Ava's Man (27 page)

She tried to act tough. “I wore pants, blue jeans. Juanita grew up in pants.”

Juanita, she thought, wouldn’t be scared to go into the hospital and see about him. Juanita would have waltzed right up to the doctor and said, “Hey, you.” Juanita would have bossed the nurses around.

But Margaret just sat in the car, wishing she could play the radio
but knowing it would run the battery down, wondering why her daddy didn’t just bust through the hospital doors and take her home.

And of course, one evening, he did. “And then me and him went home and he went back to work, and nobody thought much about it.”

As the years went by, she learned that he had gone to Holy Name because of his liver. It was bad. The doctor cut part of it out.

A lifetime of moonshine whiskey, the only bad habit he had except for fighting and a little snuff and some discreet cussing, had rotted his liver, and a man can’t live without a liver. But he can live with part of one, the doctor had told him, if he gets off the likker, and stays off.

Margaret just knew her daddy was home, and that everything was fine again, the way Juanita knew it would be fine on that day, a whole decade before, when she had seen him walking up the dirt driveway from his trip to Rome to see the army men. It wasn’t like he was a ghost of the man who had walked into the hospital, the way some people are when the doctors carve on them. He was the same man as before. He worked as hard, and fished as much.

He seemed to spend more time with them after that. He taught the two oldest girls still at home, Margaret and Juanita, how to drive, before their legal age. He would pull his car to the side of a road and get out, letting whoever was in the middle slide under the wheel. He did not sit there all tensed up, but laughed as the girls ground hard on the gears and meandered from ditch to ditch, trying to see over the dash, and Hootie, who still rode in the back, wondered if he was about to see angels.

Hootie was still with them, still under Ava’s disapproving gaze, and Charlie’s protection. He still helped Charlie roof when he wanted to and still just sat on the porch or in the deep woods when
he didn’t, and got a little older and maybe even a little uglier, if it was possible.

He and Charlie still went to the river to set out trotlines, and every time, he hung back a little when it was time to load up and go home, like there was something calling to him there, and probably there was.

But he had been around so long that he was more than just family, he was almost a stick of furniture. He still didn’t have much to say but he still handed out dimes, and the littler girls sat by him on the porch, the way the older sisters had.

It was about that time that Charlie took in a young couple named Souther. They had just gotten married, and the boy was saving up to rent a house and had no place to stay. The boy was a carpenter, like Charlie, and was working the same job. Charlie told him he had room in his little house, and they stayed until they got on their feet, and then moved on.

One night, a young man Charlie knew staggered up and passed out cold on their front porch, and Ava walked out and stared down at him as he snored peacefully on the planks. She cut her eyes to Charlie.

“We ain’t keeping him,” she said.

But the word was out. Sometimes a good reputation can be just as inflated as a bad one, but everyone in that part of the world learned of the man’s kindness, and people, people in need or in trouble, just seemed to drift his way. They stayed a night or a month or, like Hootie, decades. It is not as romantic, maybe, as his reputation for making good likker, or for laying grown men flat with one good lick, but people still mention it from time to time.

The years had scoured him on the inside, but you couldn’t see that when you saw him standing on the roofline, his long body framed by
the clouds, that ever-present hammer swinging, swinging. Some men act old, as if they are practicing for their last years, practicing for dying. Charlie did not act old.

He was in his forties and already a grandfather, with a telltale scar above his liver. He had shot men—and one large woman—and smacked them with hammers. It routinely took a carload of deputies to put him in chains, and if all else failed, he could pick a fight with Ava.

He never seemed to get, or want, a lull in the adventure of living, as if he knew that old age was something he would never see. It may be why he seldom took a nap.

I
t had rained. It used to rain every afternoon in the late summer back then, but it doesn’t anymore. The old people say it’s because we’ve cut down all the green.

It was still green that day, and the air was so wet it stuck to you when you moved against it, like fresh paint off a wall. Charlie, wearing a pair of overalls but no shirt, dripped sweat as he poled a homemade boat between the walls of trees that leaned in over the river, leaving barely a sliver of space for the hot sun to cleave in and sparkle off the water. For Travis Bundrum, Claude’s boy and Charlie’s great-nephew, it seemed a wild, dank and dangerous place, and the sluggish water seemed to have no bottom to it as Charlie felt for the sand and rock with the end of his long pole.

The boat rode low in the water because Charlie had filled it up with kin. Travis was eleven then, his brother Sonny was about fourteen, and their cousin Roger was nine or so, and they had all begged to come. Travis’s daddy, Claude, had spent time in the TB sanatorium,
and had not been able to take his boy on many fishing trips like this.

Rounding out the party was Travis’s uncle Rich, Claude’s brother, who sat with the boys and let Charlie do the navigating, and most of the work. Richard was a fine-looking man, with sandy hair and blue eyes, who was said to be tenderhearted. He was a talker like Charlie, and was one of his favorites. The boys sat between the men in the middle of the boat, and tall tales and yarns whizzed back and forth over their heads, like bullets.

But as they headed up the river in that boat, which seemed to dip and wallow with every ripple, Travis, especially, wondered if he had been wise to come.

“We passed under branches that grew right over the water, and Uncle Charlie slapped at them, with the pole, to see if they had any water moccasins in them. The snakes would drop right in on you if you didn’t. There was water oaks and scrub oaks and pines, and deep pine thickets that lined the banks. There was bootleggers’ shacks all up and down it, open drinking and gambling, and you knew some hard men lived there.

“But I knew Uncle Charlie would take care of us. He just seemed, natural, I guess, on it. He was a mysterious man to us in a lot of ways, and he handled that boat expertly, and he knew the Coosa, every mile of it.”

Charlie was a hero to Travis, because he fought men and won and lived life pretty much as he damn well pleased, and because other men seemed to respect and admire him, and said so. People said he could stand so still in the trees that the squirrels would forget he was there and—quick as anything—Charlie would reach out with his hand and snatch one and knock its head against a tree before it could bite him, and stuff it in his coat pocket. People said they had seen him kill rabbits with rocks and hunks of lead. People said a lot of things. Travis had never seen any of that but he knew that when you went
with Charlie to fish, you actually caught fish, instead of sitting on the bank wishing that you had.

To Travis, maybe to a lot of people, Charlie fit better in the past of the river, of these foothills, than in the here and now. The new blacktop highways, reaching all the way from the mist-covered hills to the wire grass and lowlands to the south, signaled the region’s future. Charlie, who still used a broken branch as a fish stringer, was its history.

His boats were never store-bought. He still made his own boats from car hoods, and this time he had taken the hoods off two 1940 Ford coupes and welded them together to form a fat, stubby canoe. This day, Charlie was taking the kinfolks with him to set out his trotlines.

Trotlines are the way a man fishes when he is more interested in food than he is in sport. Charlie would take a long string and, every foot or so, tie a line and hook on it, and bait each one of the hooks with the cheapest, most foul-smelling stuff he could find. They would use mussels dug from the sandbars, or spoiled cow or hog liver, or chicken guts, or pieces of carp—trash fish—or even moldy bread, which men squeezed into tight balls so it would not melt off the hook quite so fast.

Then he would stretch the long line across the river or a tributary or deep pool, and let the river carry the fish past it.

Sometimes, especially during the Depression, he needed some fish in a hurry, and he would carry an old crank telephone with him, the type that you had to twist the handle round and round to make a call.

Twisting the crank built up an electrical charge, and after he had turned its tail a few times he would drop the line in the water to shock the fish, and they would come floating to the top, along with an assortment of snakes, turtles and other living things.

Charlie would scoop up the fish and turtles—turtle soup was a
fine thing then, even if you were not hungry—and leave the snakes. It may taste like chicken, as some people said, but it probably also tastes a little bit like snake, and even a little bit is a reason to gag.

The game wardens frowned on the shock method of fishing, but it was hard to catch a man at it. To this day, the rusting remnants of old crank telephones lie at the bottom of that river, covered up in a half century of silt and muck.

Charlie had quit all that a long time ago, and now he was fishing legal. They had a foul-smelling bucket of innards in the boat, and planned to bait a trotline, spend the night on the riverbank and check it in the morning. With any luck, they’d have fish and hush puppies tomorrow.

Early in the evening he found a place to camp, just below a rickety old cabin set up high on a bank, and Travis and the boys sat around the fire and listened to the men yarn.

“We had a meal of sardines, crackers and Vienna sausages, and just before dark Uncle Charlie and Uncle Richard walked over a foot-log and up the hill to get a quart of whiskey. It was a full moon, and it was almost like daylight.”

When the two men came back they let the fire burn out and tried to get to sleep, but loud cussing coming from the bootlegger’s shack up the hill woke up the ones who had actually been able to shut their eyes. Even though there was a good moon, it seemed like the heart of darkness to the boys.

“It seems like everything was magnified in those woods,” said Travis. “Then this loud argument started up on the hill, and you could hear cursing and the sound of licks being passed, and then there was a shot.”

The boys jumped up, but Charlie told them, quietly, sternly, to hush, boys, and be still. Then, up the hill, the shack’s door swung open.

Down on the river, the three boys moved in close to Charlie.

“The men come out, and two men were carrying a body
wrapped in a tarp,” Travis said. “I guess there was six or seven of them in all, and as the two men carried the body down to the river, the others stood and looked down the bank, like they were looking for something.”

That was when Charlie tugged or pushed the boys down to the ground, hissing: “Lay down, and shut your mouth.”

“We didn’t hesitate,” Travis said. They just dropped, and buried themselves in the shadows and in the leaves as the men carrying the body walked right on past them, and the men up above them scanned the bank for witnesses.

The men weighted the tarp with rocks, heaved the body into the river with a loud splash and walked back up the bank, and again Uncle Charlie whispered for Travis and the boys to lay still now, and patted them gently with his big hands.

And though it would have felt better to just get up and run for it, to go crashing through the trees, there was Charlie’s hand pressing them down, down.

They had, for all practical purposes, witnessed a killing. The kind of men who casually murdered one of their own and fed him to the catfish without even a glance back, let alone a word to the Lord, would, Travis knew even then, not hesitate to kill three wide-eyed boys and a couple of fishermen.