Ava's Man

On the Big Rock Candy Mountain
The police have wooden legs
The bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The trees let down their rich, ripe fruit
And you sleep on silky hay
And the wind don’t blow and there ain’t no snow
Forever and a day

—
A SONG FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION

S
he was old all my life. Even when I was sitting in the red dirt, fascinated with my own toes, Ava’s face had a line in it for every hot mile she ever walked, for every fit she ever threw. Her hair was long and black as crows, streaked with white, and her eyes, behind the ancient, yellowed glass of her round spectacles, were pale, pale blue, almost silver. The blind have eyes like that, that color, but Ava could see fine, Ava could see forever. She could tell your fortune by gazing into the dregs of your coffee cup, and swore that if the bottoms of your feet itched, you would walk on strange ground. She could be gentle as a baby bird and sweet as divinity candy, but if her prescription was off, or if she just got mad, she would sit bolt upright in bed at three o’clock in the morning and dog-cuss anyone who came to mind, including the dead. Some days she would doze in her rocker and speak softly to people that I could not find, even by looking under the porch. Now I know I was just listening to her dreams.

In her time she buried two daughters, one just a baby, one full-grown, and when she passed eighty my aunts just stopped telling her when people she loved had died. A kindness, I suppose. Near the end of her life, as her mind began to wobble, she would recall how pretty my ex-wife looked at Christmas dinner eighteen years ago, yet not remember yesterday. But when I think of her now I think of a woman still strong and hard in her late sixties, a woman with a banjo propped against the foot of her bed, ten thousand hairpins in the pocket of her dress and more personalities than the state hospital in Tuscaloosa. I think about how the sudden summer thunderstorms would rattle the window glass and make cups jump off their saucers, and how, unimpressed, the old woman would just take a dip of snuff and mumble, “Ol’ devil’s beatin’ his wife.”

Because she was old, and could be trusted with babies and halfwits, it was her job to watch over me when my momma, her sixth child, went to work. She would look down on me from her rocker, talking to me and, as she grew older, herself. In time I could even gauge that old woman’s mood by the pace of her chair’s squeaking runners on the bare pine planks—slow when her mind was restful, quick when she was mad, and fast, racehorse fast, when she was remembering. The sheer power of it would send those runners to squeaking fierce and hot, back and forth, and to this day I still wonder why the whole damn thing didn’t blaze up from the friction of it, and burn the house down.

She had been widowed young and never remarried, and as a child I just assumed she had always been that way, an old woman alone. There was a man once, a peddler for the Saxon Candy Company who seemed to have a lot more on his mind than salt-water taffy. But if that little ol’ man was a suitor, he was pitiful at it, and he did not give up so much as just timidly fade away. That did not stop her grandchildren from kidding her about him, from asking if she was going to run off with him someday in his panel truck full of pecan logs.

“Grandma,” we would ask, in a joke that spanned twenty years, “you goin’ to get you a man?”

Most times she just sniffed and ignored us, but sometimes she would slap her heavy black shoes down hard on the porch, applying the brakes, and the rocker’s runners would freeze in mid-squeak. We fled, usually, because she was prone to strike out, quick as a rattler, and knock us upside the head when she was displeased. But instead of hollering or swinging at us, she would just start to grin, as if something that had gone cold in her memory had begun to glow for just a second or two in time. It was probably just her medicine again, but it is better to believe it was a speck of heat from something that had once crackled and roared along the banks of the Coosa River back when it was wild, in the days before the power company dams turned it into a big brown faucet that could be switched on and off at will.

“No, hon,” she would say, “I ain’t goin’ to get me no man.” And then she would start to rock again, with satisfaction.

“I had me one.”

His name was Charlie Bundrum and he was probably the only man on earth who could love that woman and not perish in the flame.

He was a tall, bone-thin man who worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in a fist as hard as Augusta brick, who ran a trot-line across the Coosa baited with chicken guts and caught washtubs full of catfish, who cooked good white whiskey in the pines, drank his own product and sang, laughed and buck-danced, under the stars. He was a man whose tender heart was stitched together with steel wire, who stood beaten and numb over a baby’s grave in Georgia, then took a simple-minded man into his home to protect him from scoundrels who liked to beat him for fun. He was a man who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name, but who was bad to
drink too much, miss his turn into the driveway and run over his own mailbox.

He was a man who did the things more civilized men dream they could, who beat one man half to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a .410 shotgun when she tried to cut him with a butcher knife, who beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and threw them headfirst out the front door of a beer joint called the Maple on the Hill. He was a man who led deputies on long, hapless chases across high, lonesome ridges and through brier-choked bogs, whose hands were so quick he snatched squirrels from trees, who hunted without regard to seasons or quotas, because how could a game warden in Montgomery or Atlanta know if his babies were hungry?

He was just a man, I guess, whose wings never quite fit him right, who built dozens of pretty houses for Depression-era wages and never managed to build one for the people he loved the most, who could not read but always asked Ava to read him the newspaper so he would not be ignorant, who held iron bars and babies in his massive hands and called my momma “Pooh Boy,” which makes me smile.

He died in the spring of 1958, one year before I was born.

I have never forgiven him for that.

For most of my life he was no more real, no more complete, than a paper doll. I learned, scrap by scrap, that he was a carpenter, roofer, whiskey maker, sawmill hand, well digger, hunter, poacher and river man, born at the turn of the century in a part of the country that is either Alabama or Georgia, depending on how lost you are, or if you even care. But I knew almost nothing else about him growing up, because no one in my momma’s family talked much about him. As years and even decades slipped by, I began to wonder if I would
uncover anything at all about my grandfather, or if he would just remain a man of secrets I would never know.