The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  What a wonderful story it might have been.

  What if he had somehow beaten down the bigger man, and gone home with his head high and posterior in the breeze?

  Instead, Lively worked him over again, snatched a pine sapling from the ground, and whipped Bobby’s bare behind down D Street.

  Velma was there—she was always there—on the stoop, standing as Bob climbed the steps, not ducking inside to hide her face and leave him to walk the last few steps alone. She glared out the door to let any busybodies know they could all go straight to hell, and stomped off to get the salve. “I ought to knock you in the damn head, Bob,” she always said to him, in times like these.

  There are some people in the world who are not necessarily good at life if you see it as a completed work, but who are excellent at it one daub of bright color at a time. Bob, when drinking, lived in the twitch. He might never be respectable, in a Methodist kind of way. But the way he saw it, and raised his sons to see it, he could be free as a bird on a bunk in the city jail, as long as he showed some guts and left some blood on the ground—his, or somebody’s. Bob, with a bottle, would wreak mayhem in disproportion to his size, and go find his angel, to hear his story, and bind his wounds.

  He was kind to her, when sober, but would forget to be kind when he was not. She just took it, and walked miles to bail him out of jail with money she made in that stifling mill. People recall that his dark red hair went white early in his life, as if he wanted it that way, because she had loved it so.

  The nature of their story, really, is that you laugh at Bob and cry for her, for her goodness and long suffering. But it is the nature of men that it is easier for us to laugh at Bob than cry for Velma, which is why women loathe us so.

  I laughed as Jimmy told that story, burnishing one more legend of a tin-pot god. There have been a hundred drinking stories told on Bob, more, if you count the lies. But it wasn’t always that way for my grandfather. Once, he was just a citizen, just a fella, of regular behavior, and reasonable dreams.

  AS A YOUNG MAN, Bobby was sober, ramrod straight. He was a man who could sense promise in the dirt, who could sift it through his hands and feel good things, feel the potential of okra, squash, tomatoes, and make it come true. He worked his shift in the cotton mill and sharecropped, too, and grew an oasis in his little village garden.

  He could not just stand by and watch another man work. He reached for the pick. When other men sat around to drink or gossip, he slept, resting his body for the next day. There wasn’t any foolishness in him, and he would only go so far into the twentieth century. He built traps and snares and walked the streets loaded with heavy stringers of fish and carcasses of squirrels and rabbits. He greatly distrusted automobiles and would not even sit behind the wheel of one, and if he needed to travel, he saddled a horse.

  In his twenties, he still took care of his momma, Frankie, and his siblings, and people believe he lived a lifetime without being mean to her. In a time when most people had to stay inside on wash day because they had one pair of underwear, Bob’s two full-time jobs gave him a largesse, enough to save a dollar or two most months in a coffee can, for his one dream. He liked to tell it to people, tell how much cotton he could bring in, how many mules he would stable, when he finally bought his own land. He lived for it, and nothing would distract him. If a man approached him with a bottle when he was a young man he would just tell them, No thank you, Slim, but I’ll catch you in December.

  Then, working a corn crop for a man named Sam Whistenant in 1919, he saw his angel. He stopped for a sip of cool water, and as he tipped the dipper to his lips there she was, hair black as the bottom of a well and so long it almost brushed the red ground. It was poetry that he found her there, next to a field, a girl with the gentlest heart in the world, a selfless, lovely, patient girl, with rows of green corn framing her beautiful face.

  And like that, he was dreaming again.

  “Velma’s mother and father didn’t want her to marry Bobby,” said Velma’s niece, Shirley Brown. “They were hoping for an officer in the cavalry.”

  They had a picture of a dashing young cadet on the mantel, and assumed it was only a matter of time before their daughter married the man. They knew she was sneaking off to see him. She climbed up behind him on his government-issue horse and they would ride, thundering through the pines, her hair trailing behind her. The young officer must have felt like the luckiest man in the world, till he found what she really loved was the horse.

  The same day Bob’s heart fluttered at the edge of that field, she noticed him, too, by the well. She was about seventeen, and she did not fall in love with the boy so much as with the hair on top of his little head. It was kind of auburn, but darker than that, and shined.

  Why, she thought, it looks just like syrup candy. Back then, women made candy by heating a greased skillet and pouring in dollops of dark, reddish sorghum. As it cooled, they pulled it, like taffy, till it glowed, and when it cooled it set up hard as rubies. He was a little runty, true, but “he was the prettiest little man I ever seen,” she said.

  She told her mother, Emma, she liked the boy. It was like she walked into a party and flung dirt on the birthday cake. Emma was heartbroken, and forbade it. How could the foolish girl swap an officer and a gentleman for that little dirtdauber? Her father, Samuel Hampton Whistenant, told her she would die a wretched spinster before she would marry a sharecropper, and they kept a close eye on her, to keep her from running off. They were from Switzerland, the Whistenants, and men in their line had fought in the Revolutionary War and Civil War. Samuel Whistenant was not rich but he was proud. He farmed his own land and ran a little café in the mill village community of Blue Mountain, south of Jacksonville.

  To keep her close, he put Velma to work in the café, as a waitress. She was still single when she turned nineteen, old to be waiting for a husband, a beautiful, lovelorn girl.

  It was there in the café that Bobby got to see her. He came in and ate a thousand hamburgers, drank a bathtub of coffee, just to see her fill his cup. Sam always ran him off if he even tried to hold her hand. So he sat on the counter stool, stiff-backed, the starch in his overalls and shirt quietly rustling as he stared at the back of her.

  A year passed, more. On June 4, 1920, for the first time in as long as anyone could even recall, his stool was empty. For the kin who followed this forbidden love story, it looked like the boy had finally taken more than he could stand.

  In the afternoon, a horn sounded on the street outside.

  Sam peered out the window.

  A Chevrolet idled at the curb. FOR HIRE was stenciled on the door.

  Bob could not drive, so he had come to get her in a taxi.

  She snatched off her apron and was out the door. They raced south to the Oxanna Church, where a preacher named Williams pronounced them man and wife.

  “He stole her from her parents, and the cavalry,” said Shirley. It is a pattern in my family. Velma, who could have been the wife of an officer, chose the village. My other grandmother, Ava, married a roofer and a whiskey maker and lived in the dark woods. My mother married the man who once stole the keys to the county jail. Some people would say they didn’t pick well, that they gave up a chance to move up in their class, or even move out of it. How wasteful, to marry for love.

  THE MILL WHISTLE BLEW in the pitch black of four-thirty to get Bobby and Velma up. It blew again at five forty-five to start them walking, and again at six, to restart the machines. There were no clocks on the bedside tables in the mill village. There was no need. If you laid out, the hiring boss gave your job to one of the new arrivals who lined up outside the office. Bobby and Velma never laid out. They worked sick, and she worked when she was with child. Velma worked in the spinning room, Bobby in the carding room. They breathed white air, and at the end of the day, when the machines finally slowed and died and the teeth-clacking vibration finally ceased, they walked home arm in arm.

  They saved as much as they could in one-dollar bill
s and pocket change, working for the day they could walk out of that smothering heat and noise for good, and be something more than a set of expendable hands. It took longer than he expected. His farm was still just that, a dream, when the children came in the twenties and early thirties, the boys Troy and Roy, and the girls Clara, Fairy Mae and Ruby, and then the Great Depression sank its teeth deep into the village and mountains. People struggled to hold to what little bit they had as the mills slowed and finally closed, but Bob even outworked the Crash. “They were not some raggedy Depression family,” said Shirley Brown. “Bobby killed hogs, and there was pickled pig’s feet, beef tripe, beef stew, chili, fried chicken.” He butchered livestock for halves or the parts other people didn’t want, and pushed a plow in ground that others gave up on, to grow food.

  He sent visitors home with sacks of tomatoes, baskets of okra. “I reckon Bobby never did sell nothin’,” said Carlos. “He gave it away.”

  But some of Velma’s people did suffer. Store owners had no customers, and the farmers had no market. Cash was short.

  Some men, in that bleakness, drank up their families’ groceries, but not Bob. He was a man who rigidly controlled his appetites. The bootleggers sold a half-pint of corn whiskey for fifty cents, and Bob allowed himself exactly one half-pint, once a year, on the birth of our Savior. The liquor came in a thin, clear bottle, and was enough for two good, mellow intoxications or one pure, long, skull-popping drunk. The bootleggers called it a scant because it was so small, and it would last Bob the Yuletide. On Christmas Eve, every Christmas, he walked up to Velma and asked for his drinking money. “Velma, honey, gimme fifty cents. I’m gonna get me a scant.” She felt inside the coffee can, and gave it to him.

  It was sometime before the start of World War II, maybe a few years in, when he asked the last time.

  She sat down and covered her face.

  “What?” he said.

  “We don’t have it,” she said.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “I give it away,” she said.

  She had given it, a little at a time, to people who needed it worse than they did, to people suffering. Her heart was too soft, too good, to say no to people in real need. She planned to make it back by sewing, cleaning houses, but Christmas just came early for a change. No one knows, really, how much it was. It may have been fifty dollars, less, but it was a lot to them.

  “I’m sorry, Bob,” she said.

  He walked out.

  He was a renter the rest of his life.

  It would be wrong, and unfair, to say that Bob stopped trying after he gave up on his dream. He continued to work hard, and when he was sober he remained the most polite, decent and responsible man. That was the best part of Bob, that unbending sense of responsibility to people who depended on him, and he would have been ashamed to see his house dark or icebox empty. There would be meat at supper and sweets at breakfast in his house, and he didn’t give a damn if syrup went to fifty cents a sop.

  But as he grew older, more and more, he was willing to go when men came to lure him out with a jar of clear whiskey. It was a surrender, in a way. He bought his own whiskey by the gallon now, fought for the fun of it, and did odd things. Once, he hitched his horse to a wagon and rode through the mill village dressed only in his long underwear, whooping. He was Bobby Bragg, and every payday was Christmas Day.

  When you’re all alone and blue

  No one to tell your troubles to

  Remember me, I’m the one who loves you

  “He’d get to drinking, and come over to my Grandmother Whistenant’s house,” said Shirley Brown. “I was still just a girl then. We had an old wood heater, with a pan for the ashes underneath, and he would sit in there by that heater and cry. Uncle Bobby dipped snuff, and he would spit in the ashes and cry and the tears would roll down his cheeks and the snuff would run down his chin, and he would sing…”

  When this world has turned you down

  And not a true friend can be found

  Remember me, I’m the one who loves you

  He did not sing well, and liked to linger on the “Remember meeeeeeee” part, which sounded like someone strangling a cat with a nylon cord. “Some people would run and shut the door if they thought a drunk was coming, but not Momma. We all just thought the world of him.” So they all sat around, being polite, and waited for Bobby to stitch his heart back together one verse at a time.

  Once, staggering home, Bob made a misstep on the footlog and plunged into the creek. Instead of getting out, he lay on his back and sang curses at the log. Far away, at his own house, his two oldest sons heard, faintly, their father’s voice.

  “Damn,” said Roy.

  “What?” said Troy.

  “Bob’s fell in the branch,” Roy said.

  His sons went to get him. As they walked, they saw his little hat bobbing down the stream.

  TOUGHY GRIFFIN was Bobby’s friend. He was not the meanest man in Jacksonville, but he could absorb pain and whiskey in a volume few have ever seen. Being kicked by a grown, neck-high mule is comparable to being run over by a small car, and he had been kicked, butted and bit. “But there was not a mule or a horse he couldn’t shoe,” said Jimmy Hamilton. “He was usually so drunk he couldn’t walk, but he could flat out shoe. He’d get about half lit, and before it was over…well, I’ve seen him bleedin’ and the mule, too.”

  He and Homer would go sit under the Indian cigar tree in front of Toughy’s barn, for the same reason they went to the theater. If you sat there long enough, some kind of entertainment would occur. It was even better than the poker game for violence, cussing, drinking and all the manly arts. “I never knew if Toughy ever took a bath, because he always looked the same,” Jimmy said. He was covered in snuff, mud, blood, manure and smut, from his bellows, but never whiskey, because Toughy never let a drop go awry. He was one of the legendary figures in Jacksonville’s history, though his name appears on no documents except maybe a few old police reports. Bob liked to visit Toughy in the cool of the late afternoon, especially if he had a bottle to share.

  This day, Toughy had just used the nose twisters to bring a large mule down to the ground, so it could be trussed up and shod. The nose twisters worked just like the name implies—the smithy attached them, like a big set of pliers, to the nose, and twisted them around until the animal buckled. Mules do not like this, none of it, and they lie quivering in pain and terror on the ground, until the ropes are undone and it can explode up, kicking insanely at anything close. Toughy had just tied the mule down, straddled the leg, and was driving nails into the hoof when Bobby walked up.

  “Bobby had some whiskey,” Jimmy said. “That was out of the ordinary.”

  He told Toughy to quit what he was doing and have a little drink of liquor.

  “Toughy would have dropped his hammer in mid-swing,” Jimmy said, “if someone came up with a bottle…”

  …so Toughy dropped his hammer on the backswing, and sat down.

  “So there they are, Toughy and Bobby, sitting on a rock drinking whiskey,” Jimmy said.

  The mule’s owner, a big farmer, stared in disbelief.

  His prize mule lay kicking, one leg sticking straight up in the air, as Toughy took several long pulls on the whiskey.

  He walked over to the two men and ordered Toughy to get up and finish his job.

  “Toughy had to kind of wall his eye around on the man, till he could focus good,” Jimmy said.

  He nodded, staggered up, reeled over to the mule, sighted un-steadily on his next nail and, missing the bony part of the hoof altogether, drove the nail straight into the fleshy quick of the animal’s foot. Blood flew, the mule screamed and the farmer stood in disbelief. He was a respected man, a landowner, and these drunk men, these white-trash hooligans, had crippled his animal.

  He decided to blame Bob, who did not have a hammer in his hand. He walked over and started cussing him. Bob dropped his bottle in the dirt—it was empty, of course—balled his fists and raised them in
front of his face as if he was planning to box the big farmer by Marquis of Queensberry rules. Then, as a bell sounded that only he could hear, he pranced toward the man, swung twice, missed twice, and fell face-down in the gravel.

  IN A VILLAGE where so many people just broke themselves against the machines and disappeared, there are more stories than there are people left to tell them. Homer Barnwell and Jimmy Hamilton have known each other since they were boys in a time between wars, when a passing car, any car, would make them stop and stare. Bob would be more than a hundred now, if he had lived, so the only witnesses to his misadventures are old men who were boys then, who peeked into every condemned corner of the village, which was their universe, to watch men drink, lie, scratch and roar. The meek and well-behaved always seem to fade, which has always made me doubt that “inherit the earth” part. It is the Bobs who live forever.

  I am proud to have Bob’s blood in me. In it is at least part of the reason for what decency there is in me, in any sense of responsibility to my people. But in it, too, is the answer to every time I argued from spite, all those times I fought dirty when I was in the dead, pure-positive wrong. Rules? Who ever had any damn fun with those shackles on your feet? Meekness? Who wants to inherit the earth, in such company? Once, as a boy, I repeatedly slapped a boy on a baseball field, trying to goad him into swinging at me. He wanted to hit me back but he didn’t do it, maybe because he was afraid, maybe because he didn’t want to hurt me. Either way, he stood there and took it. I slapped him till my arm got tired, till I finally just walked off in defeat. But I know what Bob would have done. Bob would have switched hands.