Ava's Man (9 page)

In size, she wasn’t much, just a little thing, a tad bowlegged, with hair down past her waist and those startling, silver-blue eyes. But the Maker must have had some personality left over from somebody else—Lutherans maybe—because He gave Ava about twice as much as anybody else. Even when she was growing up on her daddy’s nice farm in the Alabama foothills, her anger burned hotter and her happiness flashed brighter, it seemed, than was altogether natural. When sorrow gripped her, it gripped her like barbed wire, and her wails would make a person shiver. But when she was happy she drew everyone around her into the circle of her warmth, her joy, and you were grateful for it even as you waited for the mood to sharply turn, like a Sunday drive that ends in a head-on collision.

Her eyes went weak early in life, and she had to wear wire-rimmed glasses to read. People would drive past the house and wave
at the little girl on the porch with a book or a newspaper in her hands, but she didn’t look up. She loved learning, people said, and if it had been another time or place Ava might have been anything, done anything. But love, and luck, set her walking down a different road.

Ava’s momma, Mary Matilda, believed that being in the country was no excuse for being dumb as a turnip, and wanted her children to read. She bought them books, and got the newspaper mailed in from Atlanta, only a day or so late.

Ava loved that newspaper. She read it and reread it. It brought the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the Battle of Verdun and the fight in the Argonne Forest. In those pages, zeppelins fell from the sky and burst into flames and Pancho Villa invaded the United States on horseback. It may have seemed like it was just a little girl with glasses sitting on a porch with a paper in her lap in rural Alabama, but the whole world spun around her there on the front porch when the paper came.

Her father, William Alonzo Hamilton, was a hard-bitten Congregational Holiness, and convinced that the only book worth reading was the King James Bible. He had built a self-sustaining farm outside Gadsden in Etowah County, the kind of farm you see on Christmas cards, and even as Mary Matilda weaned her children on music and poetry, he fed them a steady diet of hard work and hard-rock religion.

There was, besides Ava, George, Bill, Fred, Grace, Lula, Plummer and Ruth, and on Sunday they filled half a pew. Ava learned her Bible forward and backward and sideways. She could tell you how long Moses wandered and how long Job suffered with sores and what fate befell Lot’s wife and what Paul and Silas had to do with things in general.

The Congregational Holiness take their Bible straight up, and if you have never seen a Holiness service, do not go if you expect it to be like any other Protestant faith. Ava grew up in a faith where the people get happy and just start to yell, where people begin to speak in
tongues, fall out on the floor and weep and laugh and go into trances, as if dead. God does not tiptoe into a Congregational Holiness church, He busts down the door and raises the roof and, quick as death, He is among them.

“They was shoutin’ people,” my mother, Margaret, told me. “Grace always said they was Baptists but they wasn’t Baptists because Baptists don’t shout. That much.”

The Hamiltons had roots, deep roots, in the foothills, and were, for lack of a better word, respectable. The children went to school and Ava was even a cheerleader at Ashville School. When she was in her eighties, she would break into a cheer sitting on the edge of the bed, then just lay back and go to sleep.

The schools in the foothills after the turn of the century did not have football teams, but many of them had small gymnasiums or hard asphalt courts, and on Friday nights boys played basketball in shining satin uniforms and black high-top tennis shoes. It was a time of two-handed set shots and granny-style free throws, but it was entertaining, and people came to games in wagons or on muleback. Men in overalls talked cotton prices and mule genealogy as Daughters of the Confederacy sold soft drinks for a nickel, and somebody always had a jug in the parking lot, if that’s what you call a place where the conveyances had to be roped tight to posts to keep them from running off.

Ava’s school, Ashville, was the bitterest rival of neighboring Steele Station, and the opposing team’s cheerleaders would taunt them with:

And the Ashville cheerleaders would stomp their feet and answer with:

Ava made good grades without trying a lick, but what she was really gifted at was music. Passersby came to remark on how, every time they drove their mule wagons past the Hamilton farm, it was as if someone had opened the lid on God’s own music box.

The music was everywhere, in the barn, in the fields of tomatoes and okra, out in the tall cotton, serenading the chickens, appeasing the pigs. It was almost like it was in the ground itself, but it was only in the children.

Ava and her brothers and sisters sang and played music because it was just so easy for them, the way other people are just tall, or fat, or redheaded. Not one of them was tone-deaf or all thumbs. Ava sang hymns to the corn rows and beasts of the field in a voice, I am told, of angels.

Sweet tenor and rich baritone drifted from the porch, and guitar pickers traded licks under the trees, plucking out gospel and blue-grass and even, when their daddy wasn’t looking, a little white man’s blues—stolen by William Alonzo’s boys when they snuck off to the train station in Gadsden. They risked hard whippings and eternal damnation to hear the raggedy whiskey drinkers pick on beat-up Gibsons before some deputy told them to just move on down the road.

The girls sang sweet and high at the clothesline, in the squash rows, with hoes in their hands. It was in them, and had to come out. Ava’s favorite was “Victory in Jesus,” but she loved “Birmingham Jail,” and “Precious Memories,” and “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and, especially, “Wabash Cannonball.”

Ava Hamilton was a Presley on her momma’s side, and was, in fact, a far distant relative of Elvis, though we have never tried to claim any of his money. The Presleys were musical people, singers and pickers, and that is where the gift came from. Mary Matilda played hymns on the piano and organ and taught her children how to read notes, how to play everything.

But Ava did not have to read notes. She could hear a song on the
Victrola or the Philco and sit down at the piano or snatch up a banjo or guitar and just play, and strangers were amazed. She just knew which key or which string matched the sound she had heard.

The only thing she could not do was play the violin, or fiddle. She tried, and the sound that came out could not be described as music. She would get mad, put it down and go pound hard on the piano. She had, most of her childhood, a harmonica hidden in the folds of her dress—seventy years later, she still did—and she would draw it like a gun and play:

This was a whole other culture than the one Charlie Bundrum was raised in, even though the people shared space beneath the same forest, traveled the same dirt roads. But one, his, was a culture of stills and eye-gouging fistfights and riverbank campfires where men passed clear whiskey from hand to hand and could cuss like champions. The other one, hers, was one where a woman taking off her bonnet in mixed company would make tongues wag.

Charlie and Ava saw each other for the first time, it is believed, at one of those basketball games. But they did not meet, formally, until the box-lunch social in Gadsden some months later.

At the socials, girls of courting age would fix a box lunch and boys of courting age, and sometimes old men who had been widowed, would bid on the food—but of course what they were really buying there was the pleasure of the young woman’s company for the time it took to eat.

Ava’s box lunch was, it must be said, a little bit of a lie. She was
no great cook as a young woman and her sisters had actually done the entire meal, figuring that Ava would never get married if she poisoned a man to death. So they fried some chicken and boiled some eggs and put in a wedge of pound cake, and dressed Ava in a pretty cotton dress with red flowers on it, and a matching bonnet. Then they tucked the box under Ava’s arm and eased her onto the stage, where fate and Charlie found her.

Later, when the fiddling started, someone laid down some boards and they buck-danced to the music, but they got a little off track and tore up the grass.

The fiddler was an old man who knew songs from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but now and then he would break into something written by and for these people, songs about mountain railroads and young love under willow trees and sometimes, as Ava would say, just plain folly.

And it suited Miss Hamilton and Mr. Bundrum to stomp, eyes locked on each other, till the band stopped playing.

He had few prospects. Her daddy didn’t think much of him. His reputation, for drinkin’ and flirtin’ and fightin’, was not good, even, Old Man Hamilton surmised, for Baptists. Ava’s family just said no to Charlie Bundrum and sent him away, and figured he would disappear.

He did.

They both did.

They lied about their age and got a preacher named Jones to marry them in his house in Gadsden, when she was sixteen and he was seventeen. And Ava just walked away from the upstanding, church-going life she had been raised in and followed a boy, a boy who could not even read or write, into uncertainty.

He just went and stole her out of it really, because he felt he deserved something special, and she went with him because she felt she did, too.

T
he men had been drinking the evening Jeff Baker got stabbed and bled clean through the brown sugar, his hot blood melting it, turning it into treacle just as fast as Newt Morrison and Mr. Hugh Sanders could pack it in his wounds. Jeff moaned and trembled, and the men praised God that Jeff had so much good likker in him, because surely that numbed his pain and prepared his soul.

It was in the summer, not long after they were wed, on the river not far from Newt Morrison’s farm. Newt, Mr. Hugh, Charlie, Jeff and some other men had walked down to the river to a still, to have a taste. The women—Ava, Newt’s daughter, Sis, and some others—sat on a wide porch, visiting.

As soon as the men were pretty well stone-blind, Jeff, a big man in his twenties who had no visible means of support and was also rumored to be unparticular about which chicken coop he visited late
at night, got into a fistfight with a man about as big as his leg. Jeff beat him into a bloody heap on the ground, but the little man was a gamer, and kept on coming.

Finally the small man staggered to his feet for what all the men there hoped would be the last time, and Jeff, who was not an evil man at heart, waved a fist at him to stay away, and turned his back.

Somewhere in his clothes the little man found a pocketknife, and he jumped on Jeff’s back and snaked one arm hard around his throat. Then he just started stabbing, reaching over to plunge the blade into Jeff’s side and chest, the knife like a windmill, flinging drops of blood.