Authors: Rick Bragg
Charlie hit the remaining conscious trooper one time in the side of the head, with a sound like concrete blocks slapping together, and the man dropped beside his partner on the floor.
Charlie did not whoop or yell or say a word—the two men seemed beyond hearing, anyway. He dragged first one, then the other, out to the gravel parking lot, and laid them beside their patrol car.
Then he went back inside and drank his beer, until a carload of county deputies pulled into the lot. He told the boys to walk on home—and stepped out to greet them. They beat him a good bit.
He drove slow when he was drinking, and was good with everything but right turns. He always thought he had a little more room than he did, and was bad to run over the mailbox.
His children would hear his old car rumbling into the drive and—if that was not immediately followed by the sound of sheet metal on tin—they were glad. Over time the mailbox looked like it had been in an undeclared war, and the mailman would slip the letters in and grin.
They were living in Tredegar in Alabama when, late one night, they heard a horrible crash. They ran outside, to see Charlie’s truck crumpled against a massive oak tree.
“My God, Daddy,” Juanita said, “how did you not see something that big?”
“Well, you see, hon,” he said, “there was two of them.”
He would have lived longer, and his wife and children would have had him longer, if he had not been a man who liked his life sweetened with whiskey. His grandchildren would have known him.
But for some men, drinking is like breathing.
He made a living despite it. He never laid out drunk, he seldom slept in the day, the way drinkers do.
I guess you could say he got happy.
Ava saw it as her job to make sure his hangover was as painful as possible.
“You got to stop, or it’ll kill you,” she said.
“I know, Momma,” he said.
“You got to,” she said.
“I know, Momma. I know.”
“You ain’t even listening to me,” she said, her voice rising.
“Yes, Momma, I am,” he said.
“No, you ain’t,” she said, standing over his shoulder, looking down on him like a conscience. Finally he would get up and flee to the yard, and Margaret would follow him, toddling out the door.
“That woman,” he would say, “could nag paint off a wall,” and Margaret would just sit there, sad, because even a toddler knows when things are wrong.
Sometimes Ava would get so wound up she’d come out on the porch to press her point, and Charlie would climb into his cut-down to get away, all the time saying: “I hear, Momma. I hear.”
And then he would be bouncing down the road, safely away, and his penitence would vanish in the dust from his tires.
“He ain’t sorry a bit,” Ava would say back at the house, and then stomp inside. To Margaret, it seemed like Ava could make the sun sorry for coming up in the morning.
“Why is she so mad at you, Daddy?” she would ask him when she was older.
“Well, hon,” he would say, “she’s a Holiness.”
“What’s that?” Margaret said.
“A Holiness,” he said, “is somebody who ain’t never had no fun.”
Ava, he explained, sometimes forgets that she is one, and has some fun before she realizes she is having any.
“She backslides,” he explained, “which makes her tolerable.”
A time or two, he roofed houses drunk. A cousin told me, grinning, about the time she drove past a big house and saw my grandfather’s silhouette on the roofline, wobbling in the clouds.
T
he letter from the federal government came on a late afternoon in the winter of 1941, when Juanita was eight or nine. Ava read it to Charlie when he came home from work that evening, then went and sat red-eyed by the wood-stove, the government’s letter crumpled in her fist.
Juanita asked the older children why she was sad, and they said it was because their daddy had to go to Rome to see a doctor for a test, for a “zamination.” If he passed it they were going to give him a green suit like the one Hootie wore, and put him in the army.
Much of the rest of the world was already at war, but that didn’t mean a whole lot to her because no one was fighting over their dirt road, their trees. It didn’t seem right to her, that her daddy would have to go and leave them alone. Her daddy kept the ha’nts and woolyboogers away. He kept the thunder from knocking down the house. He killed the snakes.
Why couldn’t Hootie go, the children wondered, since he already had the suit. They would hate to loose Hootie, but …
“We’ll starve,” said Ava, who was expecting a sixth child, and Charlie just kept saying, hush, now.
Ava was still crying when he got up the next morning to leave. He put on a clean pair of overalls and his denim carpenter’s cap, and hugged Ava and the children. He told them not to worry, but even as a small girl Juanita could tell that his face was bleak and grim.
Hootie refused to come in the house. He went and sat by himself in the woods. Charlie called to him but Hootie just went deeper into the trees.
His old truck was broke down, so he left walking. They lived on a hill then, with a long, straight red-dirt driveway. Juanita stood on the porch and watched him walk away. He was still a skinny man—he was thin all his life—and it seemed like he was ten feet tall as he walked away.
“I stayed out in the yard all day and looked down that road, and I guess I looked down it a hundred times,” Juanita said. “I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody. I didn’t go in the house to eat. I was just waitin’ for him to come back, and I was so afraid he wouldn’t. It was the first time I ever remember being sad.”
Even as a little girl, she was like him in a lot of ways, skinny and tougher and less prone to cry than any of the girls she played with, a scrapper and tomboy. She didn’t cry that day, she just watched.
At dusk, as her momma was lighting the lantern inside, she saw him step into the drive. She ran as fast and as hard as she could, and he caught her up with one hand.
“They didn’t want me,” was all he said.
She walked back with him, but you really don’t have to walk if you are floating on air.
“Momma was still in the house, still squalling,” Juanita said. “Momma was always squalling.”
At supper, he told Ava what had happened. The doctor had
said he was healthy enough, for a man so thin, but the recruiter told Charlie he had too many responsibilities, that the army was not taking men in their thirties who had five children—and a wife expecting a sixth child. He told Charlie to go home, to be with his family. Charlie told that man he would not duck his duty if he was called, but the man laughed and told Charlie that his sons would soon be old enough to serve, if it was a long war.
“Go on home, Bundrum,” the recruiter told him, “to them babies.”
Mary Jo was born on March 27, 1941, on the Georgia side, the last time Granny Isom, who was becoming feeble, would come to Ava’s home. Mary Jo, whom everyone would just call Jo, slept in Ava’s arms as Juanita and little Margaret stood and stared at her.
“She’s kindly ugly, ain’t she?” Juanita said.
Margaret nodded her head.
She would grow out of it. Jo would be a daddy’s girl, even in a house full of them. As a baby she had terrible earaches, and her daddy bought cigars and blew the smoke into her ears. It was supposed to make it better, something folks believed back then. Whether it worked or not, it is one of her first memories of her daddy, something that helps heal her now, even if it did not heal her then.
Years later, Jo would say that it was her impending birth, the very fact that she was coming into this world, that made the army send her daddy home.
But Juanita knows that if wishing can make something happen, she wished him back up that driveway, wished him away from a war that took a thousand daddies, ten thousand, from the pines.
“I just couldn’t imagine a life without Daddy,” Juanita said. “It’s hard enough to imagine life without him now.”