Ava's Man (25 page)

The only sadness, in that fat time, was that time could not just stick in place.

They were on the Cove Road when the oldest children left Ava and Charlie to build their own lives. In 1947, in a span of only about three months, James, William and Edna all married. It was like a disease. Ava, Charlie and the four littler girls wondered who it would take next.

James wed Tadpole, which was no surprise. Bob had not managed to kill her.

William wed a lovely girl named Louise Reaves, whose momma and daddy worked in the mill in Gadsden. She was fifteen, with dark hair and blue eyes, and “she always dressed pretty,” Margaret said.

And Edna wed a sailor named Charlie Sanders, the son of Mr. Hugh Sanders, who had called for the scripture on that day so long ago, as Jeff Baker bled into his hands.

Edna, Margaret said, had grown into a beautiful woman, with rich brown hair and a lovely face. She had known Charlie Sanders when they were children, and when he went off to the navy they wrote to each other.

Margaret was still a little girl when it seemed like that house just emptied out. She was used to things being a certain way and now it just wasn’t so, and it troubled her and made her a little angry.

She was mad the day Charlie Sanders walked up in the yard, that first time.

Listen to her:

“I didn’t think he was pretty. She had a boyfriend, William Spencer, and I thought he was pretty, and she dropped him like a cold tater, dropped him like a sack of trash. Charlie Sanders had black, curly hair, tight-curly, and he come walking up in the yard and she just run to him and hugged on him and hugged on him and hugged on him, and I thought she had lost her mind for sure, I thought it was awful. But that was before I knew about Charlie Sanders’s heart. That was before I knew it was made of gold.”

Juanita was now the oldest child, which was just as well, Margaret said, since she had always been bossy anyway.

It was as hard for the older children to leave as it would have been for a planet to break free of the sun. The tie was still way too tight, too strong, to the man and woman who had raised them.

James and Tadpole moved a mile or two, Edna and Charlie moved over the ridge to Tredegar, and William and Louise moved to the dark side of the moon. They went off to Gadsden, a thirty-minute drive if the police in Glencoe did not catch you just as you crossed the Etowah County line. It was like the house on the Cove Road broke into four pieces, and the pieces landed right close by.

They ate at each other’s kitchen tables, and as their own babies came they grew up with the smaller children of Ava and Charlie, so the houses shook with laughter and dripped with tears and the babies were handed from lap to lap, and all the old stories were told over and over again. The grandchildren called him “Paw-paw,” and he liked that.

He was a young man then, just in his forties. He was still thin,
and when he bought a cheap dress coat to wear, it looked like he forgot to take the hanger out, it hung so loose on him.

Ava no longer had to make her dresses from flour sacks. She was a frugal woman, though, and she bought clothes for herself and the children at rummage sales, in Anniston, Gadsden, Jacksonville and Piedmont, a dime apiece for dresses, skirts and blouses, and the little girls always knew what they would be wearing in a year or two by looking at the backs of their sisters.

There was not much money to waste, and when they splurged they usually splurged on food.

They still talk about the Sunday morning breakfasts, about how Charlie would wake up early and start slicing meat, ham or fatback or country steak, and Ava would pat out the biscuits, about the size of a granny woman’s palm. She greased the sheet with lard, so that even the bread had the smell of bacon in it. And when she pulled the pan from the woodstove they would be golden on the top and pale yellow on the sides, and even cold they were pretty good, and in the afternoon people who came to visit would ask politely if she had any biscuit left.

She would butter some and leave some plain, and sometimes the children would slip a little piece of commodity cheese inside, to let it melt.

Bob would smell the biscuits when they came out of the oven. He was never penned—there was no need since there was really nowhere for him to go—and he would trot over to the house and wait.

If it was summer and the windows were open, he would stick his head in the window and Ava would stick a biscuit in his mouth, and Bob would swallow it down and wait for another, but biscuit, Ava would say, don’t grow on trees.

But the thing they loved most was the link sausages, and the song that went with them. Because they didn’t have a refrigerator, Charlie had to buy some of the breakfast food that morning. He would wake early, real early, and drive to the store. He would stop at Y. C. Parris’s store or at Ed Young’s and buy links made from pork,
about as big around as a banana and with skin almost as tough as what came on the original pig.

It was spiced with garlic and red pepper, and he would slice it longways and fry it in bacon grease, and as it sizzled Charlie’s girls would sing a song they learned from Mr. Hugh Sanders, whom they had come to call Grandpa Sanders in his old age.

The coffee would boil, the smell mixing in with everything else, and Charlie would begin to make the gravy. Ava would make grits, and fry up a mess of eggs, and twist open the top of a jar of preserves, and they would eat like rich people, only rich people don’t really eat this good.

Sundays was for church and loafering. If Ava and the girls went to church that morning, Charlie went the other way.

In the afternoons the kinfolks would come by or they would go to them. Grandpa Sanders had become part of their family and they became a part of his, and the children would crawl all over him.

He would sit in the shade, a baby on his lap, the other little girls clustered around, and sing in a plaintive, miserable tone:

And the little girls would start to cry and even the baby’s lips would start to tremble, and Grandpa Sanders would just shake his head in sorrow and sing on:

And the children would fall about the ground, sobbing, and Grandpa Sanders would sit looking innocent as the mommas glared at him.

It seemed like the windows always had tomatoes in them, soaking up the sun, getting ripe. It seemed like the men were always walking up from the riverbanks with strings of fish. It seemed like the babies in all four households were growing up fat and healthy, like the big mills always had openings on the day shift and the fort always needed a woman to sew or a man to drive a truck or a bus.

The steel was rolling again night and day in Gadsden, and William got on right away, and James and Charlie had homes to build and roof and others to tear down—it always bothered Charlie that a man could get a paycheck just as big for ripping something down as he did for putting it up—and on the weekends there was visiting, feasting and storytelling, and a little drinking and banjo picking, and just enough fighting to be sociable. And when a dark cloud drifted over, all eyes still cut to him, expecting him to purse his lips out and blow it away. Sometimes he brought the cloud with him, but they always seemed to forgive him for that.

He hadn’t changed much on the outside. His face was still mostly unlined as he passed forty, and his hair didn’t fall out, and his teeth
stayed white and straight, and his little girls were proud of him. Time just seemed to bounce off him, somehow. He could still climb a scaffold like a monkey, still drive a ten-penny nail with one measured, massive, dead-on blow, still make a man’s eyes water with the power of his grip. He could still drink likker like water.

Time had been harder on Ava, but that is the way of it. She had given birth to eight children, buried one, raised half of the ones that survived, and was now raising the other half, with white already in her hair. Her legs were cut with little white scars from wading through the briers, because she was too much of a lady to pick cotton in pants. Her face was already seamed, and she wore old-lady bonnets in the fields, a baby sometimes on her hip.

It should not even have to be said, really, but her children loved her, and her new grandchildren did too. She was unselfish, and she loved them back. And while a lot of people say that they gave a life, their complete life, to family, she could back it up with every line, every sunspot, on her neck, face and hands.

The worries, for her husband, for her children, for survival in the bleak years, had piled up in her mind, and she got lost in it, from time to time, the way some people do. But she always found her way out, somehow, always found a way to push through that dark curtain, and when she came out of that trance she would smile, this beautiful, beautiful smile. It was almost worth it, when she went away in her mind, to watch her come back from it. It was like flipping the light switch on in a flower shop.