by Rick Bragg
“Run to the house and get my pliers,” I told him, and he took off like it was his life in my inept hands, not the fish.
The woman had bought him some new jeans and they fell down twice as he ran, and it would have been funny any other time. It was all uphill, about three hundred yards, and that might not seem far to you, but you try it, holding to your pants.
He half killed himself getting up that hill, to save a fish. I knelt down in the mud and eased the fish, still hooked, into the water, and rocked it back and forth. I tried again and again to get the hook out, my fingers numb and slipping, and was just about to give up when the hook came free, and I eased the fish into the water, alive.
I wish he could have seen it, seen that whorl of mud, seen it streak away.
But instead, as he ran up, his lungs on fire, I was already casting for a new one.
“Never mind,” I said.
His chest was heaving. Sweat ran down his face.
“Did it die?” he said.
“No,” I said.
He might have cried if it had, or wanted to.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Circle
THE TWO-DOLLAR PROPHECY came true. Sadie, the fortune-teller, said my mother’s life would move in a circle, and I guess it did. As a young woman all her happiness depended on the mail. Now, in old age, she was still waiting, her life swinging on that mailbox lid. She walked to the box every day, a quarter mile and back along a driveway crisscrossed by redbirds, still with us after all this time. The mailman ran at one-thirty, so that was when she started her march, but being older now, she waited to read them when she could sit down. There was no surprise under the stamps now, just a postmark, a federal guarantee that her youngest son was alive for one more day. She prayed for the days to fly, wasteful, for a woman so old.
He had been doing time in the county lockup when he got out the last time, sick and thin. But she was at peace, and it seemed so was he. There was no catalyst we knew of, no evangelism. It was more like he just got tired, and decided he wanted to live quiet the rest of his days. She prayed he was truly over that life of self-destruction that took my father, but it didn’t matter if it was permanent. Every day was a gift. Then an old charge, a dusty charge, resurfaced in the courts, and sent him off again. My mother was more stunned than brokenhearted, “’cause he done so good,” and it seemed like she just shrank in her clothes. He disappeared into the state system, to Atmore, and I thought it would kill her. Everyone says that about mothers and sons, but sons do kill their mothers that way.
I once believed I could make her happy with a house. I framed a book around that house, a symbol of some kind of victory over a life in borrowed houses. People traveled across the country to take pictures of it, because it meant something to them. But she would have been just as happy in a refrigerator box under the interstate, and just as sad.
I have never been all that sharp when it comes to learning from my mistakes. I caught her dreaming through a real estate magazine, and when she put it down I found a creased page. The picture showed a red cedar house and forty fine acres of wild, beautiful land. We got in the car and drove, just a few miles, then turned up a long driveway, lined with trees.
The other house was too close to the road, too big, and had too many lightbulbs to change. The house she dreamed about was really a cabin, made from squared-off logs, solid and faded to a bluish gray on the outside, still a rich, brownish red on the inside. But it was the land that mattered. The house perched on the side of a ridge, its yard sloping down to a fence and a pasture studded with water oaks, with a beautiful little stock pond just beyond. The pasture was still wild, filled with blackberry islands, and as we sat there a hickory nut fell from the branches overhead and rattled across the car hood. Sleek cattle grazed in the belly-high grass, and the ridge above the house was thick with hardwoods. I would learn that my grandfather made whiskey there when she was a girl.
We went a dozen times, to look. The pond was deep and clean and full of bream and big bass, and as I walked up to it the first time a snapping turtle the size of a hubcap crashed through the dead grass and weeds and into the water, roiling up the mud of the bottom. At dusk, a white egret waded at the shallow end, fishing. Egrets are rare here, up this high.
I handed my mother the deed.
Maybe it would help this time.
Maybe even she believed it would.
I bought it in fall, and in the changing season the frogs would sing so loud in the trees you had to shout to be heard. She would take walks at dusk, down the driveway, to listen to their music. Wild turkeys walked into her yard, and, afraid they might be hungry, she started putting out shelled corn. After a while, the turkeys stopped running when she came out the door, and she talked to them as they moved closer and closer. Deer tiptoed to the corn but crashed away when she swung open the door, and a giant rat snake she named Red Belly took up residence in the garage. We bought ducks and chickens, and I chunked rocks at the marauding possums, hawks and great owls.
It was good. The mornings sounded with bantam roosters, and at every dusk a parade of ducks, as regular as the ones in the Peabody Hotel, trekked up from the pond and squawked until my mother spread out a fresh sprinkle of corn. In spring she fished for bream with an honest-to-God cane pole and worms she dug herself, and caught fish the size of a salad plate. As her first summer neared she talked over and over about how she would have a real garden, a showplace garden, when her boy came home.
For her birthday I got two miniature donkeys, which are like any other donkeys except, well, smaller. My mother laughed out loud as they burst out of the trailer. The thing about miniature donkeys is they do not know they are. They think they are big, and bite, holler and demand attention. I watched her pet them, watched her spoil them with sweet feed till they almost foundered.
It is hard to find a perfect place, but this seemed like it. At sunset, I liked to sit on the steps and just look at it, at the wakes cut by the snapping turtles across the still pond. Some nights I take my spinning rod and try to catch a monster bass that my brother has already caught once. You have to run the donkeys off, or they will sneak up and bite you when your back is turned. So I fish with eyes in the back of my head, and cast until past dark. I am descended from great fishermen, in a culture where a man who cannot catch fish is more pathetic than a man who cannot change a tire.
“I think I’ve been happier here than I’ve ever been in my life,” she told me, and it was as sweet a lie as I have heard.
They counted down the days, mother and son, as if they were scratching it on the walls: 200, 199, 198…He called her from inside, but sometimes there were lockdowns and sometimes he just couldn’t get to it, and sometimes when he did call she could hear the jailhouse sounds on the other line, screams, catcalls, crashing doors, and it scared her. But every day, there was a letter, to tell her that he was okay.
As the days crept by she began to talk about what they would do, him and her, on their farm.
She showed me the place, a place thick with weeds and impenetrable hedges and blackberry bushes, as if they wanted the hardest place in creation, to test them. It was the blackberry bushes that worried me. They were thicker than my thumb at the base, and tough as green hickory. “It looks a little wild,” I told her, but she said she could clear it easy, her and Mark. This would be their garden.
Now, every day’s letter was about soil and seeds and fertilizer. “He wrote the same thing over and over, like your daddy when he used to write to me,” she said. They all began with: “When I get home…”
…the garden comes first. I want you to think about what you want us to plant when I come home. Me and you will try to plant something every day we can. I will be glad when I can see it growing. We’re going to plant beans, cucumbers, and lots of tomatoes, potatoes and onions. I will plant you a pumpkin patch, because you said you wanted some pumpkins. Ma, I try only to think of good things. Sometimes that ain’t easy. But that�
�s okay and I’ll be home soon. I want you to only think of good things and happy things. We will do a lot when I come home. I would like to put a gate at the top of that hill in the second pasture. We’ll walk and look when I come, but our garden comes first. I can do all this other stuff when it rains…
I spent the first day of our honeymoon in Montgomery, begging for his early release in front of the Board of Pardons and Paroles. The board listened to my excellent lawyer, then they listened to me as I tried to tell them how every day hurt my mother a little more. The clerk warned me not to even bring up mommas, because everybody’s momma hurts when their boy is in such a place. The board denied it, after deliberating about fifteen seconds. “This is the best place for him now,” a board member said. I walked out and swung one stupid, pointless punch at the air. I am sick of this, I thought, sick of this cycle, sick of being at the mercy of something as insignificant as a drink of alcohol.
HE WAS RELEASED IN WINTER. The woman and I drove southwest on Interstate 65, deep into the pine barrens and flat-land along the Florida line. Early the next morning we waited outside a chain-link fence on a flat, dull landscape, in what has to be one of the most desolate-feeling places on this earth. When he walked out I noticed he had aged years in that year and change. I shook his hand, like he had sold me some life insurance, and we went home. My mother rushed out the front door when the car pulled into the drive but just stopped when she saw him, and they stood for a minute there, awkward, till she reached her arm around his neck and patted him once, twice. “Your hair’s gone gray,” was all she said.
THE MODERN WORLD, e-mail, cell phones, all that clutter, stopped at the garden gate. The ghost of Bob must have slept in this ground. My brother worked pale and coughing, his insides giving up the food he ate more often than he kept it down, because a lifetime of drinking leaves you that way. But he hacked and cut at the underbrush and burned it clean, her beside him, until they both just gave out. He killed snakes with his hoe as he tore at the brush and plowed up their dens, and strung barbed wire around the plot, to keep the damn donkeys out of the corn. After about two months they had a space about thirty yards wide and forty yards long, not red clay but rocky mountain soil, a yellow-gray. They combed the rocks out together, pulled the roots up and cut them in two, and fertilized the soil. In May they planted what they had written each other about, planted white corn, hot pepper, red and white potatoes, turnips, Kentucky Wonder pole beans, yellow squash, okra, Vidalias, Texas Sweet and purple onions and two kinds of tomatoes, Better Boys and Rutlers Old Timey, and cleared more ground for a pumpkin patch and peas. They didn’t have a good rain for two months so they toted water to irrigate the plants, and when I asked them why they didn’t just get a long hose and run it down from the house, they both looked at me funny, like I had asked them to cheat.
I was gone almost a month, working, and when I came home I rolled past the garden and stopped my truck. Everything there—everything—was not just growing but thriving. They had already picked and canned forty-nine pints of turnip greens, and the onions were already beginning to make. Everything was either in bloom or further along, and as I walked beside my little brother through the rows I realized I was a poser, a fake country boy, and that driving a truck and shooting a gun is a lame statement next to what he knew about the ground. Unlike me, he had paid attention walking beside the old people in our family, and when I asked how he knew what to do, he just looked at me funny, again. “I’ve always knowed,” he said.
In the squash, he reached down and pinched off a bloom, and I wondered why he would do that—you needed a bloom to grow a squash. “It’s a false bloom, on the end of a little-bitty squash. If you leave the false blooms on there, it won’t make a squash. You pinch it off, and it lets the new squash grow.”
He lectured row by row. You pinch off the first little pepper pods that show. That makes the whole plant react by producing more pods, instead of a single pod or two on a plant that never fully develops. With okra, you cut off the first pod and leaf. You keep the dirt pulled back from the onions once they begin to grow, because the packed dirt will slow or stop them from developing. I told him it was amazing what they had done, and I meant it.
“I had my doubts,” he said, smiling, “when I saw them blackberries.”
I asked him why he would work so hard on something like that, but he never answered.
“Everybody that sees it says it’s the prettiest garden they ever seen,” my mother said.
They live together, the two of them. I have a room there and my name is on the cable bill, but I always feel like a tourist when I come, with the woman and boy. Sam and his wife Teresa and their daughter Meredith, with her family, visit a lot, and we eat that food—fried squash, boiled okra, new potatoes, stewed sweet corn—all seasoned with Velma’s magic, and at dusk we fish the pond and fend off the jackasses. My aunts and uncles and cousins come when they can, but time is catching up with us, and we are fewer now.
I think a lot about my daddy’s people now. The last time I saw Bob, he was Christmas drunk in ’65 and sitting next to me in the backseat of my father’s car. He and Velma had words, and he threatened to cut her with his new pocketknife. “I told your daddy not to give Bobby a knife for Christmas,” my mother said. But he snapped it closed, grinned at me, pinched my arm blue, and we rode, a family. Velma, I saw for the last time in the funeral home in Jacksonville. The young preacher told us Velma had come to him near the end of her life, and told him she was never saved. He said he prayed with her, and he was with her when she was. But I think the young minister had it wrong. I think she was saved all along.
Their youngest son lies near them, in a grave we rarely visit. One day Sam came by, covered in sweat, and told me he had gone to the cemetery to cut the weeds off the family plots on my mother’s side—our grandfather, grandmother, others—the people he considers real family. “I walked over and I cut Daddy’s,” he said. “I mean, I was already there.”
The garden at my mother’s house thrived all summer and into the fall, bore its fruit, and died, but as it withered my baby brother was still fine, still gaunt and old before his time, but living inside that peace he had found, and allowing her to live inside it, too.
They broke that circle, together. “Everything we wrote about in them letters has come true. Everything we dreamed about has come true, this time,” my mother said. “How often does something like that happen in this world?”
THE NEXT SPRING they started over. Fearful of snakes in the tall grass of the pasture, my brothers used mowers to cut a clean path for her from the yard to her pond, and from the yard to her garden. In one week the path was covered in wildflowers. “Everywhere Momma walks is flowers,” Sam said, and he didn’t mean it to sound pretty but it was. It has acres of flowers, her new Eden, and not one rose.
She prayed it would last forever, but even for an old woman, forever can take too long. My little brother stumbled and fell. But what fine minute she lived in, before he did. Some days, she did not check the mail at all.
* * *
The Boy
FUNNY THING, about that silver sports car.
No one ever bought it.
It may be because, when people called to ask about it, I would sometimes neglect to call them back.
I guess I never called anybody back.
The boy says that’s all right.
He plans to drive it to prom.
“You don’t even know how to shift gears,” I said.
“Teach me,” he said.
He is three years away from a driver’s license, but there is no harm in knowing early.
We crawled in, and I turned the key.
The sound of it, Lord, it just hums in your blood.
The wind blows the rust off a man.
I worked the clutch but I let the boy shift through the gears from the passenger seat, telling him to listen for a change in that growl, that roar, and he figured it out quick, like he was born to do it.
We we
re in Fairhope, in a dwindling summer. We idled along Mobile Bay, then went due east on those needle-straight country roads, a respectable fifteen miles over the speed limit.
“You know,” I said, “if you ever drive reckless, I’ll whip you like you were mine.”
He just laughed.
“I mean it,” I said. “You can’t.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You don’t understand consequences,” I said. “Your life’s been too safe, too easy…” and before I knew it I was deep into my rant, again. I think I will always do that, because someone has to be afraid for this boy.
I geared down and nudged the accelerator a little more. The timbre of the engine changed, sweetened, and the telephone poles went by like fence posts.
The boy raised his hands into the wind, like a little kid.
For a second, just a brave second, the car split the air under its own volition, and I raised mine, too.
* * *
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Before I can begin to thank the people who made this book possible, I must first offer apologies to my mother and brothers for having to endure my questions about a past that was hard to relive. I can let things lie now.