Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  William and Juanita dropped off to sleep, but William soon awoke to the sound of the asphalt rushing, loud and fast, beneath the car. No matter how tight a car is, it has a sound to it when you turn it loose, when you pour the coal to it.

  It sounds like water rushing fast through a big pipe, and that’s how it sounded then.

  “Old man,” he said, “you pushing it a little hard, ain’t you?”

  Charlie did not even turn around.

  “Hush, boy. I know what I’m doing.”

  And William closed his eyes again, and the power poles flashed past like fence posts, and Charlie looped his big hands over the wheel, and enjoyed the sound.

  They stopped in a grove of grapefruit trees—people did that, then—and Charlie picked a big one off a tree and broke it open in his hands, and ate the whole thing leaning against the car.

  They found his tools, then drove over to the Gulf before heading home. Juanita had never seen anything like it, but the wind was cold and the sand was cold, and Charlie just stayed in the car.

  He had never loved the Gulf, anyway, the way some men do. It was like Guntersville. It was water without an end to it, too wide for a footlog. Water like that, so deep blue, could just swallow up a man, and it would be like he had never been.

  They drove home with his tools on the floorboard at his feet, and not long after that he went into the hospital in Piedmont. It was a fine, fine hospital, people said. It was long and narrow, like a chicken house, and made from red brick. It had green tiled floors and smelled like most of them do, of disinfectant and Salisbury steak and fear. He came out on an Easter Sunday. Margaret remembers, because she took him an Easter lily.

  Everyone was glad about that. They had him, again, among them. But Margaret knew something was wrong, because his eyes were shining from the wet in them.

  All her life, she would hate hospitals. So many educated people, so much medicine, so many machines.

  All those healers with such nice, clean hands.

  34.

  All by and by

  Jacksonville

  SPRING 1958

  Ava and Charlie had been together for more than three decades. Thousands of nights, she helped him find his bed when he came home befuddled, grinning and stumbling and singing about love and trains. Thousands more, she worried herself old waiting for the rumble of his truck in the driveway.

  She dragged that cotton sack, to help pay their way, and pricked her fingers on those sewing needles, being careful not to bleed onto the cloth. But more than anything, she gave him the children that gave him a reason to laugh, and a reason to live.

  Now she looked at him and wept, for him, for her, for all the people who believed that he hung the moon. And for once, it was not just Ava bawling again, but something that drove everybody else from that room, leaving them truly alone for the first time in … hell, could they even remember? She had a right to cry. For everyone else, he had been a wall that protected them. For her, he was the wall she threw herself against, over and over and over again.

  He decided he would not die here, in this house, under her watch. He would not die here with his three youngest daughters, Margaret, Jo and Sue, watching.

  Jo was seventeen, Sue was fourteen, and Margaret, though already grown, had depended on him more than anyone. It would hurt them, sadden them. But Ava, so brittle, might shatter, might never come back from it at all.

  He asked Edna, the oldest daughter, the tough and sensible one, to take him home with her. She said she would put a little soft bed in the living room where the television was, and they could all watch the boxing matches and Cisco and Pancho, and Lucy.

  “I’ll cook special for you, Daddy,” she promised him, but that was not why he went with her, she knew.

  “Daddy knew I was tough.”

  Now, on the morning after Easter, he waited for her to come and get him and take him away.

  He fretted as the morning passed into afternoon.

  “Lord,” he said, within Margaret’s hearing, “I wish she would come on.”

  Ava went and sat in a bedroom, and stared at the floor. She could not bear looking at him, the way he moved without strength, without purpose.

  Sam toddled around the floor, but Charlie did not seem to notice him much. Margaret could not bear it, the sadness in the house. She moved from room to room, silently, but her mind was screaming.

  Finally Charlie noticed the baby boy, who stared up at him, unblinking.

  Charlie could not pick him up, he had gotten so big, so he just reached down and touched the top of his head.

  “You don’t let nothin’ happen to him,” he said, looking at his daughter. Margaret nodded. He had said it before, so many times, but then it had been a command.

  Now, it sounded like he was begging.

  “You can’t let nothin’ happen to him.”

  He paced feebly around the house, and every few minutes he would look out the front door and mumble: “Come on, come on.”

  Later, they heard Edna’s car coming up the drive. She had gone to get the bed, and it had taken her longer than she thought.

  “Thank God,” he said as she drew closer.

  For as long as Margaret could remember, her daddy had worn a hat or a cap, but he walked out to the yard bareheaded. As he slid into the car, Margaret, with Sam on her hip, rushed into the house and got his cap, and ran back out and slipped it on his head.

  The baby was waving.

  “Bye, son,” Charlie said.

  “Bye, Paw-paw,” Sam said.

  Edna took Charlie away.

  Edna cooked him some boiled okra and stewed potatoes, and at dusk he took a walk with Charlie Sanders and Mr. Hugh. It was windy, and cool. He said he wanted to walk in the cool wind.

  Edna had not wanted him to go, but he shushed her. “I believe it’ll do me good, that wind.”

  It was a fine walk. The trees and shrubs and crawling vines were in flower or already green, covering the gray bark that always looked so dead and hopeless in winter, and new grass covered a cow pasture not far from the house. Later, the night train would rumble across the Tredegar trestle, shaking the trees, stabbing the darkness with a lance of yellow light, but now there was just the dying sunlight, and the wind, rushing.

  The men were passing a pasture gate when he just stopped, to get a breath. He looked around him, as if it was the first time he had seen anything like it, anything so fine, and fell onto the new grass.

  People came, a flood of them, to the house on the Cove Road that evening, but Ava did not greet them. She just sat on the edge of the bed, still staring at the floor, as she would do for weeks, for months. There was barely room to turn around in the small living room. Women filled up the house, and men thronged the yard, smoking, talking. For Margaret, it was like a dream.

  People hugged her and told her what a fine man her daddy was, but even with so many people encircling her, with so many arms wrapped around her, all she could think was, “Lord, I ain’t got nobody.”

  Later in the evening there was yet one more knock on the door, and she looked through the screen door to see her husband, Charles, on their stoop. He was wearing his black suit.

  “I’m sorry, Margaret,” he said.

  The cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile the day of the funeral.

  Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church couldn’t hold the people. They filled the pews and stood in the back and along the walls, and everyone said how it was good that it was not hot, with such a crowd. Most of them were people like him, working people, and they came in their mechanic’s jumpers and overalls and shirts with a name across their breast pocket, and the heavy work boots thudded across the planks as they walked by the casket. Women wore ancient felt hats and homemade dresses, the hardness of their eyes and the tight set of their jaw just a foil for their soft hearts and gentle natures, and they cried even before the preachers made a sound. Outside, their children, safe from all but the vaguest thoughts of death, sat miserable
in cars or pickups, under threat of a prolonged whipping if they made any racket at all.

  Inside, mixed in with the denims and faded floral print dresses, were the dark wool and store-bought dresses of the town people and the rich landed farmers, whom Jo called the Big People. They had closed their drugstores and left their shops and offices and come to be here, for this man who dug their wells and built their big gray barns and waved at them from the rattling cut-down, who made the finest likker on either side of the state line.

  Charles Bragg, who had killed at least one man with his bare hands in Korea, sat beside Margaret and cried like a child.

  He did not respect many men, but he respected her daddy, her daddy’s strength. When Charlie had ordered him from his door, something he might have killed another man over, he had just bowed his head and left.

  Now he took his son, Sam, and walked up to the coffin, and together they looked down on Charlie’s face.

  The casket was plain pine, something he could have made himself. In it, the man showed no sign of the sickness and the agony that had consumed him. His hair did not have a speck of gray.

  He was still, the women mourners remarked, a pretty man.

  Margaret could not stand to look at his face. As she paused beside her daddy, she looked instead at his hands.

  The undertaker had dressed him in a blue suit, but the hands did not belong to a man who wore suits. His hands were rough and scarred and callused, his nails thick and cracked, his knuckles and the joints in his fingers red and swollen, from the work.

  A lifetime of grease and tar and river muck had worked into the skin itself, and under the nails. A working man’s hands never really get clean, no matter how hard you scrub.

  The funeral singers, women and men who traveled from death to death, offering their skills, sang about the mystery of death and the beauty of living, which was a fine idea, considering the man.

  Farther along

  We’ll know all about it

  Farther along

  We’ll understand why

  Cheer up my comrade

  Live in the sunshine

  We’ll understand it

  All by and by

  Hoyt Fair and Big Fred McCrelless, two mighty men of God, preached him home.

  Big Fred could not preach for crying. Charlie, the onetime whiskey man, had been his friend. He had been one of the people Charlie loved to talk to when he saw him in town.

  Fred, built like a refigerator with a hat, could boom from the pulpit and send sin scrambling like a spider for a dark hole, but now his voice was low and soft. The good of the man just overwhelmed his faults, he said.

  “Ava, James, William, Edna, Juanita, Margaret, Jo, Sue,” he said. “I loved him, too.”

  Hoyt Fair, a man with a stern, harsh face who shoved Satan aside the same way he knocked down trees with his big yellow bulldozer,was oddly humbled, and said he belonged down there with the family—his son, Ed, was Charlie’s son-in-law.

  The two men painted a picture of a man with courage and heart, a man who was a defender of the weak and a smiter of the wicked, a man of charity, but one who never asked for it. They praised him as a fine father, which was the gospel, unbending truth, and as a fine husband, which was true mostly and anyway it was a funeral.

  They said he had found God just in time, and then everybody prayed, and the funeral singers did “Gathering Flowers for the Master’s Bouquet.”

  Gathering flowers

  For the Master’s bouquet

  Beautiful flowers

  That will never decay

  Gathered down here

  And carried away

  Forever to bloom in

  The Master’s bouquet

  Grown men cried in the pews as they sang, which does not mean anything unless you know that type of man.

  After that, Ava often retreated from the world to sit on the edge of her bed. Sometimes you could hear her singing a funeral song, not from Charlie’s service but from her own momma’s funeral, long ago.

  In the sweet by and by

  We shall meet on that beautiful shoreIn the sweet by and by

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore

  She missed him terribly, but maybe not as much as the others did. Because she still spoke with him, from time to time.

  No one had expected Hootie to come to the funeral, and he didn’t. He would have been terrified of the people, all those people, and he only could have stood it if his tall friend had been beside him.

  If Charlie was, as his Bundrum cousins claimed, the last bridge between those old, wild days of the river and this more civilized time, then Hootie’s path between those worlds vanished with the death of his friend.

  Charlie had kept his promise to look after him, and he would even go fetch the little man and ride him around on errands. But after his death, Hootie was never seen in town again.

  Not long after Charlie died, they found Hootie’s homemade boat caught in a snag on the river, and not far away, they found the little man dead on the bank.

  As in his life, the rumors swirled around his death. Was he beaten to death for his money, or had he dug it all up and planned to flee in his boat, but been caught? With no champion to shield him, did they come for him in the night?

  Or had he just gotten old and lain down to die in the dappled shade, in a place where he could see the sun dance off the water?

  In time, most people forgot he had ever been at all. But when people talk about Charlie, they will snap their fingers and a smile will creep across their face, and they will say, “Hey, remember that little ugly feller, the one who followed Charlie round like a dog?”

  His name was Jessie Clines, and he was unvarnished proof that my grandfather was a good man.

  For his family, there was something much worse than grief to live with.

  “There was a silence, then,” Jo said of her family’s life, after Charlie was buried in town. Ava almost never mentioned Charlie. The children almost never mentioned him. “It was just too hurtful,” said Jo, who was only seventeen when a lifetime of silent mourning began.

  What a funny legacy for a beloved man, to be pushed out of the minds of the people who loved him, to have the mention of his name all but vanish from the day-to-day language of his family.

  But it had to be that way, to go on living.

  Ava did not go crazy. She went to work. She had cracked, but did not shatter, and she chopped and picked cotton for Walter Rollins and in Mr. Homer Couch’s fields, and picked blackberries, to sell by the gallon. In a war, they would have called her one of the walking wounded.

  Her hands got infected and they swelled up so big it hurt Jo to even look at them, and her legs were scratched bloody because she still believed a lady did not work in pants, but she worked on.

  She was clumsy with an ax but she chopped their firewood herself, and every third whack, it seemed, a block of wood would kick off the chop block and slam into her bony shins, and she would cuss under her breath and whack at it again, and when she got mad she would flail at it so hard and fast and wild that passersby could not tell if she was chopping wood or just beating it to death. When she was done, her legs would be bloody.

  Where she hurt most, no one could heal. But Ava had two daughters at home. Jo and Sue were in high school and junior high school, and clothes had to be bought and lunches paid for, and rent made.

  Jo and Sue picked cotton with her, but everyone knew Jo would be gone soon. A good-looking boy named John Couch was courting her, and it was just a matter of time before he asked her. Homer was his daddy, and Jo would pick cotton in her school clothes—her nicest clothes—to try and catch his eye, and she did. “He had brown wavy hair, real wavy,” said Jo, and she made Margaret and even Juanita come to that field one day to see him, and they said that, yes, he did have a head full of hair.

  The older girls helped when they could. When Jo was taking typing in school, Ed and Juanita bought her a typewriter on credit. “They went into debt
for me,” said Jo.

  To escape the sadness of the house, Sue tagged along when Jo and John went to the fair or to town or to the drive-in. She was perhaps the most beautiful of that family. She was a cheerleader at Roy Webb Junior High School, and a queen at the Halloween Carnival. She made good grades without trying.

  Her life, outside that place of mourning, was a happy life, but she never understood why her daddy had to leave them so completely. The death, she understood. But she wondered why her daddy could not come and visit, in stories and memories, the way others did. Only Ava, in the middle of the night, said his name aloud. He came to visit her, and just her, but that was only because of the cracks in Ava’s mind that let him slip through.

  Margaret came and went, often, from that sad place. She had gone back to her husband after her daddy’s death, because Charles Bragg had been kind and decent at the funeral and because there was really no place else for her to go. But the whiskey twisted him, so she drifted from one house where she dreaded the sound of a car in the driveway to the now cold place where her daddy was everywhere, and nowhere at all.

  35.

  Backbone

  Jacksonville and Piedmont

  THE 1960S

  Margaret was grown now, and three children pulled at her skirts. Three years after she had Sam, she had me, and three years later, Mark. And three years after that, she had a baby who died soon after birth.

  For twelve years, her husband had shown her flashes of warmth and kindness, but he fought his war, still, and drank his paycheck, and he let his babies do without.

  And now and then, a taunt from Margaret’s childhood would echo in her mind.

  “Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat,” the other children had chanted, because she was meek and seldom fought back. But it hardly mattered then. She did not need any backbone when her daddy was alive.

  Now she hated herself, for just absorbing it, for taking it, for not showing the strength her daddy would have shown, to … to what?