Ava's Man (2 page)

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 packed 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.

But I am proud of Charlie Bundrum. I want my grandfather to walk out of the past—with Ava, God rest her soul, beside him. If what I have heard about Charlie and Ava is true, he would not have minded having just a little bit of a head start on her, so he could have some fun before she got there.

As for me, I got what I came for.

Charlie Bundrum, though I never even saw his face, would have wanted us. He would have held us high in one of those legendary hands, like a new bulldog puppy, and laughed out loud. He would have watched over us, slipping us Indian head pennies and Mercury dimes. And every Friday, when my momma went into town to cash her check, he would have fed nickels into the mechanized bucking horse outside the A&P, to see us ride.

I am not sure of that because it’s what I want, because it’s the way a boy would have built himself a grandfather. But the actual man, a flawed and sometimes boozy man, would have done it all, if he had lived. I am sure of this because that actual man lived just long enough to reach for one of us, a boy older than me, and prove it.

In the fall of 1997, an Alabama newspaper sent a reporter to interview my mother. I sat in her living room on the chert hill in northeastern Alabama and shook my head as she deftly deflected the reporter’s questions about her sacrifices, about her hard life, and laughed when she said she was just walking around the house in her old age, trying not to fall off the pedestal that I had put her on.

Then the reporter, a nice lady from Birmingham, asked her to recall the best day of her life. It was a splendid question. I wrote one whole book about her, and forgot to ask it.

I thought my momma, who had lived her life in borrowed houses, might say that it was the day I handed her the keys to her own home—partial payment of a debt I will never really repay. Or I thought she would say it was the day that
Shoutin’,
a book that honored her, was printed, and I handed her a copy with her face on the cover.

I should have known better. Books and houses. Paper and wood.

“I believe,” she said, “it was the birth of my first son, Sam.”

It was the eleventh of September 1956, and Daddy was absent,
which was a cause for concern but not alarm. He would show up sooner or later, in weeks or months, as soon as he had drank Korea away, as soon as the faces of dead men had slipped once more beneath the calm brown surface of bootleg whiskey.

When Daddy left he took the rent with him, so she had nowhere else to take the baby except home. Charlie and Ava lived in a rented house on Alabama 21, in the woods behind Wright’s store, and she took him there. What is it people say about home? It is where you go when no one else wants you.

My grandfather took the baby in his hands, engulfing him, and grinned.

“By God, Margaret,” he said, “you’ve got Samson here.” And he held him for hours.

No one slept much that night. The next day my grandfather, grumbling but good-natured, said it was too damn noisy to rest. It wasn’t that the baby had cried. The baby had not cried at all.