The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  “She’s got a man hid in the house,” he said.

  Velma rolled her eyes.

  “She ain’t got no man in the house, Bob,” my father said.

  “I tell you she does,” Bobby said.

  Here my father was, trying to impress his new girl, while his daddy was having a delusion. My mother just sat, staring at her lap, and whispered: “My, them lemons sure do smell—”

  “I heard him, goddammit,” Bobby said.

  “—nice,” she squeaked.

  My father vaulted to his feet.

  “Come on, Bob, we’ll find him.”

  He went from room to room, looking in closets.

  “Not here,” he shouted.

  He ran to the kitchen, and jerked open the refrigerator door.

  “Reckon he’s in here, Bob,” he said.

  His father sat, his face redder.

  My mother wanted to laugh, but just sat, politely.

  It was like the circus to her, with midgets and everything.

  The one thing that worried her was the way his mother looked at her. “I thought she didn’t like me, ’cause she just sat there, and looked at me so sad,” my mother said. As they left, Velma reached as high as she could and hugged her neck, fiercely. Years later, she would tell her what she wanted to say, but dared not, with the men in the room.

  She wanted to tell her to run.

  But there seemed no need to be afraid, then.

  “I never saw him drink then,” my mother said. “He drank coffee. I never even remember seeing him with a beer. I had heard all them people who went off in the military was social drinkers, but we would sit for hours and hours, him sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes, acting like a real gentleman.”

  He told my mother he had prospects, told her he might be in the Marines for life, or might work with his brothers in a body and fender shop. But he told her he would starve before he would work in a cotton mill, choking on cotton dust in a place where blades and gears chewed up people, taking their fingers, hands and arms. He had grown up seeing coughing, maimed, broken-down men pass the caskets of their brothers and sisters through the windows of houses too small and tight to fit the coffins through the halls and front door. He was not afraid of anything, usually, but that was his terror, to be passed around like that. But he told her not to worry, that he would give her and their children a better life than that. He told her, holding her hand, she could depend on him.

  He was kind to her mother, who didn’t like his fancy looks, and respectful to her father, who was almost a folk hero in these hills, a tall, gaunt moonshiner and hammer swinger who had never in his life lost a stand-up fight with another man, or any two men. My father took work with him on the weekends, roofing a house with him, and spent his paycheck on a suit for her, in the style the women called “sweater suits.” Before he had a chance to give it to her, my grandfather took my mother aside. “Now, that boy thinks he’s done somethin’ real big, and you act proud, now, when he gives it to you.” She told him yes, she would, but it had not been necessary. It was the first dress she ever had that was not homemade or cast-off, given to her by the rich ladies whose floors she swept.

  He made her other promises, crossed his heart and hoped to die.

  He gave her a silver dollar as seed corn, for money they would save.

  He gave her a cedar hope chest, to hold their future.

  “For when we get us a house,” he told her.

  When he heard she had never had a doll, growing up poor in the foothills of the Appalachians, he went to a doll maker in Jacksonville, an old woman famous for her fancy needlework, and had her make his new wife a ballerina, what my mother called a dancing doll. It cost twenty-five dollars, about half a month of a Marine’s pay.

  He gave her flowers all the time.

  “But they didn’t cost him nothin’,” she said.

  He would strain to stand as tall as he could when they had their picture made, so he would be almost as tall as her. It never worked. His feet were so small he could wear her shoes, and he did sometimes, puttering around the house in her little flat shoes, to make her laugh.

  They spent every waking minute together, and would have spent more, but her daddy would have killed him. He disappeared on Sunday night, to go back to the base in Macon in time for duty on Monday morning. Every Sunday, he stayed with her until the last minute, then roared off into the night, sliding around the twisting roads, racing the sun.

  The old car took too long to get there, and cut into his time with her. So he saved up and got a machine that would move. It was a 1954 Hudson, and had a chromed, winged hood ornament that made it look like a silver eagle was flying just ahead of it on the highway. It rolled on gangster whitewalls and four perfectly matched factory hubcaps, and had a “Big Six” six-cylinder motor, three-speed on the column, fender skirts on the rear wheels and six little-bitty chrome letters that spelled out “Hornet” on the side. On Sundays, they rode and listened to the radio and talked about the sons they would have. They would all be sons, he figured. They would have to be. They decided to name the first one Samuel, after his grandfather. With a big name like that, their kin kidded them, the boy would probably come into the world, dust himself off, and walk home.

  After midnight, he would lift his uniform out of the closet, kiss her goodbye, and disappear at the corner of D Street and Alexandria Road, leaving a little skid mark there, showing off.

  But every late night, in the stillness of the barracks, he wrote her a letter.

  Dear Mark, he wrote. He called her that, for short.

  How are you?

  I am fine.

  He beat his letters home, sometimes, but she ran to the mailbox anyway, six days a week.

  He never wrote anything special, at least nothing she remembers.

  It was how he signed them that mattered.

  Goodnight

  Sweet dreams

  I miss you

  Honey

  She read every one a dozen times, then put them, in perfect order, in a cardboard box. One letter, in the fourth month, was a little different from the rest. At the bottom, he wrote:

  “Look under the stamp.”

  She painstakingly peeled it off. Underneath, in tiny letters, he had written:

  I

  Love

  You

  She ran to the box where she had saved them, and, stamp by stamp, peeled the stamps away.

  He had written it every time.

  AT THE SPRING, people were staring at them.

  The boy on his knees seemed about to implode into his little self.

  The tall blonde woman, prettier than Rita Hayworth, giggled and shook.

  “Are you serious?” she said.

  “Yes, dammit to hell,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “okay.”

  They drove to a little town south of Chattanooga, to a justice of the peace. His sister Ruby and brother-in-law Herman, who lived in Ringgold, waited in the car.

  “Your momma was so pretty,” Ruby said.

  She borrowed a pink sweater suit from Ruby, and wore white loafers.

  He had on blue Levi’s, a blue long-sleeved shirt, and black penny loafers with Mercury dimes.

  She was so nervous, she stumbled over the vows.

  He was so nervous he kissed her too quickly, with things still unsaid.

  They ran out happy, but then she realized what she had done.

  “Charles,” she told him in the yard, “I forgot to say ‘I do.’”

  He grabbed her hand to drag her back inside, but she was too embarrassed.

  She never did get it said.

  SHE LIVED IT AGAIN, as a favor to me. She did not mind the story too much, because it was the happiest one she had. But as she talked, the man she re-created had no heart in him, no coursing blood, as if she was quoting from some book she had read. As she talked, I had in my mind a pretty rag doll sprawled on a shelf, a half-stitched hole where his heart and guts would be. I think she was sti
ll afraid, scared that if she gave him heat, or feeling, she could not stop him coming true again. But he was too much man, even as a bad one, to lie that way for too long in anyone’s mind, and almost against her will he came to life, for at least a little while.

  * * *

  The Boy

  I GOT THE BOY a sweet tea at Cecil’s café, waved at Shirley behind the grill, and took him on a tour of our town. We saw mansions and monuments, its painted face. Then, at the dead end of A Street, I showed him its still, silent heart.

  “Is it really haunted?” the boy asked.

  I glanced at the high, red-brick walls.

  “As much as a place can be.”

  The machines shut down five years ago. The roar that shook this village across a century shushed to a hateful quiet, and a blizzard of cotton fell through dead air to lie like dirty snow on scarred hardwood planks. The last to leave said they heard a rustling, as if generations still moved in the vast rooms that killed them one cut, one cough at a time.

  That morning, I told him I would show him the place my father’s people worked and lived. As I slid into the truck I tossed his travel blanket into the back, out of reach.

  “You won’t need it today,” I said.

  The truth is I didn’t want to be seen with a blanky, or with a boy who needed one. We rolled through the village of sold-off houses to the mill itself. Logging chains sealed its doors, locking out two hundred people who lost paychecks and health insurance when it closed. “It ain’t when it’s running it’s scary,” a man had told me. “It’s when it ain’t.” I wanted the boy to see it, but it was like showing him the dark side of the moon.

  It was our first year together. Still hopeful for my improvement, the woman made me go to church. She made me put on a jacket and sit in a pew in one of those big, sedate churches where no one shouts much. Children lit candles and sang hymns, and after the excitement we retired to a foyer for Bundt cake. The boy grew up in it. His grandfather was a deacon and his grandmother was, too. His mother taught Sunday school. He went to church camp, and swam in a baptismal lake. He liked church, he said. What boy says that?

  The boy’s school was a gentle place, too, where teachers knew his mother by her first name, called him a sweet boy, well-behaved, and served ice cream with strawberries at show-and-tell. He did not ride the bus. The woman dropped him off in the morning and picked him up in the afternoon, with a suitable bribe. When you are ten, sugar is your opiate, and if he had sorrows, which is unlikely, he drowned them in root beer.

  It was the same at home. At supper, his mother asked him “What would you like?” knowing damn well it was tall Dr Peppers and chicken nuggets and sundaes swimming with crushed-up M&Ms. The house was his shrine, full of kindergarten paintings and art-class abominations. His friends came over for playdates, in a bedroom buried under an avalanche of toys. At night, after prayers, his mother rubbed his back as he floated into pleasant dreams. She made sure of it. He was not allowed to watch TV news, to see the world on fire. He dreamed of ice cream, as his braces twinkled in the night-light. He had never had a cavity, and not a single curse had ever slipped from his expensive teeth.

  Mine, mine were filled with lead and mercury, courtesy of the welfare. I could have had them redone in gold, but I had come to like the taste in my mouth.

  I wanted the boy to see the mill, and know how lucky he was.

  We idled over a ditch that might have been a creek in wet weather. Beer bottles littered the bottom and not much thrived in it but snakes. In my father’s time little boys caught them with snares made of wire and pipe and boiled them alive in pickle jars. Ragweed smothered it now, but it was a great chasm in 1942.

  “My daddy jumped it when he was a boy,” I said.

  The boy saw a ditch.

  “He was the best at it, everybody said,” I said.

  The boy popped sugar-free gum and fondled his Game Boy, his first love. He was not insolent, just disconnected, immune.

  “Do you know what they call that creek?” I asked.

  “What?” he said, to be polite.

  “Shit Creek,” I said.

  He laughed out loud. You don’t hear much cussing when everybody at supper is a deacon.

  I had his attention, for a while.

  I showed him the village church.

  “They spoke in unknown tongues, and got slain in the spirit,” I said.

  His eyes opened wide.

  “They didn’t actually die,” I said.

  We passed a patch of weeds.

  “There’s where Robert Dentmon killed the police chief.”

  “Why?” the boy said.

  “They said it was over a water line.”

  We made a right turn onto D Street, and there it was, 117.

  People here call it Frogtown. My father was the prince of Frogtown.

  “They fought in the street,” I said, as much to myself as the boy.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “My daddy and his brothers,” I said.

  “Why?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “They liked to,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “They drank a good bit,” I said.

  But he had never smelled it on a man’s breath, or seen it burn wicked blue. Like always, when I thought of it, I could see them again, the men of my father’s house. I was a boy, too, the last time, but will never forget the just-checked violence in them, laughing, cursing at a kitchen table, cigarettes burning in their lips. They held jelly glasses sloshing with moonshine, and I wonder still why they did not blow themselves to kingdom come. As a boy, I believed they were what men were supposed to look like, handsome, unafraid, black knights with tire irons instead of swords. They toasted sunset and sunrise, and broke a thousand cups. “I’d never seen nothing like ’em in my life,” my mother liked to say, “and I never will.” It was their place that created them, too, but grinding, like a whetrock.

  The boy asked if we could rent a movie.

  “Sure,” I said.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Village

  I WAS STILL a little boy when I saw that first sacrifice, that first empty sleeve. I was rich then. A pocketful of birthday nickels weighed me down as I chased after imaginary Indians from the saddle of my dime-store pony. It was stuck hard in the cement in front of the A&P, but I was gaining on them, one nickel at a time, when the one-armed man walked by. I was barefoot in town on a weekday, so it had to be a payday, and it had to be summer. The linoleum was cold beneath my feet as I followed the man inside, curious and staring. He was thin, his pants billowing from his waist, his face gaunt and grooved and sad, so sad that one of us, surely, had to cry. He had on a long-sleeved, checkered shirt with one sleeve hanging loose and empty, not pinned up and final but swinging ever so slightly with every step, as if that missing arm was something he expected to get back anytime now. But his face told me different, told me that lost is just lost. It was even beyond the power of the miracles in which my people believed. No one ever prayed an arm back on—we would have heard about it if they had. I had been taught better than to stare and conditioned not to cry, by my older brother, by a dozen mean girl cousins. But there was something awful about that swaying, flat piece of cloth, and I just stood there, my eyes hot, my feet turning to ice in that unnatural cold. “Was it the war?” I asked my mother, but she told me to hush, it wasn’t our business. So I asked her again. She shook her head. “The mill,” was all she said.

  His name was Charles Hardy, and he had been about the best guitar picker in our town. A touring country music promoter saw him play one night in a convention hall, and told him, “Boy, you’re too good to be workin’ for a livin’.” He told him to hop on the bus and try his luck in Nashville, ’cause there was magic in those hands. But he would have gotten fired if he laid out even one day at the cotton mill, and knew his wife would holler at him if he ran off to Music Row. So he put the dream in a box to keep it clean, and told himself h
e could always drive to Tennessee and show out with all those Nashville cats. But one day, a little hungover, he lost his concentration on the floor of the Marvel Mill and stumbled into the teeth of a machine that shredded sheets of polyester. He fought it like it was something alive as it mangled his arm to the elbow and tried to pull his body into its teeth. He finally jammed it, killed it, with a broken broom handle.

  Everything you need to know about a mill village, a smart man told me once, is in that empty sleeve.

  But as a boy I wondered why anyone would work inside a place that could keep a part of you at quittin’ time. My mother told me only that it was work, “and people was glad to get it.” I heard that all the time, in conversations of blood, bandages and bad pay. The arm was an offering to the timekeepers, to the machines, in places like Leesburg, Blue Mountain, Piedmont and a dozen other towns in the foothills of the Appalachians. My mother took us from my father’s people and broke our connection to the mill village in Jacksonville before I got to know that world, before I understood how there are things you hate and things you thank God for, and things that are both.

  Half my history was fashioned here, between rows of spinning steel. Like the hill people who saw their lives replanted in the mill village, I am descended from two races on my father’s side, but one class. They spilled blood over a paradise neither one could own, and saw it mingle to create a people whose single greatest value would be their own expendability. Here, from the Creek wars to the Civil War to a cold-blooded industrialization of these hills, is a history of my father’s people, the people of the mills.

  IT WAS MAGIC masquerading as nature. The round summits of the highlands seldom stood stark and clear, but were softened by hot, yellow haze in summer and gray, cool mist in winter. Even in their shrouds, they were beautiful. Poison ivy veined the trees, blistering even the lightest touch. Persimmons hung fat, yellow and inviting, but hexed your mouth into a whistling knot if you bit into them even a day too soon. Tornadoes tore through both springtime and the turning leaves, winter trees filled with a million keening blackbirds, and the summer ground lay red in wild strawberries. Water moccasins, fat as a rolled-up newspaper, rode rivers the color of English tea, bullfrogs beat the air like bass drums, and panthers, black as the inside of a box, watched from the branches of ancient trees.