All Over but the Shoutin' (10 page)

Grandma Ab, who was still spry in body and mind, watched it all from the front porch, grinning, her dentures wide and bright as the grill on a 1957 Cadillac.

People have often asked me, when I talked of how I grew up, how awful it was that I did not have a solid male influence in my life, but the fact is that we had two, my uncles John and Ed, who were married to my aunts Jo and Nita. Every Friday night, without fail, my uncle John and aunt Jo came to visit. He rough-housed with us for hours, and while I didn’t know it then he was standing in for our daddy. They had no children, and it was John Couch, who worked hard for his money in the blast furnace heat of the pipe shop, who gave us an allowance of twenty-five and later fifty cents a week, and once, when I was older, a silver dollar. People say sometimes that it must have been hard, growing up without a father figure. But if I have ever met men who were more decent than my uncles, I cannot recall.

The small house we lived in with my grandma sat on land owned by my uncle Ed and aunt Gracie Juanita, and for most of my life they just let us live there, never asking anything in return. Ed Fair had been crippled as a boy when a car struck his legs, but he was the hardest-working man, except for my brother Sam, I ever knew. In the winter when the water pipes froze, it was Ed Fair who took the pick and hacked at the frozen clay until he found the leak, and patched it so we would have water to drink. It was him who brought us the coal, when he had some extra, so we could keep warm. It was him who paid the doctor bill when I slid into home and peeled all the skin off my legs.

No, by the time I was six years old, I had already witnessed what a man should be, how a man should act. I saw it in my own momma, who put on a man’s britches and worked in the field all day, then ironed mountains of clothes at night, for pocket change. Our father’s face, his voice, his character had faded to this wispy thing that needed only a soft wind to sweep him away forever, for good.

As hard as life was for my momma, I had come to expect certain things in my own. I expected to have homemade ice cream once every three months with my uncles and aunts, sometimes with a can of peaches added for flavoring. I expected to sit with my grandma Ab, singing “Uncloudy Day” at the limit of my lungs. I expected to wake up to the warmth of a woodstove, and drift off to sleep under piles of soft, frayed quilts stitched by hand generations ago.

I came to see the little house we lived in, surrounded on two sides by the cotton field, on one side by a vast green pasture and on the other by creek and swamp, as the place we belonged. I knew that if I ran outside at precisely 6:30
A.M.
, I could see the big yellow bus come and take my brother to Roy Webb Elementary School. I knew that most of the time he would throw a rock at me before he got on that bus but sometimes he would wave, and I thought that was the best thing in all the world.

I knew that the man who ran the Crow Drugstore would give me presents when my momma went in for cough syrup for the baby, and one year he even gave me an Easter basket. He had run out of the blue ones for boys, but he had a pink one left, and my momma told him, “He won’t know the difference,” and I didn’t. I expected to follow my momma to the cotton field, expected to climb on board that sack, expected to ride.

I knew that sooner or later my daddy would show up and we would live someplace else for a while, but never long enough to be thought of as home, as this little house was.

He came for us in the spring of 1965, for the last time.

I will never forget the sight of him that day. He had on dress pants and loafers and a pretty shirt unbuttoned at the neck, to show his tattoo, but I cannot remember if he was sober or just well groomed. He had always been a clean drunk, a well-dressed drunk, what people in that time called a pretty man. He might be cross-eyed drunk but his shoes were always shined, always the best-dressed man in jail. His children and wife might go without, but his shirts were always pressed. Some people had backbone to lean on. Daddy had starch.

He said he had a steady job working body and fender for Mr. Merrill, who ran a big auto body shop in rural Spring Garden in Cherokee County. He promised her that this time he would straighten up and fly right. That’s what he always said: straighten up and fly right. Three decades have whipped by since that day, but I remember, as the car pulled away, how the beer bottles clinked in the floorboards and my brother Sam sat still as stone, his hair slicked down with Rose Hair Oil, because my momma had wanted us to look nice. I remember I stood in the backseat and stared out the rear window, and saw my grandma Ab run up the walk from the house in that curious, jerking way that old people run. She had sat quiet in the kitchen as we packed our clothes, not talking, not even looking at us. But as the car pulled away she stood in the middle of the driveway, her dew rag on her head and her apron wadded in her hands, not waving, just staring and staring until we slipped over a rise in the blacktop, out of sight.

5
When God blinks

W
e were raised, my brothers and me, to believe God is watching over us. The day we left our grandma standing in the driveway for that massive, hateful house on a hill, I guess He had something in His eye. Maybe it was Vietnam. Maybe it was Selma. Either way, as my daddy’s Buick rumbled between the low mountain ridges and crossed into Cherokee County from Calhoun, we were on our own. I was six years old.

I will forever remember my first look at that house. It stood like a monument on the hill, smack-dab in the middle of a little farming community called, idyllically, Spring Garden. It was high and white, a two-story farmhouse with big, square columns in front, too big to reach around. There was a massive gray barn, and a smokehouse, and off in the distance, a string of shacks. The house stood sentry over fields of cotton and corn, and was ringed with live oak trees, trees that had outlived generations of men. There was an apple orchard and a pasture and acres and acres of empty, lonely pines.

He had told Momma he had a good job, but to rent this house, we thought, he would have to be a county commissioner, at least. For all our lives we had lived in tiny mill houses or in relatives’ homes, places so small that people sit with their knees touching and their arms tucked in tight at their sides, the way prisoners sit when they are fresh out of jail. This, we thought, as the car rolled toward it on the blacktop, was a mansion.

But as the car pulled closer and turned up the long driveway, I saw that it was no mansion, only the corpse of one. I saw peeling paint and missing boards, and looking back on it now I know that my father must have rented it for a song, because it was a house no one else would have. We would have said it was straight out of Faulkner, if we had known who Faulkner was. The bathroom, like the one we had back at our grandma’s little house, was out back, down a dirt trail, bordered by ragweed.

Inside, where the wallpaper hung like dead skin, a great mahogany staircase stretched up to a sinister, deserted second floor, a floor that we never used, one that remained covered in a fine gray powder of dust, like old graveyard dirt, the whole time we lived there. Even now, I can close my eyes and see the footprints in it, left by someone a week before, a month, years.

The house was almost empty. There was a bed in one room where Sam and I slept with our little brother, Mark, who was still just a baby, and a bed in another room for them. I remember a couch and a chair in the living room and a kitchen table, and nothing else, just space. It had a fireplace and a wood heater, which is fine when you have something to burn, and electric lights that only worked in a few rooms. The floor had so many cracks that the wind reached up to tickle your ankles, like cold, invisible fingers reaching out of the ground. I jumped the first time I felt it, and my daddy laughed.

I believe now that if I would have listened very carefully, I could have heard my mother’s heart break and tinkle down in pieces on the warped floor. She did not say anything, of course. She never said anything. It was just one more broken promise, one more sharp slap to her pride. But if that was all she had to endure, she could.

I was afraid of that house. Sam was afraid. I think even she was afraid. For the first month I slept with my head covered up, but there was no hiding from the monster in that old house. It was quiet at first, but it was only resting. It was with us just as sure as if it had been locked into one of those closets in the abandoned second floor.

F
or a little while, I believe, we were something very like a family. My momma cleaned up the ground floor of the old house, stuck our baby pictures on the wall with Scotch tape and put a few plastic flowers on the empty shelves. For weeks, our daddy woke up early and went off to work at Merrill’s body shop, carrying a lunch box full of bologna sandwiches and a Little Debbie snack cake. He came back home smelling of dust and paint, not whiskey, and on Fridays he cashed his check and put money in my momma’s hand for groceries before going to get drunk. We had not one bottle of milk in the refrigerator but two. One pure white—what we call “sweet” milk—and one chocolate. We could drink as much milk as we wanted. The milkman came back for the half-gallon bottles, and left more. I thought it was free.

Our daddy came home almost every evening and we sat around a table and ate supper. I can remember him holding three-year-old Mark on his lap, trying to get him to eat off his plate, remember how the food got in his hair and his son’s hair, how my momma would run over, wiping, fussing, and my daddy laughing and laughing and laughing. It was nice, like I said, to hear that deep voice laugh.

I remember him sitting in the living room with a cigarette in his thin fingers, talking about living, about life. He talked of life beyond cotton fields and Goodwill stores and commodity cheese.

I guess he was trying, to be a daddy, a husband. But even at six years old I knew not to count on him, believe in him. I walked around him like he was a sleeping dog, afraid every minute that he would wake up and bite me. But the weeks turned into months, and still the demons in him were quiet, till the summer vanished into fall and the giant oaks around that giant house began to burn with orange, yellow and red.

Sam and I grew less and less afraid of the house. We climbed the stairs and slid down the bannister until Momma hollered at us to quit or she would whup us, which was an empty threat if ever there was one. We even dragged her up there, herself, one day, when Daddy was gone. She laughed like a schoolgirl.

But I never got completely over my fear of that second floor, so empty, like a family of ghosts lived over our heads. I would imagine they were chasing me as I flung myself on the bannister and slid down to safety, down to my momma and my brothers and the smell of baking cornbread and boiling beans and the sound of the Gospel Hour drifting from the plastic radio.

It was about that time I had my first taste of education in the Alabama public school system. We went to school at Spring Garden, where, in the first grade, I fell in love with a little girl named Janice. Janice Something. But the first grade was divided into a rigid caste system by the ancient teacher, and I was placed clear across the room from her. They named the sections of the divided classroom after birds. She was a Cardinal, one of the children of the well-to-do who studied from nice books with bright pictures, and I was a Jaybird, one of the poor or just plain dumb children who got what was left after the good books were passed out. Our lessons were simplistic, and I could always read. I memorized the simple reader, and the teacher was so impressed she let me read with the Cardinals one day. I did not miss a word, but the next day I was back with the Jaybirds. The teacher—and I will always, always remember this—told me I would be much more comfortable with my own kind. I was six, but even at six you understand what it means to be told you are not good enough to sit with the well-scrubbed.

Her name is lost in my head. She was an aristocrat, a white-haired woman with skin like a wadded-up paper bag that she had smeared red lipstick on and dusted with white powder. I did not know it then, but I was getting my first taste of the gentry, the old-money white Southerners who ran things, who treated the rest of the South like beggars with muddy feet who were about to track up their white shag carpeting. She drove a big car with fender skirts, probably a Cadillac, and wore glasses shaped like cat’s eyes.

O
n Sunday evenings, we visited my daddy’s people, strangers to me then, strangers to me now. But for one slender ripple in time I had a second family, a people unlike my momma’s people. These were people, the menfolk anyway, without any governors on their lives, not even the law. They drove the dirt roads drunk, the trunks of their cars loaded down with bootleg liquor and unstamped Old Milwaukee beer, the springs squealing, the bumpers striking sparks on the rocks, the men driving with one hand and alternately lighting cigarettes and fiddling with the AM radio with the other, searching for anything by Johnny Horton.