by Rick Bragg
The last thing her daddy said to her, had begged of her, was to protect her children, and she had done that, every day for twelve years. She stepped in front of her husband’s rage, meekly, her eyes cast down, shielding her children. How much more backbone that must have taken, to do that, than to strike him down, as her daddy would have done.
And now, on a winter day in a raggedy white house in the little community of Spring Garden, on the day when she saw that his demons had him for good, she found the backbone to walk away.
She got up from the kitchen table and started putting her babies’ clothes and toys into brown paper sacks, and they walked away down a railroad track, walked away for good.
She went back to Ava’s house, and she let it be known that she was taking in ironing for pocket change a pound. When fall came she asked Mr. Walter Rollins if he needed cotton pickers, and he did.
Sue had married a boy named Jimmy Sweat and moved out, so it was just Margaret and Ava and the three boys in the house, unless you believe in ghosts.
And if you do, can you doubt that when he spoke to Ava, when she sat up in her bed with her silver-black hair streaming down her back, he told her he was proud.
36.
Ava
The foothills of the Appalachians
SPRING 1972 AND FALL 1994
In the mountains north of Rome, on a cold April evening in 1932, Ava left a baby girl. Four decades later, sitting in the backseat of a silver 1971 Chevelle, she went back to find her.
Juanita wheeled the car along the narrow black ribbons of asphalt, past tumble-down barns that had the command SEE ROCK CITY painted on the roofs in letters big as a Frigidaire, past red-brick churches with marquee signs that warned HIS TIME HAS COME AGAIN, past junkyards where green waves of kudzu had covered acres of rusted, picked-over cars. The hills got higher as they rolled northeast, through cotton and timber land and textile towns, past the bait shops, Dairy Queens and plywood signs that offered “pecans to pick, for halves.” The Chevelle’s six-cylinder motor did not rumble, it hummed. The vinyl still smelled new.
Ava was sixty-five, a widow of fourteen years, and was living at the time in a Jim Walter Home beside Juanita and her husband, Ed, on the Roy Webb Road in northeast Alabama. If the pulpwood trucks stayed out of their way, Nita would have them in the Georgia foothills in two hours or so. Ava, her long hair bound in a silk scarf, turban-like, for traveling, was quiet, but she was always quiet when she traveled, as if the motion itself made her sad. Juanita cannot recall the day precisely, but it was too late for a big coat and too early for dogwoods, so it must have been March.
In one hour they had crossed the Georgia line near Cedartown and were easing into Rome. There, they got a Double Cola for Jeff, Juanita’s fussing three-year-old, and picked up Ruby Crider, a second cousin on my momma’s side who had lived her life in west Georgia, and knew the roads.
Ruby, who would talk a courthouse statue to dust if it ever made eye contact, gabbed nonstop, blue-streak, bullhorn-loud-and-opinionated for the next few miles, as was her prerogative, stopping her oratory just long enough to emit a quick “Turn here” every few minutes. They drove up Highway 27 to Turkey Mountain and went left just before the River Bridge, ending up in a wide place in the road. “Curryville,” Ruby announced, as if she had led them to Solomon’s mines.
To make sure, since there were no signs, they stopped at a house there and asked an old man in overalls if they were where they wanted to be. The house had gourds strung on lines around the well house and yard, and they bumped and rattled in the breeze as the white-haired gentleman, the retired postmaster, peered into the Chevrolet’s backseat.
Ava rolled down her window, to be polite.
“Miz Bundrum,” he said, like they had last seen each other only yesterday, not forty years ago.
“How do,” Ava said.
“How is your husband?” he asked.
“He has passed,” she said.
“I am sorry,” he said.
He gave them a gourd—gourds make fine birdhouses—and told them how to find West Union Baptist Church, the last leg on the journey. They found it on a hill, a small, wooden place, brilliant white, dwarfed by a large graveyard. It did not strike the travelers as unusual to see such a large cemetery around such a tiny church. Not everybody kneels, but everybody dies.
They pulled around to the back on a dirt road and got out. If there was any noise, any noise at all, Juanita cannot recall it. Even Ruby, who had talked without drawing a breath on the world history of gourds, was quiet now. Ava looked around her at the maze of graves.
“I remember a holly tree,” she said.
Then she started to walk fast, in a straight line, as if she came here every day, and stopped at a nondescript pile of stones. She began to cry.
“I watched him,” she told Juanita, “so I’d know.”
Emma Mae, eleven months old when she died of dysentery in April of 1932, was her fourth baby, coming after James, William and Edna, and before Juanita, Margaret, Jo and Sue, and the only one she had left behind.
The pattern of rocks that Charlie had laid on her grave so they could find her again was still there, moved about by time a little bit, but still there.
It should not have taken forty years, maybe, to stand over the grave of her daughter, but her life, which was her husband’s life, had tugged her quickly away from here. This quiet place, the last time she had seen it, had been one more scene in a rearview mirror for a family who roamed the hills and valleys like gypsies, searching for a living, preoccupied with hard, bitter times. Still, after all those years, all those journeys, she remembered.
When they left for home, not much later, Ava twisted around in the seat and stared out the back glass, until the pretty little church and the neat cemetery vanished around a curve, taking with it the only piece of real estate that she and her husband had ever owned.
Ava lived twenty-two years after that. When she was in her seventies she lost another daughter, the lovely, sweet-tempered Sue, to cancer, and my aunts were so protective of her brittle mind they did not tell her for a long time. In her last years her mind and character, so tightly strung all her life that the devil could not help but use it now and then for a trampoline, frayed and weakened so much that she became sweet and demure as a child. Her violent outbursts and cussing jags faded, and her silver eyes clouded, and her skin became white and thin and translucent. There was, it seemed, no place in her anymore for her mischief to hide.
She lived her last days in my aunt Jo’s house, in a room crowded with dolls and stuffed animals. But every now and then she would wink at me, as if to say, “Yes, I’ve got ’em all fooled,” and she would whip her harmonica out of her dress and blow up another hurricane.
Her daughters doted on her, but there was a difference in the love they had for her and the love they had for him. They had, over a long lifetime, had to care for her as much as she cared for them, and perhaps even more. She could not have survived without them.
He had burned brighter, and had not asked anything from them. He was gone much too quickly for that, leaving images in their minds of his will and strength and power, of kindness and gentleness, and joy. His flaws vanished. She only got old.
Then she was just gone, on a November day in 1994.
And an odd thing happened.
Her children stopped talking about her very much, because it hurt them so bad to touch her in their memories, and what good is that?
37.
Always in summer
The foothills of the Appalachians
PRESENT DAY
The foothills vanish altogether in the winter, when the rain and the low clouds drift in, turning everything steel gray. Then the temperature drops and the rain freezes solid to the pines, and the weight of it snaps off their limbs with a sound like pistol shots, and you can stand and listen to it, like a pitched battle in those woods, if you have the time.
But now that I have a picture of my grandfather, one so
much finer than torn black-and-white, I imagine him always in summer, always in his boat made from two car hoods welded together, feeling for the mud and sand of the bottom with the end of his pole. The boat glides and glides.
I try, sometimes, to picture myself there with him, but as a boy of six or so again, not as a man. Because I don’t know what he would think of me, grown.
But a boy, now.
A boy.
I bet he would give me some candy, and sing me a song.
Apple pies grow on bushes above
And the crust is flaky and light
Roast pigeons fly into your mouth
And the sky is always bright
There’s a lake with stew and dumplings, too
Cakes to be had for the askin’
And time seems to fly ’neath a sugar sky
As you spend your whole life baskin’
—A SONG FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION
EPILOGUE
Ghosts
Jacksonville, Alabama
PRESENT DAY
John Henry died young, working himself to death as he beat a machine in a race for his own self-worth on some mythical railroad track. Big John died saving miners trapped in a cave-in. Crockett died in the Alamo, killing Mexicans. All myths and legends, made precious by stories of sacrifice and shortened lives.
Charlie was no myth, and not even a legend, really. Or at least, just a small one.
It is only when you compare him with today, with this new South, that he seems larger than life.
The difference between then and now is his complete lack of shame. He was not ashamed of his clothes, his speech, his life. He not only thrived, he gloried in it.
Maybe it’s harder now. More complicated. A friend in Alabama told me the story of some ol’ boys working at a chicken plant: about how, while they were on a cigarette break, a single bedraggled chicken escaped through a half-open door and into the courtyard where the men were squatting in the gravel, blood and guts specking their clothes.
An assembly-line worker from inside chased the chicken round and round the courtyard, but the men on their break just smoked and watched. Finally the chicken got up just enough speed and got just enough wind under its wings to cheat fate and the ground, and it soared over a chain-link fence to freedom.
And, after a moment of disbelief, all the men in the courtyard began to clap.
“You know,” one man said to another, “that chicken did something you and me ain’t never gonna do.”
The realities of this new, true South are not as romantic as in Charlie’s time, as bleak and painful as that time was for people of his class.
The new, true South is, for people like him, a South of mills that will never reopen, of fields that will never be planted again, of train tracks that are being turned into bicycle trails.
In the new, true South, it is harder to be poor and proud, harder to work your way into an unapologetic, hard-eyed independence. I think Charlie could have done it still, but he was more man than most. Imperfect, sure, but a man. A kind mostly lost to this world forever.
You see ghosts of them from time to time. They live in good men like my uncles and my brother Sam.
Now and then, the ghosts come back and spank us a little, as a reminder. I recall a time not too many years back when I walked into Brother’s Bar in Jacksonville, Alabama, and saw my grandma’s brother, Fred Hamilton, sitting on a bar stool.
The only job he ever had was picking guitar. He never married. He just picked his guitar and saw the country.
I’d thought he was dead. But there he was, in a pair of brown and tan two-tone shoes and a checked sport coat.
“What you doin’ here, Uncle Fred?” I asked him.
“I’m sitting here and drinking this beer,” he said, “and then I’m gonna go over there to that pool table and take some money off the college boys.”
And he did. He was eighty.
I watched him, wishing that he was someone else, and then I walked out into the summer night.
A lot of people, I know, never knew their grandfathers. But I will hate this, hate it until the day I die.
But even from the grave, he affected my life.
From the grave, he affected everything.
Even before I got to the reunion, I knew how it would be. On the plane I shut my eyes and imagined, blocking out the screaming babies and yammering tourists who were coming home from the theme parks and had the gigantic rubber rodent ears to prove it. A voice on the intercom said we were “circling over Alabama,” but I was already there, disappearing into it just as completely as if I had pulled one of my aunts’ quilts up over my head.
Under two-hundred-year-old pines at Germania Springs, weathered gray picnic tables would creak under gallons of potato salad, endless deviled eggs and barbecued everything. The fried chicken, cooked in iron skillets by old people or just purchased at the deli by the young, would send a smell of salt and grease and crisped flour into the breeze as men in neatly pressed jeans trimmed their nails with razor-sharp, Tree Brand pocketknives and eyed the coconut cake with bad intent. Sam and the Roper brothers would talk puppies, football, cotton mills and lures, but not politics, because no matter who is in office, it will change nothing about life down here.
The women would sit in the lawn chairs and talk about work and babies, even if those babies were now six foot two, and their children, big and small, would ask them a hundred times, “We eatin’ yet, Momma?” My aunt Jo would chase after a great-niece named Ava, threatening the toddler with wet kisses and an Instamatic. She would catch her and old women would gather around and say that the little girl, named for my grandmother, was the prettiest thing that they had ever seen.
The soft Southern accents, not quite a drawl, not quite a twang, just natural, would mix with the sound of ice rattling into plastic cups and a drone of distant trucks on Highway 21, until somebody in authority would beckon us to the tables with a simple “Well, it’s ready. Y’all come on.” Some people would pray first and a few would just close their eyes, and I would eat until I was miserable and moan about it till someone produced a cold chicken leg and a glass of tea as an antidote. I would take it, because no matter how full you are, one more chicken leg will not hurt you if it has already been prayed over.
And I would be glad to be there, to see old people I might never see again, to see cousins I played hide-and-seek with in a dark yard specked yellow with lightning bugs, back before we were scared of life and snakes.
Then the plane touched down at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International and the picture in my mind vanished in a grunting herd of traveling businessmen running hard for their too-tight connections and rental car counters, cellular phones jammed up to their ears, every single one of them dragging a little-bitty rolling suitcase behind them. I always marvel at that—a two-hundred-pound man pulling a ten-pound suitcase.
What would Charlie have thought of all this? I think he would have laughed out loud, and stopped off at the bar on Concourse B.
I got in there among the herd—I carried my bag—and was swept all the way to Hertz, where I politely asked for a Ford.
It was a pretty day, and once I escaped Atlanta, it was pure country all the way home. As I drove to pick up my momma and take her to the reunion, I passed the Bonds family enclave and noticed that Gary Bonds’s mailbox was still too close to the road. Every day, it was a tiny miracle if someone did not hit it with their sideview mirror or just run it down altogether if they met a car coming on the narrow two-lane road. It was not just that the box sat so close to the blacktop but that it was on the surprise side of a sharp curve, so at night it seemed to jump out at you, like a deer.
That might have made some people back their mailbox up a little bit, but not here. Gary, who went to school with me at Williams Junior High School and helped me push my Camaro when the battery was dead, once played a basketball game with a wrist so swollen he could barely stand to hold the ball. But when Coach Steve Green asked him if he wanted
to sit down and heal, Gary just said no sir, he reckoned he’d just play. Like most of these ol’ boys here, he will not quit and he will not change. He owns the land right up to where that blacktop begins, and if he wants to put his mailbox in the path of destruction, he will.
Some people would call it an act of defiance. I believe Gary just likes his mailbox where it is, and it always makes me happy when I manage to evade it. We would all be disappointed, I believe, if we drove by and saw it planted safely back in the right-of-way, as opposed to occasionally being knocked there. Gary should have been a Bundrum.
My momma was standing in the door when I drove up. She says she can hear the car slow down on the road, but I still don’t know how she knows it is me in it.
“You miss Gary’s mailbox?” she said as I stepped out of the car.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
That got us to talking about mailboxes in general. My little brother, Mark, said he had planted his mailbox well off the road, but while it had never been hit by a passing car, it had been shot several times. The mailbox shooting came at about the same time that someone broke into his house and stole his guns, which was too much for him to stand.
“I don’t even have to open my damn mailbox to read my damn mail,” he said from behind a wreath of smoke that, even from across the room, I recognized as Camel nonfilters. “I can read my damn mail standing out in the middle of the damn road, it’s got so many damn holes in it.”
I said that was a shame.
“I wouldn’t be so damn mad,” he said, “if I didn’t know they was shootin’ my own damn mailbox with my own damn guns.”
I nodded my head.
“Well,” he said, “they can just kiss my ass and call me Shorty.”
I nodded again.
I decided to ask him later exactly what that meant.