Ava's Man (28 page)

“So we just laid there, and we laid there all night,” with his heart hammering at his chest for one hour, two, three and on and on and on, until finally just before dawn Charlie figured the bad men were passed out, asleep or gone, and they crept to the boat and glided away.

The men must have figured that Charlie and Rich were passing by and had stopped for some likker, then just moved on, not that they were camping right there, that they had heard the shot and seen them weight and sink the body.

And for a lifetime Travis Bundrum wondered what if, what if the men had walked right up on them, or smelled the woodsmoke or the
empty sardine cans, or seen the boat pulled half in, half out of the river.

But he never wondered why he lived through it. He survived that night because his uncle Charlie, even with a pint—more or less—of likker in him, held him down in that groundcover with the power of his voice, his hands and his will.

Charlie went back to the river not long after that and put out his lines, and this time he caught some river cats and mud cats, which are yellow because they hug the bottom where the sun never shines, and tossed them on the bank.

He gutted them on the river, throwing the innards into the water, and finished cleaning them on an old board stretched across two stumps in his backyard.

Edna, who was the best fish cooker in the family and probably in the United States, took over, and dusted them in cornmeal and salt and black pepper, and fried them just perfect, so that the outside was crisp and the inside was moist and flaky, with enough of what people called a whang—a bit of a muddy taste—to tell you it was real food.

She fried potatoes—what they called Irish potatoes—and made the best hush puppies that have ever been, the kind my momma cooked for me. They would take the meal and mix in milk or water and diced onion—sometimes green onion if it was summer—and maybe even a little cubed-up commodity cheese. But instead of deep-frying them in little round balls, they would spoon it out in the hot grease in an iron skillet, in little patties.

And sometimes they would send one of the boys to the store to get a block of ice, and they would chip it up with a butcher knife and put it in a tub with some Coca-Colas or Royal Crown or the brand Double Cola, if the Georgia kinfolks had driven over to see them. It is one of the great mysteries of life that Double Colas could not be
bought this far into Alabama—you could only get them over the state line in Rome. Sometimes they would lay a watermelon in the ice water, to let it get cold. But there was never any beer, because drinking is a sin.

And they would eat it all and sit and talk and sometimes someone would even pick and sing a little, or Grandpa Sanders would tell a tale. They would talk until it was too dark to see, and then they would talk to the dark.

The children played hide-and-seek in the wet grass, and chased lightning bugs and put them in a jar with holes poked in the lid, but they never did shine all that much once you put them under glass.

The town of Jacksonville was growing. The jail, made from rock, was still the most imposing structure on the square, and the Confederate soldier still watched over its citizens with granite eyes.

But you could buy everything from a suit of clothes to a vanilla float there. The Creamery sold a big ol’ scoop for a nickel, and Juanita—who always got vanilla—would drag Margaret in there by the hand, a dime scorching her fingertips. She was about seventeen then, and Margaret a little younger. But with ice cream in their hands, they were little girls all over again, and they would sit and watch the cars. You never saw a mule anymore, not in town.

If they had money, they went to the theater on the square and saw a cowboy movie, usually with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and Trigger, but if Dale’s horse had a name they cannot remember it now. Tarzan of the Apes swung through the trees and must have killed the same big ol’ snake and the same stuffed crocodile a thousand times, but they liked to sit in the back and munch a nickel bag of popcorn and listen to him yell. “It was the best popcorn I’ve had in my whole life,” Juanita said.

It was not Charlie’s world anymore.

The revenuers had airplanes now, and took a man’s picture from the sky. Sheriff Socko Pate was in the
Anniston Star
almost every week, it seemed like, him and a bunch of deputies standing over another busted still. Charlie made a last few gallons to sip on for posterity, then stripped the copper tubing from his still to sell as scrap and left the rest of it to rust away in the woods. Practically every other whiskey man in north Alabama and northwestern Georgia had done time for making shine, but he just retired, quietly and undefeated.

It wasn’t the same in other ways. The state troopers seldom had to chase a man anymore down the dirt roads. They just took down his tag number and sent a car out to fetch him when they felt like it. That, to Charlie, was just mean.

A man couldn’t drive drunk now with all the cars, all the cars that went so fast on the creeping blacktop, and if a man fought the police or the deputies in an honest, bare-knuckle fight, it almost seemed as if they did not appreciate the contest in it, like they lost their sense of humor as soon as he balled up his fist. Taking a whupping from Charlie had been almost a rite of passage for a lot of young troopers, deputies and police, but now the men behind the badges pulled their batons and put a hand on their pistol—and what fun is that.

A man didn’t do a night in jail anymore to sober up. They took him to the county lockup in Anniston, and it cost good money to bail him out, money his family didn’t have. The judges still knew his name, still shook their heads and sometimes even smiled every two or three years when the tall man stepped before them, a man without malice, just a dusty old code of behavior that sometimes ran sideways with the law. But more and more, as the city limits inched out into the country, the law penned him in.

There was one trooper in particular he didn’t like—which was a shame because the man’s wife was a nurse at Piedmont Hospital, and helped deliver Charlie’s grandchildren—and when he arrested him, Charlie just refused to ride with him in his patrol car. Charlie would
go sit down and wait in the ditch for another trooper to drive all the way out and get him.

For Ava, the changing years brought an end to that cursed gloom, as even poor people got their houses wired for electricity. For Charlie, the Tennessee Valley Authority was no blessing. It changed his river to create huge backwaters that swallowed houses and pasture fences and old barns, and pretty soon city people were building second houses on the banks, and “fish camps” that had electricity and refrigerators and radios that blared out into the darkness.

But there were still a few wild places on the water, and Charlie went to them when he felt it all pressing in on him.

He never told his family about the killing. They heard about it only after his death, from Travis.

Such a thing will haunt you till your hair turns gray, and it did that to Travis. “How strange it was, that it wasn’t mentioned after that, by Uncle Charlie or Uncle Rich. But I thought about that man. I wondered who he was, if he had a family, but it was just a thing we didn’t talk about.”

Several years after it happened, Travis and his uncle Rich were out in the yard talking about nothing in particular. And out of the blue, Travis said:

“Uncle Rich, they killed that feller, didn’t they?”

“Yes, son,” Rich said. “They sure did.”

And they never talked about it again, and Travis didn’t talk about it at all, until he heard that a cousin was writing a book about his uncle Charlie, and he thought it was time.

Sometimes, when he rides around the square in Jacksonville and sees the Confederate statue there, he thinks about how someone should chip one out in Charlie Bundrum’s likeness and put it up there, to keep the other one company.

He thinks that if people really wanted to honor someone who was part of this place, about this place, someone who had courage and heart, then Charlie would do just fine.

The Creamery is gone. The theater is gone. And men like Charlie are gone. Why not, he figured, erect a statue to a man in a pair of overalls and a long-billed carpenter’s cap, a hammer or a trotline in his hands and a clear pint bottle in his back pocket.

He does not believe that will ever happen, of course. But imagine if it did, if all the beloved men were cast in stone and propped up there, an army of men in overalls and jumpers and hobnailed boots, holding hammers and big wrenches and bolls of cotton in their hands. An army of grandfathers, frozen in the act of baiting hooks or opening a can of peaches with a pocketknife.

Imagine that.

H
e was standing on the square in Jacksonville the first time she saw him.

“What a pretty little man,” Margaret thought.

His hair was slicked back and almost black, and he had striking blue eyes in a face that was Cherokee dark, his cheekbones high and his nose a little hooked. And he looked like he could be mean, if he wanted to be, but mostly he just looked good.

He was thin and slight but powerful-looking, like Alan Ladd, and he had on a black suit and a starched white shirt and a skinny black tie, and black loafers with dimes in them. He had a cigarette in his lips and he slouched on the corner, like he was somebody.

Her boyfriend at the time was a friend of the dark-haired boy, and had borrowed his car that day to take Margaret to town.

When the boy with Margaret saw the dark-haired boy on the corner, he pulled up to introduce him to his date.

“This is Charles Bragg,” her boyfriend said. “He’s a marine. He’s going to Korea here, pretty soon.”

Charles took her hand.

“This is Margaret,” the boy said.

She was still barely in her teens but tall, almost as tall as the dark-haired boy, and already she was what most people called beautiful.

The straight, pale hair she hated so much hung to her shoulders and she had a look that people could not describe, a serene look, but a fragile look, too. Her face was perfect, and she smiled hello.

He was too cool to say much then, it seemed. “He just smiled this wicked little smile, and I saw he had a little flower in a buttonhole on his coat, and I didn’t know why,” Margaret said.

But he was not being suave, he just forgot how to talk for a few seconds. Later, much later, he would say she looked like a movie star.

She got to know the boy a little bit, but there didn’t seem to be a future in it. She didn’t know much about Korea—the truth is, most people here didn’t even know where the place was—and no one had ever heard of a “police action” before. But he had told her, told everybody, that he was leaving this little town, that he wasn’t gonna work in no damn cotton mill for a lifetime, like his daddy did. Even if he came back home alive, he was gone for good. That made some people sad, people who had loved him for a lifetime, or just a little while. But he asked Margaret, later, when he came home on a furlough, if she would mind if he wrote her a letter every now and then, and she said it would be fine, if he really wanted to.