Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

But I am proud of Charlie Bundrum. I want my grandfather to walk out of the past—with Ava, God rest her soul, beside him. If what I have heard about Charlie and Ava is true, he would not have minded having just a little bit of a head start on her, so he could have some fun before she got there.

  As for me, I got what I came for.

  Charlie Bundrum, though I never even saw his face, would have wanted us. He would have held us high in one of those legendary hands, like a new bulldog puppy, and laughed out loud. He would have watched over us, slipping us Indian head pennies and Mercury dimes. And every Friday, when my momma went into town to cash her check, he would have fed nickels into the mechanized bucking horse outside the A&P, to see us ride.

  I am not sure of that because it’s what I want, because it’s the way a boy would have built himself a grandfather. But the actual man, a flawed and sometimes boozy man, would have done it all, if he had lived. I am sure of this because that actual man lived just long enough to reach for one of us, a boy older than me, and prove it.

  In the fall of 1997, an Alabama newspaper sent a reporter to interview my mother. I sat in her living room on the chert hill in northeastern Alabama and shook my head as she deftly deflected the reporter’s questions about her sacrifices, about her hard life, and laughed when she said she was just walking around the house in her old age, trying not to fall off the pedestal that I had put her on.

  Then the reporter, a nice lady from Birmingham, asked her to recall the best day of her life. It was a splendid question. I wrote one whole book about her, and forgot to ask it.

  I thought my momma, who had lived her life in borrowed houses, might say that it was the day I handed her the keys to her own home—partial payment of a debt I will never really repay. Or I thought she would say it was the day that Shoutin’, a book that honored her, was printed, and I handed her a copy with her face on the cover.

  I should have known better. Books and houses. Paper and wood.

  “I believe,” she said, “it was the birth of my first son, Sam.”

  It was the eleventh of September 1956, and Daddy was absent, which was a cause for concern but not alarm. He would show up sooner or later, in weeks or months, as soon as he had drank Korea away, as soon as the faces of dead men had slipped once more beneath the calm brown surface of bootleg whiskey.

  When Daddy left he took the rent with him, so she had nowhere else to take the baby except home. Charlie and Ava lived in a rented house on Alabama 21, in the woods behind Wright’s store, and she took him there. What is it people say about home? It is where you go when no one else wants you.

  My grandfather took the baby in his hands, engulfing him, and grinned.

  “By God, Margaret,” he said, “you’ve got Samson here.” And he held him for hours.

  No one slept much that night. The next day my grandfather, grumbling but good-natured, said it was too damn noisy to rest. It wasn’t that the baby had cried. The baby had not cried at all.

  “Margaret,” he said, “you kept us up all night, a’talkin’ to that boy.”

  My momma stopped then, done, as if the rest of the story, the best part, was hers alone. Finally the reporter asked her: “Well, what were you saying?”

  “I just kept whisperin’,” she said, “over and over, ‘You’re mine. You’re mine.’

  “I never did have anything,” she said, which is as close as I have ever heard her come to feeling sorry, even a little, for herself. It was just that she wanted her visitor to understand.

  “I didn’t even have a doll. But he was mine. He belonged to me.”

  I understood. I had heard her tell stories of the poverty she and her brothers and sisters had been born to, heard them all recount hard times with that benign nonchalance of their generation, like the poverty was some mean dog that had long since died from old age. Even with a daddy who worked hard, luxury was a piece of hard penny candy, plucked from a tiny brown-paper sack. It melted, in minutes.

  But now here was this amazing, tiny thing, and she would have him, with luck, all of her life. And as long as her own father lived, the boy would be protected as she had always been protected. Only the generation had changed, not his character. The sky would still clear.

  They got so much more than that. Charlie Bundrum, in the last year of his life, seemed to focus all his love, all his attention, on Sam. He would rest in the yard with one long, skinny leg crossed over the other, and for hours he would talk to the baby, sing to him, just look at him. He drilled a hole in a silver dime and put it on string, then slipped it over the boy’s head. He carried him around on his hip or in the crook of his arm, and recited senseless rhymes …

  Ain’t goin’ to town

  Ain’t goin’ to city

  Goin’ on down

  To Diddy-Wah-Diddy

  … until the baby would laugh.

  He would buy soft candy, in the shape of a peanut, and hide it in the bib pocket of his overalls. Sam learned, over time, that it was there, and would go prowling through the pocket with such dead-serious intent that my grandfather would just sit and laugh.

  At night, as my grandfather slept, the boy would toddle over to the coal bin and pick up a piece of coal, then toddle back across the room and drop the lump in one of my grandfather’s work boots. He would repeat the process, over and over, as my momma and grandmother sat and smiled, until he had filled both boots full of coal. Sam was single-minded, even then, and when he was done he would look proudly at my momma and gurgle something, as if to say, “See what a fine boy you have?” Then she would scoop him up and scrub his hands clean, to get rid of the evidence.

  In the morning my grandfather would awaken, and without even glancing at the boy he would reach down, pick up his sooty boots and dump the coal back into the bin, wearily shaking his head, mumbling, “Now how do you reckon that got in there? Must be fairies.”

  Sometimes, in the mornings, the still-young man would hold his side, from sharp pains deep, deep inside him, but would go off to work anyway, if he had a house to roof that day. If he didn’t have work, he scooped up the boy and walked outside, a worn-down man and a brand-new one, killing time.

  “Daddy,” Momma told me, a lifetime later, “was a fool over Sam.”

  Part of the story I had heard before, about the day my daddy came for them, how Charlie Bundrum told him to git or take a whip-pin’, then told my momma she was grown and could make up her own mind, but if she left, she could not take Sam. She did not return to my daddy until her father died, when Sam was not yet three years old. Life was hard after that, for a real long time.

  “I’ve always figured that if Daddy had lived he would have killed your daddy, for the way he treated us,” she told me, softly, almost in a whisper. It was not just something to say. It was something that would have happened.

  People still say what a shame it was that he died so young, at fifty-one, but I cannot say he died too soon. He lived long enough to see most of his children grown. He lasted, with his liver and heart ravaged by whiskey and hard living, till my brother Sam came into this world, and then he hung on, to save my mother and big brother from the sadness beyond his door, for as long as he could.

  Sam, being so small, remembers almost none of it, none of it except the candy in the bib pocket of the overalls. That he recalls dim and dreamy, and vaguely sweet. He does not remember getting that dime on the string. He just knows he has always had it.

  One fall day, a lifetime later, we were fishing at a lake bracketed by the Roy Webb Road and Carpenter’s Lane, casting rubber worms into the dense duck weed, not saying much, just living. All my life Sam has outfished me, and I’ve come to expect his amused, pitying look as I reel in my spinner bait with a big dollop of algae on the hook and nothing else. I know I should not care about that, but I do, because he is my big brother and forever will be, even when we sit one day wheezing and befuddled in the county home.

  But that day, the world was upside down. I cast into a clear spot in the weed and caught a ni
ce little bass, and then another, and another. I caught six. He did not catch any.

  We finally decided to pick up the tackle and go on home, and it was hard for me, a grown man, not to just prance around and around him in a circle.

  Sam just slipped the rods into the back of the Ford Bronco and, without even looking at me, dismissed the whole afternoon with a grunt. “Ricky,” he said, “I was fishin’ for the big fish.”

  Then he stared up at a perfect blue sky, a sky without a cloud.

  “And everybody knows,” he said, “the big fish won’t bite on a bluebird day.”

  I just looked at him, because I did not have a rock to throw. On the one day I outfish him, he is spouting poetry.

  Yet I could not help but wonder where that phrase, that lovely phrase, came from. Who still talks like that, I wondered, in a modern-day South that has become so homogenized, so bland, that middle school children in Atlanta make fun of people who sound Southern? I found out it was just something my grandfather and men like him used to say, something passed down to him, to us, like a silver pocket watch.

  A man like Charlie Bundrum doesn’t leave much else, not title or property, not even letters in the attic. There’s just stories, all told second-and thirdhand, as long as somebody remembers. The thing to do, if you can, is write them down on new paper.

  1.

  The beatin’ of Blackie Lee

  The foothills of the Appalachians

  THE 1930S

  Ava met him at a box-lunch auction outside. Gadsden, Alabama, when she was barely fifteen, when a skinny boy in freshly washed overalls stepped from the crowd of bidders, pointed to her and said, “I got one dollar, by God.” In the evening they danced in the grass to a fiddler and banjo picker, and Ava told all the other girls she was going to marry that boy someday, and she did. But to remind him that he was still hers, after the cotton rows aged her and the babies came, she had to whip a painted woman named Blackie Lee.

  Maybe it isn’t quite right to say that she whipped her. To whip somebody, down here, means there was an altercation between two people, and somebody, the one still standing, won. This wasn’t that. This was a beatin’, and it is not a moment that glimmers in family history. But of all the stories I was told of their lives together, this one proves how Ava loved him, and hated him, and which emotion won out in the end.

  Charlie Bundrum was what women here used to call a purty man, a man with thick, sandy hair and blue eyes that looked like something you would see on a rich woman’s bracelet. His face was as thin and spare as the rest of him, and he had a high-toned, chin-in-the-air presence like he had money, but he never did. His head had never quite caught up with his ears, which were still too big for most human beings, but the women of his time were not particular as to ears, I suppose.

  He was also a man who was not averse to stopping off at the bootlegger’s now and again, and that was where he encountered a traveling woman with crimson lipstick and silk stockings named Blackie Lee. People called her Blackie because of her coal-black hair, and when she told my granddaddy that she surely was parched and tired and sure would ’preciate a place to wash her clothes and rest a spell before she moved on down the road, he told her she was welcome at his house.

  They were living in north Georgia at that time, outside Rome. Ava and the five children—there was only James, William, Edna, Juanita and Margaret then—were a few miles away, working in Newt Morrison’s cotton field. Charlie always took in strays—dogs, men and women, who needed a place—but Blackie was a city woman and pretty, too, which set the stage for mayhem.

  It all might have gone unnoticed. Blackie Lee might’ve washed her clothes, set a spell and then just moved along, if that was all that she was after. But we’ll never know. We’ll never know because she had the misfortune to hang her stockings on Ava Bundrum’s clothesline in front of God and everybody.

  Miles away from there, Ava was hunched over in the cotton field, dragging a heavy sack, her fingers and thumbs on fire from the needle-sharp stickers on the cotton bolls. Newt Morrison’s daughter, Sis, came up alongside of her in the field, one row over, and lit the fuse.

  “Ava,” said Sis, who had driven past Ava and Charlie’s house earlier that day, “did you get you some silk stockings?”

  Ava said no she had not, what foolishness, and just picked on.

  “Well,” Sis said, “is your sister Grace visitin’ you?”

  No, Ava said, if Grace had come to visit, she would have written or sent word.

  “Well,” said Sis, “I drove past y’all’s place and seen some silk stockings on the line, and I thought they must have been Grace’s, ’cause she’s the only one I could think of that would have silk stockings.”

  Ava said well, maybe it was Grace, and picked on. Grace had wed a rich man and had silk stockings and a good car and may have come by, just on a whim. That must be it. Had to be.

  Edna, then only a little girl, said her momma just kept her back bowed and her face down for a few more rows, then jerked bolt upright as if she had been stung by a bee, snatched the cotton sack from her neck and flung it, heavy as it was, across two rows.

  Then she just started walking, and the children, puzzled, hurried after her. Even as an old woman Ava could walk most people plumb into the ground, and as a young woman she just lowered her head and swung her arms and kicked up dust as she powered down the dirt road to home.

  When she swung into the yard, sometime later, it was almost dark and Blackie Lee was on the porch, cooling herself. Ava stopped and drew a breath and just looked at her for a moment, measuring her for her coffin. Then she stomped over to the woodpile and picked up the ax.

  About that time it must have dawned on Blackie Lee who this young woman was, who these big-eyed children were, and she ran inside, put the latch down on the door and began to speak to Jesus.

  Ava just stood there, breathing hard, her long hair half in and half out of her dew rag, and announced that the woman could either open the door and take her beatin’ or take her beatin’ after Ava hacked down her own door. And “you might not want me to walk in thar, with a’ ax in my hand.” Blackie Lee, hysterical, unlatched the door and stepped back, and Ava, as she promised, dropped the ax and stepped inside.

  She might not have beat the woman quite so bad if it had not been for the dishpan. It had dirty water in it, from that woman’s clothes. No one, no one, washed their clothes in Ava’s dishpan.

  Edna stood at the door, peeking.

  Listen to her:

  “Momma beat her all through the house. She beat her out onto the porch, beat her out into the yard and beat her down to the road, beat her so hard that her hands swelled up so big she couldn’t fit ’em in her apron pocket. Then she grabbed aholt of her with one hand and used the other hand to flag down a car that was comin’, and she jerked open that car door and flung that woman in and told the man drivin’ that car to get her ‘on outta here.’ And that man said, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and drove off with Blackie Lee.”

  Charlie was at work when this happened, which was very fortunate, so fortunate that even now his children swear there was God’s hand in it. Even with temptation at his house, he went off to work and made a living, and it saved him, it saved everything. A weak man would have just laid out that day, and if he had been home Ava would have killed him dead as Julius Caesar.

  Ava and the five children went back to Newt Morrison’s to spend the night. Newt was distant kin and Ava knew she was welcome there. But first she walked inside her house and threw that dishpan out into the yard as far as she could.

  That night, Charlie showed up to take them home. And Ava lit into him so hard and so fast that Charlie lost one of his shoes in the melee and had to fight from an uneven platform, which is bad when you have what seems to be a badger crawling and spittin’ around your head. They fought, Edna said, all the way down the hall, crashing hard into the wall, making a hellish racket and scaring everybody in there to death. Children screamed and dogs barked and Charl
ie just kept on hollerin’ over and over, “Dammit, Ava. Quit.” Finally they crashed onto a bed, and into the room walked the old man, Newt, barefoot, one of his overall galluses on and one off. Newt thought that it was Charlie who was beating his wife to death, instead of the other way around, and all he knew was that this boy, Charlie, kin or not, had invaded his home, rattled the walls and frightened his family.

  Newt, stooped and gray and gnarly, was much too old to fist-fight a man in his own house. So he reached into his overalls pocket, fished out his pocketknife and flicked out a blade long enough to cut watermelon.

  Ava took one look at that knife and flung her body across her husband, to shield him. Then she looked up at Newt, and when she spoke there were spiders and broken glass in her voice.

  “Don’t you touch him,” she hissed.

  Everybody has a moment like it. If they never did, they never did love nobody, truly. People who have lived a long, long time say it, so it must be so.

  They never spoke about it. They never had another moment like it again. They fought—my Lord, did they fight—for thirty years, until the children were mostly grown and gone. But they stuck. You go through as much as they did, you stick. I have seen old people do it out of spite, as if growing old together was some sweet revenge. Charlie and Ava did not get to grow old together. What they got was life condensed, something richer and sweeter and—yes—more bitter and violent, life with the dull moments just boiled or scorched away.

  She never bowed to him, and he never made her, and they lived that way, in the time they had.

  Every now and then, they would jab a little. She would stand over her new dishpan and recite a little poem as she gently rinsed her iron skillet and biscuit pans:

  Single life is a happy life

  Single life is a pleasure

  I am single and no man’s wife

  And no man can control me

  He would pretend not to hear. And bide his time, to get even.