All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg

Author:Rick Bragg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780307762917
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1997-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

21

Running hot

He was running from the law again, in a flatbed pickup that wouldn’t outrun a riding lawn mower, but on the narrow and twisting roads of home, speed is less important than nerve. A man who can live with the fact that he will almost certainly sooner or later drive head-on into a tree can almost always outrun a man who expects to live to see his children when he clocks out that evening. The man who doesn’t have any fear, who has so little to lose, hell, he can almost fly.

It helps to have a little bit of liquor in you, and Mark did, even on a Sunday. I only heard about it after the fact, but I can see him hunched over the steering wheel, cigarette in his mouth, rumbling between the ditches in a cloud of blue smoke, the engine running red-hot, about to come apart under his feet, slinging rods like shrapnel. He had a good head start and was already well out of sight, but to get away he needed a hidey-hole, a place to duck and cover for just a little while, until the deputy gave up. (One of us, it seems, is always running from the law, or something.)

That was when he saw the little church, the Church of the Nine Gifts, and saw the cars pulling up in the parking lot for the Sunday service. He hit on a plan. He whipped the truck in among the sheep, and together they filed inside, for the worship. Mark sat drunk in the back row. “Welcome Brother,” they said to him, and he stayed for the entire service, the preaching, the singing, the altar call, everything.

They are good people, there at that church, my momma told me. The preacher told her, when he came to visit her some time later, that the sinners are the ones he wants to find in God’s pews. The Saved are doing alright already. They treated Mark so good that he kept going back for two years.

But, like me I guess, he never heard the call.

I could not make that story up if I tried. At best, it sounds like a scene out of the whiskey-running days of the 1950s, like pages ripped from my own ancient family history. It was just a few years ago.

Time doesn’t mean much to Mark. In many ways he is frozen in a generation he never even saw, and all his adult life he has lived life pretty much like he wanted. The price, from time to time, is jail, and every time he goes in my momma dies a little more inside. I know it is a cliché to say that, but if you had ever seen her sit in that living room and talk to him on the phone when he is in jail, knowing there was not one thing she could do to help him beyond a little cigarette money, it would be clear to you what I mean. It’s not the shame of it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.