Ava's Man (30 page)

So he just waited, and seethed, and hated it, because there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

They had power over him in a way no man had ever had, and it burned a hole in him. He had been in jail before, but every time until now, he had by God earned it.

It took days for him to cool down. In the meantime, Ava came back into the world of the living, and his daughters rejoiced, and the word of his miraculous discovery spread on both sides of the state line.

“That was when I learned to pray,” Margaret said. “I promised the Lord a lot of things, if he would let my daddy come back.”

Just as Charlie could always find a wild place to fish or set out his trotlines, boys found places to swim the river, places where the fear was small enough to challenge. I know, because I stood in it with them, a feeling of dread in my guts, my hands searching the ripples for a promise that it would deliver me, breathing, to that other side. And for a while, when you feel the water carrying you sideways as fast as you can pull for the other bank, you really are stuck halfway between life and death, and as close to being in purgatory as a Protestant is likely going to be.

Leave it to Charlie, to my grandpa, to be the only man I know
who was said to be lost in it, then come striding back, big as life, into the here and now. It wasn’t the same as Huck and Tom faking their deaths just to hear the cannon boom across the Mississippi, to attend their funerals. Only Charlie could be presumed drowned and it turn out he was just short on bail.

T
he dark-haired boy stole flowers for her when he came back from the war.

He would be driving down the road and see a rosebush, and stomp on the brakes and almost send the people with him through the windshield. Since the war he had carried a straight razor in his slacks pocket, and he whipped it out like a saber as he ran into the yard. Quick, he would slash the stems and come sprinting back to the car, and spin the wheels in the getaway.

Once, he was riding beside Margaret’s daddy in his truck when he saw a huge rosebush on a steep bank, and he said, “Stop, Charlie, stop!” and he was out the door before Charlie could say a word. He climbed the bank and came down with a giant armload of red roses.

Charlie hung his head, because he had never stolen a thing in his life and now he was an accessory to the theft of yard flowers, but as the boy climbed in and slammed the door he didn’t have the heart to seriously chastise him, because he knew where the flowers were going.

The boy had come home from the war a whole man, or at least that was how it seemed, and Margaret was just happy he had come home at all. He didn’t talk much about all the killing he had seen or done, he just stole flowers.

He seemed to have lost his desire to leave the town where he had grown up, or maybe he just found a reason to stay. He still wore a black suit every time he came to see her, and he came to see her a lot. “And if he ever had his hand held behind his back when he walked up the walk, I knew I had some roses,” she said.

He was a little bit of a smart-aleck, “and always acted like he knowed everything.” But every time she got mad at him, here he would come with his arm behind his back, grinning.

She asked her daddy to find him some work so he could stay out of the cotton mill, and he did. The boy was respectful to him. Charles Bragg didn’t know a damn thing about being a carpenter or about roofing, but he listened and he learned. Charles met Charlie at his house in the mornings and rode to work with him. There was never confusion as to names. Charles was only called Charles. Charlie was never called anything but Charlie—in fact it was his legal name. Mostly, Charles just called him “sir.”

Charlie couldn’t get the boy to be careful, though. He walked the rooftops, no matter how high up, completely unafraid, and Charlie figured that a man who had seen people shot to pieces overseas was not too scared of falling off a roof, even though it could make you just as dead.

One day they were putting up a new roof—not just the shingles but the plywood base—and Charles slipped and fell through a hole in the roof. He just managed to catch the corner of a board with his left hand. He couldn’t reach across his body and get a grip with his other hand, so he just hung there, by one hand, till Charlie could get to him.

“I’ll say this much for him,” Charlie said to Margaret, “the boy’s strong.”

He said something else, sometimes, about him.

“He misses his war.”

He liked to fight. He picked them. He fought like a rooster fights, from something deep inside that has to be turned loose, before it burns a hole.

And they barely touched him, the men he fought. Where Charlie had just clobbered men, Charles bloodied them and danced away, untouched. The Corps had scarce use for a man who couldn’t fight, and Charles had pulled two hitches.

The boy drank, too, but Charlie didn’t have much to say about that. If the worst he ever did was get drunk and get caught pilfering roadside flowers, or pick a fight now and then, he might not be all that bad. In spite of himself, he liked Charles.

But Charlie had lived long enough to know that rage was never something that could be aimed straight and true like a Remington, but something that blew up and hurt people every which way.

So day by day they worked on the rooftops and he watched him and listened to him—the boy didn’t have much to say, though—and if Charles ever went bad, he would be there to knock a knot on his head, or run him off. But instead the boy was respectful to him and Ava and very kind to his daughter in his presence.

One day Charles came walking up in the yard literally dripping with flowers, flowers of every kind, a bushel or more of them. Charlie, who was not a stupid man, knew what the boy had in mind.

“Did you ask them people if you could cut them flowers?” Margaret asked him as he proposed.

“Sure,” Charles said.

Charlie and Ava lost two of their daughters in 1955, one to a boy who wooed with flowers and one to a boy who wooed with a coal truck and assorted milk chocolates.

Hoyt Fair’s boy, Ed, was still courting Juanita. Hoyt was a well-known,
respected man, a Congregational Holiness minister. The Fair family had run the sawmill, and now his sons ran the coal yard. Ed was a round-faced boy who always gave Juanita a big heart-shaped box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day. He had finished high school, and had a gray Chrysler. But sometimes he came straight from work to see her and drove the coal truck, and sometimes the Bundrums would load up in it and they would all go over to Edna and Charlie Sanders’s house to watch television.

Nobody worried about what kind of husband Ed would make. He was a good boy and everybody knew it, who didn’t drink and worked hard and made a good living. If he stayed out late, he was coon huntin’.

He was the kind of Southern man who expressed his toughness with tools. He broke down dump-truck tires with a sledge and chisel, and when he needed to see if a car’s electrical system was hot, he just grabbed a wire to see if it shocked him. He could weld, plow, drive a bulldozer or a front-end loader, run a power saw, work the boom on a pulpwood truck without killing anybody, and drink RC Colas by the crate.

Juanita and Ed got married first, in Mississippi. Juanita came home to Jacksonville with a solid man—and an unlimited supply of really fine tools.

Margaret and Charles got married not long after that. Her daddy told her he was happy for her, but she couldn’t understand why such a tough man would have tears in his eyes.

Ava was suspicious of Charles.

“He drinks,” she said.

H
e called Edna’s second-oldest girl, Linda, Flour Girl, because she would take the lid off the flour barrel when no one was looking, to play in it. She would eat a little of it, but mostly she just liked the white cloud it made when she threw it in the air. Edna would walk in to see her two big eyes shining from what seemed to be a white mask. It is hard to beat a child at times like that, but she tried.

Back when she was still a toddler, the Flour Girl would come running when her grandpa Charlie came in the door. Instead of jumping onto his legs the way the other grandkids did, she would stop a few feet in front of him and just stare, up and up and up, at the tall man.

“Is that my girl?” he would say, and then he would bend over
from his waist, with that incredible balance any roofer has to have, till his nose was inches from her face. To the little girl it must have looked like a crane dropping from the sky.

Then he would just stand there, bent more than double, his hands on his hips, and grin, and she would squeal.

He could carry two and sometimes even three at a time, if one rode his back and looped their arms around his neck, and it was hard keeping them out of his pockets and his snuff can. When he would take a dip the babies would sneeze, and he laughed at that. The bad thing about snuff is you have to have a spit can—for him, it was usually an empty can of pork and beans, washed clean—and the bad thing about grandchildren is that they are always, always, going to kick the spit can over. With as many as he and Ava had, the spit can was in constant peril.

By the time he was fifty, he was covered up in grandkids. They rode his bony knees and swung from his arms and legs and pulled his ears, which is exactly what he wanted them to do.

The babies that his son James had lost to the house fire had been among Charlie’s first grandchildren, and when they died he had balled his fists and pounded his own legs and cursed God and man. Edna said she had not seen such misery in him since he buried his own little girl, Emma Mae, so many years before.

But as the years tumbled by, his older children filled his house and his yard with little boys and girls, and while he never forgot that tragedy, the grandchildren who came after it created a soft, warm distance, or at least that was how it seemed.