Read Online The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg - Free Book Online Page B

no experience beyond the limitless pines were squeezed into a single, limited space. When men felt hemmed up, they reacted in unusual ways. It was common then for a man to get drunk and ride his horse or mule into a café in town. “There was lots of odd things that happened back then,” said Homer Barnwell, who grew up in the mill village, a child of its first generation of workers, and would become its historian. He cites the time in ’38 someone dynamited the brush arbor, and the time a man named Joe Pierce got drunk at Toughy Griffin’s blacksmith shop and pulled Slut Luttrel’s teeth—“and by the time he got done, he’d even pulled the right ones,” Homer said.
    The gentler townspeople of Jacksonville contemplated them at a safe distance, in awe, and fear.
    With the books of science and logic closed to them, they believed in things, in signs and warnings that had no foundation in the wider world. They planned their days in the morning, “turning the cup,” when they would empty the coffee grounds into a saucer and examine the patterns on the porcelain. A teardrop shape meant sorrow. A streak represented a road, and meant that you would travel, or that someone would travel to you. A series of specks meant rain. They divined more of the future in cards. A jack of clubs meant a brown-eyed, handsome man would come to your door. A king of hearts meant a wise, older man, of fair complexion, would affect your life. The ace of spades meant death. They believed that a swarm of gnats heralded violent storms, that they could cure a sty in their eye if they stood in the middle of a darkened crossroads and chanted:

    Sty, sty
    Leave my eye
    Catch the next
    Who passes by

    They believed it was an invitation to murder to bring an ax into a house, and the only way to undo it was to turn around three times and back out the door. They believed that a snapping turtle, if it bit their finger, would not let go until it thundered, that a coach whip snake could form itself into a circle, like a wheel, and roll down the trails after them until it caught them, and whip them to death. They believed if they killed a dove they would be punished by God, because the dove had been a sign of hope in a world drowned for its sins. They believed that the granddaddy longlegs, a delicate spider that moved on legs thinner than the finest wire, was good luck, and they would chant…

    Granddaddy, Granddaddy,
    Which way is your cow?

    …until the spider would lift one threadlike leg, and point.
    They believed that the presence of dragonflies, which they called snake doctors, meant a serpent lay nearby. They believed that they could cure warts by pretending to wash their hands over an empty washpot, and that old women could murmur worms out of the ground. They believed it was bad luck if a woman gave her man a knife, because it would cut their love in two.
    The village had its own witch, an old woman who could breathe the fire out of a burned child’s wound, and simple-minded children wandered into houses two blocks away and climbed into chairs at the dinner table, expecting to be fed. Faith healers blew rabbit tobacco smoke into the ears of squalling babies, and pressed scraps of Scripture to the chests of dying men.
    If you did not have faith, you trusted to luck. The men bet on game-cocks, cards, and which way a bird would fly off a wire when someone let fly with a chunk of coal or an empty bottle of booze. Between shifts, they pitched pennies in the bathroom, and gathered in a circle on the railroad switchback to roll dice. It was there, in the 1920s, that an unlucky man named Charlie Tune made the strangest bet of all. “Charlie Tune needed to roll a four, and he said, ‘If I don’t make this four with two deuces before I crap out, I’ll leave this town and you won’t ever see me again,’” Homer said. He cannot recall what it was Charlie Tune rolled, but it wasn’t a pair of deuces. “He got up, threw his coat over his shoulder and