Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  There was a war coming for them, one that had nothing to do with the Third Reich or the Empire of the Rising Sun. There was an enemy, and when it came, it was riding in a rumble seat.

  17.

  The Reardens

  Coyle’s BluffTHE 1940S

  The Reardens loved conflict more than chocolate pie. Ned Rearden, who stood almost seven feet tall and was shaped like a stovepipe, would get into a hideous cuss-fight with his wife, May, and storm out into the yard. He would jump into a Ford car and twist the starter and here would come May, dragging their daughter, Mickey, by the arm, screaming for him to get out of that car, “or I’ll throw Mickey under them car tires.” And Ned would sit and gun the motor to drown out May’s screeching, as Mickey waited nonplussed, catsup on her mouth—she liked to drink it from the bottle—as May and Ned hollered and the engine roared. May never threw Mickey under the car tires and Ned never did think she would, and Mickey at five or six years old was smart enough to know melodrama when she saw it, and it always ended with the gravel flying as Ned drove off to Rome, cusses streaming like litter from the driver’s-side window.

  Some people are just interesting. They can’t help it. They just are.

  The Reardens were like that.

  About the time Jo was born, Charlie moved his family again, this time up on Coyle’s Bluff, near the Oostanaula River. Of all the wild and beautiful places they had lived, this was perhaps the most wild and most beautiful. Deer leapt in front of the car on dirt roads that were little better than pig trails, and skunks lived under the porch, which is a lot like living over a time bomb. But perhaps the wildest creatures there on Coyle’s Bluff lived just over the ridgeline from the Bundrums, in a ramshackle house with the curtains closed up tight.

  Old Man Rearden, his wife, five grown sons, two grown daughters, one daughter-in-law, a little grandchild with bizarre eating habits and one of the son’s sweethearts all lived in a four-room house. Dark smoke drifted from its chimney, even in summer. Unlike most people, who hid a still deep in the woods, the Reardens made their moonshine indoors, and got away with it for a long, long time.

  Old Man Rearden was a dried-up little man, in a wheelchair after a stroke, and Ava, whose heart was touched by things like that, made him custard and chocolate pies, which didn’t last long in that crowded house. Old Lady Rearden, who was sometimes called Granny Rearden, had the rough circumference of a fifty-five-gallon drum and was almost as tall.

  The boys were all dark and tall. There was Ned, the oldest, and Jerry, who was mean as a cornered snake, and Junior, who had nice teeth, and Rodney, who could run like a Tennessee racehorse, and Dan, who was said to be level-headed and likely to make something of himself.

  Their daughters were the kind of women who could make a preacher lay his Bible down. June and Ruth were slim, dark and lovely. “They were like movie stars,” said Juanita, and men would walk a half day out of their way just to look at them sitting on the porch.

  Mickey, the grandchild, was perhaps the most interesting Rear-den, even had she not drunk catsup from its source. When Ava would take the pies up to Old Man Rearden, she took Margaret, then about four, with her. As Ava and the Reardens visited in the kitchen, Mickey tortured Margaret by slapping her face just to see what she would do.

  Margaret sat and let it happen. Margaret, with her calm spirit, hated no one, and just craved peace. She hated conflict, hated screams, hated curses, hated the fear that a reasonable person feels when other people are trying to inflict pain. Even as a tiny girl, she would just absorb the meanness of the people around her, and as that strange girl slapped her, Margaret literally turned the other cheek.

  “I just took it,” she said sixty years later.

  “Why?” Juanita said.

  “’Cause I was scared of her,” Margaret said.

  “You should have told me,”Juanita said.

  “Why?” Margaret said.

  “I would have pinched her,”Juanita said.

  Living close to them, back then, was like sneaking under a circus tent. They fought all the time, made whiskey, ran from and sometimes got caught by deputies and revenuers, often escaped, but came straight home to Coyle’s Bluff to get caught again. The revenuers there paid absolutely no mind to Charlie Bundrum or his little moonshine still. It would have been like arresting someone for popping bubble gum in the middle of Mardi Gras.

  They were the only indoor whiskey cookers the Bundrums had ever seen. Their house was always “black dark” because they kept the curtains closed, said Edna, who was about twelve then. Late at night the Rearden boys would come walking out the front door carrying gallon cans.

  Once, on a raid, the revenuers chased Junior and Rodney along the river and caught Junior. They couldn’t spare a man to hold him, so one revenuer had him reach his hands around the trunk of a cedar tree, almost as tall as a church steeple, and slapped the handcuffs on him. “He’ll not get away unless he takes that tree with him,” the revenuer said, and they took off again after Rodney. As soon as they were out of sight, Junior—who was not short on brains—began inching up that skinny tree. A cedar has flimsy limbs, and he just squeezed through them till he got up to the top. When the revenuers got back, he was gone.

  The Rearden boys were mostly kind to the Bundrums, except for one, the foul-tempered Jerry. He kept company with a large woman named Norris, a woman with buzzoms the size of feed sacks who was said to be almost as mean as he was, but was treated as part of the Rearden family. Ava would mutter, “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean,” if she saw them drive past the house.

  Everyone seemed to fear Jerry, except Charlie. Hootie was out-and-out terrified of him, but wouldn’t tell why. If Jerry was anywhere around, Hootie stuck fast to Charlie, walking almost under his feet.

  For a year or so, the Bundrums lived beside them. The children even named their favorite hen, a short, plump bird, “Old Lady Rearden,” because of that resemblance, and Charlie laughed. “Does look like her,” their daddy said.

  They love to tell the story of the time a tornado came and they saw Old Lady Rearden huffing and puffing along the ridgeline, trying to make it to a storm pit. But one of her feet slipped, and she rolled halfway down the mountain before she could get stopped.

  The Bundrum children laughed, and their momma and daddy scolded them and said it was mean to make fun of people.

  The next day, Charlie, grim-faced, walked into the house and said he had some terrible news.

  “Miz Rearden has died,” he said. “She’s out in the yard with her legs stickin’ straight up in the air.”

  The children were stunned, and shamed, but they ran outside to see anyway, because how often does a child get to see a woman the size and circumference of a fifty-five-gallon drum laying dead in the yard with her legs in the air. But when they rushed outside to see her, it was just the hen. She was dead, though. And her legs were, as a point of truth, sticking straight up. “Kicked the bucket, by God,” Charlie said as the angry children turned on him, and he laughed half a day. Ava went out, not amused, to see if she was too far gone for dumplings.

  They were good neighbors for the most part. Charlie never made more than a few gallons of whiskey, so he was no threat, no competition, and they seemed to respect the skinny man. All but Jerry. He had a hot-rod Ford, and he would rumble past the Bundrum house and glare.

  When a roofing job opened up down on Highway 53, way on down the mountain, Charlie loaded his family and Hootie onto his truck and moved them to a house near the job, owned by a family named Roach. Hootie was much happier there, until one day came when they heard the loud muffler on Jerry’s Ford and saw him creep past the house. Norris, all two-hundred-some-odd pounds of her, sat behind him in the rumble seat, like a chubby child on a kiddy car, drinking soda pop and looking mean.

  18.

  Reckoning

  The Roach place

  THE 1940S

  They were getting ready for supper just a few weeks later when Hootie
raced up onto their porch, jerked the door open with a crash and slammed it shut behind him, rattling the plates on the table. He shook, and was wild-eyed, like a horse in a burning barn. “Hep me, hep me, Mr. Chollie, he’s come to get me ag’in.” Then he raced through the house to the back door, snatched it open and was gone in the night.

  That was when they heard Jerry Rearden call from the yard.

  He had coasted his Ford up to the house, his headlights off, and had almost snatched Hootie before the little man saw him and ran for his life. Now he stood in the gloom with a shotgun pressed into his shoulder. A man doesn’t hold his shotgun that way to talk. He holds it that way to kill.

  “Send Hootie out,” Jerry hollered. “He stole some whiskey from me and I want him.”

  That was probably when Charlie was sure of what he had suspected all along, that Jerry Rearden was one of the people who had hurt Hootie, to make him tell a secret he did not even know, or just for the sport of it. Hootie didn’t have the courage to steal from anybody, and surely not Jerry Rearden. And now this man had come to his house, bringing a threat of violence to where his wife and children lived.

  Ava and the girls started to cry, in part from the look on his face, and his boys, now almost teenagers, stood quietly by the windows, looking out. Charlie was a doer, not a thinker, in times like that, but this time he didn’t have all the tools he needed to kill Jerry Rearden deader than Aunt Minnie’s house cat, which was in his mind to do.

  He was out of shells for his shotgun. His hammer and his roofing hatchet were in his truck, in his carpenter’s apron, and Jerry now stood between the house and the truck. He looked around for a stick, a lump of coal, anything. He thought about reaching for Ava’s iron skillet, but it would have been bad for him, he thought, to get shot dead with a skillet in his hand. That was when Jerry Rearden said he was coming inside, that he was going to take that little son of a bitch and there was nothing Charlie could do about it.

  Then Charlie did one of the bravest things I have ever heard of, a thing his children swear to. He opened the door and stepped outside to meet his enemy empty-handed, and just started walking.

  “Hootie ain’t here,” he said, walking, it seemed, straight into the bore of the shotgun. It was a single-shot .410, and he thought that if Jerry didn’t get him good with that first shot, he could get his big hands around his throat before Jerry could pop in another load.

  “You got to leave here,” he said, walking closer. “I got babies in that house.”

  “You prob’ly a damn thief, too,” Jerry said, his voice thick with whiskey, and he pressed his face against the steel of his shotgun to draw a bead. Back then men were always threatening to kill other men. But this man was drunk and mean enough to pull the trigger.

  He did.

  Inside the house, the girls pulled pillows over their heads, so they would not have to hear the shot, would not have to hear their daddy die.

  Charlie felt the hot rush of shot fly past his face, and his legs shook under him with the boom of the gun. But it was a clean miss, and he started to run at Jerry, closing the distance even as Jerry fished in his pocket for another load.

  Twenty feet …

  Jerry cursed and broke open the breech.

  Twelve feet …

  He slapped in the fresh shell.

  Eight feet …

  He snapped the gun closed.

  Six feet …

  He threw it to his shoulder.

  Four feet …

  He saw a fist the size of a lard bucket come flying at his nose.

  Charlie was already on him. As Jerry’s head snapped back from the blow, Charlie snatched the gun out of his hands like it was a toy and hit him in the teeth with it. Jerry dropped like a box of rocks, his face and teeth a red mess. And just then Charlie saw a huge figure hurl itself at him from the shadows.

  It was that big woman, and she lunged at him with a hog-killing knife. Charlie whirled and fired. The woman, who was turned sideways to stab him, took the shot in the side of her breast, point-blank.

  The shot passed through the breast and went into and through the other one, and the woman fell hard and heavy onto the grass. She yelled, bled and flopped around, but neither she nor Jerry was mortally wounded and Charlie just stood over them, breathing hard, sweat running like ice water down his spine.

  He told them they best be out of his yard before too long, and he walked on up to his house. Ava had not let the children out on the porch, so when the door opened they did not know whether it would be their daddy or the devil himself. He stepped inside to see all of them staring at him with their eyes big, except Margaret, who still had her head covered up.

  “We best put the young’uns in the truck,” he said, “and go somewhere for a little while.”

  Out in the yard, they could hear the big woman and Jerry cussing and trying to help each other off the ground. The big woman wailed.

  She was blessed that day, that woman, and Charlie was, too. The gun he snatched from Jerry Rearden was a little .410, used for squirrel and rabbit and sometimes deer, not a 12-gauge.

  A 12 would have ripped that poor woman almost in two, at point-blank range. But if that gun had been a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot, Rearden would not have missed Charlie in the first place. A man cannot get drunk enough to miss a man with a 12-gauge at point-blank range.

  What had happened was not casual. He would go to prison for it, he figured, or the Reardens would kill him. Old Lady Norris was family, almost a Rearden herself for all practical purposes. The fact that there was no wedding ring would not save him.

  But he could not have let that man and woman come into his home where two sons, three little girls and an infant would have been in the path of whatever meanness they would bring. That is why he didn’t drink his likker at home, why he didn’t allow it in his house. It was not, he knew, a perfect wall, but it was the one he had built.

  They loaded the children quickly into the cut-down, ignoring the moaning of the two people on the ground, and about that time Hootie just materialized in the yard and crawled on the back of the truck. They rode to a county road, a mile or so away, and waited, but for what they weren’t sure, until it seemed senseless to hide, and Ava touched his arm and said quietly, “Charlie, let’s go on home.” Their yard was empty when Ava and Charlie pulled back into their driveway, the children asleep in the cut-down. Charlie toted his daughters in two at a time.

  The Reardens never came, maybe because they respected him, or because they thought it wasn’t worth their time. The law did not even investigate. No deputy ever came into the yard. Like some people need killing, some people need shooting, and need being knocked upside the head.

  Charlie never got angry at Hootie for bringing the trouble there, at least that anyone knows of. Ava did. But then Hootie was terrified of Ava anyway, so it didn’t change things none. They moved over to Alabama again, not long after that, just for a little distance. But a man with a temper has to drive a long, long way to get away from his nature.

  19.

  There but for Grace

  Jacksonville, Alabama

  THE 1940S

  Grace smoked slim cigarettes, drank like a man and wore makeup, and when she rumbled down Carpenter’s Lane in her big car, the people’s heads swiveled to follow her, because it was a fine automobile, and because Grace was pretty fine herself, sitting in it.

  Grace visited Ava a good bit, when her older sister lived on the Alabama side, and when she came it was like a big movie star had come to town. Grace was a tiny, beautiful woman who went to the beauty shop when she wanted, who dressed in clothes from the department stores in Gadsden, Birmingham and Atlanta. Other women wore bonnets. Grace had store-bought hats with lace that drooped mysteriously over the eyes, hats with silken roses and even tiny redbirds with real feathers sewn onto them, and when she stuck her foot out of the car to get out, there was a high heel on it.

  When they were grown, James and William used to take her to town and
pretend she was their girlfriend, to make their sweethearts jealous. She was forty by then but looked twenty-five, and she had eyelashes like bat wings, and when she fluttered them, it just did something to men’s insides.

  Grace had married a Greek named George Manas, and they ran a cafe in Birmingham and later in Attala, near Gadsden. They were well off—he employed twenty people at one time—and they went to Florida to see the ocean and orange groves and alligators. They sent postcards. Ava put them in the corners of the mirror, so she could look at them.

  It was the life Ava could have had, maybe the life she was raised to have. Instead, she sat in another rented house with another baby to feed, to worry over, with two grown sons, a teenage daughter, and two more little girls pulling at her dress, all day, every day.

  It was not so obvious, most days, until Grace came and they sat on the porch or in the kitchen, coffee cups in their hands. Grace’s hands were still smooth. Ava’s, scarred from the cotton bolls that always managed to gouge her up under her nails, and burned pink in places from hot skillet handles.

  Her dresses were made from flour sacks and feed sacks, and she picked cotton in them—and it wasn’t even her damn cotton.

  She wore her hair like the black women of the time, bound up in a scarf, like a turban, to keep it out of her eyes when she did stoop labor and sewing. And one day she unwrapped it and found that the shining, inky black was now cut with white strands, as if by some kind of evil hex, and she cried and cried, and there was not one thing that Charlie could say.

  She did not have a wedding ring or even a simple gold band, and while she still had about a hundred cheap, dime-store purses, she didn’t have a damn thing to put in them except newspaper clippings of all those things she found interesting but would never do or see, and cutout pictures of Hank Williams from discarded magazines.