Portrait of My Father as a Young Man

I remembered my father only in fragments. My mother re-created him for me.

His Mother Remembers

I had never dated, in my disreputable life, a woman with a child, and I dreaded women who seemed determined to have one. I did not want a child, the way I did not want fuzzy pajamas, dishwashers, neckties, sensible cars, department store credit cards, multivitamins, running shorts, umbrellas, goldfish, grown-up shoes, snow skis, and most cats.

I saw her, and I forgot.


I love women, but I had seldom been plagued by the debilitating kind of love other men went on about till it was just nauseating. My attention span, in romance, was that of a tick on a hot rock. Then I met her, and landed with a thud on the altar at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. "I have children," she told me, and I am sure I heard that, must have heard it. But by the time I regained what sense I had, I was driving carpool next to a ten-year-old boy who, for reasons I may never truly understand, believes I hung the moon.

I guess it is natural that, in the company of the boy, I almost always think of my father. I didn't know him well. If you add up all the time I spent with Charles Bragg in my life, as he tore in and out of it, it comes to only a few months, not even one whole year. I remember him in fragments, because we left him too soon, my mother and I and my two brothers, and still not soon enough. In the last year of his life, alcohol was the only sustenance he ever cared to receive. As the TB squeezed his lungs and the cirrhosis ate his liver, he followed his family from afar, from twice and three times removed, asking friends of friends and kin of kin about us. He missed my mother badly, but by then too much damage had been done.

He died in 1975, when I was 16.

There was no more time left.

But with the weight of a new boy tugging on me, I went to find my father. I did not believe in ghosts, though others did. The writer Willie Morris once told me, as elegantly as anyone ever did, "There is no place you can go he will not be." I didn't want to rewrite my father, or whitewash him. But the man I knew was not all that he was.

I wanted to know the other man, the young man, the young husband, the young father-to-be before I came around, the man who would one day have a son who needed him. It might open my eyes a bit, help me improve my view. Help me understand why everything I did was so rich in consequence. And my mother, Margaret, now in her 70s and with a past that was hard to relive, helped me find my father by remembering.

Man, I wish I could have seen him. They say he was slick and pretty in '55, and when he leaned against his black-and-pearl '49 Mercury in his white Palm Beach suit and cherry-red necktie, he looked like he got lost on his way to someplace special and pulled off to ask the way.

He always stole a red flower for his lapel—what magic, to always steal a red one—and cinched up his pants with a genuine leatherette imitation alligator belt. His teeth were too good to be true, long and wicked-white, and he wore his wavy, reddish-brown hair swooped up high like the Killer, Jerry Lee. It turned black when he combed it back with Rose hair oil, and when he fought on the streets, leading with his right, punishing with his left, all that hair flopped into those blue-flame eyes. My father only finished sixth grade, but he was drawing good government money then, as a Marine, and drove home every weekend from the base in Macon, Georgia, with one thing on his mind.

He liked to pose on the square and see the girls sway by, but he wouldn't whistle, because he'd already found the one. "He smiled mischievous," my mother remembered, like he was picking life's pocket, like he was getting away with something just by breathing air. He was just another lint-head kid, but different from the other men she knew. When it was time to leave the square, he slid behind the wheel and turned the key, and he looked like an angel, one of the fallen kind, as the big engine caught fire and he vanished in a blue-black, oily, noxious cloud.

"His car burnt a lot of oil," she told me. "It burnt so much oil that a cloud followed him around town. People used to laugh at him. They'd say, 'Here comes that Bragg boy, in a cloud of smoke.' They ought not to have laughed, though. People are mean."

All these years later, my mother remembered for me and defended him. She had not defended him in 40 years. She also remembered him, sometimes, on his knees.

"It was about four months after we started seeing each other," she said. "We were at Germania Springs, and he was getting a drink of water, laying on his belly on the creek bank. You could drink it right out of the creek back then, and it was good and cold. Well, he got a drink, and he turned and looked at me. 'Will you marry me?' he said. And I laughed at him and he got mad. I think he cussed a little too. But I mean, who asks somebody to get married while they're on their belly getting a drink of water? 'You're kidding, ain't you?' I told him. He cussed again. He said, 'Hell, I was serious. Will you marry me?' But I giggled again. I couldn't quit."

She has tried to forget so much, it seems odd to try to remember. But she can still see him pushing himself up to his knees for a little dignity. For a second, just a second, he faced her on one knee, like in a storybook.

"I mean it," he said to her.

His face was bright, burning red.

"Will you, or not?"

He was not a marrying man.

Winning Her Heart

The women loved his face. Even the men would concede that, yeah, Charles Bragg was a good-looking man. He had a movie star's squared-off chin with a dashing white line across it, like a dueling scar. He got it one night, drunk, when he banged his face on the steering wheel, but it made him look mysterious and a little bit dangerous all the same. He had Indian blood and cheekbones, proud and high, and his face tanned to dark red. He chain-smoked Pall Malls and toted a thin, yellow-handled knife in his left hip pocket, so he could get at it, quick. I guess he was a scoundrel before he knew what a scoundrel was.

"He would cut you, if you hemmed him up," said my father's cousin, Carlos Slaght. "But he was a good boy, all in all."


He had a reputation, of course, but my mother didn't know, and that is the same as having none at all. "Charles always had the women," said his buddy Jack Andrews. "Nice girls too. Church girls. But your momma—he fell in love with her. He made up this picture in his head of how he thought his life ought to be. She was in that picture with him."

My mother was raised in the foothills of Appalachia. When she came to town as a young woman, it was to keep other people's babies and mop their floors. Then here comes my father, all dressed up and slicked down and pool-hall cool, with the mountains in his own bloodline and the mill village on his driver's license, but posing as something different, something more. He was as quick and sharp as a serpent's tooth but not sharp enough to see he did not need to pose for her. "Oh, he sure did priss around," she said. "I just liked his teeth."

My father never really lived anywhere but here, in the northeast Alabama town of Jacksonville, the town where he was born. He was stationed overseas and in Georgia, incarcerated for a while in Virginia, and found body-and-fender work in Texas, but mostly his life passed within the Jacksonville city limits. It is a lovely town, and 50 years ago, as he wooed my mother, it was a postcard in real time, its main avenue lined with white-columned mansions and 300-year-old oaks, its working-class people tucked out of sight and down the hill.

In the middle of it all was the square—a circle, really—with City Hall squatting off to one side. And it was there, in an orbit of Hudsons, Packards, and Chevrolets, that my father fell in love, betrayed a buddy, and third-wheeled his way into my mother's heart.

He wooed my mother while she was on a date with one of his best friends. It was a Saturday, we believe. Underage roughnecks slouched dejectedly in front of the pool hall as, inside, decorated World War II veteran Homer Barnell watched over the tables. "I never could play," Barnell would tell the boys, but he took a lot of money off the ones who said they could.

The young man my mother was seeing then, a tall, black-haired, green-eyed boy, was a good-looking rake just like my father. They were just hanging out, killing time, when the boy told Charles that he wanted to take that Bundrum girl out on a proper date. But he had just had his prized '48 Ford painted a sharper battleship gray, and any fool knows that if you drive a car before the paint dries right, every speck of highway dust in four counties will adhere to the hood. Still, he was anxious. He was pretty sure that if he didn't take her out, some sweet-talker would.

"That's that pretty girl?" my father asked.

He knew damn well who she was. The boy had introduced them some time ago, and my father had even asked if he might write her from where he was stationed, somewhere far-off and probably dangerous.

The boy said yes, she was pretty.

My father was willing to help a buddy out.

"You can take my car," he said.

"Thanks," the boy said, and reached for the keys.

My father dangled them but didn't let go. "Do you mind," he asked, "if I go with y'all?"

When the boy went to pick up my mother, my father was sitting in the backseat, his suit pressed, a carnation in his lapel. It was cool weather, and all the flowerpots and beds were just dead sticks, and she has always wondered if he crawled into a hothouse to get that carnation. He did not buy flowers. It was against his religion.

He nodded hello as she climbed in the car. The other boy touched the gas pedal, and they left in a black, reeking cloud. The gears were out of sync, so my father, as the engine began to whine, would fling himself forward from the backseat, shout at the boy to press the clutch, and, leaning between the boy and my mother, shove the gearshift up or down or sideways with a horrible grinding sound. Then he would settle back into the backseat until he had to shift again.

They hadn't gone a mile when my father began talking to the back of their heads. "I reckon you're the most beautiful thing in this whole town," he told my mother.

She didn't know what to do. Neither did the boy who was driving.

"I reckon you're the most beautiful thing I ever seen," he said.

She just stared out the windshield.

"In the whole world," he said.

Whiskey can make men talk like that. But there was not one trace, one sniff, on his breath.

Then he leaned forward and tapped the boy on the shoulder. "I'm gonna take her away from you," he said. He did not sound like he was joking.

The boy could have fought for her. But my father's reputation, and his family's reputation, prevented a lot of violence in those days. A family that routinely pulled knives on each other was not one you engaged without at least weighing the consequences. The boy was seething, though, and steered the oil-burning hulk to his own house, took my mother by the hand, and tugged her away. He opened the door of his still-moist Ford so my mother could slide in, then drove off mad as hell, flinching at every puff of sand or flying leaf that brushed his quarter panels, leaving my father on the sidewalk, grinning like a devil in the lingering smoke.

That is what she saw, those white, perfect teeth in that devil's grin, as the first boy told her good night.

My father took her out the next weekend, and the next, and the suitors began to peel away. He told my mother that she was as pretty as Rita Hayworth. He said this in a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. You could feel it, not just hear it, feel his whole chest vibrate from that deep voice. It's the kind of voice you believe.

They got to know each other, riding around in his wretched car, and soon he took her to meet his mother and father. Bobby and Velma, his parents, greeted her at the door, and they all sat politely for a while, knee to knee. Finally, when they were leaving, Velma reached up and hugged my mother fiercely.

My father told her that he had prospects, that he might be in the Marines for life or he might work with his brothers in a body-and-fender shop. But he told her he would starve before he would work in a cotton mill, choking on cotton dust in a place where blades and gears chewed up people. He told her not to worry, that he would give her and their children a better life than that. He told her, holding her hand, that she could depend on him.

He was kind to her mother, who did not like his fancy looks, and respectful to her father, a tall, gaunt moonshiner and hammer swinger who had never in his life lost a stand-up fight with another man. My father made her promises, crossed his heart and hoped to die. He gave her a cedar hope chest, to hold their future.

"For when we get us a house," he told her.

And when he heard that while she was growing up poor in the foothills, she had never had a doll, he went to a doll maker in Jacksonville, an old woman famous for her fancy needlework. He had this woman make a ballerina for his wife-to-be, what my mother called a dancing doll. It cost him $25, about half a month's pay for a Marine back then. He also gave her flowers all the time.

"But they didn't cost him nothin'," she said.

First Memory

They spent every waking minute together and would have spent more. But he disappeared on Sunday night to go back to the base in Macon in time for duty on Monday morning. Every Sunday, he stayed with her until the last minute, then roared off into the night, sliding around the twisting roads, racing the sun. And every late night, in the stillness of the barracks, he wrote her a letter.

Dear Mark, he wrote. He called her that, for short. How are you? I am fine.


She ran to the mailbox six days a week. Sometimes he beat his letters home, but still she ran.

He never wrote anything special, at least nothing special that she remembers. But it was how he signed them that mattered, she told me: Good night, sweet dreams, I miss you, honey.

One letter, in the fourth month, was a little different from the rest. At the bottom, my father had written, Look under the stamp.

My mother painstakingly peeled it off. Underneath, in tiny letters, he had written, I love you.

And then she ran to the box where she'd saved all his mail. Letter by letter, she peeled all the stamps away.

He had written it every time.

Back at the spring, with my father on his knees, people were staring at them.

My father, the boy, seemed about to implode into his little self.

My mother, the tall blonde, prettier than Rita Hayworth, giggled and shook.

"Are you serious?" she asked.

"Yes, damn it," he said.

"Well," she said, "okay."

They drove to a little town south of Chattanooga, to a justice of the peace. His sister, Ruby, and his brother-in-law, Herman, who lived nearby, waited in the car.

"Your momma was so pretty," Ruby told me.

She was wearing a pink sweater suit, borrowed, and she wore white loafers.

He had on blue Levi's, a blue long-sleeved shirt, and black penny loafers with Mercury dimes.

She was so nervous, she stumbled over the vows. He was so nervous, he kissed her too quickly, with things still unsaid. They ran out happy, but then she realized what she had done.

"Charles," she told him in the yard, "I forgot to say 'I do.'"

He grabbed her hand to drag her back into the building, but she was just too embarrassed.

I do, she said, inside her own mind.

My mother lived all this again, as a favor to me. She did not mind the story too much because it was the happiest one she had. And then, because she's my mother and because I asked for her help—now that I had my own boy—she helped me sharpen my own first memory of my father, which was bright and fine.

I remember my mother was hanging white sheets on the line in the yard on a hot, windy day. She sang as she hung them, but what song I cannot say, and the sheets puffed up like sails on a ship, and now and then a gust would make them snap and pop. I was a tiny boy back then, and I was holding a handful of something sticky—I believe it was wild strawberries. And she made me go sit in the grass, to keep me from handling and ruining all the clean sheets.

I saw a car pull up in the gravel driveway, tires crunching, and park behind a line of evergreens. The trees stand 30 feet high now, but in those days a man could still peek over, even a little man. Then I saw what seemed to be the head of a large, goofy animal—a bear, I believe—peer at me over the trees, and disappear.

A few seconds later, it rose again, slowly turned sideways, to show me a profile, and glided along, just its head showing behind the curtain of green.

I was dumbstruck.

My father appeared at the edge of the trees, carrying the biggest stuffed animal I had ever seen, a bear as big as he was.

It was my birthday, I believe.

***
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