Ava's Man

  Also by Rick Bragg

  All Over but the Shoutin’

  Somebody Told Me

  To Ava and Charlie

  and the children

  James, William, Edna, Juanita, Margaret, Jo,

  Sue, and Little Emma Mae

  And the grandchildren,

  And the great-grandchildren,

  And the ones who come after

  Contents

  Other Books By This Author

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE • On a bluebird day

  1. The beatin’ of Blackie Lee

  2. Run off

  3. Jimmy Jim

  4. Whistle britches

  5. Four-Eyes

  6. In the wild

  7. Dead dogs and rolling steel

  8. Little Hoover

  9. Movers

  10. Hootie

  11. The big end

  12. The worst of it

  13. Margaret, and mystery

  14. Burning

  15. Gettin’ happy

  16. The letter

  17. The Reardens

  18. Reckoning

  19. There but for Grace

  20. Sons and daughters

  21. Free cheese, cold water and gentle horses

  22. Do like I say, not like I do

  23. Lost

  24. Holy Name

  25. Lying still

  26. Hello, and goodbye

  27. Underwater

  28. Pilfered roses

  29. Jeanette, Child of God, and the Flour Girl

  30. Sam

  31. Saved

  32. The gremlin goes home

  33. Water without end

  34. All by and by

  35. Backbone

  36. Ava

  37. Always in summer

  EPILOGUE • Ghosts

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  On the Big Rock Candy Mountain

  The police have wooden legs

  The bulldogs all have rubber teeth

  And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs

  The trees let down their rich, ripe fruit

  And you sleep on silky hay

  And the wind don’t blow and there ain’t no snow

  Forever and a day

  —A SONG FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION

  PROLOGUE

  On a bluebird day

  She was old all my life. Even when I was sitting in the red dirt, fascinated with my own toes, Ava’s face had a line in it for every hot mile she ever walked, for every fit she ever threw. Her hair was long and black as crows, streaked with white, and her eyes, behind the ancient, yellowed glass of her round spectacles, were pale, pale blue, almost silver. The blind have eyes like that, that color, but Ava could see fine, Ava could see forever. She could tell your fortune by gazing into the dregs of your coffee cup, and swore that if the bottoms of your feet itched, you would walk on strange ground. She could be gentle as a baby bird and sweet as divinity candy, but if her prescription was off, or if she just got mad, she would sit bolt upright in bed at three o’clock in the morning and dog-cuss anyone who came to mind, including the dead. Some days she would doze in her rocker and speak softly to people that I could not find, even by looking under the porch. Now I know I was just listening to her dreams.

  In her time she buried two daughters, one just a baby, one full-grown, and when she passed eighty my aunts just stopped telling her when people she loved had died. A kindness, I suppose. Near the end of her life, as her mind began to wobble, she would recall how pretty my ex-wife looked at Christmas dinner eighteen years ago, yet not remember yesterday. But when I think of her now I think of a woman still strong and hard in her late sixties, a woman with a banjo propped against the foot of her bed, ten thousand hairpins in the pocket of her dress and more personalities than the state hospital in Tuscaloosa. I think about how the sudden summer thunderstorms would rattle the window glass and make cups jump off their saucers, and how, unimpressed, the old woman would just take a dip of snuff and mumble, “Ol’ devil’s beatin’ his wife.”

  Because she was old, and could be trusted with babies and halfwits, it was her job to watch over me when my momma, her sixth child, went to work. She would look down on me from her rocker, talking to me and, as she grew older, herself. In time I could even gauge that old woman’s mood by the pace of her chair’s squeaking runners on the bare pine planks—slow when her mind was restful, quick when she was mad, and fast, racehorse fast, when she was remembering. The sheer power of it would send those runners to squeaking fierce and hot, back and forth, and to this day I still wonder why the whole damn thing didn’t blaze up from the friction of it, and burn the house down.

  She had been widowed young and never remarried, and as a child I just assumed she had always been that way, an old woman alone. There was a man once, a peddler for the Saxon Candy Company who seemed to have a lot more on his mind than salt-water taffy. But if that little ol’ man was a suitor, he was pitiful at it, and he did not give up so much as just timidly fade away. That did not stop her grandchildren from kidding her about him, from asking if she was going to run off with him someday in his panel truck full of pecan logs.

  “Grandma,” we would ask, in a joke that spanned twenty years, “you goin’ to get you a man?”

  Most times she just sniffed and ignored us, but sometimes she would slap her heavy black shoes down hard on the porch, applying the brakes, and the rocker’s runners would freeze in mid-squeak. We fled, usually, because she was prone to strike out, quick as a rattler, and knock us upside the head when she was displeased. But instead of hollering or swinging at us, she would just start to grin, as if something that had gone cold in her memory had begun to glow for just a second or two in time. It was probably just her medicine again, but it is better to believe it was a speck of heat from something that had once crackled and roared along the banks of the Coosa River back when it was wild, in the days before the power company dams turned it into a big brown faucet that could be switched on and off at will.

  “No, hon,” she would say, “I ain’t goin’ to get me no man.” And then she would start to rock again, with satisfaction.

  “I had me one.”

  His name was Charlie Bundrum and he was probably the only man on earth who could love that woman and not perish in the flame.

  He was a tall, bone-thin man who worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in a fist as hard as Augusta brick, who ran a trot-line across the Coosa baited with chicken guts and caught washtubs full of catfish, who cooked good white whiskey in the pines, drank his own product and sang, laughed and buck-danced, under the stars. He was a man whose tender heart was stitched together with steel wire, who stood beaten and numb over a baby’s grave in Georgia, then took a simple-minded man into his home to protect him from scoundrels who liked to beat him for fun. He was a man who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name, but who was bad to drink too much, miss his turn into the driveway and run over his own mailbox.

  He was a man who did the things more civilized men dream they could, who beat one man half to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a .410 shotgun when she tried to cut him with a butcher knife, who beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and threw them headfirst out the front door of a beer joint called the Maple on the Hill. He was a man who led deputies on long, hapless chases across high, lonesome ridges and through brier-choked bogs, whose hands were so quick he snatched squirrels from trees, who hunted without regard to seasons or quotas, because how could a game warden in Montgomery or Atlanta know if his babies were hungry?

  He was just a man, I guess, whose wings never qu
ite fit him right, who built dozens of pretty houses for Depression-era wages and never managed to build one for the people he loved the most, who could not read but always asked Ava to read him the newspaper so he would not be ignorant, who held iron bars and babies in his massive hands and called my momma “Pooh Boy,” which makes me smile.

  He died in the spring of 1958, one year before I was born.

  I have never forgiven him for that.

  For most of my life he was no more real, no more complete, than a paper doll. I learned, scrap by scrap, that he was a carpenter, roofer, whiskey maker, sawmill hand, well digger, hunter, poacher and river man, born at the turn of the century in a part of the country that is either Alabama or Georgia, depending on how lost you are, or if you even care. But I knew almost nothing else about him growing up, because no one in my momma’s family talked much about him. As years and even decades slipped by, I began to wonder if I would uncover anything at all about my grandfather, or if he would just remain a man of secrets I would never know.

  It could not be, I knew, that his children were ashamed of him—the flashes of his life they had let slip, from time to time, were bright, quick and warm, a sliver of light under a closed door. But in a family rich in storytellers, they were stingy with him, just him. It always left me with the same feeling I used to get when we would drive past the giant Merita bread factory in Birmingham. The smell of baking bread, mouthwatering, would fill the car for just a few seconds, then vanish as we sped on, leaving me daydreaming about sandwiches.

  I asked my momma, two Christmases ago, why I had heard so little about him from her and her sisters. She told me that it was just a matter of time.

  Only in the past few years, as his oldest son passed seventy, as his children marked the forty-second anniversary of their father’s death, was there enough space between then and now to talk about him, to really remember. In the past, talking about his life always led to thinking of his death, to a feeling like running your fingers through saw briers—and what good is that?

  “After Daddy died,” my momma told me, “it was like there was nothin’.”

  I remember the night, an icy night in December, I asked three of Charlie Bundrum’s daughters to tell me about his funeral. I sat in embarrassment as my aunts, all in their sixties, just stared hard at the floor. Juanita, tough as whalebone and hell, began to softly cry, and Jo, who has survived Uncle John and ulcers, wiped at her eyes. My mother, Margaret, got up and left the room. For coffee, she said.

  What kind of man was this, I wondered, who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?

  A man like that, I thought to myself, probably deserves a book.

  I had a grandfather, another, who really did get drunk, hitch his wagon and drive through the mill village of my hometown shouting dirty limericks to church ladies and Jehovah Witnesses until the town sheriff hauled him away, in chains. But my daddy’s daddy, Bobby Bragg, though entertaining as hell, had never seemed to claim us. He was not cruel, merely indifferent, and between rants and incarcerations he would do his best not to step on us, very much, as we played on his porch.

  So, since I never really had a grandfather, I decided to make me one. I asked my mother’s people to tell me all the stories they could remember from Charlie Bundrum’s life and times. With their help, I built him up from dirt level, using half-forgotten sayings, half-remembered stories and a few yellowed, brittle, black-and-white photographs that, under the watch of my kin, I handled like diamonds.

  Two, in particular, tell his story. In one, he is dressed in his Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes, not his overalls, but his big wrists and scarred, tar-stained, gnarled hands tell on him. The face staring out from under a misshapen straw slouch hat looks tense and hard-edged, as if it can’t wait for this foolishness to be over, and the eyes bore into you, challenge you. It is a studio photo, taken on Noble Street in Anniston, Alabama, in front of a painted-on palm.

  A poor man, posing.

  “That ain’t Daddy,” my aunt Jo said.

  The one I love to look at, the one I have on my living room wall, is more honest. He is wearing ragged overalls, faded to gray, the legs specked with what seems to be fish blood, and he is prison-camp thin. In one big hand, strong fingers hooked through its gills, is a catfish three feet long, its head as broad as a bull calf.

  A poor man, winning.

  “I remember when we were little and we would wait for him to come in from the job,” said my aunt Gracie Juanita, thinking back to one night—or maybe many, many nights—when she was a child. “We would be playin’, and Momma would already have supper done. And then it would come up a cloud, and I was so scared.

  “Then Daddy would come in the door, and it was like, well, like the sky had cleared. And we weren’t afraid of nothin’, because he wasn’t afraid of nothin’.” Then she just looked at me, hard, in that way that old women look at you when they tell you something private, something almost secret, and fear you will not feel it as strong as they do—or, worse, not believe.

  “Ricky,” said my momma from across the room, “she’s tellin’ God’s sanction. It was like the sky cleared.”

  Maybe all men like that deserve a book.

  The challenge in telling Charlie Bundrum’s story, I soon found out, was how to do it without being disowned, and probably slapped, by one of my sainted aunts. If I ever let his wings drag in the dust, his surviving daughters would do more than forget my birthday.

  But he is so much more precious smelling of hot cornbread and whiskey than milk and honey. His story is more important knowing how the moonshine made him sing instead of cuss, knowing how he did fight, with bared teeth and blood in his eye, the people who insulted him or brought trouble to his door. He is more beloved because he truly did ride into their yard late in the evenings, passed out cold on the back of his saddle horse, Bob, who would gently shrug him to the grass before trotting into his stall.

  The one thing I am dead sure of is that his ghost, conjured in a hundred stories, would have haunted me forever if I had whitewashed him. He was, I am told, usually a quiet man, not given to foolishness, who would ride the river in his homemade boats for hours, silent, or sit with a baby in the crook of his arm on the front porch, humming a railroad song. But when the spirit—or the likker—moved him, he was one of the finest storytellers who ever lived in our part of the country, a spinner of beautiful campfire stories and notorious tall tales, a man who didn’t need a gun to kill you because he was capable of talking you to death. A man like that, surely, would want a legacy with pepper on it.

  But as it turned out, they need not have worried what people would say about him. I spoke to distant cousins and tiny, frail great-aunts, to old men with no reason to lie and some, my aunts warned me, who lied with every quavering breath. They all said the same thing—that he was a damn rascal, all right, but he was their damn rascal, and they ought to stick a statue of him up smack-dab in the middle of the square in Jacksonville, Alabama, next to the Confederate soldier.

  “He was a hero,” said Travis Bundrum, his great-nephew, a sad-eyed, silver-haired man who fished the brown Coosa with him in a boat made from two car hoods welded together. His great-uncle Charlie—most people here pronounce it “Chollie”—saved his life on a dark night on that river fifty years ago, one more piece of the legend that people tell over macaroni and cheese and pork chops at the family reunions.

  “He ought to have a monument,” Travis says, “because there ain’t no more like him. All his kind are gone.”

  In a time when a nation drowning in its poor never so resented them, in the lingering pain of Reconstruction, in the Great Depression and in the recovery that never quite reached all the way to my people, Charlie Bundrum took giant steps in run-down boots. He grew up in a hateful poverty, fought it all his life and died with nothing except a family that worshiped him and a name that gleams like new money. When he died, mourners pack
ed Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church. Men in overalls and oil-stained jumpers and women with hands stung red from picking okra sat by men in dry-cleaned suits and women in dresses bought on Peachtree Street, and even the preacher cried.

  Looking back on it, I do not think I have ever had so much fun as I have had in learning and sharing the stories of a man that history would otherwise have ignored, as it would have ignored my mother and people like her, the working people of the Deep South. In her story, a book that people just call Shoutin’, I introduced Charlie and Ava and their children, but I was in too much of a rush, people told me. I left out the good part.

  At book signings, in letters, in encounters on the street, people asked me where I believed my own momma’s heart and backbone came from, where she inherited the strength and character to sacrifice herself in those endless cotton fields, to raise three boys alone. And why did that work—with the indignities of welfare and the disdain of the better-off—not burn away her sense of humor, the part of her that shines?

  But before I could answer, they answered for me. They said I short-shrifted them in the first book, especially about Charlie, about Ava, about their children. That, they say, is the root of it, the answer. That, people lectured me on the phone and harangued me in airports, is the beginning.

  I wrote this story for a lot of reasons, but for that above all others—to give one more glimpse into a vanishing culture for the people who found themselves inside such stories, the people who shook my hand and said, “Son, you stole my story.”

  Some of them would admit, shamefully, that they battled with the past all their lives and never quite knew whether to be proud of their people or ashamed. Some even pretended that there was no past, that they had no history before sorority rush, or induction into the Mason lodge. For them, the past was a door they locked themselves—but in the closet late at night they could always hear those rattling bones.