All Over but the Shoutin'

by Rick Bragg

  It took a few months to close, until that November day when I showed up at her door unannounced, and told her she owned a house now, her house. She smiled, as wide as I have ever seen her smile, and the tears pooled in her eyes. She asked me if we could afford the mortgage payments, and I told her there were none, that she could run around and around in it banging on pots and pans with a hairbrush, and no one could do a thing about it. It was hers.

  I will never, ever forget that day. She and my aunts were having a yard sale, selling canned pickles and quilts and homemade doodads, and though the wind blew strong and just a little cold the sky was electric blue, cloudless. It was a fine day, in every way.

  We went for a drive to look at it. The previous residents had not moved out yet, so all we could do was sit in the car at the side of the road and look at it, which was all she wanted to do anyway. The hill behind it was on fire with color from the changing season—fall comes late down here—and we sat, not saying anything, until the light started to fail and we began to worry that the people in the house would call the law on us, for lurking down there at the foot of our own hill. Somehow it didn’t matter that we could only sit at the side of the road and look up at it.

  “It’s a dream, ain’t it. It’s just a dream,” she said, and I told her no. It was just us getting even with life, one more time.

  My brother Sam went to work on it as soon as it was hers, fixing all the little things it needed, making a pretty house much prettier. “I ain’t got money,” he said, “but I got labor.” He sawed down unwanted, spindly trees, painted every inch of the thing that wasn’t covered in brick, and crawled over it and under it, with a hammer in his hand and nails in his teeth, to make it perfect. He worked on it every day after his shift at the cotton mill, dragging brush out of the wooded area behind the house by flashlight. At night, from my apartment in Atlanta or whatever hotel room I was in that night, we schemed by telephone on what to do next, what colors to use, talking about any and everything we could do to it, until we finally just ran out of projects. I know he was as proud of it as she was, as I was, that he had watched her, helpless as I was, just existing in that borrowed home. One night we sat in his living room trying to decide between tan and off-white paint for the trim, and it struck us, how odd that was. “Did you ever think we’d be doing this?” I asked him, and he shook his head. There was no celebrating. You celebrate winning, not just catching up.

  We tried hard to make it perfect. The house sits on Nisbet Lake Road, but that is kind of misleading because Nisbet Lake dried up a long time ago (and calling it Nisbet Hole in the Ground Road was not attractive). If we could have done it without going to prison, Sam and me would have broken the dam and filled that lake up again, so she could have ridden past water on her way to town. It would have been closer to perfect, as a family, if Mark had been with us, beside us, as we did these things for her and for us, as we built this nice, new life for her, safely away from the ruins of the old one. But he was off somewhere, grappling with his own ghosts.

  “You can’t fix everything,” one of my old girlfriends told me, when I complained about those missing pieces of this life I was trying to reshape, re-create. “You think you can. But some things you can’t buy and some things you can’t just wish true.”

  “Did you know it had a doorbell?” my momma asked me, right after we bought it. “I never had a doorbell.” I asked her if the sound of it bothered her, and she shook her head. “I kind of like it.”

  Some weeks later I was talking to Sam on the telephone, asking if she had settled in. She has, he told me, but he was a little worried about one thing. “She rings her own doorbell,” he said.

  I told him to let her ring it till she wore it out.

  I guess it was hard for her, even as much as she loved that new house, to leave the tiny house on Roy Webb Road, the one we had shared for so long with our grandma, the one that had been a refuge for us, from our daddy.

  She lived there forty years, almost all her adult life, most of that time without hot water in the kitchen, with pipes that froze every winter, without room for even a decent-sized Christmas tree in the tiny front room, at least one bigger than a shrub.

  Some of our kinfolks did not like the idea of me moving her out. I can’t understand that.

  “Margaret won’t never be happy nowhere but in that little house,” one of our kinfolks warned us, but it had never been hers, that little house. The fire a few years earlier that had started in my bedroom had turned most of my momma’s keepsakes and memories to ashes. Almost all her pictures, my daddy’s letters, our baby books—back then the hospital doctors gave you a book to fill in with the baby’s first words, first song, other things—were gone. There were just the walls, and the memories they contained.

  Life inside those walls had been bittersweet, certainly not always happy, but somehow better than the life we had so often run from, to escape. This was the house where we healed.

  I do not know if my aunt Nita and uncle Ed, who own it, will ever rent it out, or if they will keep it as a shrine to my grandma. People, my people, do things like that.

  My momma did not walk it one last time, trying to remember. You never know what you will prick yourself on when you feel back into the past. She packed her last bag and made sure the stove was off by patting the eyes, turned off the lights and left.

  She did not cry, she did not show any emotion at all, as we drove her to her own house on the hill, at least not until we pulled into the driveway. “I’m gonna put a Christmas tree in every window,” she announced. “In the living room, a big one, one you can walk around.”

  I did go back to the little house, to look and remember. I have seen movies where people walked through their empty houses, their footsteps echoing with memories. It wasn’t that way. I couldn’t take more than a few steps in any direction before having to turn around again. But in every cramped step there was a flash, like an old projector running backward. There was my momma in her bed, sick, after the death of my brother, and my brother Mark, a toddler with fat cheeks, sitting on the floor, laughing, showing his new teeth. There was my uncle John in the living room, before his hair turned white, fishing in his pocket for a silver dollar, and my uncle Ed at the door, his face unlined, telling us it was time to go to work, boys.

  There was my grandma with a rag around her head, high on her medicine, shaking me awake at 3 A.M. instead of 7 A.M., shouting that it was time to go to school, and my poor momma taking her by the elbow and leading her back to bed. There was Sam, about ten years old and wearing a cowboy hat, staggering in from doing work no boy should have been asked to do, his boots tracking in mud, my momma cleaning it up without saying a word. There was me, about twelve, reading a book by the light of a naked 40-watt bulb dangling from a drop cord looped over a bent nail in the ceiling, the orange cord disappearing past the quilt nailed over the doorway to the living room, for privacy. There was my young-looking aunt Jo, balancing a plate of turkey and cornbread dressing on her knee, and my aunt Nita, her hair still a rich, dark brown, asking my momma if she needed anything from town.

  Even though it was winter and dead quiet, I could hear the drone and rattle of the electric fan that made it bearable to sleep in the August heat, even though the fan sucked in the bugs that, sooner or later, found their way into at least one ear. I could hear the radio in my grandma’s room, hear Bill Monroe in his high lonesome tenor singing about a boy going off to sea, his true love begging him to stay at home with her. I could hear Hank, and Merle, and Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash singing about Jackson, her calling him “you long-legged, guitar-picking man.” I could hear The Word on that dusty TV.

  They say you can’t remember a smell, but I could smell the wood smoke and the Rose Hair Oil and the chicken shit that invariably crept into the house on the bottoms of feet, and the musty quilts our momma pulled up to our nose, and, stronger than anything, the smell of fatback, fried crisp, that smell that lasted all day and rode to school with you on yo
ur hands, so that you could put your hands to your face during history class and get hungry all over again.

  I don’t know. Maybe I did wrong. Maybe I should have let things alone and left her there. A friend, a good, well-meaning one, told me once that I was buying the house for me, for my own satisfaction, to meet my own sense of duty, and not really for her. But that friend had grown up middle class and comfortable, protected by her daddy’s steady paychecks, never forced to tote wood a hundred yards just to stay warm. If she wanted to be cold, she went camping. That friend had never seen the silverfish scurry by the hundreds across the floor because there were so many cracks and holes in the walls and floors, or felt a rat crawl across their legs at night. I doubt if her momma had ever stuffed cotton in her ears, to keep the bugs out. I doubt if she had ever flushed the toilet with buckets, not for a day, but for a winter. I doubt it.

  Yet it planted some doubt in my mind. Was this house just my own selfish act? Had I taken her out of the only place on earth she could feel at home, even with all its hardships? I asked her, sometime later, if I had tried to fix something that wasn’t broke.

  My momma seldom gets mad at me now, at least that I can see, but she was mad at me then. “I wish everybody would quit telling me how I feel,” she said. “They don’t know nothin’.” Then she stomped off—as much as a sixty-year-old woman can stomp—over her wall-to-wall carpeting, to her big, clean kitchen, in the house where every time you have company, it goes ding-dong.

  It may sit empty a hundred years, that tiny house we grew up in, until the pine trees out front—the ones Sam and my grandma planted when I was just a boy—reach into the clouds. Funny, I cannot imagine anyone in it except us. I guess everyone feels that way, when they leave a house behind. But when I think about it now, for some reason my thoughts carry me not through the yard or even into the house itself, but beneath it. It takes me into that cool darkness where I used to play for hours in the dirt, burying the cat-eye marbles, fake-gold buttons and bits of tinfoil, only to go digging for them again in a week, a month, a year. In a stupid, silly way I search my grown-up memory for the things I reclaimed there, and for the treasures that just disappeared in the soft ground. Like it matters now.

  40

  The same

  So here we are, Daddy.

  I did what you didn’t do. It took me a long time, all of your life, most of hers, perhaps even most of mine. But it is done. She wakes up in a house of her own, a real home, and she is as good as anybody on that road. She lives warm when it is cold and cool when it is hot and even has a bright light on a pole in the yard, to chase away the dark. She has cable, and garbage pickup, and county water. She still prefers to walk in the backyard instead of the front, out of sight. Some habits really do die hard, I reckon.

  I couldn’t fix everything. I couldn’t take any of the pain out of her mind. I couldn’t give Sam back his childhood. I couldn’t save my little brother from the same demons that consumed you, and maybe I didn’t even try very hard. But there is time left for him. For reasons I cannot really explain, I believe that Mark will one day escape whatever it is that hunts him so mercilessly. I believe he has enough of Momma in him to just outlast it. I believe it.

  I have had a lot of luck in my life, Daddy. Some of it, maybe, I earned, but most of it was blind, dumb, stumbling luck. Maybe, when it is all said and done, that is the only difference between you and me. I got the luck.

  I hear it said a lot, especially lately, what a good man I turned out to be, considering. I always feel like a poser when I hear that, because I know it’s not true. I wrote once that I was “my momma’s son,” but that was a mistake, to claim that.

  The truth is that, in so many ways, I am just like you. The meanness you had in you, I used to get where I am. But instead of spraying it out, like you did, I channeled it. I used it every time I told some loving soul that I had to say good-bye because my work was more important to me than them, or just because it was time to move on.

  I used your coldness, the same way I used my momma’s kindness, in my work. Because of her, I could understand the pain and sadness of the people I wrote about, and could make others feel it. But because of you I could turn my back on them when I was done and just walk away, free and clean. Think about it. What kind of man can do that, as much as I have, and live with himself?

  Your hatred of responsibility, of ties, is in me just as strong as it was in you. I have no home, no children, no desire for them. I picked one responsibility, just one, and I met it. But, any fool can meet just one responsibility. Any lame idiot can set the bar so low, and clear it.

  There have been a thousand nights when I would rather have been you, nights when I wanted nothing more in this world than to give up and drink myself into a good night’s sleep. But that would have surely killed her, to see it. It would have put her in her grave. I do not know what will happen to me when she is gone, when the responsibility I picked up after you threw it down is fully met. I might be very, very tired then. The truth is that I can see myself wrapped around a bottle of bad likker for good company, that there are times when the very thought of that oblivion is so, so appealing. Luck or not, it has not always been easy being the raggedy-ass boy made good, the one the smart people like to have around, sometimes, to hear my rustic witticisms.

  I am you, in better ways. I love the music as you did, and the women as long as they would someday go away, and sometimes a good fistfight just to let the rage out, and to see if my nerve is still there. Only it takes so much longer to get up now than it used to. I wonder, is that what finally happened to you?

  I have never fought in a war, never experienced the hell you did. I have seen it, the killing and dying, but not on the scale of horror that consumed you. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if you had come home from that war crippled in body instead of spirit, if she had had to care for you, parking you in the sun, helping you to bed. Would you have lived? Would you have lasted?

  There is no hate in me for you. I know that now. There is no profit in hating a dead man. I glimpsed the good in you when I was a little boy, and I saw it shine through you the day you gave me those books, the day you told me the story. I believe you told me the truth, mostly, about your war, and I believe that it took you from us, from me, allowing me only those glimmers of the man before. Like I said, I have to believe it. I have to, because without it there is only a clenched fist where your face would be, in my mind.

  Some people tell me I should thank you, that by being the man you were, it forced me to be a different one. But I don’t buy that “Boy Named Sue” bullshit. If I could talk to you again, I would want to know one thing. Did you ever think of us, those years we didn’t hear from you. Did you ever think of us at all?

  I am about the age you were, now, when you left us for that one, final time, when the telephone finally fell silent. Men in our family don’t last long, anyway, do they? We only look indestructible. We come to pieces in time, in such short time.

  I will always remember that last time we talked, after you had given up on living but so feared death. Even with your life so tenuous, you unscrewed that cap and hastened your death with that amber liquid. And I understood. I would have done the same.

  Some people say I am more like her, of course. They say I look like her. But I’m not much like her. I wish I was, but I’m not.

  She has proved she can outlast anything. As hard as life has been for her, she hates death, she despises it. She even hates funerals because she does not like to feel its breath.

  She is good and patient, and devout, so that she is never alone, like you and me.

  I don’t really know why I think this, but I believe you would have liked to see Momma in her house. I think you would have liked it, since you always seemed to appreciate nice things. It is a pretty big house, not scary like the last one we lived in with you, but warm and big and friendly. It has no ghosts in it, not that I can feel. Still, ghosts have a way of finding your new address. You can’
t fool them by changing zip codes. I know. As much as I would like to be a dam, some barrier to the sadness that rolls through her life and her mind, I’m helpless. In the same way, there is no guarantee that the memories we make in her new house will be good ones. We can only try.

  She jokes, sometimes, that she gets lost in it.

  There would have been room for you.

  41

  Who we are

  Mid-November 1996

  There wasn’t much to move, and memories don’t weigh nothin’ really. She took a chrome-and-vinyl couch and chair, leftovers from some doctor’s office, and took her washing machine, which she had nicknamed “Old Smokey,” because the house fire had blackened the white paint. Smokey didn’t look like much, and, like my own machine in Atlanta, was prone to dance across the floor, as if possessed by demons on the spin cycle. But you couldn’t kill him with a gun. “Still runs. Don’t leak,” Momma said, refusing to let us get her a new washer. That was by God that.

  I was in Louisiana, I think, on the day she finished moving in. I would have liked to have been there. As it turns out, it was good that I was far away.

  The night after my momma’s first full day in her new house, my little brother came to see her. He was drinking, a little bit. We had all asked him not to come there, when he was. I don’t know what right we had to say that, or to expect him to comply.

  My big brother, Sam, drove up at about the same time, just to check on her. They faced off in the yard.

  I guess they had to fight. They had to, because of who we are.

  Sam fought because he believed he was protecting her, because he believed he was fighting in my place, because I had begged Mark to stay away from there when he was drinking. Mark fought because he felt he was being pushed away, unwanted, which I guess is about the worst feeling in the world.