Ava's Man (26 page)

She did not compete with Charlie for their love, the way some mommas do. She was far, far too busy, and too damn smart, for that.

She knew he had their hearts, mostly.

She knew, as much as anybody in the whole wide world, how he could break them.

T
he night James decided to kill George Buchanan, Charlie was in the yard, enjoying the night air and looking at the stars a little bit before he went in to bed. You could see the stars on the Cove Road, clear and bright just like when he was a boy on that bad mule riding in from the big city of Gadsden. He was not a smoker and he didn’t like to dip right before he went to bed, so sometimes he just went out into the yard and stood in the quiet, especially if Ava was emotional that night. Sometimes Hootie walked out with him and waited on him to say something, and if he didn’t that was fine, too. And they would stand and listen to crickets and night birds, and Hootie would talk to them awhile.

Charlie was alone that night, standing so quiet and still that James did not even see him slouching there, in the shadows, when James tiptoed into the house to get a gun.

It was a good thing he was there, good for James, good for the Bundrum family, and especially good for George Buchanan.

It happened this way:

James, Phine and their first baby, Mary, were between houses and living with Charlie and Ava then. James had gone out drinking that night with George, which was his first poor decision of the evening, “because everybody knew George was mean as a snake,” James admitted.

George Buchanan was about the only man anyone knew in this corner of the country who’d had his throat cut and lived. He was a big man with squinty blue eyes and chin whiskers, and a man not to be messed with.

As they pulled up in the yard in George’s Model A, he looked over at James, who was about twenty-two then.

“You got any money on you, Bundrum?” he said.

James said he didn’t have none.

“You a liar,” George said.

James just got out and slammed the door and George drove off, but with every step he made to the house his rage ticked up a little, getting hotter and hotter. By the time he touched the screen door he knew that he had to kill George. It might not have been his conclusion if he had been sober and clear-headed, but he wasn’t. He quietly took the shotgun off the wall—everyone inside was sleeping—and went back outside.

He checked the gun. It was loaded with double-aught buckshot. It could knock a deer down or blow out a man’s chest.

George only lived a little piece off and James figured to walk over there and kill him, but he had barely made it off the porch when he heard, almost in a whisper:

“Hey, boy.”

He saw his daddy standing in the moonlight.

“Hey, Daddy,” he said.

“What you doin’ with that gun?”

“I reckon I’m gonna kill George,” he said.

His daddy didn’t say anything.

“I’m mad,” James said.

He started walking and his daddy fell into step beside him. They walked down a little hill, and Charlie told him to hold up a minute.

“Son,” he said, “you got a wife and a little baby in that house.”

“I know,” James said, “but—”

“I said you got a wife and baby in that house,” Charlie said, not used to repeating himself.

“But,” James said, “I—”

Charlie hit his son as hard as he could across the jaw with his clenched fist, hard as he could because that boy was as big as him now, and as strong, and because he intended it to be the last lick passed in anger that night, or in love.

James’s head snapped back and his arms flew out and Charlie took the shotgun as his son fell backward onto the ground. To James, it was like lightning hit him in his jaw. It burned for one hot, brutal second and then he went to sleep. He was sleeping before he hit the ground.

He woke up a little later to see his daddy there, still looking at the stars.

“I said,” his daddy began, as if the punch had never been thrown, “that you got a wife and a baby now, and if you’d killed him, you’d be gone.”

To James, it seemed like the words were coming from very, very far away.

“They’d put you in the penitentiary,” Charlie said, “and who would take care of them?”

He helped James up and they went back to the house.

“If you ever do anything that damn dumb again,” Charlie said, his hand on his boy’s arm, “I’ll leave you for the buzzards.”

At home, James bled a whole lot onto a pillowcase.

It might seem a little hypocritical. If George Buchanan had ever called Charlie a liar, Charlie might have killed him on the spot. But it is one thing to beat on a man in anger and another to shoot him when he steps out on his porch. Charlie understood the finer points of the law, as it applied to poor people and drinking men.

He also had more than forty years of life to look back on, at the mistakes, at the violence he had seen, had dealt out and had survived. He had seen its consequences, and stood humbled before judges, hating it and counting his sentence off in his mind, wondering how many groceries Ava had, wondering—his mind working quick—if he would be out before they had to do without.

Some people would call it a complicated existence, would wonder how come he did not do right all the time, and spare himself and his family that drama.

The answer is that if he had, he would have been somebody else.

As he got older, he thought things through more. He used what people remember as a pretty fine brain more than his knuckles. But the truth is, sometimes it takes both.

He could have reasoned with James that night, and in fact he had honestly tried, but it was just a mile or two to the Buchanan place, and every step they took closer to it was one more step he might have had to carry his son back. Most men, hit by him, didn’t come to that quick, but hitting James was like punching himself, and he knew how hard his head was.

“Knocked me out, cold as an onion,” James would say, when it came up on Sundays and Christmas Eve and around the campfire. “If he
asked you something, you was supposed to answer him straight, and I forgot that, that night. And he always said that if you ever hit anybody, hit ’em hard, and I reckon I forgot that, too. But things like that, once your eyes can focus right again, make you love your daddy. I know everybody loves their daddy, I know you’re supposed to. But there I was, a grown-up man, and he was still saving me. Now, ain’t that one hundred percent man?”

I
t is not a family that will talk for long about sadness, and on some days, sadness is all there is. James’s two smallest babies died when his and Phine’s house burned that year, while he was at work and she was at the neighbor’s home. Mary and Jeanette, the two oldest girls, crawled out a window, but a boy baby, James Junior, and girl baby, Shirley, died in the black smoke. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to us,” said Margaret. That is the most anybody said about it in fifty years, and about all there is to say now.

M
argaret didn’t mind being up so high, for the same reason a baby laughs when you toss it in the air.

“We helped him roof, me and Juanita, when I was about twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t scared being so high because I knew he would stop me if I fell, and it didn’t scare Juanita, because it just didn’t. Nothing did much. But Daddy wouldn’t take us with him to roof if he was roofing in town, because men would holler at us, and Daddy didn’t like that.”

Juanita was a teenager then and tough as a prison bantamweight, but slim and dark-haired and pretty, which is why Charlie never let his two teenage girls help him roof in town. It must have been a sight, though, the rawboned man in his baggy overalls kneeling up high on the skyline with the pretty dark-haired girl working on one side of him and another, fairer daughter swinging a hammer on the other side. He would fill his mouth full of roofing nails and spit
one nail, just one, into his open hand, and seat the nail with one lick. That way, he could keep one hand partly free to snatch at one of the girls if they slipped.

He got out of bed slow one morning, feeling weak, like he could barely raise his arms, let alone a hammer. At the job, when he tried to climb the ladder, he made a step or two, and just sagged. He drove home from the job, but when he pulled up in the driveway he sat awhile behind the wheel, holding on to it. Margaret, who was twelve or thirteen then, was not even born the last time he had been sick, when the scaffold fell on him. All her life, he was not just healthy, he was bulletproof.

Now he went bone white from the pain in his insides, and couldn’t eat. He told Ava he had to see the doctor at Holy Name of Jesus Hospital, and he would drive himself over to Gadsden in the morning.

As he got ready to go, Charlie looked at Margaret and said, “Pooh Boy, why don’t you ride over there with me and we can stay the night with Riller and Tobe”—his sister and brother-in-law, who still lived in Gadsden. And Margaret wondered why, if they were just going to see a doctor, they would need a place to stay.

She didn’t really want to go, because hospitals were sad places and sick places, and Holy Name was a Catholic hospital, run by the strange Catholic nuns. But she was glad her daddy asked her to go, so she crawled into his old car with him and they headed up the Gadsden highway.

Her daddy walked into the hospital but didn’t come out that night, or the next. Only the nuns came in and out. To Margaret, they looked like angels, but that did not make her feel any better.

Riller, now on her way to being an old woman, and Tobe, who
had retired from the steel plant, sat with him in the hospital. But Charlie told them he didn’t want to scare his daughter, so every night she sat in the car in the hospital parking lot and waited.

She spent her days with Riller, and her aunt sent her on errands. One day Tobe’s false teeth tore up—Margaret can’t recall exactly how a person tears up a set of teeth—and Riller sent Margaret to the repair shop with Tobe’s teeth wrapped in a napkin.

She walked with the grinning teeth held way, way out in front of her, because sometimes the napkin slipped off and the hard pink part, the gum part, brushed her hand. She hated that, and she wished her daddy would hurry and get well. But one thing was certain. She never had any use for false teeth after that.

She was lean and light-skinned and her hair was almost white, and it hung completely straight. Jo had got all the curls, and Margaret would rub her hair between her fingers and wish it didn’t just hang there the way it did.

But mostly, she just wanted to be brave. She wanted to be just like him, fearless like him, but she couldn’t be.

“You couldn’t scare him, but I took after poor ol’ Momma, and Momma was scared about all the time, unless you made her mad. I always wished I could be fearless. Because I hated it, being scared. Juanita was just like Daddy. She wasn’t scared of nothing, and I guess she never was. I wish I could have took after him, like Juanita took after him. She’s more like him than any of us. She got the guts and the backbone. She just copes with things. But fear, Lord, it works out on me.”