It wasn’t easy to get from Clayton to Knoxville, Alabama. It was a long way along a series of two-lane blacktop roads. Mamaw and Mr. Henry’s house was about sixty miles from the middle of the Mississippi state line, and Clayton was about eighty miles from the southwest corner of Georgia. We were like a pair of scissors cutting Alabama diagonally in half when we drove from our house to Mamaw and Mr. Henry’s.
On the day we left for the broken road in the early summer of 1959, Daddy had not come home for several days. “Checking the pulse,” he called his political moving around.
Mama was in a hurry. She didn’t tell us we were going ’til the night before. She packed up what she could in suitcases and wedged the rest of our shoes and clothes and some cleaning supplies and jars of homemade preserves in cracks and crevices in the car.
“Here,” she said, handing me a large bowl filled with figs. “Find some place to put them.”
It was midafternoon before we left. “We’re going to get caught by the dark before we get there,” said Mama.
When Mama traveled without Daddy, she would look for a “rocking chair” to ride in—the space between two traveling eighteen-wheeler trucks. The first time I heard Mamaw tell Mama to ride in a rocking chair when she was driving alone or just with us, I asked Mamaw what that meant. “Well, it’s like this,” Mamaw said. “When your mama is driving on those blacktops through the woods and such, without your daddy (which is most of the time, I might add), she needs to get between two of those eighteen-wheelers so she can get some help if that worn-out junk car of hers breaks down. I would trust those truck drivers to help her before I would trust some man in a Cadillac.”
I sensed my mama’s spirit lighten as we left Clayton behind. Ashes from her cigarettes flew out of her rolled-down window as she drove. When we lost the radio signal out in the countryside, Mama would get us to sing with her, most times church songs.
How sweet and happy seem those days of which I dream,
When memory recalls them now and then!
And with what rapture my weary heart would beat.
If I could hear my mother pray again.
If I could hear my mother pray again,
If I could hear her tender voice as then!
So happy I would be,
’Twould mean so much to me,
If I could hear my mother pray again.
As our car gained ground, climbing up hills and leaving the flatlands of southeast Alabama behind, I never thought about asking Mama what our trip was about, how long were we going to stay or why we had left in such a hurry. A warm breeze blew through our rolled-down windows. My eyes were heavy. Just before I fell asleep I wondered what was going to happen when I let go of the bowl of figs I was still holding in my lap.
It was dark when Mama woke me.
“Where are we?”
“Almost to Tuscaloosa,” Mama replied. Driving through the downtown, I asked her, “Is that the store where you worked when you met Daddy?”
“It’s somewhere around here. Hold your breath,” she said. The car climbed a small rise onto the bridge over the Black Warrior River. We passed through Northport and the highway narrowed. The broken road was close. A pale moon rose in the cloudless night, pushing itself up and over treetops and the red clay hills.
Then there it was, as always. The broken road.
Mr. Henry was nodding off in a chair on the front porch when we pulled up to the house. He always waited up when he knew we were coming. His strong arms felt good around me when he hugged me. We sat at the kitchen table with Mr. Henry while Mamaw stoked the fire to make a pot of coffee. Mamaw got a jar of milk out of the icebox and poured a glass and handed it to me. “Honey, your eyes look like you’ve been on a binge. Drink this milk and let Mr. Henry go throw you in the bed. We can get all your clothes put out in the morning.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” Mama said.
The wallpaper in the room was light tan with bouquets of green-stemmed white lilies tied together with faint pink ribbons. An oscillating fan sat on the top of a small dresser; it blew the warmish air over us. The window curtains were pulled together with safety pins to keep the light out. Mama and I slept until the warming timbers in the attic began to pop.
Although it wasn’t made clear to me in so many words, I could read between the lines. At first, this trip to Mamaw’s felt no different from all the others. And then it did. My eyes were heavy, but I was happy when I sat down at the breakfast table. From what I was hearing, it sounded as though Mamaw and Mr. Henry were trying to persuade Mama to think about moving back up their way.
You would think I might have been dismayed at that prospect—but I wasn’t. Instead, my spirits rose. At Mamaw and Mr. Henry’s house there was no making a choice of whom to love or taking sides for one or the other. We all walked the same way. Here comes a fork; let’s all go this way. Wait a minute, I need to rest; then let’s just sit right down, we can’t go on without you. There was never the sense of aimlessness and emptiness I felt in Clayton. “Honey, if you can’t find something to do with yourself around this place, then you’re not looking in the right places,” Mamaw often said when we were visiting.
Several days after we arrived, I retreated to the front porch to escape the relentless heat that dragged moisture from the ground and hung it out to dry in suffocating layers of humidity. Mamaw was shelling butter beans.
“Go get you a pan. It’s time to teach you how to shell butter beans without ripping your thumbnail off. See that darker green strip on the top? Take your little thumb and split it open, then wiggle it inside and push out the beans. Now it takes practice, honey. If you’re not careful, that fingernail will pop off at the quick and you will be out of business, and I will have to soak that finger in alcohol. Here, swap pans with me. Let me go inside and get these washed up, then we’ll have us a break.”
I heard a car on the highway slow down and turn into our driveway. A dusty blue Ford emerged from beneath the crepe myrtle blooms. Mamaw watched from just inside the screen door as Uncle Gerald stepped out from behind the wheel and wished Mamaw a good morning.
“Nothing particular good about it as far as I can see,” my grandmother replied. “What brings you to these parts?”
Without answering, he turned to me and with a quick grin said, “Come over here and give me a hug. You haven’t gone off and married anybody, have you?’
A grudging smile crossed my face. “No, Uncle Gerald. I told you I would wait on you.”
“Well, me and Buddy Holly both have a crush on Peggy Sue.”
Mamaw stepped onto the porch. “Did you drive all the way up here from Montgomery this morning just to gab with us?”
“No, ma’am. I drove up last night and stayed in town. Got a late start this morning.”
“Guess you had to push your company out the door this morning. Hope she was worth the money.”
It was obvious that Mamaw was ready for a showdown. “Peggy Sue, go find Henry and tell him your uncle Gerald has just showed up.”
I ran back behind the house where Mr. Henry was tending to his elderly plow mule, Bertis. “Now that Bertis has a new pair of shoes, what say we let her take you on a ride around the pen. You, me, and Bertis need to get to plowing this field. Time to plant is comin’.”
After I told him Uncle Gerald was up front, all thoughts of riding or plowing were put aside. Mr. Henry pulled a handkerchief from his rear overall pocket and wiped his face and the two of us headed toward the front of the house, him moving along with a giddy-up walk, an uneven and awkward gait with a hitch in each step, and me right behind him.
After we rounded the corner of the house, Mr. Henry confronted Uncle Gerald head-on. “She’s not going back this time, Gerald. She is where she belongs, and we are going to take care of her until she can get back on her feet.”
Mamaw looked at me. “Sugar, you just cover up those ears.”
“She shoulda cracked a cola bottle over your brother’s head a long time ag
o,” Mamaw said.
“I hear you, Mrs. Burns,” Uncle Gerald replied. “But George has big plans. He’s running for governor again. You know he never really stopped after he got beat. And what kind of life will Lurleen have living with you up here in the country? I can’t promise George will ever change, but he can give Lurleen things she never dreamed of and take her places she has never been.”
“How can she expect him to do that when he can’t take his fine self up here himself to talk to Lurleen?”
“George figured Lurleen will likely listen to me before anyone else.”
“Lurleen will never have any peace of mind living with him,” Mr. Henry said.
Uncle Gerald didn’t take him up on that. Perhaps he knew it was true. Instead, he looked my way. “I bet your mama has gone fishing. Let’s go find her.”
We picked up a pig trail behind the barn and walked toward a creek, not far from Mr. Henry’s back property line. Mama, with her back facing us, was sitting beneath a mimosa tree on a flipped-over wooden crate that had seen its better days. A cane pole was propped up in a crook of one of the tree’s branches. Mama’s chin rested on her pulled-up knees, her eyes following a white ball cork drifting in one of the creek’s washouts.
The creek was a spring-fed tributary of the Black Warrior River. Mama never called it anything other than “the creek down behind the house.” It was mostly narrow with high red clay banks. When the creek was running high in the late winter and spring, the fast-moving water would carve out washouts in some of the creek’s curves. When the low water came in the summer, the washouts were where the fish were.
“Why, look who’s here,” Gerald said in his most pleasant voice.
Mama opened her metal tackle box and pulled out a crumpled pack of Camel cigarettes and passed one to Gerald. She uncrossed her legs and stood up. “I expected you to show up at some point.”
Uncle Gerald looked down at me. “Why don’t you run on back to the house while I talk to your mama for a minute.”
Some years after Mama died, I asked Uncle Gerald about their conversation on that day.
“Daddy says you two ganged up on him,” I said.
“Me and your mama ganged up on him a lot of times,” he replied. “As long as we let your daddy think he was winning, even when he wasn’t, he would wave his cigar around like it was some voodoo stick and tell us: ‘You two think you can outsmart me, but you can’t!’ We’d thank him for listening, let the dust settle, then do what we needed to do anyway.
“When Lurleen took you up to Knoxville, at first I don’t think your daddy even knew you were gone! It probably took him a few days to wonder why all of your clothes went missing. When ‘I think she left me!’ dawned on him, I bet he almost fainted, got mad, stomped around the house and then called me.
“ ‘Go up there and talk some sense into her,’ he said.
“So your daddy sent me up there to bring all you home.” Gerald said. “Your mama and I had a rough conversation on that creek bank after she sent you back to the house. She was mad as hell and told me she had had enough of your daddy and the way he ignored all of you. And of course everything she said was the God’s truth. I had no argument for any of her very valid complaints.
“I told your mama that your daddy loved her, and I believed she loved him. We all knew he was most times an SOB, so that was not something I could get around. But I told her that after all the crap she had been through, if she could just stay around a little bit longer, she could be First Lady of Alabama. And you children would be able to live in the Governor’s Mansion and have a kind of life that most people only dream of. This is Gerald you’re talking to, I told her. I know better than most what you have been through with George. I wish things were different but both of us know that he is not going to change. He loves you, you know that, but he just doesn’t know how to show it.
“Your mama said that if your daddy loved her, he needed to learn fast how to act like he loved her. And I agreed. What could I say? I think she called him a penny-pinching skinflint, which of course he still is.
“ ‘Even if he had money, he wouldn’t even know how to write a check,’ your mama said.” We both laughed at that one.
“Mama must have been on a roll when y’all talked,” I said. “I should have stayed at the creek with you!”
“Your mama said she would call your daddy that night. I told your daddy he had better be listening out. Well, you know what happened. She called him a bunch of times and he either was not at the house or didn’t pick up the phone, but I damn well know he knew she was going to call him ’cause I told him she was. After that, the shit didn’t just hit the fan, it knocked it over!”
I remember Mama trying to call Daddy several times the day after Uncle Gerald came for a visit. She asked the operators to double-check the number. Finally, she gave up. Mamaw and Mama mostly sat out on the porch the rest of the day.
“I’m too tired to fix a big supper. Just eat what we got.” I remember Mamaw saying that, because a pot of something was always boiling on the stove when we were there.
The next morning, I woke up to a singing Mamaw and the smell of bacon in the air.
“Your Mama had to run over to Eutaw this morning. She has some business at the courthouse. Should be back way before dark.”
Mamaw brought me a plate piled high with breakfast food. “Y’all all need to go ahead and finish this up so I can put on supper and get around to at least one batch of fried apple pies.”
The Greene County courthouse, a rather dour building, stood amid scattered stores and small offices in downtown Eutaw, Alabama.
Mama sat down across the desk from a young lawyer who asked what he could do for her.
“I want a divorce,” Mama said.
“Name and occupation of your husband?” the lawyer asked.
“George Wallace, and he is unemployed at the moment.” Mama always laughed at that part of her story. “You should have seen that lawyer’s face.”
“Did you say George Wallace?”
“That’s what I said.”
“The same George Wallace that was the judge and just ran for governor?”
“One and the same.”
“What grounds?”
“You name it, he’s probably done it!” That was what Mama claimed she said.
Mama told the lawyer she wanted him to get it filed as fast as he could.
Mama told Mamaw the details of her courthouse trip while we were sitting on the front porch that night. Mamaw said something like, “Are you sure you are doing the right thing?”
It seemed at one point Mamaw started backing up, asking Mama if she was sure about divorcing Daddy. She said something to the effect of, “This is a big decision, no matter how I feel about George.” (I think she actually called him “a little scoundrel.”) “If he’s still in the picture at least there would be some money coming in to make your bills each month.”
“Well, how has that been going for me these past sixteen years?” Mama told Mamaw that while she might not have been the most important person in Daddy’s life, she was the most powerful.
“Have you ever heard of a divorced man being elected governor of Alabama? Or better yet, have you ever heard of a divorced man with a bunch of children running around missing their daddy being elected governor?” Mama said.
“Can’t say as I have.”
“Well, neither have I. George tells me and everybody else who will listen that next time around he’s going to win and be governor of Alabama. No ifs, ands, or buts. Strutting around. The one thing he can’t lose is me. I just hate that it took me this long to figure this out. He needs me more that I need him, and things are going to change.”
My grandmother looked at her daughter with pride. “All hell is about to break loose,” she said.
“I bet we are going to have a visitor in a couple of days,” Mama said, and I knew she was talking about Daddy.
When my daddy did get the news that Mama had filed for divor
ce, Gerald told him that they were driving up to the broken road. “If you ever want to be governor, you have to make up with Lurleen and start acting right. I told you to never underestimate her.”
“Well, what if she won’t listen?” Daddy said.
“Then you will be a two-time loser and going to somebody else’s inauguration come January of 1963.”
When Mama saw Daddy pull up in the driveway in Uncle Gerald’s car, she told me to go give him a hug. Mamaw was peeking from around her bedroom door. I squealed as Daddy picked me up and raised me over his head. “How’s my Uudlum Scuudlum?” He pulled out a bag of M&M’s from his right coat pocket and handed it to me. “I sure do miss you. Our house gets mighty lonely when you are not around.”
“Have you come to take us home?” I asked.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to your mama about. Why don’t you go find her for me?”
I remember seeing Daddy and Mama standing in the front yard. Daddy paced around; Mama leaned up against the car, hands folded across her chest. It seemed to me they were somewhere in between a hug and a fight.
Sometime after the sun went down but before the moon came up, Mama and Daddy came up into the house.
“You’re gonna stay up here with Mamaw and Henry for a while,” Daddy told me. “Your mama and I have some things to work out.”
Daddy and Mama kissed me goodbye, and then they left. I didn’t feel abandoned. I loved my grandparents and felt at home on the broken road.
I stayed by the broken road for the rest of that summer. In the fall, I went to school in Eutaw. Mr. Henry drove the school bus. “First one on, first one off,” he would say.
The Broken Road Page 6