by Rick Bragg
Once every few months he would not come home for supper, and it was torture for a wife still not eighteen. But late at night she would hear a slow thud of hoofbeats in the yard, and she would carry her good lantern out to the porch, to see Charlie’s mule stomping into the yard.
Charlie would be drunk as Cooter Brown and singing cowboy music, and if he had not lost his hat, he waved it, and tried to get the mule to rear up like he was Tom Mix or Lash LaRue.
But mules rear from the back end, and the mule—it was such a distasteful creature that it was never given a name—would fling its hind legs straight out and duck its head and Charlie would go flying to the earth headfirst, too drunk to alter his trajectory.
The mule, to his credit, would not stomp him to death, and would step carefully around Charlie—a good mule will do that—and trot to the pasture. And Ava, depending on how mad she was at him, would sit her lantern on the porch and go down and half carry, half drag him up to his bed.
Or not. And he would lay on the ground, mumbling about how, someday, Lord, he sure would like to have him a nice, gentle horse, one that would let him down easy. After a while he would notice that he was alone, that the ground was hard and that the night was cold, and go hunt for a door handle that—dammit to hell—didn’t seem to be where he had left it. He must have wasted years, groping for that knob.
Her tongue was sharp, from the beginning. And, in the beginning, he liked it that way.
She was more prone to voice her opinion, probably, than most women of that time, and with Ava there was never any such thing as a compromise. But while she complained a lifetime about being cast into the damned wilderness, she always knew she had found something in this man that she had never seen in another, certainly not in any of the Congregational Holiness she had known since birth.
He talked to her.
He did not grunt about crops and scripture. He talked.
If he dug a well, he did not say, “Well, today I dug a well.”
It might just be a hole in the ground, but he made it seem like a tunnel into adventure.
“You should have been there, Ava,” he told her once as they sat at their little table, their heads close together within the circle of lamplight.
“Why would I want to be in the bottom of a damn hole,” said Ava, who cussed more than most Congregational Holiness in that place and time.
“Because of the Chinaman,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“The Chinaman,” he said.
“A Chinaman helped you dig that well?”
“Naw. I met one, in the middle, a’comin’ the other way.”
She just looked at him, her eyes glittering behind her wire-rimmed spectacles.
“It was a deep well,” he said. And as much as she hated to, she laughed at him, and laughed with him, and then told him he was pitiful, surely. “All you study,” she said to him, “is folly.”
But it beat the hell out of talking about cotton.
He kidded her, and egged on her natural cussedness, and he would look oh-so-wounded when she let him have it.
“Ava, Ava, Ava,” he would say, shaking his head in mock dismay as she dog-cussed him in his own house. And then he just could not pretend anymore and tears would run down his face, from holding his laughter in.
It bothered her, a lot, that he was almost as good a cook as her, and that when it came to that staple of the Southern table—gravy—he had her beat. Gravy is not hard to make, but good gravy is.
When they had steak, he would stir the flour into the hot grease until it was the perfect shade of tan, and salt it just a bit—beef drippings, unlike pork, are not salty enough for a good taste—and then shake in a heavy dose of black pepper. He would stir water or milk into the roux until it was the texture of heavy cream, and they would sit down to biscuits and steak and gravy and—if it was the summer—sliced red tomatoes or cantaloupe.
And he would eat with such relish that it would make her smile, at first.
“I love steak,” he would say, and if she had cooked it her eyes would light up.
“But God,” he would say, “ain’t the gravy good.” She would dog-cuss him some more.
“Ava, Ava, Ava.”
Her education continued. She learned that you never scrub an iron skillet too hard, and you have to season it, with a little bacon grease and a rag, before you hang it on the nail for the coming morning.
She learned that, if the paycheck was lean, a few chicken gizzards fried crisp were just as good as steak, if the bicuits were good.
One day they were at the table and he noticed a difference in her, more in her face than anything else, like a shadow of nothing.
“What you worried about, Four-Eyes,” he asked her, and she put his hand on her stomach. And in that instant, that tiny instant, the boy she laughed with became something else, something better. And, in a way, she did, too.
“Momma, Momma, Momma,” he said.
He would never call her anything else.
7.
Dead dogs and rolling steel
Outside Rome, and in the Gadsden mills
1925–1929
The midwife’s name was Granny Isom, and she looked like she was a hundred, and might have been. She was about the size of a nine-year-old, a gnarled, skinny, short-tempered little woman, and if you had smoothed out the wrinkles she probably would have just disappeared. But for the people in Floyd County, Georgia, people too poor or too far out or just too damn hardheaded to use a town doctor, she was an angel, and countless babies passed through her hands.
Granny Isom did not think much of the miracle of birth, perhaps because it was such a common thing, and she did not suffer meddling and nervous daddies or wailing women in the little houses and the riverside shacks where she practiced something very close to medicine.
“Git out!” was the way she greeted men at their own door.
She did not say anything to the children, who ran like hell at the sight of her.
She came to Ava for the first time on March 2, 1925.
Ava was big as a barn with her first baby, and told Charlie that she thought it was about time—that, or the sweet Lord was just taking her home, because what else could hurt so terrible bad. Charlie saddled his mule and rode it half to death to fetch the old midwife while Ava waited in a tiny frame house deep in the woods near Curryville, in northwest Georgia. She was seventeen.
They made it back in plenty of time. Ava, who never did one thing quietly, screamed and yelled and cussed, almost certainly, as the miracle unfolded. When it was over, the midwife handed her a son.
They named him James, for Charlie’s daddy. In the South, you do not have to love someone a real whole lot to name a child for them. It is just something you do, naming the first boy after his grandfather.
Granny Isom did not stay long after that. What happened after that, she figured, wasn’t really her fault.
We do not know what James cost. Like other professional people, she took whatever the man could afford in trade for the child—corn, a quilt, some onions, or just a pone of cornbread and some apple butter—and climbed up on a wagon seat. An angel should not have needed a mule to get home, but a short-tempered one does, I suppose.
The baby was long—male babies always run long in the family—and even in his first day on this earth he had a fine set of ears on him. His hair was sandy, like his daddy’s. In fact, as the year crept by, as he looked less and less like a pink monkey and more like a human, as babies naturally do, he looked more and more like his daddy. In time it would be uncanny, how much he mirrored him, in his face, those gigantic hands, all of it.
Charlie was still just a boy himself, but if he ever was good at one thing on this earth, it was being a daddy. At that time, when he was eighteen, he knew the one thing a man needed to know.
Don’t let nothin’ happen to it. Kill if you have to, but don’t never, ever let nothin’ happen to it, because it is weak, and small, and it belongs to you. One day,
twenty years later, he would seize James by the arms and say those very words to him after he had married and had a child of his own. That is how we know the code he lived by.
Just a little more than a year later, on June 19 of 1926, he sent for Granny Isom again. This one they named William, also after kin, and this one, too, was long, and sprouted up tall and big-eared like his daddy. It was good that the two sons came so close together like that, because it is almost certain that one would have killed the other one if he had had any real advantage in size. By the time the boys were toddlers, just as soon as they could make a good fist, they fought—hair-pulling, eye-gouging and biting, drawing blood and raising welts and purple bruises. Charlie, Ava and other kin stripped all the low limbs off the hickory trees trying to find enough switches to discipline their boys, but it was just plain useless. The two boys considered a good beating to be more or less fair payment for the pleasure of hitting each other with rocks, pushing each other into mud holes or cow flop.
But while it was acceptable for brothers and cousins to beat you senseless, outsiders could not lay a hand on you in anger, and could not hurt you for sport, not without feeling Charlie’s terrible wrath.
William saw it for the first time when he was still less than waist-high. Almost seventy years later, it makes him proud.
Life in the foothills had not softened much since Charlie’s childhood. Cars and trucks were creeping along the rutted roads, but men still rode mules through the streets of Rome, the county seat, still fought duels with pistols and flick-knives and even ax handles, still beat each other bloody.
The cockfights drew a hundred on a Saturday, and men whose finer dispositions had been dulled by the hard work and likker found something in the life-and-death struggle of the chicken fights that sliced through, that penetrated, that pleased. The chicken-fighters sawed the bone-hard natural spurs off the gamecocks and strapped on razor-sharp steel spurs, called gaffs, and tossed them into a pit, winner take all. The loser was served the next day with biscuits and white gravy.
But it was the dog pits that really got a man’s blood up. Harsh old men with a brittle, horny place where a heart should have been took puppies and taught them to kill with kittens, and when the dogs matured the dogfighters trimmed back their ears and cut off their tails, so the other dog could not get a solid grip. They crossbred the slow and dull-witted bulldogs with leaner, faster breeds, and came up with a killer.
A man named Dempsey, who lived not far from where the Bundrums lived in Curryville, had a dog like that. He kept it in his barn, and it was mean—so mean he kept it tied with a heavy logging chain.
Ava and her boys were visiting one day and William wandered down to the barn. Old Man Dempsey thought he would have some sport as the big dog growled and pulled at his chain at the sight of the boy.
Dempsey reached down and picked up a cornstalk that was laying on the ground, and handed it to William. Then he unhooked the dog’s chain from the barn wall and held it, like a leash.
“Draw that cornstalk back, boy,” he said, “and make like you’re gonna hit him.”
William, being little, did as he was told.
He drew back the stalk and, pretend-like, swatted at the air in front of the growling, snapping dog.
Then Dempsey let go of the chain.
The dog leapt on William, snapping, and sank his teeth deep into the boy’s side. The blood spurted and Old Man Dempsey, seeing that his joke had gone much too far, dragged his dog away.
But not before William’s side was bit bloody. He ran hard to his momma, screaming, and if she could have found a gun or even a good stick, she would have killed Dempsey. But she just took her crying boy home, and waited for her husband to get in from work.
He came in from the job, grimed with sweat and sawdust, and listened as Ava, crying, told him what had happened.
Charlie, in anger, was the opposite of most men. While most men got mad and loud, he got quiet, so quiet, and dropped his voice so low that you had to lean in close to him to hear what he was saying.
He was deathly quiet now.
William lay in the bed, his side covered in salve—they would have put salve on a brain tumor—and bound up with clean rags.
“Son,” Charlie said softly, “he eat you up pretty good, didn’t he?”
“Yes sir, I believe he did,” William said.
“Can you move?” his daddy said. “Can you walk?”
“Yes sir, I believe I can.”
“Then let’s go.”
Charlie reached and got his shotgun and slung it over his shoulder. Ava stood at the door, quiet for once, and watched them go.
They got in an old cut-down truck that Charlie had bought and drove to the Dempseys’. They held hands as they walked up to the pine porch, and Charlie rapped on the front door with the gun barrel.
Old Man Dempsey cracked the door and looked out.
“What you doin’ here, Bundrum, with that gun,” he said.
“I’ve come for the dog,” Charlie said softly.
“You can’t have him,” Dempsey said.
“I’ve come for the dog,” Charlie said again, this time almost in a whisper, “or I’ve come for you.”
Dempsey looked at Charlie’s face.
“The dog’s in the barn,” he said.
Charlie walked to the barn with William at his side, and told him to wait outside. He walked in and, immediately, there was one shot. Then Charlie walked out, his face blank.
All his life, Charlie knew he should have shot the man, truly, but in Floyd County, in the 1920s, they didn’t put a white man into prison, usually, for shooting a dog.
But they would strap you down and make you ride the lightning for killing a man, and who would have fed his family, if he was so foolish.
He looked down at his son.
“Let’s go home, Shorty,” he said.
It was a hopeful time. World War I was done and the veterans had come home to sit on the courthouse benches, some trailing an empty pants leg, and tell stories of the hand-to-hand fighting in the Argonne Forest, of the choking hell of the trenches as the mustard gas poured in and the bodies stank on the barbed wire in no-man’s-land. But this was peacetime and there was good work in the steel mills and pipe shops in Gadsden and Anniston over in Alabama, and in the textile mills on the Georgia side.
Charlie wore a carpenter’s apron and built homes for the soldiers who came home, then landed a good job, for real money, at the steel plant in Gadsden, an industrial town alongside the Coosa. His brother-in-law, Tobe Morrison, helped him get on.
He rolled steel, working in heat that burned the hairs off his arms, beating at sparks that singed his hair and his eyebrows and made his lungs prickle. He shoveled coal into the coke ovens where the heat would melt your shoes and make you faint, and loaded boxcars with new, fresh steel, so new it didn’t even have any rust on it. And on payday, when the smut-covered men lined up for their money—the gentry there called them “smoke necks”—he laughed and laughed.
Gadsden was like a lot of industrial cities in the South, a city that went from nothing to something really fast. The workers, some who had been behind a mule just the week before, built little frame houses with real porches, and sometimes the company even built them for their workers. It was a different time, then, when companies did things like that. If a man wasn’t afraid to work, he could have things he never dreamed of.
Charlie bought a new car, a 1928 Whippet, and they rented a house in Attalla, near Gadsden, which was almost close enough to the country to suit him—he could not rest, he always said, in town.
He and Ava bought some nice clothes from the Sears and Roebuck and had their pictures made, and Ava started buying pocketbooks—she loved pocketbooks.
While they were in Attalla, living fat and easy at the corner of First and Forest, Ava gave Charlie a daughter. A genuine doctor—with plaques on the wall and a necktie—delivered the baby girl.
Edna was born on September 3, 1929, an
d as proud as he was about his sons, Edna tickled him to death. Even when she was small, he propped her on his shoulders and took her with him when he went fishing. She had brown hair, and even as a toddler she was unusually brave, and not a bit squeamish about fishworms or catfish or other slime-covered things. She was tough, which was good. Otherwise her brothers might have killed her, probably by accident but not necessarily so.
“He would take me places and not take James and William,” Edna said, proud of the time they stole.
Edna would be the model older sister, old beyond her years, and a strong right hand to Ava. She snapped beans, sewed, and as other babies came, she helped look after them. Edna was the glue. As Ava ranted, Edna soothed. As Ava fumed, Edna looked for solutions. Even as a little girl, Edna would sometimes seem older than her momma, sewing clothes for the younger children and helping to cook. But as a baby, before there was work to do, she rode her daddy’s bony shoulders to the creek, and laughed and clapped her hands when he pulled in a fish.
Some men love daughters more. Charlie was just one of them.
It was a good family, or at least a good start on one, and a good life. A man could afford things. He could feed his children hot biscuits, ham and fresh cantaloupe on Sunday, and buy his oranges by the bushel. His wife didn’t have to count the eggs and make water gravy, because milk was not such a precious thing that you had to meter it out by the ounce. Ava, used to this life, this abundance, was not impressed much, but Charlie, a poor boy all his life, went a little wild. He bought a slouch hat, like a movie star would wear, and had his first taste of store-bought likker. He thought it was bland. Like many things, if it’s legal, it cannot be all that good. But he liked that hat, and went all the way to Anniston—one whole county away—to have his picture made on Noble Street.
It would last forever, that life, because steel would have to roll forever. It had to. How could you build a country without steel?
Ava, who hated the deep woods, loved living in a place where the stores were right there, right there in front of her, and a person could sit on their front porch at night and see a light—a real electric one—glowing just a few feet away in the window of a neighbor’s house. Here you could walk to church, or take your babies to the doctor. In the cool of the evenings people would walk past the porch and say, “How do?” And, best of all, there was the money—never enough to pile up too high but enough to pay their way, to buy groceries and pay rent, so that a person did not have to be ashamed at the first of the month.