All Over but the Shoutin' (45 page)

I have had a lot of luck in my life, Daddy. Some of it, maybe, I earned, but most of it was blind, dumb, stumbling luck. Maybe, when it is all said and done, that is the only difference between you and me. I got the luck.

I hear it said a lot, especially lately, what a good man I turned out to be, considering. I always feel like a poser when I hear that, because I know it’s not true. I wrote once that I was “my momma’s son,” but that was a mistake, to claim that.

The truth is that, in so many ways, I am just like you. The meanness you had in you, I used to get where I am. But instead of spraying it out, like you did, I channeled it. I used it every time I told some loving soul that I had to say good-bye because my work was more important to me than them, or just because it was time to move on.

I used your coldness, the same way I used my momma’s kindness, in my work. Because of her, I could understand the pain and sadness of the people I wrote about, and could make others feel it. But because of you I could turn my back on them when I was done and just walk away, free and clean. Think about it. What kind of man can do that, as much as I have, and live with himself?

Your hatred of responsibility, of ties, is in me just as strong as it was in you. I have no home, no children, no desire for them. I picked one responsibility, just one, and I met it. But, any fool can meet just one responsibility. Any lame idiot can set the bar so low, and clear it.

There have been a thousand nights when I would rather have been you, nights when I wanted nothing more in this world than to give up and drink myself into a good night’s sleep. But that would have surely killed her, to see it. It would have put her in her grave. I do not know what will happen to me when she is gone, when the responsibility I picked up after you threw it down is fully met. I might be very, very tired then. The truth is that I can see myself wrapped around a bottle of bad likker for good company, that there are times when the very thought of that oblivion is so, so appealing. Luck or not, it has not always been easy being the raggedy-ass boy made good, the one the smart people like to have around, sometimes, to hear my rustic witticisms.

I am you, in better ways. I love the music as you did, and the women as long as they would someday go away, and sometimes a good fistfight just to let the rage out, and to see if my nerve is still there. Only it takes so much longer to get up now than it used to. I wonder, is that what finally happened to you?

I have never fought in a war, never experienced the hell you did. I have seen it, the killing and dying, but not on the scale of horror that consumed you. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if you had come home from that war crippled in body instead of spirit, if she had had to care for you, parking you in the sun, helping you to bed. Would you have lived? Would you have lasted?

There is no hate in me for you. I know that now. There is no profit in hating a dead man. I glimpsed the good in you when I was a little boy, and I saw it shine through you the day you gave me those books, the day you told me the story. I believe you told me the truth, mostly, about your war, and I believe that it took you from us, from me, allowing me only those glimmers of the man before. Like I said, I have to believe it. I have to, because without it there is only a clenched fist where your face would be, in my mind.

Some people tell me I should thank you, that by being the man you were, it forced me to be a different one. But I don’t buy that “Boy Named Sue” bullshit. If I could talk to you again, I would want to know one thing. Did you ever think of us, those years we didn’t hear from you. Did you ever think of us at all?

I am about the age you were, now, when you left us for that one, final time, when the telephone finally fell silent. Men in our family don’t last long, anyway, do they? We only look indestructible. We come to pieces in time, in such short time.

I will always remember that last time we talked, after you had given up on living but so feared death. Even with your life so tenuous, you unscrewed that cap and hastened your death with that amber liquid. And I understood. I would have done the same.

Some people say I am more like her, of course. They say I look like her. But I’m not much like her. I wish I was, but I’m not.

She has proved she can outlast anything. As hard as life has been for her, she hates death, she despises it. She even hates funerals because she does not like to feel its breath.

She is good and patient, and devout, so that she is never alone, like you and me.

I
don’t really know why I think this, but I believe you would have liked to see Momma in her house. I think you would have liked it, since you always seemed to appreciate nice things. It is a pretty big house, not scary like the last one we lived in with you, but warm and big and friendly. It has no ghosts in it, not that I can feel. Still, ghosts have a way of finding your new address. You can’t fool them by changing zip codes. I know. As much as I would like to be a dam, some barrier to the sadness that rolls through her life and her mind, I’m helpless. In the same way, there is no guarantee that the memories we make in her new house will be good ones. We can only try.

She jokes, sometimes, that she gets lost in it.

There would have been room for you.

41
Who we are

Mid-November 1996

T
here wasn’t much to move, and memories don’t weigh nothin’ really. She took a chrome-and-vinyl couch and chair, leftovers from some doctor’s office, and took her washing machine, which she had nicknamed “Old Smokey,” because the house fire had blackened the white paint. Smokey didn’t look like much, and, like my own machine in Atlanta, was prone to dance across the floor, as if possessed by demons on the spin cycle. But you couldn’t kill him with a gun. “Still runs. Don’t leak,” Momma said, refusing to let us get her a new washer. That was by God that.

I was in Louisiana, I think, on the day she finished moving in. I would have liked to have been there. As it turns out, it was good that I was far away.

The night after my momma’s first full day in her new house, my little brother came to see her. He was drinking, a little bit. We had all asked him not to come there, when he was. I don’t know what right we had to say that, or to expect him to comply.

My big brother, Sam, drove up at about the same time, just to check on her. They faced off in the yard.

I guess they had to fight. They had to, because of who we are.

Sam fought because he believed he was protecting her, because he believed he was fighting in my place, because I had begged Mark to stay away from there when he was drinking. Mark fought because he felt he was being pushed away, unwanted, which I guess is about the worst feeling in the world.

So, on my momma’s second night in her new house, a forty-year-old man and his thirty-three-year-old brother are fighting mean and earnest in the front yard of the very symbol of our new beginning. It was not two blowhards swinging at air and curses between the newsstands on Broadway. I wasn’t there but I can tell you that it was dirty, chilling. Mark choked him until his eyes began to dim, and all Sam could think, as he fought to get loose, was that if Mark hurt him bad he would lose a day’s work at the mill, and if you lose two, you’re fired.

My momma introduced herself to her new neighbors not by taking them a jar of homemade jelly or some pickled banana pepper, but by running to them for help.

And somewhere, my daddy was laughing.

Finally, Sam broke free and they broke apart, and it was just over. No one wanted to fight any more. Sometimes, the anger just dies on you that way. There is no reason, no sense to it.

I heard about it two days later. I don’t know if saying that it broke my heart is strong enough. It made me sick. I hung up the telephone and got in my car and just drove, not to home but away from it, going east on Interstate 20 until I crossed over the South Carolina border. I played the radio and drove. I turned around somewhere this side of Anderson, or maybe it was Greenville, and drove back home again.

Sam only did what he believed I would have done, or would have tried to do, if I was man enough. He did it to keep something good in her life from being tarnished.

But of course Momma didn’t see it that way. She has tolerated drunks all her life; she is good at it. She expects it, like she expects the sun to rise in the morning. Instead of being angry at my little brother, her baby, she was mostly mad at Sam. I had never really seen him beat before, not even bowed, but he was hurt by that.

So, instead of fixing anything, I only built a stage, a prop, for another sadness. I felt an anger at Mark that almost scorched me, raw, but it faded over the days, as the resignation set in. As long as he is alive, as she is alive, she will care for him, nurture him, tolerate him, and that is exactly as it ought to be. How do you tell a mother not to love her baby.

Even though I couldn’t make everything right with the simple purchase of a house, I wanted to believe it would at least be someplace fresh, free, for a while, of that lingering aroma of dusty pain. But what killed me, was when I heard my mother had left her new home, for a little while. She went back to the old little house, as she always had, even though it was empty, and sat in silence. There was no television, no phone, just my momma and an empty little house.

The house on Nisbet Lake Road sat empty for almost a week. My brother Sam would not go near it. My little brother Mark vowed he would never set foot in it again.

I begged her to go back, not to give up, and she told me that she never intended to stay away for long, that she just needed to let that bad beginning fade away, a little bit. But to me it was like all the things I had worked for were wasted.

And then I knew that maybe I had bought this house more to redo the past than to make her dreams come true. I felt sorry for Sam, for Mark, for her, but especially for me.

I
t got better, of course.

By Thanksgiving, Sam and Momma were working side by side again, again trying to make the house perfect, cosmetically. She held the ladder for him, passed him nails, cooked him biscuits as he did the little things that needed doing. I came home the day before Thanksgiving and hung pictures and fixed a broken lock and carried some broken limbs up into the woods. I felt like part of it.

My momma had fixed me a room. It had a spare bed with a box spring and two mattresses on it, so that it was a good four feet off the floor. When I dangled my legs over the side they didn’t touch the floor, and for a minute I felt like a little boy again. I thought again what I had thought as a child, morbidly comforting: If I should die before I wake, at least God won’t have to stoop over much to jerk me up into heaven. If He is inclined.

We had Thanksgiving dinner that next day, Sam and his family, Momma and me, my aunt Jo and uncle John. They have no children of their own, and have always eaten this meal with us. I guess it was the best food I have ever had. Momma used every rack in the oven and every eye on the stove in her new kitchen, and there were biscuits and dressing and mashed potatoes and pinto beans with a ham bone as big as my fist, and a turkey that fell off the bone … I was full as a tick. For the first time, ever, we all sat in the same room and ate, because it was the first time we, Momma, Sam and me, had ever had a room big enough to gather in. After a while my momma went and sat in a chair in the adjoining den, and Sam looked at me over the table and, without smiling, said: “Look how far away she is. And we’re in the same room.”

We tried hard not to notice the empty chair.

M
omma said she slept good in her new house, mostly, but couldn’t sleep on the cold nights. She thought about Mark then, and she has never been able to close her eyes when she is worried. Since his house burned down, he had been sleeping in his truck beside the ruins of his house, and on the cold nights he dressed in some thermal coveralls someone had given him, and shivered in the dark.

How could she sleep, knowing that?

But since his fight with Sam, something has happened to him. He has been cold-sober, working night and day to rebuild his house, this time out of concrete block. I guess it is anger that drives him, I don’t know. But day after day he slaps those blocks together, and at night he crawls into the cab of a truck and goes to sleep.

W
e started painting the wood trim and concrete-block portions of my momma’s house right after Thanksgiving. My momma paints as high as she can reach, and Sam paints the rest. There is still hurt in their faces, when they see each other, Momma and Sam, but that will fade, too.

She won’t let me hire a painter. It doesn’t bother her that it might take all winter—you can only paint on the warm, pretty days—and it doesn’t bother her at all that the wooden part of the house is forest green in some places and “ivory” in others. She isn’t like me, like I said.

The other night, in a light drizzle, we drove to Gadsden in the Bronco and got her a new couch. It was the first new piece of sitdown furniture she had ever owned.

The end of the couch stuck out into the rain, and my job was to ride in back of the Bronco and cover that end with a rain slicker. My momma held my ankle, to keep me from falling out the back.

For some reason I can’t explain, about halfway home with the rain blowing in my face, I started to laugh, and pretty soon my momma started to laugh, and although I couldn’t see him, in the darkened cab, I am sure Sam was grinning.

“You know, if you scoot on back there and sit on the very end of that thing, it won’t get wet,” he told me.

“I’ll fall out,” I said.

“Maybe not,” he said.

When we got home I went into the guest bathroom—imagine that, a guest bathroom—to dry my face and hands. I noticed that the towel said “Emory University Hospital” on it. Stolen, no doubt, and given to my momma in one of those boxes of throwaway clothes. Just on a hunch I went into the next bathroom, and the towel there said “Peninsula Medical Center,” and I started to laugh all over again. I walked back into the living room laughing, and saw my momma and Sam exchange one of those looks that they used to swap when I was little and did something odd.