by Rick Bragg
“Make a man give up likker,” Charlie said, to no one in particular.
“I doubt it,” Ava said.
It was another house without lights, but even though this was just another house way back in the woods, another house where the closest man or woman lived out of earshot, it just had a different feel.
A panther, maybe the very last one that ever walked through these woods, prowled the trees at night. No one ever saw it. They only heard it in the distance, once in a great while. But it only made the blaze in the hearth brighter, somehow, only made the quilts warmer.
In the way people say they sleep better when it’s cold, the cat, wandering like a ghost in the dark outside, made Margaret, Jo and little Sue snuggle deeper into their bed. If it got too close, there was always Charlie.
A yellow school bus came and got them and took them to school, and they only had to walk three miles to catch it, but more than anything about the house, the well and the forests around it, there was a sense, a feeling, that it would last awhile. “We thought we owned it,” Margaret said.
Leon Boozer asked ten dollars a month for it. Charlie, who had more work in the county than he could do, counted out twelve ten-dollar bills. Margaret, Ava and the other girls sat almost speechless, because Charlie was committing to one house, one piece of ground. They could not have dreamed it.
He did the same thing every year after that, for an amazing seven years.
Seven years in one place.
“It was our home,” Margaret said.
The Cove Road ran through the county a few miles outside the town of Jacksonville. Most people mispronounce its name, and call it the “Coal Road.” The house sat a few hundred yards off it, hidden by the trees. The Boozer place was just another rented, borrowed house, but it wove itself into their hearts as if they had paid taxes on it, as if they had the deed rolled up somewhere in a coffee can.
It was not just another floor to walk. It was almost magic.
It even came with a magic horse.
They got the place in an odd way, almost as if there was luck in it. The Smith family had been living there, but they hated living so far out. The Bundrums had lived on Boozer’s Lake Road, where Charlie was crowded in by too many houses. The families decided to switch houses, but there was a problem.
The Smiths had a horse named Robert—Robert Smith—and no place to keep him. “Will you take him off my hands?” Mr. Smith asked Charlie.
When the Bundrums pulled up in the cut-down and saw him grazing in a pasture by the house, Margaret squealed.
He was beautiful.
He was black as smut, with one white dot on his forehead, and he had long legs, like a racehorse.
“You was Robert Smith,” Charlie said, reaching out to pet his nose. “But now your name is Bob Bundrum.”
It seemed too good to be true, that someone would leave such a fine animal, such a well-formed and noble beast, behind.
It became clear, pretty soon, why that had happened.
James’s girlfriend at the time was Phine Taylor, a small, dark-haired woman with a lot of Indian blood and green eyes. Phine—they pronounced it “Feen”—was from a farming family close by, and she plowed like a man. Charlie nicknamed her, for reasons apparent only to him, “Tadpole.”
One day she hooked Bob up to a plow to get some work out of him, and wrapped herself in the reins, and popped the long leather straps at him and said, “Git up, Bob,” and Bob took off like a bullet.
He dragged Phine sideways across the field and out of sight.
“Well,” Charlie said from the porch.
Several more long minutes went by.
“Reckon I best go out and see if he’s killed Tadpole,” he said.
Charlie decided that maybe Bob should be a saddle horse. He put Margaret on his back and began to walk them around the pasture till Bob got tired of it. Then Bob threw Margaret into the fence and trotted off, Charlie cussing him.
There seemed no use for Bob, until Charlie bought a secondhand saddle and climbed up on him himself. And instead of bucking or biting or throwing Charlie into the fence, Bob behaved like a little lamb. Bob and Charlie trotted off to see the neighbors on Sunday, and sometimes, Margaret said, “Daddy stopped off.” To “stop off” means to have a toot of likker.
He was not making much likker now himself, and had to go hunting for it, but likker was like chiggers then. If you took a walk in the woods, you would get some of it on you.
And Charlie would sip and tell stories until it was about dark and then he would climb back up on Bob—or someone picked him up and put him there—and Charlie and Bob trotted home, Charlie singing and weaving in the saddle, but at least the mailbox was safe.
And sometimes he would go to sleep in the saddle, slumped forward with his nose buried in the horse’s mane, but Bob knew the way home, and Charlie might have been sitting in the backseat of a Cadillac.
But the way Bob treated him when they came into the yard was the magic of it. Bob would gently shrug Charlie to the ground, and then walk slowly off to his stall. The no-name mule, decades ago, had accomplished the same thing, pretty much, but the landing was different. Just getting dropped, Charlie said, was so much better than gettin’ throwed.
They had never had a free anything, really, except maybe the fish that Charlie pulled from the Coosa. Now they had a free horse, and free cheese.
If the children thought Bob was magic, they thought that every month, when Ava went into town to get her commodities, was Christmas.
The federal government had discovered that poor people, as tough and resourceful as they were, as proud as they were, would not say no to a little free food.
The government called them “commodities,” just plainly packaged surplus food that the government handed out at National Guard armories and courthouse auditoriums, and the word would work its way into the vernacular of the region.
Old women would say they would love to chat, they dearly would, but “I got to go and get my commodities.”
It may be the single greatest gift that the federal government ever bestowed on my people. This was not food stamps, which could be used for junk food and white loaf bread and candy.
This was food.
The government handed out cans of good peanut butter, and five-pound loaves of mellow, yellow American cheese. Chances are, if you are Southern and your grandma ever made you a grilled cheese sandwich or a plate of macaroni, there was government cheese in it.
Everybody from the woods got it, if you were old enough or poor enough or had enough children, which was just about everybody. And the people who were too proud to take it would go to their momma’s or their grandma’s house on the weekends and hack off a pound-weight block of cheese or take a can of peanut butter.
Ava scrambled the cheese in with eggs and the children scraped the skillet. Charlie took a hunk of it fishing, and ate it with saltine crackers and sardines.
The government also handed out big sacks of yellow grits, and cornmeal and flour, oats and rice, and canned chopped meat—people didn’t even know what it was but they fried it for breakfast.
Show me somebody who says that their grandma never made them a “sammich” from homemade jelly and government peanut butter, and I’ll show you a liar or a Republican.
Even now, when people get together for reunions or Christmas or July Fourth, they talk about that cheese. Country people, unlike fancy, more urbane people, do not think cheese has to smell like a dead dog to be good, and this was clean-smelling and didn’t even have any holes in it.
Where I’m from, it almost has its own mystique—because it has been gone so long—like Bear Bryant or Big Jim Folsom or Jim Nabors, who went from Sylacauga, Alabama, to Hollywood, to play “Gomer.” Mr. Nabors may not think it is an honor, being compared to cheese. But it truly, truly is.
Sometimes the government went a little far. One day Charlie turned the can opener on a container about the size of a Quaker Oats box, and a whole cooked chicken pl
opped out.
Everybody just stood around and looked at it.
The only sadness, in that fat time, was that time could not just stick in place.
They were on the Cove Road when the oldest children left Ava and Charlie to build their own lives. In 1947, in a span of only about three months, James, William and Edna all married. It was like a disease. Ava, Charlie and the four littler girls wondered who it would take next.
James wed Tadpole, which was no surprise. Bob had not managed to kill her.
William wed a lovely girl named Louise Reaves, whose momma and daddy worked in the mill in Gadsden. She was fifteen, with dark hair and blue eyes, and “she always dressed pretty,” Margaret said.
And Edna wed a sailor named Charlie Sanders, the son of Mr. Hugh Sanders, who had called for the scripture on that day so long ago, as Jeff Baker bled into his hands.
Edna, Margaret said, had grown into a beautiful woman, with rich brown hair and a lovely face. She had known Charlie Sanders when they were children, and when he went off to the navy they wrote to each other.
Margaret was still a little girl when it seemed like that house just emptied out. She was used to things being a certain way and now it just wasn’t so, and it troubled her and made her a little angry.
She was mad the day Charlie Sanders walked up in the yard, that first time.
Listen to her:
“I didn’t think he was pretty. She had a boyfriend, William Spencer, and I thought he was pretty, and she dropped him like a cold tater, dropped him like a sack of trash. Charlie Sanders had black, curly hair, tight-curly, and he come walking up in the yard and she just run to him and hugged on him and hugged on him and hugged on him, and I thought she had lost her mind for sure, I thought it was awful. But that was before I knew about Charlie Sanders’s heart. That was before I knew it was made of gold.”
Juanita was now the oldest child, which was just as well, Margaret said, since she had always been bossy anyway.
It was as hard for the older children to leave as it would have been for a planet to break free of the sun. The tie was still way too tight, too strong, to the man and woman who had raised them.
James and Tadpole moved a mile or two, Edna and Charlie moved over the ridge to Tredegar, and William and Louise moved to the dark side of the moon. They went off to Gadsden, a thirty-minute drive if the police in Glencoe did not catch you just as you crossed the Etowah County line. It was like the house on the Cove Road broke into four pieces, and the pieces landed right close by.
They ate at each other’s kitchen tables, and as their own babies came they grew up with the smaller children of Ava and Charlie, so the houses shook with laughter and dripped with tears and the babies were handed from lap to lap, and all the old stories were told over and over again. The grandchildren called him “Paw-paw,” and he liked that.
He was a young man then, just in his forties. He was still thin, and when he bought a cheap dress coat to wear, it looked like he forgot to take the hanger out, it hung so loose on him.
Ava no longer had to make her dresses from flour sacks. She was a frugal woman, though, and she bought clothes for herself and the children at rummage sales, in Anniston, Gadsden, Jacksonville and Piedmont, a dime apiece for dresses, skirts and blouses, and the little girls always knew what they would be wearing in a year or two by looking at the backs of their sisters.
There was not much money to waste, and when they splurged they usually splurged on food.
They still talk about the Sunday morning breakfasts, about how Charlie would wake up early and start slicing meat, ham or fatback or country steak, and Ava would pat out the biscuits, about the size of a granny woman’s palm. She greased the sheet with lard, so that even the bread had the smell of bacon in it. And when she pulled the pan from the woodstove they would be golden on the top and pale yellow on the sides, and even cold they were pretty good, and in the afternoon people who came to visit would ask politely if she had any biscuit left.
She would butter some and leave some plain, and sometimes the children would slip a little piece of commodity cheese inside, to let it melt.
Bob would smell the biscuits when they came out of the oven. He was never penned—there was no need since there was really nowhere for him to go—and he would trot over to the house and wait.
If it was summer and the windows were open, he would stick his head in the window and Ava would stick a biscuit in his mouth, and Bob would swallow it down and wait for another, but biscuit, Ava would say, don’t grow on trees.
But the thing they loved most was the link sausages, and the song that went with them. Because they didn’t have a refrigerator, Charlie had to buy some of the breakfast food that morning. He would wake early, real early, and drive to the store. He would stop at Y. C. Parris’s store or at Ed Young’s and buy links made from pork, about as big around as a banana and with skin almost as tough as what came on the original pig.
It was spiced with garlic and red pepper, and he would slice it longways and fry it in bacon grease, and as it sizzled Charlie’s girls would sing a song they learned from Mr. Hugh Sanders, whom they had come to call Grandpa Sanders in his old age.
The butcher threw a sausage
Down upon the floor
The dog said “I decline”
For in that link, I recognize
That dear ol’ gal of mine
The coffee would boil, the smell mixing in with everything else, and Charlie would begin to make the gravy. Ava would make grits, and fry up a mess of eggs, and twist open the top of a jar of preserves, and they would eat like rich people, only rich people don’t really eat this good.
Sundays was for church and loafering. If Ava and the girls went to church that morning, Charlie went the other way.
In the afternoons the kinfolks would come by or they would go to them. Grandpa Sanders had become part of their family and they became a part of his, and the children would crawl all over him.
He would sit in the shade, a baby on his lap, the other little girls clustered around, and sing in a plaintive, miserable tone:
Go tell Aunt Sally
Go tell Aunt Sally
Go tell Aunt Sally
The old gray goose is dead
And the little girls would start to cry and even the baby’s lips would start to tremble, and Grandpa Sanders would just shake his head in sorrow and sing on:
Wonder if they been saving
Wonder if they been saving
Wonder if they been saving
To make a feather bed
And the children would fall about the ground, sobbing, and Grandpa Sanders would sit looking innocent as the mommas glared at him.
It seemed like the windows always had tomatoes in them, soaking up the sun, getting ripe. It seemed like the men were always walking up from the riverbanks with strings of fish. It seemed like the babies in all four households were growing up fat and healthy, like the big mills always had openings on the day shift and the fort always needed a woman to sew or a man to drive a truck or a bus.
The steel was rolling again night and day in Gadsden, and William got on right away, and James and Charlie had homes to build and roof and others to tear down—it always bothered Charlie that a man could get a paycheck just as big for ripping something down as he did for putting it up—and on the weekends there was visiting, feasting and storytelling, and a little drinking and banjo picking, and just enough fighting to be sociable. And when a dark cloud drifted over, all eyes still cut to him, expecting him to purse his lips out and blow it away. Sometimes he brought the cloud with him, but they always seemed to forgive him for that.
He hadn’t changed much on the outside. His face was still mostly unlined as he passed forty, and his hair didn’t fall out, and his teeth stayed white and straight, and his little girls were proud of him. Time just seemed to bounce off him, somehow. He could still climb a scaffold like a monkey, still drive a ten-penny nail with one measured, massive, dead-on blow, still make
a man’s eyes water with the power of his grip. He could still drink likker like water.
Time had been harder on Ava, but that is the way of it. She had given birth to eight children, buried one, raised half of the ones that survived, and was now raising the other half, with white already in her hair. Her legs were cut with little white scars from wading through the briers, because she was too much of a lady to pick cotton in pants. Her face was already seamed, and she wore old-lady bonnets in the fields, a baby sometimes on her hip.
It should not even have to be said, really, but her children loved her, and her new grandchildren did too. She was unselfish, and she loved them back. And while a lot of people say that they gave a life, their complete life, to family, she could back it up with every line, every sunspot, on her neck, face and hands.
The worries, for her husband, for her children, for survival in the bleak years, had piled up in her mind, and she got lost in it, from time to time, the way some people do. But she always found her way out, somehow, always found a way to push through that dark curtain, and when she came out of that trance she would smile, this beautiful, beautiful smile. It was almost worth it, when she went away in her mind, to watch her come back from it. It was like flipping the light switch on in a flower shop.
She did not compete with Charlie for their love, the way some mommas do. She was far, far too busy, and too damn smart, for that.
She knew he had their hearts, mostly.
She knew, as much as anybody in the whole wide world, how he could break them.
22.
Do like I say, not like I do
The Cove Road
ABOUT 1948
The night James decided to kill George Buchanan, Charlie was in the yard, enjoying the night air and looking at the stars a little bit before he went in to bed. You could see the stars on the Cove Road, clear and bright just like when he was a boy on that bad mule riding in from the big city of Gadsden. He was not a smoker and he didn’t like to dip right before he went to bed, so sometimes he just went out into the yard and stood in the quiet, especially if Ava was emotional that night. Sometimes Hootie walked out with him and waited on him to say something, and if he didn’t that was fine, too. And they would stand and listen to crickets and night birds, and Hootie would talk to them awhile.
