My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  In his workshop, sheltered by the big pines behind his house, is everything a working man needs or thinks he might someday need; you never know when you will need a horseshoe nail, or a fender clip from a … well, I don’t know what it’s from. Here, there are a hundred well-oiled and freshly cleaned power saws, drills, mowers, other machines, and an untold number of carefully cleaned and sorted handtools, not one out of place, not one put away wet, or begrimed. I think if he knew a three-sixteenth socket was left out of its designated slot in his big red toolbox, he would be unable to live with himself.

  The most precious tools he has there, the most valuable, are rarely used, though they have hung on one wall of his crowded workshop for as long as I can remember and will hang there long after we are gone. No one with our blood would dare take them down from their altar here. They were already black and pitted with age in ’29, when rich men leapt from the windows on Wall Street. I have never understood those men, never understood how a broken dream could send you flying, your necktie and coattails aflutter in the wind. The men who used the tools on my brother’s wall were different, and in some ways the tools made them that way. Their lives were hard in the beginning, hard in the Depression and the recessions to come, and hard in the end, but as long as their muscles held out and could power their tools, drive them, then they could beat out a life, a noble life. I get that.

  They were poured from hot steel in American mills and stamped out, smoothed and sharpened by men with little white scars on their arms from the whorl of sparks they worked within, a thing I know only because my kin worked in steel mills back when the blast furnace fires still lit up the skylines of Birmingham, Bessemer, Gadsden, other places. My grandfather and men like him rolled steel in the Gadsden plant, and when that work vanished in ’29 they picked up their hammers and handsaws and buckets of tar and built many of the houses you see along the thin ribbons of asphalt that run through the hills of my home, here in the highlands of the northern third of the state.

  There are wrenches, hammers, saws, roofing hatchets, chisels … all stained with a hundred years of grease and soot and, finally, after a century or more, coated with an unavoidable rust, but still good, still waiting for men—or women—with the muscle and know-how to take up and, by God, make something. They are what is left of my grandfather’s tool kit. They might as well be smelted from silver and gold.

  I never saw his face, his living face. But Sam did. It is, I believe, why he can make anything, do anything, and I am the worst carpenter, the worst mechanic, in my family line. I am also the worst fisherman, but I can only deal with one great shame at a time.

  The story of them, the old man and the baby boy, is one of my favorites, one I know only because I overheard a conversation between my mother and a young woman who was writing a story about her. The young woman, a much better journalist than I will ever be, asked my mother to tell her about the best day of her life. I tried to appear modest as I waited for my mother to tell the young woman of the day I showed her the first copy of a book with her face on the cover, or the day I won some big prize.

  “I believe,” my mother said, thoughtfully, “it was the birth of my first son.”

  I slunk away, but not so far I could not hear.

  My mother told the story of giving birth to the boy they named David Samuel, and how, since the man who would be my father was nowhere around and almost certainly drunk, my mother had no place to take the baby but home to her mother and father’s house, to Ava, and Charlie.

  The baby did not cry. I do not believe he ever has cried. He was a man all his life, serious and capable. My little brother, Mark, likes to joke that when Sam was born he “dusted himself off and walked home.”

  The morning after the boy’s birth, my grandfather pretended to chastise my mother, saying that while the baby had slept soundly, she had not, and stayed up all night. “Margaret, you kept us up all night,” my grandfather told her, “a’talkin’ to that blame boy.”

  The young reporter asked my mother what she said to the baby, but it took my mother a moment to answer.

  “I never had a doll,” my mother said, not looking for sympathy, just stating a fact. A child of the Great Depression, she had had almost nothing nice, nothing, in a house crowded with children, to call her own. And now there was this thing, this beautiful child.

  “And I just kept telling him, ‘You’re mine.’

  “ ‘You’re mine.’ ”

  My grandfather, the master carpenter, worked every day he was physically able to rise from his bed. Sometimes it was a roofing job, or framing up a house, or digging a foundation, but sometimes, to be honest, he was nowhere near a hammer. He augmented his carpenter’s pay by making liquor. When he came home, sometimes smelling like sweat and sawdust, and other times smelling like sour mash and wood smoke, he would reach down with one big hand and snatch up the baby and sit him on his knee. Sometimes he would talk to the boy like he was grown, about floor joists and shingles and such, and sometimes they both went to sleep in the straight-backed chair, the child on his chest. When he was a year old, the baby began to go through the pockets on my grandfather’s overalls, curious, searching, always busy, so my grandfather took to hiding a piece of soft candy there, for the boy to find. I like to think something fine passed between them, there in that chair.

  And then, when my brother was not yet 3 and I was not yet born, the white whiskey that my grandfather had drunk most of his life took him from this world, and then there was nothing, really, except those tools. A toddler does not remember much, truthfully, although people, being romantic, like to say they can. But I swear, something passed between them, maybe nothing more than plain genetics, like a fine tenor voice, or a strong nose, or big feet. But something broke off the old man and stuck in the mind of the boy.

  By the time he was walking, he was working, putting together junk and taking it apart and putting it back together, to make it slightly better junk than it had been before. He made wagons, and rafts, and tree houses, and then bicycles out of abandoned pieces. I called them Frankenstein bicycles, some of them so ugly you would leap off the thing when you saw a girl coming and hope it’d get swallowed up by the weeds. But they rolled, man. They took us down the road.

  He could build anything, and I was his unskilled labor. We built dams, and stopped rivers … well, creeks, but when you are 3 feet tall anything bigger than a roadside ditch is a raging torrent. We built boats … well, plywood rafts, and sailed them around the world or at least as far as the depth of Mr. Paul Williams’ cow pasture creek would allow us to go. We built treehouses that reached into the clouds … or at least eyebrow high on a tall man. We built clubhouses where we threw lavish parties … really just a shed, but it was straight, plumb, and watertight. We sat there with our cousin and listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival, and sharpened our pocketknives. I guess if I am being truthful I let him sharpen mine. “A dull knife ain’t no ’count,” he told me. He sharpens mine still, because I did not draw from that blood the skills a man needs.

  In construction projects, I toted wood.

  I sawed crooked, at a slant, ruining the precious lumber we scrounged.

  I bent nails, on, it seemed, every swing. I hit my own fingers every fourth or fifth lick, and once, with my big brother looking, not only missed the nail but missed the board.

  And in time, in all construction or mechanic jobs, I became the boy who held the light, when the sun sank in the middle of a project and we were intent on finishing before our mother chased us into the house. A chucklehead could hold the light. But even in that, I was inept. I got bored, and shone the beam on every other place except the board Sam was cutting, or the head of the screw he was feeling for in the dark. Come to think of it, he never hollered at me, much.

  In time, in junior high school, I fell in love with books, and I abandoned my family’s legacy almost completely. I tried, now and again. As a young man, I came into possession of a great Saint Bernard dog named King, big as a Sh
etland pony. I had to build a fence but wire was expensive, so I borrowed some one-by-eights from behind my Uncle Ed’s house and commenced construction. I sank some creosote posts, nailed on some two-by-fours, and then tacked the one-by-eights onto them, to make a respectable 6-foot-tall fence … respectable until the first windstorm, when the whole thing began to lean drunkenly toward the house in some sections, and away from the house in others. I rode by there not long ago to see if it had survived, but I guess the new owners of the house were ashamed of it.

  In New Orleans, I tried to build a shelf in my office and gouged out holes in the wall so big you would have thought someone was looking for a time capsule.

  In Tuscaloosa, I destroyed whole walls just trying to hang a picture. The contractor said if I would promise not to try to put any more nails in the wall, he would promise not to write a book.

  In Miami, I built bookshelves too big to get through the door when I moved. I fled in the night.

  In Fairhope, after a thousand-year flood sent water into a basement that had been bone-dry since the Johnson Administration, I went into something very much like a rage and took a shovel to some wet drywall. It cost $5,000 to fix what I did. It might have been too much tool for the job.

  “A shovel?” the contractor said.

  “Yep,” I said, and did not try to explain. I am not sure I could.

  My brother looks at my projects with an undeniable pity, but he has tried not to be unkind. He listens to my ideas for home improvement, and offers sensible suggestions, like, “Don’t.”

  Still, I like looking at those old tools. They are our history, my brothers and mine, our legacy. The rich folks have their Confederate sabers over the mantel. These tools, that rusted roofing hatchet, that old box-end wrench, is our crest, our insignia. My brother Sam hits the nail head every time, dead and true. Even my little brother, Mark, born years after my grandfather’s death, has the ghost of my grandfather in him, can sight down a board and tell you, to a fraction, how much it is warped, how far it is off true.

  Me. Well, surely I inherited something.

  I am told, now and then, the old man was a good storyteller.

  STUCK FOR GOOD

  I guess the best way to tell the story of how I glued myself to the wall of my house, how such a thing could even happen, is to tell it chronologically. Otherwise, I might appear stupid. But if I walk you through it, tiny misstep by tiny misstep, you will come to see that such a thing could happen to almost anybody, even a smart person.

  It began, as all great disasters do, with a plausible theory.

  It began with the simple thought, I can fix that.

  I have a rambling old house in Fairhope, Alabama, made of 50-year-old cypress that has turned hard as iron. It all sits on ancient bricks shaped by men who are only ghosts now, and is shaded by long porches on the front and back. It’s not a fancy house but one with sheltering trees and rocking chairs and screens to keep the stinging, buzzing things at bay. The bamboo is out of control, the hedges have not been pruned in this decade, and a 3-foot snake—a copperhead with an attitude—suns himself at the corner of the house and retreats into a crack in the foundation when he sees me coming with a shovel. If I am barehanded, he just looks at me. I swear he knows. There is a raggedy swimming pool in the back, and I like to float there and listen to the wind in the branches of the pecan trees, but there is a yellow jacket nest in the ground close by and, no matter how many generations of them I kill, they return every year to chase me out of the water and across the yard. I am told it is hilarious.

  The point is, it is not a perfect house, but it is perfect for a man like me, a man who hates new things and pretends to be a carpenter. I have a real carpenter, a real electrician, and a real plumber, and that is fortunate. If I tried to plumb, to twist a wrench on a pipe, I would drown myself. If I tried to mess with wiring, I would become a human torch.

  But carpentry? How much trouble can you get into driving a little-bitty nail?

  I do not permit myself power tools, beyond a drill, so mostly I hunt for jobs that involve only hammering and prying, and occasional sawing. You have to work hard at it to maim yourself with a handsaw. You have to be dedicated to drill yourself to death. But I digress. One day, I got to lookin’ at a chair rail that ran around the living room walls.

  That bothers me, I thought.

  It bothered me more, the more I looked at it.

  After a week or so, I came to hate that chair rail.

  I can fix that, I said inside my head.

  No, you can’t, another voice said, a voice that we will refer to as common sense.

  But it is not a very clear voice and is easily ignored.

  So, I got out my framing hammer, and started yanking. The man who put that chair rail up meant for it to last through The Rapture, but after yanking, pulling, cussing, and questioning that man’s parentage, I had the chair rail boards on the floor … and immediately saw why it was there in the first place. Every 3 feet, there was a hole, about 3 inches wide and 6 inches deep, in the painted wooden paneling. The holes had been cut for obsolete light switches, and instead of patching them, the way a master carpenter such as myself would have done, the man whose lineage I had questioned chose to hide them with the 6-inch-high chair rail.

  Well that’s unfortunate, I said in my head.

  You think? Common sense said.

  I told that voice to shut up.

  I sat for a minute and stared at the holes.

  I can fix that.

  Common sense had left the building.

  I got some wood putty, cut some patches out of thin scrap wood, and commenced. I knew I could not cut the patches precisely to fit the holes, which were irregular, odd shaped. So I planned to just place the patches inside the quarter-inch-thick paneling, glue them in place, and later fill the shallow depression, the quarter-inch, with wood putty, sand, and paint. The problem was, there was nothing, no stud, no beam, to fix the patches to. The logical step—at least inside my mind—was to angle the pieces, which had been cut slightly larger than the hole in the walls, inside the hole and bring them up flush against the inside of the paneled wall. I would first put glue around the edge of the patch, facing the inside of the wall, and pull it flush and let it dry. The problem was, there was nothing to hold to on the patch in order to secure it in place as it dried. But I am a genius. I put a small, thin screw into the center of the patch, safely away from where the glue would be, which gave me a little handle to manipulate the patch into place and a way to hold it flush as it dried. Once it had, I would carefully remove the screw, fill the now-shallow depression with the wood putty, which is the finest invention since onion rings, and sand.

  What, as they say, could go wrong?

  It actually worked, once, twice, three times. I got sure of myself. I was a carpenter, after all, the son and grandson of capable men.

  I held the fourth patch in place till it was good and dry. I had seen in the first patches that the glue sometimes ran, but I was careful not to get any on me, and I thought I had done the same on the fourth patch. I really did think that.

  When I tried to turn loose, I couldn’t. A glob of glue had run unseen from the side and secured my hand not only to the screw I was using as a handle but to the patch of wood itself. I was glued to the patch, the patch was glued, apparently forever, to the wall, the wall was nailed to the iron-hard cypress of the house, the house was fixed to the brick foundation, and the foundation was dug into the earth. We were one.

  I can fix this.

  At first I just tried brute strength. I pulled, and twisted.

  It hurt.

  But it held.

  That was my own damn fault. Some men would have carefully selected the glue they used on such a delicate operation, but when it comes to glue it seems to me that the job of glue is to stick and you ought to get the kind that sticks the most and the best. No one ever walks up to the counter in the local hardware store and says, “Excuse me, but do you have any glue that
just sticks a little bit?” I had perused the glue aisle, which is a whole lot more complicated than you’d think, and settled on Gorilla Glue.

  I can tell you now, those people make a fine product.

  I decided there was no need to panic. I would figure something out. I would get my toolbox, and use a screwdriver to remove the small screw, though that presented some problems because my whole body would have to turn with the screw and I am not Spiderman. As a last resort, I could use a hammer or small pry bar to carefully pull it free. The glue that was fixed by fingers to the wood itself, I would scrape or shave away with a scraper or knife, all things I had in my toolbox … the toolbox that sat on the floor, across the room.

  I searched my brain. Whenever a cowboy was locked in the hoosegow on television, he always took off his belt and, using the belt buckle as a kind of grappling hook, swung it over to the sheriff’s desk and dragged the keys across the floor and through the bars. I could have done that, but I hate belts—they just seem unnecessary—and refuse to wear them; and, my belt would have needed to be 15 feet long, anyway, to reach my bag. I moved to Plan B, but that one was hard. I would swallow my pride, and call for help.

  Which would have been plausible if I had worn a belt. But because I do not wear a belt it means my pants are always slipping down, and the surest way to get them to slip all the way down in the buffet line at the Chinese restaurant is to walk around with a heavy smartphone in your pocket, so I had to choose between having a belt and a phone or having neither. It had seemed a happy choice, till now.