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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.
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