Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  The presidential election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, though he was an aristocrat himself, brought work with the WPA, and thin, weak hope. People from the foothills wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she had a spare coat they could use till times got better. “Nothing fancy, please,” a woman wrote. “All my clothes are plain.” Another woman sent Eleanor her wedding ring as collateral for a loan, so she could buy her baby clothes. “I don’t want charity,” the woman wrote. Meanwhile, striking textile mill workers in Georgia were herded into makeshift, barbed-wire prisons—the equivalent of concentration camps—by lawmen armed with shotguns.

  “Better Times Are on the Way,” read a department-store ad in the Atlanta Journal after Roosevelt’s inauguration. The same ad offered its readers three months’ worth of toothpaste for one dollar, and said people could postdate checks three months ahead, when, surely, times down here would be better.

  “I hope to believe this,” wrote an out-of-work man in a letter to columnist Mildred Seydell of the Georgian newspaper. “How it hurts, to know you are almost starving in a land of plenty.”

  I wonder, sometimes, what Ava saw in the bottoms of the coffee cups. Did she see a decade of hardship ahead, or did she have faith in this crippled rich man who used a cigarette holder but talked humanely about poor people in the pages of the week-old newspapers.

  When federal aid finally did trickle into the foothills, it was a fraction of what other regions got—as if a baby in the honeysuckle did not need as much milk, as much medicine.

  Ava gave up after a while, not on living, just on staying anyplace long enough to really get to know it, to see the trees get taller.

  He would walk in and gently tell Ava, “Four-Eyes, we got to go,” then loaded up his life on the truck bed and hauled it away, his children holding tight to dogs that did not seem to mind all the motion, as long as someone tossed them a hard biscuit every now and then. He would grind the gears and not even look back, because everything of value would be with him when he stopped again, unless he bounced someone off or one of the chickens committed suicide somewhere along Highway 9. Strangers pulled the weeds that sprouted over the one thing he could not carry with him, because even the dead were a luxury. So they rambled, and while they never really made it anyplace better, he knew how to take them there.

  And Ava would be beside him, the kerosene sloshing back and forth in her beacon, her hands cradling the heavy, smut-blackened glass like it was leaded crystal. Setting up house was never hard for her.

  All she had to do was find a match.

  Some historians say the time that defines us, as a people, was the Civil War, and I guess that is true for those Southerners who hold tight to yellowed daguerreotypes of defiant colonels, distant ancestors who glare at the camera like it was a cannon, leaning on their swords.

  But you seldom hear people of the foothills talk much about the Civil War, contrary to the popular belief that all of us down here are sitting around waiting for the South to Rise Again, gazing at our etching of Robert E. Lee and sipping whiskey from the silver cups our great-aunt hid in the corncrib when she saw the Yankees comin’.

  But you hear them talk a lot about the Depression, at reunions, at dinner on the ground, on that bench outside E. L. Green’s store, down the road from my momma’s house. They cannot tell you who commanded much of anything at Little Round Top or Missionary Ridge, but they know the names of all the knothead mules that dragged their daddies cussing and sweating across ground so poor that grass would not grow, and will look you dead in the eye and tell you that, yes, people really did work themselves to death. The Depression, endured in the lifetimes of people we know, was our time of heroes and martyrs, and our monuments are piled neatly on the ground.

  10.

  Hootie

  The banks of the Oostanaula

  THE LATE 1930S

  Let’s put it this way. A woman wouldn’t run herself to death going after him.

  —JUANITA, ON JESSIE “HOOTIE” CLINES

  On the river, among the dragons that slumbered in the deep caves along its banks and the mysterious things that called down from the dark trees, was a gremlin.

  His name was Jessie Clines, but everyone just called him Hootie. He was a dusty, scrawny man, about five feet high in his bootheels, and would have weighed less than a hundred pounds if his trouser pockets had not always been filled with silver dimes—just dimes.

  He had a face like a pickax. His nose was long and hooked, and pointy on the end, like he had bought it at the Dollar Store and tied it on his face with a string, and it curved all the way down past his lips. I would not have believed it if the people telling me his story had not raised their right hand to God.

  He had beady eyes, set in close on his nose. And if he had one tooth in his head, it would have died of loneliness. He always smelled like woodsmoke and bait.

  He could go entire days without saying a word, and when he did talk his voice was reedy and high. He always wore an old army uniform, but he had never been in the army. He just liked the suit. His britches had holes in them, many holes, and he wore red long-handle underwear, which was plain to see.

  He wore a long-billed fisherman’s cap, the kind the rich men wore in their yachts on salt water, and it had a leaping blue marlin stenciled on the crown. Hootie probably never saw a marlin, or saw an ocean, but he loved that hat. When it wore out—actually, when the hat just rotted off his head—he got a felt slouch hat, like the one Jimmy Cagney wore.

  He wore discarded shoes, and cut holes in them if they were too tight, or just for ventilation.

  “Daddy wore holes in his shoes,” said Juanita. “Hootie just cut holes in his.”

  He lived down on the river in a tiny shack. No one seemed to know if he owned it, had once owned it or just squatted there. He had just always been there, living on fish and whiskey, trading one for the other.

  His only luxury was potted meat, a paste made from ground meat, and he ate it by scooping it out of the tiny flat cans with his pinkie finger. The cans, gold-colored, were hidden around his tiny shack like Easter eggs. Inside, he cured animal skins—beaver, rat, fox, other things—and the smell was enough to knock you back out the door.

  His shack teetered on a steep bank, just above the brown river, hidden completely in the summer by the thick green. It was as far back, as remote, as a man could live. Leaves rotted a foot deep on the ground and the vines and pines and hardwoods blocked the sun, and it was still and quiet and cool in the summer. If a man wanted to live alone, it was probably as good a place as any to be left that way.

  They called him Hootie because he talked to the owls. The woods on the river were full of owls—they hunted the banks for rats, ground squirrels, chipmunks and just about anything else that moved—and the calls they gave really did sound like “hoot, hoot,” but trembling, like what you imagined a ghost would sound like.

  He could answer them, and it sounded just the same.

  People would see him on the bank, working his trotline or traps, and point at him and either laugh or stare. But Hootie only looked like a gremlin. He was too harmless for that, too good-natured. He was more like an elf.

  He wasn’t even a real hermit. Hermits do not get lonely. Hootie had.

  Charlie first saw Hootie when he was fishing the river near his shack. He waved at the little man.

  Hootie just stood there.

  Charlie waved again.

  Hootie stuck his hand up in the air, as if surprised that it didn’t hurt. Charlie walked up the riverbank and Hootie stood there, acting like he wanted to run. Charlie looked him up and down.

  “Well,” Charlie said, “you shore ain’t purty, are you, son?”

  Hootie shook his head.

  “I’ve got some biscuit, if you want some?”

  Hootie nodded, hard.

  Friendships get started on less than that.

  To Charlie he was not a gnome or an outcast, just another person to tell tales to, to catch fish with, another man who pr
eferred campfire to the glare of electric light.

  From that moment, Hootie followed him around like a new puppy. Charlie, who could talk enough for any two men, did not mind the fact that Hootie just smiled, listening, and was not prone to interrupt.

  He was not retarded, just quiet and a little bit slow, but people thought he wasn’t right because he would not always answer them when they spoke to him. He was just shy, achingly shy. Life had probably made him that way, made him live in his own head.

  He could never have lived in town. There were a lot of men on the river then who couldn’t have. Charlie was almost one of them, but it was just too lonely on the river for a man who wanted friends, a wife, and an ever-growing number of babies crawling round him on the floor.

  So, instead of being a place he lived in, it was a place he went to, to get away from life for a while, and Hootie was always there.

  The two men, one so tall, one so small, built fires and passed a mason jar of hooch back and forth, and cooked fish over the fire on thin pieces of steel that Hootie had scavenged from a junkyard, or in an old iron skillet that Charlie carried in a tow sack with his hooks and line. With the help of Charlie’s sons, they dug mussels from the sandbars and used them to bait their lines, and snatched the giant cats from the eddies. And through it all Charlie talked.

  “I like to hear you talk, Mr. Charlie,” Hootie said once, out of the blue.

  “Well, son,” Charlie said, “we are both fortunate.”

  Charlie always called him son, even though Hootie was probably twenty years older than him. Somehow, it just seemed right.

  It went on that way for about a year. Charlie saw him every month or so, always on the river.

  Some people would have said he was mysterious, which is just a fancy way of saying he was lied about. There were more lies told about Jessie “Hootie” Clines than any man on the river, and it almost killed him.

  In time, as word of the little hermit’s presence leaked out, the stories came.

  Some people said Hootie was a wounded hero from the Great War who had been horribly mutilated—that would explain his appearance, because nobody is born that ugly—and others said he was a circus performer who had committed some terrible crime under the big top. That, or he fell off the circus train as it passed through north Georgia. Some said he had escaped from a loony house.

  And some said he had robbed a bank up north—in Chicago, maybe, or Indiana—and that all the other members of his gang had been gunned down. Hootie, they said, had escaped with thousands in silver dollars.

  They said he came here to this isolated place to lay low—no one seemed to mind that he had been laying low for thirty years—and that he had hidden the money on the river.

  Some people even said he had buried the money all around his yard in mason jars, and that he dug it up every now and then, to feel it in his hands.

  If the stories had been true, Jessie Clines would have been the most famous man on the state line. Instead, there was just enough rumor, enough myth, to draw people to him, and many of them were bad.

  The river was still a lawless place then. One night a group of men came to Hootie’s shack and told him they wanted his money, and they commenced to beat him. They passed a bottle and beat him, for a long, long time.

  It became a ritual. Every now and then, a group of drunks would catch him in his bed, and make a game out of it. Some people are just a waste of human skin, and these people were that kind.

  Sometimes they just beat him a little, slapping his jaws back and forth, and sometimes they beat him pretty bad, putting their boots to him—there is no mistaking a mark from a bootheel. No one knows why he did not pack his few pitiful belongings and run. It may be he had no place to go, or that even this was better than how he had lived before he drifted here.

  One day Charlie came and he saw what the river trash had done to Hootie. Both his eyes were blacked, his lips were split and he was still bleeding from his mouth. When Charlie asked Hootie who had beaten him so badly, Hootie refused to answer.

  Charlie sat with him all day, and that night he laid Hootie down on his cot—all Hootie ever slept on was an old army cot—and walked down to his car to fetch his roofing hatchet.

  He waited on the stoop of the shack all night, his hatchet in his right hand, hoping. But no one came.

  The next morning, he told Hootie to pack up his clothes and come with him.

  “You can’t stay here, and I got to work and can’t stay with you,” he told Hootie.

  He took him home to their little place in the country, outside Rome.

  “What you doin’ with him?” Ava asked when she saw Hootie sitting on the porch.

  “He’s gonna stay with us for a while,” Charlie said, and he explained what had happened, how the river trash had abused him.

  “We barely got enough for us,” Ava said.

  “We’ll have enough,” Charlie said.

  Ava, who considered it a point of pride that she would go to her grave without ever letting anyone have the last word on anything, said she reckoned it would be fine, for a while.

  It would be years before Charlie found out who had beaten his friend, and the anger should have cooled by then. It should have.

  He slept on a pallet on the floor, or on a cot, or outside, when he needed to be by himself. He almost never spoke, but he would sit with Charlie and Ava’s children on the porch as the talk swirled around him.

  He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, and when he was done with the tiny cloth pouches, he gave them to the girls. They put them on sticks and made a doll.

  And sometimes, when they were sick, or just because he felt like it, he would give them dimes. They jingled in his pockets when he walked and he never seemed to run out, as if there really was some magic in the little man.

  The only things he owned in the world, he kept in a tiny bundle, the kind hoboes used to carry when they hopped trains. He had a spare shirt and a spare pair of pants—old army clothes, too.

  “And,” Juanita said, “he slept in his hat.”

  No one bothered him for a long time because he was almost always within the tall man’s orbit, and the trash who had hurt him apparently figured it was just not worth the pain.

  About a year after Charlie adopted him, the work dried up there in north Georgia. Charlie and Ava packed up the children and belongings for a move to Alabama, and waited, the car’s engine running, for Hootie to climb on board.

  Charlie blew the horn and motioned for him, but Hootie just stood there.

  He had left his shack on the river, where he had been for as long as anyone could remember, and now Charlie wanted to take him even farther away. It must have seemed like the cut-down was a rocket ship to the moon.

  “I need you to make sure the kids don’t fall out,” Charlie said. Hootie’s job was, indeed, to stretch his legs across the tailgate of the truck—he was shaped funny and had long legs for a little man—and he took that job seriously.

  But this time he just stood there, his chin—well, if he had a chin—tucked on his breast.

  Finally Charlie put the truck in gear and rolled away, leaving Hootie standing in the yard.

  In Alabama, they unloaded the truck and unpacked, and Ava cooked supper. Charlie stood on the porch, lost in thought. Then he walked back to his truck, slammed the door so hard that it boomed, and sped off down the dirt road, heading east.

  He found Hootie sitting on the steps of the empty house.

  Hootie hopped in the front seat.

  They went home.

  Hootie helped Charlie work sometimes, for decent wages. He ate at their table, and was treated like family. “I never remember when he wasn’t there,” Juanita said.

  Sometimes their friends would ask them who the funny-looking little man was, and they always said the same thing: “That’s Hootie. Daddy got him off the river.”

  “Why?” the other children always said.

  11.

  The big end

  Nor
theastern Alabama

  AS THE DEPRESSION DEEPENED

  Times was hard enough, Ava felt, without having to deal with the morons.

  People still talk of the night the three drunk men kicked at the door in the middle of the night, shouting for him to come and drink some shine. One of the men was named Martin and everybody knew he didn’t have the brains God gave a water bug. With his babies in bed, Charlie had too much good sense to let such men in his home, even in daylight.

  “Y’all git,” he said, loud, so his voice would carry through the pine. “These babies is sleepin’.”

  “Come on, Bundrum. We got a quart,” growled Martin from the other side of the door. A whole country in need of food, but the clear whiskey still ran like water.

  Before Charlie could swing his legs out of bed, all three men started hammering on the door.

  “I said git,” Charlie shouted, and reached for his overalls. Ava sat bolt upright but still, a hurricane forming on her features, and the children looked from the door to their daddy, big-eyed.

  “Let us in, Chollie,” said Martin, his voice slurred, “or I’ll kick it in.” One man giggled as another, apparently Martin, kicked one, two, three times at the door, and then they all started kicking until the door trembled on its hinges.

  Charlie’s tool belt was inside, and he reached down and drew his hammer—about a pound of good iron on the end of an oak handle—from its loop.

  “You got one more chance,” Charlie said, but this time his voice was low, far too low to be heard by the men outside the wooden door. But then, most likely, it was way, way too late for second chances.

  The men suddenly stopped pounding on the door, and it was deathly quiet. The littlest babies started to cry.

  “Trash,” Ava seethed, and she turned her eyes like two drill bits onto Charlie, to let him know it was his fault for knowing such men.