All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg Read Free Book Online

knees and pushed himself on top of the man, and the ice popped and cracked again. The other man clawed at my daddy’s face, screaming, and finally fought free. He tried to do the impossible, to walk on that thin ice, and plunged straight through it.
    The man rose up, his hands clutching the edge, and although he didn’t know it, he was already dead. The cold, that unbearable cold, would take him even if he could get out of the water. My daddy could have left him that way, could have let the ice have him. Instead, he reached down into the water and put both hands on top of the man’s head, and pushed him down, again and again, till there was no need anymore.
    When the thing was done, my daddy, freezing, crawled back to where he guessed dry ground was, to the shelter, peeled off his wet, freezing gloves and shoved both hands between his legs to warm the numbness away.
    If there was satisfaction in what he had done, he didn’t say.
    “I remember he had big eyes,” my daddy said of the man he killed. “A little feller, but big ol’ eyes.”
    He was done talking then. I left him with his empty bottle and never saw him again, alive or dead.
    I don’t know anything about wars. I don’t think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it.
    But I have little doubt that, in that narrow space of time, his life shifted, tumbled off balance. I do not know, not for dead certain, that I can blame his meanness and cruelties, his abandonment of us, my momma, on something as distant as the war. It might be that he was just a flawed man, a man without conscience, who let his wife and children suffer and just didn’t care. It might even be that, as he sat dying, he would have told me anything if it would have made me think better of him. Even a legacy of a lie is better than hate.
    I choose not to believe that. I believe instead that there, in that wretched place where the ground blows up under your feet and dead men motion to you from the sidelines of war, a boy with thin blood was rearranged. I believe it. I want to. I have to.
    I asked Momma, not long ago, to tell me stories about my daddy’s war.
    “He did some killin’, but he only told me about one time,” my momma said. “He didn’t even talk about it with men, just me, that one time. That one man. That’s all I know,” and I could tell it was something she would rather not remember. It is a mean thing to do, for a son to ask his momma to remember things like that. Still, I had to know.
    I asked her how my daddy killed him. “He killed him a little bit at a time,” she said. Then, to show me how, my gentle mother put her hands together with her palms turned toward the floor, and made a pushing motion, again and again and again …
    H e came home from the war to marry my momma. I guess, in the end, he did what we all do when we suffer. He came home, to try and heal. But in a way, he was dying, failing, even before I was born. My momma’s life with him, my life, Sam’s and Mark’s lives, may have given him some joy, some peace. It might be that we distracted him from his devils. It is the only reason I can come up with, for why he wanted us at all.
    H e called once, maybe twice more before he died. In the final few weeks he said he could still see the angel on his footboard, just waiting. I could not tell if he was drunk or not, but that is the way drunk people talk. I told him it was just a dream.

3
Fake gold, other people’s houses, and the finest man I never knew
    T he first memory I have is of a tall blond woman who drags a canvas cotton sack along an undulating row of rust-colored ground, through a field that seems to reach into the back forty of forever. I remember the sound it makes as it slides between the chest-high stalks that are so deeply, darkly green they look almost black, and the smell of kicked-up dust, and sweat. The tall woman is wearing a man’s britches and a man’s old straw hat, and now and then she looks