Ava's Man (37 page)

Sometime later, I went prowling through my momma’s basement. In the corner of a downstairs bathroom, an ignoble spot for a family heirloom, I found what I was searching for—an old kerosene lamp.

It was made of heavy glass, thick as a Coke bottle, and it was yellowed and smut-streaked, but it had a few inches of fuel in its bowl and a new wick.

“Is that it?” I asked my momma.

She nodded her head.

I had grown up in the same house as that lamp, the one Ava used to cradle in her arms—instead of one of her babies—when Charlie loaded their lives on that truck and moved, and moved and moved. But I didn’t know its story then. The lamp was just another knick-knack in a room so crowded with them it looked like a flea market, lost between the plastic flowers and ceramic Santa Clauses and three dozen pocketbooks.

It made sense that she would have given it to my momma. Of all her girls, Margaret needed a warm circle of light.

Momma told me that it had been in her other little house the day it burned back in 1993, and that—even though it had been full of kerosene—it had somehow survived. It should have exploded into a million pieces, she said, but it didn’t. The glass was too thick.

“They don’t make them that good no more,” she said, and I said I guess not.

I asked her why she kept it downstairs in a bathroom no one ever sees, and she looked at me like I was simple in the head.

“Well, honey,” she said, “that’s where I need it. That’s where I go when there’s storms, when the power goes out.”

I had bought my momma three powerful flashlights, to use when the power goes out. I got those indestructible, rubber-coated kind, the kind that won’t break if you drop them. I didn’t want her to use a lantern because it could start a fire if she dropped it.

But of course, that would never happen.

And, I guess, a ghost would walk right on past a flashlight. There’s no magic in a D-cell.

“Well, I guess it’s made its last trip, at least,” I told her, being all philosophical. But she told me no. Someone will need it, a generation or two from now. Someone always will.

It seems, people here say, that the weather is worse than it used to be, like the storms come harder and more frequent, knocking down power lines. People blame the fact that so many trees have been hacked down, or the hole in the ozone layer, or, like Ava, they blame the men who walked on the moon.

Or maybe, it is only because there is no one left to clear the sky.

I want to thank Edward Bundrum for his research on the family history and Lori Soloman for her help with historical research, and especially I want to thank all the people, kin or not, who re-created Charlie Bundrum for me from their memories. I also want to thank Jordan Pavlin, my editor, who set oil upon the stormy waters. And Amanda Urban, who knows how to roil ’em up.

A Note About the Author

Rick Bragg is the best-selling author of
All Over but the Shoutin’
and
Somebody Told Me.
A national correspondent for the
New York Times,
he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996. He lives in New Orleans.