The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  It was a time in their lives when a discarded box was a covered wagon, a castle, a tank. But mostly, he turned them into sleds. In a world without snow, he discovered that pine straw can keep you going at a pretty slick clip. She remembers walking with him up the hill and, against her better judgment, climbing inside the box.

  “It’s so high,” she said.

  “No it ain’t,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  She decided she would just sit awhile.

  No one ever broke a leg sitting in a box.

  “It’ll be fun,” he said.

  “It won’t,” she said.

  “It will,” he said, and pushed.

  She went the last few yards sideways.

  He ran down the hill, jumping into the air every few steps.

  “You done good,” he said.

  He liked to wear his aviator cap on his turn. It was just a box sliding on the pine straw or slick spring grass, but if you believe for a second he was not airborne, that he was not throttling through the clouds in his Sopwith Camel, machine-gun bullets clipping the guide wires with a sound like snapping guitar strings, well, you didn’t see what Shirley saw.

  He led her on spying missions, crawling behind furniture, through closets, under the kitchen table. One day they crept from under the porch, through the darkened house and toward the sounds of, well, something odd, in the middle room. There was a couch there, and further back in the boxcar-like house sat an unused rollaway bed on which Velma had piled mountains of folded quilts, sheets and other clean laundry. They crawled belly-down through the rooms, climbed the rollaway bed, cringing when the springs squealed, and burrowed under the laundry. From there they could see Troy and Dinky on the couch. It was the first smooching either of them ever witnessed that actually made a noise.

  “Why do you reckon they do that?” he whispered.

  “Don’t know,” she hissed.

  “By God,” he whispered, “I won’t never.”

  It was all backflips and giggles, a cycle of washtub swimming pools, fatback and biscuits and eternal sunshine, till they almost killed Grandmother Whistenant.

  The old house, made of batten board, was built into the side of a hill. It stood on pillars of natural rock, and the front porch was so high a child could stand under it. The porch was the center of life. Women rocked and snapped beans and cut okra and Uncle Carl Whistenant would lean his straight-backed chair against the wall of the house, and doze. It was mostly Braggs and Whistenants, the clans. There was no television, just a dust-covered radio, so they told stories, and gossiped. World War II raged in the Pacific and Europe, and in window after window in the village was taped a cardboard star, to show that house had given a son to the war. Word of their fate trickled through the streets, the church, the weekly paper, and made its way to the high porch. Louis H. Harris, of 111 D Street, had been captured in the Philippines after the fall of Corregidor, and died of starvation in a Japanese prison camp on October 1, 1942. James E. Johnston, of 36 A Street, was killed on his ship. Olin L. McCurry, of 69 C Street, and Renay W. Webb, of 98 D Street, died in combat. George Robinson Jr., of 73 C Street, was killed when his ammunition ship blew up off Marcos Island. But the hardest news was of Everett Slaght, my father’s cousin, who was blown from his gun turret on the Iowa and disappeared in the waves.

  The war news baffled the children, who were too young to grasp it.

  The gossip was just as hard.

  “Well, poor ol’ so-and-so’s with child again.”

  “She don’t tell nobody.”

  “Bless her heart.”

  “Don’t know who she’s foolin’.”

  “Um.”

  “Ain’t nobody come forward.”

  “Um.”

  “Bad, ain’t it.”

  “Bad.”

  “It’s a shame.”

  “Bless her heart.”

  Big, fist-sized chunks of ice, chipped off a twenty-pound block with an ice pick black from rust and time, knocked against the side of jelly glasses and Mason jars filled with iced tea. Snuff, which they ladled into their mouths with the tiny little paddles you get with tubs of ice cream, would lift off on the breeze in mid-dip and sift down through the planks to the gloom below. If they listened, they could hear a small child sneeze.

  “I guess you know poor ol’ mister and missus so-and-so’s having trouble again?”

  “Lord, no.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Came home drunk.”

  “Well.”

  “She called the law.”

  “She ort to have.”

  “Bless her heart.”

  The children could hear but not see much, since the house was built tight in a time when carpenters never said things like “Just let that do.” The boards of the porch joined just right, so children could lurk unseen for hours. There was, though, a single knothole, and the bravest children would press an eye against it like it was a telescope, and spy.

  “I think it’s where I learned my morals,” said Shirley, who sat there a thousand days and nights with my father, eavesdropping. One evening, Grandmother Whistenant, who had finally forgiven her oldest daughter for not marrying into the officer corps, half dozed in her chair as kin gossiped around her. Under the porch, the children noticed that the old woman’s chair was positioned perfectly over the knothole. Shirley cannot remember whose idea it was, but they took a curvy stick with a small knot on the end and poked it through the hole, and touched Grandmother Whistenant, ever so gently, on the leg.

  Grandmother Whistenant looked down just in time to see the knobby end of the stick withdraw back into the hole.

  Her face turned white and her breath died in her throat.

  “Lordy, Lordy, mercy on me,” she wailed. “A snake has bit me.”

  She sank to the planks and prepared to die.

  She prayed, the words tumbling from her lips.

  “Oh Lord, though I walk…”

  The children ran from under the porch.

  “We got scared,” Shirley said. “She was so worked up, we thought she really was going to die.”

  Her kin helped her to her feet and made her stand, so they could check her for the fang marks. After as effective a search as could be made with decorum under the long skirt, slips and apron, it was determined there were none.

  “You ain’t dying,” her kin assured her, one by one.

  “Yes I am,” Grandmother Whistenant avowed.

  She insisted on dying, but had to wait quite some time.

  The men looked for the snake, and my father, grinning, helped. Their search failed, but as was the custom in such things, they killed innocents for the entire summer, black snakes and rat snakes and the rare copperhead and baby ground rattlers. Fence rails and tree limbs hung with them, and the birds feasted. But the children slept easy, because there is nothing in the Bible that sends you to hell for killing snakes.

  Shirley does not recall being afraid of them then, when she and my father ran barefoot in the weeds. But she found, when she first came to live with her mother’s people, something that did frighten her. With fine-tuned cruelty, children in Jacksonville quickly picked up on the things that most hurt Shirley Vasser, the new girl in town.

  One little girl, a preacher’s kid, climbed to the top of a sliding board and stared down at Shirley, pious and accusing.

  “My momma says your momma is going to hell, ’cause she got a divorce,” she told Shirley.

  “She ain’t,” Shirley said.

  “She is,” the little girl said.

  “Well…” Shirley worked her brain. “Well…”

  The little girl waited up high on the slide, triumphant.

  “Well, you’re ugly,” Shirley said.

  The little girl’s mouth fell open.

  She looked at my father, standing there.

  He nodded.

  The little girl slid down with her lips trembling, and ran off crying.

  Another snooty little girl a
sked Shirley why she lived in an unpainted house with so many relatives.

  “Well,” Shirley said, “this is just our extra house. We’ve got another house.”

  “You do?” the girl said.

  “Yep,” Shirley said.

  My father just watched, complicit.

  “It’s got a ’frigerator,” Shirley said.

  “It don’t,” the girl said.

  “It does,” Shirley said.

  Every house for blocks around just had an icebox, an apparatus dependent on the whims and health of a man named Lanky Snyder, who showed twice a week with a twenty-pound block of ice.

  But this new girl, this Shirley, not only had a ’frigerator, she had a summer house, too.

  The little girl walked away to spread the news.

  “I know the Good Lord doesn’t want us to say such things, but it felt so good,” Shirley said.

  My father, if she asked, would have hit them with a rock.

  HE WAS NOT completely unafraid. No little boy is. He dreamed about coffins that glided through the windows of the little houses, dreamed of old men in overalls and faded black coats lifting, pushing. He dreamed of machines, and in his bed he could hear them pounding through the walls. It was no wonder ghost stories did not impress him much.

  Every root cellar, every closet was haunted then. Every dirt road ended in murder, every rope dangling from every limb was a hang-man’s tree instead of a rotted-off tire swing. “A witch lived in the cedar tree, and would grab you if you walked too close,” Shirley said. She would draw you into her thick green, and let the birds peck out your eyes.

  My father squatted at the base of the haunted tree, daring her to show herself.

  “Come out,” he called.

  The witch withdrew into her needles, and waited for a different boy.

  In the old cemetery, the restless dead of Rebel campaigns whistled from stones marked with LOVING HUSBAND, whispered from behind cement angels. The children ran past it, but he prowled inside, his slingshot loaded with a cat’s-eye marble, because any fool knows there’s magic in that. The dead just hunkered down in the rustling leaves, and let him pass.

  “I wanted to be like him,” Shirley said.

  She told me a lot of stories. Then she told me she wished I had talked to her, if only for a minute, before I had dismissed him, in my words, as a mean drunk and tragic figure.

  But it doesn’t fix anything, I thought. He changed, between her time and mine.

  I told her I wished I had, too.

  * * *

  The Boy

  THE ONLY GENTLENESS the boy got, I gave him by accident.

  The woman and boy lived in Memphis most of our first year together, and I commuted from Alabama. He met me at the door.

  One night, near Christmas, he was on the couch, trying to figure out how many apples Johnny would have if he gave five-eighths of them to Sue, who gave four-fifths of them to Jimmy, who gave two-thirds of them back to Johnny, who I am pretty sure would have never gotten in the apple business to start with if he knew he was going to have to figure out this mess.

  I was in the kitchen, wrapping presents. It was bitter cold outside—if you look at a map, Memphis is damn near as close to the Great Lakes as it is to the Gulf of Mexico—and the kitchen smelled warm and fine. There was nutmeg, cinnamon, evergreen. The big tree was covered in handmade ornaments from three little boys’ lives.

  I love Christmas, and have since my big brother used to wake me, standing all serious with a big flashlight in his hand.

  “Has he done come?” I always asked, the light blinding me.

  “He done was,” he said.

  My baby brother was too small to fool with. We let him sleep.

  What did he know about Santy Claus?

  We had to sneak to the tree, past my mother sleeping on the couch. It was forbidden, to peek before dawn.

  We never waited on dawn in our lives.

  The simple act of wrapping a present always pulled me back in time, shut out everything else, and sometimes, if I forgot myself long enough, even made me sing.

  Old toy trains, little toy tracks

  Little toy drums, coming from a sack

  Carried by a man, dressed in white and red

  Little one don’t you think it’s time you were in bed

  It probably sounded pretty bad. I sing like an angel drunk, but do not drink anymore.

  I looked up to see the woman smiling.

  She walked over and whispered.

  “He’s in there on the couch, just grinning.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Because he thinks you’re singing to him.”

  My father believed it was wrong to treat a boy, even a boy just five years old, as a helpless thing, so he rarely held my hand. He would carry us sometimes, Sam and me both, like a carnival ride, but when we walked he walked at his pace, and now and then he would wheel around, grin, and tell us, Come on, boys, come on. I remember a sidewalk in the mid-1960s, remember running to keep up when I was four or five years old. Sam, never helpless, matched him step for step. He would have killed himself, had his heart burst, rather than let him know he had won. Me, he had come back to retrieve, his face red.

  But my legs were shorter.

  We don’t talk about him a lot, Sam and me.

  I went home to see him later that Christmas season. The ring still felt hot on my finger then, and I pulled it on and off as cars passed us on Highway 21.

  We were driving to Anniston, the county seat, to look at a used truck. You look at a million over your lifetime, and buy four. It’s just good, somehow, to go look. There might be a magic truck out there. We walked round and round one that day but it was just a truck, and on the way home we stopped for a barbecue at a place called Dad’s.

  “Tell me one good thing about our daddy,” I said.

  “I don’t remember one,” he said.

  “There had to be something,” I said.

  “He didn’t even buy no groceries,” he said.

  We left there in a cold rain, so he drove slowly—even slower than usual. He says I drive too fast, but most people who drive like him are wearing pillbox hats and pearls. I hope when we are old he does not drive me to the hospital when my heart begins to fail. I would have to get right with God as I crawled in the cab, because I would never see the emergency room.

  “There has to be one good memory,” I said.

  Four red lights and an eternity later, he nodded.

  “One,” he said.

  “Well?”

  “It was that Christmas he got me that red wagon, and bought you that big tricycle,” he said.

  “Daddy never bought me a damn tricycle,” I said.

  “He did. He got drunk, and when him and some others left they run over it in the driveway,” he said. “Momma took it in the house, and hid it in the closet. We moved, it was still there.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Bootlegger’s Rhythm

  THE DITCH CLEAVED FROGTOWN into two realms, and two powerful spirits held sway, one on each side. One was old, old as the Cross, and the other had aged only a few days in a gallon can. Both had the power to change men’s lives. On one side of the ditch, a packed-in, pleading faithful fell hard to their knees and called the Holy Ghost into their jerking bodies in unknown tongues. On the other side, two boys, too much alike to be anything but brothers, flung open the doors of a black Chevrolet and lurched into the yard of 117 D Street, hallelujahs falling dead around them in the weeds. In the house, a sad-eyed little woman looked out, afraid it might be the law. When your boys are gone you’re always afraid it might be the law. But it was just her two oldest sons, Roy and Troy, floating home inside the bubble of her prayer, still in crumpled, cattin’-around clothes from Saturday night, still a little drunk on Sunday morning. They were fine boys, though, beautiful boys. They were just steps away now, a few steps. She would fry eggs by the platterful and pour black coffee, and be glad they were not in a
smoking hulk wrapped around a tree, or at the mercy of the police. She thought sometimes of walking over to the church to see it all, to hear the lovely music, but that would leave her boys and man unsupervised for too long. Her third son was eleven or so then. He could hear the piano ring across the ditch, even hear people shout, but he could smell the liquor that was always in the house on a Sunday and even steal a taste of it when no one was looking, so it was more real.

  THE HOLY GHOST MOVED INVISIBLE, but they could feel it in the rafters, sense it racing inside the walls. It was as real as a jag of lightning, or an electrical fire.

  The preacher stood on a humble, foot-high dais, to show that he did not believe he was better than them. “Do you believe in the Holy Ghost?” he asked, and they said they did. He preached then of the end of the world, and it was beautiful.

  They were still a new denomination then, but had spread rapidly in the last fifty years around a nation of exploited factory workers, coal miners, and rural and inner-city poor. Here, it was a church of lint-heads, pulpwooders and sharecroppers, shoutin’ people, who said amen like they were throwing a mule shoe. Biblical scholars turned their noses up, calling it hysteria, theatrics, a faith of the illiterate. But in a place where machines ate people alive, faith had to pour even hotter than blood.

  It had no steeple, no stained glass, no bell tower, but it was the house of Abraham and Isaac, of Moses and Joshua, of the Lord thy God. People tithed in Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels, and pews filled with old men who wore ancient black suit coats over overalls, and young men in short-sleeved dress shirts and clip-on ties. Women sat plain, not one smear of lipstick or daub of makeup on their faces, and not one scrap of lace at their wrists or necks. Their hair was long, because Paul wrote that “if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given her for a covering.” Their hair and long dresses were always getting caught in the machines, but it was in the Scripture, so they obeyed. Some wore it pinned up for church, because of the heat, but before it was over hairpins would litter the floor.