Read The Prince of Frogtown for Free Online Page A

reached as high as she could and hugged her neck, fiercely. Years later, she would tell her what she wanted to say, but dared not, with the men in the room.
    She wanted to tell her to run.
    But there seemed no need to be afraid, then.
    “I never saw him drink then,” my mother said. “He drank coffee. I never even remember seeing him with a beer. I had heard all them people who went off in the military was social drinkers, but we would sit for hours and hours, him sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes, acting like a real gentleman.”
    He told my mother he had prospects, told her he might be in the Marines for life, or might work with his brothers in a body and fender shop. But he told her he would starve before he would work in a cotton mill, choking on cotton dust in a place where blades and gears chewed up people, taking their fingers, hands and arms. He had grown up seeing coughing, maimed, broken-down men pass the caskets of their brothers and sisters through the windows of houses too small and tight to fit the coffins through the halls and front door. He was not afraid of anything, usually, but that was his terror, to be passed around like that. But he told her not to worry, that he would give her and their children a better life than that. He told her, holding her hand, she could depend on him.
    He was kind to her mother, who didn’t like his fancy looks, and respectful to her father, who was almost a folk hero in these hills, a tall, gaunt moonshiner and hammer swinger who had never in his life lost a stand-up fight with another man, or any two men. My father took work with him on the weekends, roofing a house with him, and spent his paycheck on a suit for her, in the style the women called “sweater suits.” Before he had a chance to give it to her, my grandfather took my mother aside. “Now, that boy thinks he’s done somethin’ real big, and you act proud, now, when he gives it to you.” She told him yes, she would, but it had not been necessary. It was the first dress she ever had that was not homemade or cast-off, given to her by the rich ladies whose floors she swept.
    He made her other promises, crossed his heart and hoped to die.
    He gave her a silver dollar as seed corn, for money they would save.
    He gave her a cedar hope chest, to hold their future.
    “For when we get us a house,” he told her.
    When he heard she had never had a doll, growing up poor in the foothills of the Appalachians, he went to a doll maker in Jacksonville, an old woman famous for her fancy needlework, and had her make his new wife a ballerina, what my mother called a dancing doll. It cost twenty-five dollars, about half a month of a Marine’s pay.
    He gave her flowers all the time.
    “But they didn’t cost him nothin’,” she said.
    He would strain to stand as tall as he could when they had their picture made, so he would be almost as tall as her. It never worked. His feet were so small he could wear her shoes, and he did sometimes, puttering around the house in her little flat shoes, to make her laugh.
    They spent every waking minute together, and would have spent more, but her daddy would have killed him. He disappeared on Sunday night, to go back to the base in Macon in time for duty on Monday morning. Every Sunday, he stayed with her until the last minute, then roared off into the night, sliding around the twisting roads, racing the sun.
    The old car took too long to get there, and cut into his time with her. So he saved up and got a machine that would move. It was a 1954 Hudson, and had a chromed, winged hood ornament that made it look like a silver eagle was flying just ahead of it on the highway. It rolled on gangster whitewalls and four perfectly matched factory hubcaps, and had a “Big Six” six-cylinder motor, three-speed on the column, fender skirts on the rear wheels and six little-bitty chrome letters that spelled out “Hornet” on the side. On Sundays, they rode and listened to the radio and talked about