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

second that she did not see the rest of the world, the better world, spinning around her, out of reach.
    In fact, poor was all she had ever witnessed, tasted, been. She was not some steel magnolia thrust into an alien poverty by a sorry man, but a woman who grew up with it, whose own mother would just forget to eat supper if there wasn’t enough to go around. Her sisters wed men who worked hard, who bought land, homes and cars that did not reek of spilt beer. Through their vows, and some luck, they made good lives and had good things that had never been worn or used before. Momma, bless her heart, picked badly, and the years of doing without spun a single, unbroken thread through her childhood, her youth, her middle age, until the gray had crept into her hair.
    We have to go back a ways to find the start of it, to a little rented house so deep in the pine barrens that night fell like a black cloth. It is lit by lanterns and ringing with a young woman’s cries as a new baby appears, kicking and screaming, like she knew what life had in store.
    She was born the daughter of Charlie and Ava on April 23, 1937, just over the state line in Floyd County, Georgia. An elderly doctor named Gray drove out from Rome in an Model A Ford to help with the birth, but no one seems to remember if he left with a live chicken or a ham or a ceramic jug of fine, homemade whiskey in payment. More than likely, if the doctor had any sense and was not a Baptist, or perhaps if he was, it was likker. Charlie Bundrum did not distill whiskey for just any trash, but sold it only to the doctor, the lawyer, the man who owned the drugstore and the man who ran the school board. It was known in the dry counties of northwestern Georgia and northeastern Alabama that a jar of Mr. Bundrum’s pale gold, almost clear likker was safe as buttermilk. It would not make you go blind or howl at the moon or shoot your wife. A cup or two—or a few long pulls on the jug—only put a nice little fuzz around the edges of the world, like a soft lens on a camera. It helped you sleep, and some people said it even improved your dreams. A gallon of it, in its purity, was seen as fair payment for a few hours of doctoring, even the bringing forth of new life.
    The baby girl had the blond hair and blue eyes of all the Bundrums, who were said to have come from Germany, but later learned that they were maybe Scotch, or maybe Irish. I guess that doesn’t matter. It’s not like we’re searching for a family crest. They named her Margaret Marie, not after anybody in particular, but because it sounded pretty. And because it was a warm April in the north Georgia mountains and because it was tradition—some say superstition—my grandfather bundled the baby up and carried her once around the house. It was said that babies would absorb all the good qualities of the person who walked them that first time around the house in which they were born, that the tiny, weak things would borrow from their strength, their character. We do not know where the tradition came from, only that it has been a ceremony of birth for generations (for me, it had been my great-aunt Plumer, a woman of virtue, abstinence and deep religious conviction. I reckon, sometimes, it don’t take good).
    There were worse spirits for my momma to absorb than the one of her father. He was a towering, sun-cured man with ears too big for his head, with bright blue eyes and perfect white teeth and light brown hair. His children worshipped him, because, while he whupped them too hard when they were bad, mostly he was kind, warm, laughing, solid. He drank, but instead of unveiling a hard and cruel inner man, as it so often does, the likker only revealed someone much like the sober version of himself, only one who bumped his head on the door facing.
    I never saw him with my own eyes. I know him only from faded black-and-white photographs taken during the Depression, and through the rich, vivid, Technicolor memories of his children,