The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg Read Free Book Online Page A

saw himself as a benevolent soul who gave the poor mountain people a good life. But Greenleaf never bothered to repair any of the mill village houses, Pruett said. “I don’t know how many he ruined,” Pruett said. When a tenant confronted Greenleaf, he ordered them from his presence with these words: “When it is raining, I can’t fix it, and when the sun is shining, it doesn’t need it.”
    If you knocked heads with him, you lost. Since the days of the Creek Indian Wars, a pristine watering hole called Big Spring had provided a constant source of cold, sweet water to the town. Greenleaf, who owned property near the spring, fouled it with construction, and pumps and spigots in the town and mill village belched red mud. Greenleaf told the complainers they could go to hell, or see his lawyer.
    He dealt routinely in thousands of dollars yet seemed to enjoy the tiniest confrontations. After a handyman named Luke finished a repair at the mansion, Greenleaf pulled out a wad of money and thumbed off a few bills. As he counted, he told Luke to carry a ladder to the garage and come back and get his pay.
    Luke returned and asked for his money, and Greenleaf responded that he had already paid him. When Luke insisted he hadn’t been paid, Greenleaf looked at Luke’s helper. “You look like an honest sort of chap. I paid him, didn’t I?”
    The helper shook his head: “No, sir, you got your money out, but you didn’t pay him.”
    “Well, I’ll just pay you again, Luke,” Greenleaf said.
    “No, sir, you won’t be paying me again,” Luke replied. “You’ll be paying me for the first time.”
    Greenleaf did not seem to understand what the work meant to them, the value they held for their own labor.
    “He would do petty things,” Pruett said. “My Uncle Bob almost shot Greenleaf once. Caught him moving a fence, stealing a couple of feet on a property line.”
    In this time of economic agony, he wasted thousands. Once, a crew delivered trees and dug more than one hundred holes for an orchard. “He never planted the first tree,” Pruett said. “The holes are still there.”
    Another time, he had timber cut from land in nearby White Plains. For days, trucks rolled into the yard with loads of raw lumber that hadn’t been planed. Greenleaf stacked the lumber. “About forty thousand dollars worth of damn lumber rotted to the ground,” Pruett said. “I’ve seen him waste so much money. God.”
    Greenleaf filled his yard with cars, and let many of them rot and rust, because he did not want anyone else to have them. He was eccentric, complicated, but more than anything, confident of his place in the world he had created. As sunset approached one evening, Pruett watched Greenleaf step off a certain distance from the dining room table and then do a hard left face. He looked through a piece of smoked glass at the setting sun and checked his watch. One of Greenleaf’s sons explained, quietly, that Daddy Greenleaf believed the sun was off course.
    In the mill village, he controlled the electricity, the water, the groceries, all of it. Even though he was a hard-drinking man, he did not want his workers to drink—that could get in the way of production. “There was a bootlegger down here then,” Homer Barnwell said. “Greenleaf didn’t like it. He hired a man from Birmingham to run him off. They shot each other.”
    He expected his employees to shop only at the company store with their metallic script, tokens called “clinkers.” But Greenleaf also owned Westside Drug, a pharmacy, said Sam Stewart Sr., who was friends with Greenleaf’s children. “He had them with food, and he had them with medicine,” Stewart said.
    The holidays brought out a gentler side of Greenleaf. Trucks would roll through the village, loaded with free shoes, hams, and turkeys. Yet he was insulted when working class people came accidentally into his presence. Two blue-collar boys from Piedmont came up his driveway in a rusty car, wanting to