The Prince of Frogtown (15 page)

I used to daydream myself away from my room.

I want the boy to do that too.

I just don’t want him to have to.

CHAPTER SEVEN

My Fair Orvalene

M
Y FATHER THOUGHT
no girl would resist him, at thirteen, and if he had kept his eyes from wandering outside the village he might have been correct. But he didn’t figure on Orvalene. She had blonde hair that was darkening to brown, fair skin, and made her own clothes. “I would not say that I was beautiful,” she said, fifty-six years later. But she was. She had to be. My father, so full of his little self, would not have looked twice if he had not seen a beauty there. They went to school together at Cedar Springs Junior High School just outside town, “but I don’t remember him being very diligent, as to school.” She believes the first time she ever really had any interaction with him was in the summer of her eighth-grade year. “We lived in Angel Station, close to the railroad tracks. As I remember, I was sitting on the porch, hemming a dress I had made, and I saw this horse and rider coming up the road. As they got closer I saw it was Charles, and I don’t know if he was coming to see me or if he just saw me on the porch and decided to stop and talk to me. I remember he had dark hair—long and slicked back—and dark skin. And…tell me, did your father have really pretty teeth? When I tried to remember him, I kept seeing those pretty teeth. I didn’t have pretty teeth, and it was the first thing I looked at. I guess I’d have to say that he was being a little bit flirty,” and might have been sweet. “He was just so bold, so much bolder than the other boys, and he just seemed older and wiser than the other guys. He said, ‘Why don’t we go for a ride?’ Well, my daddy was Baptist. We went to Angel Grove Baptist Church. And you know how Baptists can be.”

He did not say, as he swaggered up: “Would you like to go for a ride?”

He said: “Let’s go for a ride.”

“No, I can’t do that,” she said.

He asked again before she even had a chance to explain herself.

Her father, an auto mechanic, and mother, a seamstress, had rules. “When we were here by ourselves, we were not allowed to go off, and we were never allowed to bring people in the house,” said Orvalene. She didn’t quite know what to do about this boy who just showed up and expected her to go riding off into the sunset.

“I think he knew he was a good-looking guy—he always tried to look good, always dressed nice. I remember checkered shirts,” she said. “I think he knew he had some features that were quite acceptable.”

He chatted with her on the porch as the horse, his father’s horse, cropped at the grass. The horse was Able Lady, a chestnut, sleek and lovely. Bob wouldn’t have an ugly horse.

“Let’s just go,” he said again.

She told him no again.

He said, well, he reckoned he would just go, then.

“Can I have a glass of water first?” he asked.

Orvalene went inside to get his water, and when she came back he was leaning in the doorway.

“He scared me, a little bit,” she remembers.

“Come on. Let’s just go for a ride,” he said.

She was a little scared, not of my father, really, but of the possibility her father or mother would come home and find a boy at the threshold of their home. But he just drank his water, and rode away.

“He was determined,” she said. “And he was…confident.”

“Full of himself?” I said.

“He was that,” she said.

“Would you have gone, if you could have?” I asked her.

“Oh, Daddy wouldn’t have let me. The first question he would have asked me was, ‘Where does he go to church?’ And I don’t think that your daddy went to church, did he?”

No, I said. But, I thought, if it hadn’t been for a weedy ditch in Frogtown, I am pretty sure he would have fought clear into the parking lot of one.

“In that world, in that time, if you didn’t go to church, there had to be something wrong,” she said, and there was. My father was trouble no matter how you looked at him, and it didn’t matter if you were a Baptist, Methodist, or howled at the moon.

His pride wounded, he never rode by again, and he never told about it around the bonfire because they might have kidded him, and he would have had to beat them up—two or three of them at least. He had tucked his shirt in, mounted his charger and gone to claim a princess.

It might have been the first time he realized that being a prince in Frogtown might come with a tinfoil crown.

The Boy

T
HE BOY LOVED STORIES,
and after a few months, after being shushed by the woman in mid-sentence a few thousand times, I finally figured out how to tell them to a little boy. I told him about seeing crocodiles lunge out of the water to seize a wildebeest in the Masai Mara, described coming face to face with a black rhino in a forest of thorns, and how the Masai warriors jumped high into the air around a popping fire as they sang of the killing of lions. I left out the women and children I saw starving against the wall of an Ethiopian church.

I told him I had been to the great deserts to see camel trains plod across a burnt-orange horizon, and stood on the same sand as Alexander the Great. I omitted the bombs, and men who leapt through flames from burning tires to prove their love of a man named bin Laden.

I told him of voodoo priests in Haiti, of zombies and pounding drums, but never mentioned bloody coups or funeral flowers cut from tin.

“He’s lived one inch from death,” the boy told his mother.

She rolled her eyes.

In my office, he saw guns, a lever-action Remington, a 30.06 with a scope, 12-gauge over-and-under bird guns, the stocks gleaming, blued barrels shining—because all I did was polish them now. In my mother’s house he heard us talk about being boys, tough boys, fighting boys.

It is easy to impress a ten-year-old.

That was the problem.

It happened as I tried my first real lecture. He is smart, real smart, but sloppy in his schoolwork. I was, too. I told him, sitting in the living room, he had to do well in school, that it was his job. He just smiled, because a lecture from me was just ridiculous, as if the Abominable Snowman told you to stop tracking mud in the house, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon told you to be sure and put the toilet seat down.

Still, it made me mad to be ignored.

“I’m serious,” I said. “This is your world. You have to succeed in it. You are not tough enough to make it in a blue-collar world.”

It stung him.

For a while, he almost killed himself, to show he was not a pampered boy.

He had been so lazy he would help his mother carry in groceries by lifting a roll of paper towels, and skipping away. Now he staggered under bags, cartons of soda, and watermelons.

He suffered greatly from allergies, and it would break your heart, sometimes, to hear him trying to breathe in his room at night. Without thinking, I asked him one late afternoon if he wanted to throw the football. I had not noticed he could barely breathe. “No, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the woman said. But the boy jumped off the couch, announced that he was fine, and after a half-hour search for his sneakers, ran into the yard.

He was so hopped-up on decongestant he could barely see. I threw a bullet at him in the backyard and it tore through his fingers and smacked him in the face, hard. He lay as if dead and he would have cried, he said later, but he could not feel anything above his chin.

I ran over to him, but he jumped up, pushed me away.

The welt rose on his face.

The other hurt was there long after that one faded.

He hurt me back a little, now and then.

“You’re not a dad,” he told me once.

Dads are responsible. Dads pose with your mother and brothers in a Christmas card.

“What am I?” I said, and even though I had done damn little to deserve better, it still bothered me, to be told outright.

He thought awhile.

“I dunno.”

Sometime later, it came to him.

“Well, you call me little buddy,” he said.

“I do,” I said.

“So you’re the big buddy.”

“Well okay,” I said.

I knew how to be a buddy.

He was not like me, true, had none of my blood in him at all, but there were worse boys to have. I saw them in movie theaters, screaming into their nachos as a poor, pitiful man went back to the snack counter to exchange Whoppers for Milk Duds, or Gummy Bears for Gummy Worms. I saw them hunched over video games like a crack pipe, saw them screeching like a tornado warning siren in the Target, for God knows why.

The boy was spoiled, but not yet rotten.

In time, I even got used to the nastiness. The woman was right. The boy was no nastier than other children, so I just resigned myself to eating with a boy who stuck his nose
in
a bowl to eat rice and shoved three forks of food in his mouth before beginning to chew.

“Close your mouth when you chew,” the woman said.

“Why?” he asked, around a wad of something I won’t even say.

“’Cause it’s what humans do,” I said.

Mostly, I just lived with it. But even after I realized the boy carried no known, life-threatening disease, I still didn’t hug him enough. I hugged him because he insisted I did. He was too big to hold like a baby, but the woman said he was too little to deny, to turn away.

I was still living mostly on the road our first year together, writing and talking about it. He often answered the phone when I called from the road. I automatically asked for his mother, because I had not mastered the art of talking to a child on the telephone. It takes a skill, and a vast patience. I had told myself a long time ago I would never be one of those men, one of those harried, travel-worn men in a faraway city, talking to a child on the edge of a hotel bedspread or airport seat, talking nonsense. I used to pity those henpecked fools hunched over their dainty phones, finally pleading: “Can I talk to Mommy?”

It hurt his feelings, every time. “You don’t want to talk to me?” he asked, and I said of course I did, but I was running to a plane, or exhausted, or my feet or head hurt, and everything in between.

But when I came home, he almost always stood at the door.

The next talk we had, of a father-son kind, came after he committed a little boy’s transgression, misplaced his pants, something, and the woman made him cry.

I was just glad it wasn’t me she was after.

“Let me talk to him,” I said, like a grown-up person.

I think she thought I was going to lecture him on irresponsibility—wouldn’t that be a pill—but instead I just held two fingers tight together in front of his face.

“She’s got to carp at you ’cause it’s her job, but you and her,” I said, wiggling my joined fingers, “you’ll always be like this. There is no reason to cry, to get all upset about this little stuff. No matter where you go, or what you do, you and her will always be like that.”

I thought it was brilliant parenting.

He just looked at me.

He waited.

He waited.

“Me and you,” I said, wiggling those conjoined fingers, “we’re like that, too.”

But they are smart, little boys, for creatures that will run in front of cars if you don’t hold their shirttail. They believe what they feel, not what you tell them.

In sixth grade, his teachers had their students write a book for English class. It was supposed to be fiction, but he wrote a real-life story and just changed the names. He wrote about a little boy (him) who went to visit an old woman on a farm in Alabama, a woman who cooked magic biscuits, and had three sons. The old woman’s middle son (me) was named Fred, and he was the boy’s stepfather. Fred was not unkind to the boy but sometimes treated him as an afterthought. But at
THE END
, as the boy and his mother got in their car to leave, Fred waved goodbye to them, “and for the first time in my life, Fred was smiling square at me, not at my mom.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Hanging

F
ROM THE CRADLE,
they had been taught that their very worth as a people was tied to their ability to labor. Their fathers told them, sometimes with a ragged Bible or a fresh-cut hickory in their hands, that a shirker was a pitiful and a sorry thing, and sloth was not only a sin but a deadly one. They would stripe the legs of a lazy child as quickly as they would a mean or mouthy one, and quote from Ecclesiastes as the stick hissed through the air.

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet…

And there would be the sting, and the rising welt….
whether he eat little or much.

Grandparents, their lives and fingers shortened, their eyes red-streaked and hard as peppermint candy, would pull frightened grandchildren close, and whisper:

“You are as good as anybody.”

But the one true thing you learned in the village, as real as the whistle that shook you from bed, was that a lot of people who lived outside the alphabet streets believed, really believed, they were better than you. Because their world was cleaner, nicer, they believed their lives held more value than Bill Joe Chaney’s people, than my father’s, who did the dirty, dangerous work and came home to identical rooms that smelled of snuff and bacon grease and Mentholatum. You could not make them look at you differently. You could only punish them, for the way they did look at you.

The rigid caste system, as hard-stuck then as racial segregation, had not flexed in fifty years. After a crime was committed in town or in the outlying county, investigators came to the village first, even pulled workers from their stations, lined them against the wall and questioned them or compared their faces to the police artist’s sketch. Across generations, town boys in their daddies’ cars egged houses in the village for sport, and yelled “Linthead!” at old women walking home from a twelve-hour shift.

In fifty years, there had not been a homecoming queen from the mill village, or a cheerleader. The people of the mill village took revenge, but it would be wrong to say they got even. In those days, a vending machine at the mill routinely cheated workers out of nickels and dimes. “It would keep your money but it wouldn’t give you nothin’ to eat,” said retired mill worker Donald Garmon. One day, Garmon’s brother Eugene and a friend, Alan McCarty, dropped nickels in the slot and the machine hung up again. It was all they could take. “They throwed the machine off the third floor,” he said.

Town boys who wandered into the mill village on foot were chased and beaten. “You didn’t come here if you was town,” said my father’s friend, Bill Joe. Even if you had a rare friend outside the village you could not side with them against your own. “We stuck together,” Bill Joe said.

My father hated the swells, hated the stigma, and hated himself, a little, for his place in it. “Your daddy had a lot of false pride,” my mother always said. She was not ashamed to mop other people’s floors, but he was ashamed for people to know it. It is why, when he had to choose between a car that would run and one that looked good at the curb, he picked the one with the best paint job, and poured burnt motor oil into it by the bucketful.

As a boy, he picked fights every weekend in town, over a word, or a look.

“Your daddy,” Bill Joe said, “was a good bit meaner than the rest of us.”

B
ILL JOE CHANEY
swiveled his head to watch for witnesses, but the schoolyard was deserted except for the hanging party, under an elm tree. The town boy was already in the rope. Still, he did not struggle too much. “I don’t think he knew how serious we was,” Bill Joe said. The hanging party, none of them older than thirteen, rambled around the schoolyard in their overalls, searching for plum trees. “We were going to pull him up, and whip him with plum branches as he dangled,” Bill Joe said. The condemned boy, also about thirteen, meandered around in a small circle as Bill Joe held the other end of the rope. It was surreal, as he remembers it. Even as he took up the slack, the boy did not beg for his life or even cry. He thought he was wearing the black hat in some B western, and even smiled. But as the minutes slipped by he began to understand that this was not a play. He must have done something bad to these village boys in that summer of ’48, something unforgivable.

Bill Joe saw my father then, saw him saunter by the schoolyard, glance over, stop and stare, and turn and walk toward the elm. He was about thirteen then, also.

“What you doin’, Bill Joe?” he asked, like he saw a hanging every day.

“We’re hangin’ this feller,” Bill Joe said.

“I figured that,” my father said.

Bill Joe was a big, tough boy. Not too many people talked smart to him.

“Why you doin’ it?” my father asked.

“’Cause he thinks he’s better than us,” Bill Joe said.

My father just nodded. He did not ask what the evidence was.

My father just looked at the boy.

It was insanity, and made perfect sense.

“Your daddy knew why we was doin’ it,” said Bill Joe, more than fifty years after that day.

“He was one of us,” he said.

The condemned boy was right, though. His hangmen had gotten the idea from the westerns at the Princess Theater. “They was always hangin’ somebody,” Bill Joe said.

But sometimes, at the last cinematic minute, a dark, handsome hero would ride up, tell the mob they would have justice but “not like this, boys,” and order the hangmen to cut the condemned man down. Then he would kiss a girl and sing a song to his horse.

My father looked the part. He was not in ragged overalls, not barefoot like the village boys tended to be. He was going to town and had dressed accordingly. He had on a checkered dress shirt and ironed dungarees and his shoes gleamed like a Birmingham lawyer’s. The village boys were often shorn almost bald, because of lice and chinch bugs that lived inside the walls of the company houses. Their mommas poured scalding water in the cracks to kill them. “I remember your daddy had a full head of hair,” Bill Joe said, and as they talked my father took out his pocket comb in a quick-draw and ran it through his hair. It must have been clear then to the condemned boy that this boy was not his salvation after all, just a linthead posing, with silver dimes shining in his black penny loafer shoes.

B
ILL JOE IS A BIG MAN
in old age, and still looks strong. He still wears overalls, but accessorizes now with a white porkpie hat, toothpicks saved inside the hatband. He is not one of those big talkers who carry you along like a current, and often leaves things half-said, as if, since he knows what comes next in the story, you should, too. It is a condition of old Southern men that they will tell you they are proud, a lifetime later, of the darkest things, and blame it on the times, or blame it on Dixie. But he is not proud of what almost happened in the schoolyard. “I’ll tell it, though, ’cause of your dad, ’cause it’s the least I can do.”

“The boy we was hanging was a straight-A student,” said Bill Joe. “He was 99 percent more educated than us, and he always thought he was superior. One day, he was running around in the classroom, acting a fool, and…”

Funny, he can’t remember what the boy said.

It may be he didn’t say a thing.

Bill Joe’s father had been a top sawmill hand before he came down to work at the mill. His net worth was tabulated on how many straight boards he sawed and how much cotton he spun, and night after night Bill Joe could hear his future, like the other village children, through the thin walls of their house. It was hard for the mill hands to catch their breath even hours after the shift, because the lint tickled their throats and a bacteria that rode the cotton fibers seized their lungs. They couldn’t cough it up, no matter how hard they tried.

“So we caught that boy and carried him out to them big elms. We already had the rope, and we had him pretty much hung, pretty much ready to pull up, when your daddy walked up.”

Bill Joe remembers how my father looked standing there, quiet. Bill Joe wasn’t worried that my father would intervene. To help the boy, my father would have had to betray his own history.

Bill Joe decided to get on with it.

“Hold it,” my father said.

“What?” Bill Joe said.

“Untie him,” my father said.

Bill Joe glared down at him.

“Why?”

“Turn him loose,” my father said.

He balled his fists.

“I was a whole lot bigger than him, but your dad was all muscle,” Bill Joe said. “I believe he would have scratched us some, if we hadn’t done what he said. I turned him loose.”

Bill Joe quit school not long after that, and went to work in the mill.

But first, he and my father faced each other under the elm tree.

“Why’d you do it?” Bill Joe asked him.

Of all the descriptions of my father by so many people, the one description I had never heard was “uncertain.” He was deliberate, pointed. Even in his own destruction, he was that. But he didn’t have an answer for Bill Joe.

His fists came undone.

He turned and walked away.

“W
HY DID HE DO IT?”
I asked Bill Joe.

“I think he did it for me,” he said.

Bill Joe’s great meanness never was. It never happened, he said, because of my father. It would be nice to believe my father did it from simple human kindness, to keep the boy from being hurt if not killed, but Bill Joe is convinced the life my father truly saved that afternoon was his.

“I would have gone to reform school at least. Maybe they would have sent me to prison, I don’t know. I think he knew that, and I think he stopped us ’cause he wanted to save my life, not that boy’s. He was just a kid like us, but he figured that. I think he changed my life.”

“Would you have really hung him?” I asked.

“I guess I could say we might have just hung him a little bit,” he said.

“But I believe,” he said, his voice quiet, “we would have hurt that feller.”

They might have cut him down, like in the westerns.

“But we would have hurt him.”