The Prince of Frogtown

by Rick Bragg

  He was serving a year in the stockade in Norfolk when his first child was born, on September 11, 1956.

  She wrote him that it was a boy.

  Again, they wrote each other every day, and it kept her sane. He wrote that he missed her, and sealed it in an envelope. He signed them the same, and left the same secret under the stamp.

  His military discharge, issued February 20, 1957, reads: “other than honorable.” His son Sam was five months old when he came home. My mother ran out to meet the car as it turned into the driveway, because there was still hope then, and even as he staggered out of the car she was still glad. The boy was in the house, and they walked in together, to look at him. My father bent over, to lift his son off the bed, and as he did a slim pint bottle of liquor tumbled out of a pocket and fell to the floor.

  “I can still see the label,” she said. “I can still see them Four Roses.”

  IT WAS LIKE A SIGN, the way it happened, and she believed in signs then.

  Whether it was a curse or not, everything pretty much turned to dirt after that. He drank all the time, even breaking his family tradition of weekend drunks. Once a man cannot tell his Wednesdays from his Saturdays, he is well and truly lost. He would give her money, sometimes, but usually just let her make her own way, one clean floor at a time. He vanished, reappeared, robbed her purse, and vanished again.

  The next few years followed a bleak pattern of separation and reconciliation. She wouldn’t give up. She ran away from him and ran back to him, and he would promise to do right and break his promise by sundown. In defeat, and ashamed, she signed up for welfare, so there would be something to live on when he disappeared. For long months he just forgot about them, and lived single, as if they were not flesh and blood but something he could drag out of a closet when they crossed his mind, like a style of shoe.

  She had to sell the few things she owned, to feed her and my brother.

  She sold her wedding rings to her sister Edna, to pay debts. She sold the beautiful cedar chest he got her to her older brother William, for groceries. She held tight to the solid silver dollar, till her baby got sick, and she swapped it to the pharmacist for a bottle of cough medicine.

  I was born in the summer of ’59, in the middle of it.

  Somewhere out there he was binge drinking and joyriding.

  But, as the cliché goes, that is another story.

  LIKE A LOT OF PEOPLE from the mountains, faith and superstition crisscrossed in her mind. She bent her knees and prayed for deliverance, for God to touch her man’s heart, or at least his conscience. But she still looked for signs in coffee cups, in the sky, in the jack of diamonds and queen of hearts. If ever a woman needed to see into the future, it was her.

  She went to see Sadie.

  Every mill town, pipe shop town or coal town had a fortune-teller, widow women, usually, who worked from their sewing rooms or kitchens in little houses covered with asbestos siding. They hung a homemade plywood sign from the porch or on a stick in the yard, with a name or a phone number and a FORTUNES TOLD, and always a crude drawing of an eye, the all-seeing eye. My mother never wondered why, if that eye really does see all, those women did not move the hell out of an asbestos house. But she had a lot more to worry about then, when she scrapped together her ironing money, and went to Piedmont, to have her future told.

  Sadie didn’t say much, for a mystic. She was neither young nor old, just a plump woman who greeted the curious adorned in her house-dress, in a tiny white cottage on a plain, working-class street in Piedmont, about fifteen minutes north of Jacksonville on Highway 21. Sadie would tell you your future, or at least tell you what she saw, flashing through her mind as she read a palm, or flipped through a deck of cards. The problem with Sadie, my mother said, “was she didn’t explain it real, real good,” so she often left Sadie’s house as mystified as when she walked in. Sadie charged two dollars to look into the future, so it may be she figured that two dollars of the Gift was good for a hint, a peek maybe, but not enough to just fling the door open on the way that things would be.

  She paid Sadie in copper and silver, and waited to find out if there was any hope, or if there was a warning, because things can always get worse. Sadie shuffled her worn cards, businesslike. She was not overly friendly, usually. She was a seer in a mill town, a prophet to working women, and you had to foretell a lot of love and prosperity to make a buck and keep ’em coming back. But she didn’t tell my mother, this day, what she wanted to hear.

  “I see you crossing water with the child,” she said, pointing to me. “I see a lot of water.”

  My mother nodded.

  “When?” she asked.

  “When you are old.”

  That was all Sadie had to say about that, but it was a lot. My mother would live a long time, and see things beyond the foothills.

  Sadie shuffled, and dealt the days to come.

  “I see writin’in your life. I see you writin’…lots of words,” she told my mother.

  My mother wrote poetry, and would write it all her life.

  Sadie shuffled again, and flipped the cards across the table.

  “I see your life in a circle,” she told my mother. “I see you doing things young, and doing them old.”

  “What things?” my mother asked.

  But Sadie just shook her head.

  “It don’t say,” she said.

  “Tell me, please,” my mother said, “about my man.”

  Sadie shuffled and dealt, and shuffled and dealt again.

  It was nothing bad, no evil omen.

  He just didn’t come up in the cards.

  People were waiting on the porch to see into their own future.

  “She just left me hangin’,” my mother said.

  She went back to Sadie one more time after that, but stopped going when she got religion, “because the Bible says that nobody knows the future but the Lord. I was wrong to do that,” she told me. I told her that if every fortune-teller in the world was going to hell, New Orleans could fill it up all by itself. “At least she didn’t lie, and tell you we’d all live happily ever after,” I said.

  I do not believe Sadie was a fraud, not really. I believe she looked for the future in those cards, and told it the best she knew how, and sometimes life shuffled around to fit her vision and sometimes it didn’t, but she got one thing dead-on.

  She went looking for my father and she couldn’t find him in our future. It is a wonder the deck did not catch fire, and burn the house down.

  IT WAS NOT ALL BAD, of course. My first memory of him, as a tiny boy, was bright and fine. I remember my mother was hanging white sheets on the line on a hot, windy day. She sang as she hung them, but what song I cannot say, and the sheets puffed up like sails on a ship, and now and then a gust would make them snap and pop. I had a handful of something sticky, I believe it was wild strawberries, and she made me go sit in the grass, to keep me from handling and ruining the sheets. I saw a car pull up in the gravel driveway, tires crunching, and park behind a line of evergreens. The trees stand thirty feet high now, but then a man could still peek over, even a little man. Then, I saw what seemed to be the head of a large, goofy animal, a bear I believe, peer at me over the trees, and disappear. A few seconds later it rose again, slowly turned sideways, to show me a profile, and glided along, just its head showing, behind the curtain of green. I was dumbstruck. My father appeared at the edge of the trees, carrying the biggest stuffed animal I had ever seen, a bear as big as he was. It was my birthday, I believe.

  But he continued to change. Wild is one thing. They make movies about wild boys. We laugh about them, and even admire them. I used to be one, myself. Even a neglectful man, you can forgive. But mean is mean, and that’s how he got, the drunker he got. He had the woman of his dreams, and tore her down. My little brother Mark was born in that time, November 10, 1962, as the world around us began to grow darker.

  “The thing about Charles was, he just couldn’t figure out how to be a drunk and a
daddy, too,” said Carlos.

  My mother just absorbed it.

  Unlike Velma, she never called the law.

  There are all kinds of darkness in this big ol’ scary world. Old men in this town recall being wild boys themselves back then, recall sitting in the window of a café on the square as a big man with a pale, round face rolled by in his cruiser. They remember how the man’s pasty face would turn toward them, and ruin their supper. They could be chewing on a steak, on a payday, and it would taste like their last meal.

  * * *

  The Boy

  IT WAS FOOLISH, against all science, to expect the boy to take after me. I could dress him like me, cut his hair like mine, hide his socks, even teach him to cuss, but he would not be like me. I knew it, the first time I peeked into his room. There were robots, dragons, monsters, spacemen, and not one model car.

  I see flashing blue lights in my sleep, and I had more cars than I had girlfriends. In my life, there were three Camaros, two Firebirds, three Mustangs, three thirdhand Porsches, a ’56 Chevrolet and a ’66 Corvair, a car deemed “unsafe at any speed.” As a young man I daydreamed no more about centerfolds, of 36-24-36, than I did 289, 327, 429, and the very word “hemi” made me sweat. I would race anything with wheels then, and as an older man I twice drove the silver car to the straightaways of the Mississippi Delta, to test my own failing nerve. As a boy I rode motorcycles, even a moped, but took the muffler and pedals off, for speed.

  The woman’s two oldest boys did not love speed or cars—had never looked under a hood. To me, that would be like reaching puberty without ever peeking down a blouse.

  But this could not be allowed in my boy. He could not be my boy and be a peddler, a pedestrian, a pilgrim with a bus pass.

  He would drive.

  The woman would have gutted me with a dull spoon if I had bought the boy a motorcycle, and the truth is I wouldn’t have. There are too many fools on the roads now, blowing on their lattes, dialing little-bitty phones, rolling through stop signs as they text their grocery list. So I did the next best thing. I bought him a high-performance go-cart with an engine so big it could have shot a lawn mower to the moon.

  The previous owner sold it to me because his wife made him, after his youngest son flipped it going wide-open and hung upside down, screaming for his momma. But really, how dangerous can something be that you start by pulling on a rope?

  It looked safe to me. The driver sat in a cage of steel tubing, strapped in with a full-body harness, and wore a helmet with a full face guard to shield against low, whipping tree branches, or the errant June bug.

  He buckled in, pulled on his helmet, and pressed the accelerator. He decided, in that second, that life has two speeds—“Stop” and “Whoa, Nelly”—and what fun is there put-puttering around? He made it almost one full turn around the yard, knobby rear tires sliding in the grass, before he miscalculated on a sharp turn around the tetherball pole.

  It happens.

  He cut her too sharp, sideswiped the pole and jumped the concrete foundation used to hold the whole apparatus upright. His machine wedged there sideways, one rear tire, the one attached to the drive chain, spinning wide-open, the motor screaming, as the boy unsnapped his harness and bailed out like he was on fire.

  “What in the hell were you thinkin’?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, “I wasn’t thinking that much.”

  The woman looked at me, in surrender.

  “He’s yours,” she said.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ross

  IF YOU BROKE THE LAW you dealt with Ross, and dealt with him till the preacher led revival over your bones. Once Ross made up his mind you were trouble, he would fine, imprison and humiliate you with or without papers, because he didn’t mind signing a judge’s name to a warrant if it meant taking out the trash. If you fought him, when he was a young man, he would walk you to his police car across asphalt scattered with your own teeth. He was big and wide and white, like a Frigidaire sitting on size 12 wing-tip shoes, and wore black-framed glasses on his benign, MoonPie face. He had been a prizefighter before he served in the Pacific in World War II, and the blue steel .38 on his gun belt was just an afterthought, an unnecessary accessory, like a tie clip. Ross could point a finger at you and take everything you would ever have. He passed judgment on the Braggs soon after taking office, because they offended his sense of how the world should turn. “He hated your daddy ’cause he couldn’t get him to do right,” my mother said, and while that is certainly true, there was more than that between them. One day, in ’58, my father and mother were helping my grandfather Charlie Bundrum roof a house in town, and looked down to see Ross, all six feet five, three hundred pounds of him, leaning against the hood of his Chevrolet. Ross didn’t speak, just smiled pleasantly up at them, then cocked his thumb over a pointed finger, sighted down his knuckle on my father’s face, and squeezed the invisible trigger. “Bang,” he said.

  Chief of police Ross Tipton lectured the Exchange Club on humane enforcement of the law, and liked to prove his humanity by giving some of my more docile, drunken kin his castoff shoes. But in my father, fresh from the Norfolk stockade, he found a poor but uppity white man he could not scare. Ross was determined to humble him, to break him, so he chained him like a dog where Pelham Road meets College Hill, and put him to work with a sling blade. That way, everyone saw what happened to people who dared strut around in Ross’s town.

  My aunt Jo and uncle John Couch, two of the people who helped raise me, were walking through town one summer and saw him chained there, as the whole population rolled by. He had been arrested for public drunkenness and fighting and deserved his jail time, but men who worked off fines were not routinely chained. Ross stood by, his gun belt riding high on his big belly. My aunt Jo, a little woman with a heart of glass, could not stand it. Her eyes burned behind her cat’s-eye glasses, and she marched over and confronted the chief.

  “You ought not do that to the boy,” she said.

  “I have to,” he said.

  “Why do you have to put him in chains?” she asked.

  “He’ll run,” he said.

  My father, shamed and helpless in the presence of his sister-in-law, hacked at the Johnson grass.

  “Won’t you, Rabbit?” Tipton said.

  My father’s eyes lifted from the ground and met Ross, but Ross stayed just out of reach. He had dealt with bad men all his life, and this whelp was nothing special.

  “It’s not right,” my aunt Jo said.

  But Ross got to say what right was.

  My father dragged his chains past kin and friends and perfect strangers, stopping at dinnertime to eat a thin hamburger from Zuma’s café. At dark, Ross unsnapped his holster and put a hand on his pistol butt, till my father handed his sling blade to the trusty and shuffled into his cage. In his cell, he murdered Ross Tipton a thousand times.

  It went on for years like that. We rode our momma’s hip, all of us, into city hall, as she made his bail a few dollars at a time.

  If you are going to do right all the time, it matters very little who the police chief is in your town. You won’t see him except at Kiwanis. But if you know that sooner or later you are going to do wrong, that doing wrong is a part of who you are, it matters a great deal. For twenty-five years, Ross ran our town, respected by many, feared by some, and hated by people with my last name, because Ross rubbed our noses in our sins.

  Carlos Slaght, who has a kindness in him you can feel and almost see, is one of the people who believe my father was somehow better than the life he led. He believes that, with a little luck, my father’s life would have been different, and, in a domino effect, other lives would have, too. It is a wonderful notion. But Carlos, Jack and others believe a series of events that began in the summer of ’55 made this town all but unlivable for him, smeared his pride, and quickened his decline. It is a gothic story, the way they tell it, and you can see the bad luck tumbling, as if the devil himself had
shaved the dice.

  “It goes back to Everett, my brother, who whupped Ross when he was one-legged, and started the feud,” Carlos said. “But I guess it goes back even farther than that. I guess it goes back to the killin’ of Chief Whiteside by Robert Dentmon. Dentmon don’t pull that trigger, there wouldn’t have been no place here for Ross.”

  AS MUCH AS ANYONE, the people of the mill village and its close-in neighborhoods know violence. They accept industrial accidents and even a certain amount of murder, because some men just need killing. But there are things impossible to reconcile, and the killing of Chief D. E. Whiteside haunts the place and people even now. He was raised in the country, understood them and treated them like equals, and they lost him to a drunken meanness. D.E., whom everyone called Whitey, was an easygoing big man, bald as a boiled egg, and a respected member of the Mason’s Lodge. D.E. and Mary had five children, Peggy, Charlotte, Sandy, Bill and Jack, so Whitey drove a truck on his off days, hauling corn. He could throw drunks around like feed sacks, but when his children were scraped or burned, he could be gentle as a grandmother. “It’s him I remember looking after us,” said his daughter Sandy, who was ten years old in the summer of ’55.

  “We never had trouble with Whitey,” Carlos said. “When we was teenagers he’d see us hanging around someplace, and he’d say, ‘Boys, I got to walk over here and check this building, and if you’re still here when I get back I’ll whip you all the way home.’” He tipped his hat to Velma, shook hands with Bob and the boys. He got along with my father, whom he treated with the respect due a returning serviceman, even if he had ended his hitch behind bars. “The thing about that cop was, he treated your daddy like a man,” said Jack Andrews, “and he treated everybody alike. He didn’t treat village boys any different than town or college boys.” He remembers a Grand Ole Opry traveling road show with Grandpa Jones and String Bean, on the square. Two drunken village boys kept disrupting the show, till Whiteside snatched them up, banged their heads together like in a cartoon, and led them out. What was unique about that was the fact he did not sweep all the village boys out of the tent. He distinguished, and that meant the world.