The Most They Ever Had (11 page)

epilogue

sam

My brother Sam got a job with the city. The money wasn’t as good, but he was free of the danger and the dust. People who loved him celebrated behind his back, and every time I see him now I think the same thing:

It didn’t get you.

He still works hard with his hands, still bends his back for a paycheck. But he does it in a place where the only cotton he sees is in those fields as he drives in to work.

He is in his middle fifties, past the age when he should be running up and down mountains, but he still loads his coon dogs into the back of his pickup, drops the tailgate on dirt roads and reservations, and chases the sound of their voices up and down the lonesome dark. He wheezes a bit, now, and I wonder if it is the ghosts of the mill, reaching for him.

If you ask him if he is still a cotton miller at heart, he will tell you no, that part of his life is over. But then you open the drawer on his dresser and you see dozens of t-shirts from company fishing tournaments, company health and blood drives, company safety seminars, never worn but never to be discarded. You open a living room closet and Fruit of the Loom jackets, packed tight like baled cotton, push out toward you, every one of them like new. He went to work sick a hundred times, not for the damn jackets, but because he did not want to be thought of as a man who would lay out, not so much by the company but by the people he worked beside, his society. It was a good job—dangerous, hot, hard and nasty, but a good job—and he was glad to get it.

In my momma’s farmhouse, from the basement where I sometimes write, I listen as his truck pulls up in the driveway, listen to the tailgate drop and the dogs burst out, quivering muscle and energy, hear them tear through the leaves as they surge up Bean Flat Mountain. I stroll out to say “hey” and watch. But by the time I make it out the door, most times my brother is gone, moving fast up the side of the mountain, chasing the sound. I wish, sometimes, I could hurry up that cold mountain after him and his dogs, but I never do. I am not tough like that, and I guess I never was. So I just lean against the pickup, to watch and listen. All I see is a speck of yellow from his light dancing between the black trees on a black mountainside, and then that vanishes, too.

acknowledgements

First, I have to thank my wife Dianne and boy, Jake, for not murdering me in my sleep as this book was written, re-written and worried over, for years and years. As my moods shifted like a crazy man’s, as I disappeared for far too long into these stories, you put up with me, and I am grateful, and for so much more than that. And again, I thank my kinfolks, who are the tap root of my writing life. Your insights and stories are the genesis of everything I do.

I did this book, and stuck with it after it should have died, because I believe it is important. It began more than seven years ago, and for a slim volume has taken up more work, more time, than anything I have ever done.

I could never have done it alone. Many others helped me gather the stories within, and while I know I will fail in thanking those people, I will try.

First, I thank all the people of the mill, and the surrounding town, who took the time to speak with me and others, who bothered to share the stories that make up the soul of any book. I believe you are about the best people I have ever know, and, certainly, you are the toughest.

The names of the village, and the modern-day workers, hold up the paragraphs here. But one, the great local historian Homer Barnwell, I have to thank especially, because he did everything but pat me on the head while I did this work. Homer, I kept my promise.

I thank, again, the respectable historians who have laid solid foundations of knowledge about my people, especially Wayne Flynt and Hardy Jackson. I also have to thank many others, people like Bokie McClellan, who wrote of the village and, especially, its baseball teams.

I have to thank Peter Howell, who gave me pounds of information on the mill, and tried to save it, and David B. Schneider, who complied an official history of the mill and its founders in a comprehensive application for historic status.

I thank the long-past reporters of The Anniston Star and Jacksonville News. You gave me a window into a different age, and I thank a current one, Margaret Anderson, whose kindnesses to me stretch back a lifetime.

I thank the librarians of my county, who were patient, and helpful.

And special thanks go to a small army of friends, old and new, who did some of the heavy lifting in this book. Jerry “Boo” Mitchell, perhaps the best reporter in the world at peering into the past, helped me tremendously. But there was also Greg Garrison, Lanier Norville, Lori Solomon, Megan Nichols, Jen Allen, James King, Taylor Hill, Ryan Clark, Beth Linder, and Cori Bolger.

I thank, again, my agent, Amanda Urban, for putting up with me, and my editor, Sonny Brewer, who knows his way around a sentence, himself.

I thank, again, the people at the University of Alabama, including the professors and students who heard me kicking the walls and throwing books against the door, and did not call the police, or the loony house.

But more than anyone, perhaps, I thank the readers who have followed me along on a writing life that I could not have predicted, that I am sure I do not deserve.

About the author

Rick Bragg is the author of five books including the best sellers
All Over but the Shoutin’
,
Ava’s Man
,
and
The Prince of Frogtown
. He was born and raised on the outskirts of Jacksonville, the mill town that is the subject of
this book. A newspaper and magazine writer who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, Bragg is currently a professor of writing
at the University of Alabama.