Ava's Man (31 page)

James and Phine had Mary, David, Jimmy, Jeanette and Linda Faye, and William and Louise had Peggy, Alton, Janie and Becky. Edna and Charlie Sanders had a house full of girls, with Betty, Linda, Elizabeth and Wanda. Juanita and Ed had Jackie, a girl, then little Joe Edward. But the baby boy died when he was just a few months old, a reminder of how precious and fragile this family, his family, could be.

Juanita went to the boy’s grave every day.

One morning, her daddy gently took her aside.

“As long as you go,” he said, “it’ll hurt.”

He knew his daughter could not push the child from her mind, but he knew that standing over a grave is no way to get on with living.

“For a while,” he said. “Don’t go for a while.”

They all went to him when it hurt. The grandchildren learned early on to run to him when the dog bit, or they got slashed by a brier. He was there the day that James’s boy David fell and cut his throat on a fruit jar—it wasn’t as bad as it sounds—and at a hundred other little emergencies.

Like Margaret, they just figured he could fix anything. It was why Jeanette wasn’t afraid the day she fell out of the Dodge.

Charlie, Ava, Jo and Sue were living on the Roy Webb Road then, not far from Holder’s store. Charlie was sitting on the porch, feeling a little lonely.

“I think,” he said, “I’ll go get James’s kids.”

He did things like that. When things were too quiet, he would just stride to the car and go loafering, and sometimes he came back with grandkids hanging from the truck bed.

This time, he had David, Jimmy, Mary and Jeanette, who was then six years old, in his 1946 Dodge. He was rounding a curve when the door on the passenger side just flew open and Jeanette, who was sitting next to the door, fell out.

She rolled and tumbled and then lay in the middle of the road in a crumpled little heap. Jeanette, who has never been called anything
except Guinea because that is what Charlie named her, lay still as death.

Margaret was in the yard when the Dodge, much faster than it should have, wheeled into the yard.

“Hon,” said her daddy, white-faced, carrying a limp body in his arms, “I’ve kilt little Guinea.”

He laid her on the porch and wiped at her face with a cloth and found that she was breathing, and then she opened her eyes and Charlie just said, quietly, “Thank you, Lord.”

He took her to the doctor in town, who picked the gravel out of her legs. Jeanette didn’t scream, she didn’t even cry that much.

Margaret, Juanita and the other sisters swear that something happened to Jeanette as she lay unconscious, because as she grew up and older she became an angel, a selfless, giving, caring woman who watches over others and lives for them.

Margaret came to call her Jeanette, Child of God, and you can argue with her about it if you want to, about what might have happened during those moments of unconsciousness, but you won’t convince her otherwise.

Jeanette is noncommittal. On the one hand, it is nice to be thought of as a true saint, even a Protestant one. But on the other, it is a terrible burden. What if she slipped up, and cussed in public?

She just lets the legend roll on.

“It all depends, hon,” she says now, “on who you ask.”

There was never a quiet time for him, between his children and grandchildren, never an empty nest. Some people might have ached for a little peace, a little solitude, but that was what God made the rivers for. As he neared fifty, his life had not changed. Charlie still climbed the ladder every day with a hammer dangling from his hip, still fished when it suited him, and still seemed at his best, at his happiest,
with children on the floor at his feet, or doing chin-ups on his skinny forearms. Ava loved them, too, but Charlie … well, Charlie just owned them, owned their hearts, as he owned the hearts of his own children. Some men are just blessed that way. Some men walk in the room, and babies laugh out loud.

T
o some cultures, leaving your husband is a stark, definite thing. Women of Margaret’s era did not so much leave their husbands during bad times as they just went home.

“Goin’ home to Momma” was the last thing they would say as the screen door slammed. It was during such a period that Sam was born.

Margaret was watching
American Bandstand
at Edna’s house when the baby she was carrying let her know it was time. Her sisters took her to the hospital in Anniston—the Piedmont Hospital, the one much closer to home, had not been built—for what had become routine in their family.

But the baby was situated wrong, and it was a terrible night. When morning came, the doctor and nurses still hovered over her.

They almost didn’t make it, mother and child. When Charlie came to see his grandson, he noticed the boy had scratches all over
his head, from where the doctor had gripped him, trying to bring him safely into this world.

Charlie stared at the boy for a few minutes, then stuck his head in her room. “You got Edner and Juaniter beat,” he said, “’cause you had a boy.”

It was that night, or maybe the next, that Margaret stood over her son in the house just off the Piedmont Highway and told him, over and over and over again, that he belonged to her, to her alone.

His daddy might have some claim, but she knew even then she could not count on him. So she just stood over him and later lay beside him, to whisper those words to him. And as tired as she was from the hard birth, she was still awake the next morning, looking at him.

“He didn’t have a hair on his head,” she said, and he was long and thin, but she thought he was beautiful. Juanita said he was ugly, but she might have been kidding.

More and more, after coming back from Korea, Charles kept his own company. He had always been a drinker, but now he was drinking alone. And no one knew how long he would be gone, where he was or what he was doing. He showed up a little while after Sam was born. Charlie forgave him once or twice, but one day he saw more fear than anger in his daughter’s face after she’d spent time with him, and that ate his guts out. So one day, when Charles Bragg came for his wife and son, Charlie just held the boy in his arms and let his daughter choose. And the dark-haired boy, no flowers in his arms this time, drove away alone.

O
n Sundays, he would haul Ava and the girls to Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church, a small wooden chapel where the floor would shake from The Spirit and sensible shoes, and he would sleep in his 1946 Dodge while the people inside sang and shouted and celebrated in the high holy.

He never went inside, not once.

He could have faked it. He could have slid into one of those hard pews and nodded his head as the preacher sweated, pointed and rocked back and forth on his feet, in the grip of joy. But he hated hypocrites, hated people who quoted scripture as they picked your pocket.

So he just lived by his own morality, which a lot of people say they do, but it doesn’t count much if your heart is black as coal dust. The good people of the foothills could call Charlie a sinner in the purest sense, because of the likker and more, and because he never
talked to God. But knowing what I know, I wonder. How many people would want to stand naked before God side by side with him if heaven was winner-take-all.

It was fall, the night it happened, one of those nights when Sam filled his boots with coal just after Charlie closed his eyes.

Margaret and Sam were living with Charlie and Ava and the younger girls in a house not far from where James and his family lived. Charlie, who said he often felt cold, had started sleeping on a sofa in the living room. He had gotten more gaunt in the past few months, but he was so bony anyway, no one thought much about it.

Margaret and Sam were asleep when she heard the door open, and it scared her. In all her life, nothing good had come from being awakened in the middle of the night. But it was just her daddy, standing at the foot of the bed.

“I remember he put both his hands on the bedstead—I can still see his hands on the bedstead even today, and he said, ‘Wake up, Margaret, I want to tell you something.’ It really scared me, because he was so serious, and looking straight at me, and he just said: ‘I’m saved. The Lord has saved me.’”

It terrified her, because in a world of people who walked around talking about God, he had stood alone, unasking.

“He said, ‘I went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing this music, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. So I walked outside, and I saw that the music was coming from above, from where I guess heaven is. And then I heard a voice tell me that this was my last chance. I just wanted to tell you, tell you I was saved.’ Then he walked out of the room and walked down to James’s house, and told James.

“I wanted to ask him about the song,” Margaret said, “but I was too scared at the time.”

He didn’t tote a Bible around, after that, or go into the church, or preach to anyone else. He just knew he was saved, just knew the voice in the sky was real. He knew he had to give up his sins, and he did.