Ava's Man (13 page)

A
va hated moving day. When everything was loaded and tied down, she sat red-eyed and tight-lipped in the passenger seat of the Model A, her hands wrapped not around one of her babies but around something almost as dear, her kerosene lamp. Her husband could not abide living poor in town, so he usually rented houses at the lost end of a dirt road, deep in the pine barrens and old-growth hardwood forests, surrounded by poison ivy and blackberry bushes as impenetrable as trench wire. The power lines seldom reached so far, and the nighttime came alive with wild things, hidden things. No matter how many times you tell yourself a screech owl is just a bird, when you hear it in the dark woods, it sounds like murder in the trees. Ava’s lamp, made of glass as thick as a Coke bottle, was her island, a circle of safe, amber light. Candles, no matter how many you light, are too flimsy for the woods. Ava knew that a ghost would walk right on past a candle and say hello.

Electricity might have caught up with them if they had stayed in
one place long enough, but there was no profit in sitting still. Charlie, smelling like heat and tar from the shingles he pounded into place, would come in the house and tell Ava that the job had dried up, but that he had heard there was work over in Alabama, or over in Georgia. It happened at least once a year, often twice, sometimes three times a year.

In the decade of the Depression, they moved twenty-one times.

The prosperity they would chase, crisscrossing the state line in that overloaded, rattletrap, cut-down Ford, was usually only marginally better than the life they had left behind. The ladders he climbed, in the summer heat that turned the shingles to black mush, in the cold that made them crack like panes of glass, never got him more than a few feet higher than rock bottom, and the wells he dug were just dead-end tunnels leading to a wadded-up ten-dollar bill. Maybe prosperity is too strong a word for it. They pursued the here and now, a sack of flour, a gallon of kerosene, a yard of copper tubing, a new needle and thread.

They would have loved him anyway, if times had not been so hard, if he had not saved them from it, but would they have loved him as much? It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.

History gave him one.

The stock market crash of October 24, 1929, Black Thursday, wafted down into the Deep South like a slow-working disease. Even now, seventy years later, old people still thank God that they lived in the country, where the shame of their poverty was hidden by the trees.

It was a creeping thing, down here, not the drama that sent the Yankee stockbrokers leaping from window ledges. In a part of the nation still wasted from Reconstruction, this “Great Depression” was, at first, almost redundant, like putting the bootheels to a man already down. It did not make the rows any longer for a farmer plowing
a mule, or change the diet of a family already eating cornbread and beans seven days a week. It took a while to feel it. But in time, it even found the people at the ends of the dirt roads.

It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse.

You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth.

People did go hungry. Meanwhile, on the lawn of the White House, President Hoover was photographed feeding his dog.

They were living north of Rome when Juanita came—again, with Granny Isom’s grim-faced supervision—on April 22, 1934. Her full name is Gracie Juanita, which is about as grand a name as I ever heard, as if Charlie and Ava were fighting back against the stinginess of the years with that forty-dollar name. But the baby was small and slight, and her momma and daddy were afraid for her. Emma Mae was fresh on their minds.

She would get sick, and Ava died a little every time. Her mind was not built for worry, for being sad. It could not absorb it somehow, the way some ground can’t hold water. She prayed hard, her eyes
closed. She prayed a lot. Charlie would stand over the bed, helpless. He could have gotten down on his knees, too, but he was not a praying man, then. It could be that he did talk to God, but inside his own mind, standing up, the way some proud men insist on doing it. But I guess we’ll never know that either.

All around them babies had slipped away, but Juanita thrived in time. Juanita grew up fine. She was not sickly, just bony, and she would be bony all her life. She was just uninterested in food, and eating was something she endured.

The girl they just called “Niter” inherited her daddy’s hands—not the size, but the skill in them—and made playhouses from branches and scraps when she was just a toddler, building things and tearing them down and building them again. Some girls wanted dolls. She wanted a good hammer.

Once, when she was still small, Edna built herself a playhouse out of tree branches and refused to let Juanita play in it. Nita just stood looking at it a moment, figuring, then built one just like it.

Then Edna’s mysteriously caught on fire.

“I helped her put it out, after a while,” Juanita recalls.

His children say, today, that they never really noticed the pain and the poverty that swirled around them, because he loomed over it and would never let it reach them. They did not mind that they ate a whole lot of cornbread, did not notice—not until much later—that Charlie and Ava waited to eat until the children had, to make sure there was enough.

Outside their protection, outside that perimeter of pride and love, the long, bad years writhed on, coiling and coiling upon themselves like a snake they couldn’t kill.

Ragged tent cities took shape beside lonely Southern blacktop,
on riverbanks, beside railroad tracks. By the early 1930s, one in three men in the foothills was out of work. Cotton farms failed because the textile mills were padlocked, and cotton rotted in the dirt.

In the mills that survived, the owners slashed wages in half, by seventy-five percent and even more. Hard men who would have half killed another man for even the vaguest insult just bowed their heads to it, to survive.

It was bad here but at least it was a little warmer, and county sheriffs armed with ax handles waited at railroad depots and at lonely crossroads to discourage the out-of-work men who came south looking for work or just a more pleasant place to wait it all out.

Aristocratic Southerners, the ones who somehow held on to the old money that set them above and apart, did not, history shows, do a lot for their brethren. And some even seemed to take sadistic pleasure in driving poorer Southerners, a class they had long disdained, to even greater pain.

“Let ’em starve,” said Eugene Talmadge, a Depression-era governor of Georgia who refused to aid federal efforts to give destitute people of his own state a pittance to help them survive, who stalled, harassed and demanded the names of every person receiving federal aid.

In hell, as Ava used to say, there is a special box seat reserved for all those bow-tie-wearing, imperious sons of bitches.

In Alabama and Georgia, people wore out their last good suit of clothes and just stopped going to church because they were ashamed, and preachers nailed signs to fence posts to remind their flocks that old, faded dresses and ragged overalls were not offensive in the eyes of the Lord. Here, eight out of ten schoolchildren stopped coming because the books and teachers cost money, and even now old women will tell you one of the most hateful things about the Depression was that it stole books, teachers and knowledge, and held another generation prisoner to the old life of backbreaking work,
a life in which every book may as well have had a chain wrapped around it, for all the good it did a person who did not read.

People with deep roots stood fast in the doorways of ancestral homes, and lost everything. People without roots, the wanderers like Charlie Bundrum, drifted with the times, and survived.

He could do sawmill work, build houses and barns, pound shingles, strip cane, plow a mule, lay brick, do stoop labor and, if the law would just leave him alone, run off a little shine. But he had to keep moving, going to the work, so he would wander, dragging Ava and a varying number of children with him, first in a mule-drawn wagon, then in his truck. It was a car, really, but he had used a torch to hack off the back part and then rigged a flat wooden bed on it, because you can’t haul anything but relatives in a backseat. On moving day he piled it high with mattresses, rocking chairs, chickens, girls, boys and, her daughters recall, “about ninety pocketbooks.” Ava didn’t have anything much to put inside one, but she had, in truth, dozens of cheap, dime-store purses, which she counted on moving day to make sure she had them all. She could always come back and get a chair or a chicken and even a child, but people would steal a good pocketbook.

It usually took at least two trips. They had to come back and get the cow. If it was a short move, the children walked the cow, for miles, at the side of the road. But if it was a long one, he hoisted the heifer on the cut-down and drove away, the cow, wild-eyed and bleating, going backward at thirty-five miles an hour.

After a while, the cow would run when she saw Charlie coming at her with a halter or a rope, and for years she kicked anyone who milked her. I guess she was just getting even.

For a few dollars a month, they rented little frame houses in the hills around Gadsden and Rome, on farmland above Noccalula Falls,
on Bean Flat Mountain, in Whites Gap, on the Piedmont Highway, Boozer’s Lake Road, Littlejohn Road, Cove Road, and on the lovely-sounding Carpenter’s Lane. Some places had no names, and are remembered only by the landlords. There was the Osby place, the Buchanan place, the Coot Green place and the Coot Stevenson place. You have to move a lot to live in two different houses owned by two different men named Coot.

Ava and the children picked cotton for some of their landlords to help pay the rent, but as the Depression wore on that work was scarce, too. Charlie was the machine that powered their lives, pushing them from place to place.

For his family, there was none of the excitement of a brand-new beginning. Birds live that way, not people. His wife and children knew, every time they pulled up in another red-dirt driveway, that it was not actually home. In a home, you notice the trees getting taller.