Ava's Man (32 page)

He stopped drinking.

He didn’t taper off, he just stopped.

It had to be God.

His daughters said it just had to be.

You hear stories like it a lot down here. People get saved in the tomato patch. They get saved driving to get a pack of Winstons, or get saved watching wrestling. Some people might laugh at it, but then they probably never heard music from the stars, and a voice in the sky. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, though. Wouldn’t that be fine.

T
hey were fishing, Charlie and Hootie, not far from Hootie’s old shack. They had some fried bologna sandwiches with hot mustard and a big wedge of sharp cheddar cheese, waiting in a sack stuck in the crook of a tree limb, if they got hungry. They hauled in mud cat, and Charlie talked and Hootie listened, the way it had always been. Charlie had raised much of his family in the years since he first met Hootie, and as the Bun-drum children grew up and married, Hootie had grown gray and wrinkled, though it was still hard to tell exactly how old he was. He didn’t help Charlie on the rooftops anymore because he was creaky and stove-up on the cold, wet mornings, but he still bundled up his clothes and climbed on the old car or truck when the Bundrums moved, still found an empty corner to lay his belongings and make his bed, still sat on the porch and rolled smoke, but now it was the grandchildren he handed the empty tobacco pouches to when he was done.

Though he was much older than Charlie—that much was plain—their relationship was reversed. Charlie was the father, and always had been. That was just the way it was, though from a distance, it must have looked so different, what with Charlie yammering on and on about something, and Hootie just nodding, sagely, every now and then.

When he did talk, he spoke to Charlie about being homesick for the river, but Charlie didn’t think much about it. Hootie had become a permanent thing, or at least that was how it seemed.

On this particular day, they caught all the fish they could tote. When it was time to leave, Hootie said, quietly but firmly:

“I believe I’ll stay.”

Charlie told him not to play folly, and come on. They’d have a fish fry.

“I believe I’ll stay,” Hootie said again.

“But why, son?” Charlie said, but he knew why, knew it better than most people.

This dark place just had a music only a special few people could hear.

“I’ll be back, by and by, to check on you,” Charlie said as the little man disappeared in the gloom, in the direction of his old shack.

When he pulled up in the yard, Jo and Sue asked him where Hootie was.

“He went home,” Charlie said.

He shouldn’t have missed him all that much, maybe. Jo and Sue were still in the house, lovely, blond-haired girls who did not fight like the older children had, but who held hands and did everything together, as if from some bedtime story. They were both quiet, and they took books into the woods to read. They doted on him, too, like the others did.

But it was a long, long time before he stopped glancing over to the corner where Hootie had lain, covered up to his hat with a quilt, only his long, hooked nose sticking out, like a smokestack.

It just didn’t seem right, somehow, not to holler over in the mornings, “Git up, boy, let’s ketch ’em ’fore somebody else does,” or pack an extra lunch for him when he went off to work.

It just didn’t seem right.

Y
ou can swing a hammer for a hundred years, swing it all your life, and all it does is throw sparks and drive nails and get hot from the friction, but it don’t bend and it don’t melt and it don’t even change. The handle, that part, will crack and shatter, but you either buy a new one at the mercantile, whittle a new one or get some black electrician’s tape and bind the old one tight enough to last, and just keep pounding. Because the business end, the driving steel, was made to outlast muscle and bone, even will. It just plain wears a man out and then passes from his hand to his son’s, then commences on him.

Even Charlie couldn’t wear out a hammer.

He landed a good-paying job in Clearwater, on the west coast of Florida, early in 1958. It was the farthest he had ever been from home, but he went down and pounded nails and came home with a wad of money in his pockets. He never liked banks. How could a man ever have more money than he could carry in his Liberties? It was beyond him.

He would have stayed longer, he said, maybe even saved up enough to make a down payment on a little house, but he had been feeling puny again.

That’s what he called it. Puny. Like it was a weakness, to get sick.

But he did get sick, and then sicker. He had not had a drink in months, but the doctor at the new hospital in Piedmont told him that he had lost too much of his liver, told him he was going to suffer, and he was going to die. The doctor didn’t know when exactly, just that it was certain, the hurting and the dying.

Charlie walked out of there and went to work, and just kept working, for months, because pity don’t feed the bulldog. But in the spring, the misery knocked his will out of him, and the hammer slipped from his big hand. It wasn’t his good hammer. He had forgotten his good hammer, left it with some men down in Clearwater, along with some other tools, when he got sick down there and had to come home.

It bothered him, not having it. All he had ever been, really, was a blue-collar man. He had made some whiskey, yes, and caught some catfish and jack salmon, but he was a roofer, mostly, a man who worked with tools—with that hammer and a level and a handsaw—and he didn’t really have much to leave, except them.

“We got to go get them tools,” he said to Ava, and Ava told him to hush, Charlie, stop worryin’ about them damn tools.

They had moved back to the Cove Road, not the same house, but close. The grandchildren still came and he still doted on Sam, but a gloom was on him.

In March, William and Juanita helped him into the backseat of William’s like-new 1956 Chevrolet. It was two-tone, blue and white, and as pretty a car as has ever been made.

They headed south, to get his tools. They had made a bed in the backseat, and he lay there, propped on pillows, wrapped in a quilt, as they glided between the pines.

He slept hard and long. He was still asleep as his children
crossed into Randolph County and into the little town of Wedowee, where a police cruiser pulled in behind them, and the officer turned on his flashing light.

Juanita was at the wheel. Juanita can drive anything that rolls.

But this time she had a little trouble with the gears, and the tires squealed a little as she found second, and that is enough in Wedowee to get you arrested, on a slow day.

They had a white plastic jug full of water between them on the bench seat, and as the officer strolled up he pointed to it.

“Is that likker?” he said.

William, who even as a grown man still had a little of the devil in him, picked the jug up and shook it so hard that little bubbles formed on the rim at the water level, the same way he had seen Charlie shake that moonshine in his beading bottle a long time ago.

“Got a fine bead on it, it sure does,” he said, and laughed, and then the officer took the jug, unscrewed the cap and sniffed it.

His face fell.

He told the Bundrums to try and be more careful, and walked stiff-backed to his cruiser. Charlie, apparently asleep in the backseat, had not even opened his eyes.

It was his last brush with the law, the last time they tried to hang a likker charge on him, and he slept through the whole damn thing.

It was a different Florida, then. The asphalt sliced through the scrub and palms and the thick oaks, so different, so alien, from the up-country forests. It had a loneliness to it, a loneliness that Floridians dream about today. The hottest thing going was the gator farms, and you could see a man wrestle one if you wanted to. The orange groves
stretched as far as you could see, in places, and the smell of the rotting fruit reached out to them.

It was cold, for Florida, and they rode with the windows rolled up tight. Charlie got cold easy, then.

He got bored in the back. He told William to pull over and let him drive, and even as a grown man, William found it hard to say no to him.

He had never been behind the wheel of a car as fine as this, a car William bought with his steel-plant money. He had never been behind the wheel of a car that could go as fast as this.

William and Juanita dropped off to sleep, but William soon awoke to the sound of the asphalt rushing, loud and fast, beneath the car. No matter how tight a car is, it has a sound to it when you turn it loose, when you pour the coal to it.

It sounds like water rushing fast through a big pipe, and that’s how it sounded then.

“Old man,” he said, “you pushing it a little hard, ain’t you?”

Charlie did not even turn around.

“Hush, boy. I know what I’m doing.”

And William closed his eyes again, and the power poles flashed past like fence posts, and Charlie looped his big hands over the wheel, and enjoyed the sound.