Ava's Man (11 page)

“Why would I want to be in the bottom of a damn hole,” said Ava, who cussed more than most Congregational Holiness in that place and time.

“Because of the Chinaman,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“The Chinaman,” he said.

“A Chinaman helped you dig that well?”

“Naw. I met one, in the middle, a’comin’ the other way.”

She just looked at him, her eyes glittering behind her wire-rimmed spectacles.

“It was a deep well,” he said. And as much as she hated to, she laughed at him, and laughed with him, and then told him he was pitiful, surely. “All you study,” she said to him, “is folly.”

But it beat the hell out of talking about cotton.

He kidded her, and egged on her natural cussedness, and he would look oh-so-wounded when she let him have it.

“Ava, Ava, Ava,” he would say, shaking his head in mock dismay as she dog-cussed him in his own house. And then he just could not pretend anymore and tears would run down his face, from holding his laughter in.

It bothered her, a lot, that he was almost as good a cook as her, and that when it came to that staple of the Southern table—gravy—he had her beat. Gravy is not hard to make, but good gravy is.

When they had steak, he would stir the flour into the hot grease until it was the perfect shade of tan, and salt it just a bit—beef drippings, unlike pork, are not salty enough for a good taste—and then shake in a heavy dose of black pepper. He would stir water or milk into the roux until it was the texture of heavy cream, and they would sit down to biscuits and steak and gravy and—if it was the summer—sliced red tomatoes or cantaloupe.

And he would eat with such relish that it would make her smile, at first.

“I love steak,” he would say, and if she had cooked it her eyes would light up.

“But God,” he would say, “ain’t the gravy good.” She would dog-cuss him some more.

“Ava, Ava, Ava.”

Her education continued. She learned that you never scrub an iron skillet too hard, and you have to season it, with a little bacon grease and a rag, before you hang it on the nail for the coming morning.

She learned that, if the paycheck was lean, a few chicken gizzards fried crisp were just as good as steak, if the bicuits were good.

One day they were at the table and he noticed a difference in her, more in her face than anything else, like a shadow of nothing.

“What you worried about, Four-Eyes,” he asked her, and she put his hand on her stomach. And in that instant, that tiny instant, the boy she laughed with became something else, something better. And, in a way, she did, too.

“Momma, Momma, Momma,” he said.

He would never call her anything else.

T
he midwife’s name was Granny Isom, and she looked like she was a hundred, and might have been. She was about the size of a nine-year-old, a gnarled, skinny, short-tempered little woman, and if you had smoothed out the wrinkles she probably would have just disappeared. But for the people in Floyd County, Georgia, people too poor or too far out or just too damn hardheaded to use a town doctor, she was an angel, and countless babies passed through her hands.

Granny Isom did not think much of the miracle of birth, perhaps because it was such a common thing, and she did not suffer meddling and nervous daddies or wailing women in the little houses and the riverside shacks where she practiced something very close to medicine.

“Git out!” was the way she greeted men at their own door.

She did not say anything to the children, who ran like hell at the sight of her.

She came to Ava for the first time on March 2, 1925.

Ava was big as a barn with her first baby, and told Charlie that she thought it was about time—that, or the sweet Lord was just taking her home, because what else could hurt so terrible bad. Charlie saddled his mule and rode it half to death to fetch the old midwife while Ava waited in a tiny frame house deep in the woods near Curryville, in northwest Georgia. She was seventeen.

They made it back in plenty of time. Ava, who never did one thing quietly, screamed and yelled and cussed, almost certainly, as the miracle unfolded. When it was over, the midwife handed her a son.

They named him James, for Charlie’s daddy. In the South, you do not have to love someone a real whole lot to name a child for them. It is just something you do, naming the first boy after his grandfather.

Granny Isom did not stay long after that. What happened after that, she figured, wasn’t really her fault.

We do not know what James cost. Like other professional people, she took whatever the man could afford in trade for the child—corn, a quilt, some onions, or just a pone of cornbread and some apple butter—and climbed up on a wagon seat. An angel should not have needed a mule to get home, but a short-tempered one does, I suppose.

The baby was long—male babies always run long in the family—and even in his first day on this earth he had a fine set of ears on him. His hair was sandy, like his daddy’s. In fact, as the year crept by, as he looked less and less like a pink monkey and more like a human, as babies naturally do, he looked more and more like his daddy. In time it would be uncanny, how much he mirrored him, in his face, those gigantic hands, all of it.

Charlie was still just a boy himself, but if he ever was good at
one thing on this earth, it was being a daddy. At that time, when he was eighteen, he knew the one thing a man needed to know.

Don’t let nothin’ happen to it. Kill if you have to, but don’t never, ever let nothin’ happen to it, because it is weak, and small, and it belongs to you. One day, twenty years later, he would seize James by the arms and say those very words to him after he had married and had a child of his own. That is how we know the code he lived by.

Just a little more than a year later, on June 19 of 1926, he sent for Granny Isom again. This one they named William, also after kin, and this one, too, was long, and sprouted up tall and big-eared like his daddy. It was good that the two sons came so close together like that, because it is almost certain that one would have killed the other one if he had had any real advantage in size. By the time the boys were toddlers, just as soon as they could make a good fist, they fought—hair-pulling, eye-gouging and biting, drawing blood and raising welts and purple bruises. Charlie, Ava and other kin stripped all the low limbs off the hickory trees trying to find enough switches to discipline their boys, but it was just plain useless. The two boys considered a good beating to be more or less fair payment for the pleasure of hitting each other with rocks, pushing each other into mud holes or cow flop.

But while it was acceptable for brothers and cousins to beat you senseless, outsiders could not lay a hand on you in anger, and could not hurt you for sport, not without feeling Charlie’s terrible wrath.

William saw it for the first time when he was still less than waist-high. Almost seventy years later, it makes him proud.

Life in the foothills had not softened much since Charlie’s childhood. Cars and trucks were creeping along the rutted roads, but men still rode mules through the streets of Rome, the county seat, still fought duels with pistols and flick-knives and even ax handles, still beat each other bloody.

The cockfights drew a hundred on a Saturday, and men whose finer dispositions had been dulled by the hard work and likker found something in the life-and-death struggle of the chicken fights that sliced through, that penetrated, that pleased. The chicken-fighters sawed the bone-hard natural spurs off the gamecocks and strapped on razor-sharp steel spurs, called gaffs, and tossed them into a pit, winner take all. The loser was served the next day with biscuits and white gravy.

But it was the dog pits that really got a man’s blood up. Harsh old men with a brittle, horny place where a heart should have been took puppies and taught them to kill with kittens, and when the dogs matured the dogfighters trimmed back their ears and cut off their tails, so the other dog could not get a solid grip. They crossbred the slow and dull-witted bulldogs with leaner, faster breeds, and came up with a killer.

A man named Dempsey, who lived not far from where the Bundrums lived in Curryville, had a dog like that. He kept it in his barn, and it was mean—so mean he kept it tied with a heavy logging chain.

Ava and her boys were visiting one day and William wandered down to the barn. Old Man Dempsey thought he would have some sport as the big dog growled and pulled at his chain at the sight of the boy.

Dempsey reached down and picked up a cornstalk that was laying on the ground, and handed it to William. Then he unhooked the dog’s chain from the barn wall and held it, like a leash.

“Draw that cornstalk back, boy,” he said, “and make like you’re gonna hit him.”

William, being little, did as he was told.

He drew back the stalk and, pretend-like, swatted at the air in front of the growling, snapping dog.

Then Dempsey let go of the chain.

The dog leapt on William, snapping, and sank his teeth deep into the boy’s side. The blood spurted and Old Man Dempsey, seeing that his joke had gone much too far, dragged his dog away.

But not before William’s side was bit bloody. He ran hard to his momma, screaming, and if she could have found a gun or even a good stick, she would have killed Dempsey. But she just took her crying boy home, and waited for her husband to get in from work.

He came in from the job, grimed with sweat and sawdust, and listened as Ava, crying, told him what had happened.

Charlie, in anger, was the opposite of most men. While most men got mad and loud, he got quiet, so quiet, and dropped his voice so low that you had to lean in close to him to hear what he was saying.

He was deathly quiet now.

William lay in the bed, his side covered in salve—they would have put salve on a brain tumor—and bound up with clean rags.

“Son,” Charlie said softly, “he eat you up pretty good, didn’t he?”

“Yes sir, I believe he did,” William said.