The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  THE LAST CHILD of Bob and Velma came into the world on January 10, 1935. The boy, named Charles Samuel after his grandfather, was allergic to some types of milk, so Velma mixed a formula from sweet canned milk even as, in the hills around town, babies perished from simple dehydration. Born into that cycle of breadlines, layoffs and lockouts, he was wrapped in soft blankets, and raised in a house of love and whiskey.

  * * *

  The Boy

  I WILL NEVER FORGET the first time I saw him. He was still just a roly-poly little kid, playing in the white sand with his cousins on the Alabama coast.

  “Hey,” was all I said to him, but I thought: You’re going to be my boy. I’m going to have a boy, after all this time.

  “Hey,” he said, with just half a glance, and went back to burying his cousin in the sand. I watched him awhile, then went to the souvenir shop and bought him a shovel.

  If you’re going to bury somebody, bury ’em.

  “We buried my brother once, in Pensacola,” I told him. “We left him there, up to his neck, hollering, and didn’t dig him out until right before the tide came in.”

  He grinned and said, Naw you didn’t, but I was telling the truth.

  The woman said she never truly worried what kind of stepfather I would be, but I did. Everything I knew about being a father, almost everything, was wrong, twisted.

  “You will spend time with him,” she said. “That’s all you have to do.”

  But I didn’t recognize this kind of boy.

  “He’s not different, he’s just little,” said the woman. “You never were that little, were you?”

  I hate conversation like this. Am I twelve now, but I wasn’t twelve then? Hell, I can’t keep up.

  “You never got to be,” she said. “When you were his age, you broke rocks. Your momma carried you on a cotton sack. It’s a different world, for him.”

  This woman protected her son from everything sharp. She even cut up his apples, lest he come into contact with a paring knife.

  He had never lit a firecracker, and run away.

  He had never fired a BB gun at a tin can.

  She still ran his bathwater, lest he be chilled, or scorched.

  She sat on the edge of the tub and talked to him, so he would not be alone.

  “He likes it when I talk to him,” she said.

  “Well I hope he gets tired of it before he goes to college,” I said.

  I have read of boys in plastic bubbles who had more adventure.

  The woman and boy lived on a dead-end street, what suburban people call a cove. The boy was only allowed to ride his bicycle on that street, never out of sight. I would watch him, circling, circling.

  I thought of a hamster on a wheel.

  I had believed that being a boy was about getting away with things, just short of murder, and if you got lucky, you could still be a boy when they lowered you into the red clay. What troubled me most was not that he was bound, but that he did not seem to mind it.

  I was born into a people who could cuss the horns off a bull, before revival and after dinner on the ground, but he lived in a world rated G, with candy sprinkles on top. Once, in the car, I let slip a “damn” or “hell” or some other entry-level curse, and the boy puffed up like a toad and said his mother would not allow me to speak in such a vulgar fashion.

  “Well,” I said, and looked up, down, left and right.

  “Is she here?” I said.

  He told on me.

  He asked for me at bedtime to tell him a story, but I never felt comfortable. Even though I made a living telling them, I knew few suitable for children. Most bedtime stories I told involved loose women and began with “And she was so damn drunk…” I told him finally he was too big to be tucked in. The woman cornered me, breathing fire. “If he tells me he does not want me to tuck him in, if I lose that, because of you…” she said, and left the rest unsaid. I thought she was going to cry, or punch me in the nose.

  We battled like that, good and evil, for the boy’s immortal soul.

  I had always loved speed, and as I turned forty I bought myself one last rocket ship. It was low and sleek and the color of a silver bullet, and James Dean died in one like it. The first time we were alone together, the boy and me, I put the top down, told the boy to buckle in tight, and we left that safe, middle-class neighborhood behind in a hot wind. I let the engine roar before shifting, and as I popped the clutch it felt like we were riding on a pulled-tight rubber band that had been let go. A boy who doesn’t thrill to speed could never be a boy of mine, and as we flashed over the asphalt he oddly raised both hands heaven-ward, as if pleading for deliverance, or a soft landing.

  I wanted to twist that engine up to a hundred, to show him how it felt to fly, but it seemed wrong to torture a boy who was calling to the Lord, so I eased off. I knew that if I hurt the boy the woman would kill me and drag my bones behind a minivan, so I eased off some more.

  He looked like he had something to say, so I asked him what was on his mind.

  “Rick,” he said, “why am I here?”

  I had just started seeing his mother. I wanted to tell him the bald truth: ’Cause I’m after your momma, son. But I didn’t.

  “’Cause your momma is my friend,” I said. “So, I want to be your friend, too.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, but I could almost smell the smoke from the gears spinning in his head as we swooped off the four-lane and geared down, growling into a turn.

  He raised his arms again, as if in surrender.

  I told the woman about it, how he raised his hands, like he was giving himself to God.

  That wasn’t it, the woman said.

  When he rides in a convertible, she said, he likes to shut his eyes and pretend he’s on a roller coaster.

  He raises his arms, she said, to show her how brave he is.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Fearless

  HE CRESTED THE HILL on his red tricycle, two RC bottles full of canned milk corked and holstered, one in each side pocket of his little blue overalls. Charles Bragg, five years old, pedaled hard to make the summit, pushing when he needed to, then stopped to stare contemptuously down the long, sweeping grade that sliced through mean blackberry bushes and creaking, flexing pines. If the breeze whispered, Caution, child, caution, it failed to filter through his dark red curls. He rocked back and forth, once, twice, and he was gone, pumping furiously to keep up with a front tire that spun like a sawmill blade, the spokes a blur. He couldn’t keep his feet on those whirling pedals, so he stuck his legs straight out and rode it down, teeth clenched, knuckles bone-white on the handlebars, every rock and rut bouncing him off the seat, threatening to pitch him into those murderous trees or fishhook thorns. He was almost down, almost safe when he lost it, when he bounced high and came down wrong, tilting, careening right into a few thousand stickers, because tricycles never will wreck in a straight line. He did not cry as he extricated himself, but it took a while, since anyone who has ever been caught in blackberry bushes knows that two barbs stick you for every one you pull free. He had time to think about the foolishness of what he’d done, as pinpricks of blood popped up on his arms and the milk leaked down his leg. Finally, he righted his chariot, took the bottles from his pockets and set them on the ground, and went back up the hill to do it again.

  “He was my hero,” said Shirley Brown, his first cousin. “I was always so afraid and he was so brave, and I thought he could do everything. He was short and cute and his hair was curly, and in colder weather he wore one of those little aviator caps, the ones with the earflaps. He would strap that little hat on and ride a cardboard box down a hill, and light firecrackers in his hand and throw them, at the last second. Even when he was little he walked everywhere by himself, looking to get into some adventure. Velma worked a twelve-hour shift at the cotton mill, so he stayed with us and played with me, the ’fraidy cat. And I guess I thought he was the grandest thing in all the world.”

 
Shirley’s father was a wandering man who wandered away. “He always had on a brand-new suit and drove a big shiny car, and he would blow in and leave so quickly, just a beautiful, shining light that I always knew was out there, but could never quite touch,” she said. When she was just a little girl she went to Jacksonville to live with her mother’s people, the Whistenants, in an unpainted house. She needed a friend.

  “Let me tell you about your daddy,” she said, and it was like she broke the lock on some dust-covered toy box and scattered its contents—decommissioned lead soldiers, rode-hard wooden horses and a bottomless bag of cracked, flecked marbles—across the floor.

  She told me how they played in the red mud until Velma scrubbed them raw with Octagon soap in a big washpot by the elephant ears, how they walked the footlog like it was a high wire, then snuck into the house to watch Troy and his fiancée Dinky make out on the couch. When he was beginning elementary school and her a little younger, they climbed trees until her nerve gave out and she tried to pray herself down. “The preacher on the radio told us if you’ve got faith enough you can do anything. I got up in the apple tree and lost my faith.” But he climbed till he ran out of tree, till the limbs were just twigs and the treetops bent and swayed beneath his weight. Even then there was no fear in him, only disappointment in the flimsy, insubstantial chemistry of clouds.

  “Velma whipped him,” Shirley said.

  But how do you whip a boy out of the sky?

  She told me they sneaked fried chicken legs off the big table in Velma’s kitchen, and painted their faces with illegal pie. She told me he was so fierce that the big boys ran away from him when he picked up a rock, but was never mean to her, never pinched or made fun of her because she was afraid of the same world he stood master of in his doll-sized shoes. But mostly, she told me how he stood by her when she needed to be more than she was, how he still clutches at places in her heart even though they drifted apart after just a few years, when he reached that bubble of time in a boy’s life when he is ashamed to be in the company of blonde-haired little girls.

  IT SEEMS LIKE two separate universes, sometimes.

  In one universe, three sisters, Velma, Odell and Eva, stand in almost-matching flower-print dresses, purses clutched in front of them, waiting for a nurse at the reception desk to notice they are alive. It is the 1940s, and the nurse, reigning over a doctor’s office in Anniston, the Calhoun County seat, knows these women, or knows women like them, just timid country people. She pushes a physician’s sign-in form across the counter and turns away. Shirley and my father, scrubbed bright pink and suffocating in their dress-up clothes, hold to their mothers’ hems, watching.

  The three sisters just stand there. Velma has worked in pain for days, standing at her machine. She needs a doctor to look at her feet, and right now wants nothing more than to just sit down. Odell and Eva, Shirley’s mother, came in solidarity, as was custom then. You rarely saw just one working-class woman in the doctor’s office. When they went among the swells, they went together. The nurse showed them her back for a few long minutes, then turned to look at them with cool superiority.

  “Have you signed in?” she said.

  The three ladies shook their heads.

  “Why not?” she said.

  The three ladies stood silent.

  Every eye in the waiting room bored into their backs.

  “Well?” the nurse said.

  “I can’t,” Velma said.

  She could write her name, but she could not decipher the form.

  In the other universe stands a big, white house on Glenwood Terrace, the most fashionable street in the city of Anniston. The two-story house, where Shirley lives now with her husband Charles, is filled with antiques, with dark-wood furniture, with china and crystal and knickknacks without end. She is a beautiful woman, still, and he is a successful, retired businessman. She recently hosted an English tea for her book club, and sometimes meets the ladies for lunch at the club. Not a speck of red mud shows on her now.

  But she is not one of those people who pretend they were born this way. She would lose too much if she did, and lose my father altogether. She remembers how the red earth would steam after the violent summer thunderstorms, and Grandfather Sam Whistenant would sneak ahead of Shirley and my father as they walked the trail through the dripping pines. Old Sam would bend down, scoop a handful of the wet clay in his hands, and craft little mud people from the warm, red muck. He would place his sculptures along the trail where the children were sure to find them. She would walk in the gloom and rustle of the deep trees, holding hands with her little hero so that his courage, like electric current, could flow through them, back and forth. And, around every bend, they would find those tokens, as if the raindrops were seeds and these mud people sprouted up along the dark trail after every storm. Old Sam, who had an old man’s license to lie to children at will, denied any involvement in it, so haunts or fairies, he told them, it had to be.

  There had to be witches, too, in a forest like that. She would walk through it on one condition.

  “I was safe with your daddy,” she said.

  THE BOY CHARLES may have been brave because he was protected by the talismans he carried in his pockets, a gris-gris of charms and nonsense, like his homemade rabbit’s foot, gristle sticking out of the skin, half a pocket comb, a lead sinker, and interesting rocks. He carried a knotted mile of monofilament and a bream hook sunk in a piece of cork, in case he should come across a promising ditch, a broken-handled pocketknife with one and one-half blades, and an unspeakable mess of what had once been two graham crackers sandwiched around a daub of commodity peanut butter. One whole pocket bulged with marbles, just marbles. He would have carried more treasure, certainly, if he hadn’t already been weighed down like Balaam’s ass with all that sloshing milk.

  Velma petted the child, but as soon as he was able to walk she made him, because there was little room for clingy, dependent children in a place where you nursed your baby to a punch clock, and got docked good money if the line didn’t start because you were still buttoning your blouse. He never crawled much, just stood up one day and went. Velma seldom let him out of the house without those two bottles of thick, sweet milk. She liked the RC bottles because the glass was thicker than store-bought junk and less likely to break in the rough-and-tumble that was just a given with little boys. He had no playmates in the house, so Velma corked his bottles, gave him the admonishment that generations of mothers have given their children in the age of the automobile—“Now, don’t you get run’t over”—and sent him through the pines, to his cousins.

  Shirley can still remember the first time she ever saw him, striding up over the hill and into the yard in his old-fashioned high-top shoes. She had been a pudgy baby, so one of her uncles nicknamed her “Fatty,” and still called her “Fat” for short.

  “You ain’t fat,” he said, puzzled.

  “I know,” she said.

  “He ort not call you that,” he said.

  She noticed his bottles.

  “Why you bringin’ your own milk?” she asked him.

  “’Cause I can’t drank reg’lar,” he said.

  She did not laugh.

  Friendships are sealed, tight and forever, in a minute like that.

  Being so small and burdened with the milk bottles, he would have been doomed, sacrificed to children’s cruelties, if he had been even the slightest bit meek. He would have never come out of the cotton mill village alive, would have been called nipple head and momma’s boy and beaten half to death. Instead, it was like the midwife clipped his nerves when she cut the cord, and he answered every jeer and catcall the same way. He picked up a rock, and threw it. Some little boys throw rocks and run away, but he ran at his target, closer and closer, till he was right on them, till he couldn’t miss.

  He led Shirley across days of danger. Her heart wasn’t in it, but she went because she loved being with him, and wondered how anyone so small could be so unafraid. He was not wild-eyed and
crazy-acting, but serious-faced and confident, till he got to the top of a tree or the bottom of a hill. Then, she believes, he was in pure joy. As he said then, “Doin’ somethin’ was always better’n talkin’ ’bout doin’ somethin’.”

  He showed up one day with a whole pack of Black Cat–brand firecrackers—sometimes, being Bobby’s boy had real advantages. They crept off into the woods, far enough so that the blast would have been just an innocent pop in Grandma Whistenant’s failing ears, and set to work blowing up dirt, anthills, tin cans but not frogs, because that was sadistic and stupid. “He was rough, but not mean,” Shirley said. But he soon tired of blowing up things from a distance and began to play a game with himself, a kind of child-sized Russian roulette. He lit the Black Cat with a Blue Diamond kitchen match and held it, sizzling, as the fuse burned shorter, shorter…

  “Throw it, throw it, throw it,” Shirley begged…. till he flicked it away, to explode in the air.

  He was miserable under the eyes of grownups, his wardens. He would stare out a rain-streaked window, waiting, and then the screen door would be snatched half off its hinges, and she was racing to keep up.

  He remains, to this day, the undisputed lightweight champion of the sewage-ditch pole vault. He would cut a thin pole as long as he could find and as heavy as he could lift and swing around. He would hold it in front of him, the far end waggling and wavering, because he was so small he could barely hold it up, and start to run. When he got to the edge of the ditch, he would gouge the end into the bottom near the other bank and heave himself upward, then turn loose of the pole, and fly. “He could go further out and higher up than any of the other little boys,” Shirley said. The first time she tried it, she set the pole, soared upward and fell straight into the snake-infested, questionable water below.