Ava's Man (24 page)

They did fine. And the army, with all the wisdom of the armed forces, found the perfect job for James, the scrapper who loved a big fight, who loved a drink of likker, who was not concerned with laws.

They made him an MP.

Some of the soldiers, city boys, might have been tempted to poke a little fun at the tall, skinny boy with the jutting ears—maybe even more profound than his daddy’s—but James, who could also talk a blue streak, would clamp one giant hand on their necks and look in their eyes with his daddy’s stare, and they would do right.

In the lockup, as the angry soldiers threatened and postured, he told them stories about the big stick his daddy once whittled for him to use against a mean, bigger boy named Dahmer Jones, and how he beat that boy bloody with it.

And as he talked he smacked his baton, really just another big, long stick, softly into his hand.

James Bundrum didn’t have a lot of trouble in the cell block.

It was a good time, all in all, a good time for the family.

Ava still waited to eat until her children had been fed, but it was out of habit, not because there wasn’t enough. It seemed like there was enough of everything then. James and William were coming home from the service, and the new baby was healthy, and the girls were going to school. Times were kind. The federal government was even passing out free peanut butter.

E
ven now, my momma walks the Cove Road in her sweetest dreams. The woods were old and thick but not endless, the way some of the forests had been that ringed their other houses. Every few acres the wall of trees gave way to wide-open fields that let the sun in.

The house was not a sharecropper’s shack or river cabin but had three big, open rooms, and for the first time in as long as the Bundrum
children could remember, the family would not all sleep in one room.

It almost drove Hootie crazy. All his time with them, he had squeezed into a vacant corner. Now he walked the three rooms from corner to corner with his tiny hobo bundle over his shoulder, twelve corners to choose from, and he could not decide.

As Charlie and the children began undoing the ropes and lifting their belongings from the truck bed, Hootie was still circling from room to room.

After they unloaded they went out to the well for a drink, and a smile crept across Charlie’s face as he tilted the dipper and the water poured down his throat. In almost two decades of motion, they had water that looked like coffee, smelled like sulfur and tasted like turpentine, but never this, so clean and fine-tasting.

Margaret, then about nine, peeked over the edge of the well and down, down. The well was so deep that she could not see the bottom, and the water that came out of it was like ice.

“Make a man give up likker,” Charlie said, to no one in particular.

“I doubt it,” Ava said.

It was another house without lights, but even though this was just another house way back in the woods, another house where the closest man or woman lived out of earshot, it just had a different feel.

A panther, maybe the very last one that ever walked through these woods, prowled the trees at night. No one ever saw it. They only heard it in the distance, once in a great while. But it only made the blaze in the hearth brighter, somehow, only made the quilts warmer.

In the way people say they sleep better when it’s cold, the cat, wandering like a ghost in the dark outside, made Margaret, Jo and little Sue snuggle deeper into their bed. If it got too close, there was always Charlie.

A yellow school bus came and got them and took them to school, and they only had to walk three miles to catch it, but more than anything about the house, the well and the forests around it, there was a sense, a feeling, that it would last awhile. “We thought we owned it,” Margaret said.

Leon Boozer asked ten dollars a month for it. Charlie, who had more work in the county than he could do, counted out twelve ten-dollar bills. Margaret, Ava and the other girls sat almost speechless, because Charlie was committing to one house, one piece of ground. They could not have dreamed it.

He did the same thing every year after that, for an amazing seven years.

Seven years in one place.

“It was our home,” Margaret said.

The Cove Road ran through the county a few miles outside the town of Jacksonville. Most people mispronounce its name, and call it the “Coal Road.” The house sat a few hundred yards off it, hidden by the trees. The Boozer place was just another rented, borrowed house, but it wove itself into their hearts as if they had paid taxes on it, as if they had the deed rolled up somewhere in a coffee can.

It was not just another floor to walk. It was almost magic.

It even came with a magic horse.

They got the place in an odd way, almost as if there was luck in it. The Smith family had been living there, but they hated living so far out. The Bundrums had lived on Boozer’s Lake Road, where Charlie was crowded in by too many houses. The families decided to switch houses, but there was a problem.

The Smiths had a horse named Robert—Robert Smith—and no place to keep him. “Will you take him off my hands?” Mr. Smith asked Charlie.

When the Bundrums pulled up in the cut-down and saw him grazing in a pasture by the house, Margaret squealed.

He was beautiful.

He was black as smut, with one white dot on his forehead, and he had long legs, like a racehorse.

“You was Robert Smith,” Charlie said, reaching out to pet his nose. “But now your name is Bob Bundrum.”

It seemed too good to be true, that someone would leave such a fine animal, such a well-formed and noble beast, behind.

It became clear, pretty soon, why that had happened.

James’s girlfriend at the time was Phine Taylor, a small, dark-haired woman with a lot of Indian blood and green eyes. Phine—they pronounced it “Feen”—was from a farming family close by, and she plowed like a man. Charlie nicknamed her, for reasons apparent only to him, “Tadpole.”

One day she hooked Bob up to a plow to get some work out of him, and wrapped herself in the reins, and popped the long leather straps at him and said, “Git up, Bob,” and Bob took off like a bullet.

He dragged Phine sideways across the field and out of sight.

“Well,” Charlie said from the porch.

Several more long minutes went by.

“Reckon I best go out and see if he’s killed Tadpole,” he said.

Charlie decided that maybe Bob should be a saddle horse. He put Margaret on his back and began to walk them around the pasture till Bob got tired of it. Then Bob threw Margaret into the fence and trotted off, Charlie cussing him.

There seemed no use for Bob, until Charlie bought a secondhand saddle and climbed up on him himself. And instead of bucking or biting or throwing Charlie into the fence, Bob behaved like a little lamb. Bob and Charlie trotted off to see the neighbors on Sunday, and sometimes, Margaret said, “Daddy stopped off.” To “stop off” means to have a toot of likker.

He was not making much likker now himself, and had to go hunting for it, but likker was like chiggers then. If you took a walk in the woods, you would get some of it on you.

And Charlie would sip and tell stories until it was about dark and then he would climb back up on Bob—or someone picked him up and put him there—and Charlie and Bob trotted home, Charlie singing and weaving in the saddle, but at least the mailbox was safe.

And sometimes he would go to sleep in the saddle, slumped forward with his nose buried in the horse’s mane, but Bob knew the way home, and Charlie might have been sitting in the backseat of a Cadillac.

But the way Bob treated him when they came into the yard was the magic of it. Bob would gently shrug Charlie to the ground, and then walk slowly off to his stall. The no-name mule, decades ago, had accomplished the same thing, pretty much, but the landing was different. Just getting dropped, Charlie said, was so much better than gettin’ throwed.

They had never had a free anything, really, except maybe the fish that Charlie pulled from the Coosa. Now they had a free horse, and free cheese.

If the children thought Bob was magic, they thought that every month, when Ava went into town to get her commodities, was Christmas.

The federal government had discovered that poor people, as tough and resourceful as they were, as proud as they were, would not say no to a little free food.

The government called them “commodities,” just plainly packaged surplus food that the government handed out at National Guard armories and courthouse auditoriums, and the word would work its way into the vernacular of the region.

Old women would say they would love to chat, they dearly would, but “I got to go and get my commodities.”

It may be the single greatest gift that the federal government ever bestowed on my people. This was not food stamps, which could be used for junk food and white loaf bread and candy.

This was food.

The government handed out cans of good peanut butter, and five-pound loaves of mellow, yellow American cheese. Chances are, if you are Southern and your grandma ever made you a grilled cheese sandwich or a plate of macaroni, there was government cheese in it.

Everybody from the woods got it, if you were old enough or poor enough or had enough children, which was just about everybody. And the people who were too proud to take it would go to their momma’s or their grandma’s house on the weekends and hack off a pound-weight block of cheese or take a can of peanut butter.

Ava scrambled the cheese in with eggs and the children scraped the skillet. Charlie took a hunk of it fishing, and ate it with saltine crackers and sardines.

The government also handed out big sacks of yellow grits, and cornmeal and flour, oats and rice, and canned chopped meat—people didn’t even know what it was but they fried it for breakfast.

Show me somebody who says that their grandma never made them a “sammich” from homemade jelly and government peanut butter, and I’ll show you a liar or a Republican.

Even now, when people get together for reunions or Christmas or July Fourth, they talk about that cheese. Country people, unlike fancy, more urbane people, do not think cheese has to smell like a dead dog to be good, and this was clean-smelling and didn’t even have any holes in it.

Where I’m from, it almost has its own mystique—because it has been gone so long—like Bear Bryant or Big Jim Folsom or Jim Nabors, who went from Sylacauga, Alabama, to Hollywood, to play “Gomer.” Mr. Nabors may not think it is an honor, being compared to cheese. But it truly, truly is.

Sometimes the government went a little far. One day Charlie turned the can opener on a container about the size of a Quaker Oats box, and a whole cooked chicken plopped out.

Everybody just stood around and looked at it.