The Prince of Frogtown (8 page)

Some men, in that bleakness, drank up their families’ groceries, but not Bob. He was a man who rigidly controlled his appetites. The bootleggers sold a half-pint of corn whiskey for fifty cents, and Bob allowed himself exactly one half-pint, once a year, on the birth of our Savior. The liquor came in a thin, clear bottle, and was enough for two good, mellow intoxications or one pure, long, skull-popping drunk. The bootleggers called it a scant because it was so small, and it would last Bob the Yuletide. On Christmas Eve, every Christmas, he walked up to Velma and asked for his drinking money. “Velma, honey, gimme fifty cents. I’m gonna get me a scant.” She felt inside the coffee can, and gave it to him.

It was sometime before the start of World War II, maybe a few years in, when he asked the last time.

She sat down and covered her face.

“What?” he said.

“We don’t have it,” she said.

“Why not?” he said.

“I give it away,” she said.

She had given it, a little at a time, to people who needed it worse than they did, to people suffering. Her heart was too soft, too good, to say no to people in real need. She planned to make it back by sewing, cleaning houses, but Christmas just came early for a change. No one knows, really, how much it was. It may have been fifty dollars, less, but it was a lot to them.

“I’m sorry, Bob,” she said.

He walked out.

He was a renter the rest of his life.

It would be wrong, and unfair, to say that Bob stopped trying after he gave up on his dream. He continued to work hard, and when he was sober he remained the most polite, decent and responsible man. That was the best part of Bob, that unbending sense of responsibility to people who depended on him, and he would have been ashamed to see his house dark or icebox empty. There would be meat at supper and sweets at breakfast in his house, and he didn’t give a damn if syrup went to fifty cents a sop.

But as he grew older, more and more, he was willing to go when men came to lure him out with a jar of clear whiskey. It was a surrender, in a way. He bought his own whiskey by the gallon now, fought for the fun of it, and did odd things. Once, he hitched his horse to a wagon and rode through the mill village dressed only in his long underwear, whooping. He was Bobby Bragg, and every payday was Christmas Day.

When you’re all alone and blue

No one to tell your troubles to

Remember me, I’m the one who loves you

“He’d get to drinking, and come over to my Grandmother Whistenant’s house,” said Shirley Brown. “I was still just a girl then. We had an old wood heater, with a pan for the ashes underneath, and he would sit in there by that heater and cry. Uncle Bobby dipped snuff, and he would spit in the ashes and cry and the tears would roll down his cheeks and the snuff would run down his chin, and he would sing…”

When this world has turned you down

And not a true friend can be found

Remember me, I’m the one who loves you

He did not sing well, and liked to linger on the
“Remember meeeeeeee”
part, which sounded like someone strangling a cat with a nylon cord. “Some people would run and shut the door if they thought a drunk was coming, but not Momma. We all just thought the world of him.” So they all sat around, being polite, and waited for Bobby to stitch his heart back together one verse at a time.

Once, staggering home, Bob made a misstep on the footlog and plunged into the creek. Instead of getting out, he lay on his back and sang curses at the log. Far away, at his own house, his two oldest sons heard, faintly, their father’s voice.

“Damn,” said Roy.

“What?” said Troy.

“Bob’s fell in the branch,” Roy said.

His sons went to get him. As they walked, they saw his little hat bobbing down the stream.

T
OUGHY GRIFFIN
was Bobby’s friend. He was not the meanest man in Jacksonville, but he could absorb pain and whiskey in a volume few have ever seen. Being kicked by a grown, neck-high mule is comparable to being run over by a small car, and he had been kicked, butted and bit. “But there was not a mule or a horse he couldn’t shoe,” said Jimmy Hamilton. “He was usually so drunk he couldn’t walk, but he could flat out shoe. He’d get about half lit, and before it was over…well, I’ve seen him bleedin’ and the mule, too.”

He and Homer would go sit under the Indian cigar tree in front of Toughy’s barn, for the same reason they went to the theater. If you sat there long enough, some kind of entertainment would occur. It was even better than the poker game for violence, cussing, drinking and all the manly arts. “I never knew if Toughy ever took a bath, because he always looked the same,” Jimmy said. He was covered in snuff, mud, blood, manure and smut, from his bellows, but never whiskey, because Toughy never let a drop go awry. He was one of the legendary figures in Jacksonville’s history, though his name appears on no documents except maybe a few old police reports. Bob liked to visit Toughy in the cool of the late afternoon, especially if he had a bottle to share.

This day, Toughy had just used the nose twisters to bring a large mule down to the ground, so it could be trussed up and shod. The nose twisters worked just like the name implies—the smithy attached them, like a big set of pliers, to the nose, and twisted them around until the animal buckled. Mules do not like this, none of it, and they lie quivering in pain and terror on the ground, until the ropes are undone and it can explode up, kicking insanely at anything close. Toughy had just tied the mule down, straddled the leg, and was driving nails into the hoof when Bobby walked up.

“Bobby had some whiskey,” Jimmy said. “That was out of the ordinary.”

He told Toughy to quit what he was doing and have a little drink of liquor.

“Toughy would have dropped his hammer in mid-swing,” Jimmy said, “if someone came up with a bottle…”

…so Toughy dropped his hammer on the backswing, and sat down.

“So there they are, Toughy and Bobby, sitting on a rock drinking whiskey,” Jimmy said.

The mule’s owner, a big farmer, stared in disbelief.

His prize mule lay kicking, one leg sticking straight up in the air, as Toughy took several long pulls on the whiskey.

He walked over to the two men and ordered Toughy to get up and finish his job.

“Toughy had to kind of wall his eye around on the man, till he could focus good,” Jimmy said.

He nodded, staggered up, reeled over to the mule, sighted un-steadily on his next nail and, missing the bony part of the hoof altogether, drove the nail straight into the fleshy quick of the animal’s foot. Blood flew, the mule screamed and the farmer stood in disbelief. He was a respected man, a landowner, and these drunk men, these white-trash hooligans, had crippled his animal.

He decided to blame Bob, who did not have a hammer in his hand. He walked over and started cussing him. Bob dropped his bottle in the dirt—it was empty, of course—balled his fists and raised them in front of his face as if he was planning to box the big farmer by Marquis of Queensberry rules. Then, as a bell sounded that only he could hear, he pranced toward the man, swung twice, missed twice, and fell face-down in the gravel.

I
N A VILLAGE
where so many people just broke themselves against the machines and disappeared, there are more stories than there are people left to tell them. Homer Barnwell and Jimmy Hamilton have known each other since they were boys in a time between wars, when a passing car, any car, would make them stop and stare. Bob would be more than a hundred now, if he had lived, so the only witnesses to his misadventures are old men who were boys then, who peeked into every condemned corner of the village, which was their universe, to watch men drink, lie, scratch and roar. The meek and well-behaved always seem to fade, which has always made me doubt that “inherit the earth” part. It is the Bobs who live forever.

I am proud to have Bob’s blood in me. In it is at least part of the reason for what decency there is in me, in any sense of responsibility to my people. But in it, too, is the answer to every time I argued from spite, all those times I fought dirty when I was in the dead, pure-positive wrong. Rules? Who ever had any damn fun with those shackles on your feet? Meekness? Who wants to inherit the earth, in such company? Once, as a boy, I repeatedly slapped a boy on a baseball field, trying to goad him into swinging at me. He wanted to hit me back but he didn’t do it, maybe because he was afraid, maybe because he didn’t want to hurt me. Either way, he stood there and took it. I slapped him till my arm got tired, till I finally just walked off in defeat. But I know what Bob would have done. Bob would have switched hands.

T
HE LAST CHILD
of Bob and Velma came into the world on January 10, 1935. The boy, named Charles Samuel after his grandfather, was allergic to some types of milk, so Velma mixed a formula from sweet canned milk even as, in the hills around town, babies perished from simple dehydration. Born into that cycle of breadlines, layoffs and lockouts, he was wrapped in soft blankets, and raised in a house of love and whiskey.

The Boy

I
WILL NEVER FORGET
the first time I saw him. He was still just a roly-poly little kid, playing in the white sand with his cousins on the Alabama coast.

“Hey,” was all I said to him, but I thought: You’re going to be my boy. I’m going to have a boy, after all this time.

“Hey,” he said, with just half a glance, and went back to burying his cousin in the sand. I watched him awhile, then went to the souvenir shop and bought him a shovel.

If you’re going to bury somebody, bury ’em.

“We buried my brother once, in Pensacola,” I told him. “We left him there, up to his neck, hollering, and didn’t dig him out until right before the tide came in.”

He grinned and said, Naw you didn’t, but I was telling the truth.

The woman said she never truly worried what kind of stepfather I would be, but I did. Everything I knew about being a father, almost everything, was wrong, twisted.