Ava's Man (33 page)

They stopped in a grove of grapefruit trees—people did that, then—and Charlie picked a big one off a tree and broke it open in his hands, and ate the whole thing leaning against the car.

They found his tools, then drove over to the Gulf before heading home. Juanita had never seen anything like it, but the wind was cold and the sand was cold, and Charlie just stayed in the car.

He had never loved the Gulf, anyway, the way some men do. It was like Guntersville. It was water without an end to it, too wide for a
footlog. Water like that, so deep blue, could just swallow up a man, and it would be like he had never been.

They drove home with his tools on the floorboard at his feet, and not long after that he went into the hospital in Piedmont. It was a fine, fine hospital, people said. It was long and narrow, like a chicken house, and made from red brick. It had green tiled floors and smelled like most of them do, of disinfectant and Salisbury steak and fear. He came out on an Easter Sunday. Margaret remembers, because she took him an Easter lily.

Everyone was glad about that. They had him, again, among them. But Margaret knew something was wrong, because his eyes were shining from the wet in them.

All her life, she would hate hospitals. So many educated people, so much medicine, so many machines.

All those healers with such nice, clean hands.

A
va and Charlie had been together for more than three decades. Thousands of nights, she helped him find his bed when he came home befuddled, grinning and stumbling and singing about love and trains. Thousands more, she worried herself old waiting for the rumble of his truck in the driveway.

She dragged that cotton sack, to help pay their way, and pricked her fingers on those sewing needles, being careful not to bleed onto the cloth. But more than anything, she gave him the children that gave him a reason to laugh, and a reason to live.

Now she looked at him and wept, for him, for her, for all the people who believed that he hung the moon. And for once, it was not just Ava bawling again, but something that drove everybody else from that room, leaving them truly alone for the first time in … hell, could they even remember? She had a right to cry. For everyone else, he had
been a wall that protected them. For her, he was the wall she threw herself against, over and over and over again.

He decided he would not die here, in this house, under her watch. He would not die here with his three youngest daughters, Margaret, Jo and Sue, watching.

Jo was seventeen, Sue was fourteen, and Margaret, though already grown, had depended on him more than anyone. It would hurt them, sadden them. But Ava, so brittle, might shatter, might never come back from it at all.

He asked Edna, the oldest daughter, the tough and sensible one, to take him home with her. She said she would put a little soft bed in the living room where the television was, and they could all watch the boxing matches and Cisco and Pancho, and Lucy.

“I’ll cook special for you, Daddy,” she promised him, but that was not why he went with her, she knew.

“Daddy knew I was tough.”

Now, on the morning after Easter, he waited for her to come and get him and take him away.

He fretted as the morning passed into afternoon.

“Lord,” he said, within Margaret’s hearing, “I wish she would come on.”

Ava went and sat in a bedroom, and stared at the floor. She could not bear looking at him, the way he moved without strength, without purpose.

Sam toddled around the floor, but Charlie did not seem to notice him much. Margaret could not bear it, the sadness in the house. She moved from room to room, silently, but her mind was screaming.

Finally Charlie noticed the baby boy, who stared up at him, unblinking.

Charlie could not pick him up, he had gotten so big, so he just reached down and touched the top of his head.

“You don’t let nothin’ happen to him,” he said, looking at his daughter. Margaret nodded. He had said it before, so many times, but then it had been a command.

Now, it sounded like he was begging.

“You can’t let nothin’ happen to him.”

He paced feebly around the house, and every few minutes he would look out the front door and mumble: “Come on, come on.”

Later, they heard Edna’s car coming up the drive. She had gone to get the bed, and it had taken her longer than she thought.

“Thank God,” he said as she drew closer.

For as long as Margaret could remember, her daddy had worn a hat or a cap, but he walked out to the yard bareheaded. As he slid into the car, Margaret, with Sam on her hip, rushed into the house and got his cap, and ran back out and slipped it on his head.

The baby was waving.

“Bye, son,” Charlie said.

“Bye, Paw-paw,” Sam said.

Edna took Charlie away.

Edna cooked him some boiled okra and stewed potatoes, and at dusk he took a walk with Charlie Sanders and Mr. Hugh. It was windy, and cool. He said he wanted to walk in the cool wind.

Edna had not wanted him to go, but he shushed her. “I believe it’ll do me good, that wind.”

It was a fine walk. The trees and shrubs and crawling vines were in flower or already green, covering the gray bark that always looked so dead and hopeless in winter, and new grass covered a cow pasture not far from the house. Later, the night train would rumble across the Tredegar trestle, shaking the trees, stabbing the darkness with a lance
of yellow light, but now there was just the dying sunlight, and the wind, rushing.

The men were passing a pasture gate when he just stopped, to get a breath. He looked around him, as if it was the first time he had seen anything like it, anything so fine, and fell onto the new grass.

People came, a flood of them, to the house on the Cove Road that evening, but Ava did not greet them. She just sat on the edge of the bed, still staring at the floor, as she would do for weeks, for months. There was barely room to turn around in the small living room. Women filled up the house, and men thronged the yard, smoking, talking. For Margaret, it was like a dream.

People hugged her and told her what a fine man her daddy was, but even with so many people encircling her, with so many arms wrapped around her, all she could think was, “Lord, I ain’t got nobody.”

Later in the evening there was yet one more knock on the door, and she looked through the screen door to see her husband, Charles, on their stoop. He was wearing his black suit.

“I’m sorry, Margaret,” he said.

The cars lined the blacktop for more than a mile the day of the funeral.

Tredegar Congregational Holiness Church couldn’t hold the people. They filled the pews and stood in the back and along the walls, and everyone said how it was good that it was not hot, with such a crowd. Most of them were people like him, working people, and they came in their mechanic’s jumpers and overalls and shirts
with a name across their breast pocket, and the heavy work boots thudded across the planks as they walked by the casket. Women wore ancient felt hats and homemade dresses, the hardness of their eyes and the tight set of their jaw just a foil for their soft hearts and gentle natures, and they cried even before the preachers made a sound. Outside, their children, safe from all but the vaguest thoughts of death, sat miserable in cars or pickups, under threat of a prolonged whipping if they made any racket at all.

Inside, mixed in with the denims and faded floral print dresses, were the dark wool and store-bought dresses of the town people and the rich landed farmers, whom Jo called the Big People. They had closed their drugstores and left their shops and offices and come to be here, for this man who dug their wells and built their big gray barns and waved at them from the rattling cut-down, who made the finest likker on either side of the state line.

Charles Bragg, who had killed at least one man with his bare hands in Korea, sat beside Margaret and cried like a child.

He did not respect many men, but he respected her daddy, her daddy’s strength. When Charlie had ordered him from his door, something he might have killed another man over, he had just bowed his head and left.

Now he took his son, Sam, and walked up to the coffin, and together they looked down on Charlie’s face.

The casket was plain pine, something he could have made himself. In it, the man showed no sign of the sickness and the agony that had consumed him. His hair did not have a speck of gray.

He was still, the women mourners remarked, a pretty man.

Margaret could not stand to look at his face. As she paused beside her daddy, she looked instead at his hands.

The undertaker had dressed him in a blue suit, but the hands did not belong to a man who wore suits. His hands were rough and scarred and callused, his nails thick and cracked, his knuckles and the joints in his fingers red and swollen, from the work.

A lifetime of grease and tar and river muck had worked into the skin itself, and under the nails. A working man’s hands never really get clean, no matter how hard you scrub.