Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  It was dusk, heading toward dark, and the fire under the pot was throwing out too much smoke. Charlie always made his whiskey in a cave or under an overhang or in a tangle of fallen trees, so that their branches, like a filter, would help dissipate and hide the smoke from his fires.

  But he had put too much wood on the fire, or else part of it was wet, and even with the trees overhead as a screen, the coals sent a fat black column of smoke into the air. James, afraid the revenuers would see it, jumped almost into the fire itself and began flailing at the smoke, till his daddy started shaking with laughter.

  “Beat the hell out of it, son,” he said, and if any revenuers had been around they would have heard him snorting and belly-laughing there on the ground.

  It was, James remembers, quiet and beautiful on the tops of those ridges and deep in the hollows, with no cities to muddle up the stars—just him and his daddy sitting on the grass, telling stories as the fire burned down and the perfume of the cooking whiskey, sweet and strong, ran along the breeze. When he was older his daddy let him have a small taste, and it really did run through his body like blue fire, burning his mouth, scorching his throat, but settling warm into his belly, like good whiskey will. It made you forget things, yes, and made it hard to see things, but nothing worth remembering, nothing worth seeing. At least that was how it seemed after the fourth or fifth swaller.

  Sometimes he and his daddy would lay on their backs and watch the stars, which stood still, mostly, unless they had been drinking some, and the lightning bugs, which wandered on the air. The stars were pure white and the lightning bugs were gold, or an electric yellow, depending on the wetness of the air.

  That particular night, “just as I finished whupping that smoke,” just as the dark settled down completely around them, they saw a single light in the distance, moving slowly toward them in a straight, unwavering line.

  “Son,” Charlie said in a whisper, deadly serious now, “don’t look good, does it?”

  James was too scared to speak.

  “Step over behind that big pine and stand still,” Charlie said. “Don’t you move no matter what happens. If it goes bad and they get me, go on home as quick as you can.”

  Then he stooped over and picked up that blacksmith’s hammer, and stood in the clearing by the still, the flames framing him in an aura of yellow light. James wondered, at first, why his daddy didn’t hide. Then it came to him.

  When the man or men with the light chased Charlie, or fought him, he would be the one drawing all the attention, and James could just slip away—or just stand still, in the deep shadows, until it was safe.

  Charlie smacked the hammer once, twice into his palm. It could be revenuers or it could be some low-rent son of a bitch coming to steal his whiskey and perhaps hurt him or his boy. The Belgian shotgun was propped, close at hand, against a tree.

  The light came closer and closer and closer and … about that time James and his daddy noticed that it didn’t seem to be getting any bigger. Then it just hummed right on by, a ball of light, bright, tiny, distinct.

  Then, deep in those woods, they knew it was a ghost. Now James knows it was just a lightning bug, but the mother of all lightning bugs, the biggest one anyone has ever, ever seen. But why did it fly so true, for so long? Lightning bugs dance on the breeze.

  Ghost stories begin like this. But then, drinking stories begin this way, too.

  Federal men and county sheriffs harried him for thirty years, and while they locked him up now and then for carrying too much moonshine around in his bloodstream, they never caught him cooking.

  “They chased him,” said James. “I reckon they caught everybody, everybody but Daddy.”

  He remembers one time, when they were living in Alabama, they saw a big cloud of dust racing above the trees. Two carloads of county pulled up in the yard.

  “I don’t like this,” said James, who was about fourteen.

  “It don’t make me smile, neither, son,” Charlie said.

  All eight car doors opened and men poured out. The sheriff—they believe it was the famous still-smasher Socko Pate—walked up to the porch.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Chollie Bundrum,” he said.

  “I am him,” Charlie said.

  “I’d like to look around your place,” he said, “for a whiskey still.”

  “You go ahead,” Charlie said, pleasant, not mocking. Socko was not a man you teased. “If I wasn’t gettin’ ready to sit down to dinner, I’d go with you.”

  But as soon as he stepped inside, he turned to James and said, “Son, I believe they got me.”

  But while the still was just a mile from the house, Charlie had found the perfect place. He had found a deep sinkhole, deeper than a man is tall, and had carefully scooped out a cave in the side of the hole—then covered that with vines and honeysuckle. He had not worn out a path walking to it because he eased through the weeds on a slightly different route every time he went to it.

  “Unless he can fly,” the sheriff said, walking into the yard, “he ain’t been down there.”

  He called to Charlie to come out of the house.

  “Well, we didn’t have no luck,” he said. “We never found so much as a rabbit trail, all the way up in there.”

  Charlie told them he would be sure to come and see them if he ever saw a whiskey still close by.

  He could not fly, of course.

  But, after a few long pulls on his own product, sometimes he thought he could.

  While a culture of deceit ruled the making of it, it also ruled the drinking of it, for men like Charlie.

  Some men drank in their houses, of course. He never did. Ava, who had learned a long time ago that the devil rode on a popping cork, didn’t let whiskey in her house. Charlie would not have done it anyway.

  Under his code, a man did not drink in front of his wife and daughters—but once his boys were old enough, he drank in front of them, and did not lecture them not to drink.

  Men drank. Men worked. Men fought.

  By the time you were thirteen or fourteen, you were a man, or else something pitiful.

  They drank in the woods, beside their stills, and in their trucks and cars, parked on dirt roads. Sometimes, if they just had to have a tot or two, they would drink parked in their yards.

  It was not religion that forced them to hide it. Charlie was not, as we have said, a religious man, though he lived surrounded by people of deep faith. There were men of that time, and this time, too, I guess, who would preach drunk, who would be so full of the spirit—and spirits—that they would stagger to their feet in the woods and start quoting loud and hot from the Bible, until they passed out.

  Charlie did not cloak his drinking to hide it from church people. Men like Charlie, the ones squeezed between their love for their families and their love for the likker, came home only when their drinking was done.

  That might seem like an empty victory, a senseless one, to have a man drink himself half-blind and then stagger into the house, bringing all the bad things it caused into his home.

  But that is one of the reasons they loved him. His nature, his fine nature, was not turned ugly by it. He drank and he laughed and he drank and he sang and he drank and he told good stories, and sometimes he drank and he just went to bed smiling.

  He liked living, so he did not drink to hide. He just liked it. He liked the taste.

  When he first started making it, as the Depression ended, it was a certain way—as long as he didn’t get caught—of making a little money on the side. If he had drank his money up, cheating his family, he would have been a sorry man. But he made that likker and drank a portion of it—and I guess it would be asking too much to expect a man to make it, smelling it, and not have a sip.

  I am not trying to excuse it. He did things that he shouldn’t have. I guess it takes someone who has outlived a mean drunk to appreciate a kind one.

  But he never poisoned anybody. He never caused anyone to go lame or blind from bad whiskey, and if you�
��re going to have whiskey—and it, like the mountains where it was made, will always be with us—you might as well have memorable whiskey. And people do recall it. They truly do.

  The one it hurt the most was him.

  The law, frustrated at not being able to catch him, dogged him. More than a few police, tired of being knocked upside the head by him when they had tried to haul him to jail for other things, followed him along the dirt roads, and pulled him over when he wobbled.

  Once, two Georgia state troopers followed him to a well-known beer joint outside Rome called the Maple on the Hill.

  It was a real, sawdust-on-the-floor beer joint, and the mighty Roy Acuff even wrote a song about it—or they named it for the song, one or the other—and Charlie, James and William went in and sat at a row of stools.

  The two troopers walked in and stepped up behind him.

  “Come on, Bundrum, let’s go,” one said.

  “I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” Charlie said.

  “Come on,” the other said.

  “I’m just sittin’ here,” he said. “I got these boys with me, and I can’t leave ’em here.”

  Then one of the troopers hooked his arm around Charlie’s throat and dragged him backward off the stool.

  What happened next in that bar happened so quick that James and William did not even have time to step in and help him. From the floor, Charlie swept one of his long arms against the back of the trooper’s legs and upended him.

  “His legs was up where his head was supposed to be,” William said.

  He landed on his head, and the fight was pretty much out of him. The other trooper took a swing at Charlie with his nightstick, and hit him square and solid across the head—but it just didn’t do the job.

  Charlie hit the remaining conscious trooper one time in the side of the head, with a sound like concrete blocks slapping together, and the man dropped beside his partner on the floor.

  Charlie did not whoop or yell or say a word—the two men seemed beyond hearing, anyway. He dragged first one, then the other, out to the gravel parking lot, and laid them beside their patrol car.

  Then he went back inside and drank his beer, until a carload of county deputies pulled into the lot. He told the boys to walk on home—and stepped out to greet them. They beat him a good bit.

  He drove slow when he was drinking, and was good with everything but right turns. He always thought he had a little more room than he did, and was bad to run over the mailbox.

  His children would hear his old car rumbling into the drive and—if that was not immediately followed by the sound of sheet metal on tin—they were glad. Over time the mailbox looked like it had been in an undeclared war, and the mailman would slip the letters in and grin.

  They were living in Tredegar in Alabama when, late one night, they heard a horrible crash. They ran outside, to see Charlie’s truck crumpled against a massive oak tree.

  “My God, Daddy,” Juanita said, “how did you not see something that big?”

  “Well, you see, hon,” he said, “there was two of them.”

  He would have lived longer, and his wife and children would have had him longer, if he had not been a man who liked his life sweetened with whiskey. His grandchildren would have known him.

  But for some men, drinking is like breathing.

  He made a living despite it. He never laid out drunk, he seldom slept in the day, the way drinkers do.

  I guess you could say he got happy.

  Ava saw it as her job to make sure his hangover was as painful as possible.

  “You got to stop, or it’ll kill you,” she said.

  “I know, Momma,” he said.

  “You got to,” she said.

  “I know, Momma. I know.”

  “You ain’t even listening to me,” she said, her voice rising.

  “Yes, Momma, I am,” he said.

  “No, you ain’t,” she said, standing over his shoulder, looking down on him like a conscience. Finally he would get up and flee to the yard, and Margaret would follow him, toddling out the door.

  “That woman,” he would say, “could nag paint off a wall,” and Margaret would just sit there, sad, because even a toddler knows when things are wrong.

  Sometimes Ava would get so wound up she’d come out on the porch to press her point, and Charlie would climb into his cut-down to get away, all the time saying: “I hear, Momma. I hear.”

  And then he would be bouncing down the road, safely away, and his penitence would vanish in the dust from his tires.

  “He ain’t sorry a bit,” Ava would say back at the house, and then stomp inside. To Margaret, it seemed like Ava could make the sun sorry for coming up in the morning.

  “Why is she so mad at you, Daddy?” she would ask him when she was older.

  “Well, hon,” he would say, “she’s a Holiness.”

  “What’s that?” Margaret said.

  “A Holiness,” he said, “is somebody who ain’t never had no fun.”

  Ava, he explained, sometimes forgets that she is one, and has some fun before she realizes she is having any.

  “She backslides,” he explained, “which makes her tolerable.”

  A time or two, he roofed houses drunk. A cousin told me, grinning, about the time she drove past a big house and saw my grandfather’s silhouette on the roofline, wobbling in the clouds.

  16.

  The letter

  Outside Rome

  THE EARLY 1940S

  The letter from the federal government came on a late afternoon in the winter of 1941, when Juanita was eight or nine. Ava read it to Charlie when he came home from work that evening, then went and sat red-eyed by the wood-stove, the government’s letter crumpled in her fist.

  Juanita asked the older children why she was sad, and they said it was because their daddy had to go to Rome to see a doctor for a test, for a “zamination.” If he passed it they were going to give him a green suit like the one Hootie wore, and put him in the army.

  Much of the rest of the world was already at war, but that didn’t mean a whole lot to her because no one was fighting over their dirt road, their trees. It didn’t seem right to her, that her daddy would have to go and leave them alone. Her daddy kept the ha’nts and woolyboogers away. He kept the thunder from knocking down the house. He killed the snakes.

  Why couldn’t Hootie go, the children wondered, since he already had the suit. They would hate to loose Hootie, but …

  “We’ll starve,” said Ava, who was expecting a sixth child, and Charlie just kept saying, hush, now.

  Ava was still crying when he got up the next morning to leave. He put on a clean pair of overalls and his denim carpenter’s cap, and hugged Ava and the children. He told them not to worry, but even as a small girl Juanita could tell that his face was bleak and grim.

  Hootie refused to come in the house. He went and sat by himself in the woods. Charlie called to him but Hootie just went deeper into the trees.

  His old truck was broke down, so he left walking. They lived on a hill then, with a long, straight red-dirt driveway. Juanita stood on the porch and watched him walk away. He was still a skinny man—he was thin all his life—and it seemed like he was ten feet tall as he walked away.

  “I stayed out in the yard all day and looked down that road, and I guess I looked down it a hundred times,” Juanita said. “I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody. I didn’t go in the house to eat. I was just waitin’ for him to come back, and I was so afraid he wouldn’t. It was the first time I ever remember being sad.”

  Even as a little girl, she was like him in a lot of ways, skinny and tougher and less prone to cry than any of the girls she played with, a scrapper and tomboy. She didn’t cry that day, she just watched.

  At dusk, as her momma was lighting the lantern inside, she saw him step into the drive. She ran as fast and as hard as she could, and he caught her up with one hand.

  “They didn’t want me,” was all he said.

  She walked ba
ck with him, but you really don’t have to walk if you are floating on air.

  “Momma was still in the house, still squalling,” Juanita said. “Momma was always squalling.”

  At supper, he told Ava what had happened. The doctor had said he was healthy enough, for a man so thin, but the recruiter told Charlie he had too many responsibilities, that the army was not taking men in their thirties who had five children—and a wife expecting a sixth child. He told Charlie to go home, to be with his family. Charlie told that man he would not duck his duty if he was called, but the man laughed and told Charlie that his sons would soon be old enough to serve, if it was a long war.

  “Go on home, Bundrum,” the recruiter told him, “to them babies.”

  Mary Jo was born on March 27, 1941, on the Georgia side, the last time Granny Isom, who was becoming feeble, would come to Ava’s home. Mary Jo, whom everyone would just call Jo, slept in Ava’s arms as Juanita and little Margaret stood and stared at her.

  “She’s kindly ugly, ain’t she?” Juanita said.

  Margaret nodded her head.

  She would grow out of it. Jo would be a daddy’s girl, even in a house full of them. As a baby she had terrible earaches, and her daddy bought cigars and blew the smoke into her ears. It was supposed to make it better, something folks believed back then. Whether it worked or not, it is one of her first memories of her daddy, something that helps heal her now, even if it did not heal her then.

  Years later, Jo would say that it was her impending birth, the very fact that she was coming into this world, that made the army send her daddy home.

  But Juanita knows that if wishing can make something happen, she wished him back up that driveway, wished him away from a war that took a thousand daddies, ten thousand, from the pines.

  “I just couldn’t imagine a life without Daddy,” Juanita said. “It’s hard enough to imagine life without him now.”