Ava's Man (18 page)

“Maybe we shouldn’t write this,” she said so many years later, “but I was his favorite. Maybe not in love. He loved us all. But maybe he gave me more attention. I knew that nothing could ever hurt me with Daddy there. I knew he would never let it happen.”

H
er mind went away while she was on fire. Margaret was not yet three years old then, fair and white-blond, a lovely child. They were living in the old Osby place, maybe three miles from their nearest neighbor, on the Georgia side of the line. Charlie had gotten temporary work at Fort McClellan in Alabama, a three-hour drive away, building barracks and roofing. He slept there, and came home on the weekends. He was gone the night it happened.

Edna had made Margaret a new dress out of a feed sack, a pretty dress, Edna said, “but I didn’t have no buttons yet, and I told her not to put it on.” It was a long dress, down to her feet. You can grow into dresses like that.

“I can’t wait,” Margaret said, and she begged and cried until the other women in the house, big and little, gave in. Juanita was about five, Edna was about ten but acted older.

Because Edna didn’t have any buttons, they fastened the back of
the dress together with a big safety pin. A new dress was the happiest, grandest thing that had happened in her life, and it was her first real, clear memory. How could such a thing wait on buttons.

It was dusk. She and Juanita were cutting paper dolls out of old newspapers, and Ava and Edna were washing clothes on a rub-board not far from the house.

The two little girls made a lot of paper dolls, and the scraps piled up on the floor. Margaret started throwing the paper scraps into the fireplace, and a red-hot coal rolled from the fire and brushed the hem of her dress. The cotton dress blazed up, and Margaret beat at the flames as they climbed the back of her new dress, scorching her legs.

They tried to get it off her, but it fit tight at the neck, where the button would have fastened, and Juanita tore at the safety pin but it wouldn’t come undone. Screaming, Margaret ran from the house and onto the porch, and when she rushed out into fresh air the whole dress seemed to come alight. “I was all on fire,” she said. It was then that she lost her mind.

Edna and Ava had heard her screams and come running, and caught her just as she breached the door. Ava knocked her to the porch and the two of them started to smother the flames with their bare hands. Edna cried and Ava prayed and cussed and they just beat at the fire until their own hands were blistered, until Margaret lay smoking on the porch, deathly, terrifyingly quiet.

Her eyes were wide, wide open, but she was not seeing anything in this world. She was still breathing, her chest rose and fell, but she was in shock or something like it. It was no so-called near-death experience, just a little child out of her head with pain.

She just remembers that she had a dream.

“I went up and up and I was flying, but I didn’t see the Lord. I was playing with these kids, three or four of them, and we could all fly, and we flew all around up there, and we had on white dresses. I
flew around a real long time, but I never did see the Lord. I wanted to, ’cause I’d been good. But I’d of remembered if I’d seen the Lord.”

They didn’t have a car. Charlie had taken it with him. There was no way to get a doctor, at least no way quick. When Margaret came to she cried, and Ava knew then that she was probably not going to die.

Ava had this unusual ability to always do what was needed of her when times were the worst, then panic and crumble. It was so this night. As soon as Margaret was put out, she gently lifted her up and laid her on her stomach—most of the burns were on her legs and back—and started to put salve on them. She told Edna and Juanita to go for help, and finally just gave up and started to shake.

They took Ava’s lantern, the big, heavy one, and ran and walked the miles to Miss Osby’s, the closest house. Miss Osby didn’t have a phone, but she and the girls walked another two miles to a store where there was a telephone. They did not believe an ambulance would come out so far for such a thing, so they called the police in Anniston, Alabama, near Fort McClellan, and they went and found Charlie.

He jumped in his truck and raced home, but when he walked in the door there was whiskey on his breath. Men often took a drink after work, sneaking a few sips of home brew smuggled into the dry counties. But the angels were against him this time. This time, the people who needed him, who believed he could kill any dragon, needed him stone-cold sober.

It would be one of the few times, times his daughters can count on one hand, that he failed them.

Margaret lay on her belly on the bed, cried-out, quiet again, and the blisters on her lower body had just begun to rise. Charlie stood over her, trying to focus his bleary eyes, and said, “Well, maybe it ain’t too
bad,” and he went to the store and got some more salve, then went back to work.

But it was bad. The blisters rose up big as teacups, and then got infected.

“I used to lie beside her in bed and hold the cover up off her, because she couldn’t stand to have nothing touch her, but she would get cold,” Edna said. “I had sore hands from trying to tear that dress off her, but that was all right. But sometimes I would go to sleep and drop the cover on her. She sure had it rough. It scared me. I was scared we was gonna lose her.”

Margaret would lie there, drifting in and out of her mind, and she would wake up to pain.

Ava sent the girls for Charlie again. This time he saw what had happened to his child through clear eyes, and he took her to the doctor in Rome. He went back to work shamed.

Many, many years later, I asked her how she felt about it all, if it left any bad memories for her, if it had affected how she felt about him.

“No, hon. I was real young, so it didn’t leave no bad scars,” she said.

I guess she misunderstood me, that she thought I was talking about the fire itself. Or maybe she understood me just fine.

L
ikker.

It even sounds like a sin.

Charlie could swing his hammer all day and not make a ten-dollar bill, but he could run off a gallon of white whiskey and make five dollars a jug. He sold it to Jack Milsap, and Ralph Crow, merchants and druggists and other respected men, because his product was clean, because it was pure, and because it was safe as Kool-Aid. Other people may have run it off from rusted truck radiators, their hooch laced with lead salts, invisible, deadly. No one ever found a dead possum floating in Charlie’s mash. He never sold a sip—not one sip—that he did not test with his own liver.

Just as his daddy had taken him to the woods to learn it, he took James, then a teenager and his oldest, to help carry wood, to help keep watch. James remembers how his daddy would watch the likker drip slowly, slowly from clean copper tubing—they called that process “sweetening it in”—until it was time to taste.

Charlie carried a clear, flat half-pint bottle in the back pocket of his overalls, and he would run off a pint and shake it to check its bead—good likker had a fine bead of tiny bubbles along its surface when it was shaken. He would peer hard at it, like the bottle was his microscope, then take one quick, hard pull, then a second, then a third, till it was gone.

He would close his eyes and raise his face to the trees, and quietly announce:

“Son, that’s alcohol.”

He drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold.

There was a culture to it, almost a religion, in the deep woods. More than anything, more than wars, or car crashes, or feuds, it killed men of my blood, or caused them to do things that killed them. It was a sin, but it was our sin. I guess it always will be.

Prohibition had come and gone, but most of Alabama and Georgia was officially dry in the 1940s, and would be for decades to come. But it was only dry if you wanted it to be.

In Rome, Anniston, Gadsden and the other cities in the foothills, the wealthier men and women sipped wines and drank stamped brown whiskey that they bought from bootleggers or wet counties. They had it delivered, discreetly, to their back doors, then went to Sunday school stiff-backed, holy-mouthed and straight-faced, as if Jesus didn’t know. Some of the old men who had grown up country but now lived in town had a taste for likker made in the trees, and they sought out men like my grandfather.

In the country, every county had at least two bootleggers—one white, one black—and they sold beer by the bottle from trapdoors and wellsprings, to keep it cool, and clear moonshine whiskey by the quart. In Calhoun County on the Alabama side, it was a woman named Aunt Hattie, a legendary figure who gave her customers secret
numbers written on bits of paper—a code to make sure that she did not sell by accident to any revenuers or police. Long after she died, and her bootlegging operation had died with her, men kept the scraps of paper with their code in their wallets, and they would pull them and show their number, with pride.

Some people have secret handshakes. We had Aunt Hattie’s code.

If you wanted whiskey in the foothills, your likker was almost always clear. It was considered superior to anything from Kentucky, and the fact that it was illegal just made it taste better.

It was a culture of deceit, coursing under the very upturned noses of the hard-shell Baptists and Congregational Holiness of that place and time, a people who got high on the Lord, who walked across backs of church pews when they were enraptured—my momma called it “gettin’ happy”—and sometimes even handled serpents to prove that nothing, nothing could pierce the armor of their faith.

But whiskey trickled through, under and around it, invisible—if you did not know where to look.

Even in houses like Charlie Bundrum’s, there was a culture of deceit. The funny thing is, it was almost noble.

The deceit was necessary for the making of it, surely, because if a man like Charlie went to prison his family went hungry and that is just a natural fact.

Charlie, like his daddy, went to his still in the black of night, when the deep woods could keep a secret. He never took the same way more than once or twice and always circled and circled his still—he called it his “pot”—like a dog circling his bed before he lays down. Dogs do that, old men say, because they do not want to lay down on a snake. In a way, Charlie was just doing the same thing.

He carried his Belgian-made 12-gauge double-barrel, and a pound-and-half blacksmith’s hammer, for snakes, he always said.

Once, twice, they were laying for him, on both sides of the state
lines, but he was a ghost in the dark—“walked like a Indian,” the cousin Travis Bundrum said. The first time they came for him—the law at that time had to actually catch the whiskey man at his still—he melted quietly into the dark. The next time they were better hidden, and stepped quickly from the trees all around him. He did the only thing he could, he ran over one of them, like a bull over a rodeo clown, and ran the rest of them into the ground. No white man could outrun him in those woods, said his cousins. It is not a myth born from whiskey. It was what people knew, and know now.