Coach: The Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant - Softcover
"Revised & Updated"
More than two decades after his death, Paul "Bear" Bryant's imposing shadow still towers over the sport of college football.
For twenty-five years at the University of Alabama, and thirteen years before that at Maryland, Kentucky, and Texas A&M, Bryant pushed his players to excel with a combination of charisma and fear, winning 323 games and six national championships.
In this definitive portrait of a rough-hewn man with an extraordinary gift for leadership, Keith Dunnavant shows how Bryant survived headline-grabbing controversies and the vagaries of a changing social landscape to become college football's greatest coach and the foremost Southern icon of his time.
Coach is the epic story of a larger-than-life figure who overcame poverty and insecurity with intense desire and steely will, reflecting the transformational power of the American experience while emerging as a beacon of pride for Alabamians who felt defensive about their place in the world.
Praise for Coach
"The definitive Bear Bryant biography.... The first serious attempt to portray Bryant as he really was...."
---John Pruett, The Huntsville Times
"Bryant's story says volumes about America and that story is very ably told by Dunnavant...."
---Geoffrey Norman, American Way Magazine
"Balanced and intelligent."
---Kirkus Reviews
"A masterful job."
---The Christian Science Monitor
"Dunnavant skillfully raised my eyebrows...[in] a robust and revealing biography of college football's greatest coach."
---Paul Finebaum, Birmingham Post-Herald
"A thoroughly captivating read."
---Larry Woody, The (Nashville) Tennessean
"Thanks to Dunnavant, the Bear has a biography that does him justice."
---The Sporting News
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
KEITH DUNNAVANT, a native of Athens, Alabama, is the founder of four magazines and the author of three books. He has also been an award-winning writer and editor for the National Sports Daily, the Los Angeles Times, Sport magazine, Atlanta, BusinessWeek, Mediaweek, and the Birmingham Post-Herald. Since the original publication of this definitive biography, Dunnavant has been utilized as a creative consultant and expert commentator on Bryant documentaries produced by ESPN and CBS Sports.
Coach 1 Fordyce
ON THE MORNING of December 29, 1982, Paul “Bear” Bryant leaned back on the sofa in his hotel suite and stared out the fourteenth-floor window overlooking the Mississippi River. For a moment, he seemed lost in the distance. A dozen men clutching notepads and pens waited for him to speak, the silence broken only by the muffled sounds of The Young and the Restless emanating from the bedroom television set, which someone had forgotten to turn off. He was dressed in a red sport coat, blue shirt, and gray slacks, and a steady trail of smoke flowed from the unfiltered Chesterfield cigarette dangling from his lips. On the day of the final game of his epic coaching career, Bryant’s sixty-nine-year-old face was a sea of wrinkles and sadness, and his usually vibrant, piercing eyes reflected his melancholy mood.
“I remember the first time I came to Memphis,” he mumbled to the small group of reporters, launching into a memory nearly sixty years old, of the day when he had hitchhiked from his home in Fordyce, Arkansas, to the banks of the big river. “So long ago . . .”
Two weeks after declaring Alabama’s Liberty Bowl date against Illinois as his final game on the sidelines, the winningest coach in college football history arrived in Memphis as an American folk hero who seemed larger than the game, larger than life. Calling him a football coach seemed inadequate, like referring to Frank Sinatra as a pop singer. The Bear’s presence demanded adjectives and bold type. In Memphis as in other southern cities and towns, he could not walk down the street without being mobbed. The clawing crowds even followed him into the men’s room. He was like a rock star or a monarch, but he was also a tired old man in failing health, and although he didn’t want to quit the game, he knew the time had come.
Several hours after this impromptu gathering, the Bear was late for a pregame meeting with key members of his staff at the team hotel. Sam Bailey, his longtime aide, who knew more than he wanted to know about the details of Bryant’s health, started worrying. His boss was a stickler for punctuality. Bailey feared the worst.
After searching throughout the hotel without success, Bailey happened to walk by a darkened ballroom on the first floor. He opened the door just a crack and saw his boss sitting all alone behind the head table, staring past all the empty chairs and into the darkness. He had a faraway look in his eye. Football had transformed the Bear from impoverished and insecure to wealthy and beloved. It had been his life. The old man knew more than a career was ending that night. He knew that something inside him was about to die.
· · ·
Around the turn of the century, Wilson Monroe Bryant migrated from Georgia to rural Arkansas, where he met his future wife, Ida Mae Kilgore, in church. Like many southerners of the time, the Bryants lived a life virtually untouched by the progress experienced in the industrial cities of the North. Much like their ancestors, who had blazed a trail through the American wilderness, Ida and Monroe and their nine children lived off the land and struggled against the elements to survive. They were simple people, sustained by their faith, hard-working, thrifty, and self-reliant. Monroe, a large man with a scrubby mustache and a distant, somewhat melancholy disposition, was the son of poor Georgia farmers. The couple settled on a small patch of land in a sparsely populated area between the hamlets of Fordyce and Kingsland, where the acres were cheap, plentiful, and unforgiving. The area was not marked on any map, but the Bryants and the half-dozen other families scattered among two or three square miles called their community Moro Bottom, for its proximity to Moro Creek.
Their domicile was more a shack than a house. A plank wood structure with a front porch running the length of the house and a wooden swing hanging by chains at one end, it consisted of four rooms: a kitchen with a fireplace used for heating and cooking; the parents’ bedroom; a children’s bedroom; and a living area called the “big room,” where some of the children also slept on pallets. They supported themselves by growing vegetables and raising chickens and hogs; they had no electricity, telephone, or indoor plumbing, but no one ever went to bed hungry or felt deprived of love.
Ida Bryant was a sturdy woman with long, prematurely graying hair. Friends and family members described her as a woman of unusual determination and resourcefulness. “Miss Ida was always a lady, but she was as tough as a sack of nails,” said her nephew, Dean Kilgore. In an era when women’s suffrage was the most divisive political issue, she was the dominant figure in the Bryant clan. While most of the children were still school age or younger, Monroe fell ill and was rendered a semi-invalid for the rest of his life. Unable to endure the kind of physically taxing work a family farm required, he mostly sat around the house. The illness may not have been purely physical: One night, after a big rain, Ida discovered Monroe missing from their bed, and after an exhaustive search, he was found sitting in a large mud puddle in the middle of the road that ran alongside the house. He couldn’t explain why he was sitting in a puddle of water in the middle of the night. Some of the neighbors and townsfolk who didn’t know any better believed he was lazy, and that became a burden for his youngest son. After he became ill, Ida took charge of the farm and was, in all but ceremonial functions, the head of the family.
Their faith was a powerful anchor for the Bryants. Before Paul was born, Ida had served for a short time as a lay preacher at Smith’s Chapel down the road toward Kingsland. That a woman was allowed to enter the pulpit in such a fundamentalist environment was a testament to the respect she enjoyed from her friends and neighbors. Every night after dinner and chores, the children gathered around their parents in the “big room” and listened, under the glow of a kerosene lamp, as Ida read a passage from the Bible. As far as the children could remember, the Bible was the only book their parents ever kept in the house. The Bryants believed so fervently in the strict teachings of the Church of God that they considered it sinful to seek medical treatment, Monroe’s mysterious illness lingered for at least fifteen years without a doctor’s care until he died in 1931 at the age of forty-six with what was believed to be a case of pneumonia.
“Mother and Daddy believed if you had enough faith you didn’t need a doctor,” said Louise Goolsby, the Bryants’ tenth child. “Well, Paul just couldn’t understand that. He thought his father suffered and died needlessly.”
Born on September 11, 1913—the year then-unknown Notre Dame used a new weapon called the forward pass to upset football powerhouse Army—Paul was the eleventh of twelve children. Ida never consulted a doctor during her pregnancies or the ensuing births. After delivering a child in her own bed, she usually returned to the fields within a few days. Three of her children died as infants. From oldest to youngest, the surviving children were Barney, Orie, Harlie, Jack, Ouida, Kathryn, Louise, Paul, and Frances.
The working day on the farm started before dawn, when Ida lit a lamp and walked around the small house waking her children, who slept two and three to a bed. There were cows to be milked, hogs to be slopped, water to be pumped from the well. At first light some headed for the fields to plow or pick, while others trudged off to school. It was grueling, back-breaking work, and as much as he hated it, Paul learned the value of hard work and sacrifice at an early age.
A mama’s boy who hung on her every word, Paul was shameless in pursuit of Ida’s attention. The special bond between Ida and her youngest son may have been cemented when he was about four years old. After he had misbehaved one night during the Bible reading, Monroe pulled down the boy’s pants and started whipping his naked butt with a long wooden paddle with a hole in it. The boy cried and cried, and Monroe kept on whipping him until Ida, who was standing nearby with the other children, thought he had crossed a line; fearing for her son, she pulled Monroe off Paul and told him never to hit another child of hers like that again. The boy’s father dropped the paddle and walked away. The challenge to his authority as the man of the house enraged and embarrassed Monroe, and his relationship-with his wife and children was never quite the same. From that point on, Ida handled all the discipline. Paul was a mischievous boy who always seemed to be trying his parents’ patience—he once created a community scandal by stealing watermelons from a neighbor’s garden—and Ida was not one to spare the rod on him or any of their other children; when one of the children misbehaved, she pulled out her plum tree switch and got busy. But her discipline was always tempered by her memories of Monroe’s whipping.
By the time he was six or seven, Paul’s brothers were mostly grown up and were leaving to make their own homes, so as the only remaining son he was responsible for feeding the mules and hitching them to the family’s wagon every morning before breakfast. During the week, he and his sisters would drive the wagon to the one-room schoolhouse three miles down the dirt road in Kingsland, a town of some nine hundred souls that was really just a larger collection of small dirt farms. The trip required crossing Moro Creek, which was no simple task after a big rain. In fact, Jack Bryant, who fancied himself a shrewd businessman, kept a team handy to pull the occasional wagon or automobile out of the drink—for a reasonable price. During the bitterly cold winters, when the creek sometimes froze solid, Paul and his sisters would heat bricks in the fireplace and sit on them during the trip to Kingsland to keep from freezing. On Saturdays throughout the year, Paul and his mother would load the wagon with vegetables, butter, milk, and eggs and head for Fordyce to peddle the homegrown merchandise door-to-door.
Years later, whenever a writer referred to Fordyce as Bryant’s hometown, he always made a point of emphasizing that Moro Bottom, which wasn’t a town at all, held that distinction. This was his way of saying he never forgot those unhappy Saturdays. Fordyce was a town of about thirty-six hundred people in the early 1920s. Its downtown included two general stores, a movie theater, a train station, a hotel, a dry goods store, and a livery stable, among other points of interests. In those days, the children of Fordyce attended school until noon on Saturday. Invariably, Paul and his mother would wind up in front of the school about the time the boys and girls were dismissed. There was always a group of more prosperous “city” boys and girls waiting to tease the poor boy from the “country.” They made fun of his dusty old overalls, his bare feet, the way he talked, that beat-up wagon, and those tired old mules; they ridiculed the fact that he was so poor that he had to go around with his mother scraping for enough pennies to buy those things they couldn’t raise on the farm. In time, he and his mother moved on through town and past the hateful voices, but he knew they would be there when he and his mother came through the next Saturday, and the Saturday after that. At a vulnerable, impressionable time in his life, when his self-image was shaped by the way others saw him, those children had the power to make him feel inferior.
“I can pass that school now and hear those voices,” Bryant wrote in his 1974 autobiography, Bear, with John Underwood. “I still remember the ones that did it.”
Years later, when he was the very embodiment of his profession, Bryant often was asked what motivated him to succeed. “I didn’t want to have to go back behind that plow . . . or peddling through Fordyce with my mama,” he would say. “I was motivated by the fear of having to go back to that more than anything else.”
Those Saturday encounters helped shape the insecure boy’s evolution as a man. They fostered his feelings of inferiority, which infused him with an intense need for attention and acceptance and, for a while, made him an angry young man. But those encounters also lit a fire inside him. It seems clear that his incredible ambition was driven not merely by the desire to break free from a cycle of poverty, but also by the need to prove something to himself and all those voices of doubt that rang in his head. Like many men with weak fathers, he was driven by a determination to be strong.
“There were people who thought they were better than Paul, and I don’t think you ever get over that,” said his sister Louise. “He was never ashamed of where he came from or having been poor, but he never forgot the ones who belittled him and our mother. He was determined to show them he was made of something special.”
When Paul and his mother finished their rounds, they drove the wagon over to the Kilgore Brothers general store on Main Street. Ida’s brother, who owned the store and a hotel across the street and was considered their rich relative, would buy the rest of her vegetables as a favor and treat her to a good meal. Paul was so bashful and so self-conscious about his table manners, he didn’t want to go to the restaurant with his mother, so she let him buy a hunk of cheese and a handful of soda crackers and walk two blocks south to the railroad station to watch the afternoon train rumble through town. There was a water pump at the livery stable next door for when he got thirsty, as he always did after devouring his cheese and crackers. From the top of an old boxcar, he could see the courthouse clock; at four o’clock, he would head back to the wagon to help his mother load the supplies she had bought and head for home. Until then, he could dream about becoming a railroad man and riding one of those trains out of town for good.
· · ·
When the older boys came of age and started moving away, the Bryants hired a man to help around the farm. Mr. Dukes was a big, strong man in his forties who had his mind set on winning the affections of a teenage farm girl down the road. When he wasn’t busy riding past the girl’s house and enduring the wrath of her father, Dukes became an uncle of sorts to the youngest Bryant son. Bryant later credited the farmhand with teaching him the facts of life and how to cuss, among other skills. “He would teach me a few words, then he’d go tell Mama and she’d whip me,” Bryant said. Though he never said so, it seems clear that Dukes was more of an influence on him than his own father.
As a timid young boy, Bryant believed in the existence of ghosts and goblins. He was extremely fearful of graveyards and tombstones, especially the century-old marker that stood no more than fifty feet from their back door. Whenever he walked on that side of the farm, Paul always cut a wide swath around the grave, as if its inhabitant might rise up out of the ground and drag him under, as in one of his brother Jack’s scary stories. One night when Jack was a teenager and Paul was six or seven, Jack told Paul he would give him thirty-five cents to walk up to the grave and slap the tombstone. Naturally, Paul was scared, but thirty-five cents was thirty-five cents; in those days a man would work all day in the fields to make fifty cents, so thirty-five cents was a lot of money for a poor boy with no dependents.
After working up his courage, Paul accepted the challenge and walked slowly toward the grave as Jack watched. He was scared, but he just kept thi...
ON THE MORNING of December 29, 1982, Paul “Bear” Bryant leaned back on the sofa in his hotel suite and stared out the fourteenth-floor window overlooking the Mississippi River. For a moment, he seemed lost in the distance. A dozen men clutching notepads and pens waited for him to speak, the silence broken only by the muffled sounds of The Young and the Restless emanating from the bedroom television set, which someone had forgotten to turn off. He was dressed in a red sport coat, blue shirt, and gray slacks, and a steady trail of smoke flowed from the unfiltered Chesterfield cigarette dangling from his lips. On the day of the final game of his epic coaching career, Bryant’s sixty-nine-year-old face was a sea of wrinkles and sadness, and his usually vibrant, piercing eyes reflected his melancholy mood.
“I remember the first time I came to Memphis,” he mumbled to the small group of reporters, launching into a memory nearly sixty years old, of the day when he had hitchhiked from his home in Fordyce, Arkansas, to the banks of the big river. “So long ago . . .”
Two weeks after declaring Alabama’s Liberty Bowl date against Illinois as his final game on the sidelines, the winningest coach in college football history arrived in Memphis as an American folk hero who seemed larger than the game, larger than life. Calling him a football coach seemed inadequate, like referring to Frank Sinatra as a pop singer. The Bear’s presence demanded adjectives and bold type. In Memphis as in other southern cities and towns, he could not walk down the street without being mobbed. The clawing crowds even followed him into the men’s room. He was like a rock star or a monarch, but he was also a tired old man in failing health, and although he didn’t want to quit the game, he knew the time had come.
Several hours after this impromptu gathering, the Bear was late for a pregame meeting with key members of his staff at the team hotel. Sam Bailey, his longtime aide, who knew more than he wanted to know about the details of Bryant’s health, started worrying. His boss was a stickler for punctuality. Bailey feared the worst.
After searching throughout the hotel without success, Bailey happened to walk by a darkened ballroom on the first floor. He opened the door just a crack and saw his boss sitting all alone behind the head table, staring past all the empty chairs and into the darkness. He had a faraway look in his eye. Football had transformed the Bear from impoverished and insecure to wealthy and beloved. It had been his life. The old man knew more than a career was ending that night. He knew that something inside him was about to die.
· · ·
Around the turn of the century, Wilson Monroe Bryant migrated from Georgia to rural Arkansas, where he met his future wife, Ida Mae Kilgore, in church. Like many southerners of the time, the Bryants lived a life virtually untouched by the progress experienced in the industrial cities of the North. Much like their ancestors, who had blazed a trail through the American wilderness, Ida and Monroe and their nine children lived off the land and struggled against the elements to survive. They were simple people, sustained by their faith, hard-working, thrifty, and self-reliant. Monroe, a large man with a scrubby mustache and a distant, somewhat melancholy disposition, was the son of poor Georgia farmers. The couple settled on a small patch of land in a sparsely populated area between the hamlets of Fordyce and Kingsland, where the acres were cheap, plentiful, and unforgiving. The area was not marked on any map, but the Bryants and the half-dozen other families scattered among two or three square miles called their community Moro Bottom, for its proximity to Moro Creek.
Their domicile was more a shack than a house. A plank wood structure with a front porch running the length of the house and a wooden swing hanging by chains at one end, it consisted of four rooms: a kitchen with a fireplace used for heating and cooking; the parents’ bedroom; a children’s bedroom; and a living area called the “big room,” where some of the children also slept on pallets. They supported themselves by growing vegetables and raising chickens and hogs; they had no electricity, telephone, or indoor plumbing, but no one ever went to bed hungry or felt deprived of love.
Ida Bryant was a sturdy woman with long, prematurely graying hair. Friends and family members described her as a woman of unusual determination and resourcefulness. “Miss Ida was always a lady, but she was as tough as a sack of nails,” said her nephew, Dean Kilgore. In an era when women’s suffrage was the most divisive political issue, she was the dominant figure in the Bryant clan. While most of the children were still school age or younger, Monroe fell ill and was rendered a semi-invalid for the rest of his life. Unable to endure the kind of physically taxing work a family farm required, he mostly sat around the house. The illness may not have been purely physical: One night, after a big rain, Ida discovered Monroe missing from their bed, and after an exhaustive search, he was found sitting in a large mud puddle in the middle of the road that ran alongside the house. He couldn’t explain why he was sitting in a puddle of water in the middle of the night. Some of the neighbors and townsfolk who didn’t know any better believed he was lazy, and that became a burden for his youngest son. After he became ill, Ida took charge of the farm and was, in all but ceremonial functions, the head of the family.
Their faith was a powerful anchor for the Bryants. Before Paul was born, Ida had served for a short time as a lay preacher at Smith’s Chapel down the road toward Kingsland. That a woman was allowed to enter the pulpit in such a fundamentalist environment was a testament to the respect she enjoyed from her friends and neighbors. Every night after dinner and chores, the children gathered around their parents in the “big room” and listened, under the glow of a kerosene lamp, as Ida read a passage from the Bible. As far as the children could remember, the Bible was the only book their parents ever kept in the house. The Bryants believed so fervently in the strict teachings of the Church of God that they considered it sinful to seek medical treatment, Monroe’s mysterious illness lingered for at least fifteen years without a doctor’s care until he died in 1931 at the age of forty-six with what was believed to be a case of pneumonia.
“Mother and Daddy believed if you had enough faith you didn’t need a doctor,” said Louise Goolsby, the Bryants’ tenth child. “Well, Paul just couldn’t understand that. He thought his father suffered and died needlessly.”
Born on September 11, 1913—the year then-unknown Notre Dame used a new weapon called the forward pass to upset football powerhouse Army—Paul was the eleventh of twelve children. Ida never consulted a doctor during her pregnancies or the ensuing births. After delivering a child in her own bed, she usually returned to the fields within a few days. Three of her children died as infants. From oldest to youngest, the surviving children were Barney, Orie, Harlie, Jack, Ouida, Kathryn, Louise, Paul, and Frances.
The working day on the farm started before dawn, when Ida lit a lamp and walked around the small house waking her children, who slept two and three to a bed. There were cows to be milked, hogs to be slopped, water to be pumped from the well. At first light some headed for the fields to plow or pick, while others trudged off to school. It was grueling, back-breaking work, and as much as he hated it, Paul learned the value of hard work and sacrifice at an early age.
A mama’s boy who hung on her every word, Paul was shameless in pursuit of Ida’s attention. The special bond between Ida and her youngest son may have been cemented when he was about four years old. After he had misbehaved one night during the Bible reading, Monroe pulled down the boy’s pants and started whipping his naked butt with a long wooden paddle with a hole in it. The boy cried and cried, and Monroe kept on whipping him until Ida, who was standing nearby with the other children, thought he had crossed a line; fearing for her son, she pulled Monroe off Paul and told him never to hit another child of hers like that again. The boy’s father dropped the paddle and walked away. The challenge to his authority as the man of the house enraged and embarrassed Monroe, and his relationship-with his wife and children was never quite the same. From that point on, Ida handled all the discipline. Paul was a mischievous boy who always seemed to be trying his parents’ patience—he once created a community scandal by stealing watermelons from a neighbor’s garden—and Ida was not one to spare the rod on him or any of their other children; when one of the children misbehaved, she pulled out her plum tree switch and got busy. But her discipline was always tempered by her memories of Monroe’s whipping.
By the time he was six or seven, Paul’s brothers were mostly grown up and were leaving to make their own homes, so as the only remaining son he was responsible for feeding the mules and hitching them to the family’s wagon every morning before breakfast. During the week, he and his sisters would drive the wagon to the one-room schoolhouse three miles down the dirt road in Kingsland, a town of some nine hundred souls that was really just a larger collection of small dirt farms. The trip required crossing Moro Creek, which was no simple task after a big rain. In fact, Jack Bryant, who fancied himself a shrewd businessman, kept a team handy to pull the occasional wagon or automobile out of the drink—for a reasonable price. During the bitterly cold winters, when the creek sometimes froze solid, Paul and his sisters would heat bricks in the fireplace and sit on them during the trip to Kingsland to keep from freezing. On Saturdays throughout the year, Paul and his mother would load the wagon with vegetables, butter, milk, and eggs and head for Fordyce to peddle the homegrown merchandise door-to-door.
Years later, whenever a writer referred to Fordyce as Bryant’s hometown, he always made a point of emphasizing that Moro Bottom, which wasn’t a town at all, held that distinction. This was his way of saying he never forgot those unhappy Saturdays. Fordyce was a town of about thirty-six hundred people in the early 1920s. Its downtown included two general stores, a movie theater, a train station, a hotel, a dry goods store, and a livery stable, among other points of interests. In those days, the children of Fordyce attended school until noon on Saturday. Invariably, Paul and his mother would wind up in front of the school about the time the boys and girls were dismissed. There was always a group of more prosperous “city” boys and girls waiting to tease the poor boy from the “country.” They made fun of his dusty old overalls, his bare feet, the way he talked, that beat-up wagon, and those tired old mules; they ridiculed the fact that he was so poor that he had to go around with his mother scraping for enough pennies to buy those things they couldn’t raise on the farm. In time, he and his mother moved on through town and past the hateful voices, but he knew they would be there when he and his mother came through the next Saturday, and the Saturday after that. At a vulnerable, impressionable time in his life, when his self-image was shaped by the way others saw him, those children had the power to make him feel inferior.
“I can pass that school now and hear those voices,” Bryant wrote in his 1974 autobiography, Bear, with John Underwood. “I still remember the ones that did it.”
Years later, when he was the very embodiment of his profession, Bryant often was asked what motivated him to succeed. “I didn’t want to have to go back behind that plow . . . or peddling through Fordyce with my mama,” he would say. “I was motivated by the fear of having to go back to that more than anything else.”
Those Saturday encounters helped shape the insecure boy’s evolution as a man. They fostered his feelings of inferiority, which infused him with an intense need for attention and acceptance and, for a while, made him an angry young man. But those encounters also lit a fire inside him. It seems clear that his incredible ambition was driven not merely by the desire to break free from a cycle of poverty, but also by the need to prove something to himself and all those voices of doubt that rang in his head. Like many men with weak fathers, he was driven by a determination to be strong.
“There were people who thought they were better than Paul, and I don’t think you ever get over that,” said his sister Louise. “He was never ashamed of where he came from or having been poor, but he never forgot the ones who belittled him and our mother. He was determined to show them he was made of something special.”
When Paul and his mother finished their rounds, they drove the wagon over to the Kilgore Brothers general store on Main Street. Ida’s brother, who owned the store and a hotel across the street and was considered their rich relative, would buy the rest of her vegetables as a favor and treat her to a good meal. Paul was so bashful and so self-conscious about his table manners, he didn’t want to go to the restaurant with his mother, so she let him buy a hunk of cheese and a handful of soda crackers and walk two blocks south to the railroad station to watch the afternoon train rumble through town. There was a water pump at the livery stable next door for when he got thirsty, as he always did after devouring his cheese and crackers. From the top of an old boxcar, he could see the courthouse clock; at four o’clock, he would head back to the wagon to help his mother load the supplies she had bought and head for home. Until then, he could dream about becoming a railroad man and riding one of those trains out of town for good.
· · ·
When the older boys came of age and started moving away, the Bryants hired a man to help around the farm. Mr. Dukes was a big, strong man in his forties who had his mind set on winning the affections of a teenage farm girl down the road. When he wasn’t busy riding past the girl’s house and enduring the wrath of her father, Dukes became an uncle of sorts to the youngest Bryant son. Bryant later credited the farmhand with teaching him the facts of life and how to cuss, among other skills. “He would teach me a few words, then he’d go tell Mama and she’d whip me,” Bryant said. Though he never said so, it seems clear that Dukes was more of an influence on him than his own father.
As a timid young boy, Bryant believed in the existence of ghosts and goblins. He was extremely fearful of graveyards and tombstones, especially the century-old marker that stood no more than fifty feet from their back door. Whenever he walked on that side of the farm, Paul always cut a wide swath around the grave, as if its inhabitant might rise up out of the ground and drag him under, as in one of his brother Jack’s scary stories. One night when Jack was a teenager and Paul was six or seven, Jack told Paul he would give him thirty-five cents to walk up to the grave and slap the tombstone. Naturally, Paul was scared, but thirty-five cents was thirty-five cents; in those days a man would work all day in the fields to make fifty cents, so thirty-five cents was a lot of money for a poor boy with no dependents.
After working up his courage, Paul accepted the challenge and walked slowly toward the grave as Jack watched. He was scared, but he just kept thi...
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- PublisherSt. Martin's Griffin
- Publication date2005
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- ISBN 13 9780312348762
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