Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  Just because a man works in overalls, or a woman takes a dip of snuff in the evening, that does not mean they do not hold to traditions. Just as a story passed down through the generations is as precious, as valuable, as bone china, the things we do just because our kin did them are as sacred to us as anything passed along by the gentry. That is why Charlie’s behavior on the day his sixth child was born was so puzzling. He turned his back on a tradition so old no one can even remember where it came from, or when it began.

  It was a simple ceremony at a birth, once the hard part was over. The baby would be handed to a relative or a respected neighbor or friend, usually one of the eldest, to honor them. Then the relative would carry the newborn slowly, slowly around the house, talking to it, telling it good, fine, hopeful things. They would hold the baby close to their hearts, so the child could feel that beat, and when the circle was complete the old people would give it back to the mother without a word, because to speak about what was said on the sacred circle was bad, bad luck, the same way telling what you wish for over birthday candles will make your wish not come true.

  In the foothills, our kin believed that the baby would inherit all that person’s goodness, all their finer nature, all the luck, love and talent in them. It did not mean that the baby would not take after their momma and daddy, but that it would have a little something extra from their kin. It was just something these people believed, something they did the exact same way every time because it had always been done the exact same way, until Margaret came.

  She cost Charlie a quart of whiskey, and was born in the season of dogwoods. The doctor in Rome, a man named Gray, delivered the poor woman’s baby, a bleating, angry-looking, blond-haired thing that would be beautiful one day but for now looked like a pink rat. Ava insisted on naming her Margaret, for an old woman who had helped care for her once when she was ill, and the boys, James and William, walked around the little house grumbling about one more damn sister. The doctor had a cup of coffee, and didn’t offer any advice about child rearing. It seemed like Mr. and Mrs. Bundrum had some experience at that.

  Charlie followed him out to his A-Model with a quart in his fist. It was a full quart, which is the most amazing thing about that day. It was worth a dollar or more then, in the Depression, and as good as cash and a whole lot better if you were dry. The doctor unscrewed the cap and sniffed but did not take a sip, and if this was an affront, Charlie never said so. A lot of men went blind drinking bad likker, and a few men died. It may seem a sin to trade whiskey for such a thing, but God may have forgiven him that time.

  The ceremony did not happen right away. The baby had to be fed, had to feel comfortable in the arms of its momma. And only then did the baby’s daddy pull it from her, then hand it to a great-aunt, or beloved uncle, or man or woman who had been kind to them.

  They always said “Thank ye,” because it was a gift, truly.

  No one knows why Charlie broke with tradition that day—he had not been drinking any—but he scooped the little girl up into his arms and carried her around that tiny house himself, his face tucked into the blanket with hers, whispering something. What, we’ll never know.

  When he was done he handed Margaret back to Ava, who had not objected when he took her from the bed and did not complain when he brought her back. The other kin who had gathered looked on, a little puzzled. It seemed a tiny bit selfish, to them.

  Charlie never said why he did it, and died with it unexplained. We can only guess.

  It was not that she was his favorite—he loved all the girls the same, as far as they could tell—and it was not that he thought he was the best person for the baby to take after. Charlie Bundrum knew his failing, his one true failing.

  But see, according to tradition, it was only the good things the newborn inherited. This was his chance to funnel all the good, brave and pure things in him into one of his own. It was not science—in science you inherit all the traits, good and bad—just superstition. Or maybe faith.

  Still, what if it was true, what if a man could guarantee that his baby would get all the good inside him, and be free from all the weaknesses, and the pain they caused?

  What if it was only true?

  Margaret was the alter ego of Juanita. She was more timid. She was not a fighter. The fair-skinned little girl with that white-blond hair believed that no matter how mean a person was, they would stop it if she was just patient enough. When other children fought, she walked away. When grown-ups fought, she ran. She fought back only when she was cornered, when there was no way out, and then she clawed and kicked.

  Her brothers were mean to her, but they were mean to everyone. They tied her up in sacks, and every time Ava left William to baby-sit her, he gave her a haircut. William cut all the hair off one side and left the other side long, and laughed even when his momma whipped him over it.

  When the Bundrums moved from Alabama to Georgia, her brothers told her they were going there to dig up little Emma Mae, who was not dead but buried alive. They gave her a hoe about twice as long as she was, and she dragged that hoe everywhere she went. She believed them, because she was so small, believed that they might not be able to get Emma Mae out of the ground if she was not ready to help them dig.

  When someone, a grown-up, told her that they were just fooling her, she sat down and wept, not angry, just sad that they would leave Emma Mae in the ground.

  She followed Juanita everywhere. She snuggled up in Edna’s lap. Ava always had a needle and thread in hers, and she was always fearful one of the children would run to her and stick themselves on those big needles she used for quilting. Margaret hated the needles.

  The needles meant pain, and she hated pain—in her body or in her mind, awfully, terribly bad.

  Charlie called her “Pooh Boy,” though why no one seems to know, and she would toddle after him down the dirt road to the mailbox, then toddle back, just to be close to him. He was the protector against the pain. When she got a speck in her eye, it was he who laid a warm washcloth against it, to ease the hurt. If she got a burn from their stove, he blew on it. If he caught her brothers being mean to her, he whipped them.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t write this,” she said so many years later, “but I was his favorite. Maybe not in love. He loved us all. But maybe he gave me more attention. I knew that nothing could ever hurt me with Daddy there. I knew he would never let it happen.”

  14.

  Burning

  The Osby place

  THE LATE 1930S

  Her mind went away while she was on fire. Margaret was not yet three years old then, fair and white-blond, a lovely child. They were living in the old Osby place, maybe three miles from their nearest neighbor, on the Georgia side of the line. Charlie had gotten temporary work at Fort McClellan in Alabama, a three-hour drive away, building barracks and roofing. He slept there, and came home on the weekends. He was gone the night it happened.

  Edna had made Margaret a new dress out of a feed sack, a pretty dress, Edna said, “but I didn’t have no buttons yet, and I told her not to put it on.” It was a long dress, down to her feet. You can grow into dresses like that.

  “I can’t wait,” Margaret said, and she begged and cried until the other women in the house, big and little, gave in. Juanita was about five, Edna was about ten but acted older.

  Because Edna didn’t have any buttons, they fastened the back of the dress together with a big safety pin. A new dress was the happiest, grandest thing that had happened in her life, and it was her first real, clear memory. How could such a thing wait on buttons.

  It was dusk. She and Juanita were cutting paper dolls out of old newspapers, and Ava and Edna were washing clothes on a rub-board not far from the house.

  The two little girls made a lot of paper dolls, and the scraps piled up on the floor. Margaret started throwing the paper scraps into the fireplace, and a red-hot coal rolled from the fire and brushed the hem of her dress. The cotton dress blazed up, and Margaret beat at the flames as they climbed
the back of her new dress, scorching her legs.

  They tried to get it off her, but it fit tight at the neck, where the button would have fastened, and Juanita tore at the safety pin but it wouldn’t come undone. Screaming, Margaret ran from the house and onto the porch, and when she rushed out into fresh air the whole dress seemed to come alight. “I was all on fire,” she said. It was then that she lost her mind.

  Edna and Ava had heard her screams and come running, and caught her just as she breached the door. Ava knocked her to the porch and the two of them started to smother the flames with their bare hands. Edna cried and Ava prayed and cussed and they just beat at the fire until their own hands were blistered, until Margaret lay smoking on the porch, deathly, terrifyingly quiet.

  Her eyes were wide, wide open, but she was not seeing anything in this world. She was still breathing, her chest rose and fell, but she was in shock or something like it. It was no so-called near-death experience, just a little child out of her head with pain.

  She just remembers that she had a dream.

  “I went up and up and I was flying, but I didn’t see the Lord. I was playing with these kids, three or four of them, and we could all fly, and we flew all around up there, and we had on white dresses. I flew around a real long time, but I never did see the Lord. I wanted to, ’cause I’d been good. But I’d of remembered if I’d seen the Lord.”

  They didn’t have a car. Charlie had taken it with him. There was no way to get a doctor, at least no way quick. When Margaret came to she cried, and Ava knew then that she was probably not going to die.

  Ava had this unusual ability to always do what was needed of her when times were the worst, then panic and crumble. It was so this night. As soon as Margaret was put out, she gently lifted her up and laid her on her stomach—most of the burns were on her legs and back—and started to put salve on them. She told Edna and Juanita to go for help, and finally just gave up and started to shake.

  They took Ava’s lantern, the big, heavy one, and ran and walked the miles to Miss Osby’s, the closest house. Miss Osby didn’t have a phone, but she and the girls walked another two miles to a store where there was a telephone. They did not believe an ambulance would come out so far for such a thing, so they called the police in Anniston, Alabama, near Fort McClellan, and they went and found Charlie.

  He jumped in his truck and raced home, but when he walked in the door there was whiskey on his breath. Men often took a drink after work, sneaking a few sips of home brew smuggled into the dry counties. But the angels were against him this time. This time, the people who needed him, who believed he could kill any dragon, needed him stone-cold sober.

  It would be one of the few times, times his daughters can count on one hand, that he failed them.

  Margaret lay on her belly on the bed, cried-out, quiet again, and the blisters on her lower body had just begun to rise. Charlie stood over her, trying to focus his bleary eyes, and said, “Well, maybe it ain’t too bad,” and he went to the store and got some more salve, then went back to work.

  But it was bad. The blisters rose up big as teacups, and then got infected.

  “I used to lie beside her in bed and hold the cover up off her, because she couldn’t stand to have nothing touch her, but she would get cold,” Edna said. “I had sore hands from trying to tear that dress off her, but that was all right. But sometimes I would go to sleep and drop the cover on her. She sure had it rough. It scared me. I was scared we was gonna lose her.”

  Margaret would lie there, drifting in and out of her mind, and she would wake up to pain.

  Ava sent the girls for Charlie again. This time he saw what had happened to his child through clear eyes, and he took her to the doctor in Rome. He went back to work shamed.

  Many, many years later, I asked her how she felt about it all, if it left any bad memories for her, if it had affected how she felt about him.

  “No, hon. I was real young, so it didn’t leave no bad scars,” she said.

  I guess she misunderstood me, that she thought I was talking about the fire itself. Or maybe she understood me just fine.

  15.

  Gettin’ happy

  In the deep woods

  THE LATE 1930S

  Likker.

  It even sounds like a sin.

  Charlie could swing his hammer all day and not make a ten-dollar bill, but he could run off a gallon of white whiskey and make five dollars a jug. He sold it to Jack Milsap, and Ralph Crow, merchants and druggists and other respected men, because his product was clean, because it was pure, and because it was safe as Kool-Aid. Other people may have run it off from rusted truck radiators, their hooch laced with lead salts, invisible, deadly. No one ever found a dead possum floating in Charlie’s mash. He never sold a sip—not one sip—that he did not test with his own liver.

  Just as his daddy had taken him to the woods to learn it, he took James, then a teenager and his oldest, to help carry wood, to help keep watch. James remembers how his daddy would watch the likker drip slowly, slowly from clean copper tubing—they called that process “sweetening it in”—until it was time to taste.

  Charlie carried a clear, flat half-pint bottle in the back pocket of his overalls, and he would run off a pint and shake it to check its bead—good likker had a fine bead of tiny bubbles along its surface when it was shaken. He would peer hard at it, like the bottle was his microscope, then take one quick, hard pull, then a second, then a third, till it was gone.

  He would close his eyes and raise his face to the trees, and quietly announce:

  “Son, that’s alcohol.”

  He drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold.

  There was a culture to it, almost a religion, in the deep woods. More than anything, more than wars, or car crashes, or feuds, it killed men of my blood, or caused them to do things that killed them. It was a sin, but it was our sin. I guess it always will be.

  Prohibition had come and gone, but most of Alabama and Georgia was officially dry in the 1940s, and would be for decades to come. But it was only dry if you wanted it to be.

  In Rome, Anniston, Gadsden and the other cities in the foothills, the wealthier men and women sipped wines and drank stamped brown whiskey that they bought from bootleggers or wet counties. They had it delivered, discreetly, to their back doors, then went to Sunday school stiff-backed, holy-mouthed and straight-faced, as if Jesus didn’t know. Some of the old men who had grown up country but now lived in town had a taste for likker made in the trees, and they sought out men like my grandfather.

  In the country, every county had at least two bootleggers—one white, one black—and they sold beer by the bottle from trapdoors and wellsprings, to keep it cool, and clear moonshine whiskey by the quart. In Calhoun County on the Alabama side, it was a woman named Aunt Hattie, a legendary figure who gave her customers secret numbers written on bits of paper—a code to make sure that she did not sell by accident to any revenuers or police. Long after she died, and her bootlegging operation had died with her, men kept the scraps of paper with their code in their wallets, and they would pull them and show their number, with pride.

  Some people have secret handshakes. We had Aunt Hattie’s code.

  If you wanted whiskey in the foothills, your likker was almost always clear. It was considered superior to anything from Kentucky, and the fact that it was illegal just made it taste better.

  It was a culture of deceit, coursing under the very upturned noses of the hard-shell Baptists and Congregational Holiness of that place and time, a people who got high on the Lord, who walked across backs of church pews when they were enraptured—my momma called it “gettin’ happy”—and sometimes even handled serpents to prove that nothing, nothing could pierce the armor of their faith.

  But whiskey trickled through, under and around it, invisible—if you did not know where to look.

  Even in houses like Charlie Bundrum’s, there was a culture of deceit. The funny thing is, it was almost noble.

  Th
e deceit was necessary for the making of it, surely, because if a man like Charlie went to prison his family went hungry and that is just a natural fact.

  Charlie, like his daddy, went to his still in the black of night, when the deep woods could keep a secret. He never took the same way more than once or twice and always circled and circled his still—he called it his “pot”—like a dog circling his bed before he lays down. Dogs do that, old men say, because they do not want to lay down on a snake. In a way, Charlie was just doing the same thing.

  He carried his Belgian-made 12-gauge double-barrel, and a pound-and-half blacksmith’s hammer, for snakes, he always said.

  Once, twice, they were laying for him, on both sides of the state lines, but he was a ghost in the dark—“walked like a Indian,” the cousin Travis Bundrum said. The first time they came for him—the law at that time had to actually catch the whiskey man at his still—he melted quietly into the dark. The next time they were better hidden, and stepped quickly from the trees all around him. He did the only thing he could, he ran over one of them, like a bull over a rodeo clown, and ran the rest of them into the ground. No white man could outrun him in those woods, said his cousins. It is not a myth born from whiskey. It was what people knew, and know now.

  If he had James with him and he was suspicious, he would hide him and tell him to lay quiet till he came for him.

  They would walk to the still if it was just a few miles from home, and drive and leave the car, a 1935 Plymouth cut-down, if the still was farther off.

  James will never forget the time he and his daddy were up high, way up Bean Flat Mountain in the foothills, with about three gallons already run off. That meant Charlie had three pints in him, and, to tell it true, was not seeing all that well. Or else he was seeing double.