Ava's Man (36 page)

The women would sit in the lawn chairs and talk about work and babies, even if those babies were now six foot two, and their children,
big and small, would ask them a hundred times, “We eatin’ yet, Momma?” My aunt Jo would chase after a great-niece named Ava, threatening the toddler with wet kisses and an Instamatic. She would catch her and old women would gather around and say that the little girl, named for my grandmother, was the prettiest thing that they had ever seen.

The soft Southern accents, not quite a drawl, not quite a twang, just natural, would mix with the sound of ice rattling into plastic cups and a drone of distant trucks on Highway 21, until somebody in authority would beckon us to the tables with a simple “Well, it’s ready. Y’all come on.” Some people would pray first and a few would just close their eyes, and I would eat until I was miserable and moan about it till someone produced a cold chicken leg and a glass of tea as an antidote. I would take it, because no matter how full you are, one more chicken leg will not hurt you if it has already been prayed over.

And I would be glad to be there, to see old people I might never see again, to see cousins I played hide-and-seek with in a dark yard specked yellow with lightning bugs, back before we were scared of life and snakes.

Then the plane touched down at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International and the picture in my mind vanished in a grunting herd of traveling businessmen running hard for their too-tight connections and rental car counters, cellular phones jammed up to their ears, every single one of them dragging a little-bitty rolling suitcase behind them. I always marvel at that—a two-hundred-pound man pulling a ten-pound suitcase.

What would Charlie have thought of all this? I think he would have laughed out loud, and stopped off at the bar on Concourse B.

I got in there among the herd—I carried my bag—and was swept all the way to Hertz, where I politely asked for a Ford.

It was a pretty day, and once I escaped Atlanta, it was pure country all the way home. As I drove to pick up my momma and take her to the reunion, I passed the Bonds family enclave and noticed
that Gary Bonds’s mailbox was still too close to the road. Every day, it was a tiny miracle if someone did not hit it with their sideview mirror or just run it down altogether if they met a car coming on the narrow two-lane road. It was not just that the box sat so close to the blacktop but that it was on the surprise side of a sharp curve, so at night it seemed to jump out at you, like a deer.

That might have made some people back their mailbox up a little bit, but not here. Gary, who went to school with me at Williams Junior High School and helped me push my Camaro when the battery was dead, once played a basketball game with a wrist so swollen he could barely stand to hold the ball. But when Coach Steve Green asked him if he wanted to sit down and heal, Gary just said no sir, he reckoned he’d just play. Like most of these ol’ boys here, he will not quit and he will not change. He owns the land right up to where that blacktop begins, and if he wants to put his mailbox in the path of destruction, he will.

Some people would call it an act of defiance. I believe Gary just likes his mailbox where it is, and it always makes me happy when I manage to evade it. We would all be disappointed, I believe, if we drove by and saw it planted safely back in the right-of-way, as opposed to occasionally being knocked there. Gary should have been a Bundrum.

My momma was standing in the door when I drove up. She says she can hear the car slow down on the road, but I still don’t know how she knows it is me in it.

“You miss Gary’s mailbox?” she said as I stepped out of the car.

“Oh yeah,” I said.

That got us to talking about mailboxes in general. My little brother, Mark, said he had planted his mailbox well off the road, but while it had never been hit by a passing car, it had been shot several times. The mailbox shooting came at about the same time that someone broke into his house and stole his guns, which was too much for him to stand.

“I don’t even have to open my damn mailbox to read my damn mail,” he said from behind a wreath of smoke that, even from across the room, I recognized as Camel nonfilters. “I can read my damn mail standing out in the middle of the damn road, it’s got so many damn holes in it.”

I said that was a shame.

“I wouldn’t be so damn mad,” he said, “if I didn’t know they was shootin’ my own damn mailbox with my own damn guns.”

I nodded my head.

“Well,” he said, “they can just kiss my ass and call me Shorty.”

I nodded again.

I decided to ask him later exactly what that meant.

When it was time to head over to the reunion, I asked my momma, in defiance of my rent-a-car contract, if she wanted to drive. She said no, the car looked too new. I offered to drive it through a mud puddle first, but she said she was afraid to, because while she had driven for much of her life and once owned a 1956 Buick, she never had a driver’s license. Things like licenses, for hunting, fishing or driving, did not impress us very much. If you live far enough back in the country, it is not crucial, even in the year 1999, to always have proper paperwork.

We pulled up to the springs at dinnertime, which is nowhere near dark down here. I parked on a chert road and we just sat for a minute to let the white dust blow away. Under the shade, old women were popping the tops on Tupperware and laying out food, and it was like I had painted it in my mind and hung it from the trees.

Germania Springs was still clear as a wineglass and so cold it burned, and crawfish still backpedaled across the smooth brown rocks and took shelter in the tender watercress, which my momma used to pull and cook in bacon grease. Cajuns would have laughed at us for eating a weed and ignoring the crawfish, but back then I didn’t eat anything that looked that much like a water bug, unless there was money on it.

There had been a killing here when I was seventeen, but we tried not to think about that. The better memories wrapped themselves around it, over and over, until you barely remembered it at all. We used to know the very tree it happened under, but I looked for it and couldn’t find it.

It seemed like every Bundrum in creation was in the shade of the pines, which is not grand shade but better than no shade at all. There were only a hundred or so people, truthfully, but the reunion was the first time in a long, long time I had seen all the close relatives and distant cousins in one place. Old women hugged my neck and said they were glad to see me, and it made those air kisses of Manhattan seem like, well, air.

There was a jet pilot from Texas and some middle-class retirees from Plant City, Florida, but most of the people here were blue-collar, people who pull wrenches, spin yarn in the maddening clatter of the mills, make steel-belted radials at Goodyear in Gadsden, climb poles for Alabama Power, scald chickens for Tyson, drive dump trucks, saw pulpwood, answer phones in the police department, raise hogs, preach, farm, cut hair, raise children and, when life gets a little sideways, work off their fines. My brother Sam was there, talking about the mill. He cuts the steel bands off bales of cotton using a set of bolt cutters. The bands split with hundreds of pounds of pressure and the steel sings through the air, sharp and deadly. But the pay is better than a man can make for a safe, easy job, so he shields his eyes with goggles, armors his arms and torso with leather and goes to work, trusting in God and luck, and the medical plan.

I guess what I am trying to say is, these are people who earn what they have, people with Charlie Bundrum’s blood in them. Even if it weren’t for the ears, you could tell by looking at them, at their big hands, the sandy hair, the fact that they can listen to and engage in two conversations at once. If that isn’t proof these are his kin, I don’t know what is.

They did not have to come far to be here, most of them. They
live within fifteen minutes of each other. They say with great pride that they only have to stop at one intersection to visit each other, that their children ride the same school bus route that they used to ride. The bus is new but it is often the same number, even the same bus driver. I can’t recall the bus number that came by our house, but I remember it was a Mr. Ted Parris who drove it, and that I went to sleep on it one day when I was seven and Sam, out of meanness, got off and let it carry me almost to Piedmont. My momma didn’t whip him, but she should have.

For most of them, there was no reason to ever leave. Even in the failed economic promise of the so-called New South, in a land of boarded-up mills and overgrown farms, this is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment. Sam, Mark, Momma, her three surviving sisters and one brother—the other moved off to Birmingham—live within only five minutes of each other, and have since Charlie Bundrum died.

They had been movers, true, but that was only because of Charlie. They had no choice but to follow him, and now they have no choice but to stay. Where he died, they live. They will not quit on the place where he lays.

Now my aunts think a trip to Anniston, fifteen minutes away, is a damn safari. Rootless as children, they will find the most amazing reasons not to travel, saying their dogs will run off or maybe even starve, though it is a stone-cold fact no dog ever starved in an hour and a half.

What a reason to become part of a place—that grave. Yet we are part of it, even those of us who left, came back, left again and are even now trying to make it back one more time, maybe one last time.

We became familiar faces at the Food Outlet and the Winn-Dixie, and Young’s store and Snook’s, McFall’s and E. L. Green’s and Wright’s and Tillison’s, buying sweet snuff, unfiltered cigarettes and Little Debbie snack cakes every payday, and pork chops every Fourth of July, buying a dollar’s worth of gas when it was a dollar and a half a
gallon. The old men behind the counter learned which of us to extend a little credit to between paychecks and when to hang up the
CLOSED
sign when we thundered up in a jacked-up, pastel blue 1969 Mustang with five-hundred-dollar Cragar mag wheels and two-dollar used tires bought from a man named Houston Jenkins, a sun-faded, blue-and-gold tassel from high school graduation dangling from the rearview mirror, and Tony Joe White blaring from one speaker—only one.

For good and bad, it was our place. It was not unheard of to see one of us accepting an award on one page of the newspaper, flip the page, and see another one of us being led off in handcuffs. We played ball for the Roy Webb Hawks and the Williams Panthers and the Ed Fair Landscaping Dirtdaubers, and joined but did not excel in the 4-H club, except for my girl cousin Charlotte, who has always been a teacher’s pet.

Our mommas got the GED and jobs at Fort McClellan, and we filled space and sometimes even learned something in the red-brick schools. We got Saved here, we backslid here—and everybody knew about it—and some of us just got mightily confused. Our cars’ motors swayed on chains from the limbs of trees, and our pickles and jellies and leftover baby clothes sold at yard sales that were really just bait to lure people into the yard for gossip, or just an excuse to sit awhile with a sister you were officially mad at and missed something terrible. Why else would you sit all day for a net profit of a dollar and seventy-two cents?

We got to know people, but mainly, we got to know each other. We know whose potato salad has green onions in it, and whose don’t. We know who grows the best tomatoes, and what time to go visit, so as to be sure to get some. We know not to call Aunt Nita at one o’clock when her story is on, ’cause Juanita does not answer her phone As the World Turns.

Our mailboxes have rusted in the ground.

About two o’clock, the descendants of the Huguenots lined up for banana puddin’ and scraped the Tupperware. I didn’t even know Huguenots liked banana puddin’, but I guess everybody does. As for me, I never did find out if the food was as good as I had made it seem in my mind. Word was out I was looking for stories about my grandpa and it took all afternoon to hear them, until the last comatose baby had been carried off on her daddy’s shoulder, until the last pieces of cherry pie had been wrapped in aluminum foil. I scribbled notes and nodded my head and didn’t eat a damn thing.

By sunset, decades—centuries, really—had slipped by beneath that adequate shade. We took a hundred pictures, but Juanita’s do not count because she always cuts off the top of your head even when she tries really hard not to. I think, now, she does it on purpose.

Everybody told everybody else how good their food was, which they would have done even if it had been terrible, and my cousin Charlotte, Edna’s baby girl, told me I could come live in her basement in Atlanta if I ever lost my job.

“My dog smells bad,” she said, in warning.

I told her if it ever came to that, I would not be particular.

My uncle Ed told me he had retired, but I know that means he will now only work about half a day on Saturday. Uncle John’s mother, Mag, had been sick, so he did not come to the reunion. Everyone told my aunt Jo to tell him “hey,” to tell him that they were praying for her.

In the dusk, I walked with Momma to the car carrying an empty gallon jar.

“They must have liked your tea,” I said.

“It wasn’t sweet enough,” she said.

It would have put somebody with high blood sugar into a coma.

I noticed as we got in the car that the chert road had streaks of red dirt in it. When I was little, I would always find a patch of it when it rained, just to feel the clay squish between my toes. Ask anybody from Alabama or Georgia to tell you what that feels like, and all they will do is smile. You can’t tell about it with words, with just words.

All this, all this sense of place, of family, of love, from the fact that a dead man, a man I never even met, lies in this ground. If he had died across the river, I would have been a Georgian. If he had died in the Arctic, I would have been an Eskimo.