Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  And if a child got sick, Ava opened her pocketbook and bought the medicine it took to make them well again or paid the doctor to heal them, which is how life is supposed to be. How could it ever be any other way?

  Who would ever let such a thing happen.

  The plant laid him off not long after Edna’s second birthday, but it wasn’t personal. U.S. Steel had 225,000 full-time employees in 1929—and zero four years later. It had changed the lives of a whole generation of Southerners who found that rolling steel was child’s play next to what they had done, next to cutting pulpwood or fighting a brain-dead beast along endless rows of red dirt. And now, it was changing them back.

  People would come to call it the Great Depression.

  For Ava and Charlie, it was as if the biggest broom in the world just dropped out of the sky and swept everything away. Charlie could do a whole lot more besides work in the steel mill, he could make a living. But he could not make that living, he could not give them that life.

  Town cost too much. They went back to the woods.

  8.

  Little Hoover

  Curryville, Georgia

  SPRING 1931

  Edna stood beside the bed, amazed, and just watched her. She did not know a person could be so small. Her momma told her she would get bigger with time, and that was true, for a while.

  They had come back to Georgia to live, where Charlie could always jerk a living from the hills and the river around Curryville, if he had a little luck on his trotline or in the woods with his .410. Now there was a new child to feed, but instead of worrying he stepped lighter, taller.

  The baby had jet-black hair, like her mother. Charlie called her “Little Hoover,” a dark joke in honor of a failed president who watched, helplessly, as his own federal soldiers attacked and destroyed a raggedy squatters’ village of homeless, destitute World War I veterans who asked for early payment of their pensions. Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, not yet heroes, cleansed the capital of the poor, and that news, carried down to the South in faded, secondhand newspapers, made common men like Charlie Bundrum despise the remote politician and gentlemen soldiers.

  The baby’s real name was Emma Mae. Born on May 29, 1931, she entered the world in a black time.

  For Edna, then just old enough to understand the struggle between life and death, the year is carved deep, deep in her mind.

  “I watched her sleep on the bed when Momma was out picking some onions, and she woke up and squirmed around and fell behind that bed. I just started crying, ‘I can’t get her, I can’t get her.’ Momma came in, threw a bunch of onions down and got her and held on to her. ‘To hell with them onions,’ she said.”

  Edna hoped the baby would get big enough so she couldn’t fall behind the bed again. But in spring, she started getting smaller.

  “She had the diarrhea real bad. They boiled milk and boiled water. Momma nursed her by laying her on a pillow ’cause she was so little. Then she took the pneumonia, real bad.”

  A hospital could have saved her. Medicine could have helped. Edna does not remember ever going to a hospital or seeing any medicine in the house, but then she was just a child herself. She just remembers that she and her brothers James and William ate corn-bread then—just cornbread.

  “She was buried not long before sundown, not far from a holly tree. I stood on a hill and watched Momma and Daddy stand there at the grave, and I didn’t have on no coat or shoes and the wind was cold on my legs. And I watched the sun go down and they was still standing there.”

  There was no money for a real headstone. But before he left the graveyard, Charlie gathered white chert rocks from the hillside and laid them on the grave, being very careful about it, as if painting some kind of design with them on the ground. Edna did not understand why he did it, but as he worked Ava stood by him and watched, paying attention.

  Then he took her arm and they walked off the hill together.

  Edna understood little of it, really, just that they left Emma Mae at Curryville when they moved not long after that, and that her daddy, who always laughed even when he hit his thumb with a hammer, who would grab up his children, pop them down on his bony shoulders and walk for miles, seemed to sleepwalk through the weeks. Edna, puzzled, wondered why he was quiet, because he was never that quiet. He even stopped singing. To Edna, it seemed like some strange new man lived in her daddy’s old clothes, a man who didn’t know the words.

  “The one thing,” she said, “that whupped my daddy.”

  Something seemed to go out of Ava, too. “I always figured Momma didn’t like me anymore because of Emma Mae and what happened,” but that was how a child would have taken it, the coldness that enveloped Ava in that time.

  It might have been better if she had stayed in the mountains of Curryville for a while, where she could sit under a holly tree and pick weeds off a tiny grave, the way people do. It shouldn’t have cost nothin’, really, just to be still awhile.

  9.

  Movers

  The foothills

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  Ava hated moving day. When everything was loaded and tied down, she sat red-eyed and tight-lipped in the passenger seat of the Model A, her hands wrapped not around one of her babies but around something almost as dear, her kerosene lamp. Her husband could not abide living poor in town, so he usually rented houses at the lost end of a dirt road, deep in the pine barrens and old-growth hardwood forests, surrounded by poison ivy and blackberry bushes as impenetrable as trench wire. The power lines seldom reached so far, and the nighttime came alive with wild things, hidden things. No matter how many times you tell yourself a screech owl is just a bird, when you hear it in the dark woods, it sounds like murder in the trees. Ava’s lamp, made of glass as thick as a Coke bottle, was her island, a circle of safe, amber light. Candles, no matter how many you light, are too flimsy for the woods. Ava knew that a ghost would walk right on past a candle and say hello.

  Electricity might have caught up with them if they had stayed in one place long enough, but there was no profit in sitting still. Charlie, smelling like heat and tar from the shingles he pounded into place, would come in the house and tell Ava that the job had dried up, but that he had heard there was work over in Alabama, or over in Georgia. It happened at least once a year, often twice, sometimes three times a year.

  In the decade of the Depression, they moved twenty-one times.

  The prosperity they would chase, crisscrossing the state line in that overloaded, rattletrap, cut-down Ford, was usually only marginally better than the life they had left behind. The ladders he climbed, in the summer heat that turned the shingles to black mush, in the cold that made them crack like panes of glass, never got him more than a few feet higher than rock bottom, and the wells he dug were just dead-end tunnels leading to a wadded-up ten-dollar bill. Maybe prosperity is too strong a word for it. They pursued the here and now, a sack of flour, a gallon of kerosene, a yard of copper tubing, a new needle and thread.

  They would have loved him anyway, if times had not been so hard, if he had not saved them from it, but would they have loved him as much? It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.

  History gave him one.

  The stock market crash of October 24, 1929, Black Thursday, wafted down into the Deep South like a slow-working disease. Even now, seventy years later, old people still thank God that they lived in the country, where the shame of their poverty was hidden by the trees.

  It was a creeping thing, down here, not the drama that sent the Yankee stockbrokers leaping from window ledges. In a part of the nation still wasted from Reconstruction, this “Great Depression” was, at first, almost redundant, like putting the bootheels to a man already down. It did not make the rows any longer for a farmer plowing a mule, or change the diet of a family already eating cornbread and beans seven days a week. It took a while to feel it. But in time, it even found t
he people at the ends of the dirt roads.

  It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse.

  You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth.

  People did go hungry. Meanwhile, on the lawn of the White House, President Hoover was photographed feeding his dog.

  They were living north of Rome when Juanita came—again, with Granny Isom’s grim-faced supervision—on April 22, 1934. Her full name is Gracie Juanita, which is about as grand a name as I ever heard, as if Charlie and Ava were fighting back against the stinginess of the years with that forty-dollar name. But the baby was small and slight, and her momma and daddy were afraid for her. Emma Mae was fresh on their minds.

  She would get sick, and Ava died a little every time. Her mind was not built for worry, for being sad. It could not absorb it somehow, the way some ground can’t hold water. She prayed hard, her eyes closed. She prayed a lot. Charlie would stand over the bed, helpless. He could have gotten down on his knees, too, but he was not a praying man, then. It could be that he did talk to God, but inside his own mind, standing up, the way some proud men insist on doing it. But I guess we’ll never know that either.

  All around them babies had slipped away, but Juanita thrived in time. Juanita grew up fine. She was not sickly, just bony, and she would be bony all her life. She was just uninterested in food, and eating was something she endured.

  The girl they just called “Niter” inherited her daddy’s hands—not the size, but the skill in them—and made playhouses from branches and scraps when she was just a toddler, building things and tearing them down and building them again. Some girls wanted dolls. She wanted a good hammer.

  Once, when she was still small, Edna built herself a playhouse out of tree branches and refused to let Juanita play in it. Nita just stood looking at it a moment, figuring, then built one just like it.

  Then Edna’s mysteriously caught on fire.

  “I helped her put it out, after a while,” Juanita recalls.

  His children say, today, that they never really noticed the pain and the poverty that swirled around them, because he loomed over it and would never let it reach them. They did not mind that they ate a whole lot of cornbread, did not notice—not until much later—that Charlie and Ava waited to eat until the children had, to make sure there was enough.

  Outside their protection, outside that perimeter of pride and love, the long, bad years writhed on, coiling and coiling upon themselves like a snake they couldn’t kill.

  Ragged tent cities took shape beside lonely Southern blacktop, on riverbanks, beside railroad tracks. By the early 1930s, one in three men in the foothills was out of work. Cotton farms failed because the textile mills were padlocked, and cotton rotted in the dirt.

  In the mills that survived, the owners slashed wages in half, by seventy-five percent and even more. Hard men who would have half killed another man for even the vaguest insult just bowed their heads to it, to survive.

  It was bad here but at least it was a little warmer, and county sheriffs armed with ax handles waited at railroad depots and at lonely crossroads to discourage the out-of-work men who came south looking for work or just a more pleasant place to wait it all out.

  Aristocratic Southerners, the ones who somehow held on to the old money that set them above and apart, did not, history shows, do a lot for their brethren. And some even seemed to take sadistic pleasure in driving poorer Southerners, a class they had long disdained, to even greater pain.

  “Let ’em starve,” said Eugene Talmadge, a Depression-era governor of Georgia who refused to aid federal efforts to give destitute people of his own state a pittance to help them survive, who stalled, harassed and demanded the names of every person receiving federal aid.

  In hell, as Ava used to say, there is a special box seat reserved for all those bow-tie-wearing, imperious sons of bitches.

  In Alabama and Georgia, people wore out their last good suit of clothes and just stopped going to church because they were ashamed, and preachers nailed signs to fence posts to remind their flocks that old, faded dresses and ragged overalls were not offensive in the eyes of the Lord. Here, eight out of ten schoolchildren stopped coming because the books and teachers cost money, and even now old women will tell you one of the most hateful things about the Depression was that it stole books, teachers and knowledge, and held another generation prisoner to the old life of backbreaking work, a life in which every book may as well have had a chain wrapped around it, for all the good it did a person who did not read.

  People with deep roots stood fast in the doorways of ancestral homes, and lost everything. People without roots, the wanderers like Charlie Bundrum, drifted with the times, and survived.

  He could do sawmill work, build houses and barns, pound shingles, strip cane, plow a mule, lay brick, do stoop labor and, if the law would just leave him alone, run off a little shine. But he had to keep moving, going to the work, so he would wander, dragging Ava and a varying number of children with him, first in a mule-drawn wagon, then in his truck. It was a car, really, but he had used a torch to hack off the back part and then rigged a flat wooden bed on it, because you can’t haul anything but relatives in a backseat. On moving day he piled it high with mattresses, rocking chairs, chickens, girls, boys and, her daughters recall, “about ninety pocketbooks.” Ava didn’t have anything much to put inside one, but she had, in truth, dozens of cheap, dime-store purses, which she counted on moving day to make sure she had them all. She could always come back and get a chair or a chicken and even a child, but people would steal a good pocketbook.

  It usually took at least two trips. They had to come back and get the cow. If it was a short move, the children walked the cow, for miles, at the side of the road. But if it was a long one, he hoisted the heifer on the cut-down and drove away, the cow, wild-eyed and bleating, going backward at thirty-five miles an hour.

  After a while, the cow would run when she saw Charlie coming at her with a halter or a rope, and for years she kicked anyone who milked her. I guess she was just getting even.

  For a few dollars a month, they rented little frame houses in the hills around Gadsden and Rome, on farmland above Noccalula Falls, on Bean Flat Mountain, in Whites Gap, on the Piedmont Highway, Boozer’s Lake Road, Littlejohn Road, Cove Road, and on the lovely-sounding Carpenter’s Lane. Some places had no names, and are remembered only by the landlords. There was the Osby place, the Buchanan place, the Coot Green place and the Coot Stevenson place. You have to move a lot to live in two different houses owned by two different men named Coot.

  Ava and the children picked cotton for some of their landlords to help pay the rent, but as the Depression wore on that work was scarce, too. Charlie was the machine that powered their lives, pushing them from place to place.

  For his family, there was none of the excitement of a brand-new beginning. Birds live that way, not people. His wife and children knew, every time they pulled up in another red-dirt driveway, that it was not actually home. In a home, you notice the trees getting taller.

  Home was the driveway, any driveway, that they saw their daddy walk up in the cool of the evening. It was always a new porch, but the same rocker, the same laps to crawl into, the same voice singing about patience and salvation from the open window, the same old saddle horse or mule cropping g
rass in the yard. And in time, everything there would be just one more memory. To this day, his girls have no trouble recounting specific stories about that time, and don’t waver much as to dates and ages and most other pertinent facts. But they often have trouble as to the where of it. The where, it all runs together.

  Ava cried, but cried harder if they were leaving Georgia. She had been born in Alabama and loved living in Gadsden in the fat years, and that should have been where her heart was. But if she was going to live in a damn jungle, she preferred it be a damn jungle in Georgia, she always said, and never saw any reason to elaborate on that. At least she had the comfort of knowing that she would never be very far from the Peach State—her husband never moved more than a hundred miles in any direction—and that she would be back within its borders soon enough. It was almost as if life had tied Charlie Bundrum to the end of a string and staked down the other end on the Alabama-Georgia line. He could ramble, but just so far.

  It was about this time that he started a few gallons of likker, to swap for meal and bacon and coffee. Sometimes, to be accurate, they moved not in search of work but because one of the lawmen had found one of Charlie’s stills. That did not mean Charlie went to jail, because finding a still, hard as that was, did not mean you had found him. The lawmen often knocked at houses that echoed from the emptiness inside, and neighbors would smile, knowing that Charlie and his cow were safe across the state line.