Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

The foothills

  THE 1920S

  He could run, man, could he run. Up and over the ridges and down, down into the hollows, he trailed the dogs that trailed the possums, his ears tuned to their music. The hounds would bark short and sharp as they ran through the darkness, their miraculous noses scudding along the pine needles and dead leaves, seeking, seeking, all the time gaining, gaining. Charlie ran with a tow sack trailing his back pocket, swinging a lantern from one fist, and in the pitch black of the woods it looked like a ball of lightning bouncing through the brush and trees. Then the timbre of the music would change, from the quick, static barks to an urgent, mournful howl, and Charlie would shout out “Treed!” to the men who were too old or fat or drunk to keep up, and he’d follow that sound to the dogs. The hounds, their ears half chewed away from encounters with angry coons and bobcats, would be quivering and baying and staring up into the dark branches, doing what they were bred to do. The possum, silver-gray with teeth that could punch a hole in a can of Pet milk, would hiss from his perch, his eyes shining red in the gloom.

  “Got you, Mr. Possum,” Charlie would say, and he’d climb up and deftly snatch that possum by the scruff and stick it in a sack.

  “Let the dogs have him,” some men would say, wanting to see some sport. But Charlie, still a teenager then, would just shake his head.

  “They’s a colored lady in town gives me fifty cents,” he’d say, and he would drag the dogs away from the trees—a good hunting dog is smart but will fixate on a tree the way some men fixate on lost love—and get them running down another trail, to another possum.

  If he couldn’t sell them, he would give them away and hope to be invited for supper—hopefully on a night they were not having possum.

  Later, the men would gather around a fire and tell lies and stories, and to Charlie that was as good as anything on this earth.

  The most famous such story from his time was that of a man who sat by the fire lamenting that his wife was not a beautiful woman.

  “Beauty,” one of the hunters told him, “is skin deep.”

  The man thought about that a minute.

  Then he got up and walked off into the darkness.

  “Where you a’goin’?” someone shouted after him.

  “Home,” came his voice, from the darkness. “To skin my wife.”

  These are the stories young Charlie heard and told as he hunted, fished and loafered from Georgia to Alabama and back again in the first two decades of the twentieth century, moving by car, mule wagon or passing freight car. Some people say poverty is a box. For Charlie, as a teenager, it was everything outside the box.

  He was as free as a man could be, with no land, no money, just a borrowed bed in some kinfolks’ houses and a change of clothes. He could have tied everything he owned to the end of a stick, asked someone to feed his dog and hopped a train, leaving this place for good.

  But this was his place, even though he did not own enough of it to fill a snuffbox. It was his as much as anybody’s.

  Him and his kind were too wild for church and too raggedy for the Kiwanis Club, but they were as much a part of the landscape as the mockingbirds and the camellias and the red brick—baked from the clay—that held up the towns.

  They lived on mostly beans and bread, but it was good beans, good bread. On every stove, a pot of pintos simmered, a ham hock or a thick piece of fatback swimming in the thick brown soup. They ate great northerns, limas, black-eyed peas and purple butter beans, but nothing even came close to pinto beans. Pintos were good enough for company.

  In every stove, a golden cake of cornbread baked in an iron skillet, and the smell of the hot bread and bacon grease—you always smeared bacon grease around the skillet before you poured in the meal—would draw people in from the yard. The women would put the pone of bread on a dinner plate and cover the top with another dinner plate, because that’s how it was always done and always will be.

  Sometimes, if the season was right, the women would mix pork cracklin’s—little cubes of rendered pork fat and skin—into the meal and lard and buttermilk or water, and men carried it—just that—in their lunch pails to the cotton mills, coal mines and pipe shops.

  And sometimes, for a change, people just crumbled up a little cornbread in a glass or a bowl and poured cold buttermilk or sweet milk over it, and ate it with a spoon. They chopped hot Spanish onions up in it, and that was a meal.

  They fried okra and squash and green tomatoes in the summer, and turned cucumbers into sweet pickles and pickled cabbage and pepper sauce into chow-chow, a red-hot relish that people ate with their beans. In the fall they ate collards and cooked turnips with butter and salt and pepper—a good turnip will just melt under your tongue. Deer rode across the hoods of Model Ts and across the rumps of mules, and smart cooks ground it up with a little pork sausage, to give it taste, or soaked roasts in buttermilk, to make the meat less gamey. They scrambled squirrel brains into their eggs, and made candy for their children by melting cane sugar in skillets and then letting it get hard.

  They lived in tightly packed mill villages where the sturdy little houses, all exactly the same but all with a real front porch, seemed so much better than anything they had ever lived in before. Or, like Charlie’s kin, they stayed in the woods in ramshackle houses that had never seen a coat of paint.

  They rented, because they were one class below the owners, and owning land was a dream that most of them certainly had. But it might as well have been a dream about steamships and zeppelin rides, for all it would amount to, for generations.

  But there was a dignity in them that no amount of servitude could collapse. The women wore their hair long—dictated by the doctrine of a Protestant faith—and the men, even the young ones like Charlie, draped their overalls in severe black coats for court and funerals and voting. A man has to have a lot of dignity to walk around proud with most of the rear end worn out of his overalls. But a pair of ventilated breeches, Charlie figured, was no reason to bow your head.

  By the time he was fully grown, Charlie stood more than six feet tall but weighed less than one hundred and sixty pounds. When he climbed into his faded blue overalls, he looked like a mast stuck in a sail. “Whistle britches,” old men would say, grinning, because of the breeze that surely found a way into his clothes through the ragged holes or flapping pants legs.

  It was the seat that always wore out first, because he found work as a roofer early on, and the shingles, like sandpaper, just ate the cloth away as he skidded around the roof on his rump and knees. His sisters sewed patches on the inside of his overalls, for decency’s sake.

  He wore the same thing every day, because it was all he had. In the winter he wore long underwear under his Liberties, and a canvas work shirt that might have been some color once, but now was gray. He wore lace-up leather boots, what people called hobnails, strung with thin strips of leather, because cloth rotted in the weather, and he wore them when he was working, fishing and dancing. Men like him wore their hobnails to funerals under black suits. They got married in them, and worked saddle soap or oil into the leather to keep it from cracking. When the boots finally wore out, they threw them to a hound puppy, which gnawed them down to the bootheel, then nothing. They came from Lehigh, Pennsylvania, and they cost a week’s pay, so a man had to get the good out of them.

  He was bareheaded only when he ate and slept, otherwise wearing a denim cap low down over his brow, so that his eyes, which had a natural shine, looked like headlights in a tunnel. The cap, like everything else, wore out from the weather and dry rot, and his hair stuck through it. People smiled at that, too. Stick a punkin’ on his head, and prop him there in the corn, they joked, to scare the crows and coons away.

  He didn’t own a watch. The boss man told him when to come, go and eat his lunch, which was biscuit and cornbread, mainly. He was sixteen, going on seventeen, gangly, gaunt, with air-conditioned pants.

  But if you looked down, down to the ends of those skinny arms, you could see signs of the
man’s character—the man the boy would be—in his hands.

  Not the arms. His arms were abnormally long, with long muscles from real work, but so narrow and thin that his elbows stuck out like onions. Just the hands.

  The hands were magnificent.

  They hung at the ends of his skinny arms like baseball mitts, so big that a normal man’s hand disappeared in them. The calluses made an unbroken ridge across his palm, and they were rough, rough all over, as shark’s skin. The grease and dirt, permanent as tattoos, inked his skin, and the tar and dirt colored the quick under his fingernails, then and forever. He could have burned his overalls, changed his name and bought himself a suit and tie, but those hands would have told on him.

  And they were strong, finger-crushing, freakishly strong, as if the tendons in his arms were steel cables that worked a machine made to kink pipe, crush rocks and pull stumps. He could grip a man’s wrist and squeeze—just squeeze—and make his eyes water.

  When he would tell a story, he would clamp one big hand down on his listener’s leg, at about the knee, and—especially if he had been nipping a little bit—squeeze to make a point. Grown men would wince, cuss and howl. But he always got to finish his story.

  In a fight, and there were some, he clenched his fingers in a fist the size of a baking hen, and it was like being hit in the face with a pine knot.

  But that was just sideshow stuff. The hammer seemed to dance in his hand, and he was twice as fast—machine-gun fast—as most men on the rooftops, slapping down shingles, pounding them in place. His daddy, Jimmy Jim, had strong hands like that, agile hands. Charlie got them from him.

  After work, the big hands with the long fingers could pick out beautiful notes on the banjo, which he learned from his kinfolks. When Charlie visited them, he would sit a baby on its bottom in one big hand and just stare into its face, until it gurgled or grinned or squalled. He wasn’t rough with them, and he liked to hold them.

  Few doors were closed to him, because of his nature. Sober, he was a fine listener. Drunk, he hogged the very air. He spoke in the language—the very specific language—of the Appalachian foothills. It was an unusual mix of formal English and mountain dialect. The simple word “him” was two distinct sounds—“he-yum.” And a phrase like “Well, I better go,” was, in the language of our people, more likely to sound like “Weeeelllll, Ah bet’ go.” Some words are chopped off and some are stretched out till they moan, creating a language like the terrain itself. Think of that language as a series of mountains, cliffs, valleys and sinkholes, where only these people, born and raised here, know the trails.

  Charlie spoke with a smooth, low voice. If he wanted to make a point, he just said damn, for punctuation, as in “That’s a damn big house, fellers, to roof in this damn heat.”

  He did not curse in front of ladies, usually, and among men he drew a line between good, solid biblical cursing and what he called “ugly talk,” which was anything a twelve-year-old would scrawl on an outhouse wall.

  He did not spit in front of ladies, even if he had to swallow the juice. He tipped his hat, like in a cowboy matinee.

  He was blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. He thought people who would lie were trash. “And a man who’ll lie,” he said, even back then, “will steal.” Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker—a full pint is enough to get two men drunk as lords—before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization.

  He saw no reason to obey some laws—like the ones about licenses, fees and other governmental annoyances—but he would not have picked an apple off another man’s ground and eaten it.

  He was not literate, but he was no fool. He could figure in his head the carpenter’s calculations needed to roof a house or build one—some men just have a gift that way—but while men came to respect him for his abilities, he would always be the one who did their lifting for them.

  If they talked down to him, he quit and he never worked for them again. The South of Charlie Bundrum had a strict class system, and he was beholden to the monied whites for his living. But even as a boy he thought his life was worth just as much as anyone else’s. “We’re as good as anybody,” he liked to say. It might have been obvious, as he rode past in a ragged car, a big tar bucket on the floorboards, that some people lived better. But if there was any envy, it never boiled up to where it passed his lips. He did not hate a rich man, did not covet his life, at least that anyone can remember.

  He did not talk about heaven, the way a lot of poor people did then and always will, to justify their struggle on this earth.

  He was funny that way.

  He was happy being who he was, without even an expectation of wings, and feet of clay.

  If someone, maybe around a fire on one of those riverbanks, had asked him then, “What do you want, Charlie,” he could have told them.

  He wanted enough work to live decent, and on a Saturday he wanted a drink of likker, because it sent the silver shivers down him and that was good.

  He wanted a ham and biscuit. He wanted to hear some music, and watch a pretty girl walk down the street in town, if he could do it and not be obvious about it.

  He wanted, even though he was just a boy himself, some babies. His heart melted around them, his spirit soared. He might not have been able to put it into words, but they made him noble, they raised him up. And he wanted that little four-eyed gal, the one he had seen at a basketball game over by Gadsden on the Alabama side. There was just something about a black-haired girl with blue eyes.

  Claude Bundrum, his kin, knew Ava Hamilton when she was a young woman. He knew that, even then, she was different—if not outright peculiar.

  “And meeting Charlie,” he said, “probably didn’t help things none.”

  5.

  Four-Eyes

  Outside Gadsden, Alabama

  1910–1920

  God made just one.

  In size, she wasn’t much, just a little thing, a tad bowlegged, with hair down past her waist and those startling, silver-blue eyes. But the Maker must have had some personality left over from somebody else—Lutherans maybe—because He gave Ava about twice as much as anybody else. Even when she was growing up on her daddy’s nice farm in the Alabama foothills, her anger burned hotter and her happiness flashed brighter, it seemed, than was altogether natural. When sorrow gripped her, it gripped her like barbed wire, and her wails would make a person shiver. But when she was happy she drew everyone around her into the circle of her warmth, her joy, and you were grateful for it even as you waited for the mood to sharply turn, like a Sunday drive that ends in a head-on collision.

  Her eyes went weak early in life, and she had to wear wire-rimmed glasses to read. People would drive past the house and wave at the little girl on the porch with a book or a newspaper in her hands, but she didn’t look up. She loved learning, people said, and if it had been another time or place Ava might have been anything, done anything. But love, and luck, set her walking down a different road.

  Ava’s momma, Mary Matilda, believed that being in the country was no excuse for being dumb as a turnip, and wanted her children to read. She bought them books, and got the newspaper mailed in from Atlanta, only a day or so late.

  Ava loved that newspaper. She read it and reread it. It brought the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Battle of Verdun and the fight in the Argonne Forest. In those pages, zeppelins fell from the sky and burst into flames and Pancho Villa invaded the United States on horseback. It may have seemed like it was just a little girl with glasses sitting on a porch with a paper in her lap in rural Alabama, but the whole world spun around her there on the front porch when the paper came.

  Her father, William Alonzo Hamilton, was a hard-bitten Congregational Holiness, and convinced that the only book worth reading was the King James Bible. He had built a self-sustaining farm outside Gadsden in Etowah County
, the kind of farm you see on Christmas cards, and even as Mary Matilda weaned her children on music and poetry, he fed them a steady diet of hard work and hard-rock religion.

  There was, besides Ava, George, Bill, Fred, Grace, Lula, Plummer and Ruth, and on Sunday they filled half a pew. Ava learned her Bible forward and backward and sideways. She could tell you how long Moses wandered and how long Job suffered with sores and what fate befell Lot’s wife and what Paul and Silas had to do with things in general.

  The Congregational Holiness take their Bible straight up, and if you have never seen a Holiness service, do not go if you expect it to be like any other Protestant faith. Ava grew up in a faith where the people get happy and just start to yell, where people begin to speak in tongues, fall out on the floor and weep and laugh and go into trances, as if dead. God does not tiptoe into a Congregational Holiness church, He busts down the door and raises the roof and, quick as death, He is among them.

  “They was shoutin’ people,” my mother, Margaret, told me. “Grace always said they was Baptists but they wasn’t Baptists because Baptists don’t shout. That much.”

  The Hamiltons had roots, deep roots, in the foothills, and were, for lack of a better word, respectable. The children went to school and Ava was even a cheerleader at Ashville School. When she was in her eighties, she would break into a cheer sitting on the edge of the bed, then just lay back and go to sleep.

  The schools in the foothills after the turn of the century did not have football teams, but many of them had small gymnasiums or hard asphalt courts, and on Friday nights boys played basketball in shining satin uniforms and black high-top tennis shoes. It was a time of two-handed set shots and granny-style free throws, but it was entertaining, and people came to games in wagons or on muleback. Men in overalls talked cotton prices and mule genealogy as Daughters of the Confederacy sold soft drinks for a nickel, and somebody always had a jug in the parking lot, if that’s what you call a place where the conveyances had to be roped tight to posts to keep them from running off.