Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

When it was time to head over to the reunion, I asked my momma, in defiance of my rent-a-car contract, if she wanted to drive. She said no, the car looked too new. I offered to drive it through a mud puddle first, but she said she was afraid to, because while she had driven for much of her life and once owned a 1956 Buick, she never had a driver’s license. Things like licenses, for hunting, fishing or driving, did not impress us very much. If you live far enough back in the country, it is not crucial, even in the year 1999, to always have proper paperwork.

  We pulled up to the springs at dinnertime, which is nowhere near dark down here. I parked on a chert road and we just sat for a minute to let the white dust blow away. Under the shade, old women were popping the tops on Tupperware and laying out food, and it was like I had painted it in my mind and hung it from the trees.

  Germania Springs was still clear as a wineglass and so cold it burned, and crawfish still backpedaled across the smooth brown rocks and took shelter in the tender watercress, which my momma used to pull and cook in bacon grease. Cajuns would have laughed at us for eating a weed and ignoring the crawfish, but back then I didn’t eat anything that looked that much like a water bug, unless there was money on it.

  There had been a killing here when I was seventeen, but we tried not to think about that. The better memories wrapped themselves around it, over and over, until you barely remembered it at all. We used to know the very tree it happened under, but I looked for it and couldn’t find it.

  It seemed like every Bundrum in creation was in the shade of the pines, which is not grand shade but better than no shade at all. There were only a hundred or so people, truthfully, but the reunion was the first time in a long, long time I had seen all the close relatives and distant cousins in one place. Old women hugged my neck and said they were glad to see me, and it made those air kisses of Manhattan seem like, well, air.

  There was a jet pilot from Texas and some middle-class retirees from Plant City, Florida, but most of the people here were blue-collar, people who pull wrenches, spin yarn in the maddening clatter of the mills, make steel-belted radials at Goodyear in Gadsden, climb poles for Alabama Power, scald chickens for Tyson, drive dump trucks, saw pulpwood, answer phones in the police department, raise hogs, preach, farm, cut hair, raise children and, when life gets a little sideways, work off their fines. My brother Sam was there, talking about the mill. He cuts the steel bands off bales of cotton using a set of bolt cutters. The bands split with hundreds of pounds of pressure and the steel sings through the air, sharp and deadly. But the pay is better than a man can make for a safe, easy job, so he shields his eyes with goggles, armors his arms and torso with leather and goes to work, trusting in God and luck, and the medical plan.

  I guess what I am trying to say is, these are people who earn what they have, people with Charlie Bundrum’s blood in them. Even if it weren’t for the ears, you could tell by looking at them, at their big hands, the sandy hair, the fact that they can listen to and engage in two conversations at once. If that isn’t proof these are his kin, I don’t know what is.

  They did not have to come far to be here, most of them. They live within fifteen minutes of each other. They say with great pride that they only have to stop at one intersection to visit each other, that their children ride the same school bus route that they used to ride. The bus is new but it is often the same number, even the same bus driver. I can’t recall the bus number that came by our house, but I remember it was a Mr. Ted Parris who drove it, and that I went to sleep on it one day when I was seven and Sam, out of meanness, got off and let it carry me almost to Piedmont. My momma didn’t whip him, but she should have.

  For most of them, there was no reason to ever leave. Even in the failed economic promise of the so-called New South, in a land of boarded-up mills and overgrown farms, this is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment. Sam, Mark, Momma, her three surviving sisters and one brother—the other moved off to Birmingham—live within only five minutes of each other, and have since Charlie Bundrum died.

  They had been movers, true, but that was only because of Charlie. They had no choice but to follow him, and now they have no choice but to stay. Where he died, they live. They will not quit on the place where he lays.

  Now my aunts think a trip to Anniston, fifteen minutes away, is a damn safari. Rootless as children, they will find the most amazing reasons not to travel, saying their dogs will run off or maybe even starve, though it is a stone-cold fact no dog ever starved in an hour and a half.

  What a reason to become part of a place—that grave. Yet we are part of it, even those of us who left, came back, left again and are even now trying to make it back one more time, maybe one last time.

  We became familiar faces at the Food Outlet and the Winn-Dixie, and Young’s store and Snook’s, McFall’s and E. L. Green’s and Wright’s and Tillison’s, buying sweet snuff, unfiltered cigarettes and Little Debbie snack cakes every payday, and pork chops every Fourth of July, buying a dollar’s worth of gas when it was a dollar and a half a gallon. The old men behind the counter learned which of us to extend a little credit to between paychecks and when to hang up the CLOSED sign when we thundered up in a jacked-up, pastel blue 1969 Mustang with five-hundred-dollar Cragar mag wheels and two-dollar used tires bought from a man named Houston Jenkins, a sun-faded, blue-and-gold tassel from high school graduation dangling from the rearview mirror, and Tony Joe White blaring from one speaker—only one.

  For good and bad, it was our place. It was not unheard of to see one of us accepting an award on one page of the newspaper, flip the page, and see another one of us being led off in handcuffs. We played ball for the Roy Webb Hawks and the Williams Panthers and the Ed Fair Landscaping Dirtdaubers, and joined but did not excel in the 4-H club, except for my girl cousin Charlotte, who has always been a teacher’s pet.

  Our mommas got the GED and jobs at Fort McClellan, and we filled space and sometimes even learned something in the red-brick schools. We got Saved here, we backslid here—and everybody knew about it—and some of us just got mightily confused. Our cars’ motors swayed on chains from the limbs of trees, and our pickles and jellies and leftover baby clothes sold at yard sales that were really just bait to lure people into the yard for gossip, or just an excuse to sit awhile with a sister you were officially mad at and missed something terrible. Why else would you sit all day for a net profit of a dollar and seventy-two cents?

  We got to know people, but mainly, we got to know each other. We know whose potato salad has green onions in it, and whose don’t. We know who grows the best tomatoes, and what time to go visit, so as to be sure to get some. We know not to call Aunt Nita at one o’clock when her story is on, ’cause Juanita does not answer her phone As the World Turns.

  Our mailboxes have rusted in the ground.

  About two o’clock, the descendants of the Huguenots lined up for banana puddin’ and scraped the Tupperware. I didn’t even know Huguenots liked banana puddin’, but I guess everybody does. As for me, I never did find out if the food was as good as I had made it seem in my mind. Word was out I was looking for stories about my grandpa and it took all afternoon to hear them, until the last comatose baby had been carried off on her daddy’s shoulder, until the last pieces of cherry pie had been wrapped in aluminum foil. I scribbled notes and nodded my head and didn’t eat a damn thing.

  By sunset, decades—centuries, really—had slipped by beneath that adequate shade. We took a hundred pictures, but Juanita’s do not count because she always cuts off the top of your head even when she tries really hard not to. I think, now, she does it on purpose.

  Everybody told everybody else how good their food was, which they would have done even if it had been terrible, and my cousin Charlotte, Edna’s baby girl, told me I could come live in her basement in Atlanta if I ever lost my job.

  “My dog smells bad,” she said, in warning.

  I told her if it ever came to that, I would not be particu
lar.

  My uncle Ed told me he had retired, but I know that means he will now only work about half a day on Saturday. Uncle John’s mother, Mag, had been sick, so he did not come to the reunion. Everyone told my aunt Jo to tell him “hey,” to tell him that they were praying for her.

  In the dusk, I walked with Momma to the car carrying an empty gallon jar.

  “They must have liked your tea,” I said.

  “It wasn’t sweet enough,” she said.

  It would have put somebody with high blood sugar into a coma.

  I noticed as we got in the car that the chert road had streaks of red dirt in it. When I was little, I would always find a patch of it when it rained, just to feel the clay squish between my toes. Ask anybody from Alabama or Georgia to tell you what that feels like, and all they will do is smile. You can’t tell about it with words, with just words.

  All this, all this sense of place, of family, of love, from the fact that a dead man, a man I never even met, lies in this ground. If he had died across the river, I would have been a Georgian. If he had died in the Arctic, I would have been an Eskimo.

  Sometime later, I went prowling through my momma’s basement. In the corner of a downstairs bathroom, an ignoble spot for a family heirloom, I found what I was searching for—an old kerosene lamp.

  It was made of heavy glass, thick as a Coke bottle, and it was yellowed and smut-streaked, but it had a few inches of fuel in its bowl and a new wick.

  “Is that it?” I asked my momma.

  She nodded her head.

  I had grown up in the same house as that lamp, the one Ava used to cradle in her arms—instead of one of her babies—when Charlie loaded their lives on that truck and moved, and moved and moved. But I didn’t know its story then. The lamp was just another knick-knack in a room so crowded with them it looked like a flea market, lost between the plastic flowers and ceramic Santa Clauses and three dozen pocketbooks.

  It made sense that she would have given it to my momma. Of all her girls, Margaret needed a warm circle of light.

  Momma told me that it had been in her other little house the day it burned back in 1993, and that—even though it had been full of kerosene—it had somehow survived. It should have exploded into a million pieces, she said, but it didn’t. The glass was too thick.

  “They don’t make them that good no more,” she said, and I said I guess not.

  I asked her why she kept it downstairs in a bathroom no one ever sees, and she looked at me like I was simple in the head.

  “Well, honey,” she said, “that’s where I need it. That’s where I go when there’s storms, when the power goes out.”

  I had bought my momma three powerful flashlights, to use when the power goes out. I got those indestructible, rubber-coated kind, the kind that won’t break if you drop them. I didn’t want her to use a lantern because it could start a fire if she dropped it.

  But of course, that would never happen.

  And, I guess, a ghost would walk right on past a flashlight. There’s no magic in a D-cell.

  “Well, I guess it’s made its last trip, at least,” I told her, being all philosophical. But she told me no. Someone will need it, a generation or two from now. Someone always will.

  It seems, people here say, that the weather is worse than it used to be, like the storms come harder and more frequent, knocking down power lines. People blame the fact that so many trees have been hacked down, or the hole in the ozone layer, or, like Ava, they blame the men who walked on the moon.

  Or maybe, it is only because there is no one left to clear the sky.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank Edward Bundrum for his research on the family history and Lori Soloman for her help with historical research, and especially I want to thank all the people, kin or not, who re-created Charlie Bundrum for me from their memories. I also want to thank Jordan Pavlin, my editor, who set oil upon the stormy waters. And Amanda Urban, who knows how to roil ’em up.

  A Note About the Author

  Rick Bragg is the best-selling author of All Over but the Shoutin’ and Somebody Told Me. A national correspondent for the New York Times, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. He lives in New Orleans.

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2001 by Rick Bragg

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Integrated Copyright Group, Inc.: Excerpts from “Victory in Jesus” by E. M. Bartlett, copyright © 1939 by E. M. Bartlett, copyright renewed 1967 by Mrs. E. M. Bartlett. Assigned to Albert E. Brumley & Sons/SESAC (administered by ICG). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Integrated Copyright Group, Inc. (ICG).

  Peer International Corporation: Excerpt from “Wabash Cannonball” by A. P. Carter, copyright © 1933 and 1939 by Peer International Corporation, copyright renewed.

  International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Peer International Corporation.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bragg, Rick.

  Ava’s man/Rick Bragg.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-41351-3

  1. Bundrum, Charlie. 2. Working class whites—Southern States—Biography.

  3. Depressions—1929—Southern States. 4. Southern States—Social life and customs—

  20th century. 5. Southern States—Biography. I. Title.

  CT275.B78516 B73 2001b

  975’.042’092—dc21

  [B] 2001032677

  v3.0