Ava's Man (12 page)

“Can you move?” his daddy said. “Can you walk?”

“Yes sir, I believe I can.”

“Then let’s go.”

Charlie reached and got his shotgun and slung it over his shoulder. Ava stood at the door, quiet for once, and watched them go.

They got in an old cut-down truck that Charlie had bought and drove to the Dempseys’. They held hands as they walked up to the pine porch, and Charlie rapped on the front door with the gun barrel.

Old Man Dempsey cracked the door and looked out.

“What you doin’ here, Bundrum, with that gun,” he said.

“I’ve come for the dog,” Charlie said softly.

“You can’t have him,” Dempsey said.

“I’ve come for the dog,” Charlie said again, this time almost in a whisper, “or I’ve come for you.”

Dempsey looked at Charlie’s face.

“The dog’s in the barn,” he said.

Charlie walked to the barn with William at his side, and told him to wait outside. He walked in and, immediately, there was one shot. Then Charlie walked out, his face blank.

All his life, Charlie knew he should have shot the man, truly, but in Floyd County, in the 1920s, they didn’t put a white man into prison, usually, for shooting a dog.

But they would strap you down and make you ride the lightning for killing a man, and who would have fed his family, if he was so foolish.

He looked down at his son.

“Let’s go home, Shorty,” he said.

It was a hopeful time. World War I was done and the veterans had come home to sit on the courthouse benches, some trailing an empty pants leg, and tell stories of the hand-to-hand fighting in the Argonne Forest, of the choking hell of the trenches as the mustard gas poured in and the bodies stank on the barbed wire in no-man’s-land. But this was peacetime and there was good work in the steel mills and pipe shops in Gadsden and Anniston over in Alabama, and in the textile mills on the Georgia side.

Charlie wore a carpenter’s apron and built homes for the soldiers who came home, then landed a good job, for real money, at the steel plant in Gadsden, an industrial town alongside the Coosa. His brother-in-law, Tobe Morrison, helped him get on.

He rolled steel, working in heat that burned the hairs off his arms, beating at sparks that singed his hair and his eyebrows and
made his lungs prickle. He shoveled coal into the coke ovens where the heat would melt your shoes and make you faint, and loaded boxcars with new, fresh steel, so new it didn’t even have any rust on it. And on payday, when the smut-covered men lined up for their money—the gentry there called them “smoke necks”—he laughed and laughed.

Gadsden was like a lot of industrial cities in the South, a city that went from nothing to something really fast. The workers, some who had been behind a mule just the week before, built little frame houses with real porches, and sometimes the company even built them for their workers. It was a different time, then, when companies did things like that. If a man wasn’t afraid to work, he could have things he never dreamed of.

Charlie bought a new car, a 1928 Whippet, and they rented a house in Attalla, near Gadsden, which was almost close enough to the country to suit him—he could not rest, he always said, in town.

He and Ava bought some nice clothes from the Sears and Roebuck and had their pictures made, and Ava started buying pocketbooks—she loved pocketbooks.

While they were in Attalla, living fat and easy at the corner of First and Forest, Ava gave Charlie a daughter. A genuine doctor—with plaques on the wall and a necktie—delivered the baby girl.

Edna was born on September 3, 1929, and as proud as he was about his sons, Edna tickled him to death. Even when she was small, he propped her on his shoulders and took her with him when he went fishing. She had brown hair, and even as a toddler she was unusually brave, and not a bit squeamish about fishworms or catfish or other slime-covered things. She was tough, which was good. Otherwise her brothers might have killed her, probably by accident but not necessarily so.

“He would take me places and not take James and William,” Edna said, proud of the time they stole.

Edna would be the model older sister, old beyond her years,
and a strong right hand to Ava. She snapped beans, sewed, and as other babies came, she helped look after them. Edna was the glue. As Ava ranted, Edna soothed. As Ava fumed, Edna looked for solutions. Even as a little girl, Edna would sometimes seem older than her momma, sewing clothes for the younger children and helping to cook. But as a baby, before there was work to do, she rode her daddy’s bony shoulders to the creek, and laughed and clapped her hands when he pulled in a fish.

Some men love daughters more. Charlie was just one of them.

It was a good family, or at least a good start on one, and a good life. A man could afford things. He could feed his children hot biscuits, ham and fresh cantaloupe on Sunday, and buy his oranges by the bushel. His wife didn’t have to count the eggs and make water gravy, because milk was not such a precious thing that you had to meter it out by the ounce. Ava, used to this life, this abundance, was not impressed much, but Charlie, a poor boy all his life, went a little wild. He bought a slouch hat, like a movie star would wear, and had his first taste of store-bought likker. He thought it was bland. Like many things, if it’s legal, it cannot be all that good. But he liked that hat, and went all the way to Anniston—one whole county away—to have his picture made on Noble Street.

It would last forever, that life, because steel would have to roll forever. It had to. How could you build a country without steel?

Ava, who hated the deep woods, loved living in a place where the stores were right there, right there in front of her, and a person could sit on their front porch at night and see a light—a real electric one—glowing just a few feet away in the window of a neighbor’s house. Here you could walk to church, or take your babies to the doctor. In the cool of the evenings people would walk past the porch and say, “How do?” And, best of all, there was the money—never enough
to pile up too high but enough to pay their way, to buy groceries and pay rent, so that a person did not have to be ashamed at the first of the month.

And if a child got sick, Ava opened her pocketbook and bought the medicine it took to make them well again or paid the doctor to heal them, which is how life is supposed to be. How could it ever be any other way?

Who would ever let such a thing happen.

The plant laid him off not long after Edna’s second birthday, but it wasn’t personal. U.S. Steel had 225,000 full-time employees in 1929—and zero four years later. It had changed the lives of a whole generation of Southerners who found that rolling steel was child’s play next to what they had done, next to cutting pulpwood or fighting a brain-dead beast along endless rows of red dirt. And now, it was changing them back.

People would come to call it the Great Depression.

For Ava and Charlie, it was as if the biggest broom in the world just dropped out of the sky and swept everything away. Charlie could do a whole lot more besides work in the steel mill, he could make a living. But he could not make that living, he could not give them that life.

Town cost too much. They went back to the woods.

E
dna stood beside the bed, amazed, and just watched her. She did not know a person could be so small. Her momma told her she would get bigger with time, and that was true, for a while.

They had come back to Georgia to live, where Charlie could always jerk a living from the hills and the river around Curryville, if he had a little luck on his trotline or in the woods with his .410. Now there was a new child to feed, but instead of worrying he stepped lighter, taller.

The baby had jet-black hair, like her mother. Charlie called her “Little Hoover,” a dark joke in honor of a failed president who watched, helplessly, as his own federal soldiers attacked and destroyed a raggedy squatters’ village of homeless, destitute World War I veterans who asked for early payment of their pensions. Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, not yet heroes, cleansed the capital of the poor, and that news, carried down to the South in faded,
secondhand newspapers, made common men like Charlie Bundrum despise the remote politician and gentlemen soldiers.

The baby’s real name was Emma Mae. Born on May 29, 1931, she entered the world in a black time.

For Edna, then just old enough to understand the struggle between life and death, the year is carved deep, deep in her mind.

“I watched her sleep on the bed when Momma was out picking some onions, and she woke up and squirmed around and fell behind that bed. I just started crying, ‘I can’t get her, I can’t get her.’ Momma came in, threw a bunch of onions down and got her and held on to her. ‘To hell with them onions,’ she said.”

Edna hoped the baby would get big enough so she couldn’t fall behind the bed again. But in spring, she started getting smaller.

“She had the diarrhea real bad. They boiled milk and boiled water. Momma nursed her by laying her on a pillow ’cause she was so little. Then she took the pneumonia, real bad.”

A hospital could have saved her. Medicine could have helped. Edna does not remember ever going to a hospital or seeing any medicine in the house, but then she was just a child herself. She just remembers that she and her brothers James and William ate corn-bread then—just cornbread.

“She was buried not long before sundown, not far from a holly tree. I stood on a hill and watched Momma and Daddy stand there at the grave, and I didn’t have on no coat or shoes and the wind was cold on my legs. And I watched the sun go down and they was still standing there.”

There was no money for a real headstone. But before he left the graveyard, Charlie gathered white chert rocks from the hillside and laid them on the grave, being very careful about it, as if painting some kind of design with them on the ground. Edna did not understand why he did it, but as he worked Ava stood by him and watched, paying attention.

Then he took her arm and they walked off the hill together.

Edna understood little of it, really, just that they left Emma Mae at Curryville when they moved not long after that, and that her daddy, who always laughed even when he hit his thumb with a hammer, who would grab up his children, pop them down on his bony shoulders and walk for miles, seemed to sleepwalk through the weeks. Edna, puzzled, wondered why he was quiet, because he was never that quiet. He even stopped singing. To Edna, it seemed like some strange new man lived in her daddy’s old clothes, a man who didn’t know the words.

“The one thing,” she said, “that whupped my daddy.”

Something seemed to go out of Ava, too. “I always figured Momma didn’t like me anymore because of Emma Mae and what happened,” but that was how a child would have taken it, the coldness that enveloped Ava in that time.

It might have been better if she had stayed in the mountains of Curryville for a while, where she could sit under a holly tree and pick weeds off a tiny grave, the way people do. It shouldn’t have cost nothin’, really, just to be still awhile.