Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  Then, with a crash of breaking wood, the door slammed open, and Martin and the other men stood grinning and wobbling in the doorway, an open jar of likker held out, as if in apology.

  As if in slow motion, the drunkards’ heads traversed from the rage in Charlie’s face down, down to the hammer that swung back and forth, grim as a hanged man, at the end of his bony arm.

  They fled. They stumbled over each other and spilt their whiskey, but they made it to their car and piled into it like a troop of circus clowns. And then, feeling safe, Martin cursed Charlie out the window as he turned the key, the motor started and the headlights winked on.

  And there in the yellow glow, just a few feet from the hood, was Charlie, a scarecrow come to life in baggy red long-handles, his hammer held high in one fist, like a thunderbolt.

  “Help me Jesus,” Martin screamed, trying to find reverse.

  The car lurched backward and Charlie threw his hammer with all his might, and the windshield shattered into a million glistening pieces. The hammer passed through and hit one of the men hard in the chest, and all three of them piled out, one wheezing, trying to get his breath, the two others cursing and screaming. They ran to the safety of the woods.

  Charlie, his face still full of fury, walked into the house and loaded his Belgian 12-gauge, and walked back out on the porch. He stood, patient, until he saw one of the men run for their car, and tracked him across the dark yard like he was a pheasant. There was a half-moon, not good light to shoot by, but good enough.

  He squeezed the trigger and the whole house shook, and out in the yard there was a yelp, like when you step on a little dog’s tail.

  “Damn, you shot me.” It was Martin’s voice.

  “I shot you in the leg,” Charlie said, correcting him.

  “You still shot me,” came the voice from the darkness, followed by some whimpering.

  “Well, you ort not to kicked in my door,” Charlie said.

  For some reason Charlie considered it a point of pride that the men not be able to get back in their car, that they had to walk home. It seemed only reasonable, perhaps, after the trouble they caused.

  Finally Ava, who had undergone another sea change, walked up and herded Charlie protectively back inside.

  “I guess the law will be here in the morning,” he said, all the anger draining out of him, leaving him empty.

  “I reckon so,” Ava said, and steered him over to the bed.

  No one seems to remember what Hootie did, but more than likely he crawled under a bed.

  Early the next morning, Walter Rollins came knocking on the door, which Charlie had hung back up before dawn. Walter was a full-time cotton farmer and a full-time police officer in Jacksonville, in Calhoun County, a respected man who did not cheat his pickers and did not complain if the women brought their children to the field. He let the small children play in the cotton wagon with his own boys, and paid in cash.

  Walter had perhaps the most distinctive voice in Calhoun County. It was shrill and nasal and strung-out, all at the same time. Walter, a man who liked folks and liked talking, often accentuated the final word in his sentences a long, long time, like he wanted to make it last.

  “My God, Charlie,” he said, sitting down at the table and taking a cup of coffee, “what’d you dooooo?”

  Charlie told him straight.

  Walter accepted a buttered biscuit, and a little daub of apple butter. It was all they had that morning.

  “Next time,” he said, brushing crumbs off his hands, “why don’t ye just kill the little son of a beeetch.”

  Hootie, because he was weaker, because he needed a hero, brought out the light in Charlie’s character. His children pulled it out of him, like taffy, when they crawled in his lap and felt his nose or tugged his ears. Ava could, still, if she wanted, with a cool hand on his sunburned neck. And in a way, sad as it may seem, the likker made him gleam, too, hiding his worries in a golden fog, loosening his tongue, numbing his mind and reminding him it had been a long, long time since he sang “Darling Nelly Gray.”

  But anger, temper, opened up the door on the hot, dark basement in Charlie’s soul. His actions were so quick and so violent that people wondered how the two sides of his character lived in only one body, as if one leg would want to go one way and one leg go another, like a poor zombie conjured from goofer dirt. But the anger, dark as it seemed, was not meanness. Meanness just sleeps inside a man’s brain, like a cancer. Anger is put inside a man, spins around in his guts and comes out like bile and razor blades. It looks the same, but only from a distance.

  Some people blamed it on the times. Old men swear it even made the wild things meaner. Men who would have never stolen crept into the chicken houses and stole the eggs, and other men shot at them from the porch. But it wasn’t the times, really. The willingness to hurt a man, when that man hurt or threatened you or your loved ones, was distinct, like fingerprints, to each man. In some men, it was tempered by reason and fear, and in others their rage overcame everything in one violent, terrifying moment. Charlie’s temper did not blind him. He hit, and hit hard, because he believed he had to.

  It is impossible to explain that to someone who has never hit in anger, who has never been hit, and known that the hitting would not end, could not end, until you’d hurt your enemy real, real bad. Jimmy Jim had taught it to Charlie, and Charlie taught it to his boys. Some men sent their children to military school, to learn war with honor. Charlie taught them how to war and win, and to go on living with their heads held straight up.

  James learned it when he was about eleven or twelve.

  He was on his way to school when an older boy named Dahmer Jones, bigger and stronger, hit him in the leg with a rock. When his daddy saw James limping, he asked, “What happened to you, son?”

  When James told him, Charlie just said, “Well, I reckon we can break him of that.” He went to a big hickory tree and broke off a limb, and with his pocket knife he made James a big stick—about four feet long and about as big around as his wrist on the big end. “I want to see this stick when you get done with him,” Charlie said as he handed James the weapon. “I want to see the bark tore off it.

  “And son,” Charlie said as his boy walked away, “use the big end.”

  Later, James told his daddy how it went.

  “I went and hid in the culvert, and then I stepped out from it as Dahmer Jones went by. He said, ‘Hah, you kind of hoppin’, ain’t you, Bundrum.’ And I set into him, boy, and once I got started I just couldn’t stop.”

  He laid the boy’s head open to the skull.

  The boys had grown up just like their daddy, unencumbered by too much school or civilization, and Ava wrote them both off as hooligans by the time they were eleven or twelve. His sons, who were becoming teenagers as the 1930s faded slowly into the 1940s, looked and spoke like Charlie, so much so that it was hard to tell them apart at a distance, just three tall, skinny men in overalls, walking the dirt roads and trails.

  Charlie had, in the tradition of his own daddy, been hard on his two boys, but they respected him. “My daddy is a man,” they would always say when somebody said something about him, about his drinking, his sideline whiskey making, his raggedy overalls. They learned to be men by watching him, the good and the bad.

  Like a lot of brothers so close in age, they didn’t like each other a lot. They drew blood. Once, in a wood pile, they battled with pine knots, which is like battling with baseball bats. Margaret ran and hid behind the house until it was over.

  “They get it from you,” Ava always said to Charlie, and he always nodded his head, no high ground to stand on.

  But it wasn’t hate. If it had been hate, one of them would have died. And, as is often the case, they sided with each other against the entire outside world.

  James, with massive fists and arms of bone and sinew, was feared by the other boys. William would pick a fight with two and even three of them, and as they closed on him he would let out a single high whistle. Jame
s would come running, and the beating would commence. After a while, it occurred to James that William was whistling a real whole lot, that he was taking advantage of him. So one day, as the whistle came, he just looked up and smiled, and listened as the whistle grew more urgent, then plaintive, then finally faded to silence.

  The things the boys remembered about their daddy were not always spoken things, which are just wind, really, but things he did. He always walked in front of them on a game trail or through tall grass, so that a snake coiled there would strike at him. He carried a long stick the size of a broom handle, but heavy and green, loose in his hand.

  Once, as they pushed through high weeds, they heard a rattler’s sing—they only bit you when you walked up on them but that didn’t make you any less bit or any less dead—and Charlie and his sons looked around wildly.

  A rattler was coiled at William’s feet, and it struck even as Charlie stepped in front of his son and whipped his stick at its head, which made a sound like a pistol shot.

  The snake thrashed, crazy-like, on the ground, dying, and Charlie kept walking, like nothing had happened, and the two little boys told it to anybody who listened that day, that week, until they led their own kids through the tall grass, stepping in front.

  The snake, to Charlie, was just one more thing stabbing at his children, no more evil than drunk men at the door late at night, or an empty flour can or smokehouse. They could all get you, Charlie figured, but could get the children easier, because they were not as strong or fast.

  He had to absorb it, like he would have absorbed the poison in those fangs, if that had been the only way to save his son.

  He would not have seen it as heroic.

  He just figured he could take it.

  12.

  The worst of it

  The foothills

  THE MID-1930S

  A half century after the Depression was over and done, I would hear Ava brag about beating it in 1936 and 1937, what she called the worst of it. But her stories would get jumbled up in other remembrances, so it was hard to tell just what all she was telling. The decades ran together in her mind the way the flavors of a two-scoop ice cream cone ran together on your hand outside Tillison’s store when I was just a boy, when we asked for a scoop of chocolate and butter pecan. She would start out talking about the WPA and in mid-sentence cross over to how she wasn’t real sure men ever really landed on that moon and if they did that was the reason why we weren’t getting any good rain. It would seem like the original thought had just melted away, like that fifty-cent ice cream, when she would rear back her head and proclaim, “Me and Charlie never did let them babies go hungry, and I’ll tell you that and no water hot.” I never did know what the last part of that meant, but I knew what the first part did.

  They scraped by in 1934 and 1935, and most of 1936. Then, in the winter of 1936, they had some bad luck. They were living in Georgia but Charlie was working on a scaffold over in Alabama, driving nails, raising walls. The scaffold, made from pine planks set on a framework of steel, hadn’t been rigged right. He was way up high, reaching in his apron for a nail, when it just fell out from under him.

  He hit the jumble of wood and iron hard, on his side, and coughed blood, and the boss man told him to go on home but he worked all that day anyway, because there is a whole lot of difference between a half day and a whole day when they sign your check. A week later, he had pneumonia.

  He lay sick for weeks, refusing a doctor, knowing that there was no money for one anyway. He coughed into a rag and sipped now and then on a tonic that was really just white whiskey with a pinch of sugar.

  One morning he staggered out of bed and reached for his lace-up boots, but he was still sickly and there was little work then for a puny man. He had lost so much weight that his face looked like a skull. The foremen and the line bosses shook their heads and sent him on down the road. “We need whole men,” they told him.

  Edna remembers it as the worst time.

  “Momma wouldn’t eat, but watched us eat, me, William, James and Juanita. We ate cornbread and sometimes we had some peas, and some fried potaters. We lived mostly over in Floyd County then. I remember one day we didn’t have nothin’ and Uncle Newt brought us over a pan of mashed taters and a hunk of cornbread. Daddy lost his job because he was out so long, then he took an ax and cleared brush for people, and cut pulpwood when they’d let him on the truck, and he would go door to door and ask if they need a well dug, and go stand with the men out at Dixie Clay, in case they needed someone to load the boxcars. And if they did he would load them cars by hand.”

  Landlords came for their rent, and Ava begged them to let her sew for them instead. She and Edna sewed all day when there was no cotton for her and the older children to pick. Ava counted out pennies on top of the store counters for needles and thread, and had to owe a penny many, many times.

  “I’m good for it,” she would always say, looking the store owners dead in the eye.

  “I know you are, missus,” they would say.

  They pieced quilts and made sheets and dresses from feed sacks. But it seemed like the day always came when the landlord would walk into the yard and call to them. Mostly, people were apologetic and kind, and some would say how they hated this, but “y’all got to move on.” Others were not kind. Just as poverty made some people shine, it stripped the decency from others.

  They were living in Coyle’s Bluff, also near Rome, when the only way to pay the rent was to sell the cow. Ava led the cow out of the shed and handed the reins to a woman who had come to get it.

  “And,” the woman said, “I’ll take the morning’s milk.”

  Ava had already milked the cow and the woman figured that she was being cheated.

  “You can’t,” Ava said.

  “Why?” the woman asked.

  “I’m keeping it for my children,” Ava said, “because that’s all they’ll have.”

  The woman tried to argue. Ava, desperate, might have given in, but she had seen so much of their already meager life shaved away that she just couldn’t take any more scraping on the bone that remained.

  She turned and walked into the house and portioned out the milk for her children, and watched them as they drank it. The woman huffed a little, then took her cow and left. Ava crowed about that for seventy years.

  But that was just Ava. Some days she cried, some days she laughed. On any other day, she might have kicked that woman’s derriere back to Rome.

  Ava kept the cow’s calf, which couldn’t give milk now but would in the future. A promise of milk, then, was better than nothing.

  A few months later, they ran behind on the rent, again. They were staying at a little place owned by a family named Johnson. Charlie, who had found work a few counties over, was coming that weekend with his paycheck, to square that debt. But the landlord wouldn’t wait. He sent a hired man round to the Bundrum house.

  “Pay it up,” said the man, “or I’m coming back tonight to get that calf.”

  That night, the hired hand and another man came into their yard carrying a lantern and a rope. James, the oldest boy, had gone with his father. Ava walked out on the porch and begged them to leave them alone, to leave the calf alone.

  “It’s our food,” she said.

  William, then just nine or ten, lifted his daddy’s shotgun from the wall and stepped out onto the porch before Ava could stop him.

  It was a high porch built on narrow columns, what people then called a chicken-leg porch. The two men looked up at the small boy on that big porch holding a gun almost as long as he was, and snorted.

  “What you gonna do, boy?” they asked.

  “You put that rope on that calf,” William said, “and I’ll kill you.”

  The men stopped when William pressed the shotgun’s stock into his bony shoulder and pointed the barrel down into their faces. Looking deep, deep into the dark, cold, unblinking eye of that 12-gauge, the men backed slowly from the yard.

  The family moved as
soon as Charlie came back. Drifters, movers, did not win when landlords brought the sheriff into their borrowed yard in that time. They loaded up in the night, and were gone.

  (I remember all this now when I think about a story I heard once about a student at a prestigious Southern university, a woman who threw away her dollar bills because they cluttered up her room. And one dollar, she said, wouldn’t buy anything, anyway.)

  Charlie healed even as the times seemed to get some better, though prosperity is always a relative thing when you’re that poor. By 1937 he was working almost every day for whatever anyone could afford. He worked for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches, and he was able, finally, to go back into the woods and to the riverbanks to shoot game—squirrels and rabbits mostly—and catch fish. He continued to make his whiskey, to drink and to sell. He never would have let his babies go hungry to drink—because that is, and forever will be, the mark of a sorry man, but if you are making it, drinking it just doesn’t seem to be such a sin.

  He had the skill. His daddy gave him that. All he needed was a quiet place to work. And like his daddy, he soon learned that people—very respectable people—would pay good money for a taste.

  In 1937 a new baby, their sixth, was coming. Granny Isom was busy with a baby across the county, so Charlie drove to Rome to fetch that city’s town doctor. The doctor asked him, as he crawled into his Model A, if Charlie had any money.

  Charlie just told him no, but, well, maybe they could work something out.

  13.

  Margaret, and mystery

  The foothills

  SPRING 1937

  They believed that if you ate an onion a day you would live to be a hundred, which may not have been true but at least no one that they knew of ever died eating onions. They believed that burned motor oil cured the mange, even though a dog covered in black oil was twice as objectionable as one with a few bare patches and a constant itch. They believed you could smother a chigger with Vaseline, and that eating too many pickles dried up your blood. They believed things, a lot of things, because their mommas and daddies did.