The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  “I remember this time, up in Rich Bundrum’s barn loft, we found this case of dynamite,” Jack said, and then he paused and shook his head, as if realizing now what he should have then: that there are no good endings to stories that begin with we found this case of dynamite. “Well, we found the blasting caps and wire, and got this ol’ flashlight battery, and went to Big Creek. But first, we took a knife, and, real, real careful, we cut that dynamite into little pieces. We had this ol’homemade boat, and we floated down to this place where the water pooled…and, since the water was real deep in that place, we thought it would be safe…” Jack fixed the cap to the dynamite and the wire to the cap, then leaned out over the boat, to drop it in the pool. A rusty steel cable ran across the stream there, and Jack held on to that with one hand, for balance. He let the dynamite nubbin go and watched it swirl down as my father touched one end of the split wire to the old battery negative post, then touched the other end to positi—

  BLAM!

  Jack was blown off his feet, would have been blown into the air, but he kept his grip on the wire, his toes pointed to heaven, till he crumpled, eyeballs bulging, ears ringing. “You all right?” my father mouthed at him, but Jack really didn’t know.

  He can still see my father laughing, laughing, but with no sound.

  “That might be what’s wrong with me now,” Jack said.

  ONE DAY, after they turned sixteen, they were tapping down the sidewalk side by side, clickety-clack, and saw their buddies on the square, “and ever’ one of ’em was all dressed up,” Jack said. “A. J. Bragg was up there, and all the Stricklands. I said, ‘Where y’all goin’ all dressed up?’ ‘We goin’ to church,’ they said. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘ ’Cause we done found a whole church full of pretty women,’ they said. So we all went. Me and your daddy walked in and, oh Lord, I never seen at the pretty women. I don’t know where all them women came from. I never will forget it, us in the pews with our hair slicked back, singing hymns. The preacher preached it fire and brimstone, I mean he preached it like it was, and me and your daddy sat and nodded our heads.” They would look left at big-eyed brunettes and right at dime-store blondes, and if the girls looked back Jack and my father would nod, mouth a discreet “amen,” and turn back to the Word. “You know, a lot of the boys got their wives there,” Jack said. “I mean they married’ em.”

  But Jack and my father still had too much running around to do, so they watched some of the boys forfeit their sins at the altar call, then backslid home to Jacksonville. My father did not go to church again, but Jack did. “It’s where I learned to pick the guitar,” he said, and I like to believe there was God’s hand in that.

  “Your daddy,” Jack said, “loved to hear me bend them strings.”

  Jack learned from every half-drunk picker who would teach him a chord. “But gospel was the first music I played,” he said. He learned at the knee of J. D. Hulsey in the heat of Emmanuel Holiness. “Watch, young ’un,” J.D. would say, and Jack would follow his fingers along the frets. Every church picker in the South had to know Ferlin Husky’s “On the Wings of a Dove” in 1950, and J.D. could play it just like they did on the radio.

  On the wings of a snow-white dove

  He sends his pure sweet love

  A sign from above

  On the wings of a dove

  It was always the three of them you saw, my father, Jack, and Jack’s guitar.

  He didn’t even believe in the faith Jack sang of, but he loved the songs.

  “I don’t know, it’s like it put him to rest,” said Jack.

  On Sunday mornings, with church music drifting from every block, my father and Jack would find a clean, green, shady place to lie down. “Pick us somethin’ purty, Jack,” he would say, and Jack would pick till sunset, then pick in the dark.

  On Saturday nights, the two boys gathered around a radio for the Grand Ole Opry, live from the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. Ernest Tubb sang “I’m Walkin’ the Floor Over You.” Through a hiss of static, they heard the place go wild over Hank.

  I’m gonna find me a river, one that’s cold as ice

  And when I find me that river, Lord I’m gonna pay the price, Oh Lord I’m going down in it three times, but Lord

  I’m only comin’ up twice

  They would walk miles to see a front-porch picker drink and play. James Couch tore it up on lead guitar, and Charles Hardy, of course, played flawless rhythm, and they sang with that tortured voice you cannot fake, that you can only get in a cotton mill, or a red-dirt field, or if your children call another man “Daddy.” The music itself was flavored by corn whiskey that made Jim Beam taste like soda pop, and culminated in a sound as different from modern-day country music as a rattler is from a garter snake. One of the best front-porch pickers in town was in the family, my uncle Bartow Wall. His friends shortened his name to Bato, then shortened that to Bat, which we pronounced Bot, and if you ask me why I would just have to make something up. He married my aunt Clara, and if you can’t marry a dentist, the next best thing would have to be a guitar man. It was like going to the Opry or the Louisiana Hayride when you walked up on their porch. Bot bootlegged a little, but there wasn’t a hillbilly song on this earth that he couldn’t play.

  My father didn’t have that rhythm in him that Jack did, so he got some spoons, so he could keep time, and beat them on his leg as Jack and the grownups picked. “He was just happy,” Jack said. “As long as music was playing, your daddy was happy.” The girls loved it, too, Jack said. “That guitar was a master key, for me and your dad,” Jack said. “The women loved that guitar.”

  He got a brand-new guitar as soon as he thought he could afford it. “I didn’t play but one kind…maybe two, if you count a Martin,” he said. “I got me a Gibson.” It cost $260, which was a fortune. He bought it on credit for $17 a month. “I touched the strings, and it was like they knew where to go,” he said. He lived part of his dream with that guitar. Next to the John Wayne poster is a faded photograph of a genuine country and western band. All the men in it are young and straight and whole. There’s young Charles Hardy, Vernon Copeland, Jimmy Roberts, Frankie Snyder, and Jack, young and handsome with a mop of jet-black hair. “We’uz playin’ the convention hall in Gadsden,” Jack said, and the people used to holler at them like they were true stars, like they were Hank Williams’ hat. He played a big talent show in Gadsden, the parking lot swimming with tail fins and shining with baby moon hubcaps, and a whole contingent of fans—my mother and her sisters were there—came over from Jacksonville and hollered like crazy. “He done good,” said my mother, who knew Jack when they were both teenagers. “He liked to have won.”

  My father was always there to clap for Jack, but he didn’t see her, and she didn’t see him. They would have remembered if they had. He would have noticed the prettiest girls, and she would have noticed he was pretty well drunk. By seventeen, he was drinking hard on weekends, fighting for fun. “I could calm him down with that guitar, but just a little bit,” Jack said.

  My father was still underage when he signed up for the Marines, as the war in Korea ground to a bloody tie. Velma signed a paper and cried, because he was underage, and he was gone.

  Jack wound up in Korea, too, just a little later, in the army.

  They never saw each other there. Jack dreamed a lot about home, since it was more real than anything there. He dreamed about music running through the streets like clear water, and the sound of spoons. “Pick it again, Jack.”

  He was afraid he would lose his buddy there.

  It might have been easier if he had.

  * * *

  The Boy

  I MIGHT HAVE GONE TOO FAR, too soon with the snipe hunt.

  One cold night in our first year, after the snakes had gone in their holes, I told him it was time for his rite of passage. We were at my mother’s farm in late fall and had just had supper with my family, my mother saying how it was a sin, what they charged for KFC.

  I stood and hitched up my p
ants in a manly fashion.

  “Put your coat on, boy,” I said, “and let’s go get us a snipe.”

  “What’s a snipe?” he said.

  “It’s a flightless bird,” I said.

  “I never heard of them,” he said.

  “Well, they’re rare,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “But they’re not real bright,” I explained.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “You can catch them in a sack,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “You get to hold the sack,” I said.

  He got so excited I thought he was going to levitate.

  Anything we did together, just us, made him smile. We did his homework together, trekked with Coronado and Ponce de León, pounded spikes on the Great Plains. I worried over logic, named off state capitals till my lips went numb, and when he opened his math book I did not even try. At night, on an old couch with three boys’

  worth of Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers and SpongeBobs lost forever in its dark recesses, we watched men wrestle giant snakes, and ate sugarless Popsicles that tasted a little like cough medicine on a stick.

  He still believed the only thing that really held me to him was the woman, so even in the middle of a belly laugh he could look a little sad.

  But the snipe hunt tickled him to death. He had heard me talk about hunting, how it was something men did where I was from, something that fathers and sons did together, free from women in the dangerous, primal woods. I did not tell him it was also a tradition to take a boy on a snipe hunt and, for the sake of frivolity, abandon him in the trees.

  So we got a sack and flashlight and walked into the dark, his mother again drilling holes in me as we went out, but not stopping us. A few minutes later my brother Sam slipped out the door and crept behind us, then circled behind and above us, on the hill.

  The traditional snipe hunt is not too traumatizing, in itself. You just position some poor fool bent over holding a sack in the dark, and go home.

  Sooner or later, bent over like a moron, he figures it out.

  But we have our own twist here. As the boy and I walked in the gloom, Sam, above us in the dark, pushed a big rock down the hill.

  It rolled crashing through dead leaves and dry sticks, banging into tree trunks. He aimed it away from us, of course. It would not have been funny if one of us had been knocked off the mountain by a rock the size of a five-gallon bucket.

  “What’s that?” the boy hissed.

  “Bear,” I whispered.

  We hunkered down in the leaves.

  “Rick?” he whispered.

  “Shhhhhh,” I whispered.

  “Rick?” louder this time.

  “What?” I said.

  “What do we do?” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “hope it ain’t hungry.”

  I reached over and put my hand on his shoulder.

  He was shaking.

  “You want to run home,” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  But I think he changed his mind when my brother began to stomp down the hill in the dry leaves.

  “Rick?”

  “What?”

  “Should we pray?”

  “Well,” I said, “the bear might hear.”

  The woods were still now, except for the faint creaking of the trees.

  “I think we’re okay,” I said, to give the boy a shred of hope.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause he’ll probably just eat one of us.”

  A full minute passed in silence.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “The slowest one,” I whispered.

  I had heard that joke somewhere, about how fast a bear could run.

  For dramatic effect, I slipped my pocketknife out of my jeans and opened it up, with a loud click.

  “You ain’t armed?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Pity,” I said.

  Out of sight, I eased the knife closed and put it back in my pocket.

  Fun is fun until someone puts an eye out, Momma always said.

  “Well, I better lead, then,” I said.

  We began to ease down the hillside.

  “Now,” I said, “if the bear attacks, don’t wait for me. I’ll keep him occupied.”

  “Okay,” he said, a little too quick.

  Soon we saw the warm, yellow lights of my mother’s house shining through the dark, and I think the boy did say a prayer then, of thanks. When we were safe inside he told the story of his near-death experience, leaving out the part where I heroically agreed to fight the bear off while he ran home. He did not notice the smiles for a good long time.

  “Son,” I said, “there was no bear.”

  I pointed at Sam.

  He waved.

  The boy just looked at me.

  “There’s no such thing as a snipe.”

  I saw tears begin to form in his eyes.

  Of all the boys left in the woods, I never saw one cry.

  “He thought he was going to get a bird to take home,” his mother told me later.

  The boy always wanted a bird, she said.

  “Well how in the hell would I know that?” I said.

  At first, I fretted again at his fragility. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that boy just wanted there to be a bird to catch, and even wanted there to be a bear in the trees. And he wanted to believe that, together, we were safe in the woods.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  What You’re Supposed to Do

  THEY TALKED ABOUT IT ONE TIME, what they saw across the ocean, and never talked of it again. They both had a story to tell, one that just wouldn’t sit right in their mind, and the liquor made it easier, that’s a fact. “I remember I was sittin’ at the house, me and Hubert Woods and his brother Slim. We’d been out on the reservation, playing music,” Jack said. “They wanted me to go out with them that night, to do some runnin’ around, but then I saw Charles’s car comin’ up the driveway. ‘Y’all go on,’ I told ’em, ‘I’m gonna stay here and talk to Charles.’ Well, I had some beer in the house, and I had some white whiskey hid in the back, and we just set and talked a long time, like we did when we was kids. Charles said, ‘Jack, you see a lot of bad things over yonder?’ and I told him I did…” He told my father how he was an army medic at the close of the war, assigned to the minefields and the young men who cleared them. The mines went off and blew men apart, and he bandaged what was left. He came home to work in the mill, but on weekends he still pulled on his western suit, and picked every place he could find a stage. He was still whole, and if someone tossed him a dream he could still grab it with both hands. “Well, I told it, and we dranked.” They drank it all, and sat in the quiet, listening dark.

  Jack picked a little, to satisfy it.

  As I walked down the streets of Laredo

  As I walked down Laredo one day

  I spied a poor cowboy all wrapped in white linen

  Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay

  “You believe I killed a feller over yonder, Jack?” my father asked.

  “Why, sure I do,” Jack said.

  “I didn’t shoot him,” my father said.

  “What’d you do?” Jack said.

  “I drowned him,” my father said.

  He sounded ashamed.

  “Ain’t no need talkin’ about it, Charles,” Jack said.

  “I drowned him with my own hands,” my father said.

  Jack took a pull on the air itself.

  “You don’t know anybody you shoot,” my father said. “You just shoot, and you don’t really see their face. Well, I know how it feels to look ’em dead in the face.”

  The story my father told, he told in a few sentences, the same way he told it to my mother on a sleepless night, and told to me, when I was in high school, as he finished drinking himself to death. He told of a bitter-cold night, and killing a man with his bare hands, hol
ding his head underwater until he went still.

  “You think if somebody does somethin’ like that, in a place like that, it ought to bother you?” he asked.

  “You didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” Jack said.

  “No?”

  “You didn’t do nothin’ you wasn’t supposed to do,” Jack said.

  “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy”

  These words he did say as I boldly stepped by

  “Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story

  I was shot in the chest and I know I must die”

  “There was still killin’ goin’ on when I got there, and Charles got there before I did,” Jack said. “He was a fighter, your daddy, but he hadn’t never killed nobody.”

  All my life I had wanted an excuse for his drunkenness, a catalyst for the man he was, and I seized on that, when I was a teenager. Jack is sure it haunted my father. Certainly, he had to water it down with whiskey to even speak of it. “But there was a lot of things haunted your dad,” Jack said. The people who loved him say what happened to him in Korea rode in his mind forever, but did not begin his alcoholism. That train had been rolling a long time. He was born on that train.

  It is likely, though, that the killing made it worse somehow. I really don’t know. I just know that in the early 1950s my father was still on the threshold of his adult life, and killed a man before he was old enough to buy a beer or cast a vote, or shave. If it was a ticking bomb, an unexploded mine in my father’s head, it rattled round in there with other things, Jack said. “He never blamed anything that happened to him on it,” Jack said. Besides, Jack said, my father would have drowned a man every night in his dreams, if he could have only done over the years to come.