Ava's Man (8 page)

They lived in tightly packed mill villages where the sturdy little houses, all exactly the same but all with a real front porch, seemed so much better than anything they had ever lived in before. Or, like Charlie’s kin, they stayed in the woods in ramshackle houses that had never seen a coat of paint.

They rented, because they were one class below the owners, and owning land was a dream that most of them certainly had. But it might as well have been a dream about steamships and zeppelin rides, for all it would amount to, for generations.

But there was a dignity in them that no amount of servitude could collapse. The women wore their hair long—dictated by the doctrine of a Protestant faith—and the men, even the young ones like Charlie, draped their overalls in severe black coats for court and funerals and voting. A man has to have a lot of dignity to walk around proud with most of the rear end worn out of his overalls. But a pair of ventilated breeches, Charlie figured, was no reason to bow your head.

By the time he was fully grown, Charlie stood more than six feet tall but weighed less than one hundred and sixty pounds. When he climbed into his faded blue overalls, he looked like a mast stuck in a sail. “Whistle britches,” old men would say, grinning, because of the breeze that surely found a way into his clothes through the ragged holes or flapping pants legs.

It was the seat that always wore out first, because he found work
as a roofer early on, and the shingles, like sandpaper, just ate the cloth away as he skidded around the roof on his rump and knees. His sisters sewed patches on the inside of his overalls, for decency’s sake.

He wore the same thing every day, because it was all he had. In the winter he wore long underwear under his Liberties, and a canvas work shirt that might have been some color once, but now was gray. He wore lace-up leather boots, what people called hobnails, strung with thin strips of leather, because cloth rotted in the weather, and he wore them when he was working, fishing and dancing. Men like him wore their hobnails to funerals under black suits. They got married in them, and worked saddle soap or oil into the leather to keep it from cracking. When the boots finally wore out, they threw them to a hound puppy, which gnawed them down to the bootheel, then nothing. They came from Lehigh, Pennsylvania, and they cost a week’s pay, so a man had to get the good out of them.

He was bareheaded only when he ate and slept, otherwise wearing a denim cap low down over his brow, so that his eyes, which had a natural shine, looked like headlights in a tunnel. The cap, like everything else, wore out from the weather and dry rot, and his hair stuck through it. People smiled at that, too. Stick a punkin’ on his head, and prop him there in the corn, they joked, to scare the crows and coons away.

He didn’t own a watch. The boss man told him when to come, go and eat his lunch, which was biscuit and cornbread, mainly. He was sixteen, going on seventeen, gangly, gaunt, with air-conditioned pants.

But if you looked down, down to the ends of those skinny arms, you could see signs of the man’s character—the man the boy would be—in his hands.

Not the arms. His arms were abnormally long, with long muscles from real work, but so narrow and thin that his elbows stuck out like onions. Just the hands.

The hands were magnificent.

They hung at the ends of his skinny arms like baseball mitts, so big that a normal man’s hand disappeared in them. The calluses made an unbroken ridge across his palm, and they were rough, rough all over, as shark’s skin. The grease and dirt, permanent as tattoos, inked his skin, and the tar and dirt colored the quick under his fingernails, then and forever. He could have burned his overalls, changed his name and bought himself a suit and tie, but those hands would have told on him.

And they were strong, finger-crushing, freakishly strong, as if the tendons in his arms were steel cables that worked a machine made to kink pipe, crush rocks and pull stumps. He could grip a man’s wrist and squeeze—just squeeze—and make his eyes water.

When he would tell a story, he would clamp one big hand down on his listener’s leg, at about the knee, and—especially if he had been nipping a little bit—squeeze to make a point. Grown men would wince, cuss and howl. But he always got to finish his story.

In a fight, and there were some, he clenched his fingers in a fist the size of a baking hen, and it was like being hit in the face with a pine knot.

But that was just sideshow stuff. The hammer seemed to dance in his hand, and he was twice as fast—machine-gun fast—as most men on the rooftops, slapping down shingles, pounding them in place. His daddy, Jimmy Jim, had strong hands like that, agile hands. Charlie got them from him.

After work, the big hands with the long fingers could pick out beautiful notes on the banjo, which he learned from his kinfolks. When Charlie visited them, he would sit a baby on its bottom in one big hand and just stare into its face, until it gurgled or grinned or squalled. He wasn’t rough with them, and he liked to hold them.

Few doors were closed to him, because of his nature. Sober, he was a fine listener. Drunk, he hogged the very air. He spoke in the language—the very specific language—of the Appalachian foothills. It was an unusual mix of formal English and mountain dialect. The simple word “him” was two distinct sounds—“he-yum.” And a phrase like “Well, I better go,” was, in the language of our people, more likely to sound like “Weeeelllll, Ah bet’ go.” Some words are chopped off and some are stretched out till they moan, creating a language like the terrain itself. Think of that language as a series of mountains, cliffs, valleys and sinkholes, where only these people, born and raised here, know the trails.

Charlie spoke with a smooth, low voice. If he wanted to make a point, he just said damn, for punctuation, as in “That’s a damn big house, fellers, to roof in this damn heat.”

He did not curse in front of ladies, usually, and among men he drew a line between good, solid biblical cursing and what he called “ugly talk,” which was anything a twelve-year-old would scrawl on an outhouse wall.

He did not spit in front of ladies, even if he had to swallow the juice. He tipped his hat, like in a cowboy matinee.

He was blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. He thought people who would lie were trash. “And a man who’ll lie,” he said, even back then, “will steal.” Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker—a full pint is enough to get two men drunk as lords—before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization.

He saw no reason to obey some laws—like the ones about licenses, fees and other governmental annoyances—but he would not have picked an apple off another man’s ground and eaten it.

He was not literate, but he was no fool. He could figure in his head the carpenter’s calculations needed to roof a house or build one—some men just have a gift that way—but while men came to respect him for his abilities, he would always be the one who did their lifting for them.

If they talked down to him, he quit and he never worked for them again. The South of Charlie Bundrum had a strict class system, and he was beholden to the monied whites for his living. But even as a boy he thought his life was worth just as much as anyone else’s. “We’re as good as anybody,” he liked to say. It might have been obvious, as he rode past in a ragged car, a big tar bucket on the floorboards, that some people lived better. But if there was any envy, it never boiled up to where it passed his lips. He did not hate a rich man, did not covet his life, at least that anyone can remember.

He did not talk about heaven, the way a lot of poor people did then and always will, to justify their struggle on this earth.

He was funny that way.

He was happy being who he was, without even an expectation of wings, and feet of clay.

If someone, maybe around a fire on one of those riverbanks, had asked him then, “What do you want, Charlie,” he could have told them.

He wanted enough work to live decent, and on a Saturday he wanted a drink of likker, because it sent the silver shivers down him and that was good.

He wanted a ham and biscuit. He wanted to hear some music,
and watch a pretty girl walk down the street in town, if he could do it and not be obvious about it.

He wanted, even though he was just a boy himself, some babies. His heart melted around them, his spirit soared. He might not have been able to put it into words, but they made him noble, they raised him up. And he wanted that little four-eyed gal, the one he had seen at a basketball game over by Gadsden on the Alabama side. There was just something about a black-haired girl with blue eyes.

Claude Bundrum, his kin, knew Ava Hamilton when she was a young woman. He knew that, even then, she was different—if not outright peculiar.

“And meeting Charlie,” he said, “probably didn’t help things none.”

G
od made just one.