Ava's Man (10 page)

Jeff was screaming, staggering. The other men—they might have acted faster if they had not been so damned drunk—pulled the tiny man off him and flung him aside, and Jeff slumped face first in the dirt.

“He’s kilt,” Newt said, as the little man ran off, crashing through the weeds.

But the wounds still pumped blood. The men all grabbed an arm or leg and staggered—from the weight of the man, and their own unsteady, tossing decks—all the way back to Newt’s house. Newt called for brown sugar. Everyone knew that if you packed a wound with enough brown sugar, it could clot the blood and stop a man from bleeding to death.

But as fast they could cake it on, the blood from the stab wounds washed it away, until Newt and Mr. Hugh were bloody up to their elbows and most of the people had begun to pray. Mr. Hugh searched his mind for a scripture that could save the man. Just because a man is drunk does not mean he cannot speak to the Lord.

“Does anybody know that goddamn Bible verse?” he shouted. “This son of a bitch is bleeding to death.”

“Which ’un?” several people asked.

“Ezekiel,” he yelled.

Ava, who hated any violence she was not directly involved in, had stood trembling. But now she stepped smartly forward as if called from on high, and knelt at the man’s side.

“And when I passed by thee, and see thee polluted in thine own blood,” she quoted, “I said unto thee, ‘When thou wast in thy blood, live ye.’ I said unto thee, ‘When thou wast in thy blood, live.’”

“That ’un,” Mr. Hugh said, looking at Ava in something close to awe.

“Chapter 16,” Ava said.

Mr. Hugh said that seemed like it.

“Verse 6,” Ava said.

It would be a grand story if the blood had ceased to flow right then, at that precise moment, but it didn’t. Yet somehow, either through the will of God or the coagulating properties of brown sugar, the wounds soon stopped pouring and began to seep, slowly. Of course, by then Jeff was bled almost white.

They figured there was no need to take him to a doctor, and when he came to he told them, “No, I reckon I’ll just lay here and die.”

He paid Sis and Newt’s other children a nickel a day to brush the flies off him, and he waited to die for a long, long time. Finally, after a few days, Newt told him that if he wasn’t going to die he sure did want his porch back, and Jeff got up and walked on down the road.

This was the life Charlie had delivered Ava unto, a place where people still lived shrouded by the trees, where the local sheriff was a deacon who meted out justice based on the season, because all the roads in and out of the backcountry were dirt and his old Model T was bad to sink up to its axles in the mud. Here, the people knew, a man sometimes just needed killing, and if it was more or less unanimous,
the kilt man was buried quietly and no one ever saw any reason to call the law.

Here, Ava would need every scrap of Bible she ever knew.

She was not a city girl. Ava had been raised with a hoe in her hand, swatting at sweat bees, and she had stood on the fence and gazed unblinking when her daddy entered their hogpen with a .22 rifle and a razor-sharp butcher knife. But the place Charlie took her to was not safe and solid country living the way she had known it.

Charlie took her to a high place in Georgia, cut by three rivers. In Rome, smack-dab in the middle of that city, the Etowah and the Oostanaula converged to form the Coosa, and it was the Coosa that, all his life, ran through Charlie’s heart.

Rome bustled with cotton mills, cement plants and ironworks that specked the night sky with orange fires. It had a massive drawbridge down on Fifth Avenue that opened to let the barges through. Endless trains, hauling tons of iron ore, belched smoke and shook the earth. Children put pennies on the tracks and the weight mashed them thin as notebook paper.

Most roads were dirt and brick, but the place had a clock tower so high that it disappeared from sight on a cloudy day, and a brand-new federal courthouse, lousy with revenuers.

Charlie didn’t much like town, but the industry meant workers and workers meant houses, and a good hammer swinger could make a living here. But like many men who had grown up in the woods, he saddled his mule and rode off into the trees when the boss man said quit, and he did not stop until the foundry fires were lost in the distance and the ground did not shake from machines.

The river ran there, right there. The Coosa, a muddy green where it ran clean and swift around giant rocks, turned brown when the red mud washed in from the rains. The river flooded high, clean up into the low branches of trees. It ate into the banks and formed deep caves overhung by the twisted, exposed roots of trees that clung to the disappearing ground.

Monsters lived here. Fat water moccasins coiled around the lower branches, thick as a man’s arm. Snapping turtles, as big around as a car tire with jaws strong enough to snap a broomstick in two, lurked in the deep, dark holes. Just under the river’s surface, primeval catfish, four feet long, hung suspended in that translucent water as their whiskers, like snakes clinging to their jaws, undulated in the slow current.

Charlie spent every spare moment on it. He did not have a store-bought boat. He took the hoods of two junk cars and welded them together to form a craft that he powered by muscle, using a long pole to push the boat along the sluggish water. Ava refused to get in it, and he laughed until she stomped up the bank.

They lived in a house that was not much better than a shack, but Ava’s momma had given her a good kerosene lantern, so they had light. It may have not been just what she expected, but while she did carp and nag—it was her prerogative to carp and nag—she stayed.

The people were almost as wild as the country, and their language alone could knock a regular God-fearing person flat on their back. It was not that they did not believe in the Bible. It was that they believed in other things, too.

Here, when people got sick, they sent for healers—women who had a power in them that no one questioned if they were smart—and a healing woman named Lula was known to have taken a cancer out of a man named James Couch, but was called too late to save Pine Knot Johnson.

No one had to worry about the future. The old women knew how to tell it. They would dump the grounds from their coffee cups in a saucer and move it around with their fingers, and they could tell your fortune that way.

It could be something of as great import as life or death, or they might look at you and say you were going to get a letter. They read palms, and used herbs to ease morning sickness and cure a baby’s croup.

People knew that if you dropped a fork, company was coming, and if a piece of food fell to the floor, it meant you secretly grudged sharing your meal.

If a snapping turtle bit you, even if you cut off its head, it would not turn loose until it thundered. Night birds were bad luck, and babies born at night were at peril if the night birds called.

And there was no ailment on earth, from a bee sting to a bullet wound, that could not be eased by daubing on a little wet snuff.

Ava listened to it all, mixing it in her mind with the doctrine of her Holiness upbringing, and stored it away. To her, the girl who loved learning, this was just a whole new kind of knowledge.

Whiskey ran through the place just as surely as the river, and on every bend, it seemed, the thin, dark trickle of smoke marked the spot of a still. Ava’s man, still a boy, really, brought home money on Friday and only drank homemade likker, and on weekends they went to Newt’s and wound up the Victrola, and danced on the porch.

In the week she did stoop labor, picking cotton or corn, tended her own garden and waited for a child.

And late at night, after supper, she read him the newspaper. He sat beside her, and she would have taught him to read if he had wanted, but they never got around to it. He could sign his name, and he could do math—because a boss man would cheat a worker who could not count—but to him books were a secret, locked up tight. And no one wanted a hammer swinger who quoted poetry.

And so they lived. He was different from many men of his time and place. If they were in the same general area, they sat or stood together. If she hung clothes, he stood at the line. And, unheard of for a man, he helped her cook. She made the biscuits and he fried the meat—steak when he had just finished a job, or pork chops, or thick smoked bacon—and made the gravy. There was plenty of work then, so they ate good, real good. There were no one-egg days, but two-and three-egg days. They lived, though simply, richly, if rich means a good cup of coffee.

They did not have a car, but had a mule who hated most human beings, for reasons that only mules can tell. The mule would pull a plow if he wanted, but he often did not want to plow in a straight line. When anyone put him in harness, he would start out in a clean, straight line down the row and then just turn hard right or left and, as fast as he could, snort and buck and drag the plow and the cussing plowboy across the field. He would also lie down and refuse to get up, even when Charlie demanded it—and he always seemed to hate Charlie a little less than most.

Finally Charlie learned that if he went in the house and got his shotgun and sent one shot high across the mule’s ears—kind of like firing a warning shot across a ship’s bow—the mule would snort indignantly, bray at the sky and rise.

If he and Ava had to go a good ways off, to town or to family, he saddled the mule and she climbed up, cautiously, behind her husband, arms locked around his waist, and they traveled. If that mule bucked, he would club it one good time across the ears, which sounds a tad mean but not to anyone who has ever had to argue with a mule. And Ava would mumble to his back about why in God’s name did they not own a wagon.

He was good to her, except for calling her “Four-Eyes,” and he was never mean to her when he drank. In fact, she never saw him drink. She just dealt with the fallout.

Once every few months he would not come home for supper, and it was torture for a wife still not eighteen. But late at night she would hear a slow thud of hoofbeats in the yard, and she would carry her good lantern out to the porch, to see Charlie’s mule stomping into the yard.

Charlie would be drunk as Cooter Brown and singing cowboy music, and if he had not lost his hat, he waved it, and tried to get the mule to rear up like he was Tom Mix or Lash LaRue.

But mules rear from the back end, and the mule—it was such a distasteful creature that it was never given a name—would fling its
hind legs straight out and duck its head and Charlie would go flying to the earth headfirst, too drunk to alter his trajectory.

The mule, to his credit, would not stomp him to death, and would step carefully around Charlie—a good mule will do that—and trot to the pasture. And Ava, depending on how mad she was at him, would sit her lantern on the porch and go down and half carry, half drag him up to his bed.

Or not. And he would lay on the ground, mumbling about how, someday, Lord, he sure would like to have him a nice, gentle horse, one that would let him down easy. After a while he would notice that he was alone, that the ground was hard and that the night was cold, and go hunt for a door handle that—dammit to hell—didn’t seem to be where he had left it. He must have wasted years, groping for that knob.

Her tongue was sharp, from the beginning. And, in the beginning, he liked it that way.

She was more prone to voice her opinion, probably, than most women of that time, and with Ava there was never any such thing as a compromise. But while she complained a lifetime about being cast into the damned wilderness, she always knew she had found something in this man that she had never seen in another, certainly not in any of the Congregational Holiness she had known since birth.

He talked to her.

He did not grunt about crops and scripture. He talked.

If he dug a well, he did not say, “Well, today I dug a well.”

It might just be a hole in the ground, but he made it seem like a tunnel into adventure.

“You should have been there, Ava,” he told her once as they sat at their little table, their heads close together within the circle of lamplight.