Ava's Man (17 page)

But that was just Ava. Some days she cried, some days she laughed. On any other day, she might have kicked that woman’s derriere back to Rome.

Ava kept the cow’s calf, which couldn’t give milk now but would in the future. A promise of milk, then, was better than nothing.

A few months later, they ran behind on the rent, again. They were staying at a little place owned by a family named Johnson. Charlie, who had found work a few counties over, was coming that weekend with his paycheck, to square that debt. But the landlord wouldn’t wait. He sent a hired man round to the Bundrum house.

“Pay it up,” said the man, “or I’m coming back tonight to get that calf.”

That night, the hired hand and another man came into their yard carrying a lantern and a rope. James, the oldest boy, had gone with his father. Ava walked out on the porch and begged them to leave them alone, to leave the calf alone.

“It’s our food,” she said.

William, then just nine or ten, lifted his daddy’s shotgun from the wall and stepped out onto the porch before Ava could stop him.

It was a high porch built on narrow columns, what people then called a chicken-leg porch. The two men looked up at the small boy on that big porch holding a gun almost as long as he was, and snorted.

“What you gonna do, boy?” they asked.

“You put that rope on that calf,” William said, “and I’ll kill you.”

The men stopped when William pressed the shotgun’s stock into his bony shoulder and pointed the barrel down into their faces. Looking deep, deep into the dark, cold, unblinking eye of that 12-gauge, the men backed slowly from the yard.

The family moved as soon as Charlie came back. Drifters, movers, did not win when landlords brought the sheriff into their borrowed yard in that time. They loaded up in the night, and were gone.

(I remember all this now when I think about a story I heard once about a student at a prestigious Southern university, a woman who threw away her dollar bills because they cluttered up her room. And one dollar, she said, wouldn’t buy anything, anyway.)

Charlie healed even as the times seemed to get some better, though prosperity is always a relative thing when you’re that poor. By 1937 he was working almost every day for whatever anyone could afford. He worked for a side of bacon or a bushel of peaches, and he was able, finally, to go back into the woods and to the riverbanks to shoot game—squirrels and rabbits mostly—and catch fish. He continued to make his whiskey, to drink and to sell. He never would have let his babies go hungry to drink—because that is, and forever will be, the mark of a sorry man, but if you are making it, drinking it just doesn’t seem to be such a sin.

He had the skill. His daddy gave him that. All he needed was a quiet place to work. And like his daddy, he soon learned that people—very respectable people—would pay good money for a taste.

In 1937 a new baby, their sixth, was coming. Granny Isom was busy with a baby across the county, so Charlie drove to Rome to fetch that city’s town doctor. The doctor asked him, as he crawled into his Model A, if Charlie had any money.

Charlie just told him no, but, well, maybe they could work something out.

T
hey believed that if you ate an onion a day you would live to be a hundred, which may not have been true but at least no one that they knew of ever died eating onions. They believed that burned motor oil cured the mange, even though a dog covered in black oil was twice as objectionable as one with a few bare patches and a constant itch. They believed you could smother a chigger with Vaseline, and that eating too many pickles dried up your blood. They believed things, a lot of things, because their mommas and daddies did.

Just because a man works in overalls, or a woman takes a dip of snuff in the evening, that does not mean they do not hold to traditions. Just as a story passed down through the generations is as precious, as valuable, as bone china, the things we do just because our kin did them are as sacred to us as anything passed along by the gentry. That is why Charlie’s behavior on the day his sixth child
was born was so puzzling. He turned his back on a tradition so old no one can even remember where it came from, or when it began.

It was a simple ceremony at a birth, once the hard part was over. The baby would be handed to a relative or a respected neighbor or friend, usually one of the eldest, to honor them. Then the relative would carry the newborn slowly, slowly around the house, talking to it, telling it good, fine, hopeful things. They would hold the baby close to their hearts, so the child could feel that beat, and when the circle was complete the old people would give it back to the mother without a word, because to speak about what was said on the sacred circle was bad, bad luck, the same way telling what you wish for over birthday candles will make your wish not come true.

In the foothills, our kin believed that the baby would inherit all that person’s goodness, all their finer nature, all the luck, love and talent in them. It did not mean that the baby would not take after their momma and daddy, but that it would have a little something extra from their kin. It was just something these people believed, something they did the exact same way every time because it had always been done the exact same way, until Margaret came.

She cost Charlie a quart of whiskey, and was born in the season of dogwoods. The doctor in Rome, a man named Gray, delivered the poor woman’s baby, a bleating, angry-looking, blond-haired thing that would be beautiful one day but for now looked like a pink rat. Ava insisted on naming her Margaret, for an old woman who had helped care for her once when she was ill, and the boys, James and William, walked around the little house grumbling about one more damn sister. The doctor had a cup of coffee, and didn’t offer any advice about child rearing. It seemed like Mr. and Mrs. Bundrum had some experience at that.

Charlie followed him out to his A-Model with a quart in his fist. It was a full quart, which is the most amazing thing about that day. It was worth a dollar or more then, in the Depression, and as good as cash and a whole lot better if you were dry. The doctor unscrewed the cap and sniffed but did not take a sip, and if this was an affront, Charlie never said so. A lot of men went blind drinking bad likker, and a few men died. It may seem a sin to trade whiskey for such a thing, but God may have forgiven him that time.

The ceremony did not happen right away. The baby had to be fed, had to feel comfortable in the arms of its momma. And only then did the baby’s daddy pull it from her, then hand it to a great-aunt, or beloved uncle, or man or woman who had been kind to them.

They always said “Thank ye,” because it was a gift, truly.

No one knows why Charlie broke with tradition that day—he had not been drinking any—but he scooped the little girl up into his arms and carried her around that tiny house himself, his face tucked into the blanket with hers, whispering something. What, we’ll never know.

When he was done he handed Margaret back to Ava, who had not objected when he took her from the bed and did not complain when he brought her back. The other kin who had gathered looked on, a little puzzled. It seemed a tiny bit selfish, to them.

Charlie never said why he did it, and died with it unexplained. We can only guess.

It was not that she was his favorite—he loved all the girls the same, as far as they could tell—and it was not that he thought he was the best person for the baby to take after. Charlie Bundrum knew his failing, his one true failing.

But see, according to tradition, it was only the good things the newborn inherited. This was his chance to funnel all the good, brave
and pure things in him into one of his own. It was not science—in science you inherit all the traits, good and bad—just superstition. Or maybe faith.

Still, what if it was true, what if a man could guarantee that his baby would get all the good inside him, and be free from all the weaknesses, and the pain they caused?

What if it was only true?

Margaret was the alter ego of Juanita. She was more timid. She was not a fighter. The fair-skinned little girl with that white-blond hair believed that no matter how mean a person was, they would stop it if she was just patient enough. When other children fought, she walked away. When grown-ups fought, she ran. She fought back only when she was cornered, when there was no way out, and then she clawed and kicked.

Her brothers were mean to her, but they were mean to everyone. They tied her up in sacks, and every time Ava left William to baby-sit her, he gave her a haircut. William cut all the hair off one side and left the other side long, and laughed even when his momma whipped him over it.

When the Bundrums moved from Alabama to Georgia, her brothers told her they were going there to dig up little Emma Mae, who was not dead but buried alive. They gave her a hoe about twice as long as she was, and she dragged that hoe everywhere she went. She believed them, because she was so small, believed that they might not be able to get Emma Mae out of the ground if she was not ready to help them dig.

When someone, a grown-up, told her that they were just fooling her, she sat down and wept, not angry, just sad that they would leave Emma Mae in the ground.

She followed Juanita everywhere. She snuggled up in Edna’s lap. Ava always had a needle and thread in hers, and she was always fearful one of the children would run to her and stick themselves on those big needles she used for quilting. Margaret hated the needles.

The needles meant pain, and she hated pain—in her body or in her mind, awfully, terribly bad.

Charlie called her “Pooh Boy,” though why no one seems to know, and she would toddle after him down the dirt road to the mailbox, then toddle back, just to be close to him. He was the protector against the pain. When she got a speck in her eye, it was he who laid a warm washcloth against it, to ease the hurt. If she got a burn from their stove, he blew on it. If he caught her brothers being mean to her, he whipped them.