Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  Charlie was alone that night, standing so quiet and still that James did not even see him slouching there, in the shadows, when James tiptoed into the house to get a gun.

  It was a good thing he was there, good for James, good for the Bundrum family, and especially good for George Buchanan.

  It happened this way:

  James, Phine and their first baby, Mary, were between houses and living with Charlie and Ava then. James had gone out drinking that night with George, which was his first poor decision of the evening, “because everybody knew George was mean as a snake,” James admitted.

  George Buchanan was about the only man anyone knew in this corner of the country who’d had his throat cut and lived. He was a big man with squinty blue eyes and chin whiskers, and a man not to be messed with.

  As they pulled up in the yard in George’s Model A, he looked over at James, who was about twenty-two then.

  “You got any money on you, Bundrum?” he said.

  James said he didn’t have none.

  “You a liar,” George said.

  James just got out and slammed the door and George drove off, but with every step he made to the house his rage ticked up a little, getting hotter and hotter. By the time he touched the screen door he knew that he had to kill George. It might not have been his conclusion if he had been sober and clear-headed, but he wasn’t. He quietly took the shotgun off the wall—everyone inside was sleeping—and went back outside.

  He checked the gun. It was loaded with double-aught buckshot. It could knock a deer down or blow out a man’s chest.

  George only lived a little piece off and James figured to walk over there and kill him, but he had barely made it off the porch when he heard, almost in a whisper:

  “Hey, boy.”

  He saw his daddy standing in the moonlight.

  “Hey, Daddy,” he said.

  “What you doin’ with that gun?”

  “I reckon I’m gonna kill George,” he said.

  His daddy didn’t say anything.

  “I’m mad,” James said.

  He started walking and his daddy fell into step beside him. They walked down a little hill, and Charlie told him to hold up a minute.

  “Son,” he said, “you got a wife and a little baby in that house.”

  “I know,” James said, “but—”

  “I said you got a wife and baby in that house,” Charlie said, not used to repeating himself.

  “But,” James said, “I—”

  Charlie hit his son as hard as he could across the jaw with his clenched fist, hard as he could because that boy was as big as him now, and as strong, and because he intended it to be the last lick passed in anger that night, or in love.

  James’s head snapped back and his arms flew out and Charlie took the shotgun as his son fell backward onto the ground. To James, it was like lightning hit him in his jaw. It burned for one hot, brutal second and then he went to sleep. He was sleeping before he hit the ground.

  He woke up a little later to see his daddy there, still looking at the stars.

  “I said,” his daddy began, as if the punch had never been thrown, “that you got a wife and a baby now, and if you’d killed him, you’d be gone.”

  To James, it seemed like the words were coming from very, very far away.

  “They’d put you in the penitentiary,” Charlie said, “and who would take care of them?”

  He helped James up and they went back to the house.

  “If you ever do anything that damn dumb again,” Charlie said, his hand on his boy’s arm, “I’ll leave you for the buzzards.”

  At home, James bled a whole lot onto a pillowcase.

  It might seem a little hypocritical. If George Buchanan had ever called Charlie a liar, Charlie might have killed him on the spot. But it is one thing to beat on a man in anger and another to shoot him when he steps out on his porch. Charlie understood the finer points of the law, as it applied to poor people and drinking men.

  He also had more than forty years of life to look back on, at the mistakes, at the violence he had seen, had dealt out and had survived. He had seen its consequences, and stood humbled before judges, hating it and counting his sentence off in his mind, wondering how many groceries Ava had, wondering—his mind working quick—if he would be out before they had to do without.

  Some people would call it a complicated existence, would wonder how come he did not do right all the time, and spare himself and his family that drama.

  The answer is that if he had, he would have been somebody else.

  As he got older, he thought things through more. He used what people remember as a pretty fine brain more than his knuckles. But the truth is, sometimes it takes both.

  He could have reasoned with James that night, and in fact he had honestly tried, but it was just a mile or two to the Buchanan place, and every step they took closer to it was one more step he might have had to carry his son back. Most men, hit by him, didn’t come to that quick, but hitting James was like punching himself, and he knew how hard his head was.

  “Knocked me out, cold as an onion,” James would say, when it came up on Sundays and Christmas Eve and around the campfire. “If he asked you something, you was supposed to answer him straight, and I forgot that, that night. And he always said that if you ever hit anybody, hit ’em hard, and I reckon I forgot that, too. But things like that, once your eyes can focus right again, make you love your daddy. I know everybody loves their daddy, I know you’re supposed to. But there I was, a grown-up man, and he was still saving me. Now, ain’t that one hundred percent man?”

  23.

  Lost

  Whites Gap, Alabama

  1951

  It is not a family that will talk for long about sadness, and on some days, sadness is all there is. James’s two smallest babies died when his and Phine’s house burned that year, while he was at work and she was at the neighbor’s home. Mary and Jeanette, the two oldest girls, crawled out a window, but a boy baby, James Junior, and girl baby, Shirley, died in the black smoke. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to us,” said Margaret. That is the most anybody said about it in fifty years, and about all there is to say now.

  24.

  Holy Name

  The Cove Road

  THE EARLY 1950S

  Margaret didn’t mind being up so high, for the same reason a baby laughs when you toss it in the air.

  “We helped him roof, me and Juanita, when I was about twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t scared being so high because I knew he would stop me if I fell, and it didn’t scare Juanita, because it just didn’t. Nothing did much. But Daddy wouldn’t take us with him to roof if he was roofing in town, because men would holler at us, and Daddy didn’t like that.”

  Juanita was a teenager then and tough as a prison bantamweight, but slim and dark-haired and pretty, which is why Charlie never let his two teenage girls help him roof in town. It must have been a sight, though, the rawboned man in his baggy overalls kneeling up high on the skyline with the pretty dark-haired girl working on one side of him and another, fairer daughter swinging a hammer on the other side. He would fill his mouth full of roofing nails and spit one nail, just one, into his open hand, and seat the nail with one lick. That way, he could keep one hand partly free to snatch at one of the girls if they slipped.

  He got out of bed slow one morning, feeling weak, like he could barely raise his arms, let alone a hammer. At the job, when he tried to climb the ladder, he made a step or two, and just sagged. He drove home from the job, but when he pulled up in the driveway he sat awhile behind the wheel, holding on to it. Margaret, who was twelve or thirteen then, was not even born the last time he had been sick, when the scaffold fell on him. All her life, he was not just healthy, he was bulletproof.

  Now he went bone white from the pain in his insides, and couldn’t eat. He told Ava he had to see the doctor at Holy Name of Jesus Hospital, and he would drive himself over to Gadsden in the morning.

 
As he got ready to go, Charlie looked at Margaret and said, “Pooh Boy, why don’t you ride over there with me and we can stay the night with Riller and Tobe”—his sister and brother-in-law, who still lived in Gadsden. And Margaret wondered why, if they were just going to see a doctor, they would need a place to stay.

  She didn’t really want to go, because hospitals were sad places and sick places, and Holy Name was a Catholic hospital, run by the strange Catholic nuns. But she was glad her daddy asked her to go, so she crawled into his old car with him and they headed up the Gadsden highway.

  Her daddy walked into the hospital but didn’t come out that night, or the next. Only the nuns came in and out. To Margaret, they looked like angels, but that did not make her feel any better.

  Riller, now on her way to being an old woman, and Tobe, who had retired from the steel plant, sat with him in the hospital. But Charlie told them he didn’t want to scare his daughter, so every night she sat in the car in the hospital parking lot and waited.

  She spent her days with Riller, and her aunt sent her on errands. One day Tobe’s false teeth tore up—Margaret can’t recall exactly how a person tears up a set of teeth—and Riller sent Margaret to the repair shop with Tobe’s teeth wrapped in a napkin.

  She walked with the grinning teeth held way, way out in front of her, because sometimes the napkin slipped off and the hard pink part, the gum part, brushed her hand. She hated that, and she wished her daddy would hurry and get well. But one thing was certain. She never had any use for false teeth after that.

  She was lean and light-skinned and her hair was almost white, and it hung completely straight. Jo had got all the curls, and Margaret would rub her hair between her fingers and wish it didn’t just hang there the way it did.

  But mostly, she just wanted to be brave. She wanted to be just like him, fearless like him, but she couldn’t be.

  “You couldn’t scare him, but I took after poor ol’ Momma, and Momma was scared about all the time, unless you made her mad. I always wished I could be fearless. Because I hated it, being scared. Juanita was just like Daddy. She wasn’t scared of nothing, and I guess she never was. I wish I could have took after him, like Juanita took after him. She’s more like him than any of us. She got the guts and the backbone. She just copes with things. But fear, Lord, it works out on me.”

  She tried to act tough. “I wore pants, blue jeans. Juanita grew up in pants.”

  Juanita, she thought, wouldn’t be scared to go into the hospital and see about him. Juanita would have waltzed right up to the doctor and said, “Hey, you.” Juanita would have bossed the nurses around.

  But Margaret just sat in the car, wishing she could play the radio but knowing it would run the battery down, wondering why her daddy didn’t just bust through the hospital doors and take her home.

  And of course, one evening, he did. “And then me and him went home and he went back to work, and nobody thought much about it.”

  As the years went by, she learned that he had gone to Holy Name because of his liver. It was bad. The doctor cut part of it out.

  A lifetime of moonshine whiskey, the only bad habit he had except for fighting and a little snuff and some discreet cussing, had rotted his liver, and a man can’t live without a liver. But he can live with part of one, the doctor had told him, if he gets off the likker, and stays off.

  Margaret just knew her daddy was home, and that everything was fine again, the way Juanita knew it would be fine on that day, a whole decade before, when she had seen him walking up the dirt driveway from his trip to Rome to see the army men. It wasn’t like he was a ghost of the man who had walked into the hospital, the way some people are when the doctors carve on them. He was the same man as before. He worked as hard, and fished as much.

  He seemed to spend more time with them after that. He taught the two oldest girls still at home, Margaret and Juanita, how to drive, before their legal age. He would pull his car to the side of a road and get out, letting whoever was in the middle slide under the wheel. He did not sit there all tensed up, but laughed as the girls ground hard on the gears and meandered from ditch to ditch, trying to see over the dash, and Hootie, who still rode in the back, wondered if he was about to see angels.

  Hootie was still with them, still under Ava’s disapproving gaze, and Charlie’s protection. He still helped Charlie roof when he wanted to and still just sat on the porch or in the deep woods when he didn’t, and got a little older and maybe even a little uglier, if it was possible.

  He and Charlie still went to the river to set out trotlines, and every time, he hung back a little when it was time to load up and go home, like there was something calling to him there, and probably there was.

  But he had been around so long that he was more than just family, he was almost a stick of furniture. He still didn’t have much to say but he still handed out dimes, and the littler girls sat by him on the porch, the way the older sisters had.

  It was about that time that Charlie took in a young couple named Souther. They had just gotten married, and the boy was saving up to rent a house and had no place to stay. The boy was a carpenter, like Charlie, and was working the same job. Charlie told him he had room in his little house, and they stayed until they got on their feet, and then moved on.

  One night, a young man Charlie knew staggered up and passed out cold on their front porch, and Ava walked out and stared down at him as he snored peacefully on the planks. She cut her eyes to Charlie.

  “We ain’t keeping him,” she said.

  But the word was out. Sometimes a good reputation can be just as inflated as a bad one, but everyone in that part of the world learned of the man’s kindness, and people, people in need or in trouble, just seemed to drift his way. They stayed a night or a month or, like Hootie, decades. It is not as romantic, maybe, as his reputation for making good likker, or for laying grown men flat with one good lick, but people still mention it from time to time.

  The years had scoured him on the inside, but you couldn’t see that when you saw him standing on the roofline, his long body framed by the clouds, that ever-present hammer swinging, swinging. Some men act old, as if they are practicing for their last years, practicing for dying. Charlie did not act old.

  He was in his forties and already a grandfather, with a telltale scar above his liver. He had shot men—and one large woman—and smacked them with hammers. It routinely took a carload of deputies to put him in chains, and if all else failed, he could pick a fight with Ava.

  He never seemed to get, or want, a lull in the adventure of living, as if he knew that old age was something he would never see. It may be why he seldom took a nap.

  25.

  Lying still

  On the Coosa

  THE EARLY 1950S

  It had rained. It used to rain every afternoon in the late summer back then, but it doesn’t anymore. The old people say it’s because we’ve cut down all the green.

  It was still green that day, and the air was so wet it stuck to you when you moved against it, like fresh paint off a wall. Charlie, wearing a pair of overalls but no shirt, dripped sweat as he poled a homemade boat between the walls of trees that leaned in over the river, leaving barely a sliver of space for the hot sun to cleave in and sparkle off the water. For Travis Bundrum, Claude’s boy and Charlie’s great-nephew, it seemed a wild, dank and dangerous place, and the sluggish water seemed to have no bottom to it as Charlie felt for the sand and rock with the end of his long pole.

  The boat rode low in the water because Charlie had filled it up with kin. Travis was eleven then, his brother Sonny was about fourteen, and their cousin Roger was nine or so, and they had all begged to come. Travis’s daddy, Claude, had spent time in the TB sanatorium, and had not been able to take his boy on many fishing trips like this.

  Rounding out the party was Travis’s uncle Rich, Claude’s brother, who sat with the boys and let Charlie do the navigating, and most of the work. Richard was a fine-looking man, with sandy hair and blue
eyes, who was said to be tenderhearted. He was a talker like Charlie, and was one of his favorites. The boys sat between the men in the middle of the boat, and tall tales and yarns whizzed back and forth over their heads, like bullets.

  But as they headed up the river in that boat, which seemed to dip and wallow with every ripple, Travis, especially, wondered if he had been wise to come.

  “We passed under branches that grew right over the water, and Uncle Charlie slapped at them, with the pole, to see if they had any water moccasins in them. The snakes would drop right in on you if you didn’t. There was water oaks and scrub oaks and pines, and deep pine thickets that lined the banks. There was bootleggers’ shacks all up and down it, open drinking and gambling, and you knew some hard men lived there.

  “But I knew Uncle Charlie would take care of us. He just seemed, natural, I guess, on it. He was a mysterious man to us in a lot of ways, and he handled that boat expertly, and he knew the Coosa, every mile of it.”

  Charlie was a hero to Travis, because he fought men and won and lived life pretty much as he damn well pleased, and because other men seemed to respect and admire him, and said so. People said he could stand so still in the trees that the squirrels would forget he was there and—quick as anything—Charlie would reach out with his hand and snatch one and knock its head against a tree before it could bite him, and stuff it in his coat pocket. People said they had seen him kill rabbits with rocks and hunks of lead. People said a lot of things. Travis had never seen any of that but he knew that when you went with Charlie to fish, you actually caught fish, instead of sitting on the bank wishing that you had.