Ava's Man (19 page)

If he had James with him and he was suspicious, he would hide him and tell him to lay quiet till he came for him.

They would walk to the still if it was just a few miles from home, and drive and leave the car, a 1935 Plymouth cut-down, if the still was farther off.

James will never forget the time he and his daddy were up high, way up Bean Flat Mountain in the foothills, with about three gallons already run off. That meant Charlie had three pints in him, and, to tell it true, was not seeing all that well. Or else he was seeing double.

It was dusk, heading toward dark, and the fire under the pot was throwing out too much smoke. Charlie always made his whiskey in a cave or under an overhang or in a tangle of fallen trees, so that their branches, like a filter, would help dissipate and hide the smoke from his fires.

But he had put too much wood on the fire, or else part of it was wet, and even with the trees overhead as a screen, the coals sent a fat black column of smoke into the air. James, afraid the revenuers would see it, jumped almost into the fire itself and began flailing at the smoke, till his daddy started shaking with laughter.

“Beat the hell out of it, son,” he said, and if any revenuers had been around they would have heard him snorting and belly-laughing there on the ground.

It was, James remembers, quiet and beautiful on the tops of those ridges and deep in the hollows, with no cities to muddle up the
stars—just him and his daddy sitting on the grass, telling stories as the fire burned down and the perfume of the cooking whiskey, sweet and strong, ran along the breeze. When he was older his daddy let him have a small taste, and it really did run through his body like blue fire, burning his mouth, scorching his throat, but settling warm into his belly, like good whiskey will. It made you forget things, yes, and made it hard to see things, but nothing worth remembering, nothing worth seeing. At least that was how it seemed after the fourth or fifth swaller.

Sometimes he and his daddy would lay on their backs and watch the stars, which stood still, mostly, unless they had been drinking some, and the lightning bugs, which wandered on the air. The stars were pure white and the lightning bugs were gold, or an electric yellow, depending on the wetness of the air.

That particular night, “just as I finished whupping that smoke,” just as the dark settled down completely around them, they saw a single light in the distance, moving slowly toward them in a straight, unwavering line.

“Son,” Charlie said in a whisper, deadly serious now, “don’t look good, does it?”

James was too scared to speak.

“Step over behind that big pine and stand still,” Charlie said. “Don’t you move no matter what happens. If it goes bad and they get me, go on home as quick as you can.”

Then he stooped over and picked up that blacksmith’s hammer, and stood in the clearing by the still, the flames framing him in an aura of yellow light. James wondered, at first, why his daddy didn’t hide. Then it came to him.

When the man or men with the light chased Charlie, or fought him, he would be the one drawing all the attention, and James could just slip away—or just stand still, in the deep shadows, until it was safe.

Charlie smacked the hammer once, twice into his palm. It could be revenuers or it could be some low-rent son of a bitch coming to
steal his whiskey and perhaps hurt him or his boy. The Belgian shotgun was propped, close at hand, against a tree.

The light came closer and closer and closer and … about that time James and his daddy noticed that it didn’t seem to be getting any bigger. Then it just hummed right on by, a ball of light, bright, tiny, distinct.

Then, deep in those woods, they knew it was a ghost. Now James knows it was just a lightning bug, but the mother of all lightning bugs, the biggest one anyone has ever, ever seen. But why did it fly so true, for so long? Lightning bugs dance on the breeze.

Ghost stories begin like this. But then, drinking stories begin this way, too.

Federal men and county sheriffs harried him for thirty years, and while they locked him up now and then for carrying too much moonshine around in his bloodstream, they never caught him cooking.

“They chased him,” said James. “I reckon they caught everybody, everybody but Daddy.”

He remembers one time, when they were living in Alabama, they saw a big cloud of dust racing above the trees. Two carloads of county pulled up in the yard.

“I don’t like this,” said James, who was about fourteen.

“It don’t make me smile, neither, son,” Charlie said.

All eight car doors opened and men poured out. The sheriff—they believe it was the famous still-smasher Socko Pate—walked up to the porch.

“I’m looking for Mr. Chollie Bundrum,” he said.

“I am him,” Charlie said.

“I’d like to look around your place,” he said, “for a whiskey still.”

“You go ahead,” Charlie said, pleasant, not mocking. Socko was
not a man you teased. “If I wasn’t gettin’ ready to sit down to dinner, I’d go with you.”

But as soon as he stepped inside, he turned to James and said, “Son, I believe they got me.”

But while the still was just a mile from the house, Charlie had found the perfect place. He had found a deep sinkhole, deeper than a man is tall, and had carefully scooped out a cave in the side of the hole—then covered that with vines and honeysuckle. He had not worn out a path walking to it because he eased through the weeds on a slightly different route every time he went to it.

“Unless he can fly,” the sheriff said, walking into the yard, “he ain’t been down there.”

He called to Charlie to come out of the house.

“Well, we didn’t have no luck,” he said. “We never found so much as a rabbit trail, all the way up in there.”

Charlie told them he would be sure to come and see them if he ever saw a whiskey still close by.

He could not fly, of course.

But, after a few long pulls on his own product, sometimes he thought he could.

While a culture of deceit ruled the making of it, it also ruled the drinking of it, for men like Charlie.

Some men drank in their houses, of course. He never did. Ava, who had learned a long time ago that the devil rode on a popping cork, didn’t let whiskey in her house. Charlie would not have done it anyway.

Under his code, a man did not drink in front of his wife and daughters—but once his boys were old enough, he drank in front of them, and did not lecture them not to drink.

Men drank. Men worked. Men fought.

By the time you were thirteen or fourteen, you were a man, or else something pitiful.

They drank in the woods, beside their stills, and in their trucks and cars, parked on dirt roads. Sometimes, if they just had to have a tot or two, they would drink parked in their yards.

It was not religion that forced them to hide it. Charlie was not, as we have said, a religious man, though he lived surrounded by people of deep faith. There were men of that time, and this time, too, I guess, who would preach drunk, who would be so full of the spirit—and spirits—that they would stagger to their feet in the woods and start quoting loud and hot from the Bible, until they passed out.

Charlie did not cloak his drinking to hide it from church people. Men like Charlie, the ones squeezed between their love for their families and their love for the likker, came home only when their drinking was done.

That might seem like an empty victory, a senseless one, to have a man drink himself half-blind and then stagger into the house, bringing all the bad things it caused into his home.

But that is one of the reasons they loved him. His nature, his fine nature, was not turned ugly by it. He drank and he laughed and he drank and he sang and he drank and he told good stories, and sometimes he drank and he just went to bed smiling.

He liked living, so he did not drink to hide. He just liked it. He liked the taste.

When he first started making it, as the Depression ended, it was a certain way—as long as he didn’t get caught—of making a little
money on the side. If he had drank his money up, cheating his family, he would have been a sorry man. But he made that likker and drank a portion of it—and I guess it would be asking too much to expect a man to make it, smelling it, and not have a sip.

I am not trying to excuse it. He did things that he shouldn’t have. I guess it takes someone who has outlived a mean drunk to appreciate a kind one.

But he never poisoned anybody. He never caused anyone to go lame or blind from bad whiskey, and if you’re going to have whiskey—and it, like the mountains where it was made, will always be with us—you might as well have memorable whiskey. And people do recall it. They truly do.

The one it hurt the most was him.

The law, frustrated at not being able to catch him, dogged him. More than a few police, tired of being knocked upside the head by him when they had tried to haul him to jail for other things, followed him along the dirt roads, and pulled him over when he wobbled.

Once, two Georgia state troopers followed him to a well-known beer joint outside Rome called the Maple on the Hill.

It was a real, sawdust-on-the-floor beer joint, and the mighty Roy Acuff even wrote a song about it—or they named it for the song, one or the other—and Charlie, James and William went in and sat at a row of stools.

The two troopers walked in and stepped up behind him.

“Come on, Bundrum, let’s go,” one said.

“I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” Charlie said.

“Come on,” the other said.

“I’m just sittin’ here,” he said. “I got these boys with me, and I can’t leave ’em here.”

Then one of the troopers hooked his arm around Charlie’s throat and dragged him backward off the stool.

What happened next in that bar happened so quick that James
and William did not even have time to step in and help him. From the floor, Charlie swept one of his long arms against the back of the trooper’s legs and upended him.

“His legs was up where his head was supposed to be,” William said.

He landed on his head, and the fight was pretty much out of him. The other trooper took a swing at Charlie with his nightstick, and hit him square and solid across the head—but it just didn’t do the job.