Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  She had been a momma, a momma and a manual laborer, her whole damn life, and her husband was not going to lift her out of it and in fact had never promised that he would.

  Charlie Bundrum didn’t have one pair of overalls she had not had to stitch, and he smelled like tar and snuff, and he drank his moonshine when it pleased him and acted a fool and ran over the mailbox and fought the deputies and brought home hermits.

  She could have hated her life.

  But what, she always said, if she had married a dull man.

  Oh, it was true that she told him to go to hell more times than she could count.

  And it was true she told him to get his raggedy behind out of her house before she killed him, and to take his hermit with him.

  But no one can remember one time, in all those years, that she told him to shut up.

  There was never a time, not one time, that he came in from work, sat down at the kitchen table and had nothing to say.

  What a by God tragedy that would have been.

  So when Grace climbed back in her car, careful not to snag her stockings, Ava watched from the porch, little girls clutching at her dress, and waved.

  It is why Ava put up with him, and why, about that time, she whipped Blackie Lee. Any woman can appreciate a pretty man, but not every woman can appreciate a talking one.

  One night in Alabama, after the children had been put to bed and Charlie and Ava sat talking quietly in the lamplight, there was a gentle tap on the door.

  “Charrrrrrllllliiiiieeee,” came the feminine voice. “Let me in, Charlie, baby.”

  Margaret and the other girls raised up and looked at their daddy’s face. He looked puzzled, and stricken, at the same time.

  If it was Ol’ Death himself knocking at the door, Charlie could not have looked any more troubled.

  “Charrrrrrllllliiiiieeee,” the voice said again. “Let me in, Charlie. It’s cold out here.”

  Ava had taken a minute or two to let the steam build, then she sprang to the door much quicker than she should have been able to, popped the latch and jerked it open so hard the sheer momentum almost flung her off her feet.

  “Who the hell is that,” she shouted to the darkness outside, and if there had been a woman standing there, right there, she would have knocked her cold as a tater and bounced up and down on her head.

  But instead there was just Hubert Woods, a friend of Charlie’s, laying flat on his back on the ground, laughing so hard that he could not stand.

  He laughed and rolled and laughed and coughed, and further out in the yard his daddy, Earl, laughed, too, and shook his head, and said something about how, boy, you sure are lucky that little woman didn’t have no gun.

  And Ava just stood there with her fists balled up, but she knew it would be undignified to jump on a grown man while he rolled in the yard, and finally just stomped back in the house and slammed the door.

  Charlie, standing on the porch, just looked at Hubert and said, without a smile, “I ought to kill you.” Then he walked inside, and out in the yard Hubert and Earl laughed for a long, long time.

  The next day, his girls told it over and over and laughed, but they felt sorry for their daddy, in a way. “’Cause I’ve never seen a more pitiful look on anybody’s face in my whole life,” Margaret said.

  20.

  Sons and daughters

  Calhoun County, Alabama

  THE 1940S

  Margaret cannot recall when they went back to Georgia for what would be the last time, or exactly when they came back over to the Alabama side for good. To a little girl, the houses may as well have been railroad cars passing her on a lonely crossroad, as if the houses themselves were on wheels and she was just standing still.

  But she remembers the journey.

  He banged the gears, and the bald tires on the truck threw dust for fifty yards. Charlie always drove with his large foot to the floor, which would have been dangerous if his old cut-down truck had the will, the heart, to go fast enough to actually hurt anybody. They were going west, through the northwest Georgia mountains, between the wide cotton fields of Cherokee County in Alabama and on into Calhoun County, where Charlie planned to stay awhile, if he could. Ava and Edna sat next to him on the bench seat, Ava with that damn lamp, Edna with Jo riding on her knees. Juanita and Margaret rode in the back with their cow, Buck. Charlie had mercifully thrown a blanket over Buck’s eyes before pulling away, for the same reason people cover the eyes of horses when they lead the poor beasts from an inferno. It was an old cow, and the shock might have been too much for it otherwise. He had sent Hootie, James and William ahead, in an old car the boys had bought, and told Hootie to look out for them, which made Hootie shake his head in dismay.

  They had stopped in Cedartown for a whole sack of hot dogs, the first time in their lives that Charlie and Ava’s children ever had cafe food, and little Margaret, still not yet six, would remember it all her life. The hot dog came wrapped in wax paper, the bun warm and soft, the smell of raw onions, spicy meat and chili filling the car, and she rode the rest of the way full as a tick, mustard on her cheeks.

  This was an adventure for her, the longest journey she’d ever made, and she remembers almost every mile of it, remembers looking into a side-view mirror and seeing her daddy wink at her.

  Charlie was not an impassive man, but someone whose emotions rode on the bridge of his nose. Happiness, anger, frustration, dismay, disgust and pity—no one ever remembers seeing fear—flashed across his face, depending on the circumstance, but today there was nothing but peace, and maybe contentment.

  When Ava was unhappy, nobody was happy. And likewise, when their daddy was happy, when he laughed, they all felt it, and shared it.

  He was leaving Georgia, leaving the trouble there, leaving with riches. His children ranged from six feet three to a foot and a half—from soon-to-be-grown men to a baby girl with Shirley Temple curls. Ava and he had stayed together through violence and deprivation, with white-hot words and warm touches, shaken fists and soft forehead kisses. Now, with more than a decade and a half of life lived in small houses, woman and man did not have many secrets left, and what they had discovered in those years was not the love people whisper about over candles, but the kind they need when their baby girl is coughing at three o’clock in the morning. They did not pick and sing as much, now, but when they did, it still rattled the roof.

  The Depression was dead, the newspapers said. Calhoun County would be no promised land, but it was growing and carpenters were looking for roofers. And Charlie still had some faithful customers there of his sideline business. The sheriff there liked to bust up whiskey stills to get his picture in the paper, but Charlie had evaded the law before and he believed he would again. He knew the ridges and hollows, knew the hidey-holes.

  He made the turnoff to Websters Chapel, and crawled slowly along the road till he saw an opening in the trees, and then went another two miles down a narrow trail, weeds smacking the bottom of the truck, to one more little shack in the middle of pure nothing. Except trees.

  “Got us in the damn jungle again,” said Ava.

  James, William and Hootie were waiting, and the family was not even off the truck good before the brothers launched into an eye-gouging, teeth-rattling, ear-gnawing fistfight, and Charlie had to take his belt off. But the truth was, with them almost grown, a mere belt-whipping was not much of a threat. The boys were in their teens, tall, rawboned, damn nearly indestructible. Prolonged, intense and frequent beatings from Ava, Charlie and—when their arms were tired—other kin had not done much to improve James and William, and the younger boy in particular.

  William was still tying his baby sisters up in orange sacks and hanging them from trees and nail pegs, still heaving Margaret into deep water at the swimming holes, to chase off the snakes. A good rock would have done just as well, but he liked to hear her holler when she hit the water. He was not picking on her because she was still the meekest. Edna was too big to be fooled with, Juanita bit, and Jo
was too little, and would have sunk. But they did not bruise their sisters, because Charlie would have killed them dead. So they bruised each other.

  But as the boys grew ever closer to leaving home and starting their own families, Charlie fretted. It didn’t seem possible; it didn’t seem right.

  Edna was just about a teenager, still the big sister, still serious because she had to be. Ava, as she had grown older in the hard life she chose, had become more mercurial, more prone to fits, rants and weeping jags. But Ava was not one of those Southern women who could afford life as an eccentric victim of circumstance. She did not sit on the veranda waiting for the vapors. Cotton had come back big, after the Depression, and Ava and the older children, dragging the younger ones on their pick sacks, walked the rows and stood in line at the wagon to weigh in for a wad of one-dollar bills.

  Edna’s responsibilities included sweeping the yard—a lawn was not in fashion then and smooth dirt was the way most people liked it—and when Juanita and Margaret built a playhouse in the middle, Edna did the sensible thing. She tore it down and swept on. A half century later, Margaret and Juanita still held a grudge, still grumbled that “Edna tore our playhouse down.”

  Juanita was in school now—she loved school—and Margaret used to cry because she couldn’t go with her. Jo had grown out of her temporary affliction of unattractiveness—“We sure were glad of it,” Margaret said—and would be a beautiful little girl.

  All little girls are, but Jo had naturally curly hair, the color of gold, and Margaret used to touch her straight hair and wonder why she had been so sorely shortchanged. At church—where Ava herded all four girls on Sunday mornings—the women used to snatch Jo up and hold her, like a trophy.

  They went to the Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church, and the older girls attended Websters Chapel School. When Margaret was six, she went with them. “I couldn’t count,” she said, “and them kids laughed at me.” She would smart from that all her life.

  In truth, she could count. She just had trouble saying some of the numbers.

  “I can’t say ‘thirteen’ and ‘fourteen,’” Margaret said to her teacher, and the words came out—for a reason that is still a family mystery—“hirteen” and “horteen.”

  The teacher, who was kindly, asked if she was missing her front teeth.

  “No,” Margaret said, “I just can’t talk plain.”

  “You sound fine,” the teacher told her.

  “I know,” Margaret said, impatiently. “I just can’t talk plain when I try to say ‘hirteen’ and ‘horteen.’

  “And I still can’t say ‘vegetables,’” she said, saying it just about right.

  The teacher told her a lot of people have trouble with that one.

  It was the first time they ever lived very long in one place in their lives. But in a way they were still movers, still renters, still leasing the dirt they walked on, the birds they heard, the air they breathed.

  As she grew older, Margaret wondered why her daddy, a man who could build anything, who made his living with a hammer, never built a house for them, an anchor to hold them in place.

  She would come to know that it was for the same reason that the people who cook in nice restaurants do not have dinner in the big front room, and that he built houses for other people’s families to clothe and feed his own. But little girls, they still wish for things.

  “Daddy worked on some little houses once for the Jim Walter Company, and they put the houses—the very ones that my daddy built—in a calendar,” she said. “I wore it out, looking at it. He used to talk about stopping and building us one. He’d say, ‘I sure would like to find me some land, maybe by the river.’ He said he believed he could rest, by the river.”

  They lived beside the Coosa and later by its backwaters many times, sometimes within steps of the sluggish brown water. His girls would unload the truck and see the glint of sunlight on the water, and Margaret’s heart would always soar.

  This might be it, she would think. This might be the time we stop for good.

  But it was funny thing, that Depression. History said it was dead and gone, but then history never paid much attention where people like her were concerned. It was as if that death grip on her daddy, and momma, was only loosened. The landlord would still walk in the yard and shout for her daddy, they knew, if he didn’t work. But he worked until he could barely stand, and when his car broke down he slung his old tool belt and carpenter’s apron over one shoulder and lifted a big five-gallon bucket of tar in his hand, and walked miles to the job.

  There ain’t no shade on them roofs, he used to say, and the heat, baking through his boots, blistered his feet. A roofer works on his hands and knees, his mouth full of nails, the taste bitter. So Charlie took a dip of snuff to mask it, and at night his girls poured cool water on his feet.

  There was never any doubt who he did it for.

  The births of Ava’s children spanned two decades, from 1925 to 1944. As James and William were ready to start families themselves, Ava, then nearing forty, gave Charlie one more baby girl.

  Sue, who would be the last, was born March 30, 1944, in a house on Carpenter’s Lane, just outside Jacksonville, a pretty little college and mill town north of Anniston, the county seat of Calhoun.

  The baby was blond, and in a family of pretty girls, she would be the most beautiful—a department-store doll come to life. And her sisters would treat her that way, carrying her around like a toy.

  Many of the kinfolks came to witness it, including Grace, Ava’s sister. Aunt Grace liked a little toot, so Charlie unscrewed the cap on some likker and poured her a nip in a clear glass—Grace was far, far too ladylike to take a pull on a jug—and by the time Sue came into the world Charlie and Grace were both about half-tight.

  “What they doin’?” Jo asked.

  “They celebratin’,” Margaret said.

  As the war ended in Europe and then in the Pacific, James and William became old enough for the draft. James got his letter one day, inviting him to serve his country, and William hooted, jumped, danced and launched into song:

  He’s in the army now

  He’s not behind a plow

  He’s digging a ditch

  That son of a bitch

  He’s in the army now

  He sang it all day. He sang it for a week, and on into the next week. Then the mailman handed William his own draft notice.

  They went to basic training at Camp Shelby, in Mississippi, and Charlie used to go down to see them, to make sure they were doing fine. They were grown, tough men but they were still his boys, and it was the first time that he was not there to stand in the way of real trouble—the first time that they were at the mercy of strangers. So he drove to see them, drove all night, to take them food Ava had sent, to make sure they were fine. It was peacetime then, so he did not worry about a war; he was worried that his boys might not have sense enough to survive the peace.

  They did fine. And the army, with all the wisdom of the armed forces, found the perfect job for James, the scrapper who loved a big fight, who loved a drink of likker, who was not concerned with laws.

  They made him an MP.

  Some of the soldiers, city boys, might have been tempted to poke a little fun at the tall, skinny boy with the jutting ears—maybe even more profound than his daddy’s—but James, who could also talk a blue streak, would clamp one giant hand on their necks and look in their eyes with his daddy’s stare, and they would do right.

  In the lockup, as the angry soldiers threatened and postured, he told them stories about the big stick his daddy once whittled for him to use against a mean, bigger boy named Dahmer Jones, and how he beat that boy bloody with it.

  And as he talked he smacked his baton, really just another big, long stick, softly into his hand.

  James Bundrum didn’t have a lot of trouble in the cell block.

  It was a good time, all in all, a good time for the family.

  Ava still waited to eat until her children
had been fed, but it was out of habit, not because there wasn’t enough. It seemed like there was enough of everything then. James and William were coming home from the service, and the new baby was healthy, and the girls were going to school. Times were kind. The federal government was even passing out free peanut butter.

  21.

  Free cheese, cold water and gentle horses

  The Cove Road

  THE LATE 1940S

  A shallow well, it gives bad water, muddy water, but that deep well, down in the rock, that water’s clean. I can still taste that water.

  —MARGARET, ON THE COVE ROAD HOUSE

  Even now, my momma walks the Cove Road in her sweetest dreams. The woods were old and thick but not endless, the way some of the forests had been that ringed their other houses. Every few acres the wall of trees gave way to wide-open fields that let the sun in.

  The house was not a sharecropper’s shack or river cabin but had three big, open rooms, and for the first time in as long as the Bundrum children could remember, the family would not all sleep in one room.

  It almost drove Hootie crazy. All his time with them, he had squeezed into a vacant corner. Now he walked the three rooms from corner to corner with his tiny hobo bundle over his shoulder, twelve corners to choose from, and he could not decide.

  As Charlie and the children began undoing the ropes and lifting their belongings from the truck bed, Hootie was still circling from room to room.

  After they unloaded they went out to the well for a drink, and a smile crept across Charlie’s face as he tilted the dipper and the water poured down his throat. In almost two decades of motion, they had water that looked like coffee, smelled like sulfur and tasted like turpentine, but never this, so clean and fine-tasting.

  Margaret, then about nine, peeked over the edge of the well and down, down. The well was so deep that she could not see the bottom, and the water that came out of it was like ice.