Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  James and Phine had Mary, David, Jimmy, Jeanette and Linda Faye, and William and Louise had Peggy, Alton, Janie and Becky. Edna and Charlie Sanders had a house full of girls, with Betty, Linda, Elizabeth and Wanda. Juanita and Ed had Jackie, a girl, then little Joe Edward. But the baby boy died when he was just a few months old, a reminder of how precious and fragile this family, his family, could be.

  Juanita went to the boy’s grave every day.

  One morning, her daddy gently took her aside.

  “As long as you go,” he said, “it’ll hurt.”

  He knew his daughter could not push the child from her mind, but he knew that standing over a grave is no way to get on with living.

  “For a while,” he said. “Don’t go for a while.”

  They all went to him when it hurt. The grandchildren learned early on to run to him when the dog bit, or they got slashed by a brier. He was there the day that James’s boy David fell and cut his throat on a fruit jar—it wasn’t as bad as it sounds—and at a hundred other little emergencies.

  Like Margaret, they just figured he could fix anything. It was why Jeanette wasn’t afraid the day she fell out of the Dodge.

  Charlie, Ava, Jo and Sue were living on the Roy Webb Road then, not far from Holder’s store. Charlie was sitting on the porch, feeling a little lonely.

  “I think,” he said, “I’ll go get James’s kids.”

  He did things like that. When things were too quiet, he would just stride to the car and go loafering, and sometimes he came back with grandkids hanging from the truck bed.

  This time, he had David, Jimmy, Mary and Jeanette, who was then six years old, in his 1946 Dodge. He was rounding a curve when the door on the passenger side just flew open and Jeanette, who was sitting next to the door, fell out.

  She rolled and tumbled and then lay in the middle of the road in a crumpled little heap. Jeanette, who has never been called anything except Guinea because that is what Charlie named her, lay still as death.

  Margaret was in the yard when the Dodge, much faster than it should have, wheeled into the yard.

  “Hon,” said her daddy, white-faced, carrying a limp body in his arms, “I’ve kilt little Guinea.”

  He laid her on the porch and wiped at her face with a cloth and found that she was breathing, and then she opened her eyes and Charlie just said, quietly, “Thank you, Lord.”

  He took her to the doctor in town, who picked the gravel out of her legs. Jeanette didn’t scream, she didn’t even cry that much.

  Margaret, Juanita and the other sisters swear that something happened to Jeanette as she lay unconscious, because as she grew up and older she became an angel, a selfless, giving, caring woman who watches over others and lives for them.

  Margaret came to call her Jeanette, Child of God, and you can argue with her about it if you want to, about what might have happened during those moments of unconsciousness, but you won’t convince her otherwise.

  Jeanette is noncommittal. On the one hand, it is nice to be thought of as a true saint, even a Protestant one. But on the other, it is a terrible burden. What if she slipped up, and cussed in public?

  She just lets the legend roll on.

  “It all depends, hon,” she says now, “on who you ask.”

  There was never a quiet time for him, between his children and grandchildren, never an empty nest. Some people might have ached for a little peace, a little solitude, but that was what God made the rivers for. As he neared fifty, his life had not changed. Charlie still climbed the ladder every day with a hammer dangling from his hip, still fished when it suited him, and still seemed at his best, at his happiest, with children on the floor at his feet, or doing chin-ups on his skinny forearms. Ava loved them, too, but Charlie … well, Charlie just owned them, owned their hearts, as he owned the hearts of his own children. Some men are just blessed that way. Some men walk in the room, and babies laugh out loud.

  30.

  Sam

  Jacksonville

  NOVEMBER 11, 1956

  To some cultures, leaving your husband is a stark, definite thing. Women of Margaret’s era did not so much leave their husbands during bad times as they just went home.

  “Goin’ home to Momma” was the last thing they would say as the screen door slammed. It was during such a period that Sam was born.

  Margaret was watching American Bandstand at Edna’s house when the baby she was carrying let her know it was time. Her sisters took her to the hospital in Anniston—the Piedmont Hospital, the one much closer to home, had not been built—for what had become routine in their family.

  But the baby was situated wrong, and it was a terrible night. When morning came, the doctor and nurses still hovered over her.

  They almost didn’t make it, mother and child. When Charlie came to see his grandson, he noticed the boy had scratches all over his head, from where the doctor had gripped him, trying to bring him safely into this world.

  Charlie stared at the boy for a few minutes, then stuck his head in her room. “You got Edner and Juaniter beat,” he said, “’cause you had a boy.”

  It was that night, or maybe the next, that Margaret stood over her son in the house just off the Piedmont Highway and told him, over and over and over again, that he belonged to her, to her alone.

  His daddy might have some claim, but she knew even then she could not count on him. So she just stood over him and later lay beside him, to whisper those words to him. And as tired as she was from the hard birth, she was still awake the next morning, looking at him.

  “He didn’t have a hair on his head,” she said, and he was long and thin, but she thought he was beautiful. Juanita said he was ugly, but she might have been kidding.

  More and more, after coming back from Korea, Charles kept his own company. He had always been a drinker, but now he was drinking alone. And no one knew how long he would be gone, where he was or what he was doing. He showed up a little while after Sam was born. Charlie forgave him once or twice, but one day he saw more fear than anger in his daughter’s face after she’d spent time with him, and that ate his guts out. So one day, when Charles Bragg came for his wife and son, Charlie just held the boy in his arms and let his daughter choose. And the dark-haired boy, no flowers in his arms this time, drove away alone.

  31.

  Saved

  Whites Gap

  1957

  On Sundays, he would haul Ava and the girls to Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church, a small wooden chapel where the floor would shake from The Spirit and sensible shoes, and he would sleep in his 1946 Dodge while the people inside sang and shouted and celebrated in the high holy.

  He never went inside, not once.

  He could have faked it. He could have slid into one of those hard pews and nodded his head as the preacher sweated, pointed and rocked back and forth on his feet, in the grip of joy. But he hated hypocrites, hated people who quoted scripture as they picked your pocket.

  So he just lived by his own morality, which a lot of people say they do, but it doesn’t count much if your heart is black as coal dust. The good people of the foothills could call Charlie a sinner in the purest sense, because of the likker and more, and because he never talked to God. But knowing what I know, I wonder. How many people would want to stand naked before God side by side with him if heaven was winner-take-all.

  It was fall, the night it happened, one of those nights when Sam filled his boots with coal just after Charlie closed his eyes.

  Margaret and Sam were living with Charlie and Ava and the younger girls in a house not far from where James and his family lived. Charlie, who said he often felt cold, had started sleeping on a sofa in the living room. He had gotten more gaunt in the past few months, but he was so bony anyway, no one thought much about it.

  Margaret and Sam were asleep when she heard the door open, and it scared her. In all her life, nothing good had come from being awakened in the middle of the night. But it was just her daddy, standing at the foot of th
e bed.

  “I remember he put both his hands on the bedstead—I can still see his hands on the bedstead even today, and he said, ‘Wake up, Margaret, I want to tell you something.’ It really scared me, because he was so serious, and looking straight at me, and he just said: ‘I’m saved. The Lord has saved me.’”

  It terrified her, because in a world of people who walked around talking about God, he had stood alone, unasking.

  “He said, ‘I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing this music, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. So I walked outside, and I saw that the music was coming from above, from where I guess heaven is. And then I heard a voice tell me that this was my last chance. I just wanted to tell you, tell you I was saved.’ Then he walked out of the room and walked down to James’s house, and told James.

  “I wanted to ask him about the song,” Margaret said, “but I was too scared at the time.”

  He didn’t tote a Bible around, after that, or go into the church, or preach to anyone else. He just knew he was saved, just knew the voice in the sky was real. He knew he had to give up his sins, and he did.

  He stopped drinking.

  He didn’t taper off, he just stopped.

  It had to be God.

  His daughters said it just had to be.

  You hear stories like it a lot down here. People get saved in the tomato patch. They get saved driving to get a pack of Winstons, or get saved watching wrestling. Some people might laugh at it, but then they probably never heard music from the stars, and a voice in the sky. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, though. Wouldn’t that be fine.

  32.

  The gremlin goes home

  The Coosa

  1957

  They were fishing, Charlie and Hootie, not far from Hootie’s old shack. They had some fried bologna sandwiches with hot mustard and a big wedge of sharp cheddar cheese, waiting in a sack stuck in the crook of a tree limb, if they got hungry. They hauled in mud cat, and Charlie talked and Hootie listened, the way it had always been. Charlie had raised much of his family in the years since he first met Hootie, and as the Bun-drum children grew up and married, Hootie had grown gray and wrinkled, though it was still hard to tell exactly how old he was. He didn’t help Charlie on the rooftops anymore because he was creaky and stove-up on the cold, wet mornings, but he still bundled up his clothes and climbed on the old car or truck when the Bundrums moved, still found an empty corner to lay his belongings and make his bed, still sat on the porch and rolled smoke, but now it was the grandchildren he handed the empty tobacco pouches to when he was done.

  Though he was much older than Charlie—that much was plain—their relationship was reversed. Charlie was the father, and always had been. That was just the way it was, though from a distance, it must have looked so different, what with Charlie yammering on and on about something, and Hootie just nodding, sagely, every now and then.

  When he did talk, he spoke to Charlie about being homesick for the river, but Charlie didn’t think much about it. Hootie had become a permanent thing, or at least that was how it seemed.

  On this particular day, they caught all the fish they could tote. When it was time to leave, Hootie said, quietly but firmly:

  “I believe I’ll stay.”

  Charlie told him not to play folly, and come on. They’d have a fish fry.

  “I believe I’ll stay,” Hootie said again.

  “But why, son?” Charlie said, but he knew why, knew it better than most people.

  This dark place just had a music only a special few people could hear.

  “I’ll be back, by and by, to check on you,” Charlie said as the little man disappeared in the gloom, in the direction of his old shack.

  When he pulled up in the yard, Jo and Sue asked him where Hootie was.

  “He went home,” Charlie said.

  He shouldn’t have missed him all that much, maybe. Jo and Sue were still in the house, lovely, blond-haired girls who did not fight like the older children had, but who held hands and did everything together, as if from some bedtime story. They were both quiet, and they took books into the woods to read. They doted on him, too, like the others did.

  But it was a long, long time before he stopped glancing over to the corner where Hootie had lain, covered up to his hat with a quilt, only his long, hooked nose sticking out, like a smokestack.

  It just didn’t seem right, somehow, not to holler over in the mornings, “Git up, boy, let’s ketch ’em ’fore somebody else does,” or pack an extra lunch for him when he went off to work.

  It just didn’t seem right.

  33.

  Water without end

  Jacksonville, Alabama, and Clearwater, Florida

  MARCH 1958

  You can swing a hammer for a hundred years, swing it all your life, and all it does is throw sparks and drive nails and get hot from the friction, but it don’t bend and it don’t melt and it don’t even change. The handle, that part, will crack and shatter, but you either buy a new one at the mercantile, whittle a new one or get some black electrician’s tape and bind the old one tight enough to last, and just keep pounding. Because the business end, the driving steel, was made to outlast muscle and bone, even will. It just plain wears a man out and then passes from his hand to his son’s, then commences on him.

  Even Charlie couldn’t wear out a hammer.

  He landed a good-paying job in Clearwater, on the west coast of Florida, early in 1958. It was the farthest he had ever been from home, but he went down and pounded nails and came home with a wad of money in his pockets. He never liked banks. How could a man ever have more money than he could carry in his Liberties? It was beyond him.

  He would have stayed longer, he said, maybe even saved up enough to make a down payment on a little house, but he had been feeling puny again.

  That’s what he called it. Puny. Like it was a weakness, to get sick.

  But he did get sick, and then sicker. He had not had a drink in months, but the doctor at the new hospital in Piedmont told him that he had lost too much of his liver, told him he was going to suffer, and he was going to die. The doctor didn’t know when exactly, just that it was certain, the hurting and the dying.

  Charlie walked out of there and went to work, and just kept working, for months, because pity don’t feed the bulldog. But in the spring, the misery knocked his will out of him, and the hammer slipped from his big hand. It wasn’t his good hammer. He had forgotten his good hammer, left it with some men down in Clearwater, along with some other tools, when he got sick down there and had to come home.

  It bothered him, not having it. All he had ever been, really, was a blue-collar man. He had made some whiskey, yes, and caught some catfish and jack salmon, but he was a roofer, mostly, a man who worked with tools—with that hammer and a level and a handsaw—and he didn’t really have much to leave, except them.

  “We got to go get them tools,” he said to Ava, and Ava told him to hush, Charlie, stop worryin’ about them damn tools.

  They had moved back to the Cove Road, not the same house, but close. The grandchildren still came and he still doted on Sam, but a gloom was on him.

  In March, William and Juanita helped him into the backseat of William’s like-new 1956 Chevrolet. It was two-tone, blue and white, and as pretty a car as has ever been made.

  They headed south, to get his tools. They had made a bed in the backseat, and he lay there, propped on pillows, wrapped in a quilt, as they glided between the pines.

  He slept hard and long. He was still asleep as his children crossed into Randolph County and into the little town of Wedowee, where a police cruiser pulled in behind them, and the officer turned on his flashing light.

  Juanita was at the wheel. Juanita can drive anything that rolls.

  But this time she had a little trouble with the gears, and the tires squealed a little as she found second, and that is enough in Wedowee to get you arrested, on a slow day.

  They had a white plastic jug fu
ll of water between them on the bench seat, and as the officer strolled up he pointed to it.

  “Is that likker?” he said.

  William, who even as a grown man still had a little of the devil in him, picked the jug up and shook it so hard that little bubbles formed on the rim at the water level, the same way he had seen Charlie shake that moonshine in his beading bottle a long time ago.

  “Got a fine bead on it, it sure does,” he said, and laughed, and then the officer took the jug, unscrewed the cap and sniffed it.

  His face fell.

  He told the Bundrums to try and be more careful, and walked stiff-backed to his cruiser. Charlie, apparently asleep in the backseat, had not even opened his eyes.

  It was his last brush with the law, the last time they tried to hang a likker charge on him, and he slept through the whole damn thing.

  It was a different Florida, then. The asphalt sliced through the scrub and palms and the thick oaks, so different, so alien, from the up-country forests. It had a loneliness to it, a loneliness that Floridians dream about today. The hottest thing going was the gator farms, and you could see a man wrestle one if you wanted to. The orange groves stretched as far as you could see, in places, and the smell of the rotting fruit reached out to them.

  It was cold, for Florida, and they rode with the windows rolled up tight. Charlie got cold easy, then.

  He got bored in the back. He told William to pull over and let him drive, and even as a grown man, William found it hard to say no to him.

  He had never been behind the wheel of a car as fine as this, a car William bought with his steel-plant money. He had never been behind the wheel of a car that could go as fast as this.