Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  They called it snagging. As the giant cats, buffalo, jack salmon and other fish drifted past near the dam, he dropped his hook right down on them.

  He didn’t do it for sport, for there was precious little sport in it. He did it for the meat—that’s what they called it, the meat—and it is doubtful that he ever wasted a fish.

  He was a social man and liked company, but this was a bloody and methodical process, so he either fished with Hootie or fished alone. One spring day, he threw his pool cue in the backseat of his Dodge and told Ava he’d be back, d’rectly. The Dodge had a faulty starter, but it fired right up and he took that as a good sign. Fishing, despite what some men will tell you, is about luck, and Charlie believed in it.

  He wanted Hootie to go but no one could find him, so he rolled his window down and stuck his big ol’ knobby elbow out, like he always did, and left them in a swirl of dust.

  Guntersville, Alabama, is one of the prettiest places on earth, as you approach it from the riverside. The water is not sluggish, not brown, but clean-looking like the ocean or the Gulf, and flocks of big white birds, hundreds, maybe thousands, swirled over the lake.

  Charlie found a spot to park right near the water, and took his tackle over to a place near some granite rocks, and peered over into the water, waiting for the big ones to coast by.

  Later, as the sky started to darken, he noticed how high the river seemed to be running, so much higher than before. He was always intrigued at how the light-bill barons always seemed to be saving up their water or letting it go, based on everything but nature, and it had been that way since the damn thing was built.

  He also noticed that it was clouding up something terrible, and that the sky was changing from blue to a deep and angry purple, like it was bruised. Then the rain came at him like a waterfall.

  He ran to his car through the mud, and noticed that he couldn’t tell anymore where the bank ended and the river began. He jumped in and tried the starter, and the thing whined and groaned but wouldn’t catch. Starters do that when you need them not to.

  He tried it and tried it, the rain pounding and pounding at the roof, and the starter got weaker, fainter, and the water just got higher, higher …

  In the vernacular of the time and place, the words “I’ll be back, d’rectly” mean the absolute opposite of how they sound.

  There is nothing direct about it. It means that a person will be home for supper, unless they stop off for a swaller, or drop by kin-folks’ houses, or the fishing is particularly good. But Charlie didn’t have any fancy ice chest to store his catch, so he always came home no later than the morning after.

  When he didn’t come home the next morning, Ava and the girls were not particularly worried, but as the day wore on and he didn’t pull into the driveway, they started to wonder what was keeping him.

  Ava figured he had found somebody with some homemade likker and was just waiting for his eyes to focus before heading home. By nightfall she was positive of it, and by dawn of the next day, after pacing the floor, she prayed to God it was that, only that.

  He had been gone for two days, and had not sent word. Margaret, Juanita and Juanita’s boyfriend, the son of the sawmill owner and a good boy named Ed Fair, drove all around the back roads, thinking maybe his car had just broke down.

  Juanita told James and Earl Woods—it was Earl and Hubert who had played the joke on Charlie that night they pretended to be a woman at the door—and James and Earl drove up to Guntersville.

  The river was still in flood, but was starting to recede. It had swallowed Charlie’s car.

  When James and Earl found it, it was still covered almost to the top of the roof with brown water.

  James felt around inside, feeling for his daddy. But there was no body. Up the bank, caught in some bushes, they found his pool cue and his tackle.

  It put a tremble in the people who loved him, and Ava, when they told her, began to cry. Then she just went and laid down, facing the wall.

  Her brittle mind, a mind that had been chipped and flaked by so many worries over a lifetime, cracked a little then, and the fissure ran, longer and longer, every day he was missing.

  Margaret, who was sixteen or so, went and sat by herself, numb.

  It was worse than when she sat waiting for him in the hospital parking lot. It was worse than anything.

  But the men who knew Charlie could not believe that a river had killed him, even a man-made river where the water piled up against a giant cement wall.

  They searched the riverbanks, afraid of what they would find, but while there were dead chickens, dead cows and knots of snakes, there was no man on the mudbanks or sandbars or snagged in the dead trees.

  They checked all the hospitals and the morgues, but no one who matched Charlie’s description had been brought in. Then, out of common sense, they started checking the jails. They enlisted the help of what these Alabama Bundrums called the Georgia people, the kin over there.

  Together, they called or drove by every jail for a hundred miles on both sides of the line. Some places, the deputies just said, “Naw, we ain’t got him,” because they had had him before. Others ran down their lists of inmates. Nothing. The first week passed. His children were frantic.

  In town, people asked Margaret: “Have they found your daddy yet?” And she would shake her head and cry.

  Friends helped, and even people who barely knew him. They even called the Birmingham jail, though it is nowhere close to Guntersville and Charlie would have had no reason to be there. But everybody knew about Birmingham, about the jail there. A poor man, a man dressed raggedy or dirty, was swept off the street.

  Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor didn’t want any white trash on his streets, and officers routinely swept the street and the bus station for vagrants. But when James called to ask them if they had his daddy, a bored clerk ran down the docket and said they had no one by that name in the jail.

  Two weeks had gone by since he went missing. As a last resort, James drove to the jails and police stations to plead. He even went to Birmingham. He asked again for a Charlie Bundrum, and a woman asked if James would spell it for her, and she traced her finger down a list.

  “B-U-N-D-R-U-M,” she said, and then her finger stopped.

  “We’ve got him,” she said. “‘Vagrancy.’”

  James didn’t cry or act a fool. He knew his daddy had not drowned. Snapping turtles didn’t drown. Water moccasins didn’t drown. They could, but they just didn’t.

  He asked the woman, politely:

  “Can I have him back?”

  They took him home, but the word had already reached the family. When they saw their daddy step from the car, they ran for him, but froze, just froze, at the fury on his face and the storm in his eyes.

  When the car refused to start, and with the flood coming, he left it and walked in the rain to the bus station. The only way to get home was to buy a ticket to Birmingham, and then to Anniston or Gadsden.

  He stepped off the bus in Birmingham with no baggage, in tattered overalls—he always wore his worst pair to fish—with fish blood, and worse, on them, and a work shirt worn through at the elbows.

  He planned on having a cup of coffee. He was not drunk. He was not even drinking. He was just trying to go home.

  He was sitting on a bench, near a group of other ragged men who had stepped off the bus in Birmingham, when two carloads of city police carrying billy clubs came moving fast down the sidewalk where he was waiting for the bus, and swept it clean. He was charged with vagrancy. He had a pocketful of hooks and a can of snuff and a dollar or two, and had no way to make his bail. They didn’t give him a phone call. They just made him a guest of what would be, a few years later, the most famous jail in the country.

  The calls to the jail were answered by someone who apparently had no idea how the name Bundrum looked when it was written down.

  So he just waited, and seethed, and hated it, because there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
r />   They had power over him in a way no man had ever had, and it burned a hole in him. He had been in jail before, but every time until now, he had by God earned it.

  It took days for him to cool down. In the meantime, Ava came back into the world of the living, and his daughters rejoiced, and the word of his miraculous discovery spread on both sides of the state line.

  “That was when I learned to pray,” Margaret said. “I promised the Lord a lot of things, if he would let my daddy come back.”

  Just as Charlie could always find a wild place to fish or set out his trotlines, boys found places to swim the river, places where the fear was small enough to challenge. I know, because I stood in it with them, a feeling of dread in my guts, my hands searching the ripples for a promise that it would deliver me, breathing, to that other side. And for a while, when you feel the water carrying you sideways as fast as you can pull for the other bank, you really are stuck halfway between life and death, and as close to being in purgatory as a Protestant is likely going to be.

  Leave it to Charlie, to my grandpa, to be the only man I know who was said to be lost in it, then come striding back, big as life, into the here and now. It wasn’t the same as Huck and Tom faking their deaths just to hear the cannon boom across the Mississippi, to attend their funerals. Only Charlie could be presumed drowned and it turn out he was just short on bail.

  28.

  Pilfered roses

  Jacksonville

  1953–1955

  The dark-haired boy stole flowers for her when he came back from the war.

  He would be driving down the road and see a rosebush, and stomp on the brakes and almost send the people with him through the windshield. Since the war he had carried a straight razor in his slacks pocket, and he whipped it out like a saber as he ran into the yard. Quick, he would slash the stems and come sprinting back to the car, and spin the wheels in the getaway.

  Once, he was riding beside Margaret’s daddy in his truck when he saw a huge rosebush on a steep bank, and he said, “Stop, Charlie, stop!” and he was out the door before Charlie could say a word. He climbed the bank and came down with a giant armload of red roses.

  Charlie hung his head, because he had never stolen a thing in his life and now he was an accessory to the theft of yard flowers, but as the boy climbed in and slammed the door he didn’t have the heart to seriously chastise him, because he knew where the flowers were going.

  The boy had come home from the war a whole man, or at least that was how it seemed, and Margaret was just happy he had come home at all. He didn’t talk much about all the killing he had seen or done, he just stole flowers.

  He seemed to have lost his desire to leave the town where he had grown up, or maybe he just found a reason to stay. He still wore a black suit every time he came to see her, and he came to see her a lot. “And if he ever had his hand held behind his back when he walked up the walk, I knew I had some roses,” she said.

  He was a little bit of a smart-aleck, “and always acted like he knowed everything.” But every time she got mad at him, here he would come with his arm behind his back, grinning.

  She asked her daddy to find him some work so he could stay out of the cotton mill, and he did. The boy was respectful to him. Charles Bragg didn’t know a damn thing about being a carpenter or about roofing, but he listened and he learned. Charles met Charlie at his house in the mornings and rode to work with him. There was never confusion as to names. Charles was only called Charles. Charlie was never called anything but Charlie—in fact it was his legal name. Mostly, Charles just called him “sir.”

  Charlie couldn’t get the boy to be careful, though. He walked the rooftops, no matter how high up, completely unafraid, and Charlie figured that a man who had seen people shot to pieces overseas was not too scared of falling off a roof, even though it could make you just as dead.

  One day they were putting up a new roof—not just the shingles but the plywood base—and Charles slipped and fell through a hole in the roof. He just managed to catch the corner of a board with his left hand. He couldn’t reach across his body and get a grip with his other hand, so he just hung there, by one hand, till Charlie could get to him.

  “I’ll say this much for him,” Charlie said to Margaret, “the boy’s strong.”

  He said something else, sometimes, about him.

  “He misses his war.”

  He liked to fight. He picked them. He fought like a rooster fights, from something deep inside that has to be turned loose, before it burns a hole.

  And they barely touched him, the men he fought. Where Charlie had just clobbered men, Charles bloodied them and danced away, untouched. The Corps had scarce use for a man who couldn’t fight, and Charles had pulled two hitches.

  The boy drank, too, but Charlie didn’t have much to say about that. If the worst he ever did was get drunk and get caught pilfering roadside flowers, or pick a fight now and then, he might not be all that bad. In spite of himself, he liked Charles.

  But Charlie had lived long enough to know that rage was never something that could be aimed straight and true like a Remington, but something that blew up and hurt people every which way.

  So day by day they worked on the rooftops and he watched him and listened to him—the boy didn’t have much to say, though—and if Charles ever went bad, he would be there to knock a knot on his head, or run him off. But instead the boy was respectful to him and Ava and very kind to his daughter in his presence.

  One day Charles came walking up in the yard literally dripping with flowers, flowers of every kind, a bushel or more of them. Charlie, who was not a stupid man, knew what the boy had in mind.

  “Did you ask them people if you could cut them flowers?” Margaret asked him as he proposed.

  “Sure,” Charles said.

  Charlie and Ava lost two of their daughters in 1955, one to a boy who wooed with flowers and one to a boy who wooed with a coal truck and assorted milk chocolates.

  Hoyt Fair’s boy, Ed, was still courting Juanita. Hoyt was a well-known, respected man, a Congregational Holiness minister. The Fair family had run the sawmill, and now his sons ran the coal yard. Ed was a round-faced boy who always gave Juanita a big heart-shaped box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day. He had finished high school, and had a gray Chrysler. But sometimes he came straight from work to see her and drove the coal truck, and sometimes the Bundrums would load up in it and they would all go over to Edna and Charlie Sanders’s house to watch television.

  Nobody worried about what kind of husband Ed would make. He was a good boy and everybody knew it, who didn’t drink and worked hard and made a good living. If he stayed out late, he was coon huntin’.

  He was the kind of Southern man who expressed his toughness with tools. He broke down dump-truck tires with a sledge and chisel, and when he needed to see if a car’s electrical system was hot, he just grabbed a wire to see if it shocked him. He could weld, plow, drive a bulldozer or a front-end loader, run a power saw, work the boom on a pulpwood truck without killing anybody, and drink RC Colas by the crate.

  Juanita and Ed got married first, in Mississippi. Juanita came home to Jacksonville with a solid man—and an unlimited supply of really fine tools.

  Margaret and Charles got married not long after that. Her daddy told her he was happy for her, but she couldn’t understand why such a tough man would have tears in his eyes.

  Ava was suspicious of Charles.

  “He drinks,” she said.

  29.

  Jeanette, Child of God, and the Flour Girl

  Jacksonville

  THE 1950S

  He called Edna’s second-oldest girl, Linda, Flour Girl, because she would take the lid off the flour barrel when no one was looking, to play in it. She would eat a little of it, but mostly she just liked the white cloud it made when she threw it in the air. Edna would walk in to see her two big eyes shining from what seemed to be a white mask. It is hard to beat a child at times like that, but she tried.

>   Back when she was still a toddler, the Flour Girl would come running when her grandpa Charlie came in the door. Instead of jumping onto his legs the way the other grandkids did, she would stop a few feet in front of him and just stare, up and up and up, at the tall man.

  “Is that my girl?” he would say, and then he would bend over from his waist, with that incredible balance any roofer has to have, till his nose was inches from her face. To the little girl it must have looked like a crane dropping from the sky.

  Then he would just stand there, bent more than double, his hands on his hips, and grin, and she would squeal.

  He could carry two and sometimes even three at a time, if one rode his back and looped their arms around his neck, and it was hard keeping them out of his pockets and his snuff can. When he would take a dip the babies would sneeze, and he laughed at that. The bad thing about snuff is you have to have a spit can—for him, it was usually an empty can of pork and beans, washed clean—and the bad thing about grandchildren is that they are always, always, going to kick the spit can over. With as many as he and Ava had, the spit can was in constant peril.

  By the time he was fifty, he was covered up in grandkids. They rode his bony knees and swung from his arms and legs and pulled his ears, which is exactly what he wanted them to do.

  The babies that his son James had lost to the house fire had been among Charlie’s first grandchildren, and when they died he had balled his fists and pounded his own legs and cursed God and man. Edna said she had not seen such misery in him since he buried his own little girl, Emma Mae, so many years before.

  But as the years tumbled by, his older children filled his house and his yard with little boys and girls, and while he never forgot that tragedy, the grandchildren who came after it created a soft, warm distance, or at least that was how it seemed.