up in. I was not my daddy, I kept telling myself. I would not be him.

  I was in my early twenties. I had a good job. I had done as much of what we tactfully refer to as “runnin’ around” as a man can, without being shotgunned to death climbing out of someone’s bedroom window. It was time, I believed.

  I was no kind of playboy. It was just that, unlike a lot of my brethren, I learned early on that there is no way to make someone want you if they don’t. You can either waste time fantasizing about how to win your woman back, or you move on. It might not be the stuff of love stories, but in the time it takes to dive to the depths of misery in a bad relationship, sulk on the bottom, and then come clawing out for air, I could have thoroughly enjoyed being dumped three or four more times, as bad as that sounds. I was not a heart-on-your-sleeve kind of boy. I did not write love letters, did not sit and wonder why they left me or I left them. They came and went by an average of about two a year, often—you could time it by a clock—when they found out who I really was, where I came from.

  She did not seem to care about my shaky reputation or the fact I was what some people would have called, but only behind my back, white trash. She treated my momma with respect. She did not seem to think she was better than her, than me, than the other people I cared about. She had a good heart, an open one.

  We got married at Weaver First United Methodist Church, a fifteen-minute drive from my home, in July. I wore a white tuxedo, and more erudite people might think I looked like a fool. A
t the time, I thought I looked damned spiffy.

  When she walked down the aisle it took my breath away. I had heard of that happening my whole life, and I thought it was just something people said. But it really did. It took my breath away.

  My brothers and Uncle John and one of the best men I ever knew, Tony Estes, stood up with me. Tony was married to my cousin Jackie and used to loan me clothes to date in, because I didn’t have any. I would have asked my uncle Ed to stand up with me, but I thought he didn’t want to. I should have asked him. Then all the men who had ever meant anything to me in my young life would have been there, in one photograph.

  My momma came and sat in the front row, the first time I had seen her dressed up in my life. She wore a bright-colored dress that looked like it was maybe tangerine sherbet, and someone had curled her hair. I was proud of her.

  I have given more thought to buying cars than I gave to getting married; it just seemed time, and she seemed like the right one. I had my last-second doubts; I wanted to cut and run. But I stood there and took it like a man. We drove down to Panama City, Florida, for a honeymoon at the Silver Sands Hotel. We came back sunburned, to set up house.

  We lived in a three-bedroom brick house that was the nicest thing I had ever lived in. Her daddy helped us with the down payment, I think because I horrified her whole family by casually mentioning that maybe we should just get a trailer. We had brown wall-to-wall carpeting, three ill-tempered, ill-mannered Siamese cats, which I secretly despised, and a huge Saint Bernard dog named King, who I loved. She went to school and worked, and I just worked. She got her degree, and I was proud for her.

  Every summer, we went to Panama City with her parents and grandparents and stayed in their time-share condominium. Every winter, we had finger sandwiches, punch and divinity candy at their house on Christmas Eve. They were nice people, her family. I was grateful for it, all of it. All you had to do to become a part of the middle class, I now knew, was work hard, act right, and sink roots so deep that you can never, ever budge.

  In 1985, when I was in my mid-twenties, I got a job offer from the Birmingham News, the biggest newspaper in Alabama, at almost twice my salary. It was only seventy-three miles down the road, but the journey and the new job took all my time. I worked for my old editor, Randy Henderson, who wanted me to do big stories. He called it swinging for the fences, and suddenly I didn’t mind working until midnight or getting home after 2 A.M. I won some awards, covered a wall in them.

  It was about that time, one night sitting in the living room, that she told me she might be having a baby. I tried to shape a smile even as something that felt like hot lead seemed to course through my chest, and I thought that I would surely die.

  We had talked about having children, someday, but someday had seemed like such a great, safe distance away. The thought that it was happening did not just frighten me, it terrified me, consumed me. And I couldn’t say a word. For days, even after that hot-lead feeling had cooled, it lay like a weight on my chest.

  It was several days before we found out it was a false alarm. She looked at me, not accusing, just knowingly, and said, “Aren’t you disappointed, just a little?” I lied to her and said I was.

  I withdrew from her then, or maybe we just withdrew from each other. She said we lived more like roommates than husband and wife, and she was right. I told her it was only because I worked so hard, so long. She was smarter than that. The months went by. One night, early morning, actually, I came home from working on a story about a prison riot. I was exhausted and hungry. I was standing in the glow of the refrigerator, making a bologna sandwich, when she came out and said that we needed to talk.

  I just nodded my head. The next day I took my clothes and my dog and left. I was my father’s son, after all.

  I was not mean like him. I got drunk twice a year, three times at the most. I had never done violence against her, in any way. It was not in my character. We never yelled, we seldom fought. I often worked overtime and did magazine stories on the side to make a decent living, and was determined, absolutely, to surpass my father’s sorry standards for being a husband. Still I failed. I failed in thinking that was all there was to it.

  It ended, I have told myself and told others, because the only thing I had time for in my life was the work, that the only passion in me was for it, those lovely words. That is partly true. I love writing the way some men love women.

  But the greater truth is that I could not bear the thought of someday having a child, of having that child depend on me, rely on me, need me. I would have, I am sure, dragged myself through hell to give that child everything I could, but somewhere, deep, deep in the place we keep our greatest shame and fear, I was still afraid I might, just might, be like him. Not mean. Only weak.

  It is a funny thing. I have been hurt doing my job. I have stood in a crowd of massed bodies, knowing that at any second the mob’s mood could turn and they would tear me apart. But I cannot remember being so afraid as I was that day in that living room, sitting on the Naugahyde couch by the console TV, pictures of cats on the wall.

  She married again, several years later. I heard that she had a baby girl. I am sure she is a smart and pretty child, if she takes after her momma.

  Some year or so after the divorce, she walked up behind me in a grocery store parking lot. She kissed me and smiled at me, and that made me glad. I know she does not hate me. I was only wasted time.

  You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.

  19

  The price tag on heaven

  Some things, growing up in Alabama, you just know. If you need a house moved, you call Drennan Smith, who can jack even a Victorian off its foundation, put it on a big truck and haul it wherever you want it if his tires don’t blow: there is nothing more pitiful than a house broke down at the side of a road. If you need to catch enough crappie to feed a family reunion, you go to Cherokee County and fish the backwater with minnows. If you need a drink, bad, on a Sunday, when all the legal whiskey is locked away, you can go to Aunt Hattie’s in backwoods Calhoun County, where the calendar has no meaning if you have the cash. And if you need a new set of false teeth and you don’t have a whole lot of disposable income, you go to Pell City, the affordable denture capital of the world. Ask practically anyone where I grew up where they got their dentures, and they will say Pell City. Sometimes they will even spit out their set to show you the craftsmanship.

  We all try to buy our way into heaven, one way or the other. Some use the genuine currency of faith. But others, like me, try to barter, as if the great Hereafter was a swap meet in the clouds. Me, I’d always figured that if I did right by my momma, I had a shot. I tried to buy my way in with a set of dentures.

  By 1986, I had not lived in my mommas house for a long time, yet I had never truly left home. I was always close, always within a few minutes’ drive if she needed me. Any embarrassment I ever felt of being the son of a woman who took in ironing and scrubbed floors was long, long gone. I was ashamed of myself now. I tried to make up for it.

  I was making enough money now to help her with little things, like groceries and doctor bills, trying to bribe my way into Glory a fifty-dollar bill at a time. At Christmas I filled shopping carts to the brim with hams and cakes and other delicacies, things I knew she wouldn’t buy for herself, couldn’t buy for herself on the income she had from the ironing and the few dollars she made canning jelly, hot peppers and watermelon pickles. She loved the cakes. She is the only person I have ever met who actually eats fruitcake.

  I bought her what she needed, from electric heaters to new televisions, and I gave her money even though she never asked, not once in her life. She always said the same thing when I handed her some bills: “I feel like a bum.” I told her she was being silly; I thought I was a big shot, knocking down a fat four hundred dollars a week, looking after my momma and all. But now and then something woul
d happen to bring me back to reality.

  I remember the time I saw her squinting at her Bible, holding the pages so close to her eyes that it almost bumped her nose. I told her we would go see the eye doctor over in Gadsden. A few weeks later, as she sat in the examination chair, the doctor asked her how long it had been since her last examination, and since her last prescription for eyeglasses.

  “I believe it was 1963,” she said.

  The eye doctor looked at me like I was the lowest form of life on the planet.

  Most of my life, she had been seeing and reading with those magnifying glasses, the kind you buy in dime stores, and going half-blind. I never even noticed.

  We got her two pairs of new specs and she asked if she could get one pair that didn’t have bifocal lenses, a pair just for reading. I asked her why, since the bifocals were for reading, too, and for at least a full minute she wouldn’t answer me. Finally, she fessed up to me that the reason she didn’t want the bifocals was because they made her look like an old woman. I smiled inside at that. Even after so many years, after she had been through so much, there was still an ounce or so of vanity there.

  I saw it again a few years later, when I tried to get her to go to the dentist and get some dentures. She had always tried to take care of her teeth, but what money there was for a dentist went to us. By the time she was in her fifties her teeth were so bad she could eat only mush, another thing I failed to notice when I came home on the weekends from Birmingham. I told her she had to go to the dentist—if you cannot eat what you want in the South, life is not worth living—and she told me she would just as soon as the weather got cool. It got cool for ten years or so before she finally gave in; maybe the pain just got too bad to stand. (It is a peculiarity of my people that they refuse to undergo any kind of surgery—that includes tooth-pulling—in the spring or summer, when it is hot weather. Or maybe it is not a peculiarity at all. None of us had air-conditioning, most of my life. If you are going to be laid up, bedridden, it is best to recover in winter.)