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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.
***
Buy a copy of The Prince of Frogtown at rd.com/bragg
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