Ava's Man (7 page)

There are few photographs of that time, but one, if you look at it hard and long enough, tells the story pretty well. It was taken when he was still a boy, during bad times.

The photo’s backdrop is a ragged shack of rough, unpainted board and the windows, without glass, are covered by a flap of black tar paper. The poverty is burned deep into the print. But the boy in the foreground is not one of those pitiful, hollow-eyed urchins who stare up from photo books of the Appalachians. Instead, he has a faint, almost imperceptible smile, as if the hard-eyed kinfolks who pose with him just haven’t heard the joke yet.

His sister Riller, already grown and married, stands beside him, her severe face framed by a black cloth hat. Someone has strung a garland of flowers, on a string or a vine, and looped it over the crown.

Mattie died at fifty-four, when Charlie was barely fifteen, and her children buried her in the pretty graveyard at Mount Gilead Church, in Websters Chapel. Hills rise up from the cemetery on almost every side, creating deep shade around the church. It is a lovely place to rest, that little pocket of cool, quiet dark.

Charlie never, ever talked about the funeral, about his momma in death, so I don’t know what was said, what was done for her. But in time I would learn that it is a tradition with us. We blot out the funeral—we erase the image of the coffin and the flowers and even the prayers—or at least we try. It is as if the dead just walked off somewhere, just after leaving us with a story, or a covered dish, or a whittled toy.

I have always said my people are smart.

By his momma’s death, Charlie was more man than most ever get, a tall, hard, strong and smiling man, as if he were immune to the fires that had scorched him, if not purified by them.

He lived for fiddle music and corn likker, and became a white-hot banjo picker and a buck dancer and a ladies’ man, because women just love a man who can dance. At seventeen he could cut lumber all day, then tell stories all night, and people in the foothills said he would never settle down or maybe even amount to much. But the boy could charm a bird off a wire. And there seemed to be no fear in him, no fear at all. It was almost as if he had died already, met the devil and knew he could charm him or trick him or even whip him, because what did ol’ Scratch have left to show him that he had not already seen.

His daddy was an upright citizen, toward the end.

The warrants for Jimmy Jim’s arrest had all faded to yellow, and he came home from the flat country to marry again, this time to a pretty nineteen-year-old girl named Ruth. But little Ruth died less than a year later in childbirth, and he buried her with the baby, an unnamed girl child, in a grave in Georgia, the still infant resting in her rigid arms.

No one seems to know why the lawmen in the foothills, on either side of the state line, let him be. It may be he was older, and seen as less dangerous. It may be they just forgot him. He went to work making coffins, and traveled, visiting his children and grandchildren.

It is mostly a myth, I believe, that men will mellow with time—
there are men in my family who would hack off your ear as they waited to die in the nursing home—but Jimmy Jim seemed to change, to bend, I guess.

I heard from my momma that he would go to his children’s houses and teach their wives how to make stew. He met my grandma, Ava, and Ava, hard to impress, said late in her own life that she liked the old man.

It may be, as some said, he just felt hell licking at his ankles and tried to change. It happens a lot, down here. It is why a lot of the deacons are old men. But Jimmy Jim was not used up, not quite yet. At sixty-two, he married Dolee Semmes Fowler, and soon she was expecting a child.

He had been a dramatic man all his life. But on February 15, 1927, his heart just stopped. It would have been more befitting his legend if Jimmy Jim had been shot down in a pistol fight. But he went out soft and quiet, like a cat leaving a room.

They buried him in north Georgia, in the high mountains near Chattanooga. His last child, Vera, was born after his death.

In the spring of 1994, a tornado, the storm of the century, tore across the mountain and dropped onto the Mount Gilead cemetery, knocking some of the headstones over and pulling others from the ground. Mattie’s headstone was untouched.

H
e could run, man, could he run. Up and over the ridges and down, down into the hollows, he trailed the dogs that trailed the possums, his ears tuned to their music. The hounds would bark short and sharp as they ran through the darkness, their miraculous noses scudding along the pine needles and dead leaves, seeking, seeking, all the time gaining, gaining. Charlie ran with a tow sack trailing his back pocket, swinging a lantern from one fist, and in the pitch black of the woods it looked like a ball of lightning bouncing through the brush and trees. Then the timbre of the music would change, from the quick, static barks to an urgent, mournful howl, and Charlie would shout out “Treed!” to the men who were too old or fat or drunk to keep up, and he’d follow that sound to the dogs. The hounds, their ears half chewed away from encounters with angry coons and bobcats, would be quivering and baying and staring up into the dark branches, doing what they were bred to do. The possum, silver-gray with teeth that could punch a
hole in a can of Pet milk, would hiss from his perch, his eyes shining red in the gloom.

“Got you, Mr. Possum,” Charlie would say, and he’d climb up and deftly snatch that possum by the scruff and stick it in a sack.

“Let the dogs have him,” some men would say, wanting to see some sport. But Charlie, still a teenager then, would just shake his head.

“They’s a colored lady in town gives me fifty cents,” he’d say, and he would drag the dogs away from the trees—a good hunting dog is smart but will fixate on a tree the way some men fixate on lost love—and get them running down another trail, to another possum.

If he couldn’t sell them, he would give them away and hope to be invited for supper—hopefully on a night they were not having possum.

Later, the men would gather around a fire and tell lies and stories, and to Charlie that was as good as anything on this earth.

The most famous such story from his time was that of a man who sat by the fire lamenting that his wife was not a beautiful woman.

“Beauty,” one of the hunters told him, “is skin deep.”

The man thought about that a minute.

Then he got up and walked off into the darkness.

“Where you a’goin’?” someone shouted after him.

“Home,” came his voice, from the darkness. “To skin my wife.”

These are the stories young Charlie heard and told as he hunted, fished and loafered from Georgia to Alabama and back again in the first two decades of the twentieth century, moving by car, mule wagon or passing freight car. Some people say poverty is a box. For Charlie, as a teenager, it was everything outside the box.

He was as free as a man could be, with no land, no money, just a borrowed bed in some kinfolks’ houses and a change of clothes. He could have tied everything he owned to the end of a stick, asked someone to feed his dog and hopped a train, leaving this place for good.

But this was his place, even though he did not own enough of it to fill a snuffbox. It was his as much as anybody’s.

Him and his kind were too wild for church and too raggedy for the Kiwanis Club, but they were as much a part of the landscape as the mockingbirds and the camellias and the red brick—baked from the clay—that held up the towns.

They lived on mostly beans and bread, but it was good beans, good bread. On every stove, a pot of pintos simmered, a ham hock or a thick piece of fatback swimming in the thick brown soup. They ate great northerns, limas, black-eyed peas and purple butter beans, but nothing even came close to pinto beans. Pintos were good enough for company.

In every stove, a golden cake of cornbread baked in an iron skillet, and the smell of the hot bread and bacon grease—you always smeared bacon grease around the skillet before you poured in the meal—would draw people in from the yard. The women would put the pone of bread on a dinner plate and cover the top with another dinner plate, because that’s how it was always done and always will be.

Sometimes, if the season was right, the women would mix pork cracklin’s—little cubes of rendered pork fat and skin—into the meal and lard and buttermilk or water, and men carried it—just that—in their lunch pails to the cotton mills, coal mines and pipe shops.

And sometimes, for a change, people just crumbled up a little cornbread in a glass or a bowl and poured cold buttermilk or sweet milk over it, and ate it with a spoon. They chopped hot Spanish onions up in it, and that was a meal.

They fried okra and squash and green tomatoes in the summer, and turned cucumbers into sweet pickles and pickled cabbage and pepper sauce into chow-chow, a red-hot relish that people ate with their beans. In the fall they ate collards and cooked turnips with butter and salt and pepper—a good turnip will just melt under your tongue. Deer rode across the hoods of Model Ts and across the
rumps of mules, and smart cooks ground it up with a little pork sausage, to give it taste, or soaked roasts in buttermilk, to make the meat less gamey. They scrambled squirrel brains into their eggs, and made candy for their children by melting cane sugar in skillets and then letting it get hard.