Ava's Man (22 page)

Then Charlie did one of the bravest things I have ever heard of, a thing his children swear to. He opened the door and stepped outside to meet his enemy empty-handed, and just started walking.

“Hootie ain’t here,” he said, walking, it seemed, straight into the bore of the shotgun. It was a single-shot .410, and he thought that if Jerry didn’t get him good with that first shot, he could get his big hands around his throat before Jerry could pop in another load.

“You got to leave here,” he said, walking closer. “I got babies in that house.”

“You prob’ly a damn thief, too,” Jerry said, his voice thick with whiskey, and he pressed his face against the steel of his shotgun to draw a bead. Back then men were always threatening to kill other men. But this man was drunk and mean enough to pull the trigger.

He did.

Inside the house, the girls pulled pillows over their heads, so they would not have to hear the shot, would not have to hear their daddy die.

Charlie felt the hot rush of shot fly past his face, and his legs shook under him with the boom of the gun. But it was a clean miss, and he started to run at Jerry, closing the distance even as Jerry fished in his pocket for another load.

Twenty feet …

Jerry cursed and broke open the breech.

Twelve feet …

He slapped in the fresh shell.

Eight feet …

He snapped the gun closed.

Six feet …

He threw it to his shoulder.

Four feet …

He saw a fist the size of a lard bucket come flying at his nose.

Charlie was already on him. As Jerry’s head snapped back from the blow, Charlie snatched the gun out of his hands like it was a toy and hit him in the teeth with it. Jerry dropped like a box of rocks, his face and teeth a red mess. And just then Charlie saw a huge figure hurl itself at him from the shadows.

It was that big woman, and she lunged at him with a hog-killing knife. Charlie whirled and fired. The woman, who was turned sideways to stab him, took the shot in the side of her breast, point-blank.

The shot passed through the breast and went into and through the other one, and the woman fell hard and heavy onto the grass. She yelled, bled and flopped around, but neither she nor Jerry was mortally wounded and Charlie just stood over them, breathing hard, sweat running like ice water down his spine.

He told them they best be out of his yard before too long, and he walked on up to his house. Ava had not let the children out on the
porch, so when the door opened they did not know whether it would be their daddy or the devil himself. He stepped inside to see all of them staring at him with their eyes big, except Margaret, who still had her head covered up.

“We best put the young’uns in the truck,” he said, “and go somewhere for a little while.”

Out in the yard, they could hear the big woman and Jerry cussing and trying to help each other off the ground. The big woman wailed.

She was blessed that day, that woman, and Charlie was, too. The gun he snatched from Jerry Rearden was a little .410, used for squirrel and rabbit and sometimes deer, not a 12-gauge.

A 12 would have ripped that poor woman almost in two, at point-blank range. But if that gun had been a 12-gauge loaded with buckshot, Rearden would not have missed Charlie in the first place. A man cannot get drunk enough to miss a man with a 12-gauge at point-blank range.

What had happened was not casual. He would go to prison for it, he figured, or the Reardens would kill him. Old Lady Norris was family, almost a Rearden herself for all practical purposes. The fact that there was no wedding ring would not save him.

But he could not have let that man and woman come into his home where two sons, three little girls and an infant would have been in the path of whatever meanness they would bring. That is why he didn’t drink his likker at home, why he didn’t allow it in his house. It was not, he knew, a perfect wall, but it was the one he had built.

They loaded the children quickly into the cut-down, ignoring the moaning of the two people on the ground, and about that time Hootie just materialized in the yard and crawled on the back of the truck. They rode to a county road, a mile or so away, and waited, but for what they weren’t sure, until it seemed senseless to hide, and Ava touched his arm and said quietly, “Charlie, let’s go on home.” Their
yard was empty when Ava and Charlie pulled back into their driveway, the children asleep in the cut-down. Charlie toted his daughters in two at a time.

The Reardens never came, maybe because they respected him, or because they thought it wasn’t worth their time. The law did not even investigate. No deputy ever came into the yard. Like some people need killing, some people need shooting, and need being knocked upside the head.

Charlie never got angry at Hootie for bringing the trouble there, at least that anyone knows of. Ava did. But then Hootie was terrified of Ava anyway, so it didn’t change things none. They moved over to Alabama again, not long after that, just for a little distance. But a man with a temper has to drive a long, long way to get away from his nature.

G
race smoked slim cigarettes, drank like a man and wore makeup, and when she rumbled down Carpenter’s Lane in her big car, the people’s heads swiveled to follow her, because it was a fine automobile, and because Grace was pretty fine herself, sitting in it.

Grace visited Ava a good bit, when her older sister lived on the Alabama side, and when she came it was like a big movie star had come to town. Grace was a tiny, beautiful woman who went to the beauty shop when she wanted, who dressed in clothes from the department stores in Gadsden, Birmingham and Atlanta. Other women wore bonnets. Grace had store-bought hats with lace that drooped mysteriously over the eyes, hats with silken roses and even tiny redbirds with real feathers sewn onto them, and when she stuck her foot out of the car to get out, there was a high heel on it.

When they were grown, James and William used to take her to
town and pretend she was their girlfriend, to make their sweethearts jealous. She was forty by then but looked twenty-five, and she had eyelashes like bat wings, and when she fluttered them, it just did something to men’s insides.

Grace had married a Greek named George Manas, and they ran a cafe in Birmingham and later in Attala, near Gadsden. They were well off—he employed twenty people at one time—and they went to Florida to see the ocean and orange groves and alligators. They sent postcards. Ava put them in the corners of the mirror, so she could look at them.

It was the life Ava could have had, maybe the life she was raised to have. Instead, she sat in another rented house with another baby to feed, to worry over, with two grown sons, a teenage daughter, and two more little girls pulling at her dress, all day, every day.

It was not so obvious, most days, until Grace came and they sat on the porch or in the kitchen, coffee cups in their hands. Grace’s hands were still smooth. Ava’s, scarred from the cotton bolls that always managed to gouge her up under her nails, and burned pink in places from hot skillet handles.

Her dresses were made from flour sacks and feed sacks, and she picked cotton in them—and it wasn’t even her damn cotton.

She wore her hair like the black women of the time, bound up in a scarf, like a turban, to keep it out of her eyes when she did stoop labor and sewing. And one day she unwrapped it and found that the shining, inky black was now cut with white strands, as if by some kind of evil hex, and she cried and cried, and there was not one thing that Charlie could say.

She did not have a wedding ring or even a simple gold band, and while she still had about a hundred cheap, dime-store purses, she didn’t have a damn thing to put in them except newspaper clippings of all those things she found interesting but would never do or see, and cutout pictures of Hank Williams from discarded magazines.

She had been a momma, a momma and a manual laborer, her whole damn life, and her husband was not going to lift her out of it and in fact had never promised that he would.

Charlie Bundrum didn’t have one pair of overalls she had not had to stitch, and he smelled like tar and snuff, and he drank his moonshine when it pleased him and acted a fool and ran over the mailbox and fought the deputies and brought home hermits.

She could have hated her life.

But what, she always said, if she had married a dull man.

Oh, it was true that she told him to go to hell more times than she could count.

And it was true she told him to get his raggedy behind out of her house before she killed him, and to take his hermit with him.

But no one can remember one time, in all those years, that she told him to shut up.

There was never a time, not one time, that he came in from work, sat down at the kitchen table and had nothing to say.

What a by God tragedy that would have been.

So when Grace climbed back in her car, careful not to snag her stockings, Ava watched from the porch, little girls clutching at her dress, and waved.

It is why Ava put up with him, and why, about that time, she whipped Blackie Lee. Any woman can appreciate a pretty man, but not every woman can appreciate a talking one.

One night in Alabama, after the children had been put to bed and Charlie and Ava sat talking quietly in the lamplight, there was a gentle tap on the door.

“Charrrrrrllllliiiiieeee,” came the feminine voice. “Let me in, Charlie, baby.”

Margaret and the other girls raised up and looked at their daddy’s face. He looked puzzled, and stricken, at the same time.

If it was Ol’ Death himself knocking at the door, Charlie could not have looked any more troubled.

“Charrrrrrllllliiiiieeee,” the voice said again. “Let me in, Charlie. It’s cold out here.”

Ava had taken a minute or two to let the steam build, then she sprang to the door much quicker than she should have been able to, popped the latch and jerked it open so hard the sheer momentum almost flung her off her feet.

“Who the hell is that,” she shouted to the darkness outside, and if there had been a woman standing there, right there, she would have knocked her cold as a tater and bounced up and down on her head.

But instead there was just Hubert Woods, a friend of Charlie’s, laying flat on his back on the ground, laughing so hard that he could not stand.

He laughed and rolled and laughed and coughed, and further out in the yard his daddy, Earl, laughed, too, and shook his head, and said something about how, boy, you sure are lucky that little woman didn’t have no gun.

And Ava just stood there with her fists balled up, but she knew it would be undignified to jump on a grown man while he rolled in the yard, and finally just stomped back in the house and slammed the door.

Charlie, standing on the porch, just looked at Hubert and said, without a smile, “I ought to kill you.” Then he walked inside, and out in the yard Hubert and Earl laughed for a long, long time.

The next day, his girls told it over and over and laughed, but they felt sorry for their daddy, in a way. “’Cause I’ve never seen a more pitiful look on anybody’s face in my whole life,” Margaret said.

M
argaret cannot recall when they went back to Georgia for what would be the last time, or exactly when they came back over to the Alabama side for good. To a little girl, the houses may as well have been railroad cars passing her on a lonely crossroad, as if the houses themselves were on wheels and she was just standing still.

But she remembers the journey.

He banged the gears, and the bald tires on the truck threw dust for fifty yards. Charlie always drove with his large foot to the floor, which would have been dangerous if his old cut-down truck had the will, the heart, to go fast enough to actually hurt anybody. They were going west, through the northwest Georgia mountains, between the wide cotton fields of Cherokee County in Alabama and on into Calhoun County, where Charlie planned to stay awhile, if he could. Ava and Edna sat next to him on the bench seat, Ava with that damn lamp, Edna with Jo riding on her knees. Juanita and Margaret rode in
the back with their cow, Buck. Charlie had mercifully thrown a blanket over Buck’s eyes before pulling away, for the same reason people cover the eyes of horses when they lead the poor beasts from an inferno. It was an old cow, and the shock might have been too much for it otherwise. He had sent Hootie, James and William ahead, in an old car the boys had bought, and told Hootie to look out for them, which made Hootie shake his head in dismay.