by Rick Bragg
Ava’s school, Ashville, was the bitterest rival of neighboring Steele Station, and the opposing team’s cheerleaders would taunt them with:
Chew tobaccer
Chew tobaccer Spit, spit, spit
Ashville, Ashville
Thinks they’re it
And the Ashville cheerleaders would stomp their feet and answer with:
Steele Station
Starvation Sorriest place
In creation
Ava made good grades without trying a lick, but what she was really gifted at was music. Passersby came to remark on how, every time they drove their mule wagons past the Hamilton farm, it was as if someone had opened the lid on God’s own music box.
I heard an old, old story
How a Savior came
From glory
How He gave his life
On Calvary
To save a wretch like me
The music was everywhere, in the barn, in the fields of tomatoes and okra, out in the tall cotton, serenading the chickens, appeasing the pigs. It was almost like it was in the ground itself, but it was only in the children.
Ava and her brothers and sisters sang and played music because it was just so easy for them, the way other people are just tall, or fat, or redheaded. Not one of them was tone-deaf or all thumbs. Ava sang hymns to the corn rows and beasts of the field in a voice, I am told, of angels.
Victory in Jesus
My Savior, forever
He sought me, and bought me
With His redeeming blood
Sweet tenor and rich baritone drifted from the porch, and guitar pickers traded licks under the trees, plucking out gospel and blue-grass and even, when their daddy wasn’t looking, a little white man’s blues—stolen by William Alonzo’s boys when they snuck off to the train station in Gadsden. They risked hard whippings and eternal damnation to hear the raggedy whiskey drinkers pick on beat-up Gibsons before some deputy told them to just move on down the road.
The girls sang sweet and high at the clothesline, in the squash rows, with hoes in their hands. It was in them, and had to come out. Ava’s favorite was “Victory in Jesus,” but she loved “Birmingham Jail,” and “Precious Memories,” and “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and, especially, “Wabash Cannonball.”
Oh, listen to the jingle
The rumble and the roar
As she glides across the woodlands
Through the hills and by the shore
Hear the mighty rush of the engine
Hear the lonesome hoboes call
You’re traveling through the jungle on
The Wabash Cannonball
Ava Hamilton was a Presley on her momma’s side, and was, in fact, a far distant relative of Elvis, though we have never tried to claim any of his money. The Presleys were musical people, singers and pickers, and that is where the gift came from. Mary Matilda played hymns on the piano and organ and taught her children how to read notes, how to play everything.
But Ava did not have to read notes. She could hear a song on the Victrola or the Philco and sit down at the piano or snatch up a banjo or guitar and just play, and strangers were amazed. She just knew which key or which string matched the sound she had heard.
The only thing she could not do was play the violin, or fiddle. She tried, and the sound that came out could not be described as music. She would get mad, put it down and go pound hard on the piano. She had, most of her childhood, a harmonica hidden in the folds of her dress—seventy years later, she still did—and she would draw it like a gun and play:
Goin’ up Cripple Creek
Goin’ in a run
Goin’ up Cripple Creek
To have some fun
This was a whole other culture than the one Charlie Bundrum was raised in, even though the people shared space beneath the same forest, traveled the same dirt roads. But one, his, was a culture of stills and eye-gouging fistfights and riverbank campfires where men passed clear whiskey from hand to hand and could cuss like champions. The other one, hers, was one where a woman taking off her bonnet in mixed company would make tongues wag.
Charlie and Ava saw each other for the first time, it is believed, at one of those basketball games. But they did not meet, formally, until the box-lunch social in Gadsden some months later.
At the socials, girls of courting age would fix a box lunch and boys of courting age, and sometimes old men who had been widowed, would bid on the food—but of course what they were really buying there was the pleasure of the young woman’s company for the time it took to eat.
Ava’s box lunch was, it must be said, a little bit of a lie. She was no great cook as a young woman and her sisters had actually done the entire meal, figuring that Ava would never get married if she poisoned a man to death. So they fried some chicken and boiled some eggs and put in a wedge of pound cake, and dressed Ava in a pretty cotton dress with red flowers on it, and a matching bonnet. Then they tucked the box under Ava’s arm and eased her onto the stage, where fate and Charlie found her.
Later, when the fiddling started, someone laid down some boards and they buck-danced to the music, but they got a little off track and tore up the grass.
The fiddler was an old man who knew songs from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but now and then he would break into something written by and for these people, songs about mountain railroads and young love under willow trees and sometimes, as Ava would say, just plain folly.
I got a pig at home in a pen
Corn to feed him on
All I need is a pretty little girl
To feed him when I’m gone
And it suited Miss Hamilton and Mr. Bundrum to stomp, eyes locked on each other, till the band stopped playing.
He had few prospects. Her daddy didn’t think much of him. His reputation, for drinkin’ and flirtin’ and fightin’, was not good, even, Old Man Hamilton surmised, for Baptists. Ava’s family just said no to Charlie Bundrum and sent him away, and figured he would disappear.
He did.
They both did.
They lied about their age and got a preacher named Jones to marry them in his house in Gadsden, when she was sixteen and he was seventeen. And Ava just walked away from the upstanding, church-going life she had been raised in and followed a boy, a boy who could not even read or write, into uncertainty.
He just went and stole her out of it really, because he felt he deserved something special, and she went with him because she felt she did, too.
6.
In the wild
On the Oostanaula, the Coosa and the Etowah
THE 1920S
The men had been drinking the evening Jeff Baker got stabbed and bled clean through the brown sugar, his hot blood melting it, turning it into treacle just as fast as Newt Morrison and Mr. Hugh Sanders could pack it in his wounds. Jeff moaned and trembled, and the men praised God that Jeff had so much good likker in him, because surely that numbed his pain and prepared his soul.
It was in the summer, not long after they were wed, on the river not far from Newt Morrison’s farm. Newt, Mr. Hugh, Charlie, Jeff and some other men had walked down to the river to a still, to have a taste. The women—Ava, Newt’s daughter, Sis, and some others—sat on a wide porch, visiting.
As soon as the men were pretty well stone-blind, Jeff, a big man in his twenties who had no visible means of support and was also rumored to be unparticular about which chicken coop he visited late at night, got into a fistfight with a man about as big as his leg. Jeff beat him into a bloody heap on the ground, but the little man was a gamer, and kept on coming.
Finally the small man staggered to his feet for what all the men there hoped would be the last time, and Jeff, who was not an evil man at heart, waved a fist at him to stay away, and turned his back.
Somewhere in his clothes the little man found a pocketknife, and he jumped on Jeff’s back and snaked one arm hard around his throat. Then he just started stabbing, reaching over to plunge the blade into Jeff’s side and chest,
the knife like a windmill, flinging drops of blood.
Jeff was screaming, staggering. The other men—they might have acted faster if they had not been so damned drunk—pulled the tiny man off him and flung him aside, and Jeff slumped face first in the dirt.
“He’s kilt,” Newt said, as the little man ran off, crashing through the weeds.
But the wounds still pumped blood. The men all grabbed an arm or leg and staggered—from the weight of the man, and their own unsteady, tossing decks—all the way back to Newt’s house. Newt called for brown sugar. Everyone knew that if you packed a wound with enough brown sugar, it could clot the blood and stop a man from bleeding to death.
But as fast they could cake it on, the blood from the stab wounds washed it away, until Newt and Mr. Hugh were bloody up to their elbows and most of the people had begun to pray. Mr. Hugh searched his mind for a scripture that could save the man. Just because a man is drunk does not mean he cannot speak to the Lord.
“Does anybody know that goddamn Bible verse?” he shouted. “This son of a bitch is bleeding to death.”
“Which ’un?” several people asked.
“Ezekiel,” he yelled.
Ava, who hated any violence she was not directly involved in, had stood trembling. But now she stepped smartly forward as if called from on high, and knelt at the man’s side.
“And when I passed by thee, and see thee polluted in thine own blood,” she quoted, “I said unto thee, ‘When thou wast in thy blood, live ye.’ I said unto thee, ‘When thou wast in thy blood, live.’”
“That ’un,” Mr. Hugh said, looking at Ava in something close to awe.
“Chapter 16,” Ava said.
Mr. Hugh said that seemed like it.
“Verse 6,” Ava said.
It would be a grand story if the blood had ceased to flow right then, at that precise moment, but it didn’t. Yet somehow, either through the will of God or the coagulating properties of brown sugar, the wounds soon stopped pouring and began to seep, slowly. Of course, by then Jeff was bled almost white.
They figured there was no need to take him to a doctor, and when he came to he told them, “No, I reckon I’ll just lay here and die.”
He paid Sis and Newt’s other children a nickel a day to brush the flies off him, and he waited to die for a long, long time. Finally, after a few days, Newt told him that if he wasn’t going to die he sure did want his porch back, and Jeff got up and walked on down the road.
This was the life Charlie had delivered Ava unto, a place where people still lived shrouded by the trees, where the local sheriff was a deacon who meted out justice based on the season, because all the roads in and out of the backcountry were dirt and his old Model T was bad to sink up to its axles in the mud. Here, the people knew, a man sometimes just needed killing, and if it was more or less unanimous, the kilt man was buried quietly and no one ever saw any reason to call the law.
Here, Ava would need every scrap of Bible she ever knew.
She was not a city girl. Ava had been raised with a hoe in her hand, swatting at sweat bees, and she had stood on the fence and gazed unblinking when her daddy entered their hogpen with a .22 rifle and a razor-sharp butcher knife. But the place Charlie took her to was not safe and solid country living the way she had known it.
Charlie took her to a high place in Georgia, cut by three rivers. In Rome, smack-dab in the middle of that city, the Etowah and the Oostanaula converged to form the Coosa, and it was the Coosa that, all his life, ran through Charlie’s heart.
Rome bustled with cotton mills, cement plants and ironworks that specked the night sky with orange fires. It had a massive drawbridge down on Fifth Avenue that opened to let the barges through. Endless trains, hauling tons of iron ore, belched smoke and shook the earth. Children put pennies on the tracks and the weight mashed them thin as notebook paper.
Most roads were dirt and brick, but the place had a clock tower so high that it disappeared from sight on a cloudy day, and a brand-new federal courthouse, lousy with revenuers.
Charlie didn’t much like town, but the industry meant workers and workers meant houses, and a good hammer swinger could make a living here. But like many men who had grown up in the woods, he saddled his mule and rode off into the trees when the boss man said quit, and he did not stop until the foundry fires were lost in the distance and the ground did not shake from machines.
The river ran there, right there. The Coosa, a muddy green where it ran clean and swift around giant rocks, turned brown when the red mud washed in from the rains. The river flooded high, clean up into the low branches of trees. It ate into the banks and formed deep caves overhung by the twisted, exposed roots of trees that clung to the disappearing ground.
Monsters lived here. Fat water moccasins coiled around the lower branches, thick as a man’s arm. Snapping turtles, as big around as a car tire with jaws strong enough to snap a broomstick in two, lurked in the deep, dark holes. Just under the river’s surface, primeval catfish, four feet long, hung suspended in that translucent water as their whiskers, like snakes clinging to their jaws, undulated in the slow current.
Charlie spent every spare moment on it. He did not have a store-bought boat. He took the hoods of two junk cars and welded them together to form a craft that he powered by muscle, using a long pole to push the boat along the sluggish water. Ava refused to get in it, and he laughed until she stomped up the bank.
They lived in a house that was not much better than a shack, but Ava’s momma had given her a good kerosene lantern, so they had light. It may have not been just what she expected, but while she did carp and nag—it was her prerogative to carp and nag—she stayed.
The people were almost as wild as the country, and their language alone could knock a regular God-fearing person flat on their back. It was not that they did not believe in the Bible. It was that they believed in other things, too.
Here, when people got sick, they sent for healers—women who had a power in them that no one questioned if they were smart—and a healing woman named Lula was known to have taken a cancer out of a man named James Couch, but was called too late to save Pine Knot Johnson.
No one had to worry about the future. The old women knew how to tell it. They would dump the grounds from their coffee cups in a saucer and move it around with their fingers, and they could tell your fortune that way.
It could be something of as great import as life or death, or they might look at you and say you were going to get a letter. They read palms, and used herbs to ease morning sickness and cure a baby’s croup.
People knew that if you dropped a fork, company was coming, and if a piece of food fell to the floor, it meant you secretly grudged sharing your meal.
If a snapping turtle bit you, even if you cut off its head, it would not turn loose until it thundered. Night birds were bad luck, and babies born at night were at peril if the night birds called.
And there was no ailment on earth, from a bee sting to a bullet wound, that could not be eased by daubing on a little wet snuff.
Ava listened to it all, mixing it in her mind with the doctrine of her Holiness upbringing, and stored it away. To her, the girl who loved learning, this was just a whole new kind of knowledge.
Whiskey ran through the place just as surely as the river, and on every bend, it seemed, the thin, dark trickle of smoke marked the spot of a still. Ava’s man, still a boy, really, brought home money on Friday and only drank homemade likker, and on weekends they went to Newt’s and wound up the Victrola, and danced on the porch.
In the week she did stoop labor, picking cotton or corn, tended her own garden and waited for a child.
And late at night, after supper, she read him the newspaper. He sat beside her, and she would have taught him to read if he had wanted, but they never got around to it. He could sign his name, and he could do math—because a boss man would cheat a worker who could not count—but to him books were a secret, locked up tight. And no one wanted a hammer swinger who quote
d poetry.
And so they lived. He was different from many men of his time and place. If they were in the same general area, they sat or stood together. If she hung clothes, he stood at the line. And, unheard of for a man, he helped her cook. She made the biscuits and he fried the meat—steak when he had just finished a job, or pork chops, or thick smoked bacon—and made the gravy. There was plenty of work then, so they ate good, real good. There were no one-egg days, but two-and three-egg days. They lived, though simply, richly, if rich means a good cup of coffee.
They did not have a car, but had a mule who hated most human beings, for reasons that only mules can tell. The mule would pull a plow if he wanted, but he often did not want to plow in a straight line. When anyone put him in harness, he would start out in a clean, straight line down the row and then just turn hard right or left and, as fast as he could, snort and buck and drag the plow and the cussing plowboy across the field. He would also lie down and refuse to get up, even when Charlie demanded it—and he always seemed to hate Charlie a little less than most.
Finally Charlie learned that if he went in the house and got his shotgun and sent one shot high across the mule’s ears—kind of like firing a warning shot across a ship’s bow—the mule would snort indignantly, bray at the sky and rise.
If he and Ava had to go a good ways off, to town or to family, he saddled the mule and she climbed up, cautiously, behind her husband, arms locked around his waist, and they traveled. If that mule bucked, he would club it one good time across the ears, which sounds a tad mean but not to anyone who has ever had to argue with a mule. And Ava would mumble to his back about why in God’s name did they not own a wagon.
He was good to her, except for calling her “Four-Eyes,” and he was never mean to her when he drank. In fact, she never saw him drink. She just dealt with the fallout.
