We 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.
For 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.
On 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.
They fought each other like cats in a sack, existing—hell no, living—somewhere between the Snopeses of Faulkner’s imagination and the Forresters of The Yearling. It is a point of fact that the whole male contingent of the family got into a brawl in town—“they wasn’t fightin’ nobody else, just each other,” my momma said—and, as a family, went to jail. One cousin by marriage—and I am not making this up—refused to wear shoes, even in winter. They were constantly bailing each other out of jail, not for anything bad, merely for refusing to march in step with the twentieth century. If they had been machines instead of men, they would have had just one speed, wide-open, and they would have run at it until they blew themselves apart. I guess, in a way, they did. They are all dead now, not from age, but misuse.
Against my will, I grew fond of them. I would have liked to have known them better.
What I know I learned from those Sunday evenings, when we visited my granddaddy Bobby and granny Velma Bragg’s house to eat a meal that took hours to cook and a solid thirty minutes just to put on the table. I remember fine fried chicken, and mashed potatoes piled high with a small lake of butter in the middle, and cracklin’ cornbread, and butter beans with a white chunk of fat pork floating like a raft in the middle, and sweet tea poured from gallon pickle jars. They lived in a big, rambling farmhouse, paid for with money from Bobby’s steady job at the cotton mill, and they had a short, fat dog named Boots who was about 150 in dog years and moved stiffly around the yard, blind as a concrete block.
Bobby Bragg, a white-haired little man, was what we would now call an eccentric. He still had a horse and wagon, and it was not too uncommon then to see Bobby riding around the mill village in his long underwear, drunk as a lord, alternately singing and cussing and—it must be said—shouting out bawdy limericks to mill workers and church ladies.
The town’s police officers seldom bothered the ornery old man, mainly because arresting him would would have left them not only with an unmanned horse and wagon but Bobby himself, and everyone with even a lick of sense knew Bobby would cut you as soon as look at you.
I was amazed by him. His hip bone was prone to come out of joint and when it happened he would not go to a doctor or do anything else that was remotely sensible, but he would limp and cuss and drink and limp and cuss and drink until all he could do was lie on the bed and cuss and drink. Until, one day, my granny Bragg had enough. She reached down and got his bad leg by the foot, and commenced to jerking and twisting and jerking and twisting until his hip bone popped back into place with a sound like, well, a pop, and he was cured.
When sober, he often dressed for dinner, not in a suit but in a fresh pair of overalls, and a white button-down shirt that was stiff as a board with starch. “Clean as a pin,” Momma said. Of the bad things that can be said about my granddaddy, no one could ever say he did not have a certain style. (It is widely believed in my family that a good many of my peculiarities, I most certainly got from him.)
My granny Velma Bragg was a sad-eyed little woman who looked very much like the part Cherokee she was, a sweet-natured woman with great patience who hovered over the men when they drank whiskey at a beautiful dining room table, trying to wipe up what they spilt before it ate away the varnish. I remember she was always kind, always gentle, especially to my momma. I guess, in a way, she had an idea what was in store for her. Momma and Granny Bragg still talk, every week. Survivors, both of them.
After supper the men went one way and the women went another. The old man, Bobby, would hold court on the porch, surrounded by his sons. The men drank—Lord, how they could drink—from endless cans of beer or from a jug when they had one. They even talked about drinking as they drank, and smoked Camels down to the barest nub before flipping them out in the dirt of the yard. When I close my eyes I can still see the trail of orange sparks it made. My momma often would holler for me to come inside, but I was enthralled. These men were what my momma’s kinfolk called sinners, and it seemed to me like sinning was a lot of fun.
Listening to them, I learned much of of what a boy should know, of cars, pistols, heavy machinery, shotguns and love, all of which, these men apparently believed, can be operated stone drunk. I learned that fighting drunk is better than sober because a clear-headed man hurts more when hit. I learned that it is okay to pull a knife while fighting drunk as long as you are cautious not to cut off your own head.
I learned that whiskey will cure anything from a toothache to double pneumonia, if you drink enough. (Once when I was bad sick with flu, they even gave it to me. They heated it in a pan, being careful not to let it get anywhere close to an open flame, and poured it over honey in a coffee cup. Then someone, my granny probably, squeezed a lemon into it. I drank it down in four gulps, took two steps, a hop, a skip and a staggering leap and passed dead out on the floor. From what I heard later, everyone except my momma thought it was pretty amusing. I cannot say it cleared up any congestion, but it made my head hurt so bad that I did not notice it so much.)
They talked about the mill. They talked about dogs. They talked about fistfights and bootleggers and, a little, about war, but not my daddy’s war. They talked about the new war, Vietnam, but my daddy never joined in, that I remember. He drank, smoked his cigarettes. Once, I recall, he came off the porch and walked off into the night for a long time. I remember it because Momma came outside, some time later, ready to go, and we had to search for him. We found him in the car, just sitting, smoking.
Now and then, the men talked of what they called “the nigger trouble,” but I could not attach any significance to that. We had no contact with black people beyond a wave, now and then, from a car or from the side of a road. I was not of a world where there were maids, cooks or servants. When they picked in the cotton field beside white pickers, like my momma, they kept to themselves. There were no black people in my school, and at that time no black person had ever been in my house or in my yard. So how, I wondered, could there be trouble between us? They lived in their world, and we lived in our world. It became gradually clear, as I sat there listening, watching the orange comets of their cigarettes arch across the dark, what the trouble was about.
They were sick and tired of living in their world. They wanted to live in our world, too.