She did not seem to care about my shaky reputation or the fact I was what some people would have called, but only behind my back, white trash. She treated my momma with respect. She did not seem to think she was better than her, than me, than the other people I cared about. She had a good heart, an open one.
We got married at Weaver First United Methodist Church, a fifteen-minute drive from my home, in July. I wore a white tuxedo, and more erudite people might think I looked like a fool. At the time, I thought I looked damned spiffy.
When she walked down the aisle it took my breath away. I had heard of that happening my whole life, and I thought it was just something people said. But it really did. It took my breath away.
My brothers and Uncle John and one of the best men I ever knew, Tony Estes, stood up with me. Tony was married to my cousin Jackie and used to loan me clothes to date in, because I didn’t have any. I would have asked my uncle Ed to stand up with me, but I thought he didn’t want to. I should have asked him. Then all the men who had ever meant anything to me in my young life would have been there, in one photograph.
My momma came and sat in the front row, the first time I had seen her dressed up in my life. She wore a bright-colored dress that looked like it was maybe tangerine sherbet, and someone had curled her hair. I was proud of her.
I have given more thought to buying cars than I gave to getting married; it just seemed time, and she seemed like the right one. I had my last-second doubts; I wanted to cut and run. But I stood there and took it like a man. We drove down to Panama City, Florida, for a honeymoon at the Silver Sands Hotel. We came back sunburned, to set up house.
We lived in a three-bedroom brick house that was the nicest thing I had ever lived in. Her daddy helped us with the down payment, I think because I horrified her whole family by casually mentioning that maybe we should just get a trailer. We had brown wall-to-wall carpeting, three ill-tempered, ill-mannered Siamese cats, which I secretly despised, and a huge Saint Bernard dog named King, who I loved. She went to school and worked, and I just worked. She got her degree, and I was proud for her.
Every summer, we went to Panama City with her parents and grandparents and stayed in their time-share condominium. Every winter, we had finger sandwiches, punch and divinity candy at their house on Christmas Eve. They were nice people, her family. I was grateful for it, all of it. All you had to do to become a part of the middle class, I now knew, was work hard, act right, and sink roots so deep that you can never, ever budge.
In 1985, when I was in my mid-twenties, I got a job offer from the
Birmingham News
, the biggest newspaper in Alabama, at almost twice my salary. It was only seventy-three miles down the road, but the journey and the new job took all my time. I worked for my old editor, Randy Henderson, who wanted me to do big stories. He called it swinging for the fences, and suddenly I didn’t mind working until midnight or getting home after 2
A.M.
I won some awards, covered a wall in them.
It was about that time, one night sitting in the living room, that she told me she might be having a baby. I tried to shape a smile even as something that felt like hot lead seemed to course through my chest, and I thought that I would surely die.
W
e had talked about having children, someday, but someday had seemed like such a great, safe distance away. The thought that it was happening did not just frighten me, it terrified me, consumed me. And I couldn’t say a word. For days, even after that hot-lead feeling had cooled, it lay like a weight on my chest.
It was several days before we found out it was a false alarm. She looked at me, not accusing, just knowingly, and said, “Aren’t you disappointed, just a little?” I lied to her and said I was.
I withdrew from her then, or maybe we just withdrew from each other. She said we lived more like roommates than husband and wife, and she was right. I told her it was only because I worked so hard, so long. She was smarter than that. The months went by. One night, early morning, actually, I came home from working on a story about a prison riot. I was exhausted and hungry. I was standing in the glow of the refrigerator, making a bologna sandwich, when she came out and said that we needed to talk.
I just nodded my head. The next day I took my clothes and my dog and left. I was my father’s son, after all.
I
was not mean like him. I got drunk twice a year, three times at the most. I had never done violence against her, in any way. It was not in my character. We never yelled, we seldom fought. I often worked overtime and did magazine stories on the side to make a decent living, and was determined, absolutely, to surpass my father’s sorry standards for being a husband. Still I failed. I failed in thinking that was all there was to it.
It ended, I have told myself and told others, because the only thing I had time for in my life was the work, that the only passion in me was for it, those lovely words. That is partly true. I love writing the way some men love women.
But the greater truth is that I could not bear the thought of someday having a child, of having that child depend on me, rely on me, need me. I would have, I am sure, dragged myself through hell to give that child everything I could, but somewhere, deep, deep in the place we keep our greatest shame and fear, I was still afraid I might, just might, be like him. Not mean. Only weak.
It is a funny thing. I have been hurt doing my job. I have stood in a crowd of massed bodies, knowing that at any second the mob’s mood could turn and they would tear me apart. But I cannot remember being so afraid as I was that day in that living room, sitting on the Naugahyde couch by the console TV, pictures of cats on the wall.
She married again, several years later. I heard that she had a baby girl. I am sure she is a smart and pretty child, if she takes after her momma.
S
ome year or so after the divorce, she walked up behind me in a grocery store parking lot. She kissed me and smiled at me, and that made me glad. I know she does not hate me. I was only wasted time.
You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.
19
The price tag on heaven
S
ome 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.
A
ll 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.