Some things, growing up in Alabama, you just know. If you need a house moved, you call Drennan Smith, who can jack even a Victorian off its foundation, put it on a big truck and haul it wherever you want it if his tires don’t blow: there is nothing more pitiful than a house broke down at the side of a road. If you need to catch enough crappie to feed a family reunion, you go to Cherokee County and fish the backwater with minnows. If you need a drink, bad, on a Sunday, when all the legal whiskey is locked away, you can go to Aunt Hattie’s in backwoods Calhoun County, where the calendar has no meaning if you have the cash. And if you need a new set of false teeth and you don’t have a whole lot of disposable income, you go to Pell City, the affordable denture capital of the world. Ask practically anyone where I grew up where they got their dentures, and they will say Pell City. Sometimes they will even spit out their set to show you the craftsmanship.
We all try to buy our way into heaven, one way or the other. Some use the genuine currency of faith. But others, like me, try to barter, as if the great Hereafter was a swap meet in the clouds. Me, I’d always figured that if I did right by my momma, I had a shot. I tried to buy my way in with a set of dentures.
By 1986, I had not lived in my mommas house for a long time, yet I had never truly left home. I was always close, always within a few minutes’ drive if she needed me. Any embarrassment I ever felt of being the son of a woman who took in ironing and scrubbed floors was long, long gone. I was ashamed of myself now. I tried to make up for it.
I was making enough money now to help her with little things, like groceries and doctor bills, trying to bribe my way into Glory a fifty-dollar bill at a time. At Christmas I filled shopping carts to the brim with hams and cakes and other delicacies, things I knew she wouldn’t buy for herself, couldn’t buy for herself on the income she had from the ironing and the few dollars she made canning jelly, hot peppers and watermelon pickles. She loved the cakes. She is the only person I have ever met who actually eats fruitcake.
I bought her what she needed, from electric heaters to new televisions, and I gave her money even though she never asked, not once in her life. She always said the same thing when I handed her some bills: “I feel like a bum.” I told her she was being silly; I thought I was a big shot, knocking down a fat four hundred dollars a week, looking after my momma and all. But now and then something would happen to bring me back to reality.
I remember the time I saw her squinting at her Bible, holding the pages so close to her eyes that it almost bumped her nose. I told her we would go see the eye doctor over in Gadsden. A few weeks later, as she sat in the examination chair, the doctor asked her how long it had been since her last examination, and since her last prescription for eyeglasses.
“I believe it was 1963,” she said.
The eye doctor looked at me like I was the lowest form of life on the planet.
Most of my life, she had been seeing and reading with those magnifying glasses, the kind you buy in dime stores, and going half-blind. I never even noticed.
We got her two pairs of new specs and she asked if she could get one pair that didn’t have bifocal lenses, a pair just for reading. I asked her why, since the bifocals were for reading, too, and for at least a full minute she wouldn’t answer me. Finally, she fessed up to me that the reason she didn’t want the bifocals was because they made her look like an old woman. I smiled inside at that. Even after so many years, after she had been through so much, there was still an ounce or so of vanity there.
I saw it again a few years later, when I tried to get her to go to the dentist and get some dentures. She had always tried to take care of her teeth, but what money there was for a dentist went to us. By the time she was in her fifties her teeth were so bad she could eat only mush, another thing I failed to notice when I came home on the weekends from Birmingham. I told her she had to go to the dentist—if you cannot eat what you want in the South, life is not worth living—and she told me she would just as soon as the weather got cool. It got cool for ten years or so before she finally gave in; maybe the pain just got too bad to stand. (It is a peculiarity of my people that they refuse to undergo any kind of surgery—that includes tooth-pulling—in the spring or summer, when it is hot weather. Or maybe it is not a peculiarity at all. None of us had air-conditioning, most of my life. If you are going to be laid up, bedridden, it is best to recover in winter.)
The dentist pulled every tooth in her head. But instead of letting the dentist who pulled her old teeth order and fit her false teeth, she went to Pell City to get herself a set of cut-rate dentures, to save me money, she said. Pell City, being world famous and all, was the logical choice. She got a shiny new set that looked mighty fine sitting on a shelf.
They didn’t fit. They made her gag. On the way home, she got so sick at her stomach that she had to get my aunt Edna to pull over to the side of the road. She retched and the new dentures, top and bottom set, went sailing like two porcelain birds into the weeds. I know it was not a bit funny then, two aging women searching through the weeds for my momma’s new teeth, but when I think about it now, in the privacy of my own home, I laugh until my stomach hurts. I have this picture in my mind of what might have happened if a state trooper had pulled up and asked them, “Ladies, can I help y’all?” And my momma had said, “Yes, Officer, you can help us look for my teeth.”
For months after that, I would call and ask her if she was getting used to her teeth, and she would say—I swear I am not making this up—that they hurt her too much to wear when she was talking or eating. But, she said proudly, she had learned to sleep in them. I told her she had it all backwards, that they were designed for daytime use, and it hurt her feelings. But the fact is, what good are teeth if you can’t chew with them in your mouth, only dream.
I hope, sometimes at least, she dreams of pork chops.
I do not order my momma to do hardly anything—I have no authority—but I ordered her to go back and get some new teeth that she could wear without getting sick to her stomach. She said, “Okay, as soon as it gets cool.” That was years ago, and we are still waiting for the temperature to drop sufficiently. It must be that global warming business.
She is not a stubborn woman, on most things. On some things, you cannot budge her with a pickup truck. The teeth issue, I know, might never be resolved.
Anyway, I did what I could. Every winter, I bought her a big, warm, fuzzy bathrobe, the men’s size from Sears, because she was so tall. I bought her window fans, and a new toilet. I bought her a hot-water heater, and another one when it wore out. In a Christian bookstore in Nashville—I was killing time, waiting to interview a senator—I bought her a gold cross with a tiny Jesus on it. When someone stole it out of our living room, I bought her another one. They were tiny things, inconsequential things. I did them because I was supposed to, because it was my turn to do things for her, and because I was trying to make up for any wrong I had ever done her.
But the one thing I wanted most to do, to get for her, was beyond my reach.
All her life, as a child, as a young woman, as an aging one dozing in her new teeth, she had lived in other people’s houses.
Sometimes through cheap rent, sometimes through charity, she had lived beholden. The closest thing we had ever had to a home of our own was a small trailer we lived in for only a few months, when I was a boy. I wanted her to have a house, a decent house, but I had chosen careers poorly in that regard. I had picked the one profession, except for maybe teaching, where you can climb and climb and pile up honors to the moon, and still be poor as field dirt.
But someday, I promised her, I would make it happen. We were sitting in the living room of that house where I could stand in the middle of the borrowed living room and touch both facing walls, and I told her: “Momma, one of these days I’m gonna buy you a house.” She just nodded, as if to say, “That’s nice, dear,” and I shut my mouth. I know that, to her, I might as well have said that Jesus had just ridden down Quintard Avenue on a bicycle. She didn’t believe me. She just thought I was dreaming again, like that boy in the field searching for four-leaf clovers. She is a woman who has learned not to believe in promises, or dreamers.
I do not want to sound ungrateful to the people who, through their charity, gave us a place to live. If it were not for them, I am sure we would have been the first homeless family in Calhoun County. For decades, my aunts and uncles helped pay her electric bill. My uncle Ed gives her twenty dollars a week, holding it out of the money he tithes to the church. He figures the Lord won’t mind.
She never said she wanted a house. She never even hinted. But if you could have seen her face when we rode down the rural roads of our county, heard her talk about how this house is an A-frame and that one is a Victorian, about how this one will need painting in a few years and that one has just got a new covering of aluminum siding, you would know. For a woman who didn’t get out hardly at all, she knew every house on Nisbet Lake Road, on Roy Webb Road, on Cove Road, any road. She knew who lived there then and who used to live there. She would look at the roofs and pass judgment on whether it was worn out or just stained by the sweetgum trees.
She is the daughter of a carpenter, after all, a man who lived his whole life building other people’s houses and never owned one of his own, either. I guess she never expected to own one; maybe a little bit, before my daddy, when she still dared to dream.
When I was a teenager, she used to order catalogs from the Jim Walter Company, which was famous for building “affordable housing.” These were not fancy double-wides made of tin and particle board, but neat, nice, small, real-wood houses, usually white, with porches. She would flip through them like a child flipping through a toy catalog, wishing. But there was no money for land, even if we could have ever saved enough to build anything bigger than a dog house. You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don’t.
I could have bought her one on credit, could have been careful with my money and made the mortgage payments. But like her, I am wary of things that seem too good, too much. I was afraid that I would get her in a decent house, and something would happen, taking away my ability to pay for it, and she would have it taken away.
Nothing that has ever happened in my own life explains why I felt that way—I had been lucky as sin my whole life—but if you really do grow up as what some people call white trash, you grow up knowing that it might all turn to shit at any second. The only way I knew to make sure of it, was to buy it outright.
I got started late, almost too late. I had never saved a dime. When I was married, we squeaked by like everyone else, month to month. When I was single again I wasted much of what was left from rent, bills and barbecue on 1966 Mustangs, anchor women and former Shades Valley High School majorettes. I have never lived lavishly. I still don’t. My possessions, then and now, consisted of homemade book shelves, books, a couch, a chair, a TV, a stereo, a softball glove and just enough clothes to get by. I never owned a suit until I was twenty-nine. I owned two ties, then, but I’m up to four now. I didn’t wear jewelry; still don’t. My cars, never top-tier classics but rolling, pretty junk, seldom cost more than four thousand dollars, and I bought them on credit.
I seldom took a vacation, and then only to Fort Walton Beach, for a few days. I had never been out of the country, except one trip down to Mexico, when I was covering a football game in Texas. If it hadn’t been for women, hell, I could have been a monk or at least a Hare Krishna, for all the money I spent. I already have the tennis shoes.
The problem was, I picked the lowest-paying profession in America.
Then I compounded it by waiting, I guess because I was selfish. I should have sold insurance, maybe, or worked in a bank, or maybe gotten on at Goodyear, or the mills in Birmingham. Instead, I wrote stories.
In 1987, I opened a savings account in Birmingham.
We were men by now, my brothers and me.
Sam, that indestructible object that the worst of life had failed to even nick, was building his life like a man laying brick and didn’t need me or anybody. He had married Teresa, a thoughtful, quiet girl who made strawberry shortcake that would literally melt in your mouth. I went to the hospital to see their baby, Meredith Marie, named for my momma, Margaret Marie. She was so tiny I quickly passed her over to an aunt, afraid I would break her. Sam had life by the throat and was squeezing it. He would be fine until he gave out, and I knew he would never, never do that.
In many ways, Mark, my baby brother, was a stranger to me. I had known he had quit school, but that was not exactly unheard of in our world. I figured he would make a living with his own sweat, like Sam. Instead of trying to talk him out of it, I put on a bad tie and wrote stories for strangers, about strangers.
I heard about him only through my momma’s worries. He drank too much, but considering our heritage, it would be remarkable only if he did not drink, and cuss, and fight.
Only the years would determine whether he would reach some uneasy peace with life, as some of us had, or whether it would burn him up.
I should have seen the signs sooner that there was no peace in him at all. He had a souped-up Chevy Nova he bought from our cousin Charlie Couch, and every time he took me for a ride he pushed it as hard as it would go without blowing up, not just driving fast, but punishingly so. I noticed there were always beer bottles in the back floorboard, always, and not three or four, but piles, and a six-pack of warm beer. He didn’t give a damn that it was warm. That should have told me a lot.
But I always drove home to Birmingham more or less assured that, unless he broke down on a railroad track some night, he was fine. My uncle Ed gave him steady work. My uncle John helped him buy some land over near Websters Chapel, and he began to build a house.
I wrote stories and played softball and spent time with a twenty-one-year-old Catholic girl on long, sweet weekends in New Orleans. Some of the big papers started to notice me. They sent me letters, asking me if I had ever considered exploring the opportunities of journalism outside Alabama.
When I finally bothered to pay attention to my little brother again, when I finally bothered to halfway give a damn, I couldn’t find him. The boy had vanished, swept away on that same river of alcohol that carried away our father. Just looking into his eyes, those unfocused, too-old eyes, broke my heart right in two. And for the next ten years I would hold out empty hope that he would change, quit, find Jesus, do anything except destroy himself, a swallow at a time.
I have never had a drink by myself in my life.
I drink in crowds. When I was younger I thought whiskey made me charming, and bulletproof. Once, in a bar in Birmingham when I was twenty-five, and stupid, I drank so much of it that I took a pistol away from a man who was waving it around at the clientele, convinced that no harm could come to me.
But I never, ever drink alone. I am afraid I will like it too much. I am afraid it will numb me and warm me and soothe me and ultimately seduce me. I am scared to death that it will take the pains and the doubts and the fears away, that it will make me like myself just too damn much.
I fear, mostly, I would find in it the absolution that people on both sides of my family have found, for generations. It is a thing in my blood, in my genes, like blond hair and blue eyes. And once you embrace it, behind some closed door, you will never escape it.
I believe it made my daddy not care, that it made him leave her without milk or money or a way to live, or to see a doctor. I believe it. Because whatever weakness he had in him, whatever devils rode his back, a man just don’t do that sober.
I remember a time. I was in a hotel room in Miami, late at night, dog tired, keyed-up and sick. I was just back from a few months in Haiti, from writing about killing, mostly. I couldn’t sleep, my head hurt too much to read and the television just jangled my nerves.
I sought distraction, if nothing else, in the mini bar. I slipped the key into the little refrigerator and it swung open to reveal a wonderland of liquor, in neat rows of tiny bottles. There was amber Scotch and yellow tequila and clear gin, and a vodka that seemed almost silver. They were pretty. I reached in and got a baby bottle of Wild Turkey, cracked it open and poured it in a water glass. I distinctly remember raising it to my lips, and the smell, like smoke and brown sugar and something stronger, The Spirit in it. And I gagged. I poured it into the sink and rinsed the glass.
Then I got me some jelly beans and a glass of water, and I watched Rat Patrol and infomercials until the sun finally fought its way over the dark line of Biscayne Bay.