Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  To Travis, maybe to a lot of people, Charlie fit better in the past of the river, of these foothills, than in the here and now. The new blacktop highways, reaching all the way from the mist-covered hills to the wire grass and lowlands to the south, signaled the region’s future. Charlie, who still used a broken branch as a fish stringer, was its history.

  His boats were never store-bought. He still made his own boats from car hoods, and this time he had taken the hoods off two 1940 Ford coupes and welded them together to form a fat, stubby canoe. This day, Charlie was taking the kinfolks with him to set out his trotlines.

  Trotlines are the way a man fishes when he is more interested in food than he is in sport. Charlie would take a long string and, every foot or so, tie a line and hook on it, and bait each one of the hooks with the cheapest, most foul-smelling stuff he could find. They would use mussels dug from the sandbars, or spoiled cow or hog liver, or chicken guts, or pieces of carp—trash fish—or even moldy bread, which men squeezed into tight balls so it would not melt off the hook quite so fast.

  Then he would stretch the long line across the river or a tributary or deep pool, and let the river carry the fish past it.

  Sometimes, especially during the Depression, he needed some fish in a hurry, and he would carry an old crank telephone with him, the type that you had to twist the handle round and round to make a call.

  Twisting the crank built up an electrical charge, and after he had turned its tail a few times he would drop the line in the water to shock the fish, and they would come floating to the top, along with an assortment of snakes, turtles and other living things.

  Charlie would scoop up the fish and turtles—turtle soup was a fine thing then, even if you were not hungry—and leave the snakes. It may taste like chicken, as some people said, but it probably also tastes a little bit like snake, and even a little bit is a reason to gag.

  The game wardens frowned on the shock method of fishing, but it was hard to catch a man at it. To this day, the rusting remnants of old crank telephones lie at the bottom of that river, covered up in a half century of silt and muck.

  Charlie had quit all that a long time ago, and now he was fishing legal. They had a foul-smelling bucket of innards in the boat, and planned to bait a trotline, spend the night on the riverbank and check it in the morning. With any luck, they’d have fish and hush puppies tomorrow.

  Early in the evening he found a place to camp, just below a rickety old cabin set up high on a bank, and Travis and the boys sat around the fire and listened to the men yarn.

  “We had a meal of sardines, crackers and Vienna sausages, and just before dark Uncle Charlie and Uncle Richard walked over a foot-log and up the hill to get a quart of whiskey. It was a full moon, and it was almost like daylight.”

  When the two men came back they let the fire burn out and tried to get to sleep, but loud cussing coming from the bootlegger’s shack up the hill woke up the ones who had actually been able to shut their eyes. Even though there was a good moon, it seemed like the heart of darkness to the boys.

  “It seems like everything was magnified in those woods,” said Travis. “Then this loud argument started up on the hill, and you could hear cursing and the sound of licks being passed, and then there was a shot.”

  The boys jumped up, but Charlie told them, quietly, sternly, to hush, boys, and be still. Then, up the hill, the shack’s door swung open.

  Down on the river, the three boys moved in close to Charlie.

  “The men come out, and two men were carrying a body wrapped in a tarp,” Travis said. “I guess there was six or seven of them in all, and as the two men carried the body down to the river, the others stood and looked down the bank, like they were looking for something.”

  That was when Charlie tugged or pushed the boys down to the ground, hissing: “Lay down, and shut your mouth.”

  “We didn’t hesitate,” Travis said. They just dropped, and buried themselves in the shadows and in the leaves as the men carrying the body walked right on past them, and the men up above them scanned the bank for witnesses.

  The men weighted the tarp with rocks, heaved the body into the river with a loud splash and walked back up the bank, and again Uncle Charlie whispered for Travis and the boys to lay still now, and patted them gently with his big hands.

  And though it would have felt better to just get up and run for it, to go crashing through the trees, there was Charlie’s hand pressing them down, down.

  They had, for all practical purposes, witnessed a killing. The kind of men who casually murdered one of their own and fed him to the catfish without even a glance back, let alone a word to the Lord, would, Travis knew even then, not hesitate to kill three wide-eyed boys and a couple of fishermen.

  “So we just laid there, and we laid there all night,” with his heart hammering at his chest for one hour, two, three and on and on and on, until finally just before dawn Charlie figured the bad men were passed out, asleep or gone, and they crept to the boat and glided away.

  The men must have figured that Charlie and Rich were passing by and had stopped for some likker, then just moved on, not that they were camping right there, that they had heard the shot and seen them weight and sink the body.

  And for a lifetime Travis Bundrum wondered what if, what if the men had walked right up on them, or smelled the woodsmoke or the empty sardine cans, or seen the boat pulled half in, half out of the river.

  But he never wondered why he lived through it. He survived that night because his uncle Charlie, even with a pint—more or less—of likker in him, held him down in that groundcover with the power of his voice, his hands and his will.

  Charlie went back to the river not long after that and put out his lines, and this time he caught some river cats and mud cats, which are yellow because they hug the bottom where the sun never shines, and tossed them on the bank.

  He gutted them on the river, throwing the innards into the water, and finished cleaning them on an old board stretched across two stumps in his backyard.

  Edna, who was the best fish cooker in the family and probably in the United States, took over, and dusted them in cornmeal and salt and black pepper, and fried them just perfect, so that the outside was crisp and the inside was moist and flaky, with enough of what people called a whang—a bit of a muddy taste—to tell you it was real food.

  She fried potatoes—what they called Irish potatoes—and made the best hush puppies that have ever been, the kind my momma cooked for me. They would take the meal and mix in milk or water and diced onion—sometimes green onion if it was summer—and maybe even a little cubed-up commodity cheese. But instead of deep-frying them in little round balls, they would spoon it out in the hot grease in an iron skillet, in little patties.

  And sometimes they would send one of the boys to the store to get a block of ice, and they would chip it up with a butcher knife and put it in a tub with some Coca-Colas or Royal Crown or the brand Double Cola, if the Georgia kinfolks had driven over to see them. It is one of the great mysteries of life that Double Colas could not be bought this far into Alabama—you could only get them over the state line in Rome. Sometimes they would lay a watermelon in the ice water, to let it get cold. But there was never any beer, because drinking is a sin.

  And they would eat it all and sit and talk and sometimes someone would even pick and sing a little, or Grandpa Sanders would tell a tale. They would talk until it was too dark to see, and then they would talk to the dark.

  The children played hide-and-seek in the wet grass, and chased lightning bugs and put them in a jar with holes poked in the lid, but they never did shine all that much once you put them under glass.

  The town of Jacksonville was growing. The jail, made from rock, was still the most imposing structure on the square, and the Confederate soldier still watched over its citizens with granite eyes.

  But you could buy everything from a suit of clothes to a vanilla float there. The Creamery sold a big ol’ scoop for a nickel, and
Juanita—who always got vanilla—would drag Margaret in there by the hand, a dime scorching her fingertips. She was about seventeen then, and Margaret a little younger. But with ice cream in their hands, they were little girls all over again, and they would sit and watch the cars. You never saw a mule anymore, not in town.

  If they had money, they went to the theater on the square and saw a cowboy movie, usually with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and Trigger, but if Dale’s horse had a name they cannot remember it now. Tarzan of the Apes swung through the trees and must have killed the same big ol’ snake and the same stuffed crocodile a thousand times, but they liked to sit in the back and munch a nickel bag of popcorn and listen to him yell. “It was the best popcorn I’ve had in my whole life,” Juanita said.

  It was not Charlie’s world anymore.

  The revenuers had airplanes now, and took a man’s picture from the sky. Sheriff Socko Pate was in the Anniston Star almost every week, it seemed like, him and a bunch of deputies standing over another busted still. Charlie made a last few gallons to sip on for posterity, then stripped the copper tubing from his still to sell as scrap and left the rest of it to rust away in the woods. Practically every other whiskey man in north Alabama and northwestern Georgia had done time for making shine, but he just retired, quietly and undefeated.

  It wasn’t the same in other ways. The state troopers seldom had to chase a man anymore down the dirt roads. They just took down his tag number and sent a car out to fetch him when they felt like it. That, to Charlie, was just mean.

  A man couldn’t drive drunk now with all the cars, all the cars that went so fast on the creeping blacktop, and if a man fought the police or the deputies in an honest, bare-knuckle fight, it almost seemed as if they did not appreciate the contest in it, like they lost their sense of humor as soon as he balled up his fist. Taking a whupping from Charlie had been almost a rite of passage for a lot of young troopers, deputies and police, but now the men behind the badges pulled their batons and put a hand on their pistol—and what fun is that.

  A man didn’t do a night in jail anymore to sober up. They took him to the county lockup in Anniston, and it cost good money to bail him out, money his family didn’t have. The judges still knew his name, still shook their heads and sometimes even smiled every two or three years when the tall man stepped before them, a man without malice, just a dusty old code of behavior that sometimes ran sideways with the law. But more and more, as the city limits inched out into the country, the law penned him in.

  There was one trooper in particular he didn’t like—which was a shame because the man’s wife was a nurse at Piedmont Hospital, and helped deliver Charlie’s grandchildren—and when he arrested him, Charlie just refused to ride with him in his patrol car. Charlie would go sit down and wait in the ditch for another trooper to drive all the way out and get him.

  For Ava, the changing years brought an end to that cursed gloom, as even poor people got their houses wired for electricity. For Charlie, the Tennessee Valley Authority was no blessing. It changed his river to create huge backwaters that swallowed houses and pasture fences and old barns, and pretty soon city people were building second houses on the banks, and “fish camps” that had electricity and refrigerators and radios that blared out into the darkness.

  But there were still a few wild places on the water, and Charlie went to them when he felt it all pressing in on him.

  He never told his family about the killing. They heard about it only after his death, from Travis.

  Such a thing will haunt you till your hair turns gray, and it did that to Travis. “How strange it was, that it wasn’t mentioned after that, by Uncle Charlie or Uncle Rich. But I thought about that man. I wondered who he was, if he had a family, but it was just a thing we didn’t talk about.”

  Several years after it happened, Travis and his uncle Rich were out in the yard talking about nothing in particular. And out of the blue, Travis said:

  “Uncle Rich, they killed that feller, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, son,” Rich said. “They sure did.”

  And they never talked about it again, and Travis didn’t talk about it at all, until he heard that a cousin was writing a book about his uncle Charlie, and he thought it was time.

  Sometimes, when he rides around the square in Jacksonville and sees the Confederate statue there, he thinks about how someone should chip one out in Charlie Bundrum’s likeness and put it up there, to keep the other one company.

  He thinks that if people really wanted to honor someone who was part of this place, about this place, someone who had courage and heart, then Charlie would do just fine.

  The Creamery is gone. The theater is gone. And men like Charlie are gone. Why not, he figured, erect a statue to a man in a pair of overalls and a long-billed carpenter’s cap, a hammer or a trotline in his hands and a clear pint bottle in his back pocket.

  He does not believe that will ever happen, of course. But imagine if it did, if all the beloved men were cast in stone and propped up there, an army of men in overalls and jumpers and hobnailed boots, holding hammers and big wrenches and bolls of cotton in their hands. An army of grandfathers, frozen in the act of baiting hooks or opening a can of peaches with a pocketknife.

  Imagine that.

  26.

  Hello, and goodbye

  Jacksonville

  THE EARLY 1950S

  He was standing on the square in Jacksonville the first time she saw him.

  “What a pretty little man,” Margaret thought.

  His hair was slicked back and almost black, and he had striking blue eyes in a face that was Cherokee dark, his cheekbones high and his nose a little hooked. And he looked like he could be mean, if he wanted to be, but mostly he just looked good.

  He was thin and slight but powerful-looking, like Alan Ladd, and he had on a black suit and a starched white shirt and a skinny black tie, and black loafers with dimes in them. He had a cigarette in his lips and he slouched on the corner, like he was somebody.

  Her boyfriend at the time was a friend of the dark-haired boy, and had borrowed his car that day to take Margaret to town.

  When the boy with Margaret saw the dark-haired boy on the corner, he pulled up to introduce him to his date.

  “This is Charles Bragg,” her boyfriend said. “He’s a marine. He’s going to Korea here, pretty soon.”

  Charles took her hand.

  “This is Margaret,” the boy said.

  She was still barely in her teens but tall, almost as tall as the dark-haired boy, and already she was what most people called beautiful.

  The straight, pale hair she hated so much hung to her shoulders and she had a look that people could not describe, a serene look, but a fragile look, too. Her face was perfect, and she smiled hello.

  He was too cool to say much then, it seemed. “He just smiled this wicked little smile, and I saw he had a little flower in a buttonhole on his coat, and I didn’t know why,” Margaret said.

  But he was not being suave, he just forgot how to talk for a few seconds. Later, much later, he would say she looked like a movie star.

  She got to know the boy a little bit, but there didn’t seem to be a future in it. She didn’t know much about Korea—the truth is, most people here didn’t even know where the place was—and no one had ever heard of a “police action” before. But he had told her, told everybody, that he was leaving this little town, that he wasn’t gonna work in no damn cotton mill for a lifetime, like his daddy did. Even if he came back home alive, he was gone for good. That made some people sad, people who had loved him for a lifetime, or just a little while. But he asked Margaret, later, when he came home on a furlough, if she would mind if he wrote her a letter every now and then, and she said it would be fine, if he really wanted to.

  27.

  Underwater

  Guntersville, Alabama

  1953

  You had to sneak off to do it, but you did it. You had to be able to swim the river, or the other boys
would make fun of you. It was not so much that you had to do it to be a man, you had to do it to be a boy. So boys of eleven and twelve tugged on a pair of cutoff blue jeans, lied to their mommas and went to the widest place, or the narrowest, and waded in up to their waist. They would stand there, arms, face and neck burned red or brown, and let that river run through fingers as if they were divining its intent. And then they would push hard off the sandy bottom and grab a double armload of water, and beat and kick at it like a bad dream till a finger or toe scraped bottom on the other side. The ones who did not make it, who got pulled too far downstream by the current and got too tired to fight it anymore, got their picture in the newspaper.

  The dams made a different river. The dams made a river so wide, so deep, that a boy just stood on the man-made banks and hoped he didn’t fall in.

  The big dam, built in the winter of 1939, made a whole new world. Men used big, three-pronged snatch hooks to drag out monstrous catfish, almost as long as a man, and fishermen told stories of cats that lay like submarines at the base of those dams, giants lolling in the currents, too fat to move. Even accounting for how much a fisherman will lie, those were damn large fish. Charlie caught one cat about three quarters as long as he was, and was so astounded he took it home and had his picture made.

  To Charlie, a river was supposed to run narrow and wild, and was supposed to change in size and speed and character when it rained, or in drought, and should never, ever be so wide a man could not cross it on a footlog—a tree that had fallen in a storm, creating a natural bridge. But though he never liked what the dams had done to the landscape, a big fish is still a big fish, and as that water pooled he prowled its banks, hunting.

  It seemed like the fish just swam right up and jumped in a man’s arms there. The fish were too big for a conventional rod and reel, so he used an old pool cue and fixed a strong snatch hook to his line, which was about as thick as nylon cord.