Ava's Man (14 page)

Home was the driveway, any driveway, that they saw their daddy walk up in the cool of the evening. It was always a new porch, but the same rocker, the same laps to crawl into, the same voice singing about patience and salvation from the open window, the same old saddle horse or mule cropping grass in the yard. And in time, everything there would be just one more memory. To this day, his girls have no trouble recounting specific stories about that time, and don’t waver much as to dates and ages and most other pertinent facts. But they often have trouble as to the where of it. The where, it all runs together.

Ava cried, but cried harder if they were leaving Georgia. She had been born in Alabama and loved living in Gadsden in the fat years, and that should have been where her heart was. But if she was going to live in a damn jungle, she preferred it be a damn jungle in Georgia, she always said, and never saw any reason to elaborate on that. At least she had the comfort of knowing that she would never be very far from the Peach State—her husband never moved more than a hundred miles in any direction—and that she would be back
within its borders soon enough. It was almost as if life had tied Charlie Bundrum to the end of a string and staked down the other end on the Alabama-Georgia line. He could ramble, but just so far.

It was about this time that he started a few gallons of likker, to swap for meal and bacon and coffee. Sometimes, to be accurate, they moved not in search of work but because one of the lawmen had found one of Charlie’s stills. That did not mean Charlie went to jail, because finding a still, hard as that was, did not mean you had found him. The lawmen often knocked at houses that echoed from the emptiness inside, and neighbors would smile, knowing that Charlie and his cow were safe across the state line.

The presidential election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, though he was an aristocrat himself, brought work with the WPA, and thin, weak hope. People from the foothills wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she had a spare coat they could use till times got better. “Nothing fancy, please,” a woman wrote. “All my clothes are plain.” Another woman sent Eleanor her wedding ring as collateral for a loan, so she could buy her baby clothes. “I don’t want charity,” the woman wrote. Meanwhile, striking textile mill workers in Georgia were herded into makeshift, barbed-wire prisons—the equivalent of concentration camps—by lawmen armed with shotguns.

“Better Times Are on the Way,” read a department-store ad in the
Atlanta Journal
after Roosevelt’s inauguration. The same ad offered its readers three months’ worth of toothpaste for one dollar, and said people could postdate checks three months ahead, when, surely, times down here would be better.

“I hope to believe this,” wrote an out-of-work man in a letter to columnist Mildred Seydell of the
Georgian
newspaper. “How it hurts, to know you are almost starving in a land of plenty.”

I wonder, sometimes, what Ava saw in the bottoms of the
coffee cups. Did she see a decade of hardship ahead, or did she have faith in this crippled rich man who used a cigarette holder but talked humanely about poor people in the pages of the week-old newspapers.

When federal aid finally did trickle into the foothills, it was a fraction of what other regions got—as if a baby in the honeysuckle did not need as much milk, as much medicine.

Ava gave up after a while, not on living, just on staying anyplace long enough to really get to know it, to see the trees get taller.

He would walk in and gently tell Ava, “Four-Eyes, we got to go,” then loaded up his life on the truck bed and hauled it away, his children holding tight to dogs that did not seem to mind all the motion, as long as someone tossed them a hard biscuit every now and then. He would grind the gears and not even look back, because everything of value would be with him when he stopped again, unless he bounced someone off or one of the chickens committed suicide somewhere along Highway 9. Strangers pulled the weeds that sprouted over the one thing he could not carry with him, because even the dead were a luxury. So they rambled, and while they never really made it anyplace better, he knew how to take them there.

And Ava would be beside him, the kerosene sloshing back and forth in her beacon, her hands cradling the heavy, smut-blackened glass like it was leaded crystal. Setting up house was never hard for her.

All she had to do was find a match.

Some historians say the time that defines us, as a people, was the Civil War, and I guess that is true for those Southerners who hold tight to yellowed daguerreotypes of defiant colonels, distant ancestors who glare at the camera like it was a cannon, leaning on their swords.

But you seldom hear people of the foothills talk much about the
Civil War, contrary to the popular belief that all of us down here are sitting around waiting for the South to Rise Again, gazing at our etching of Robert E. Lee and sipping whiskey from the silver cups our great-aunt hid in the corncrib when she saw the Yankees comin’.

But you hear them talk a lot about the Depression, at reunions, at dinner on the ground, on that bench outside E. L. Green’s store, down the road from my momma’s house. They cannot tell you who commanded much of anything at Little Round Top or Missionary Ridge, but they know the names of all the knothead mules that dragged their daddies cussing and sweating across ground so poor that grass would not grow, and will look you dead in the eye and tell you that, yes, people really did work themselves to death. The Depression, endured in the lifetimes of people we know, was our time of heroes and martyrs, and our monuments are piled neatly on the ground.

O
n the river, among the dragons that slumbered in the deep caves along its banks and the mysterious things that called down from the dark trees, was a gremlin.

His name was Jessie Clines, but everyone just called him Hootie. He was a dusty, scrawny man, about five feet high in his bootheels, and would have weighed less than a hundred pounds if his trouser pockets had not always been filled with silver dimes—just dimes.

He had a face like a pickax. His nose was long and hooked, and
pointy on the end, like he had bought it at the Dollar Store and tied it on his face with a string, and it curved all the way down past his lips. I would not have believed it if the people telling me his story had not raised their right hand to God.

He had beady eyes, set in close on his nose. And if he had one tooth in his head, it would have died of loneliness. He always smelled like woodsmoke and bait.

He could go entire days without saying a word, and when he did talk his voice was reedy and high. He always wore an old army uniform, but he had never been in the army. He just liked the suit. His britches had holes in them, many holes, and he wore red long-handle underwear, which was plain to see.

He wore a long-billed fisherman’s cap, the kind the rich men wore in their yachts on salt water, and it had a leaping blue marlin stenciled on the crown. Hootie probably never saw a marlin, or saw an ocean, but he loved that hat. When it wore out—actually, when the hat just rotted off his head—he got a felt slouch hat, like the one Jimmy Cagney wore.

He wore discarded shoes, and cut holes in them if they were too tight, or just for ventilation.

“Daddy wore holes in his shoes,” said Juanita. “Hootie just cut holes in his.”

He lived down on the river in a tiny shack. No one seemed to know if he owned it, had once owned it or just squatted there. He had just always been there, living on fish and whiskey, trading one for the other.

His only luxury was potted meat, a paste made from ground meat, and he ate it by scooping it out of the tiny flat cans with his pinkie finger. The cans, gold-colored, were hidden around his tiny shack like Easter eggs. Inside, he cured animal skins—beaver, rat, fox, other things—and the smell was enough to knock you back out the door.

His shack teetered on a steep bank, just above the brown river,
hidden completely in the summer by the thick green. It was as far back, as remote, as a man could live. Leaves rotted a foot deep on the ground and the vines and pines and hardwoods blocked the sun, and it was still and quiet and cool in the summer. If a man wanted to live alone, it was probably as good a place as any to be left that way.

They called him Hootie because he talked to the owls. The woods on the river were full of owls—they hunted the banks for rats, ground squirrels, chipmunks and just about anything else that moved—and the calls they gave really did sound like “hoot, hoot,” but trembling, like what you imagined a ghost would sound like.

He could answer them, and it sounded just the same.

People would see him on the bank, working his trotline or traps, and point at him and either laugh or stare. But Hootie only looked like a gremlin. He was too harmless for that, too good-natured. He was more like an elf.

He wasn’t even a real hermit. Hermits do not get lonely. Hootie had.

Charlie first saw Hootie when he was fishing the river near his shack. He waved at the little man.

Hootie just stood there.

Charlie waved again.

Hootie stuck his hand up in the air, as if surprised that it didn’t hurt. Charlie walked up the riverbank and Hootie stood there, acting like he wanted to run. Charlie looked him up and down.

“Well,” Charlie said, “you shore ain’t purty, are you, son?”

Hootie shook his head.

“I’ve got some biscuit, if you want some?”

Hootie nodded, hard.

Friendships get started on less than that.

To Charlie he was not a gnome or an outcast, just another person to tell tales to, to catch fish with, another man who preferred campfire to the glare of electric light.

From that moment, Hootie followed him around like a new puppy. Charlie, who could talk enough for any two men, did not mind the fact that Hootie just smiled, listening, and was not prone to interrupt.

He was not retarded, just quiet and a little bit slow, but people thought he wasn’t right because he would not always answer them when they spoke to him. He was just shy, achingly shy. Life had probably made him that way, made him live in his own head.

He could never have lived in town. There were a lot of men on the river then who couldn’t have. Charlie was almost one of them, but it was just too lonely on the river for a man who wanted friends, a wife, and an ever-growing number of babies crawling round him on the floor.

So, instead of being a place he lived in, it was a place he went to, to get away from life for a while, and Hootie was always there.

The two men, one so tall, one so small, built fires and passed a mason jar of hooch back and forth, and cooked fish over the fire on thin pieces of steel that Hootie had scavenged from a junkyard, or in an old iron skillet that Charlie carried in a tow sack with his hooks and line. With the help of Charlie’s sons, they dug mussels from the sandbars and used them to bait their lines, and snatched the giant cats from the eddies. And through it all Charlie talked.

“I like to hear you talk, Mr. Charlie,” Hootie said once, out of the blue.

“Well, son,” Charlie said, “we are both fortunate.”

Charlie always called him son, even though Hootie was probably twenty years older than him. Somehow, it just seemed right.

It went on that way for about a year. Charlie saw him every month or so, always on the river.

Some people would have said he was mysterious, which is just a fancy way of saying he was lied about. There were more lies told about Jessie “Hootie” Clines than any man on the river, and it almost killed him.