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Authors: Rick Bragg

Tags: #Biography, #History, #Non-Fiction

All Over but the Shoutin' (46 page)

BOOK: All Over but the Shoutin'
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Of course you can’t buy respectability with a house. My momma has always been the most respectable person in my life, no matter what kind of shell surrounded her.

I really, truly had wanted her to have a place where she could be more comfortable, where she could more enjoy the good times in her life, and tolerate the bad. And she has that. She has exactly that. But I had to set my hopes on something higher. I wanted to redo the past, wanted to feel like we had won, after all.

Well, we have.

She has a split-level castle with stolen towels.

She has a four-bedroom, brick-façade mansion with vinyl den furniture scavenged from a closed-down doctor’s office.

She has a home, which is more important than any of that other unadulterated pyscho-garbage.

She wanted it to be perfect, too. She even said, tearfully, that when my brothers rolled in the dirt, that “the splendor was lost.” I don’t know where she learned to talk like that. I guess she has been reading the
New York Times.

But no, the goddamn splendor ain’t lost. It ain’t no ways lost.

“The thing we got to remember,” I told her, sitting face to face, “is that we ain’t gonna be any different here. We’re just us. We just got a little bit better place to be us, in.”

She smiled at that.

One day Mark will come back here, and while I am sure he and Sam will avoid each other for a while—it has never been unusual in my family for people to drive right on by your house if they don’t like the looks of a car in the driveway—I know it can’t last forever. It is a small county. Our corner of it is even smaller. All our young lives, we lived somewhere near the bottom of our society. We cannot afford, in the middle of our lives, to peck at each other now. Soon, too soon, we will be old men, and how silly we will be, gouging at each other with our arthritic hands, snapping at each other with our dentures. We may have to gum each other, since we ain’t never had no luck at dentures, either.

It’s not a dream. It’s just a damn house, but the roof is first-rate, the heat pump is under warranty and the woods are covered in wildflowers. Some days, when the light is good, she searches the hill behind her house for the dormant plants she will transplant in the spring. She knows exactly where the property lines are, knows which trees and shrubs and weeds are hers.

This spring she can cover it up with flowers, but, it being us, it may just blossom with junk cars.

“No, it ain’t gonna be that way,” she told me. “It’s gonna be purty. It’s gonna be real purty.”

It may be somewhere in between. We will live with that. For now, it is enough to see her walking her acre and a third, a little stooped over, with that ugly, ancient dog.

And I am grateful I could give her this much, before more time tumbled by, lost.

There ain’t no way to make it perfect.

You do the best you can for the people left, a yard-fighting, teeth-gnashing, biscuit-eating, ugly-dog-raising, towel-stealing, television-praying, never-forgiving, hard-headed people that you love with all the strength in your body, once you finally figure out that they are who you are, and, in many ways, all there is.

I
met a woman the other day. She told me she had heard me talk at a writing seminar, that I had “inspired” her. I nodded, politely. It seemed that she had grown up like me, kind of. She had been born in Charity Hospital in New Orleans, and wasn’t dead sure who her daddy was. She and her momma had grown up in the welfare projects in Morgan City. She had bought candy with food stamps, waiting for all the other children to leave before paying at the counter, because she was ashamed of who she was. All her adult life, she said, she had pretended that part of her life had never happened, but when she heard me talk about who I was and where I came from, she thought that maybe it was okay not to be ashamed anymore.

“You use it,” she said. “I don’t mean anything bad by it. But you use it …”

Like a weapon, yes.

She said she had trouble with men. She said she was prone to just move on, when people got close to her. I nodded politely, again. She said she couldn’t imagine children. There was just so much to do, wasn’t there? So much to do, so very far to run, away from what? But it is the running that is important, after a while.

She is good. She is driven. She will make it, because what drives her is meaner than what drives most people. She will make it because, as someone told me once, people like you and me, we can’t fail. I strongly suspect there are a lot of us. I never figured I was all that unique.

Several times I have found myself about to call and tell her not to put the nice things in her life on hold, not to wait for a time when she feels she has proven herself enough, has put enough distance between then and now, because that time might never come. I’ve been meaning to tell her not to look for some well-defined finish line, to tell her that sometimes you run right past it and don’t even know it’s there, like fence posts in the dark. I’ve been meaning to warn her, of all of that.

I will.

I like her. I would have liked to have spent some more time with her, but looking at me was too much like looking in the mirror, for her. She could see the strain of it, in my face maybe, maybe my eyes, could hear that old anger and lingering resentment on my lips. I guess it wasn’t pretty, with that well-worn chip on my shoulder still sticking up, like a hump on my back.

But I swear, it seems lighter now. It seems a little bit lighter now.

42
Safe in the dark

I
was bad to sleepwalk when I was a child. I would get out of bed and slip through the house, then out into the night. I would awaken to the crunch and sting of frost on the soles of my feet, or, in the summer, to the sound of crickets and night birds. Once I walked all the way to my aunt Nita’s house, fifty yards away, knocked three, slow times on the door, and turned around and shuffled back home again, a pint-sized zombie in pajama bottoms with horses on them. I was never afraid when I would awaken, because the path, the trees, the dark outlines of the cars and pickups and small houses were all so familiar to me, and I have never been afraid of the dark. And I knew I would never be alone. The house we shared with my grandma wasn’t big enough to afford my momma a bedroom, so she slept in the front room, on the couch. The banging of the screen door would wake her and she would follow me, not waking me because she had heard it was dangerous, that it was safer to just steer me back to my bed. But sometimes I would come to my senses outside and see her just standing there, beside me. I never cried. I just looked up, wondering. “You’re okay, little man,” she would tell me. “You just been travelin’.”

ALSO BY
RICK BRAGG

AVA’S MAN
With his trademark emotional generosity and compelling storytelling, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moonshiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate brawler who could sit for hours with a baby in the crook of his arm.
In telling Charlie’s story, Bragg conjures up the backwoods hamlets of Georgia and Alabama in the years when the roads were still dirt and real men never cussed in front of ladies. A masterly family chronicle and a human portrait so vivid you can smell the cornbread and whiskey,
Ava’s Man
is unforgettable.
“Grab[s] you from the first sentence.… It is hard to think of a writer who reminds us more forcefully and wonderfully of what people and families are all about.”

The New York Times Book Review
Memoir/0-375-72444-3
ALSO AVAILABLE
:
Somebody Told Me:
The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg
0-375-72552-0
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order: 1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

BOOK: All Over but the Shoutin'
13.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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