Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  “Daddy,” Margaret would ask him when she was still a little girl, “how come you haven’t bought us a radio?”

  Charlie would just shake his head.

  “Hon, we don’t need no radio,” he would say, and then he would point one of his long, bony fingers at Ava. “I already got a walkie-talkie.”

  And on and on it went, them pretending, maybe out of pride, that they did not love each other, and need each other, as much as they did.

  As time dragged on they would break out the banjo—Charlie was hell-hot on a banjo—and the guitar, which Ava played a lifetime. And in the light of an old kerosene lantern, as the children looked on from their beds, they would duel.

  Charlie would do “Doin’ My Time”—his commentary on marriage—and grin while she stared hard at him from behind her spectacles:

  On this ol’ rock pile

  With a ball and chain

  They call me by a number

  Not my name

  Gotta do my time

  Lord, Lord

  Gotta do my time

  Then Ava would answer with “Wildwood Flower” or something like it:

  I’ll sing and I’ll dance

  And my laugh shall be gay

  I’ll charm every heart

  And the crowd I will sway

  I’ll live yet to see him

  Regret the dark hour

  When he won and neglected

  This frail wildwood flower

  And Charlie would sing back at her with another song, about being on a chain gang, or doing time in a Yankee prison, or “All the Good Times Are Past and Gone”:

  I wish to the Lord

  I’d never been born

  Or “Knoxville Girl”:

  We went to take an evening walk

  About a mile from town

  I picked a stick up off the ground

  And knocked that fair girl down

  But it always ended in dancing, somehow. He would beat those banjo strings and she would buck-dance around the kitchen, her skirts in her hands, her heavy shoes smacking into the boards, and the children would laugh, because it is impossible not to when your momma acts so young.

  Much, much later, when she had passed seventy, she still played and she still sang but she could not really see how to tune her guitar, and her hand shook too much to do it right, anyway. She would miss a lick now and then, and she would always frown at what time had done to her. But she never forgot the words.

  I’ll think of him never

  I’ll be wild and gay

  I’ll cease this wild weeping, Drive sorrow away

  But I wake from my dreaming

  My idol was clay

  My visions of love

  Have all vanished away

  It didn’t all start there, of course, with the beating of that unfortunate woman. The beginning of their story goes way, way back, beyond them, even beyond the first Bundrum to drift here, to these green foothills that straddle the Alabama-Georgia border. In it, I found not only the beginnings of a family history but a clue to our character.

  All my life, I have heard the people of the foothills described as poor, humble people, and I knew that was dead wrong. My people were, surely, poor, but they were seldom humble. Charlie sure wasn’t, and his daddy wasn’t, and I suspect that his daddy’s daddy wasn’t humble a bit. And Ava, who married into that family, was no wilting flower, either. A little humility, a little meekness of spirit, might have spared us some pain, over the years, but the sad truth is, it’s just not in us. With the exception of my own mother, maybe, it never was.

  For a family so often poor, we have, for a hundred years or more, refused to adapt our character very much. But then, if we had been willing to change just a little bit, we never would have gotten here in the first place.

  We are here because our ancestors were too damn hardheaded to adapt, to assimilate. We are here because someone with a name very much like Bundrum picked a fight with the King of France, and the Church of Rome.

  2.

  Run off

  On the Coosa in the 1960s

  AND BACK IN TIME

  I was near a fish camp on the Coosa backwater near Leesburg, on the road by Yellow Creek Falls, when I saw my first real buck dance. It was not quite dark, but some fishermen had built a big campfire beside the river and heaved a truck tire on top of it to repel the skeeters. I remember how the oily smoke from the tire wafted over the cattails, how the water had gone black as ink, how glad I was that I was not swimming in it anymore. The tips of spinning rods sprouted from the back of one man’s truck, and the doors were wide open, making it easier to hear the radio. It was country, or maybe bluegrass, reedy and scratchy from the speaker, and it serenaded them as they showed off stringers of crappie. It was a scene I had seen so many times that, even though I was still a boy, I almost didn’t see it at all. The men had a bottle, and some beer pulled from the same Styrofoam ice chest as the fish, and I stood in the empty parking lot of a bait shop and watched them as I waited for my momma to come out so we could go home. The most I could hope for, I thought as I chunked rocks into the cattails, was to hear some cuss words from the men I had never heard before. Drinking always leads to cussing. Fishing does, too. Or maybe it is merely the absence of wives.

  I got a better show than that. One of the men, gaunt, bent and ancient, began to pound on his leg with one fist in rough time to that music. Then, as old, drunk men will, he commenced to dance.

  But I had never seen a dance like this. It was not rhythmic, not fluid. The old man stomped hard at the gravel, then shuffled a bit before stomping down hard again, as if he was trying to stamp out fires or snakes. And as he danced he clutched a jelly glass filled with what had to be likker in his hand, and I thought it sure was dumb, because he would only wind up spilling it all over himself. But it was only the bottom part of that old man that was in motion. He held the rest of his body still as a cement angel, his head back, his arms at his sides, as his legs, as if unbidden, did the work. It scared me a little bit.

  But it was just buck dancing, about the only kind of dancing my people did. There were no reels, no shags, just this. Folklorists trace it to Ireland and Wales and other places, and it became, over time, the odd ballet that I saw on a riverbank not far from the falls, the stench of burning tires in the wind. I cannot recall the tune, but I can still see that old man banging his bootheels together, spinning, stomping. It was to gentler dancing what a hurtling freight train is to a buggy ride, and it belongs to us, just us. We don’t even know how to do it anymore, but it’s ours.

  Charlie Bundrum was a buck dancer. He had danced it happy, with his work boots skillfully avoiding the tiny feet of laughing girls. And he had danced it sad, lit by a campfire and fresh out of whiskey as his hunting buddy plucked a tune on a Jew’s harp. He knew the steps, but he could not have told you where they came from, where they led.

  Charlie could not read. His daddy could not read, and his daddy’s daddy could not. There were no old family Bibles in their attics, no giant leather-bound books in which people scribbled an entire family history, listing births, deaths, marriages, war records, baptisms and all the rest. I have seen those books, other people’s, littered with yellowed birth certificates, faded blue 4-H Club ribbons and tendrils of lace from hundred-year-old wedding gowns. I always had the feeling that if I shook those Bibles hard enough, the darker, more secret histories would flutter out, too.

  My mother kept our memories in a suitcase. It was brown and the size of a portable record player, and it and everything in it burned up in a house fire after I was grown. It had held birth certificates, long letters from my daddy, pictures we drew for her at school, a matchstick cross, vaccination cards, valentines cut from red construction paper, a plaster impression of my right hand, and locks of my baby brother’s hair. But it was only about us, and had held no clues to where we came from.

  Ava had a family Bible—actually, she had about half a dozen of them. Once, when I sneaked into th
e dark of her bedroom to go prowling, I opened a massive white leather Bible and found … well, I guess I found her. Between the pages were petrified sticks of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, light bills seven years overdue, autographed pictures of Lurleen Wallace, Elvis Presley and Howell Heflin, neatly folded candy bar wrappers, a bill for salvation from Oral Roberts and scraps of prayer, handwritten on the back of envelopes and old Christmas cards. Only Ava would hide prayers in a Bible.

  There was no trail here, either. There was no written history. Perhaps, where our family is concerned, there never was. We get some names and dates from army enlistments, marriage records, voting rolls. Only by traveling back through those thin records do we know where we came from, and who the first Bundrum was on this side of the Atlantic, or at least who we believe it was.

  Some relatives dispute it, but one thing rings absolutely true: The first Bundrum, if the connection is correct, was just one more poor fool who got run off from someplace else. And being run off, I learned, is a rich family tradition.

  Charlie’s granddad, James B. Bundrum, who served in the Army of Tennessee, was run off by the Union army. An uncle, John Lewis, was run off by revenuers and didn’t stop till he was across the Tennessee River. Charlie’s own daddy, Jimmy Jim, was run off by the same revenuers, all the way to south Georgia. In my childhood, men were still being run off.

  “Hey, whatever happened to ol’…?” you ask.

  “He got run off,” someone will say.

  “Oh,” you say.

  Gettin’ run off only means you did something bad, and got caught but probably not prosecuted. You can be run off by the rich and powerful, by the government or by hateful women with tiny pistols and no sense of humor.

  The first Bundrum—this much we do know—was fleeing something much worse than that.

  His name was not Bundrum but Bondurant, Jean Pierre Bondurant. His journey began in a time of castles and flaming crosses and hanged men, in the din of swords ringing on shields. The events that brought this man to the New World began, if the connection is correct, almost half a millennium ago, as men murdered each other in the name of God. He was a Huguenot.

  Wandering people, set adrift by the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were the disenfranchised French Protestants, “walkers of the night,” forced to pray in caves, in secret. They had been a strong religious and military force once, which did not endear the sect to Catholics, and it took centuries to beat them down.

  In a quest for power in the name of faith, a story as old as the Bible, the two sides fought a bloody civil war, smashing idols and crosses, burning churches, murdering. On August 24, 1572, some thirty thousand Protestants were killed as Catholics took almost total control of the country in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Protestants were ostracized, and banned from holding office or respectable jobs.

  They were doomed to a life of servitude or starvation, doomed to wander. In some villages the sect was tolerated, but in others its members were beaten, mutilated and hanged. The darkest time was that of Louis XIV, who ushered in an era of nightmare. In 1664 it was decreed that “persons who should speak in public against the doctrines and ceremonies of the Roman religion should be punished by having the lips slit, and the tongue pierced by a hot iron.”

  That first Bundrum, who did not even know he was one, is no more to us than a name on a ship’s passenger manifest. Ship records show that Jean Pierre Bondurant fled to Geneva and then found passage over to England. In late summer of 1700, he boarded the ship Peter and Anthony, bound for America. Records show that the ship landed September 20, 1700, in a Huguenot town in Virginia called Manakintowne.

  His children and grandchildren—some of them—drifted south, the name Bondurant shifting to Bundren and then Bundrum in deeds, census lists and marriage records. They settled on both sides of the Alabama-Georgia line, voting, marrying, leaving scant records but enough to know they were here, among the first white settlers in these foothills in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

  They were farmers. They raised their children on deer meat, salt pork and hoecakes, and pushed ever, ever deeper into the forest of the Southern tribes. The Creeks went to war to stop it, and all but disappeared from the earth. By the middle 1800s, these woods were full of Bondurants, Bundrens, Bundrums and variations of the name.

  The first Bundrum we can put a face to was a gray-bearded, flint-eyed old farm laborer and logger named James B. Bundrum, my grandfather’s grandfather, who marched off to fight for the South—and for states’ rights, I suppose, because he damn sure didn’t own any slaves.

  He fought Sherman and U. S. Grant in the up-country as part of the Army of Tennessee, survived camp sickness in the invasion of Kentucky and Yankee sharpshooters in the battle at Chickasaw Bayou, then came home half-starved from the ashes of Georgia to plow a borrowed mule on another man’s acreage in Cleburne County in northeastern Alabama.

  James B. was husband to Mary Butts, and father to John, William, James, Andy, Sarah, Martha, Louvade and Adiline. Widowed in his old age, he married Sarah Ford and fathered Richard and Monroe. Widowed again, he married Nancy Thompson after the turn of the century when he was near to dying but apparently still inclined to companionship.

  He had been poor when he left for the war and he was poor when he came home—what he lost to it was friends, and time. In what Congress had the gall to call “Reconstruction,” he labored with the same men that he fought beside, men named Bishop, Hammett, Ingram, Kilgore, Nickson, Shellnutt, Cochran, Butler, Carder, Brown, Cooper, Harrell, Henderson, Hulsey, Jackson, Langley, Moody, Pinkard, Robertson, Childers, Law, Nance, Williams, Wright, Ayers, Caldwell, Camp, Farmer, McGinnis, Morrison, Nick-les, Pruitt, Woods, Young, Strickland, Holmes, Kiker, Love, Sanders, Turner and Hamilton, not just names in eroding graveyard granite but names that still live in the thin telephone books and high school football programs here at home. A hundred years later I threw rocks at their descendants across cotton fields and made faces at their great-great-great-granddaughters on the school bus.

  They hammered together towns and laid tracks and cut roads, and the designs they carved in this landscape are still here. I have walked railroad trestles they built, crossties rough under my bare feet.

  James B. died in 1912. He left no letters and one picture, taken late in his life. It shows a man with eyes like gray marbles and a slash of a mouth set hard and thin above white whiskers that fall halfway down his chest, and his cheeks are grooved and pocked. He is dressed in black clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. He looks like a preacher—but it might have just been Sunday.

  What he left behind was children, and they carried the Bun-drum name over several counties. His boy James Junior, whom everybody just called Jimmy Jim, was Charlie’s father, my mother’s grandfather and my great-grandfather.

  He was a logger and sawmill hand and a whiskey man, to tell the truth. Lay your hands on the oldest houses in this corner of the world, and you can feel his touch in the wood. He used axes and crosscut saws to fell the trees, and dragged them from the woods with teams of horses. In time, that old-growth timber can get hard as iron, so hard you can bend a sharp nail in it. From what we know of Jimmy Jim, and of his nature, you couldn’t drive a nail in him, either.

  Him, we know.

  But his story, which is Charlie’s childhood, almost vanished into the ground with the few very old men and women who remember him, and some of them could not bring him into focus sometimes. They would begin their stories but not always finish them, the same way they used to throw a silver dollar across the Coosa River in, well, sometime, somewhere.

  Then I talked to Claude.

  He had lived eighty-six years and begun to talk about dying, not in any self-pitying way but matter-of-fact, the same way he talks about cutting his grass. The two things are inevitable, as Claude Bundrum sees it, two things he has to do sooner or later. Dying would get him out of some yard work, but summer after summer has come and gone and Claude’s yard is s
till just as neat as a widow’s closet.

  He lives with his wife, Margaret, in a little house on Mountain Avenue in Jacksonville, Alabama, and walks with a cane now, when he goes to visit his sister Myrtle.

  “They took out one lung and seven ribs when I was a younger man, and they give up on me that time,” said Claude, who is my grandfather’s nephew and the last, rickety bridge to Charlie Bun-drum’s childhood. “When I was eighty-three I had pneumonia, and they give me up that time, too. Now they say I got kidney trouble and … Well, a man can’t live always.”

  He remembers his granddad sharp and clear, like a broken bottle. He remembers how everyone walked soft around him, like he was king of the woods.

  Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lot of them, don’t understand fury. They understand anger and even hatred, but fury is one of those old words that have gone out of style. Jimmy Jim Bundrum understood it. It rode his shoulder like a parrot.

  3.

  Jimmy Jim

  The foothills

  1900–1920

  His temper was hot as bird’s blood, and his eyes seemed to burn, even in photographs. He had a hooked nose and thick brown mustaches and wore overalls with a black suit coat over them, and was known to carry a little .22 pistol in his coat pocket. He largely disregarded any laws or influence outside his own will, and some people did not like to look him dead in the eye because it made them feel weak. “He was dark-headed, and wasn’t scared of the devil,” said Claude Bundrum, who grew up in Jimmy Jim’s long shadow. “He always drank, and done what he wanted.”

  But then, there were not many saints working at the end of an ax handle in the woods of Alabama and Georgia, as an era of failed, corrupt reconstruction gave way to a new century.