The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  “You’re not a dad,” he told me once.

  Dads are responsible. Dads pose with your mother and brothers in a Christmas card.

  “What am I?” I said, and even though I had done damn little to deserve better, it still bothered me, to be told outright.

  He thought awhile.

  “I dunno.”

  Sometime later, it came to him.

  “Well, you call me little buddy,” he said.

  “I do,” I said.

  “So you’re the big buddy.”

  “Well okay,” I said.

  I knew how to be a buddy.

  He was not like me, true, had none of my blood in him at all, but there were worse boys to have. I saw them in movie theaters, screaming into their nachos as a poor, pitiful man went back to the snack counter to exchange Whoppers for Milk Duds, or Gummy Bears for Gummy Worms. I saw them hunched over video games like a crack pipe, saw them screeching like a tornado warning siren in the Target, for God knows why.

  The boy was spoiled, but not yet rotten.

  In time, I even got used to the nastiness. The woman was right. The boy was no nastier than other children, so I just resigned myself to eating with a boy who stuck his nose in a bowl to eat rice and shoved three forks of food in his mouth before beginning to chew.

  “Close your mouth when you chew,” the woman said.

  “Why?” he asked, around a wad of something I won’t even say.

  “’Cause it’s what humans do,” I said.

  Mostly, I just lived with it. But even after I realized the boy carried no known, life-threatening disease, I still didn’t hug him enough. I hugged him because he insisted I did. He was too big to hold like a baby, but the woman said he was too little to deny, to turn away.

  I was still living mostly on the road our first year together, writing and talking about it. He often answered the phone when I called from the road. I automatically asked for his mother, because I had not mastered the art of talking to a child on the telephone. It takes a skill, and a vast patience. I had told myself a long time ago I would never be one of those men, one of those harried, travel-worn men in a faraway city, talking to a child on the edge of a hotel bedspread or airport seat, talking nonsense. I used to pity those henpecked fools hunched over their dainty phones, finally pleading: “Can I talk to Mommy?”

  It hurt his feelings, every time. “You don’t want to talk to me?” he asked, and I said of course I did, but I was running to a plane, or exhausted, or my feet or head hurt, and everything in between.

  But when I came home, he almost always stood at the door.

  The next talk we had, of a father-son kind, came after he committed a little boy’s transgression, misplaced his pants, something, and the woman made him cry.

  I was just glad it wasn’t me she was after.

  “Let me talk to him,” I said, like a grown-up person.

  I think she thought I was going to lecture him on irresponsibility—wouldn’t that be a pill—but instead I just held two fingers tight together in front of his face.

  “She’s got to carp at you ’cause it’s her job, but you and her,” I said, wiggling my joined fingers, “you’ll always be like this. There is no reason to cry, to get all upset about this little stuff. No matter where you go, or what you do, you and her will always be like that.”

  I thought it was brilliant parenting.

  He just looked at me.

  He waited.

  He waited.

  “Me and you,” I said, wiggling those conjoined fingers, “we’re like that, too.”

  But they are smart, little boys, for creatures that will run in front of cars if you don’t hold their shirttail. They believe what they feel, not what you tell them.

  In sixth grade, his teachers had their students write a book for English class. It was supposed to be fiction, but he wrote a real-life story and just changed the names. He wrote about a little boy (him) who went to visit an old woman on a farm in Alabama, a woman who cooked magic biscuits, and had three sons. The old woman’s middle son (me) was named Fred, and he was the boy’s stepfather. Fred was not unkind to the boy but sometimes treated him as an afterthought. But at THE END, as the boy and his mother got in their car to leave, Fred waved goodbye to them, “and for the first time in my life, Fred was smiling square at me, not at my mom.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Hanging

  FROM THE CRADLE, they had been taught that their very worth as a people was tied to their ability to labor. Their fathers told them, sometimes with a ragged Bible or a fresh-cut hickory in their hands, that a shirker was a pitiful and a sorry thing, and sloth was not only a sin but a deadly one. They would stripe the legs of a lazy child as quickly as they would a mean or mouthy one, and quote from Ecclesiastes as the stick hissed through the air.

  The sleep of a labouring man is sweet…

  And there would be the sting, and the rising welt…. whether he eat little or much.

  Grandparents, their lives and fingers shortened, their eyes red-streaked and hard as peppermint candy, would pull frightened grandchildren close, and whisper:

  “You are as good as anybody.”

  But the one true thing you learned in the village, as real as the whistle that shook you from bed, was that a lot of people who lived outside the alphabet streets believed, really believed, they were better than you. Because their world was cleaner, nicer, they believed their lives held more value than Bill Joe Chaney’s people, than my father’s, who did the dirty, dangerous work and came home to identical rooms that smelled of snuff and bacon grease and Mentholatum. You could not make them look at you differently. You could only punish them, for the way they did look at you.

  The rigid caste system, as hard-stuck then as racial segregation, had not flexed in fifty years. After a crime was committed in town or in the outlying county, investigators came to the village first, even pulled workers from their stations, lined them against the wall and questioned them or compared their faces to the police artist’s sketch. Across generations, town boys in their daddies’ cars egged houses in the village for sport, and yelled “Linthead!” at old women walking home from a twelve-hour shift.

  In fifty years, there had not been a homecoming queen from the mill village, or a cheerleader. The people of the mill village took revenge, but it would be wrong to say they got even. In those days, a vending machine at the mill routinely cheated workers out of nickels and dimes. “It would keep your money but it wouldn’t give you nothin’ to eat,” said retired mill worker Donald Garmon. One day, Garmon’s brother Eugene and a friend, Alan McCarty, dropped nickels in the slot and the machine hung up again. It was all they could take. “They throwed the machine off the third floor,” he said.

  Town boys who wandered into the mill village on foot were chased and beaten. “You didn’t come here if you was town,” said my father’s friend, Bill Joe. Even if you had a rare friend outside the village you could not side with them against your own. “We stuck together,” Bill Joe said.

  My father hated the swells, hated the stigma, and hated himself, a little, for his place in it. “Your daddy had a lot of false pride,” my mother always said. She was not ashamed to mop other people’s floors, but he was ashamed for people to know it. It is why, when he had to choose between a car that would run and one that looked good at the curb, he picked the one with the best paint job, and poured burnt motor oil into it by the bucketful.

  As a boy, he picked fights every weekend in town, over a word, or a look.

  “Your daddy,” Bill Joe said, “was a good bit meaner than the rest of us.”

  BILL JOE CHANEY swiveled his head to watch for witnesses, but the schoolyard was deserted except for the hanging party, under an elm tree. The town boy was already in the rope. Still, he did not struggle too much. “I don’t think he knew how serious we was,” Bill Joe said. The hanging party, none of them older than thirteen, rambled around the schoolyard in their overalls, searching
for plum trees. “We were going to pull him up, and whip him with plum branches as he dangled,” Bill Joe said. The condemned boy, also about thirteen, meandered around in a small circle as Bill Joe held the other end of the rope. It was surreal, as he remembers it. Even as he took up the slack, the boy did not beg for his life or even cry. He thought he was wearing the black hat in some B western, and even smiled. But as the minutes slipped by he began to understand that this was not a play. He must have done something bad to these village boys in that summer of ’48, something unforgivable.

  Bill Joe saw my father then, saw him saunter by the schoolyard, glance over, stop and stare, and turn and walk toward the elm. He was about thirteen then, also.

  “What you doin’, Bill Joe?” he asked, like he saw a hanging every day.

  “We’re hangin’ this feller,” Bill Joe said.

  “I figured that,” my father said.

  Bill Joe was a big, tough boy. Not too many people talked smart to him.

  “Why you doin’ it?” my father asked.

  “’Cause he thinks he’s better than us,” Bill Joe said.

  My father just nodded. He did not ask what the evidence was.

  My father just looked at the boy.

  It was insanity, and made perfect sense.

  “Your daddy knew why we was doin’ it,” said Bill Joe, more than fifty years after that day.

  “He was one of us,” he said.

  The condemned boy was right, though. His hangmen had gotten the idea from the westerns at the Princess Theater. “They was always hangin’ somebody,” Bill Joe said.

  But sometimes, at the last cinematic minute, a dark, handsome hero would ride up, tell the mob they would have justice but “not like this, boys,” and order the hangmen to cut the condemned man down. Then he would kiss a girl and sing a song to his horse.

  My father looked the part. He was not in ragged overalls, not barefoot like the village boys tended to be. He was going to town and had dressed accordingly. He had on a checkered dress shirt and ironed dungarees and his shoes gleamed like a Birmingham lawyer’s. The village boys were often shorn almost bald, because of lice and chinch bugs that lived inside the walls of the company houses. Their mommas poured scalding water in the cracks to kill them. “I remember your daddy had a full head of hair,” Bill Joe said, and as they talked my father took out his pocket comb in a quick-draw and ran it through his hair. It must have been clear then to the condemned boy that this boy was not his salvation after all, just a linthead posing, with silver dimes shining in his black penny loafer shoes.

  BILL JOE IS A BIG MAN in old age, and still looks strong. He still wears overalls, but accessorizes now with a white porkpie hat, toothpicks saved inside the hatband. He is not one of those big talkers who carry you along like a current, and often leaves things half-said, as if, since he knows what comes next in the story, you should, too. It is a condition of old Southern men that they will tell you they are proud, a lifetime later, of the darkest things, and blame it on the times, or blame it on Dixie. But he is not proud of what almost happened in the schoolyard. “I’ll tell it, though, ’cause of your dad, ’cause it’s the least I can do.”

  “The boy we was hanging was a straight-A student,” said Bill Joe. “He was 99 percent more educated than us, and he always thought he was superior. One day, he was running around in the classroom, acting a fool, and…”

  Funny, he can’t remember what the boy said.

  It may be he didn’t say a thing.

  Bill Joe’s father had been a top sawmill hand before he came down to work at the mill. His net worth was tabulated on how many straight boards he sawed and how much cotton he spun, and night after night Bill Joe could hear his future, like the other village children, through the thin walls of their house. It was hard for the mill hands to catch their breath even hours after the shift, because the lint tickled their throats and a bacteria that rode the cotton fibers seized their lungs. They couldn’t cough it up, no matter how hard they tried.

  “So we caught that boy and carried him out to them big elms. We already had the rope, and we had him pretty much hung, pretty much ready to pull up, when your daddy walked up.”

  Bill Joe remembers how my father looked standing there, quiet. Bill Joe wasn’t worried that my father would intervene. To help the boy, my father would have had to betray his own history.

  Bill Joe decided to get on with it.

  “Hold it,” my father said.

  “What?” Bill Joe said.

  “Untie him,” my father said.

  Bill Joe glared down at him.

  “Why?”

  “Turn him loose,” my father said.

  He balled his fists.

  “I was a whole lot bigger than him, but your dad was all muscle,” Bill Joe said. “I believe he would have scratched us some, if we hadn’t done what he said. I turned him loose.”

  Bill Joe quit school not long after that, and went to work in the mill.

  But first, he and my father faced each other under the elm tree.

  “Why’d you do it?” Bill Joe asked him.

  Of all the descriptions of my father by so many people, the one description I had never heard was “uncertain.” He was deliberate, pointed. Even in his own destruction, he was that. But he didn’t have an answer for Bill Joe.

  His fists came undone.

  He turned and walked away.

  “WHY DID HE DO IT?” I asked Bill Joe.

  “I think he did it for me,” he said.

  Bill Joe’s great meanness never was. It never happened, he said, because of my father. It would be nice to believe my father did it from simple human kindness, to keep the boy from being hurt if not killed, but Bill Joe is convinced the life my father truly saved that afternoon was his.

  “I would have gone to reform school at least. Maybe they would have sent me to prison, I don’t know. I think he knew that, and I think he stopped us ’cause he wanted to save my life, not that boy’s. He was just a kid like us, but he figured that. I think he changed my life.”

  “Would you have really hung him?” I asked.

  “I guess I could say we might have just hung him a little bit,” he said.

  “But I believe,” he said, his voice quiet, “we would have hurt that feller.”

  They might have cut him down, like in the westerns.

  “But we would have hurt him.”

  He had a good life, he said. He worked in the mill on the outside crew and inside, with the machines, and worked for the city. He went in the army in ’58, rolled his active service into two decades with the Army Reserve, and retired with a government pension.

  He has to go to the hospital for his chemotherapy, for the cancer in his throat. “But I can still eat, thank the Lord,” he said. His friends say Bill Joe might live forever, and in 2006 he was in remission.

  “I got no regrets in my life,” he said, then.

  He says my father gave him that.

  He relishes his days now. “I like to ride,” he said. “I got a king cab Chevrolet truck, and me and Louie Hamilton, my buddy, we like to ride, up where it’s pretty.”

  Old women call it loafering, and I’ve always loved that word. I guess it is just how we say the word “loafing,” but the way we say it makes you think of loafers, of wearing out your shoe leather for no good purpose. Old women like to sniff and use it as a condemnation. “He ain’t here. He’s off loafering.” It means you are shirking work and responsibility. To the men who loafer, it means they are free, free to waste time, to count mailboxes, and wave at other old men who, as the rear bumper vanishes in the distance, wish they were loafering, too. I plan to loafer someday. At least I hope to.

  The one thing you cannot do is loafer with a heavy heart. Good intentions and bad intentions wash together, pointless over so much time. You can’t get into heaven for one, and can’t get sent to hell for the other. Bill Joe rolls down his window and just drives, sometimes as far as the Georgia line. The mountains a
nd hills are at their prettiest now, in spring, as the hardwoods, the pines, even the weeds take on a luminescence that will shimmer into summer, till the heat itself will make the landscape fade. But for now it all just shines. His heart is light. His conscience is clear.

  BILL JOE DIED in the summer of 2006.

  * * *

  The Boy

  THE BOY LOVED TO READ and read even when he was not ordered to, or threatened. He read with his nose almost in the pages, like he was sniffing out the story there instead of just taking it in with his eyes, and he had to be told twice, sometimes three times, to put his book down and turn off the bedside light, or he would have read all night.

  My mother had to tell me to stop reading, too. I read by that naked, 60-watt bulb that dangled over the bed, and when she turned it off I replayed the pages in my head till she went to bed. As soon as I was certain she was asleep I took out a big flashlight and read underneath the quilt, and thought I fooled her but of course I never did. She came in, quietly, and switched it off after it tumbled from my hand. I never told the boy we had that thing in common, that reluctance to give up on a good book in the middle of the night, but I guess he’ll know it now.

  Having a boy was like getting to do that all over again. But instead of Frank and Joe Hardy he loved James and the Giant Peach, and the BFG. Hogwarts, I would learn, was not a disease, nor Lemony Snicket a flavor of ice cream.

  He read whole books in the backseat, and if you asked him a question he didn’t even hear, he was in so deep. Larry McMurtry wrote of an Indian tracker named Famous Shoes who wanted to learn to read so he could track the little black footprints across the page. The boy read like that, with such single-minded purpose we hated to make him go to sleep.

  But, to me, it was the only adventure he got.

  “What do you like about those stories you read?” I asked him.

  “The heroes are kids,” he said.